Type: Original Kingshot-style short story Subject: Bob "solves" RIP's 85-waitlist-for-35-invites transfer problem by stealing tickets and trying to physically cram 86 people into a room that holds 35, forcing HostileTakeOver to clean it up Created: 2026-09-02 Added to archive: 2026-09-02 Source: Drawn from real RIP alliance chat screenshots (the 85-for-35 transfer waitlist debate), 2026-09-02. HostileTakeOver's in-chat request for "a story about Bob stealing transfer tickets and trying to cram 86 people into a room that only holds 35" is the direct seed for this story.
The problem, on paper, was simple. RIP had 85 people on the waitlist wanting to transfer in, and only 35 invites to give out. The problem, in alliance chat, had been going on for three days and showed no sign of resolving itself through sheer force of arguing. "Means our power cap drops. Significantly," HostileTakeOver had typed, for what felt like the tenth time. Numbers got thrown around -- 250 million, then 150, then, at one particularly grim low point, 130. Nobody agreed on anything except that the math was bad and getting worse. Somewhere around hour sixty of this, HostileTakeOver -- sharp, exhausted, and long past the point of being surprised by anything -- typed into the chat, mostly as a joke, mostly to make herself laugh: "we need a story about Bob stealing transfer tickets and trying to cram 86 people into a room that only holds 35." She meant it as a bit. A release valve. Bob was, as always, listening. Bob did not see a waitlist-allocation problem. Bob saw a shortage, and Bob had never once in his life responded to a shortage by adjusting expectations. He responded to shortages by getting more of the thing. "The math," Bob announced to no one, staring intently at a wall, "is wrong. Not the people. The math." His reasoning, such as it was, went like this: if 35 tickets wasn't enough for 86 people, then RIP simply didn't have enough tickets, and this was a supply problem, and supply problems had solutions, and Bob was -- by his own tireless self-assessment -- extremely good at solutions. He did not consult HostileTakeOver. He did not consult anyone.
Bob's plan for acquiring "more tickets" involved considerably less permission than the term "acquiring" usually implies. He identified a rival alliance's supply depot as a promising target, reasoning that if they had tickets and RIP needed tickets, this was less "theft" and more "a redistribution RIP was owed, spiritually." He conducted what he referred to afterward as "a heist" and what everyone else referred to as "walking into an unlocked storage tent in broad daylight and leaving with an armful of ticket vouchers while whistling in a manner he believed was casual." Nobody stopped him. Nobody noticed him. This did not stop Bob from recounting the story later with the tension and gravity of a man who had scaled a fortress wall under cover of night. "There were guards," he told DeathTax afterward. "I evaded them with cunning." "There is a jeabslist entry showing you walked past the same guard twice and he waved at you both times." "He was distracted. By my cunning." He returned to RIP with a fistful of stolen transfer tickets and a look of profound accomplishment.
With the ticket shortage "resolved" (it was not resolved; it was now a theft), Bob turned his attention to the second half of the equation: RIP's actual meeting room, a space everyone agreed comfortably held about 35 people, tops. "Everyone can come now," Bob announced to alliance chat. "All 86. Today. I've fixed the tickets." HostileTakeOver, mid-spreadsheet, looked up with the specific dread of someone who has learned to recognize Bob's sentence structure as an early warning system. "Bob. The room holds 35 people. It has always held 35 people. That has not changed." "Have you tried believing in the room more?" "That is not how rooms work." "It's how I work," Bob said, which was true, and which was also the entire problem. He was already moving furniture.
What followed was less a meeting and more a structural stress test. Bob's plan, delivered with the confidence of a man unveiling a load-bearing innovation, involved several key phrases that should never appear together in any legitimate architectural context: "unused vertical real estate," "everyone just breathes in at the same time," and, memorably, "the ceiling is basically a second floor if you squint." People were stacked. Not literally -- mostly -- but close enough that the distinction stopped mattering somewhere around person sixty. DeathTax got wedged in the doorway at a diagonal and, in the spirit of gallows humor that had made him beloved, began quietly drafting his will out loud for the benefit of whoever was standing closest, which happened to be three separate people who could not move away from him. Someone near the back reported that the wall was making a sound. Bob declared the sound "the room settling into its new potential" and encouraged everyone to trust the process. The process did not hold. A support beam -- decorative, mostly, but load-bearing in a "we didn't expect anyone to test this" sense -- creaked audibly enough that conversation stopped. "That's just it agreeing with us," Bob said, into the silence. Nobody believed him. Several people began quietly, calmly, evacuating.
HostileTakeOver arrived to a room disgorging people like a clown car in reverse, a suspiciously precarious ceiling beam, and Bob standing in the middle of it all with the serene expression of a man who believed the mission had gone, on balance, extremely well. "The tickets," she said, "need to go back. All of them. Today." "They were owed to us spiritually." "They were not owed to us spiritually, Bob, they were stolen, and now a rival alliance is going to notice their supply tent is missing tickets and a guard who waved at you twice." "He seemed friendly." "He works for people who are about to be very unfriendly." She rubbed her temple, a gesture that had, over enough repetitions, become load-bearing in its own right for her sanity. "And the room. Eighty-six people. In a room for thirty-five." "It held," Bob said, "structurally, for eleven minutes. That's basically a design win." "The beam is currently making a sound like it's reconsidering its whole existence." "So is DeathTax," someone called from near the doorway, still extracting themselves from the frame at an angle no doorway was designed to accommodate. HostileTakeOver looked around at the room -- furniture displaced, a wall audibly unhappy, eighty-some confused RIP hopefuls filing out past a man loudly explaining that this had been a "soft launch" of a concept he was calling "vertical alliance density" -- and let out the long, specific exhale of a leader who had, once again, asked the universe for a funny story and gotten exactly, precisely, unbearably what she asked for. "Return the tickets," she said. "Un-cram the room. And Bob--" "Yes?" "Never let me joke about you in alliance chat again." Bob considered this seriously, the way he considered most instructions he had no intention of following. "...Can I joke about it instead?" She was already walking away.