It started, as these things do, with Miranda being bored.
She had exactly one troop doing nothing, and Fluffy had a castle sitting there, unbothered, and the math on that was simple. She sent it. One lonely little march, crawling across the map with the quiet dignity of a man walking into a job he already knows he's going to lose.
Fluffy watched it come. Fluffy did not panic. Fluffy did, with the specific dry economy of a man who has never once raised his voice about anything, drop a shield over his own castle roughly four seconds before the troop arrived.
The march hit the shield, did absolutely nothing to it, and bounced.
"Sorry, was that supposed to hurt," Fluffy said, to no one, mostly for his own satisfaction.
Miranda, watching her one troop physically rebound off an impenetrable dome like a pebble off a windshield, laughed hard enough to startle her cat.
Neither of them thought about it again.
Bob thought about it immediately. Violently. From several hundred miles and, depending on how you counted, one entire kingdom away.
He was in the middle of a completely unrelated sentence — something about turret placement, something nobody was going to remember — when he stopped talking mid-word and went very, very still.
"Bob?" said whoever he'd been talking to.
Bob didn't answer. Something had happened. He didn't know what. He didn't know where. He knew, with the specific full-body certainty he usually reserved for decisions that got him banned from things, that somewhere, something important had just occurred, and that it involved a shield, and that it involved him, personally, on a level he could not begin to articulate.
"I have to go," he said.
"Go where?"
"I don't know yet," Bob said, already walking. "But I'll know it when I get there."
He got there roughly forty-five minutes later, breathless, having crossed a kingdom border he technically had no reason to be crossing, and found Miranda and Fluffy standing exactly where the entire non-event had already ended, doing absolutely nothing dramatic, discussing something unrelated about arena times.
"WHAT HAPPENED HERE," Bob announced, arriving at a full sprint and stopping so abruptly he nearly fell into the moat.
Miranda blinked at him. "...Nothing? I sent a troop at Fluffy. He shielded. It bounced. I laughed. That was forty minutes ago, Bob."
"That is not nothing." Bob was already circling the shield's now-inactive perimeter like a man reading tea leaves. "One troop. A shield. A bounce." He said each word like it was load-bearing. "Do either of you understand what you have just recreated?"
"Recreated from what?" Fluffy asked, mildly, the way he asked most things.
"I DON'T KNOW," Bob said, and this seemed to bother him more than anything else so far. "That's the part I can't explain! I felt it! Here—" he thumped his own chest, hard enough to stagger himself slightly "—like a bell went off somewhere I didn't know I had a bell."
Miranda looked at Fluffy. Fluffy looked at Miranda. Neither of them said anything, because there was genuinely nothing to say to that.
"It's a sign," Bob continued, undeterred, already producing a notebook from somewhere on his person that neither of them had seen him carrying. "One troop. One shield. One bounce. I don't know what it's a sign of. But I intend to document it thoroughly until I do."
"Bob," Miranda said, "I was bored and you had one troop lying around and Fluffy's shield timer was up. That's the whole story."
"That's what they always say," Bob said darkly, writing something down that was almost certainly not useful.
Fluffy, who had been quiet through most of this, finally spoke. "Let him have it."
Miranda turned to him. "What?"
"He's not hurting anything." Fluffy shrugged, already walking off toward whatever he'd been doing before any of this started. "Everyone needs a bell they don't understand."
Bob stayed at the site for the better part of an hour, pacing the shield's perimeter, occasionally pressing a hand flat against the invisible dome like he expected it to tell him something. It never did. He left eventually, no closer to an answer, already halfway convinced he'd invent one anyway by the time he got home.
He never did find out why it mattered. Neither did Miranda. Neither did Fluffy.
Somewhere, in a private chat neither of them was in, on a day neither of them would ever hear about, this had already happened once before — a shield, a lone troop, a bounce, and a joke that became a legend, and then became him.
Bob just called it "The First Bounce." He filed it under important, underlined twice, and left it at that.
He was, without knowing it, exactly right.