Queenpins

Double Time Swing

Prologue

Barely five years have passed since the War against Pekoland came to an end. We won that war - at least I like to think that we did. All of the fears and wartime hysteria of those insane rabbits coming to our shores were dispelled by the peace treaty signed by our leaders.

Armies were demobilized. Territories were given and taken. Concessions were made. Soldiers were ordered to go home - and that was supposed to be the end of it.

The thing is, the soldiers that didn't come home in coffins draped in Hololive flags returned as different people - changed by the War in one way or another. Even though they were in one piece, they returned to our country broken. Wartime wounds healed, but the scars remained.

HALU reopened those wounds. The war that all of us feared came to our shores - different, but no less vicious. It came to us in pillars of blue smoke billowing from the erupted sewers, driving thousands upon thousands crazy.

Shrimp? Deadbeat? Civilian? Police? HALU didn't discriminate.

A large group of them appeared here at Strawberry Cove, emerging from the forest and the thickets like the unnaturally fearless and reckless soldiers of the Pekolander Army. They were shepherded by dirty cops with gas masks and led by Chief Enma and her conspirators - Bloop and Death-sensei.

They sicced those hallucinating people upon us like the Pekolander officers did on Sunfish Hill.

Kiara, Gura, Calli, Bae, Kronii and I stood together on the beach with the handful of gangsters and detectives that survived the Casino Train crash. With our backs turned to the restless North District Sea, we made ready for war.

...

From the line of gas-masked police officers, Chief Enma held her head high and marched through dramatically. She watched the tiny army gathered on the beach of Strawberry Cove and scoffed. One of the officers passed her a megaphone and she took it from him to speak.

"I had a feeling that throwing the entire train out wasn't gonna be enough." Enma jeered, taunting her foes, "You bastards are tough as nails - and the whole lot of ya have the luck of the devil herself! That's why I had to wield the devil's cruelty too. There will be no escaping this time."

With that announcement, Enma tossed away the megaphone and took out a peculiar whistle - a Wartime trench whistle. She blew on it with all her might - its sound echoed throughout the cove.

All of the hallucinating war veterans were driven into a maddened frenzy. The whistle brought them back five years in the past, forcing them to relive their wartime memories. Deep in the depths of their minds, beneath the five-year old scars of war, they remembered what the whistle meant.

The whistler and everyone around her was on 'their' side.

Everyone else was a Pekolander that must be destroyed.

Violent screams and war cries rang throughout Strawberry Cove. The ground seemed to shake beneath the hallucinating army's feet. Enma, Bloop, Death-sensei and the dirty cops, meanwhile, watched the spectacle with wide grins on their faces - acting like they had front row tickets to an ancient colosseum deathmatch.

Anyone on Ame's side who still had a gun in working condition opened fire, but a single Tommy Gun and a handful of pistols could hardly slow down the near-mindless horde. Dozens of the hallucinators fell, but hundred more took their place without the slightest hint of fear or remorse.

It wouldn't take long for the battle to be joined and devolve quickly into bitter hand-to-hand combat. Calli and Gura knew this - but they also knew that this was what they did best.