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But since we've decided to engage this epic in shorthand, you feel you must insist that we continue with this expository interlude.

It would turn out the arrangement of planets looked like this, rather. Bifurcated from each other, each team appearing to comprise a distinct chain in a distinct session without the luxury of the complete picture we see here.

It appeared that way until it was time to link the two chains, completing the circuit of twelve and uniting the teams.

For these final two links, Skaia had a plan, as it did with the order of every preceding link, and as it did with the paradoxical seeding of its own players on the surface of the planet it would later devastate to buy itself time. Its plan was as inescapable as all others, as inevitable as the reckoning it would ultimately face.