Sue turns twelve. He spends two months as a twelve-year-old in command of Phoenix Army, and then he graduates to Tactical.

The fantasy game is emptier now. But he finished her castle first. And all the space stations are on the same time zone, so Sue knows when to knock on her glass wall and see if she'll let him by.

Flame changes commanders again. The new one doesn't want a girl in his army - thinks she damages unit cohesion or some kuso like that - and he trades her to Rabbit, which would have been great ages ago, but Rabbit now has a different commander too. This one is clever enough - or has enough inertia - to leave her in toon leader position based solely on seniority (she is eleven, now). He gives her the boys most recently out of launch - the vets go to the toon leaders who curry more personal favor - and she trains them into a squad of formbusters and sharpshooters who inexplicably start coming to her about their personal problems too. She helps as best she can.

When she is eleven and a half, she receives command of Asp Army. She scopes them out and sees that she needs to reorganize the toon leadership completely - Asp's previous commander was an idiot, saved from last place only by good footsoldiers who could take vague or outright mumbled orders and turn them into reasonable objectives. Asp's record is still one of the worst in the school; it's ahead of Dragon (cursed), Echidna (they keep getting matched against the stronger armies but as far as Aegis can tell are intrinsically just mediocre), and Rat (the commander has checked out so completely that he's only still there because they haven't decided whether to ice him or take a chance on graduating him).

She trades the whining Asp toon leaders - one has the good grace not to whine - and their disgruntled seconds. (She doesn't demote them first: she wants good trades, and she can get more for a toon leader than for a former toon leader.) She promotes some of those good footsoldiers, trades in Qiaochu and a few other old friends with solid skills and gives them a week to get to know the boys and settle in, and then - unprecedented - lets them submit requests for their own underlings.

Everyone gets the toon they want, except for a couple of leaders with overlapping tastes in soldiers who she has to break ties on. That popularly requested handful (the ones with good records and charismatic smiles) she sorts by skill, not aiming to keep the toons all the same size: if Qiaochu wants to command fifteen men and Blue Moon wants a surgical force of four, she'll let them. The six soldiers no one asks for, she keeps for her own squad of cover fire and scouting; if she can't make them into something either, she'll trade some more.

Her six-man squad is called the Medusa in flat hours after she starts training them separately - if you so much as look at the Aegis, you'll be turned to stone! her soldiers repeat to each other with hysterical laughter. The other toons have roles too. Qiaochu's boys learn to move like a flock of pigeons, pushing off each other gently en route through the battleroom to make it hard to take steady aim at just one. Blue Moon's boys get Aegis's formbusting training. Emilio's learn hand-to-hand engagements - with strict cautions about how hard a blow a flash suit can absorb without injuring the child inside it - and Screwdriver's are a team of sharpshooters. She makes sure they each have seconds and that Qiaochu's huge toon also has a third and a fourth, so they aren't directionless if something happens to their leader. She makes sure that Medusa can be absorbed into the nearest available toon usefully if she's shot and their cover fire is no longer necessary. She experiments with combining toons, putting Qiaochu's flock around Screwdriver's gunmen or Blue Moon's formbusters on an assisted mission with Emilio's hand-to-hand (the skills are related, but not identical).

She has her army for a month, she gets a battle against Tide, and she wins it.

She doesn't win everything. Rabbit's good, Eagle's good, she gives them a hard fight for their winnings but eventually they both beat her (and she has to face Rabbit twice). But she wins most. Asp climbs the standings steadily from its miserable origins until her twelfth birthday, on which she receives an assignment to Tactical.

She sends Beri a message.

I wish to requisition a copy of my save file for the fantasy game. I have put a considerable amount of time into it. While I don't expect to have the software to run the game at Tactical, it is not impossible that I will eventually be in a position to revive my villagers.