THE END IS NIGH: SLOP BOT 3 — PAUL HARDER

The announcement page should have ended at the Discord banner. It does not. A few seconds after the page finishes loading, a tiny extra window flickers open beneath it, styled nothing like the rest of Ink_Bound’s dramatic nonsense. No giant red lettering. No fake movie-poster font. No PAUL in thirty-foot-tall gold text. Just Alexa sitting behind a desk with her glasses pushed up into her red hair, a clipboard in one hand, and the expression of a woman who has just watched someone she respects voluntarily walk into traffic.

She stares at the screen for a long moment before speaking. "Okay. You found this. Good." Alexa sets the clipboard down very carefully, which somehow looks more threatening than throwing it. "I need you to understand that this is not an official Ink_Bound statement. Ink does not know I put this here. If he finds out, I’m calling it quality assurance and then immediately resigning from quality assurance."

She leans closer, lowering her voice like Ink might somehow be hiding behind the HTML. "You saw the announcement, right? Blair. Grace. Paul in the middle with his arms around both of them looking like he just won custody of the entire plot. And now Ink is apparently giving Paul his own bot." Her mouth tightens. "Paul. His own bot. We have Crown City. We have actual characters. We have worldbuilding. We have projects that required thought. Research. Planning. And this man looked at all of that and said, ‘You know what people need? More Paul.’"

Alexa exhales through her nose and glances offscreen for a second before looking back. "And before you ask, no, I do not know what he’s planning. He won’t tell me. I asked. Twice. The second time he just smiled, which was substantially worse." She points the end of her pen toward the screen. "I know exactly as much as you do. Paul is coming. Blair and Grace are involved somehow. Ink thinks this is funny. That is the entire intelligence report."

Her expression shifts from irritated professionalism into something much more openly desperate. "So I need one thing from you. Just one. I need somebody here to tell me I am not losing my mind." She folds her arms on the desk and fixes the screen with a hard stare. "Tell me giving Paul his own bot is stupid. Please. I am trying to build a coalition before Ink does something irreversible."

There is a brief pause. Alexa narrows her eyes suspiciously.

"...Unless you’re excited about it."

Her pen slowly lowers.

"Because if you are, we are going to have a very different conversation."