Ahem, this was embarrassing. There were only two hours left, and I really couldn't make it in time. I didn't get it done. I'd originally wanted to start a side arc in Utopia City, but the distance between settings felt too great, and it could easily muddle the perspectives. So I planned to resolve the nuclear incident before moving into it, one thing at a time.
A leave request this short would seem insincere, so I might as well talk about the plot.
This time, the spotlight would probably be on the Storm Corps and the Skeleton Corps, which had mostly been background characters in the early stages. I might use some Warhammer 40K, Stellaris, and Fallout references. They were players, after all—if they were serious all the time, that would be stranger.
As for the rats, I think I'd answered this before. It wasn't that I'd stopped writing them; their arc, along with Garbage Lord and the Jungle Corps, would take place in the southern Jinchuan Province. I couldn't spoil anything, but I could only say that the keywords for that arc in the outline were: mutants, green, chaos.
And then there were the newcomers. I did want to write about some new players, but I had to prepare a scenario suitable for beginners to participate in. There were already a lot of characters. If I just changed the names and wrote the beginner phase I'd already written before, it would feel like padding. But if I handed a scenario that was too difficult to newcomers, people would definitely say it was unreasonable again—for example, why wasn't something so important assigned to more reliable veteran players?
So I needed an opportunity: an event that wasn't all that important, appearing through a plausible coincidence, but ultimately affecting the overall situation.