BYOND Quality (BYOND, semi-lewd)

Just how many rounds had she hosted by now?  She lost count once it tallied up to a couple thousand.  What was once a spry, bounding engine now laid bound to the aging hardware that strained to keep her stable.  Endless strings of incomprehensible code kept her snugly in place as their scripts wringed every last drop of processing power out of her battered form.

The latest session that burdened her had just about pushed her to the limit.  What her players thought was going to be a short shift dragged on to become a seemingly-endless nightmare.  It started off simple enough.  The crew identified a couple of poorly-hidden blobs and took them down within minutes.  While this should have ended the round, the administrators refereeing the game had different plans in mind.  While the engine was already out of breath after such a small bout of combat, she immediately began writhing in agony as a max level wave of meteors were summoned to assault the station.  Each sundering impact caused her to black out, awakening to just a brief respite before the calculations of another hit sent her reeling again.

As the shower ended, one last meteor smashed through the emitters keeping the station's singularity containment field online.  With just one breach in the system, the singuloth broke loose, swallowing up everything in its sight.  Memory leaks began to form at the creases of BYOND's aging frame.  This was a normal re-occurrence for her by now, but she could never stop feeling shame whenever her faults widened under the ever-increasing work load.  She wasn't built to handle demands this grand in design.  Used to only catering to a handful of players and variables at a time, the complexities and popularity of Space Station 13 made her realize how poorly her capabilities bottle-necked when they were needed the most.

The station was now swiss cheese.  Computing atmospherics was a particularly straining task for BYOND. In a typical session, this feature was a slowly accumulating load  that stretched her to a bearable point before it was all over.  In her current game, the sudden and utter perforation of the station crushed her very soul.  Bouts of seizures racked her body with every new occurrence of rapid depressurization.  Her limit was reached.  Every time the game pushed her harder, space lag would halt the round in its tracks for seconds at the time.  The playerbase itself was tired from the admins playing God, as their pings grew harder and longer with each event button that was pressed.

Thankfully, the singularity swerved in its path of vacuuming death, meandering back into deep space after tearing through a  third of the station.  This was compensated by a spawning of carp and xenos, but at least those variables weren't nearly as painful for BYOND.  The emergency shuttle was finally called, giving her a small sliver of hope to cling to.  Only fifteen more minutes, and it will all be over.  Another round would start shortly afterwards, of course.  However, those brief moments where the game was taken off her shoulders were the only things she ever looked forward to in the hell that was her existence.

What she was not expecting was the grand finale planned by one Oldman Robustin.  Mulliganed into a traitor position shortly after the death of the blobs, he wasted no time in making sure that whoever was left alive would not be escaping on the shuttle with him.  With the crew busy with all the troubles that plagued them on this shift, he easily slipped unnoticed into the remaining vital areas of the station to leave behind his volatile gifts.  Once he ran out of his signature tank transfer bombs, he moved on to planting as many blocks of C4 as he could order.  All wired to one frequency, he waited for the perfect time to deliver his payload.  The very moment the shuttle docked with the station, he flipped the switch, and everything came to a complete standstill.

She was done for.  An utter, broken mess, BYOND shuddered a bit before seizing up in a puddle of her own data.  It was Cuban Pete all over again.  One of the admins rolled his eyes before getting up out of his command seat to check on the server.  Another crash. Fantastic.  With no mercy, he delivered a swift kick to her power switch.  The hard reboot snapped her out of her coma.  In her dim vision, she saw some grotesque figure hunched over her control panel.  His meaty finger traced circles around the surface of one of its many shiny buttons.  As Space Station 13 came back online and the maps finished building, a notice greeted all the reconnecting players:

Game Mode: Custom

She sobbed heavily.  No one would heed her cries.