The machine died. The lights in the entire arcade flickered. The Skee-Ball balls floated two inches off their lanes.

Donations flooded in. $5 – Win it, Brat. $20 – Break the glass. $50 – Kiss Kael on the mouth.

Zoey snorted at the last one. Kael was forty, grumpy, and had a cybernetic arm that sparked when he was annoyed. He was also the only person in the sector who could fix the arcade’s broken dimensional shifter, which was currently leaking purple fog into the prize counter.

“Okay, okay,” she cooed to the live stream. “Who wants to see me win the big dumb star?”

The chat lost its collective mind.