I loved the bit with her ambushing Mateo and pulling him into a secret underground tunnel that she supposedly uses all the time to get around in order to facilitate being mysterious
So I didn't respond to the discussion about tournament arcs yesterday but I do want to observe that you and Emily both did great jobs with kind of opposite approaches
VALR's tournament arc used mostly brand-new characters, but the focus was on introducing their stories and incredible soap operatic backstory connections to the PCs and known NPCs.
...Oh, also: the reason why Astra is saying "It's one of the few non-horrible things he actually enjoys." up there is because Quinn accidentally wrote the announcement for Celestine at the start of the match as Maxwell Grey instead of Mr. Gumdrop.
So we decided that it was actually canon, and that Maxwell barged into the announcer box and grabbed the microphone to announce Celestine himself because he's genuinely just very into the historical reenactment club.
I asked Quinn at the time, and they confirmed that Hibiki was open to the idea of either Mateo or Astra... so on the way out, I had Astra leave her this:
this extremely stupid scene happensthat's the entire campaignthe two forces of the world...light and frog