As an old person who plays Genshin Impact, the “character banners” are 100% loot boxes. They have a pity system which guarantees a five star character after 100 “wishes” but even then it may not be the character you wanted. You might have to “wish” up to 200 times to get the five star character you are “wishing” for on the banner. Since you are not buying the character out right and gambling to get them it’s a loot box.

For anyone who doesn’t play “character banners” are a limited run (3 weeks) of a five star character that you can only get from the banner. “Wishes” are like rolls for the character. Each wish you lose gives you either a weapon (3 star/practically useless in game) and every 10 wishes gurantees a four star weapon or four star character.

I was about to roll my eyes and scroll past your comment but then I read “powdered wig”. I was committed to read it all when I saw “smoothbore”. The “tally ho lads” was hilarious. Great job all the way through!

This would be a great short story if for some reason the AI didn’t realize there was going to be a date issue and didn’t properly update itself causing it to crash. Then the problem is it was self sufficient for so long no humans know how to restart it or fix the issue, causing society to have a technology blackout for the first time in centuries.