Gen’ei Setsuna: “OK, enough irl stuff! Everybody stay in character!”
We were playing the very first online game—the very first MMORPG—in the entire Eldant Empire.
I was on day fourteen of my new life as a shut-in. Minori-san messaged me every day, pretty frequently at that, and I chatted with her a little. But once everyone got the idea that I was open to “conversations” as long as they were via text, they all started pinging me.
Somehow the inert letters on the screen didn’t raise my guard quite like a face-to-face conversation, and gradually I started to answer them. Via chat, I could manage it.
I could practically picture Myusel and the other girls, hunting and pecking their way around the unfamiliar keyboard as they typed up messages in hiragana. I could tell how much time and effort it took, and my heart prickled at the thought of just ignoring them.
But even so, it still made me a little queasy to think of seeing them face-to-face. I didn’t know exactly what Minori-san and Hikaru-san thought about the dribble of answers I was sending to the girls, but all of a sudden they invited me to play an online game. They had loaded some special software onto the mansion’s server and set up a simple MMO.
“Don’t even have to leave your room to play it,” Minori-san had messaged me. True enough. I was starting to get a little tired of mainlining one gal game after another, so I decided to play along with her. You could enjoy an MMO without having to actually see anyone, and our avatars would provide a kind of buffer for dealing with the others. Some people acted so different online that you could talk about an “irl personality” and an “online persona.”
So here we were. I was getting sucked into an online game for the first time in ages. Heck, MMOs were the one thing I’d had absolutely, totally no access to ever since coming here. But now that I was back on the wagon, I was finding it pretty fun.
I imposed just one condition on Minori-san and her plan: that we not talk about real-life things while we were playing. We had to completely become our alter egos.
Setting conditions? I know, even I sort of wanted to snap You’ve got some nerve! at myself. But Minori-san was surprisingly quick to accept the idea, and we got things rolling. Anyway, no better way to get the most out of an MMO than some good role-playing.
Kyouya (Minori-san): “Okay, the boss is up next. Everybody ready?”
As our warrior, Minori-san was on top of this. After a second, the chat balloons began popping up.
Miyuu (Myusel): “yes!”
GalGaiGar (Petralka): “any time.”
Yakiniku (Elvia): “meat!”
The Eldant contingent generally wrote only in short sentences composed entirely in the simple hiragana script. Myusel and Petralka could read and even write some kanji, but it looked like they weren’t entirely comfortable yet typing on a Japanese keyboard. They were probably over there somewhere, poking away at the keys with one finger at a time.
I paused. They were making this effort out of consideration for me, and I have to admit it made me feel a little guilty. It was really my own indecision and dithering that had ultimately led to me being used as a punching bag.
“No, no, no, no, no!” I shook my head vigorously to chase away the guilt.
Right now, I had a boss fight to worry about.
Gen’ei Setsuna (me): “Let’s go!”
I—or rather my avatar, Gen’ei Setsuna—headed for the 3D shadow looming on the horizon. My perspective was looking sort of downward at my character, so running beside Gen’ei Setsuna I could see Yakiniku (Elvia) and GalGaiGar (Petralka), along with Kyouya (Minori-san). I assumed that Miyuu (Myusel) and †Obsidian Fallen Angel† (Hikaru-san) were bringing up the rear.
Gen’ei Setsuna (me): “Yaaaahhh!”
Gen’ei Setsuna rushed in to strike the first blow. The dragon targeted me and got ready to attack, at which point Yakiniku came barreling up, drawing aggro so Kyouya and GalGaiGar could hit the monster from both sides. The dragon lashed out with its tail and front legs. I knew those things could take a chunk out of your health even with just a glancing blow. Miyuu would try to heal us, but for the dragon, simply sweeping with its tail was essentially an area-of-effect attack, and there was no way she would be able to heal us all fast enough. These boss characters were nothing to sneeze at.
Meanwhile...
GalGaiGar (Petralka): “by our renown as a brave we shall defeat you! Go-lu-den Earth Han-mer!”
Geez, Petralka was really into this. I remembered how back when she played the lead role in our movie, she almost seemed to forget she was supposed to be an empress, and threw herself into the part. It was almost like some sort of game to her. Stress relief, if you will. Even if the movie itself did end up banned by royal decree, a chapter of her history she wished would be forgotten.
It seemed like Myusel was enjoying herself just as much as Petralka. She had deliberately taken a Japanese name, with kanji and everything. Unlike Elvia, who called herself... Yakiniku. Yeesh. I could just picture it: her sitting at the computer, saying, “Name? Don’t really care. Hey, how about my favorite food?”
Yakiniku (Elvia): “meat! like! so good!”
Don’t you have anything else to say?
At least you knew who you were talking to.
This boss, though. We were pounding away at it, but it had such massive HP that it just wouldn’t go down. Myusel was healing left, right, and center, but the dragon’s attacks did a little more damage than her spells could heal, and those of us on the front row were left to watch our health drain slowly but surely.
I wished Hikaru-san would hurry up with that spell and hopefully turn the tide. Even a powerful magic attack
