Zeltran: Arc 1.2e

He’d only been out of SAO for two fucking days and they were already bombarding him with paperwork and questions and all kinds of other shit. The only bright side to all of this was that he was actually out of SAO. Still, that was small consolation to Ryuya as he filled out his name, age, address, and phone number on the top of the seventeenth form.

He wasn’t actually writing any of this, obviously. He was just dictating it to the government official with the clipboard. Of course, that made it seem even more monotonous. Still, he figured, it can’t really get any worse. And it’s not like I’m going anywhere in the meantime. All the same, it was long, boring, and really quite annoying.

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The good parts were the visitors. His father had come by every day for a week to talk about the game (he was a freelance designer) and to wish him well, then came by infrequently as time went on, as he was busy with work. He’d gotten a job with an American company called Indepenn Dextera. They hadn’t made any VRMMOS yet, but his father said that was because of some hocus-pocus graphics engine they were working on or something.

His mother and sister came by once a week or so. His mother usually fussed and worried over everything, and his toddling sister liked to play with his EKG. He tolerated his mother’s fussing so he could see his younger sister. She’d only been a few months old when he’d gone into SAO, so this was the first real time he’d spent with little Emi. She was talking a little already. Her vocabulary had all the basics (mama, daddy, mine, no, hi, bye-bye, uh-oh), but also included bastardizations of “brother”, “hospital”, and “restaurant”. She wasn’t making coherent sentences yet, and this was a cause of worry for her mother. Ryuya wasn’t worried yet because he could tell she understood everything that was going on.

The visitor he looked forward to seeing the most was Nanase Tachibana. She’d come to see him his third day back, mostly out of curiosity. He’d liked her first few visits because of how curious she was about SAO and how she didn’t treat him like some fragile thing that could shatter any second. She only came about once a month, but they’d already formed a loose friendship based mostly on gaming. Turns out that while he was in SAO, regular MMOs had exploded, and Nanase had been swept up with the tide. He was seriously considering suggesting to her that she try VRMMOs as an alternative, since you couldn’t play nonstop without reducing yourself to SAO Survivor levels of malnutrition.

It was ironic, he knew. An SAO Survivor telling someone else to try VRMMOs as a “better” alternative to regular ones to try to curb addiction. Still, he’d thought about this for a while in SAO. He’d been planning for a while to try other VR games once he got out and did whatever therapy they made him go through. It’d be nice to play a VR game from the beginning with a friend, minus the fear of death hanging over your head every second of gameplay.

Yeah, it’d be nice to start over in a new game and see where a new friendship would go.