Autumn

Autumn didn't react at first. But then she gave a little start and her eyes seemed to refocus; she blinked, and then looked up at Almina, then to the hand... ...her pale face regained its color, and then some. She winced and ducked her head. "I-I'm okay. I'll be fine," she said through her teeth. But despite the unwilling look on her face, she reached up without looking and took Almina's hand, letting the girl lend some help in getting up. It was a strange interaction, she thought, as their respective Strength stats were run through an algorithm to determine specifically how much hel

It wasn't a clear headspace to exist in, by anyone's measure. Ayaka's vision had closed into a dark, cramped tunnel; it felt like all she could see was the boar. Its health bar, hovering above it, was just another shade in the gooey mass of indistinct color surrounding The Boar. Virtual lungs pumping shallow breaths in and out in classic hyperventilation, the only reason Ayaka could even function now was because a virtual body needed neither bloodflow nor air to function. As long as she was recognized as breathing by the system she didn't even have to worry about suffocation damage. She f

Almina probably didn't expect the slight wince that crossed Autumn's face when she commented that her character-name suited her. But it was there and gone so quickly that Almina might have imagined it; the emotional-expression system was typically less subtle than that, after all. When Almina zeroed on on a boar for their training target, Ayaka snapped her eyes shut instead of looking at it, and seemed to be focusing on her breathing. She didn't open them again until Almina started speaking, telling her to stay back and watch for now. Ayaka tightened her grip on her sword—had she drawn it

"You're really brave..." sighed Autumn... no, Ayaka. She smiled a bit and said, "I don't know if I'll ever have the nerve to take risks that big, yet. But you never know, I guess? Maybe I need to get used to it." As for the apparent non sequitur about being struck by what Ayaka could only think of as the Isekai Truck, she opened her mouth—and right on the edge of making a quip about how Alfina had actually skipped that step by logging onto Sword Art Online, snapped her mouth shut. Good sense had caught up with her; she didn't even know this player's name yet. It would be tactless to bust

Autumn rubbed at her arm, trying to drive down the anxiety that being out in the field brought. She glanced around, as if expecting a boar to charge out of a random bush right for her... despite knowing in her head that boars didn't have much of an aggro range; not as much as the wolves, which she was pretty sure wouldn't spawn so close to town... When Almina admitted to jumping into a group of four of the things, though, Autumn's wide eyes snapped to her. "That was dangerous!" she blurted, clear panic in the high note of her voice. "You could've died! Even if you have back-up, you n

"You all right?" Ayaka froze in her clumsy attempt to stand, looking up just in time to see a young woman—around about her own age—partly-climbing but mostly-falling out of a tree not too far away. When this woman caught herself on a branch, Ayaka blinked and stared. "Ehehe, hi," said the woman, and Ayaka winced a beat before the crack sounded; she was genre-savvy enough to know that came next. And familiar enough with the durability of the trees to be found in the Town of Beginnings to guess that the ones outside of town wouldn't fare much better. So the woman took her tumble,

Another day was passing in a hazy blur. How long had it been since she'd been trapped here? Since they all had...? Autumn—no, Ayaka, she hadn't yet earned the right to think of herself as "Autumn"—had finished her food run. She had an arrangement with a local low-level, female player: she would take care of menial tasks like shopping for food, and in exchange, she would get to eat with the household. A middle-aged mother had logged on with her two rambunctious sons on launch day, kids that couldn't have been older than eleven or twelve, and she had her hands full just keeping an eye on th

Profile: Username: Autumn | Real Name: Ayaka Aoki Age: 19 | Gender: Female | Height: 5' 4" There's an absurd notion that girls aren't supposed to be into video games. What's even more absurd is that girls themselves often believe it. So it's no surprise that Ayaka hardly had any friends who shared her interests, and even less surprising that on the few occasions when she tried to share those interests with the friends she did have, the best she got was polite, feigned interest and more often than that, incredulity. Oh well. It wasn't as if she needed friends to game wi