Autumn | The Duskwalker

[Autumn 0]

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 with. There was always the arcade, and the endless sea of online randoms...

Still, living as she did among conformist plebs, the idea of a virtual world where she could just be herself? Oh, that was something she had to get in on.

Though the truth behind that reality had her regretting, soon enough, the all-nighter she pulled to snag herself a first-run copy of that death game...

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Background:

    Ayaka Aoki grew up in a particularly conservative household, attending an equally conservative all-girls' school in Tokyo, Japan. Her parents, while not precisely rich, were well-to-do and credited their life success to an adherence to proper Japanese societal norms. Which meant, above all, that Ayaka had to take her education very seriously... in spite of her family's expectation that she would find a dependable husband to secure her future with, rather than a career. This paradox has always left her bemused, whenever she stops to think about it too hard.
    Nevertheless, this lifestyle never really bothered Ayaka much. She was so successful at making and maintaining her grades, in fact, that her parents eventually gave her pretty much unlimited freedom as far as how she spent her not-insignificant allowance and her free time. Around about her last year of middle school, Ayaka gave into curiosity and tried out some of the more "hardcore" games at the arcade she always passed on her way back from school, and soon she found she had a talent for those as well; her exploits in competitive play behind the control-stick of multiple Tekken and Virtua Fighter characters became the stuff of local legend, and she achieved more than her share of top-ten scores in Hatsune Miku, as well.
    Being quite the focused academic, though, she found her true gaming passions in the Role-Playing Game genre, both in single-player and in a number MMORPG, home-grown and foreign-developed. Indeed, her stellar performance in English class enabled her to deep-dive into a number of imported titles and retro classics. She became a connoisseur of the genre, spending intense marathon sessions with such games as The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, EverQuest, and Neverwinter Nights. But with this passion came a quiet loneliness, as none of the girls she had made friends with at school seemed to find such things appropriate for a lady. Ayaka knew that there were other girl gamers out there; she'd friended several online! But here in her very old-fashioned social sphere, the only things anyone seemed to believe she should be enthusiastic about were "girl things."
    Eventually Ayaka learned to separate her "true self" from her social mask, and by the time she finished her first year of high school, she had stopped bringing up video games in public entirely. She had friends—she was quite popular, in fact—but the hours she spent going toe-to-toe with locals at the arcade or playing binge sessions of the latest RPG to absorb her had become something of a secret second life. She even had a recurring in-game character that she created and played as every time a game gave her the option to do so: the stunning beautiful, daring, and strong swordswoman, "Autumn Duskwalker," who she began to see as a real alter-ego...
    The only people who knew something of her passions were her parents, and since she seemed to be doing very well indeed, ranking among the top five in exams more often than not, they saw no reason to interfere. Indeed, when the initial promotions for Sword Art Online hit the airwaves, they bought her a NerveGear as an early birthday present and gave their full blessing for her to join the overnight line outside of the nearest shop to stock the opening run of hard copies. Join the overnight line she did, and with her family's best camping gear to boot! She was overjoyed to snag a copy just before the store ran out, and dashed home as fast as her legs (and public transit) would carry her.
    Eagerly, she awaited the day she could log on, and make her alter-ego Autumn a reality. Darkish-gold skin like hers, deep red hair, tall, lithe and athletic... everything she saw in the perfect heroine.
    Then came Launch Day. You, of course, know the rest.
    In the intervening months, Ayaka made a life for herself in the Town of Beginnings. She had tried going out into the fields, and eventually screwed herself up to try again, then again, and again... but the threat of death always turned her blood to ice, when faced with the prospect of fighting monsters for real... eventually, as the clearing efforts moved ahead without her, Ayaka resigned herself to the belief that Autumn Duskwalker had never truly been real at all, and there was only Ayaka, the pretender. A schoolgirl trapped in a brutal fantasy land that she was in no way suited to fight her way through.
    She was content to make a quiet life for herself in town, until...

 

Virtues:

• Focus. Autumn has the intense patience and willpower to dedicate herself to truly arduous, tedious, or time-consuming tasks, be it grinding a skill in a game or keeping her nose in the books to study for a big test. She's always willing, and more importantly has the temperament, to do things the long way, and hardly ever complains. When faced with one of Aincrad's more headache-inducing puzzles or rare-item spawns, she's the first to start and the last to walk away.
• Social graces. Even when out of her comfort zone with someone, her long practice adopting a friendly persona around others that she doesn't quite "click" with all but guarantees that others will at least see her as someone they can get along with. It takes a lot to make her uncomfortable around someone, or uncomfortable enough that it shows, anyway. Her upbringing also instilled her with a strong sense of social and personal boundaries, which she rarely if ever stumbles over.
• Sportsmanship. Autumn loves a good competition, but she learned early and often at the arcades that getting salty about a lost match only ever spoils the fun. Always willing for a friendly (and safe) duel or game with another player, she's more likely to praise someone for managing to beat her than get all grumpy over losing. She's also more likely to congratulate someone for finding something rare than to get jealous over not having it herself.

Flaws:

• Fear of danger. Ayaka finds fighting the monsters of Aincrad terrifying. She still hasn't gotten over the instinctive fight-or-flight response that facing down real virtual enemies provokes. She isn't likely to volunteer for any particularly dangerous raids.
• Doesn't know how to deal with boys. Having attended all-girls schools since she was old enough to attend school at all, Ayaka's only interactions with the opposite sex were at home (where she was an only child) and at the arcade (where boys mostly just hit on her when they weren't getting sour at her for beating them at games). She doesn't have any history of healthy inter-gender relations, so she tends to keep male players at arm's length. She instantly suspects male players of wanting to interact with her because they're leaping at any female players they see, and is therefore mistrustful and closed-off to them by default.
• Habitually conservative. Having been raised in an old-fashioned household, many progressive concepts are unfamiliar to her in spite of her own personal baggage. She is not prejudiced, but also has no idea how to process a number of relevant, modern social issues, such as sexual orientation and the like. If faced with such things directly, she is likely to stumble over them, having not yet been given cause to think about such issues or form opinions about them. One might call her socially naïve.

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Skills:

Unused Skill Points: 1 | Used Skill Points: 4

• «Straight Swords» Weapon Skill | RANK 1

    Known Sword Arts:
«Vertical» | [x4] ST-I (4 EN) | A single-target sword art.
«Horizontal» | [x3] AOE-I (1 + [2 * targets] EN) | AOE | A sword art that strikes multiple targets at once.
«Slant» | [x4] TECH-A (5 EN) | STUN | A single-target sword art that stuns an enemy.

Inventory:

New Character Bundle: DPS Package

Equipment:

Kobold Skirmisher's Sword
        [Straight Sword, Rare] [Damage I] [Accuracy I] | Quantity: 1
     A drop-weapon traded to Autumn by a despondent player who lost his party to mobs in the Floor One labyrinth. Seems to be a loot drop from one of those mobs.
     The player who gave it to her has retired to the Town of Beginnings.

Consumables:

Starter Healing Potion
        [Heals 50 HP] | Quantity: 3
      A novice-level alchemical healing concoction available in most shops on the lower floors. More useful out of battle than in.

 

Roleplay Log:

Spoiler

• Forever Fall [In Progress]

Quest Log

Spoiler

None yet.

Relationships:

Spoiler

None yet.

 

Edited November 19, 2023 by Autumn
Changed character image.

[NIGHT 0]

approved.