Disclaimer: I don't own Durarara!, or any of the characters used in this fic. They are the property of Ryohgo Narita and Suzuhito Yasuda. I only own any of my original characters that I choose to include, as well as any of my own original plot ideas.

From Role Play to Real Life

A/N: Mikado POV.

It was only meant to be an innocent game, something to easily occupy what time I had free on weekends and such. With school being so demanding then, I was constantly on the lookout for some kind of escape. Everyone else was too busy studying for finals or writing papers, which left them no time to hang around with me. It wasn't hard to understand and accept that, but it didn't at all mean that I had to like it. Things got boring, week after week, and all I could really do was read manga and stare at the television screen.

Truth be told, I just wanted a little bit of excitement.

Finally, during one particularly boring weekend in May, I managed to get some friends together in a chat room. The conversation started out as usual, with a few of them teasing me about how I should be a character in an action manga. From there, we went on to assign each other characters in a popular supernatural series, drawing lines that would connect us with our fictional counterparts. Somehow, everyone voted me as being the overly-ambitious hero. It was funny, being assigned that character, as I always wished that my life in Saitama could have been that exciting.

Feeling more empowered, I proposed that we create our own little "gang," each of us putting in motives or secret operations that would go on in our online role play. My friends agreed, and we ended up naming ourselves the Dollars.

Every weekend after that, we'd throw caution to the wind, and end up back in our chat room, naming it "Dollars HQ" or something like that. We'd spend hours creating our own stories, some of our characters being knocked off as if we were part of a big-time mafia group. For the first time in a long while, I was enjoying myself, laughing like I hadn't in what felt like years. I was finally having the "life" I wanted. One filled with excitement and danger on the corner of every street.

It would be a few weeks before I heard about what had happened in regards to our "gang."

When the first weekend in August rolled around, I was met with a disturbing email from one of my friends. Upon opening it, I found a link that he'd sent, indicating that someone in Ikebukuro had gone on to actually create a real gang based on that from our role play. The link was to a bulletin on a popular website's forum. That was all that was needed to prove it. Whoever this person was was working to recruit members, insisting that people could join by invitation only. Another link had been left behind, this one leading to a password-protected page for the group.

I was scared, fearing that we'd overworked the Dollar name, leading it into the hands of real gangsters. That night, my friends insisted that we desert the Dollar project.

It seemed like a good idea at first, but I felt guilty all the same. I had to do something, and so, I dedicated myself to working on the problem at hand, trying to make the Dollar name into something that people wouldn't hate.

It was all a mistake. I didn't mean for things to go so wrong.