Summary: The aftermath of the SAO Incident wasn't an entirely happy one, as Kibou could tell you. It left you broken, and vulnerable...to being picked up by an incredibly selfish Mabinogi player named Seki who's dead set on going on a cross-country commercing trip. Why did Kibou agree to help, again?

Takes place during winter vacation of 2025, which is after volume 6 of the light novels, before volume 7's "Caliber".

A/N: This was supposed to be my NaNoWriMo fic. It...didn't quite work out that way. Got about 2.5k words of it in a month, which is kinda sad... I need a more efficient way of writing.

Also, kind of alarmed at the frequency I'm going into double entendre territory as of late. It's like I can't think of a better way to make a joke anymore...

Disclaimer: Sword Art Online is owned by Reki Kawahara and Mabinogi is owned by Nexon. I own absolutely nothing in relation to either of these works, except for the plot of this particular story.

"Hey...! You there – you're a survivor of SAO, aren't you?"

The girl at table nine froze. Discreetly, since she was hoping that the voice wasn't actually addressing her, she swept her gaze left then right, not moving her head.

She found the caller soon enough. Amongst the people on the sunlit patio, chatting noisily under the shades cast by parasols, there was only one not engrossed with the big, high-resolution TV screen at the corner, and who was looking her way with a wide grin. A sixteen-ish (though of course there was no way to be sure) blonde-haired girl, wearing casual clothes – a big unzipped hoodie over a T-shirt rather stretched-out at the front, and a pair of jeans. Somehow, she gave off the impression of being a party girl, and one who would be at the center of it all. The girl at table nine immediately decided to pretend she hadn't heard her, and slouched even lower in her seat while looking the other way.

Unfortunately, the other person on table nine had different ideas. As he tended to whenever someone spoke to him or his partner, the black-haired boy's eyes, hidden behind sunglasses, zeroed in on the origin of the speaker with lightning speed and gave her a polite smile. That was apparently enough of an invitation for the blonde girl to move over to their table.

Damn it.

"Is there anything we can do for you?" the boy asked.

"Aww, thanks, sweetie! Scooch over a bit, if you don't mind," the blonde said, and then drew up a chair right next to him. The other girl bristled at the provocation, but then stopped herself. It hadn't been an entirely unreasonable action. He had been polite to her, after all, while she just tried to ignore the intruder. Case in point: she gave her glass of water more attention than strictly necessary, lifting it to take a sip.

"I'm Kaneko Tori," the blonde continued, surname-first.

Alright, the water turned out to be a bad idea. She choked ingloriously on it, coughing up liquid like a fish out on the shallows, because who in their right minds would give out their real name in this day and age, in a place like this no less? The boy looked over, alarmed, but she waved him off.

"Why –!?" she gasped out, as soon as she was able. "What the hell! Stop acting so familiar!"

"Kibou-chan..." the boy said, placatingly. Unfortunately that just made her throw him a dirty look, since she had most certainly not been considering giving her name in return.

Meanwhile, the intruder – Tori – was mulling over this piece of information. "Kibou... Ki-bou... Ki-bou..." she said in a wondering tone, tapping against her jaw with a finger. "You know, that sounds an awful lot like a pretty infamous player I've heard about from Sword Art Online. Hang on, what was the name..."

Kibou gritted her teeth. "Me and that bastard Kibaou are not the same person!" she snapped for the nth time, and then realized that that was as good as admitting that yes, she was, in fact, a victim of Sword Art Online. "Fuck. How did you even know!?"

Tori smiled. "Well," she said with a mock-mysterious air, "this may come as a surprise to you but our organization has been keeping track of –"

"Not funny," Kibou snarled, and Tori's smile disappeared. "Because there is an organization that's been keeping track of SAO victims, and if you're telling me they're still trying to throw me into that cage for the PTSDed they conveniently call a school, you may as well do yourself a favour and get the hell out, now."

For a moment there was silence as Tori and Kibou studied each other, one calm and the other with a hardened expression. Then, to Kibou's surprise, Tori pouted.

"Boo, you're no fun," Tori grumbled lightly. "I was only going to say 'keeping track of special individuals'. You didn't have to bring your sore spot into it."

Kibou flushed, belatedly realizing she said too much. She didn't know whether she should feel relieved or angered that Tori had talked about her "sore spot" so dismissively.

"It was just a hunch, anyway," Tori added.

This was doubtful, of course, and Kibou had own suspicions. A tiny part of her mind even wondered if this girl had been stalking her for a while and planned this entire conversation out. Incidentally, the rest of her mind was busy mentally slamming its figurative face into a figurative wall for how quickly her date had gone downhill.

She looked around. Luckily, no one around them had heard the exchange, the buzz around them thankfully concealing their conversation. Most eyes and ears were turned to the MMO Today channel streaming on the TV anyway. Those that were not were preoccupied in their own social rendezvous with awkwardness as only teenagers could manage. She turned back to the other girl at the table. "Just...go away. Please," Kibou said wearily.

Tori's eyes widened. "Oh! If this is about your name, I'm really sorry I mistook it for someone else's!" she said earnestly. "Really, I don't know how anyone could make that mistake. Kiba-ou – Fang King – is very different from Kibou – Hope. Hope is a better name. A pretty one."

Kibou buried her face in her hands and wished very hard for Tori to shut up and go away now, please.

"How about you, sweetie? Can you spare a cute girl a moment to tell me your name?"

Kibou looked through a gap in her fingers to see that Tori was looking (flirting, more like) inquisitively at her date, the boy who had been sitting almost forgotten beside Tori. He sent his partner a questioning glance, asking for permission. Kibou sighed.

"This is Kiri –" she began, and then shut herself up before the final syllable. Gods, today was a terrible day.

An amused smirk appeared on the boy's lips. "Rename accepted," he said dryly.

Tori looked about to frown, and then understanding dawned on her face. "So that's how it is..." Tori said wonderingly, and then, almost apologetically: "Ah – not that it's not a bad name either! With all the information about SAO floating around on forums, it's really become a popular name. Who wouldn't want to be named after the Hero of Aincrad?"

Kibou took a moment to think: of course she wouldn't think he was the real deal, despite that effeminate face behind his sunglasses – but then again, she didn't know if Tori knew how the "Hero of Aincrad" looked. His response didn't help either.

Right then, Kibou knew for sure that Tori hadn't planned this out at all, she really had been this unlucky. Again: fuck.

The boy scratched his head in a way that'd be considered awkward. "Well, thank you, Kaneko Tori-san."

"Oh! You can just call me Seki. That's my username – the short form of it, I mean."

"Very well, Seki-san."

"Oh Kiri-kun, you're just so cute!" Seki squealed, and then glomped him. The boy had time to do nothing save for a widening of the eyes before Seki was on him, and Kibou nearly shouted at her to keep her hands off before realizing exactly how possessive that would sound.

"Ah!" Seki cried, wrenching herself from the boy just as suddenly. "But before I forget, I should get to why I'm here in the first place. Kiri-kun, do you mind if I borrow Kibou-chan here for a few minutes? I need to ask her for something."

The black-haired boy (with a fair tinge of red on his cheeks, Kibou noted seethingly) looked over at his partner.

"Oh, why not," Kibou said. "The date's already been shot to hell, this girl apparently doesn't have the word 'no' in her dictionary and to top it all off, our food is late! So why the hell not!?"

"Then, if you'll excuse me, Kibou-chan, Seki-san." And with that, the boy got up to move out of the patio. A few curious glances were given his way for leaving at this point, but nothing more than that. Those same glances soon turned back to the news feed, where a pretty reporter on-screen was talking about Gun Gale Online.

"I was being sarcastic!" Kibou snarled.

Seki gave the other girl a worried look. "I don't I irritate you that much, do I?"

"Well what do you think!?" Kibou snapped, then checked around her to see if anyone had noticed her outburst; all clear, the place was as noisy as ever. She continued more quietly, but still heatedly, "You come out of nowhere and bring back a part of my life I'd rather keep forgotten. Worst of all, you interrupt my date while you're at it. Why did you think I wouldn't be annoyed!?"

"But it didn't look like the date was going well," Seki pointed out.

Kibou winced. Yes, that was true. Before Seki had called out to them, Kibou had been practically stewing with worry over how she should act and react. She had been too damn nervous.

"That doesn't matter," she said.

"Yes it should!" Seki insisted, and suddenly she grabbed Kibou's hands, looking into her eyes earnestly. "Dates are supposed to be fun! They're supposed to be a time when you can be yourself with someone you like! It's okay to be nervous, but it's never okay to force yourself to do something! And besides..."

Her grip on Kibou's hands got tighter. "I don't know if I'm right, but...I don't think you've talked to people normally for a long while now. When I'm here, all you could do was to throw up walls around yourself, asking me to leave. I can understand some of it, because I did intrude on you too suddenly. But with how much you lashed out at me... Was this date something you've been building up to for some time? Was it really something you felt you had to perfect?"

Kibou's heart thundered in her chest, her eyes wide. She couldn't respond. Was she really that easy to read?

Seki smiled sadly, compassionately. "What about your friends...?"

Kibou looked away. "...Kiri – I mean... He's my friend."

"He doesn't count," Seki said.

"Shut up."

Seki nodded decisively. "Then, I'll be one."

Kibou's head snapped back. "What?"

"I'll be your friend, if you'll have me." Seki smiled again, brighter this time. "It's the least I can do. For coming here like this, and for what I'm about to ask of you."

Kibou's mouth worked for some time, trying to find a good response. She glanced at Seki's hands, still wrapped around hers. "...You know what else you could do? Respect my personal space."

"Sure!" Seki chirped with a disgusting amount of satisfaction, before withdrawing. Kibou got the feeling that she had actually expected this, or at least got Kibou to a point farther along than she initially thought she would. Suddenly, Kibou felt very small. Compared to Seki's larger-than-life impression, and her bigger, more outgoing figure (especially at the...chest line), Kibou was too withdrawn. A simple white camisole-and-skirt combination, with a figure rather small for her age – she looked like a dainty but fragile princess-type. Not someone who would be able to help others.

"So what was it that you wanted to talk to me about, then?" she said irately, an emotion that grew when she noticed her heart was still beating rather fast. "What can I do for you that the Hero of Aincrad can't?" she added snidely, for good measure.

Seki nodded. "Have you heard about this MMORPG called Mabinogi?" she asked.

Kibou frowned. MMO Today had a feature about that, actually, right before the streaming of GGO currently going on. Mabinogi was a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game localized to Japan in 2005, gaining a player base numbering a few million. Service had ended for a while when Nexon Korea downsized a few years back, but now that the Virtual Reality industry had been solidified with AmuSpheres, they took initiative and invested an unheard-of amount of money into a dead game, which got it up and running again in 3D. If the report was true, much of the old fanbase was already back into the game along with a considerable number of new, younger players, which already put it in the top ten VRMMOs of Japan by number of players, despite not being fully functional yet.

"Yeah, just a little while ago," she said, gesturing to the MMO Today channel still streaming at the corner. "What about it?"

"I want you to help me be the richest girl in the game!" Seki said brightly.

...What.

"Hold on," Kibou said. "So you're telling me you called me out on a public place, crashed my date, and tried to befriend me...because you wanted in-game gold?"

Seki beamed shamelessly. "Yup!"

Kibou opened her mouth to rebuke her and then realized that none of her prepared retorts worked when Seki wasn't even pretending that her demand wasn't the quintessence of absolute selfishness. Any feelings of intimacy she might have been experiencing with Seki abruptly evaporated.

It was then that a waiter approached their table. "I have your order here –"

"Waiter," Kibou said immediately, "please kick this person from my table and blacklist her from the restaurant."

Seki pouted. "Oh, boo! That's just being mean!"

The poor waiter just blinked. "I'm sorry, I was unable to process that request. Can you please say it again?"

Kibou pointed at the girl across the table. "Her. Kick. From. Table."

The waiter was silent for a moment, then: "I apologize, Kibou-san. I have no authority to remove a patron from this establishment. Please send a ticket to the current host if this problem persists."

Kibou dropped her face into her hands and groaned pitifully.

"Yeah, yeah!" Seki said, still pouting. "You know, it's so mean to tell someone in front of me to kick me out! And besides, wouldn't it be kind of a waste? You went through the trouble to order this extra-large sundae, and I heard it can only be bought by a party of two, so if I wasn't here right now we wouldn't be tasting this right now!"

Kibou's head shot up in alarm. "Wait –" she began, but unfortunately she was too late; the waiter was gone and Seki had already taken one of the spoons, scooping Kiri's portion of the sundae into her mouth sulkily.

Fantastic. So much for her plan to hand-feed her date the first bite. Not that she was sure she actually had the confidence to do so, however.

"I hate you so much..." Kibou growled.

"No, Kibou-chan! Don't do this to me! ...Oh this sundae is good," Seki said in response, her mood apparently having perked up with each mouthful of the cold treat. "Anyway, it shouldn't be that bad. All I want to ask you is to kill mobs."

"So that's why you were looking for an SAO victim," Kibou realized. "Because they played virtual reality games the longest, they're the most proficient at fighting in VR...or so the bloody public thinks!"

She glared at Seki. "Why the hell would you make that assumption?" she said harshly. "Of the ten thousand trapped in that damn game, four thousand died. And out of the six thousand left, only about half – the clearers, the mid-levelers, and the orange players – only they were the ones who did any sort of fighting! That means about three thousand locked themselves up in the Safe Zones. Three fucking thousand – and out of that, did it never occur to you that I was one of them? Or did your research not tell you that, Seki?"

Kibou immediately regretted the venom with which she spat out the name, but the other girl did not seem to notice. Seki was tapping against her jaw again, gazing into the distance.

"Okay," she said finally, "this is how I see it."

Kibou frowned. She'd hoped that Seki would give up, but it didn't sound like it was about to happen.

"You say there's about three thousand players who never fought in a virtual reality environment before," Seki began, "but I'm positive that the most common way to get gold in practically any MMORPG is to fight monsters... Am I right so far?"

A cautious nod was the answer.

"The thing is – now that I tried VR games for myself, I mean – they simulate the physical condition pretty closely. Strength, stamina, the process of breathing – though not the need, that was pretty weird – and, of course, hunger."

Kibou thought she could see where Seki was going was this.

"Two years is an awfully long time to stay trapped without eating. And food can only be reliably bought if you have in-game currency. So where would these players who've never fought get the gold needed to eat?"

"There's –" Kibou began.

"Quests, trades and begging," Seki cut in, making Kibou pause in surprise. "It's easy to reason that those three are the only sources of revenue available. Easy quests, though, were probably limited to stop people from taking advantage of it. Repeatable ones, especially, should've had some kind of quota, probably daily, that limited how many people could take it, right? So they're not all that dependable a source of income. And unless you're telling me that you were one of the people who lived off of begging for other people's money –"

"I didn't," Kibou said sharply, before realizing that Seki had provoked her into this answer.

"Then it figures that you're one of those people who lived off of trade skills," Seki completed, beaming. "Right?"

There was a very pregnant pause as Seki waited. Kibou gauged her answers; on one hand, admitting Seki was right was probably playing straight into her hands. On the other, there were no flaws in her logic – the only weak point might have been the extent of the availability and rewards of quests.

Kibou knew for a fact that Seki's assumptions were right. In SAO, the quests by themselves hadn't been enough for the average player to get good food every day, which was why she stopped relying on them fairly quickly. (Sometimes, Kibou had thought that Akihiko Kayaba designed them that way just so that no player could ever live off of easy money in his castle.) What Kibou didn't know was whether Seki knew that as a fact. She might be able to get away with downplaying how unsustainable the quests were and try to end the conversation that way, but only if Seki didn't have the cold hard numbers. And if she did, she would know that Kibou was lying anyway and assume she'd been a tradesperson in SAO.

...What the hell, there was nothing to lose by agreeing to the assumption and it was probably the better answer, anyway. Besides, she could walk out later whenever she wanted to. She had no obligations to this girl at all.

"Yeah, that's right. I...owned a store back then. The, uh, the Kuroneko-ya. General Store. On the ninth floor, and it wasn't anything fancy. Er – Kuroneko-ya is just the name, by the way. I didn't actually sell black cats. Except for this Black Cat Headband that –" She shut herself up, realizing she was rambling.

Seki seemed to ponder on this for a moment. "Well, I can still use you, then," she finally said. "I said I was going to ask you to kill mobs, but really, I only want your help to make me richer, not to go on a raid or anything. And a former owner of a store seems to have the kind of experience that would help me do that."

Kibou shifted uncomfortably. "Hey, I said it wasn't anything fancy. And I didn't agree to go help you anyway –"

"Fine, consider it this way," Seki said, a playful grin coming to her face. "What I need is an additional avenue of income, which you can provide. What I can offer you in return, while you're carrying out your role, are multiple chances to polish your interpersonal communication skills with persons of genders that are ultimately up to chance but which I will ensure will involve males as often as possible."

"Um...meaning?"

Seki winked. "Practice flirting, and next time you can to do it to Kiri-kun without a hitch."

Kibou coloured. "What – you didn't – we're done with this conversation."

Seki threw her head back and laughed heartily. Kibou knew immediately that Seki wasn't making fun of her, but she still glowered at the other girl with as much resentment as she could muster.

"Lighten up, girl! It was only a suggestion." Seki giggled, and then took another spoonful of the giant sundae before Kibou could stop her. "Jokes aside, I really am serious about this – becoming a very rich girl, I mean. I'm going for it whether you're on board or not, but I won't go nearly as far by myself compared to having your help!"

Kibou looked away. "I'll think about it," she said noncommittally.

"Oh, and bring Kiri-kun too, okay? I wanted to talk to him more!"

"Go away!" Kibou snapped.

Seki complied, making her way to the exit with mirth evident on her face. Kibou dropped her head onto the table, feeling very tired.

"Idiot never even asked for my contact information," she mumbled to herself, almost triumphantly. "Let's see how I'm supposed to help her now."

She sat up as Kiri, the boy from earlier, made his way back to her table. "Thanks for waiting. We're getting out now."

The boy nodded his head. "Before that though, Kibou-chan. I think this is the segment of MMO Today that you wanted to see."

Kibou frowned, and then turned to the TV screen everyone else was enraptured in. Kiri was right; and on the other hand, she'd actually forgotten about it, what with Seki barging into her day like that.

At that moment, the channel was showing replay scenes of the various battles from GGO's Bullet of Bullets preliminary tournament. A girl with long, black hair had just slashed apart her opponent with a laser sword, and overlaid on the screen was the block capital words [WINNER: KIRITO!] An exceptionally loud cheer went up around the patio at that footage, and Kibou found herself having her breath caught at that beautiful display of swordsmanship. It had been some time since she'd last held a sword, but sometimes, she could still surprise herself with just how deeply she appreciated the skill that went behind it. Yet...

"That Seki was right," she mumbled. "'Kirito' really is an overused name these days, and why should this one be a more real one than the others?"

But she didn't turn her gaze away.

"Kibou-chan?" the boy said.

She watched until the video finally came to an end, then turned. "Yeah. Ready now. Uh..." She looked away nervously. "Th-thanks for hanging, um, out with me, Kiri –"

Kiri-kun, she meant to say.

"– Kirito-san," she said instead.

The boy smiled at her again, gently. "Rename accepted. And it's always a pleasure. I will be back any time you call for me again."

Kibou pinched her thumb and index together, then swiped down. A menu opened, and she quickly navigated through it until she came to an option that said Desummon Partner? She pressed Yes, and then the boy disappeared in a stream of light, not unlike the kind that accompanied a player logging off.

Kibou sighed, then slouched in her seat as the menu closed itself. She didn't feel like opening it again. Instead, she used voice command.

"AmuSphere, code Alt-Eff-Four – Link End."

As her senses returned to the real world, Yamashita Naomi opened her eyes.

Thought it was the middle of day, her room was dark and gloomy, courtesy of the curtains fully spread over the window. A desk, a bed, and a very cramped closet were the only furniture decorating the interior, and two out of the three of them hadn't been used in years. There were slippers by her bedside, because the hardwood floor could get fairly cold, and there were clothes folded at the corner of her bed; even her laptop was stored under her pillow.

Really, it felt like a prison cell. But it was still more comfortable to Naomi than the house, the world, outside her doors.

Slowly, Naomi moved her heavy hands from her sides to her head, removing the virtual reality console. It wasn't a well-known fact, but the SAO Case Victims Rescue Force apparently included therapists, who'd actually hand AmuSpheres out for free to former SAO players. Some just want to look away and forget, and those should stay away from VR, said the receptionist, but there are also some who hold lingering sentiments to that castle in the sky, and they need some way of making peace with themselves. Then she'd taught Naomi how to transfer her NerveGear data to the AmuSphere and then bid her good day.

What Naomi was holding right now, though, was not the AmuSphere she'd been given. Instead, it was an old but fully functional NerveGear.

She had shown the AmuSphere to her family, during one rare moment when she actually talked to them, and it was enough to stop them from barging into her room if they thought she was playing in virtual reality again. Then she promptly transferred her play data back to her NerveGear. There was something about it that she couldn't let go, like it had been a part of her for so long that she would never feel right about just packing it away. To her, VR just wasn't the same without the helmet-like console and its considerably higher specs. Besides, she convinced herself, even if the NerveGear still had the capability to kill her, there was nothing in its programming to make it do so anymore.

...Well, unless a hacker got into it and changed it specifically, for some arbitrary reason. It was unlikely.

But it was a possibility.

Naomi had not fared well after Sword Art Online. She could not even reconnect with her family after she had been released from the death game, so she never bothered to try with the friends she had before SAO took away two years of her life. It was already telling that none of them came to see her, even a year after she was freed. Also, she had no drive to do anything anymore – SAO had been a world too far removed from reality, so nothing she did there to survive was applicable to real-life skills, and, well, two years of not studying was a vicious momentum killer of education – especially after she saw how little it really counted in a matter as fragile as life and death. In effect, she had become a hikikomori, a social recluse, and the very lowest form of it at that. She had little will to live. She had no friends, not even over the Internet. No one would think it'd be worth it to become her friend.

...Except for that girl from today, apparently.

Speaking of which, how had that girl known she was a former SAO player? She said it was just a hunch, but Naomi believed that about as much as she could shot-put a ten-kilo ball – not at all. Personally, she thought she just had an unlucky encounter with an experienced therapist from the SAO Task Force. There must've been something about her that seemed similar to other victims, something that was severe enough that the therapist just up and talked to her to try and "help" her. Well, she didn't need any help, thank you very much. She had already accepted the fact that she wouldn't amount to anything that couldn't also be accomplished by some random other person. It was better not just for her, but for everyone, if she'd just stayed in exactly the same position she had been in for the past year.

...The idiot therapist even forgot to even ask for her contact address, too. And the chance of running into her again was low. One way or another, she wasn't going to see that player again.

Below her head, the laptop gave off a little ding as it received notification of a new e-mail. Naomi quickly pulled it out – all of the alerts she had subscribed to could be divided into two topics, and she was eager for news on either of them.

She opened the message without checking the header, and then read the contents.

Hey there, princess! Are you up from your beauty sleep yet?

Naomi slammed shut the laptop so hard, for a moment she thought it might've shattered the screen. Her heart pounded, her mind a mess of bewildered thoughts. What the –? How did that girl –?

Hesitantly, she lifted the screen again, making sure that, one, it did not actually break, and two, the message wasn't her imagination. Affirmative on both counts. Just as slowly, she began to type out a reply.

WHERE DID YOU GET MY EMAIL ADDRESS.

Short, simple, and thoroughly unamused. Just the tone she needed. She hit send.

Her reply came a moment later. The Virtual Plaza's HUD has an "options" dialog that you can open for each player, like the right-click button on your computer's mouse. There was a function there that let me add you to a list of players I can message you offline. Though, the message goes through your account first and then to your email, rather than revealing your email outright, so that it won't be a breach of privacy. Sorry, did this come as a surprise?

Yes, it did. She didn't even know Virtual Plaza had that function. Who was she ever going to message? And the only people who were going to message her was spambots. Though, at least that didn't happen yet.

Then again, it'd be a terrible app if it let spambot messages get through too often. Virtual Plaza was a socializing game, and Naomi knew those had to have some stringent virtual security to make it even vaguely enjoyable – doubly so after the messes of Sword Art Online and ALfheim Online. Even after the standard security tests like CAPTCHAs, most of the real functionalities of the Virtual Plaza were only unlocked after accumulating a certain amount of points for completing activities that should be designed as fun for players and difficult for run-of-the-mill bots, like arcade games. That was just common sense for these kinds of things.

A moment later, another e-mail arrived. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the blacklist function is in your account settings for Virtual Plaza. You can login to their site or blacklist from inside the game. But hey, I'll be really sad if you do that, you know? I can't be your friend if you don't talk to me often!

That, if anything, had "therapist" all over it.

Another e-mail. Seki – well, Tori, Naomi supposed – was a quick typer. Besides, I think you'll really like Mabinogi. Did you know that the Partner program originated from that game? The graphics is from the Seed, of course, and AI was renovated by an anonymous over the Internet, but its summoning and general design seemed like it was taken straight from Mabinogi's programming.

No, actually, she hadn't known that. Now she was actually a little interested. Not enough to get into the game, though.

The computer dinged once more. Which means Kiri-kun can get into the game, with some good stats and skills and a personal shop and the ability to marry him and everything!

Naomi slammed the laptop shut again, out of reflex. Her face flushed, she took a moment to mentally chide herself for the shamefully petulant behaviour, and then opened the laptop gingerly. The screen was still intact, which was good. The message was still there, which was irritating. No new one came in quickly, so Naomi assumed that the last comment had been meant to provoke a response from her.

Oh, she'll get a response, all right.

Hey, you, let me tell you something good. The last time someone tried to stick their nose into my business was in SAO where I could, courtesy of advanced graphics and a dueling system, literally shove a stick up their ass, and right now I'm feeling like getting back into that habit. At the moment the one thing that's stopping me from trying your game isn't a question of marriageability to Kirito-san, but instead YOU. So before trying to recruit me into your crusade, maybe you should've worked on your cute little attitude until I'm not at a point where I feel like screwing with you at every opportunity, like you're doing right now.

She finished her rant with an emphatic slamming of the ENTER key, delivering the message. Implied threat, check. Confrontation in her face, check. Criticism of personality, check. A good recipe for blowing someone off in style. She was just mentally congratulating herself when the reply came.

Geez, what's your problem!? I thought you were nicer than this!

And there we go, Tori was definitely too slighted to want to work together now. Naomi smiled to herself, satisfied. She studiously ignored that negligible, phantom twisting in her gut as she read the rest of the message.

If you wanted to marry ME that badly, you should've just said so! See, Nexon Japan removed that same-sex marriage restriction just like Nexon America, so there's absolutely zero problems there!

For a moment, Naomi stared at the screen with her mouth hanging open, too dumbfounded to actually make a coherent thought. How did – how in the world could the other girl have taken her message that way!?

She scanned her own reply, and suddenly phrases she hadn't given a second thought to jumped out at her.

...shove a stick up their ass...isn't a question of marriageability to Kirito-san, but instead YOU...at a point where I feel like screwing with you at every opportunity...

Oh, serious – seriously –!?

For the third time that day, Naomi slammed shut her laptop, and this time she went a step further by dropping her furiously blushing face on top of the computer in turn, moaning in despair. That, was...really not how it was meant to go. She had no idea how she managed to make herself pegged as, well, swinging that way when all she wanted was to be left alone. Everything started going downhill as soon as that girl tried to enter her life. Gods, Tori had even tried to use the existence of Kirito-san against her...

Naomi miserably recalled how Tori realized Kirito-san was a Partner from the start. A freeware published over the VR network, Partners were something of an extension of NPCs with the difference that you could take them with you into a game, and was something you could build a close relationship to. Most of the big VRMMOs didn't support them, especially with their potential for being an unfair advantage in combat-related affairs, but Virtual Plaza, as a social MMO, wouldn't have turned down that opportunity. It was part of the reason Naomi had gotten into Virtual Plaza in the first place – the chance to "design", and play out her fantasies, of someone from her heart, someone she admired from SAO...someone who was a personal hero to her. She hadn't been able to help herself.

Really, it wasn't the worst way one could have used the Partner extension, Naomi was convinced of that. Besides, there were already all these Kirito-san tributes running rampant throughout the MMO networks – in GGO, ALO, and a few other games too. If she made only one more, she could hardly be blamed for it...

...All right, she wasn't even able to convince herself. Naomi was a creepy, obsessive stalker, plain and simple.

A slight, burning sensation at the back of her eyes told Naomi she was on the verge of crying, and she hastily wiped away the tears before they could form. What's done was done; there was nothing she could do now, she told herself. She could only acknowledge. That this girl, Tori, had seen through so much of her because she'd been weak enough to "make" Kirito-san. That she made Kirito-san because she'd been so lonely. And that she had been so lonely simply because no one had ever tried to reach out to her...

No one, until now.

Hesitantly, she lifted her head and opened the laptop again. There was a new message, arriving without her notice.

Believe it or not, I do know what being cut off from friends feels like. By yourself, you feel so helpless, so lonely, so sad... It took someone extending a hand to me for me to get out of my slump, too. At the end of the day, that's the one thing that matters – someone proving to you that they still care, no matter how terrible you feel. That's the one thing you need, to realize that life is worth striving for.

So how about we go on an adventure together?

For a long moment, Naomi simply sat, staring at that last sentence as if afraid it would distort and change its meaning as soon as she looked away. Finally, with a sigh, she brought her hands to the keyboard to type out an answer.

Fine.