A/N: A bit of an AU, the events of Fairy Dance don't happen, as this is set in the continuity of the PSVita game, Hollow Fragment. Essentially, Heathcliff/Kayaba was beaten but the game bugged, so they weren't logged out, and they needed to clear all the floors anyway, everything Sugou-related happened in the final 25 floors of Aincrad, and Leafa and Sinon for some reason end up in SAO. Also, Kazuto and Suguha are doing each other IRL.

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Kidding. They're not.

Or are they?

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Living Outside the Database

by Shadow Crystal Mage

Prologue: Don't Worry, It's All Argo's Fault!

Disclaimer: Log Horizon and Sword Art Online are both antithetical to each other and combining them should go like matter and anti-matter. I like blowing things up. Hence why I'm doing this. Also, I own neither series.

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The SAO incident. The big, ultimate event every moral guardian has been waiting for to finally vindicate them in their crusade to prove that 'video games are bad'. For months they ranted on their podiums, saying this was a culmination of what they had been preaching against, and that they'd seen this coming but no one had listened to them, and so on so forth. They demanded that all video game developers bow their heads and apologize to the families of all the 'stolen, tainted children', and tried to lobby Ichihara to pass a law against video games in Tokyo.

Incidentally, Kibaou found himself sneezing a lot during this period.

But eventually the furor died and the loonies were put back into their straightjackets, and the waking had to deal with the day to day matters of dealing with thousands of coma patients with very special needs. The medical field experienced several breakthroughs as concerned friends and family of the sleeping pressured for better care for their loved ones, leading towards improvements in technologies and treatments for things such as muscle atrophy and nutrition.

With the scandal surrounding the SAO incident and the resultant stigma on NERVGear, established mouse and screen MMORPGS experienced a resurgence as the 'safer' alternative. Even when the safer AmuSphere becoming available, gamers with paranoid parents had only flatscreen, non-immersion games to play. These people were seemingly vindicated when it was found that some of users of the first-generation AmuSphere and those erroneously detected to be in the same IP as an already trapped player found themselves unable to log out as well, as unwittingly trapped in SAO as the users of the original NERVGear. While they were unlikely to die from dying in the game, since their AmuSphere's weren't rigged with the same deadly high-intensity microwave emitters, simply removing the units from their heads was deemed unsafe, since there was a chance of scrambling their brains from the sudden disconnection. The bug– or, as some people muttered darkly to themselves, hidden feature Kayaba had built into the firmware without anyone noticing?– even made it into the medical Full Dive technology, trapping a young patient who had volunteered to test the Medicuboid.

Then, one day, the game was beaten.

In the midst of happy reunions and the beginnings of weeks of rehab therapy, the resulting scandal of a RECT Progress Vice-President conducting illegal and unethical research on the sleeping gamers made waves, but was ultimately ignored in the atmosphere of celebration and later realities. Nearly all the SAO veterans swore never to play a video game again.

The record for adhering to this promise was about 2143 minutes. After all, Yuuki Asuna had only been a casual gamer to begin with, and thus had slightly stronger reserves of will.

Still, once bitten as they were, the justifiably paranoid gamers who nonetheless still enjoyed the social aspect of play gravitated towards 'old school' MMO's. Mouse, monitor and maybe microphone, the basics, since just the thought of putting on a FullDive helmet made their brains seem to itch.

Many months later, in hindsight, everyone agreed what happened next was Argo's fault.

Around the time when many players' therapies were finishing and they were getting ready to go back to 'real life', an article and a link to a blog hosting the original copy of the article began making the rounds among the survivors. 'Alternatives. Don't Worry, It's Argo's Guide to Games' billed itself the last of the Argo Guides, and was considered by many at the time to be a fitting postscript to SAO. It mostly had to do with the humorous introduction, where the 'information broker' humorously tried to bill people who still allegedly owed her money, congratulated the players who had made escaping the game possible, and cheerfully said they should all get together again… somewhere you didn't need to have a logout button.

It was followed by a short, concise analysis of the MMO games currently available, with special emphasis on the games that had come out while they were 'out'. They'd been rated by exacting criteria, as well as appended with Argo's personal analysis at the end. There were no VRMMOs on the list, with the only mention of them being a heading that had only two words in it: 'HELL NO!' It was one little note at the end of one of the reviews that really did it though: Argo mentioned one game, 'Elder Tale', as her new favorite, and that the reason she was planning to stick to it was that, unlike several other games on the list, there were no plans in the foreseeable future to shift the game towards being compatible with Full Dive accessories.

Not surprisingly, many of her readers thought that was a good and proper reason as well.

So, really, it was all Argo's fault.

….

Kirigaya Kazuto had never made a bot account before.

After all, he wasn't that kind of person. When he played a game, he played, not just mechanically accumulated exp and money. He was a solo player, not a farmer. So he took his time carefully downloading the bot program, reading the text files that came with it, and studying the interface for programming the behavior you wanted before he began. He downloaded more programs after that, hit several forums, and even tried a FullDive emulator, which allowed you to interface a FullDive game without FullDive equipment. He found where someone had hacked one of the Private Pixies meant for use in Alfheim Online, the pseudo-successor of SAO.

And then, using all that, and one special ingredient, he put his bot account together.

He named it 'Yui'. It took a while to get the interface right, but he doubted she'd have any problem with starting Elder Tales with a few thousand gold in her account.

A day later, he repeated the process. This time he named the account 'Strea'.

He'd promised her too after all.

He played Elder Tale now. He trusted Argo's assessment, and besides, it now had most of his friends in it. It was absolutely nothing like SAO.

No full immersion, only watching your character through the monitor. The monsters, no matter how big they scaled compared to your character or how horrifying their design, were only images on a screen. The log out button worked. He'd literally spend the first thirty minutes of game time logging in and logging out repeatedly, just because he could. He'd never imagined how satisfying logging out was. Truly, logging out was a woefully underrated experience.

It was literally impossible for him to be a solo player now though. Every time he logged on to his computer, Yui and Strea, each in their own individual partition, also awoke. They talked to him, and each other, and did eldritch and slightly creepy A.I. things to his phone to let them call the people they knew from the game. Yui called Asuna collect (and Kazuto had been astonished to learn that was still a thing) because of how long mother and daughter talked on the phone. Strea, bless her artificial heart, restricted herself to free voice connections and emails.

And they partied with him. After all, who else did they know in this new game that had no need for mental health A.I.s?

He'd stuck with 'Kirito' as his character name, to give the two a sense of familiarity. Yui had been happily enthusiastic at his attempt at recreating her old appearance with the avatar options Elder Tale had. Since 'my daughter's so cute' hadn't been available as a class, he'd gone with Cleric.

Strea had thanked him for same, deleted it, and rebuilt it from the ground up. All she kept was the name, height and the chest size. Her new Enchanter looked only vaguely like the self Kazuto had known in the last 25 floors of Aincrad. Perhaps that was the point.

He went with something fast that could hold 2 swords. After all, why mess with perfection?

Asuna had been with him when he'd finally gotten Yui's account and Yui herself back online, and had come the next day as well, before Yui and Strea had figured out phones. That had been five days ago. She'd told him she'd show him her new avatar today.

In the next room, he could hear Suguha logging in to her own computer. She had her own Elder Tales account, and one considerably higher-leveled than his, from before she got into ALO. On-screen, he checked his stats and inventory, reminding himself of where he was. Idly, he wondered what today's announced expansion pack would bring to his new game. Sword Art Online hadn't had new updates, just new levels with new mobs and materials. Perhaps it was a lead-up to some big event. After all, what, exactly, was 'Homesteading the Noosphere'?

A few minutes later, the update came on. And then there was nothing, nothing but a sky filled with a sticky darkness…

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- To be continued…?

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A/N: Database, database, we're living in the database..!

Please review, C&C welcome.

Until next time, this is Shadow, signing off.