unfinishednetwork | a simple question; (cw: death/dying discussion)

Stopped at what might be an afterlife before coming here. Also possibly just a different life.

[again, print letters, no signature.]

... So the afterlife's real where you're from? Possibly?

I'm pretty sure there isn't one where I'm from. Just dying hallucinations.

It wasn’t, so we had to invent one.

Any further explanation should be confidential and probably in person. Look for the short faerie wizard drinking coffee, and ask about The Wonders of Mundus.

Okay. I'll look for you.

[And he does. It takes him a little bit to find Hikaru - what the hell is a 'faerie wizard'? - but he does eventually stumble on someone who looks like the vaguely right description.]

[The kid - and he does look like a kid, being about five feet tall and looking just barely into puberty - walks up to Hikaru.]

Are you the one I'm supposed to ask about 'The Wonders of Mundus'?

He didn’t expect a teenage kid, and mentally snaps back something angry or bitter about the Librarians.

“I am indeed. I am Hikaru Aozora, and if the handwriting matches, that would make you Jun-san. Unless you’d prefer -kun?”

He is speaking in Japanese, although that doesn’t much matter in the Stacks.

“If you want coffee or tea, we’ve sourced decent stuff. And now I bet you’re curious why a figure from out of a fantasy light novel knows what a light novel is.”

"I'm Jun, yes. -san is fine." He died like an adult, he might as well be addressed like one. "Tea would be fine. And... yeah. I mean, I don't read much of them, but it's kind of weird that you do know."

If the handwriting matches... ah, right. The other apparently Japanese person on that message thread. It's kind of good to know that he's at least not being translated, because he knows translation can get weird.

“Red or b-green?” he asks, as he washes out a mug with hot water, as much to warm it up.

“Tell me, are you at all familiar with the Isekai genre? I assume you’ve at least seen a video RPG played before, given that there are laws against releasing DragonSaga games on a schoolday.”

He probably meant DragonQuest, surely?

"Green, if you have it." He sits down and sighs. Isekai isn't really something that I know of?" Though the word translates, the concept doesn't. "And yeah, I know video games?"

He doesn't play a lot of them, he's not that kind of nerd. As for DragonSaga... it sounds like something he knows of? "I'm not a fantasy nerd, though."

“There was a glut of barely distinguishable slop about someone waking up as their in-game avatar, sword in hand and able to chant Boom, Zot, Crack to great effect,” Hikaru says, voice desiccated.

He puts loose-leaf green tea in a metal infusion ball and pours hot water over top.

“Well, shall we say myself and a whole slew of my contemporaries got way too into our favorite massively multiplayer game in that vein?”

He looks at the person, blinks, and - you know what, that makes more sense than a lot of other options. "That sounds ridiculous, but I don't think you're lying to me."

And if he knew what dragged him into that situation he probably would have said it, so he's not sure that he should even ask. "Somehow that's more believable than people who are from a world where magic is a real thing."

“Less ridiculous than it sounds. We think a cyberattack by a white supremacist group on a governing S.A.I. system, who played the in game god Io and managed logins and logouts and the fast travel network, had disastrous results for everyone on the Pacific coast.”

Hikaru sighs.

“Whether or not we are just dead or merely comatose in hospitals is a question most of us are anxious to answer.”

"... Huh." Some of those terms are vague, but he gets the idea enough. A terrorist attack of some kind on whatever computer system was managing the game. How one gets sucked into their computer he doesn't know, but... "I couldn't even begin to guess. I mean, that's also getting into the idea of 'can you be conscious outside of your body' which I'd have thought would be 'no', but..."

Different worlds, he has to keep reminding himself that. "So you're some kind of gaming nerd who's stuck in a pint-sized body? That sucks."

“There are worse alternatives. Imagine my being stuck as a female character.”

Not a hypothetical. For all that was a joyous wake-up call for Deedee, rather than a dysphoric nightmare.

“How we can be conscious outside our bodies is also a question that… I am frustrated by my friends incuriosity about, especially given that the locals now know to object to being called NPC’s.”

Edited 2026-01-21 19:04 (UTC)

"Ew." Is his immediate response. He's thirteen and cisgender - not that he knows what that means - so the idea of being stuck in a female body is disgusting.

"If it were me I would be trying to figure out a way back at every moment. ... Probably." If he were in that situation, he likely wouldn't have been in the situation that he was in at home. "Unless it was better in the game than in person... which I guess I can understand."

He rubs at his face - he does look tired, despite his attempts to look put together. "Meanwhile I was dealing with a very different kind of 'game'."

I would seek a way home: Azure, a golden phoenix, rising to a mullet d’or. Then But what if life was better there?: Vert, three thorny roses chiefly and a sheaf of wheat d’or at base.

Meanwhile, Hikaru, who seeks to know what the Wonders of Mundus has become, bears a device guiles, a 13-toothed cog d’or encircling an inverted hourglass proper. Or will.

“You are under no obligation to explain yourself,” Hikaru says. “But on the other hand, if you’d unburden yourself, I’ll listen.”

He just looks at Hikaru - there's not a lot of trust that he's built up here. He really shouldn't tell people, since... it's the pity that sucks.

It's quiet for a few moments before he speaks up. "Take a giant robot. Make it run on the life energy of its pilot. Set one on each version of Earth - and there's a lot of alternative versions of Earth. Make them fight each other - you win when you kill the opposing pilot. The loser's version of Earth gets destroyed." He lets that sink in for a moment. "If you run away, you lose automatically. If you go over the time limit, you both lose."

His eyes narrow.

"You were forced to be made complicit in -"

He takes a deep breath.

"There's a saying on my earth, an acknowledgement of the pain someone's been through: you've been to the wars. You have my condolences, however inadequate they are, for the literal truth of that."

He's not pitying. He's angry. At those and that which forced Jun into this.

"Mm." It's not the same as a war. A war at least you know who you're fighting. You're also trained. "We didn't know all of this going in. The guy who handed the robot off to us didn't explain everything to us. I guess he thought we might back out."

He's not surprised, just... frustrated. "I also wasn't bound in the contract initially. But after my sister - adopted sister... after she fought and died, what was I supposed to do? Let a ten year old die for a world without putting myself up to help?" His hands drop to clench at his knees, trying to keep himself steady. "If Kana died for the world... even if I didn't believe in it, I owed it to her to at least do the same."

The fact that this has left his adopted father with no children isn't lost on him. ... But he was a terrible son anyway. Maybe it'll be better that he died as some form of a hero than lived as a reminder of everything that had gone wrong between them. "Though I'm not sure there was a group of students that the previous pilot could have picked that had more wrong with them and their lives."

He chuckles weakly, because... what else can he do?

a simple question; (cw: death/dying discussion)

no subject

no subject

Private

Private -> Action

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: child death