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

[icanhearscreams]

[An unsigned note appears on the bulletin board, written in extremely neat handwriting. There's a few smudges on it from erased lines, as if the author wrote it over and over again.]

Is anyone else here dead?

[Just five words. No signature. He'll see how this turns out.]

Comments

[ohaiyo_isekai]

“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.”

[icanhearscreams]

"... 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."

[ohaiyo_isekai]

“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.”

[icanhearscreams]

"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'."

[ohaiyo_isekai]

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.”

[icanhearscreams]

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."

[ohaiyo_isekai]

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.

cw: child death

[icanhearscreams]

"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?