respect.
neogun:
it’s eerily quiet after the previous bustle of a fantasy city, a few birds chirping and the rustle of leaves in wind the only sounds he hears. that is, until he hears footsteps behind him and he turns quick, alert, confused. when his eyes land on an unfamiliar but unassuming avatar, he breathes, shoulders relaxing. “so, what is this, some sort of weird boss fight? i don’t play this game very often,” he says by way of greeting, half joking, a grin growing on his lips as he tacks on, “but if you’re the type of boss that shows up, maybe i should log on more.”
saeyi’d stolen away in the middle of her shift, wheedling the other bartender into covering for her for just ten minutes while she ran down to try to placate little cheonsa yet again. only it’s probably made him more panicky, when whatever was holding the vr worlds together suddenly crashes. the world they’re in starts leaking pixels into the air and their avatars lose all sense of orientation, vision blacking out a moment until she finds herself in a completely different world, alone. who knew emotionally unstable vr inventors would make structurally unstable vr worlds?
this new world is a little similar to the idyllic one she’d been in, albeit ridiculously bright. perhaps its a quirk of all vr world creators, to love nature but only artificially, one where it can be controlled with codes and buttons. she’s actually paid attention to cheonsa’s excited lectures about the worlds and their creation; the crash probably triggered some safety worlds or whatever they were called to ease the load before they’re manually extracted. a small problem: she’s not in a vr cafe, she’s in a secluded backroom of ambrosia. no one’s going to get her out unless she does it herself, and she definitely doesn’t know enough about the odyssey to fix this alone.
if they’re split based on physical proximity in the real world, there probably aren’t a lot of other avatars around, but surely there’s at least someone? it’s lucky the world is smaller; she finds another person after a quick walk around the enclosure, easy smile never faltering even when she sees who it is.
“hi!” she calls, waving at gun and smiling like she’s never met the guy, hated the guy, had her hate mellow into a sort of respect for the guy. she snorts at his greasy comment, amused with his mannerisms when he isn’t aware of who she is. vapidity wouldn’t appeal to him, not if she’s looking to get his active help. “boss fight? you’re not as lucky as that,” she teases, then jumps right into their problem at hand. “the game servers must be down, so they put us in smaller worlds to stabilise the situation. we could wait for someone to get us out of here, but i’d rather not spend a few hours doing nothing while my body’s dead to the world.” she can’t remember ever voluntarily working with gun, but he doesn’t know it’s her. “wanna come with?”
