There was no reason to waste any time once she’d made up her mind about it, and her stuffy old parents weren’t likely to look kindly upon such activities at home, so Karen ended her vacation early and went back to Tokyo. She’d visited an electronics store immediately after landing at Haneda Airport and procured all the essentials for the activity.
First up was the AmuSphere, which resembled a giant set of silver goggles. The device blocked all organic senses and sent only the artificial ones into the user’s brain. In other words, Karen would be in something like a coma while operating it, although the AmuSphere did have several safety measures.
While it shut out her real senses, it also monitored them. If the device detected the user’s heart rate rising abnormally, drastic slowness of breathing, or the presence of a headache or stomach pains, its automatic shutdown features would kick in—and they were impossible to remove or override.
The AmuSphere also connected to real-world home security features like home invasion and fire alarms, as well as emergency services such as earthquake and tsunami alerts, to ensure that it shut down when necessary.
Karen had also bought a game. Out of all the VR games available, she picked ALfheim Online (ALO), which Miyu already played. It was set in a fantasy world, where players turned into winged fairies and went on adventures together.
“You’ll love it, Kohi! Yeah, it gets a little dicey when the various races fight it out, but you don’t have to do that stuff if you don’t want to. It’s super-fun just flying around in this beautiful world and chatting with everybody!” Miyu assured her.
Sure enough, the sample screenshots on the package promised a gorgeous world of dazzling green forests and deep-blue skies and lakes. If it was that pretty to look at in pictures, surely being there would feel a million times better. Her heart soared at the thought of being able to fly with her own set of wings.
With Miyu’s help over the phone, Karen set up the AmuSphere with her computer and finally made the very first full dive of her life. She’d changed into pajamas, closed the curtains, and turned on her air conditioner, as these made for the most comfortable conditions, apparently.
Then she put the plugged-in AmuSphere on her head, lay down on the bed, and closed her eyes.
“Link Start!”
The vocal command instantly took Karen’s mind to another world.
First, there was the sensation of leaving the body, like drifting off to sleep, then suddenly she was standing in darkness and receiving voiced instructions.
She knew it wasn’t the real world, but her wits were quite sharp. It was like a waking dream, where she knew it was a dream while it was happening around her.
With her heart racing in excitement, Karen followed the instructions and began to type the required information into the floating keyboard before her.
For her character name, she’d taken the ren from her name and tweaked some of the letters to ensure it didn’t match the name of any other player, doubling the consonants and putting it in all caps: LLENN.
She had the choice of nine different fairy races, but she wanted to play with Miyu, so she selected sylph, the wind fairy. Since each race started in its own territory, this would make it easy for her to meet up with Miyu right away.
Once Karen had become Llenn, she stepped into the world of ALO…
“Wh-whyyy?!”
…and screamed.
✦ ✦ ✦
“I’m sorry, Kohi! I completely forgot you have that thing about your height,” Miyu apologized over the phone. But the fact that the avatar Karen wound up with—which was generated at random by the game system—happened to be noticeably taller than the others of the sylph race wasn’t Miyu’s fault at all.
The shock of seeing herself in a mirror sent Karen’s pulse racing, kicking in the AmuSphere’s safety measures and automatically unlinking her from the program barely twenty seconds after she started the game.
“Listen… I know that must’ve been horrible, but there are races with much smaller avatars on average… The cait siths are cat fairies, for example… Why don’t you try rolling a fresh character? It’s a charged micro-transaction, unfortunately…”
Karen declined Miyu’s offer. It wasn’t an issue of money.
The shock of being very tall, even as the result of a random roll, had immediately soured her on the entire concept of ALO. She still wanted to try VR games, but she was not going back to that one. So she apologized to Miyu for the bad news, after all her friend’s help.
“I see… Well, that’s too bad, but I guess I can’t blame you. That stubbornness of yours is one of your strengths, in my opinion,” her old friend said. Then she asked, “Kohi, are you familiar with character conversion?”
That referred to the act of moving the Llenn character she had just created to a different VR game. All the VR games in existence were based on the same foundational system: an engine known as The Seed. All a player needed to move characters around was a simple user ID, and the strength of the character would be converted and preserved in the new game.
For example, if a character that had been painstakingly built to have great physical strength was converted to another game, it would start that new game in a powerful form already. The original would be destroyed, and all items and in-game money lost, but that meant nothing to Karen, of course. Best of all, the ID she had created wouldn’t go to waste that way.
This was her shot to get the avatar she really wanted.
“Yeah, it’ll be a different game, but feel free to ask me for help if you have any questions! The next time I try to get live tickets to an Elza Kanzaki concert in Tokyo, I’m going to stay with you as payment for all this help, okay?” Miyu said, and Karen promised to do her that favor.
Afterward, Karen used that ID to connect to various VR worlds, converting her character each and every time. Of course, that meant buying a whole new game each time, so she started out with choosing those with a trial period so she could first test them for free.
She didn’t care about the genre. There were VR games of every kind imaginable.
Racing games that put players in the driver’s seat. Flight simulators that allowed anyone to fly an airplane. Sci-fi adventures in which characters cruised around the galaxy. Virtual versions of any sport one wanted to play. Romance games with beautiful women and girls to woo. Even some that just simulated a “normal” day.
Once she started trying out all the different VR games on the market, Karen decided to switch to a new game any time she found the slightest flaw in the avatar she rolled. Miyu found this stubbornness exasperating, but she didn’t give Karen a hard time about it.