Sword Art Online:Afterlife
By: The 483
Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to Sword Art Online
Spoiler Alert: Some spoilers, Light to moderate, are contained herein.
Chapter 1: New Worlds
It's been 2 years since the clearing of the final boss of Sword Art online, and those captured in the game of life and death who survived have been set free. Most of those who made it till the end were alright, although a number of those involved with what were referred to as "PK guilds" suicided as soon as they were physically able, not able to bear the weight of their misdeeds now that a return to normal life was on the table. Others, who had gleefully hacked down innocents for the sheer pleasure of it, were now sitting in jail, awaiting the formation of new policies to decide their fates. Maybe they would be released, but for the mean time, at least, there were fewer sociopaths on the streets, and that is okay by me.
Me? I was there, and I made it to the end. I was known, in my circles, as Mentor. Yes, that mentor. I never made a splash, like the members of the clearing group. I just sat back, in my hole, doing what I could, to cowardly and concerned with my own things to venture to the front lines more then a few times. I was on the party that found the boss door on the 39 floor. The treasure of the skeletal horde? I was the one that triggered the trap that dropped the group right in the midst of it. Hell, I even crafted some the weapons used on the raid that cleared the game, even though I was minding the shop when the raid itself happens. I heard after we woke, that the creator of the game was actually the head of one of the main clearing guilds. Crazy world, isn't it?
Ah, but, progression wasn't my role, for the most part. I was one of those that cowered in the starting town playing it safe for the first month until we heard that a pair of fighters cleared the first floor boss. That broke the depression that had a lot of us, and got us moving. Knowing that there were people out there, fighting to get out of it while the rest of us wallowed in our own funk, really lit the fire under us.
So I took a look at myself, and found that I was not the type of hero that takes point and gets himself killed trying to save the day. Am I proud of it, no. But I wasn't just going to sit on my hands and do nothing. I was going to help somehow. So I started building my skills slowly. When you live in an MMORPG, grinding is easier than if you're just playing it, because there is nothing better to do, and you are willing to put in the necessary time when your life depends on your preparation.
So, fast forward a few months, and I have my basic weapon skills up to a respectable number, and I am sitting around 25 myself. All this time, I have been focusing my armor and weapon crafting skills, along with some light metallurgy, detection, and gardening skills. One day I am out, and this little guy, I don't remember his name now, is out trying to wastes some trash mobs. I watch, and his form is just awful. So I go over, and help him out, give him some coaching, and just fight with him, letting him improve while I keep an eye out. Come evening, he thanks me, and offers some money for the help. I let him off for free, but it gets me thinking.
Another month down the road, and I have fully fledged groups that I am running though the lower floor dungeons, teaching basics and aiding their raids, so they can get their skills up, crafting sets of armor and weapons, brewing potions and making crystals, and setting up ingredient bundles for field rations. Before I know it, People are calling me Mentor, and coming to me for basic weapons and training. Soon, I have enough to by a small cottage on the 4th floor, and I have a smithy and garden working whenever I am not raiding, and orders from low end shops looking for reliable equipment. But when things get going that good, there the problems are mostly likely to arise.
Enter Raven and Snow. Around this time, call it 7 months after the launch of SAO, I was doing alright for myself. I had a reasonably successful enterprise, my own shop with live in accommodations, and a range of quality crafting and food supplies in stock that almost no one else could match. I had even discovered a unique skill I had, in regards to my smithing ability. Every time I broke down an item to recover a small amount of mats, or learn the schematic to craft it myself, I had a small percentage chance, somewhere around 5-10%, to improve the schematic I already had, giving either a small boost to an items base stats, or a reduced cost to crafting mats. Say, crafting a small iron dagger in its base schematic takes 2 chunks of iron, 2 blocks of wood, and a 3 scraps of hide, and the item made cares a +5 to stab damage. If I got this effect when I broke one down, I would have a new schematic that would give a +6 bonus, or cost one less wood chunk, or such. Add this to the already robust craft system in SAO, and I had a lot of fairly unique items I was able to sell.
Ah, but I sidetracked from my point. I was trying to say that while I wasn't terribly busy, I had a fair bit of discretionary income. So, one day, I am browsing the stalls and shops on the lower floors, looking for new seeds that may have been developed, looking to add to my own private garden stock, when I see these 2, scruffy looking little girls, maybe 12 years old at the most. At this point in the game, it was fairly easy to judge who was getting along well, and who was still struggling based on equipment and where you saw them, as this was the point when a majority of the higher levels had joined guilds and were pushing to clear, as the 24 floor was up, and clearing rate was still accelerating.
Now, from what it looked like to me, these girls, one black haired, one white haired, seemed to be trying to steal food from an NPC vendor. This is not really possible, as the food as a item does not actually exist until the price in money is deducted from your wallet. The displays were literally just dead props. So, while the little black haired one was doing her thing, I had managed to catch the white haired by the eye, and ushered her over.
She went by the name Snow, and her sister Raven. She explained to me that they were not skilled at the game, and afraid of the monsters, even on the lowest floor, and were barely able to scrape a living by donations and scraps, now that most of the higher levels didn't visit the lower floors. So, I, in my most monumentally stupid move to date, made the girl an offer. If she and her sister would like to come and work in my smith, I would float them enough to live off and a place to stay until they could work their way up to supporting themselves.
Ever hear of Chinese Obligation? The skinny of it is, if you take in a stry kitten, you can;t un-take it in, ever. So, in a stupid act of chivalry, I, maybe only 15 myself, end up with a pair of energetic, expensive, emotionally taxing daughters.
There is a social law, dreamed up back in the 20th century, called Harshaw's law, that states plainly that "Daughters can spend 10% more than a man can make in any usual occupation." I can attest to the trueness of this, as for a time after the start, I was spending far more then I was earning.
Though I speak disparagingly of this, do NOT think that I was unhappy. I love my girls, even if they do their damnedest to irritate me at every turn. Sure it was difficult suddenly having to support and keep an eye on two young girls for 24 hours a day, but it was more than worth the trouble. With these Girls, I was no longer trying to survive, I was living.
It took a few months to get them up to speed, to a respectable level, properly equipped, able to know where not to go, ect. Getting them geared actually worked out in my favor, as they seemed to get bored with whatever they had equipped about 4 minutes after they first put it on. So, essentially, this gave me a reason to get dozens of random items on a weekly, if not daily basis, and rather then move all the way to a stall to sell the now useless gear, I was breaking it all down. I may be slightly exaggerating, but I think by the time they reach level 40, I could craft every basic armor and weapon in the game, and a handful of the less common drops.
Again, I am not complaining, as my ability to offer so many different items, in better quality then NPC vendors, and better prices then gave me an edge in the under 60 market. Granted, this gave me more money that was spent on the girls, but I didn't care. Making them happy, made me happy. It was funny, when I was alone, those first months, I had trouble sleeping every night. but with those two around, knowing that I had someone who would be sad if I disappeared, I slept well.
So, the three of us continued to grow the shop, and there was never any mention of them moving to their own place, especially about a month after moving in when they started referring to me as Big Brother. Damn kids. But life in Aincrad became not only tolerable, but enjoyable.
Then, at two years after launch, we got a message. Someone had cleared the game. A message flashed up saying we would be returned to our physical selves, and log out would occur in one minute. You would have thought we'd be happy, but all we were was afraid we'd lose each other. We quickly exchanged names, and I learned that the girls were not, in fact sisters. Celestina Taliaferro and Aurora Frost. I burned the names into my brain as I lost consciousness, onlt to instantly wake up in a strange hospital room.
It's weird, the recovery from muscle apathy of being bedridden for 2 years was not that bad. Physical therapy, the questioning, the isolation, the readjustment, none of it was that tough. True, having to wait over a month to be able to start looking for my girls was hard, but it was still not the hardest part. They had fairly uncommon last names, so I know it would not be to difficult, and at worst, they were talking about designating a separate school to educate all of us who were trapped. So I knew, one way o another, I WOULD find them.
No, the hardest part about it, was talking to people who weren't in the game with us. Now, I am not necessarily blaming them. It's not their fault. But, no matter how many times we told them, they just could not understand what we went through.
To them, we were just all in a coma for two years. They discounted the lives we lived while in Aincrad, or expected us to know all of what went on, secrets about the company, etcetera. I remember one of the times we went and visited one of the friends we had made in SAO, and his mother asked us how we knew each other. So we started explaining that we met when he askeed for some assistance with gearing to take on the 34th floor, but she couldn;t understand that we had only known eachother in SAO. How had we learned all these things about him if we were all comatose in hospital beds in different areas? And what is this non-sense he's talking about being married to this girl up north that he's never even met?
On and on like this, people just not understanding that while it was a "game," to us, it was real life for 2 years. And we were not going to just give up on it all because that world didn't exist anymore, and that everyone else said it was "just a game."
It was the second month we awoke before I was well enough to leave the hospital, and I knew where I was going. While no one truly understood what we all had, someone out there had enough empathy in them to help us. A web site showed up on the internet about a month after we all woke, accessible only to those of us with a SOA login. Inside the site was a list of people discharged from SAO, and the hospitals they were being treated at. I do not know who this person was, but I posted my name and thanked them, on the website. So I went. I had to catch a bus, as it was a town away, and the trip was taxing. But, when I opened that hospital room door, to cry's of "Big Brother! You came!" And saw those smiling, tired, skinny little faces, it was all worth it.
I have never cried as hard as I did then, nor had I ever been as happy.
I was allowed, under the circumstances, to stay at the hospital for a few days. It was good medicine. There were only 8 others in that hospital that had been on SAO, and a big room had been opened up, and all the patients were being kept together. It was like coming home, even though I had not know any of them save my girls in the game. But it didn't matter. We belonged. It was nice. Once we were all sent home, I still kept in touch with the girls, but it was hard to get together, as they lived more then 20 miles away, and were somewhere between 14 and 15, and it must have seemed uncouth for a 18 year old male to be on such close terms with them.
It is said that Children can adapt faster than older people, and I believe it. About a month after we were all healthy, I get a package from Raven (They insisted on using their avatar names, and mine. I agreed, as it was like our own special names for each other) containing a copy of a VR game.
Now, I have never denied the fact that I am cowardly. In truth, I had avoided even touching my Nerve-gear since returning to the world. Deep down I think I had an almost religious fear of getting trapped in it again. But the little messy hand scrawled note with the game made it clear that they would not stand for that.
Big Brother Mentor,
Jump in. With this, we can be together again. Here, the hand changed to the more precise and careful script of Snow.
We'll be waiting for you.
Raven and Snow.
So, I pulled out the helmet, and loaded this new game, ALfhiem Online.
It was like a déjà vu punch to the gut. It felt at once intimately familiar, and oddly strange. I would find out later that it was, in fact, basically a re-skinned SAO with a new skill system in place. The intersting thing I found, as did anyone else that had been in SAO that logged into ALO with their old Nerve-gear, was that, while the levels system was gone, their personal skill stats carried over into this game. All our items, schematics, and the like were corrupt and had to be deleted, but the money we had on person at the end carried over, as well as the actual numbers. What this meant for me was that, while all my schematics and materials were gone, the skill I had mastered in the hard hours at the forge still stayed, along with my unique skill.
So, even though I had, apparently a huge boost, having raised, before the end of SAO, my crafting and gathering skills to crazy highs, I also retained at least a 500 point rank in each of the individual weapon skills, along with high scores in all of the armor classes, I plowed into the tutorial period a rank newbie.
I of course chose the Leprechaun race, as they had a natural boost to smithing ability. I finished the tutorial, and was released into the full world, at my races capital. Not a minute passed before I got a in game mail, from Raven, with directions to a neutral town to the south east, on the border between the snowy capital of the Leprechauns, and the swampy marshes of the Spriggans. So, grasping the new flight controller in my hand, I took shakily to the air, and departed.
Raven chose the Imp race, and little Snow the Undines, and while the races tended not to mix to much outside themselves, we did not care. The location they had picked was a little out of the way hamlet called Elyswin. It was a small town of no real regard on the fix of fertile grasslands where they left the forest and meat the marshland of the Spriggan territory.
They had decided that this would be where we rebuilt what we had lost, and reopened our business to the good people of ALfhiem. We had, combined, enough Yrd to buy a real nice premade shop, but I vetoed it, and purchased a large tract of land bordering the forest near the edge off the marshland, setting a plot for our store and home on the tree line, and clearing the forest a ways back for our personal garden and herb patch. I think the town leveled up when we popped the hous, as it was slightly bigger once the shop went in. Over the next six months as our stock and services grew, the town would continue to grow, while still remaining far enough out of everyone's way that it would never really be a hotspot.
But the important thing was we were back. Eiridanus's oddities and curios emporium was resurrected, and our little family was back together.
It was good for a while, then the company that ran the game got in major trouble over some illegal activities it's manager was involved in, and the game almost died. Hell, the entire VRMMORPG industry almost died. But now, almost 2 years after the end of SAO, it's blossomed like never before. Lots of the old SAO players joined up, and they new game master reincarnated the skill system of the orignal, and even restored our ability to use our old SAO avatars.
It's nice. Here we are, a big, happy comunnity once again, claiming the good of what SAO did out of the evil.
Tommorrow is another day, and I can say with no regrets, I am happy to have been there.