Chapter 1
"Junpei!" Yoshi squealed. "Guess what I got?" I took off my headset and sighed. "What is it?" She held up two games. "Sword Art Online!" She smiled. "Wanna play?" "Not really. I don't like MMOs." "Oh come on! You never play anything with me! Just this once? For a day?" Yoshi had been hyping up the game for moths, and kept begging me to play it with her when it came out. "Look, I just want to play games with my friends." She pouted, angry. "No way! You said that we would play on launch day! And anyway, you've never even played an MMORPG, let alone one in VR!" Okay, that was true. I've never touched an RPG. They didn't really strike me as fun. But hey, she was right, and I made a promise. "Fine. When does it start?" She smiled. "One P.M. So that's twenty minutes." "Okay. Could we have lunch?" She glanced at the digital clock on my desk. "Yeah." We walked downstairs, into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and grabbed a bag of leftover pizza. I didn't bother to heat it up, since we were both pretty hungry. "So, what's SAO about," I asked, "Like, is there a story? A goal?" "No. It's just about making your own story." Yoshi dug into her pizza. "Sounds cool." I was beginning to become interested. "It's an entire virtual world. One hundred floors, and each one of them is different. It's got thousands of diffrent weapons too, and their all unique, too. No ranged attacks, though." Yoshi looked over at the clock. "Look at the time! It's 12:53. You should probabaly calibrate your NerveGear." "Yeah, probably should." She began to walk upstairs. "Oh wait! Hey, Junpei!" "Yeah?" "When you're ready, at 1:00, just put on your NerveGear and say 'Link start', okay?" I nodded. "See you soon!" She smiled, and walked upstairs. I followed, and went to my room. After calibrating my NerveGear, I lied down on my bed, put on the headset, and looked at the time. "1:00."
I closed my eyes, and remembered what Yoshi had said.
"Link, start!"
Chapter 1 Fin.