This is .hack//another but in my way,so it's a bit different. With the characters in Naruto of course! I felt like reviving this story a bit because they wasn't enough romance in that novel. Characters will be OOC and a lot of the parts will be in the novel. So here goes:
.hack//Another Birth
Vol. 1//Infection
Chapter 1: BlackCherry Sets Foot on The World
Darkness surrounded me, except for the light of the blood-red moon. Something tickled my feet. I looked down to see pink cherry blossom petals. Suddenly, the floral scent strangled me. I struggled to move, to breathe, to escape. I was alone in the wilderness. Then I saw her.
She stood on a distant hillside, her silhoutte outlined by the eerie moonlight. I moved towards her, but my body felt sluggish, weighed down. Still, I dragged my feet forward, step by step, inch by miserable inch. I had to talk to her.
I drew closer. I could see her hair swaying in the crimson yet pinkish moonlight. She wore an evening dress made of silk, but it was tattered and torn. Her arms and legs were covered with wounds. Even so, she was still really beautiful.
I finally stood close enough to touch her. I extended my hand to tap her shoulder, but as I did, a sudden gust of wind scattered a tornado of cherry blossom petals through the air. She slowly turned towards me. Blood-streaked tears ran down her face.
I tried to speak, to scream, but no sound escaped my throat as I found my self staring at my own frightening mirror image.
x-o-0-0-o-x
I woke, shaking, my dry throat. I had fallen asleep in the chair next to my brother.
Konohamaru laid in the hospital bed; tubes flowed in and out of every appendage. The only sound he made came from the respirator and the machine that recorded his biorhythms. I reached over and held his hans. Looking at his closed eyes, i couldn't help but ask, "What happened, little brother? How long are you going to sleep like this?"
I first had the dream after Konohamaru collapsed. Now the nightmare came regularly.
I felt ta tear run down my cheek. I turned away from my brother's blank face and stood to leave.
On the bus ride home from the hospital, I looked out the window. Staring at the setting sun, I wondered if Konohamaru would ever again witness such beauty.
I was glad that I'd been able to visit him there in the hospital, to give him what support I could. My afternoons were usually taken up during tennis practice, but the team had taken the day off, so I'd jumped on the bus to see Konohamaru before visiting hours ended.
Come to think of it, the last time I didn't have tennis practice was the day this all began...
x-o-0-0-o-x
As soon as I had walked through the front door that day, I could hear Kouta calling our mom from the living room.
"Mama, let's play!"
I found Kouta tugging at the hem og Mom's pants while she took a phone call. I ran over to help.
"Kouta, leave Mom alone while she's on the phone. Why don't you play with me?" I squatted down nest to him.
"You wanna draw?" he asked.
"Lets play a game." I had zero artistic talent and hated drawing more than anything.
"Let's draw! I wanna draw something!" he insisted.
"Okay" I sighed. "Go get some paper and crayons."
While he reached for the drawer with the materials, my mom hung up the phone.
"Thanks Sakura. I can take over." She then turned to my little brother. "Kou, you want to draw with Mommy?"
Kouta clung to my leg. "I'll draw with her."
"Come on, Kou. Your sister just got hie from school. She needs to change her clothes."
Kouta nodded.
"We'll play after I've changed okay?"
He reluctantly agreed and I headed for the stairs.
"When you're done, ask Konohamaru to come down, okay?" my mom asked.
I quickly changed and knocked on Konohamaru's door. He didn't answer, so I walked in. He sat in front of his PC with his goggles on.
My little brother loved online games. Lately, he'd been obsessed with something called The World.
"IS that all you ever do? Play video games?" I shouted so he could hear me.
Konohamaru turned from the screen and raised the goggles over his forehead. "This is loads of fun. You should try it!"
"You know that I hate role-playing games." I'd tried a few before, but kept giving up after getting stymied by some mystery or other.
"But this one's different from the regular RPGs," he protested. "You get to interact with different party members from all over the globe. The World may be virtual, but those people are real!"
I sighed. "Right. And you get to hunt evil monsters and slay dragins and everyone's a hero, right? It's so silly."
"No! You don't get it. There are only two heroes—the Descendants of Fianna! They're the only ones who managed to clear The One Sin event!"
Whose descendants? I didn't understand a thing he sadi. He might as well have been speaking a different language.
Konohamaru must've picked up on my skepticism, since he returned to his controller and muttered, "Well, you'd have fun if you tried it."
What he'd said start ringing a few bells. My school friends had been talking about The World lately. Something about someone or other descendants and fighting with waves and swords...since I wasn't into it, though, I hadn't paid much attention when they got on that topic.
"Hey, c'mere!" Konohamaru beckoned me to his monitor. "Let me just show you something!"
"I can't see a thing," I told him.
"Oh. Let me switch off my FMD."
"Your what?"
"The FMD is the Face Mount Display," he explained.
"Oh, you mean your stupid goggles?"
Once he made the switch, i saw a menu appear on the screen. In the topmost window was the Delta symbol followed by three words: Lonely, Corrupt, Spiral.
"What's that?" I asked.
"That's where I go when I enter a gate on the Delta server. Here, I'll let you choose my next destination. You have to fill in the words for the three choices.
"Just any random words?"
"No." He looked annoyed. "They have to be listed in these menus"
He clicked one and a long list of choices scrolled down. "There's three parts—A, B and C, right?"
"Okay." I nodded.
"Choose one of these words for my first coordinate."
Konohamaru deleted the three previous words and highlighted the choices for part A.
"I can choose any of these words?"
"Right. When you put in all three coordinates, it warps you to the corresponding field."
I didn't really see the point, but picking three things from a list was easy enough. I leaned in closer to the monitor and noticed that in the background a boy was wearing a white cape. Was that Konohamaru's character? He looked so much like the real Konohamaru, I couldn't help but laugh.
"What're you laughing at?"
"You, doofus!" I pointed to the character on the display.
"He's an accomplished Wavemaster."
"Wavemaster? What's that?"
Konohamaru looked at me as if I were an idiot. "It's someone who uses magic, like a wizard. But in here, they're called Wavemasters."
" 'Wavemaster' sounds wussy."
"Maybe to you."
"I'd never be a wuss like that."
"Shut up."
"Is that why you want me to play, so you can cast spells on me to make me do your homework?" I jabbed him in the side.
"Stop it! I just think you'd have fun."
"Not as a goofy Wavemaster, though."
"No, I think you'd make a good Heavy Blade. They're warriors, Sis."
"Not interested." I shrugged.
"Why not? I think you'd be cool, chopping off monsters' heads with a big sword."
"Yeah, sure." I returned to the menu he'd opened and pointed to one of words.
Hidden.
He clicked on it, and the second menu dropped down.
"Okay, choose another. What's next?" he asked.
Konohamaru scrolled down the list of choices. Unlike the first menu, some of the choices had more than one word, but this added bit of variety didn't stop me from beginning to get bored. I selected the next random one.
"Um…how about Forbidden."
"Hidden, Forbidden. Sounds promising." He smiled.
Then he clicked open the C group's menu. I knew which choice I wanted as soon as I saw it. "How about Holy Ground for the last one?"
"Perfect! Hidden, Forbidden, Holy Ground."
Looking back on that moment, this was the fateful turning point. If only there were some way I could have known the devastating consequences my choice would soon yield…But at the time, we were both equally ignorant.
"That sounds great," Konohamaru said. "I bet there are lots of monsters to kill there."
I remember Mom waiting for us downstairs. "Mom's gonna kill you if you don't move your butt for dinner."
"Okay, I'll be down in a minute."
The monitor went blank as he drew his goggles, or FMD, or whatever the thing's called, back over his eyes.
I shook my head and went downstairs, thinking of the crazy words I had chosen: Hidden, Forbidden, Holy Ground.
I hated to admit it, but they did sound kinda cool.
Downstairs, I found Kouta drawing with his crayons.
"What are you making, Kouta?" I took a look at the paper. There were five vaguely people-shaped blobs drawn in various colours. Our family, I assumed.
Mom came out of the kitchen. "Where's Konohamaru?"
"Uh, finishing up a game. He said he'd be down in a minute."
Then there was a crash and a heavy thud above us. Mom and I exchanged glances.
"Konohamaru?" I called out. "You okay up there?"
Silence was the only reply.
I ran upstairs and threw open his door. Konohamaru lay sprawled out on his back, completely motionless, his legs entangled with his toppled chair, and his controller still tightly grasped in his hand.
"What happened?" I screamed, trying to stay calm at the same time.
I shook him, but he didn't respond. I tore off the goggles off his head. His eyes were vacant, his pupils rolled back.
He didn't move.
"Wake up!" I slapped his cheek. He looked pale.
I ran downstairs, my legs shaking. I tried telling Mom to call an ambulance, but I sobbed.
"Sakura, what happened!?" my mother shouted.
My heart pounded; I couldn't think. I sank to the floor as she ran upstairs.
The sound of the ambulance siren brought me back with a start. I lifted my head and noticed my mother on the verge of tears.
"Sakura, you need to get a hold of yourself! I need you to look after Kouta, all right?" A moment later, she was gone.
I listened to the siren as it faded in the distance. Holding Kouta, I staggered upstairs and into Konohamaru's room. My foot accidentally kicked the goggles, which now lay on the floor. Light spilled out from the built-in display.
I set Kouta down and looked through the goggles. I couldn't believe what I saw.
The image look like it was the interior of a church. But it seemed to me like an evil place. At the altar stood the statue of a girl bound in chains. This is a game!? I felt scared.
Suddenly the image froze and was replaced by the flashing words: SYSTEM ERROR.
I removed the goggles and saw Kouta playfully tapping on the keyboard.
"I'm sorry." Kouta apologized.
"It's okay." I hugged him tightly.
When Mom finally got back home, her face looked stricken with grief as she reported bad news—Konohamaru was in a coma. It didn't seem possible to me. Had the game caused it, or was there something else wrong with Konohamaru?
Dad was stunned when he heard. We went to bed that night with hardly another word. I couldn't sleep; thoughts of my brother haunted me every second.
x-o-0-0-o-x
A bump in the road jostled me back to awareness on the bus ride home from the hospital. I suddenly felt like I had remembered an important clue. Finding Konohamaru unconscious on the floor of his room had driven the details from my memory for a time, but why had I had not remembered them until now?
In the days that followed his collapse, I had read everything I could on whether or not video games could cause comas like the one Konohamaru had fallen into. One of the things I learned about was a condition called PCR, or photo convulsive response, which occurs when an image is rapidly flashed off and on. It sometimes causes seizures, but only to those susceptible to such things. I found an article that said a program called "Deadly Flash," which exploited the phenomenon, had spread through the net about a year earlier as a sort of sick practical joke. However there were no cases of it in the past six months. But Konohamaru had been in the middle of a game, so external program seemed unlikely to be responsible. Besides, the effects of PCR wear off pretty quickly, but Konohamaru wasn't coming out of his coma, so that couldn't be it.
But now as I thought back on those words I had chosen from the game menus—Hidden, Forbidden, Holy Ground—I couldn't escape the feeling that somehow the game, or rather I (since I had chosen the words), had been responsible for putting him into his coma. And ever since he'd collapsed, I'd started having the recurring dream.
And the church I had seen, with its creepy statue…
Presently I was walking around the school during break, I had to be by myself to think this. That was when I saw Temari and her boyfriend Shikamaru on their way to the lunchroom. It suddenly reminded me of a conversation I had with my friends over lunch a month earlier. Shikamaru had brought up The World.
"I heard that another troublesome ghost appeared. Did you?"
"Yeah, I read it on the BBS." Temari answered.
"Is that some kind of event?" Karin jumped into the conversation.
"Hey, why don't we meet up at the church tonight?" Temari suggested.
"What a drag, it might really be haunted." Shikamaru replied.
"Gee, it's just a game!" She countered.
At that time, I'd ignore most of what they were saying. But now the suggestion of a church, a ghost, and what I saw through the goggles swirled around my brain. I was brought back to the presence as someone knocked into me, well as I knocked into someone.
"Oh! I'm sorry." I apologized.
"Tch. Watch it."
It was a guy, he was taller than me. He had raven spiked up hair and obsidian eyes. His features were too dark for me; I had pink hair with emerald eyes. I knew straight away that I was not to go near this guy. But for some odd reason I wanted to speak to him. He looked a bit depressed.
"Are you a freshman?" I asked, I haven't seen him before.
He looked at me with no emotion, "Yes." And walked past me without saying anything afterwards.
Did he just walk away from me? I thought wildly, he sure had no manners. But I was sure that I wasn't the only one spacing out at the moment, he looked so distant.
I kept that aside as I carried on with my thoughts. I realized that I would understand better if I went into The World myself.
So I decided to try out The World.
But what if I end up like Konohamaru? My poor parents would be devastated! Maybe I shouldn't go after all. But if I didn't go, I would never learn anything.
Would any of this have happened if I hadn't chosen those words? If he fell into a coma because of something I did, then it was my responsibility to do whatever I could to help him.
When I finally made it home, I went up to my room and sat in front of my computer. I logged on and registered a new account, determined to create my own character. I recalled Konohamaru telling me that I would make a good Heavy Blade, so I chose that as my class. Next, I was asked to allocate points among physical and magical offense and defense. Since swinging a big sword around is all about physical power, I put most of the points into physical offense.
Finally I was asked to create a character name. She was a girl, so I first thought it should be something graceful. Then I thought of Konohamaru lying there in his hospital bed, and of how little brothers should be able to depend on their big sisters to protect them. And then the dream I kept having again came to mind, how my other self always wore a jet-black evening gown, surrounded by cherry blossom petals. The way she stood there, strong and beautiful though covered with wounds, resonated me—I was hurting for my brother's sake, but I wanted to be strong and mature despite my pain and darkness that seemed to be closing in around me.
I made up my mind and typed in the name.
And in that instant, BlackCherry took her first steps upon the surface of The World.
So that is how it is! For those of you who read .hack//another birth, it's almost exactly the same but in the future it will be different. I couldn't think up of who should be who in the story so the characters would most likely be OOCs.
Plz review and tell me how you like it, flames are welcomed and don't you just alert or favourite this story without reviewing!!! I got my eyes on you! (Lol)
Akemi_Akira