Chiaki wasn't sure how long exactly she'd spent on making characters for herself and everyone she knew, but it was a lot longer than any sane person should have been staring at a computer screen. She couldn't help it that she wanted everyone to look the same in the digital world as they did in reality, and she wasn't going to stop halfway through the project just to forget she'd ever started it; once she began with making herself she was committed all the way until she put the finishing touches on the last character. That was when she took a short break, mostly to eat (something she hadn't actually done for what had to have been half a day) and stretch her legs, before she was back at her creating ways, this time forming the world that her characters were going to live in.
By the time she had enough homes for everyone to start in their own, with a few exceptions that she made for the sake of space, she'd put in over a full day towards her project, at least, and she hadn't even started properly playing her game yet! This was most likely not a problem that Hajime had seen coming when he'd given her the game, but it was one that should have been expected given that she gave all of her games everything she had whenever she was playing them. He was the first person who was going to see her work, she'd already decided, and she was almost at the point in her creating where she felt comfortable with showing it off to him.
Right after she'd moved everyone into their respective homes and gone through the process of setting them all up for their careers and future friendships and potential romances, she paused the game and left her room to go find Hajime, knowing that he was most likely out in the common area of their dorm building. "Whoa, didn't know you were still around here, Chiaki," he said upon seeing her, noting her ghost-like appearance due to how poorly she'd been taking care of herself in the time since he'd presented her with his gift. "What have you been up to, besides clearly not sleeping?"
"Playing Sims, mostly," she replied, her voice upbeat despite having not slept in a long while and having been silent for almost all of her work time. He nodded in acceptance of that response but didn't press further, which prompted her to sleepily tilt her head as she looked at him. "Come on, don't you want to go see what I've been doing?"
His eyes covered her from head to toe, recalling that the clothes she had on then were the clothes he'd seen her wearing when he gave her that game in the first place. "Not really, I'd rather see you eat and get some sleep before you go back to your game. Do that, and maybe I'll go see what you've done."
It took a moment for her to realize he'd turned her down, at which she sighed and shuffled towards the kitchen area, grabbing a couple breakfast bars and going back to the common area with them in her hand. "This will be good enough to eat for now, so will you please come check before I go to sleep, at least?"
"You must really be proud of whatever you made," he remarked, getting up from his seat and turning the tv he'd been watching off out of respect for anyone else who might wander by at that time of night. "Let's go see what it is, then it's bedtime for you. Doing this to yourself can't be good when it happens all the time." As they walked back to her room, he made her eat one of the bars just to make sure it was in fact eaten, but she'd barely taken a bite out of it by the time they were at her bedroom's door, the knob on it permanently unlatched due to how many times people had needed to break into the room to check on her.
Before he could even blink she'd darted back to her computer chair, throwing her food aside so that she could use both hands for her presentation. "Look at this please, Hajime. I worked as hard as I could to make everyone look like they do in reality, it was a lot of downloading and customizing to make it happen but…" Her voice trailed off as they were both looking at the first figure on the screen, a sleepy-faced girl that was undeniably meant to be Chiaki's own avatar in the game. "I couldn't make her perfect, the gaming traits seemed a bit limiting so she's got some other interests as well."
"That's, uh, actually really good, she looks just like you." How Chiaki had managed to translate her own appearance into the game, Hajime wouldn't ever understand, but she seemed to be so proud of it that he was going to try his best to make her feel good about what he was seeing. "Who else did you make?"
"I'm glad you asked, because when I said I made everyone look like they do in reality, I meant it." True to her word, as she showed off subsequent people that looked eerily like the other residents of their building, he found himself wondering more and more about how she'd managed to accurately portray all of them in such a limiting medium. Asking her how she'd done it would result in no answer that he'd understand, but he could feel himself being proud about how well she'd tackled her goal even if he wasn't sure how she had.
The last person she showed him was himself, and that was the only one that he wasn't entirely sold on—not because it was bad, by any means, but because there was something about the digital guy that Hajime didn't actually have in real life. "He's rather muscular, don't you think?" he asked, recognizing his own face on the guy in the game but not the body attached to him. "You might want to change that, to make him match everyone else."
"He's the perfect amount of muscles in my mind, thank you very much." Chiaki sounded dreamy as she spoke, her cursor circling the fake Hajime's face in a somewhat heart shape for a few moments before she froze and looked over at him and his half-smile on his lips. "I-I mean, if you think I should change it I will, but I thought that he was perfect…or at least, more perfect than my version of me."
"I'm flattered to know you think I look like that, but maybe you should adjust him after you get a good night's sleep, just in case your tiredness has rattled your brain about how I look." It was weird to be there next to her after what she'd just done, even if it wasn't completely unexpected given that they'd been awkwardly flirting with each other for months on end, which had been the reason he'd given her the game in the first place, but he wasn't going to walk out until he knew she wasn't going to keep being destructive towards herself once he was gone. "Eat your food, then it's time for bed. Eight hours, at least, or else I'm going to take the game back."
She protested for a second by glaring at him, but her body was so drained of energy that she couldn't do too much to fight his words. He didn't leave until she'd properly eaten something, even if it wasn't the most nutritious of meals, and soon after she was curled up in her bed, ready for sleep to overtake her. His threat of her needing to sleep for eight hours wasn't necessary, as once she fell asleep it was going to take nothing short of a miracle for her to wake up before at least half a day had passed, because of how long she'd run without actually sleeping. Until she was well-rested, there was no way that she'd be woken up, and that was just a fact of Chiaki's life.
A fact of her life that everyone in the building knew very well, and without a latching door it was easy to go into her room when she wouldn't be aware of it and cause mayhem. That was why Hajime kept an ear out for anyone else being awake at such a strange hour as he settled back into his chair watching his show, but once it was finished and he hadn't heard a sound he went to his room to get some sleep for himself. The seconds between the common area's light turned off and the sound of Hajime's door closing breaking the silence in the small building were filled with someone waiting patiently behind their own door, knowing that the time to leave was almost upon them.
It wasn't that Nagito intended on doing anything bad, but rather that he wanted to check on what it was that Chiaki had been so invested in and see if he could make any of his own improvements to her work. Adjusting anything without her permission would make her upset, and there was something about getting her to break from her normally flat emotional state that made him eager to get to work. He checked the time when he heard Hajime settling into his bed in the next room over, knowing about how long it would take for him to fall asleep before he could sneak out without worry of being caught. He'd been listening in to everything going on the whole time, voices carrying easily through the walls of their dorms, and in all of that waiting time he'd come up with his entire plan.
The first step was to leave the room, which he did exactly eighteen minutes after he'd heard Hajime get into bed. Next came quietly slipping through the halls until he was on the girls' side of the building, having to proceed even quieter than before because of light sleepers that might be in the almost-awake state that he could rise them from. Chiaki's door pushed open effortlessly when he got there, her computer shut off so it could rest from the constant playing, but he was sure that he could turn it on for a little bit of his own playtime without it getting too warm or breaking.
There was one gross miscalculation in Nagito's planning, and that was that he was dealing with playing the Sims, and no one was ever capable of just playing it for a short amount of time. He started with making a new character, someone that he slapped together in a matter of minutes and looked horrendous compared to all of Chiaki's carefully-crafted characters, but as he was using this man for trouble he didn't care too much. Dropping them in a house that consisted a couple of their roommates, he began playing the game without really knowing what was going on; however, after a little playtime he began to understand that Chiaki had built everyone that they lived with and was going to play with their lives, most likely putting people together and building all the relationships she thought should happen.
This became obvious when his character met the sleepy-faced Chiaki character, and her first thought in his presence was about the character he could only assume was meant to be Hajime. "Wouldn't it be tragic if she didn't get to get with him?" he asked himself, maneuvering his character to start talking with Chiaki's, building up their relationship rather quickly. "Wouldn't that make her despair? I can hear it now, her cries of horror as she sees that she's married off to some strange man instead!"
Almost immediately after saying that, the man stepped aside and was promptly hit by an asteroid in some freak accident, most likely a result of the modifications to the game that Chiaki had made. It was a brutal blow to his plans, but now that he had a feel for the game and what she'd been intending for it, he had a new approach in mind that he was going to run with. Switching to one of the other household, Nagito found that he was looking at controlling a rather well-designed character version of himself, living in a house with Hajime. He took the time to check out Hajime's character and found him to be just as into Chiaki's as she'd been into his, and that was what prompted what he ultimately did.
Marrying them together was easy, given how much work Chiaki had already put into building their relationship, and once they were married she was there in the household with them, making it easy to keep tabs on whatever she was doing. Between the three characters under his control, he was able to get a fair number of their digital friends to come to the house, and it was then, and only then, that he decided to completely wreck everything that he'd just built for Chiaki.
In the span of maybe an hour (he wasn't sure how long he was actually there, but the sun was starting to come up judging by how bright it was getting outside) he built Chiaki's relationship up with several of their male friends, before letting her get romantic with each of them in front of the others, as well as in front of Hajime, who seemed to get distressed every time he saw his wife all over another man. Even though these characters weren't real, and they weren't saying anything that Nagito knew of because he was playing without sound, every time he saw the negative symbols pop up over fake Hajime's head, he felt even more excited about what he was doing.
When he started hearing people moving around in nearby rooms, Nagito looked back to where Chiaki was dead to the world in her bed and laughed quietly, before turning to finish what he'd started in the game. One by one, he had Chiaki get into the bed that was clearly meant to be hers and Hajime's with the guys she'd been romancing and had them do what was clearly the "censored" version of sexual acts together, culminating in getting Hajime there in the bed and trying his hardest to get them to do the same. But the damage in their relationship was too strong and he was running out of time to try to fix things, so he saved the game right where it was and forced the computer off, sneaking out of the room without being caught or suspected of doing anything at all.
Chiaki woke up at around noon, blissfully unaware of anything having happened while she was asleep. She wasn't completely rested, but her mind was itching to get back to playing her game and she couldn't resist the desire any longer, so after freshening up and properly eating a meal since she hadn't actually done that before sleeping she was turning her computer back on and ready to really get into the swing of setting up the lives of her fictional friends. It came as a shock when she started the game and found several save states that she hadn't created, but after checking the state she had made herself and finding it to be exactly as she'd left it, she went back to investigate the strange ones. They all seemed to build on each other, so starting with the most recent one was what she decided to do, but nothing could have prepared her for what she was met with.
The sight of her character in bed with Hajime's character was bad enough, but to see him angry at her for something she didn't know about made her wonder what exactly had happened in this version of her perfect town. She noticed that she was living at his house, and after scrolling over herself she saw that she was married to him, yet they were clearly not on good terms at the moment, and the reason for that was discovered the moment she clicked to her character's relationships tab to see what their romance looked like.
They were married, yes, but she had romances with three other men—Teruteru, Kazuichi, and Byakuya—that were much stronger than hers with him. "I wasn't aware the game could do this on its own," she remarked, changing control over to Hajime's character to see that he considered her a cheater and was beyond disgusted with her, a blow that hit her in real life even though it was all fictional. "This isn't right, I have to fix that because Hajime isn't meant to be with anyone else but my person!"
She began trying to repair the damage of whatever had happened, starting by kicking everyone who was visiting out of the house, then by forcing Nagito to move out (just so that she couldn't accidentally cheat on Hajime a fourth time). From there, it became time to start slowly building their relationship back up, hoping that whatever flirting that had happened between herself and others wouldn't have too lasting of an impact. At least, she was initially under the impression that she'd just flirted with the guys she seemed to be romantically attached to, until she happened to scroll over one of her mood modifiers and saw that the reason her character was thrilled due to bedroom activities had nothing to do with Hajime at all. Now, she didn't know if it counted the most recent partner or not, but she really hoped that it did because if her character had turned into a floozy when she wasn't watching she was going to be very disappointed in her.
There was an easy way to check that, but Chiaki wasn't sure if she was ready to see what kind of horrors awaited her if she switched to any other household, so she stayed where she was. By the time it was in-game night she'd made a little progress on repairing things between herself and Hajime, but their relationship was still so damaged that sleeping in the same room wasn't an option. As she set her character to sleep in the room that had once been Nagito's, she took the time to investigate her character's information to see if she could come to any conclusions about what had happened.
Nestled deep in some of her character's memories was what she'd been afraid to see, the fact that she'd willingly cheated on Hajime three different times, all of which included with sleeping with the guys in his bed while he was in the house with them. The thought of her doing that with those guys in reality made her feel a little sick to her stomach, almost as if she needed to go apologize to the real Hajime for something he didn't know about, and like they were connected her character rose from the bed and ran out of the room to go throw up there in that moment. Chiaki had to actually pause the game at the timing of events, saying to herself, "That's strange, I didn't think that she'd get sick from guilt as well."
It wasn't guilt that she was sick from, though, and that became all the clearer when the game time turned to morning. Right after Hajime's character left to go to work for the day, the camera fixated closely on Chiaki as she spun around, changing her clothes and freezing right as a noticeable bump pushed out her shirt. In horror of what her game had just done, Chiaki had to pause it and bring her hands to her face, covering her mouth as she screamed at the fact that her character really had cheated on her husband several times and was going to be suffering the consequences for it.
The sound of screaming brought people to come check to see what was going on, Hajime showing up quickest out of everyone and being the first to push the door open to see her staring wide-eyed in horror at her game. "Uh, Chiaki, everything okay in here?" he asked, getting a slow shake of her head in return. "That's what I figured. Anything I can do to help you out?"
"N-no, I just have to go back to the original version of my town to solve this mystery," she quietly replied, bringing her hands down from her face to resume playing her game, doing exactly as she'd told him, except saving that file to return to later in case she wanted to see what kind of monstrosity her character's child would become. "I'm still having a lot of fun with your gift here, thank you again for giving me it."
"It's no problem, figured you'd have fun with the game." Hajime turned to wave off everyone else who was at the door, all of them concerned with what had gotten Chiaki to actually scream, before closing it so it was just the two of them in the room. "Say, would you mind if I stayed in here and watched you for a little while? I want to see what you're doing, since it's about all of us and all that."
Without realizing the consequences, she allowed for him to stay for as long as he wanted, opening up her proper version of her town and having him be witness as she worked to build strong romances between people that she felt needed to be together. The one she saved for last was the two of them, half because he was watching and half because she wanted as many others unavailable as possible before she started having her character romance someone, just in case she was programmed to always be a cheating wench.
"Are you intentionally making them romancing each other be such a slow process?" he asked, noticing that she was doing an awful lot of tame interactions in lieu of the more flirtatious ones. "I mean, I get it, you might think I think it's weird you're doing this, but I just watched you marry off some of our friends one by one, I can handle you marrying us to each other." He was fully accepting that this was a game, and that she really didn't mean anything by what she was doing, even if he knew that she did feel things for him she wasn't ready to address. "Go ahead and get on with it, I don't mind."
"There's a reason I'm going slow, Hajime, you'll just have to be patient." Even with his blessing Chiaki couldn't bring herself to explain why she was so scared to make it happen quickly. She didn't want him to jump to the conclusion that she'd made herself into a cheater, especially if she was romancing him and impure desires about other characters began to crop up, but no such thing happened. The long, drawn-out process of getting them together was completely unnecessary in its length, and by the time there was a dramatic proposal Hajime was rather bored of watching her playing, even if he wanted to see what she planned to do with their characters next.
He thanked her for her time and for letting him watch, telling her to keep him updated with was happening between everyone, and he headed to leave the room, her not responding to anything he'd said. A worry that him leaving when he was had upset her did cross his mind, but it was so typical for Chiaki to get wrapped up in her gaming that he figured she must have found something new to do now that she'd paired them off. Whatever worry there was lingering in his mind disappeared the moment he opened the door and found Nagito on the other side, looking like he'd been listening in intently. "Can I help you with something? You weren't trying to spy on Chiaki and me, were you?"
"I was trying to figure out what she was doing, that scream earlier was loud enough to wake the dead," Nagito replied, stating it as if the scream hadn't been what had alerted Hajime to the room in the first place. "If she's gaming, that's boring. Where's the excitement?"
"Since when do you care about 'excitement'? Usually you're all about…" Hajime sighed when he realized that a loud scream from the typically quiet Chiaki would, in fact, be related to what Nagito was most interested in. "She wasn't despairing, don't worry. She was just getting a bit too into her game."
"That's a shame to hear, but I suppose it can't be helped. She's so full of hope that she's never going to fall into despair, and that's what makes her interesting." He was beginning to sound creepy, but there wasn't anything Hajime could do about it except suggest that he go somewhere else and leave her alone. The suggestion fell on deaf ears, as Nagito was trying to look into the room to see what Chiaki was doing, and so that was how he was left, Hajime fully aware that if he tried going in, Chiaki would kick him right out.
Or so he thought, and so Nagito believed as well. When he poked his head into the room, Chiaki was still fixated on her computer, but she could tell someone was entering and she paused her game to look over at the person there. "I wanted you to be Hajime coming back," she admitted, "but you're welcome to come watch me play my game too. At least I don't have to worry about you feeling weird about your character marrying mine."
"That would be a strange decision for you to make, when Hajime exists." Coming into the room properly, Nagito could tell that she was playing in the house that he'd been using to corrupt her game, but there weren't many details that he could glean at a distance. It took coming closer to see things a bit better, and when he could tell what was happening it was hard for him to tell what he'd caused, and what she'd made happen in response. His character wasn't living in the house any longer, for some reason, and it seemed like Hajime's wasn't there at the moment—but none of that mattered when he got to take in the full scope of what had happened to Chiaki's character.
"Something went wrong with my game overnight," she said, seeing that he was focusing on her screen rather than her, "and my girl ended up doing some very wrong things with some people that weren't the one she was married to. I'm pretty sure she and her Hajime aren't going to last, but I don't know what will happen after that, since they live together. Perhaps I'll find her baby's daddy and they can get together, but I…but they…"
"What do you mean, he isn't the one responsible for that?" Sounding as surprised as he could managed given that he knew that, at least when he'd been in control, there hadn't been a moment of the married couple sleeping together, Nagito thought back to when he was playing and thought carefully about how he'd intentionally stayed away from the "try for baby" command that kept popping up. How lucky that it had happened anyway, right? "That's a shame, he'll be so upset when he learns about it."
"I almost don't want him to find out about it." Chiaki still had her screen paused, her clearly pregnant, cheating skank of a character prominent on the screen, as she considered what to do about that file. In her actual game, they were happily engaged and she could make their lives as perfect as she wanted them to be, and whenever they got to the point this file was at she'd know that the baby belonged to the man it was supposed to, but half of the fun in this file was not knowing which of the three men she'd cheated with was the one responsible.
"I thought you said you didn't want him to find out," Nagito reminded her as he watched her un-pause the game and continue playing it as if nothing was amiss. "What, does the thought of him catching her in her infidelity fill you with excitement? Do you enjoy the destruction of family values?"
She shrugged, finding herself tuning out the real world and getting absorbed back into her game. "I just want to see if I can fix things. I know that the real Hajime would be upset about this, but he'd be supportive in the end, so maybe the one in the game would be too?" That was never going to be possible and she knew it, but she knew that Nagito was there to see her crumble and falter in her positivity, and she wasn't going to give him that satisfaction.
Nor was she going to let him see the perfect world she'd been creating, but she had a feeling that he'd seen it for himself already, without her permission. That led to her setting a passcode for her computer when she went to sleep next, so that no one could go in and try messing things up a second time. Now that she knew that save states were possible, it wasn't going to be the end of the world if someone did sneak on and do it again, but she'd rather have less encounters with people she was not interested in and have more time spent working on her happy life with her muscular man of her dreams.
And when it came time for that file to start producing children, she was fairly certain she knew who was going to be fathering all the babies that would be made, not leaving any of it up to cheating or to an unsolvable mystery.
A/N: happy birthday sweet gamer girl I love you