Author's Note

This totally just happened. This is sort of a rewrite and sort of a replacement of the scene in chapter one that led up to Kimiko logging onto GGO. It's kind of both because almost everything in the original was gutted, but a few key points remain. Most of the nonessential parts of the scene have been completely removed.

By the way, for readers of Transcendent Bonds: this IRL segment is now officially canon (well, my FF-verse's canon) in that as well. It doesn't matter a whole lot right now since most of the things in that story that will call back on this are either a long way off or will be/have been adequately explained when brought up, but I just thought I'd put it out there.

Would you believe that this whole 3600-word chapter is a single scene? And that beyond that, it all takes place in just about seven or eight minutes? To be totally honest, I'm still getting used to the changes in my current writing style. I think that until I figure out exactly how long and short my individual scenes can get, I'll plan to include one scene per new chapter to avoid accidentally making one that tops 8k words and thus becomes a serious ass-pain to find the time to read.

Well, that's about it from me. Read on.

Gun Gale Online: The Swordswoman

Director's Cut Edition

Chapter One: A Little Project Called GGO

"Big sis, I'm going out for kendo practice!"

The call came from the other side of my bedroom door. I had expected something like this – I'd heard the footsteps as the speaker approached my room loud and clear. I knew that my sister, Suguha, was probably waiting there for any response I could give. Even a simple, one-word reply would have been enough to satisfy her.

Despite this, I didn't say a word or even make a sound. My feet, which I had been dragging from side to side across my stained wooden floor before she approached, had come to a complete halt. Consequently, my black leather computer chair stopped swiveling around, matching my complete stillness and silence to the letter.

The door was locked, as it usually was when I was in my room, so she couldn't just come in whenever she felt like it. Her only way of checking on me was to come up to the door and listen for my voice or sounds of movement. And because she was even more painfully straightforward than I was, she didn't even think of not announcing her presence so obviously, so she called out each time, giving me every chance I needed to react like this.

Knowing all of these things and taking full advantage of them, I remained as quiet and still as humanly possible in order to wait her out. I didn't want her to know I was even awake. And since it was Sunday, the idea that I could still be sleeping in was conceivable, even at such a late time as twelve-fifty in the afternoon.

Eventually, my plan worked. After a grand total of ten seconds of waiting, she began speaking again. "I prepared lunch for you. It's in the fridge whenever you get hungry. In case you're asleep, I'll text you about it in a bit. I'll be hanging out with the club after practice, so I won't be back until tonight. See you then, sis…"

I listened to the sound of the footsteps walking away from my room with an ounce of guilt. It wasn't really my style to just give her the silent treatment like this. My reasons for avoiding my sister weren't even her fault – in fact, they had nothing to do with her at all. The only connection they had was that all of my anger, acrimony, and outright hatred was currently directed at her mother…

In other words, my aunt. Suguha and I weren't really siblings, but I still thought of her as one because we were very close growing up. Her mother, on the other hand, could barely hide her resentment of me for most of my life, and I'd picked up on it before I was even toilet trained. By this point, I was pretty sure it was because I reminded her of her sister – my real mom – whom I knew was my grandfather's favorite child. A fact which I knew because the old geezer never shut up about it or how I was the spitting image of my mom.

And due to a string of events at school over the past year, we were having a difference of opinions over our living arrangements. I wanted to move somewhere else, to basically run away from some people I'd accidentally alienated, I did admit, and well… she didn't like that idea. In all fairness, she had the stronger argument on her side, but the way she was handling the problem didn't exactly scream parental figure of the year.

"I already bailed your sorry ass out of one school system, kid. I'm not doing it again for a reason that isn't even half as valid like this."

My current personal pick for the next cover model of Punchable Face Magazine actually said that right to my face just the night before. Was I supposed to thank her for doing what any sensible parent would have done in light of the circumstances? Even right after she blatantly told me my current problems weren't important enough to warrant similar actions?

"Go to hell, Midori," I muttered under my breath, making sure to be quiet in case my sister was still in the house.

What a joke. That jealous hussy just wanted to watch me suffer in a way that my real mom, who was dynamic, outgoing and didn't struggle to be social or keep her friends, never did. The only thing I seemed to inherit from my mother was her physique, from the well developed figure to the incredibly short height. My personality, intelligence and thought patterns? They basically came straight from my dad with no alterations, as much as I hated it most of the time.

This was why I didn't want to talk to Suguha at the moment. I couldn't let it slip that I was fighting with her mom. Or even worse, let it slip that her mom was my aunt, and that we were actually cousins, which I had tactfully kept hidden from her for the past five years. So until my emotions cooled down a little, I had decided to hold off on speaking with my sister as much as possible.

BZZ-BZZ

This noise, coupled with a subtle shaking feeling coming from the inside pocket of my dark gray denim jacket, interrupted my thoughts to notify me that I'd received an email. A single buzz would have been a text, and three of them would have been an app notification, but the presence of only two, along with the current time, told me exactly what to expect.

Rather than get out my phone, I swung my computer chair around to face my desk, where two large, high-resolution monitors, both blackened due to inactivity, stood next to each other in a way that made them look like a very obtuse angle from a geometry problem. Under the desk, there was another surface, attached to the one above it with a sliding mechanism. It was currently rolled under the desk, hiding what I kept there.

I slid it out, and a keyboard and computer mouse appeared over my bare frightfully pale legs, still slender yet toned from my kendo days. Since I almost never went outside except to go home, to school, or to certain stores, my skin looked significantly closer to that of a white American than that of a Japanese girl. In fact, my own family members all had considerably darker skin than I did, and they weren't even super huge on outdoor exercise. When boys around me at school thought I couldn't hear, many of them described it as a charm point… and coupled with the other such points they'd discuss, I usually had to fight back a shudder of revulsion and the urge to slap them across the face. Knowing my bizarre physical strength, I could very possibly snap their necks by accident if I actually went through with a slap like that.

Shaking my head to clear it of such morbid thoughts, I shifted the mouse, and both monitors lit up, showing two different screens. The cursor moved to the one on the right, which showed my work email inbox. It had just updated to show the new mail I'd received. The sender was just the person I'd been expecting to hear from around this point. I clicked on it, and it popped up in a little miniature window on the side of the screen.

Sender: Kayaba-Sensei

Subject: A Quick Notification

I trust that your copy of GGO came safely in the mail. I wanted to inform you that upon successfully logging in for the first time, your account will be that of a normal player. Your developer status has been suspended to make it fair on the other players.

That was all it said. I'd been corresponding with him since shortly before summer vacation, and to date, he'd never sent a message longer than a mid-sized paragraph. He was very brief and to the point, always conveying everything he needed to and nothing more.

The honorific I used to refer to him, sensei, was purely sarcastic. He was hands down the smartest person I'd ever met, but as much as I'd tried to learn from him about his craft, the man had never taught me a damn thing I didn't already know. Sometimes I got the distinct impression that he avoided telling me anything new just to screw with me, but he was more the serious type, so it didn't really add up.

The game he mentioned, which he abbreviated to GGO, was a little project he'd been working on for quite some time. It was an MMORPG, and the first of its kind on the particular hardware it used. Back around the time summer vacation was about to start, Kayaba scouted me as a beta tester.

He found me through my blog, where I built and sold custom high end computers, often with modified operating systems to fit the recipient, and had quite the reputation for being one of the best and most reasonably priced in my field throughout all of Japan. I also did computer repairs, upgrades, reviewed new parts shortly after they came out, and gave advice to people looking to build one themselves, which only added to my popularity.

Still, my reputation aside, it never really added up how he managed to find me. After all, I was a computer nerd, albeit a multifaceted and successful one, and he was a revolutionary quantum physicist who happened to have an interest in the gaming industry. Realistically speaking, our paths shouldn't have normally crossed. Yet he contacted me through my blog's dedicated email, asking to meet up, and after asking me a few really odd questions, he offered to let me take the last slot of GGO's closed beta, which would take place over summer vacation.

As was probably obvious, I accepted, and he gave me a developer account to allow me to see all of the under-the-hood functions of the game. I also had a direct contact line to the programming staff in case I noticed anything that needed adjusting, which I had admittedly used a few times to iron out some particularly big problems.

To be perfectly honest, I was glad that he had decided to take my developer account away. Considering I still vividly remembered everything I'd learned from it, suspending it wouldn't exactly remove my unfair advantage from a knowledge standpoint, but at the very least, I'd have an equal standing with the rest of the players. I didn't like being special in ways I could avoid it.

Deciding that by this point, there was no way that my sister was still in the house, I clicked the reply button, entered a new subject header, and began typing out my response. I kept it short and to the point, as in tone with that of the message he sent to me as I could muster.

Subject: Too late for fairness

Considering my memory is eidetic, the damage has kind of been done in terms of giving me an unfair advantage. But I'm still grateful for the gesture, since I'd like to appear as normal as possible, and having a purple "Dev" next to my player name wouldn't exactly make that easy.

The game got here just fine, by the way. You did send it first class, after all. I've already got the cartridge in my Nerve Gear, which I set up for use again yesterday, so at this point, I'm just waiting for the hour to turn so I can play.

After finishing, I hit send, and the message composition window disappeared. It occurred to me that most people in my shoes probably would have been total kiss-asses. However, it never really occurred to me to treat him as someone special, even if he most certainly was such. Because at the end of the day, whatever his reasoning was, he was the one who sought me out to play his game, not the other way around. So at the very least, this meant he held me in some regard from the start. I got his attention by doing what I normally did, so I never saw any reason to change my behavior.

Finished with my correspondence for the moment, my eyes turned to the web page open on my left monitor. It was a live countdown to GGO's launch time, down to the thousandth of a second. It was telling me I had about five minutes to kill before the server went online – enough time to take care of the remaining preparations.

I swiveled the chair around to face my room and took survey of the task that lay before me. The floor wouldn't exactly count as spotless, but it was very well organized. Anything that took up space on the floor was properly packaged or put away – nothing was just lying around messily.

However, when my eyes moved about a meter up, I found a completely different picture before me. In the center of the bedroom, I had three card tables set up. Not a single one of them had any spot with even ten centimeters of free space in any direction. Almost all of the surface area was taken up by ongoing projects – at least five half built computers stood out like mountainous islands among everything else strewn about the tables, each surrounded by an amalgam of parts that still needed to be installed.

I probably didn't have time to finish any of them or make any room, so I turned to the right, coming face to face with my bed, the entrance to my room, and my dark violet walls that I got painted shortly after moving in. I had wanted to paint them black or dark gray, but my aunt vetoed both of those, telling me that having a room those colors would only make my depression worse, which she said would defeat the whole purpose of moving to a new house. So I settled for a very deep purple, since I'd been told all my life that my gray eyes would look violet in the right lighting.

My bedroom door was a bit atypical for a Japanese household, but not incredibly rare – rather than having a sliding door, I had a European-styled wooden door, with a bronze-colored metal knob that could lock from the inside. This was an absolute necessity from my standpoint, and it was honestly the reason we chose this house specifically – its doors locked and if they were locked, you couldn't just force them open.

My queen-sized bed had a memory foam mattress that I didn't have when we bought the house. Instead, I bought it a few months later, as the first purchase I made in full with my own earnings from the computer business I'd started. However, at this point, one could not see the mattress, because of the presence of plain navy blue sheets, leopard skin-patterned blankets that I'd bought on a whim, and three fully built laptops that were currently situated on the bed. The two at the foot, which I kept there with no worries since my feet didn't even reach that far down even when I stretched out, were ones I'd built for the purpose of selling that I still needed to modify the operating systems of.

The third laptop, currently charging on my extremely fluffy pillow, was what I currently used for running my blog, making purchases, and the occasional gaming session in bed. This was what needed to move – in order to play the game that was about to go online, I'd need to lie down in bed and make use of the pillow currently occupied by my portable computer.

I stood up, walking over to my bed and grabbing my laptop with both hands. Setting it on the floor for the moment, I then turned to my large, whitish, oak wood nightstand, my eyes zeroing in on one particular device sitting next to the lamp. It was a streamlined helmet colored a dark blue, with an emerald green visor in front to cover one's eyes and a long, blue cord stretching out of the back end, the color of which matched the helmet. That cord was already plugged into the wall – I'd set it up the night before.

I grabbed the helmet and set it on my pillow, the pillowcase of which matched the leopard print of my blanket. I made sure to be as careful as humanly possible when setting it down and moving the cord – if I somehow accidentally damaged it at this stage, I wouldn't be able to play GGO for days, possibly weeks. These things were sold out in stores all across the nation.

After making sure everything was perfectly fine, I grabbed my laptop from the floor and set it in the spot on my nightstand where the helmet had once been, with notably less care than I'd used just before. That damn computer was durable as hell, so I didn't need to worry about it nearly as much.

I cast another glance to the live countdown. Three minutes left before I could start playing. As much as I hated adding to the stereotype, I had to admit that the passage of time seemed excruciatingly slow now that I was paying close attention to it. I didn't want to be even a second late in logging in, so I couldn't really leave my room, and there was nothing left to do inside it that wouldn't take more time than I had.

With nothing left to do, I sat down on my bed, deciding to just get ready a few minutes early. I swung my bare legs onto the bed, absently noting that I'd gone the entire day so far without changing or putting on any clothes aside from my jacket, which was more of a comfort than anything else. I'd just kept wearing what I'd slept in, like usual – this time, a dark gray shirt and a set of black lace underwear that I'd received from an asshole family member as my fourteenth birthday present the month before. While the message that such a gift sent was irredeemably insensitive and somewhat cruel to me, I'd taken to wearing them anyway, because no matter how much I hated that idiot for giving them to me, they were certainly very comfortable, and they were also my favorite color.

The fact that they were comfy was weird in and of itself, because they were lace, and therefore not supposed to be as comfortable as what I normally wore. I'd done a little researching shortly after receiving them and I'd found that the brand my family member had chosen was actually really high end, and that it typically made underwear with both fashion and comfort in mind.

Knowing I'd probably just killed another thirty seconds, I made a grab for the helmet on my pillow. Turning it a little as it rose through the air, I gently slid it on my head, then shifted around a little on the bed before inevitably lying down. I didn't even bother getting under the covers – though winter was quickly approaching, I still didn't feel cold. Everyone in my family seemed to be remarkably temperature insensitive, to the point that changes in temperature that weren't at least five degrees would go completely unnoticed unless we constantly monitored the thermostat.

As I lay there waiting, my eyes wandered around the visor of the helmet I wore. There were two displays, both very small, showing across the whole thing. Those displays would not be visible at all unless one was wearing the helmet – they appeared on the visor using the same technology that GGO ran on. It directly displayed the images to one's brain as pre-interpreted visual data, so there was no need for the displays to actually be on the visor.

On the far right, in the upper corner, there was a battery icon. Mine indicated that it was both fully charged and plugged in, the latter detail being shown by a lightning bolt in the middle of the battery. Which made sense, considering it had been charging all night, and even before that, I hadn't used the thing since GGO's beta, where I always kept it fully charged and ready for action.

The other display, situated in the upper right corner, told the current time in text about the size of the battery icon. It only had hours and minutes no seconds, and it was a twenty-four hour clock, rather than a twelve hour one. As I looked at it, the readout said 12:59. All this super slow-paced thinking had worked marvelously for killing time. Although how I actually managed the feat of slowing down my normally lightspeed thought processes was a bit of a mystery. I knew I could do it on command, but I'd never figured out how it worked.

I had less than a minute to go. This was the most excited I'd felt in months – back in the beta, I'd been positively addicted to GGO, and I'd spent more time playing it than I did anything else, to the point that I'd forgone meals and sleep regularly to keep going. Even though I wouldn't be able to put the same amount of time into it now, during the school year, I still planned to play as much as possible for someone with my schedule.

At long last, after what seemed like an eternity of waiting, the clock turned to 13:00. Filled with joy and anticipation, as soon as the numbers on the readout changed, I uttered a single phrase, just two English words. The words that, unbeknownst to me, would be the catalyst of an event that would change my life forever.

"Link start!"

Author's Note

For those of you who don't read every work in the Swordswoman series, a lot of the stuff in this chapter may seem new, different or surprising. But I can assure you that the only thing in this chapter that is completely new is the fact that Kayaba and Kiriko started corresponding after they met in real life. Everything else has already been explained in such works as Transcendent Bonds and Sword Art Online: The Strongest Warrior.

This chapter was really me just cementing everything that I'd already said before into the series permanently. Since this rewrite will likely be the final iteration of GGO SW, I want to make sure it includes all the relevant things that have been referenced in later installments in the series for continuity reasons.

That said, for those of you wondering how long the day one arc will last… I'm expecting it to be at least five chapters if I average one scene per installment. Give or take a chapter either way. So for those of you who aren't interested in seeing the changes I've made to day one of Gun Gale Online, check back around chapter six (not counting the prologue) to pick back up approximately where the prologue left off. And if that's not chapter six, then in the author notes of chapter six, I'll tell you where it does start.

Unlike said prologue, this chapter has been edited by my cover artist, the amazing ForteDragon. Thanks so much! While we're on the subject of my cover artist, she fairly recently released a beautiful Asuna/Yuuki drabble (which is chapter two of her fic titled "Asuna x Yuuki Drabbles"), which you can view in my community. I don't even like the pairing and I was moved by that, so if you like the ship even a little, I urge you to check it out!

On a final note, I kind of ended up posting this the day after the US election day. I honestly hated all the candidates, and even though I did vote, I felt like I was picking from the lesser of four evils (even the third party candidates were bad)… but the result I woke up to at like three in the morning was a little surprising, to say the least. Now the guy that the media has been blasting all year has been elected to the highest office of my nation. These next four years are gonna be totally nuts for the US, I'll bet.

Anyway, please leave a review that tells me at least one good thing and at least one thing that needs work! I don't ask for a whole lot…

See you next chapter! Get ready to see the world through the eyes of our favorite guy to mess with, the one, the only, the reddest head of hair in GGO, Klein!