AN: Includes hints of tigercry's personal pairing for Liz, but the concepts of her character don't change and if requested a "true version" can be written.
Next upload might be a bit late, been on a trend with my original story's manuscript (and I don't have the last one for Liz finished...) Gotta get that book published eventually xD
The Cast Files: Anxious Engineer - Love
Getting older meant that more responsibilities rested on her shoulders. More things to juggle, more things to keep in mind, more things to strive toward, and…
No more time to stall and pretend she wasn't any smarter than the average person.
With the exams for joining college classes being this year, Liz didn't have a choice anymore, she had to stop pretending.
The very thing Asuna had been telling her for years, from the very moment they had gotten out of SAO, she had been telling Liz that it wouldn't last. That eventually their friends would find out that she wasn't as average as she tended to pretend she was and she would have to face the truth.
That she didn't know how her friends would react to the fact that she was smart, and had been enrolled in college courses alongside normal ones prior to SAO.
In order to make sure she wasn't reducing her future, she would have to drop the pretending act and really buckle down. No more of the studying normal stuff a handful of times a week and hiding the fact that she wasn't just tutor in her spare time for money on the side but that she was forging and creating things like small knives along with drafting projects ideas with her father. She'd have to study college level programs, take practice tests and make sure she'd pass, and reduce the amount of time she was in VR so she was able to split her time properly.
The very things she didn't want to admit to her friends.
It was easy to admit it to Sinon since she was really close with her and Asuna, plus the girl never pretended to be any less smart than she really was. Unashamed to bypass Kirito in her skill and understanding in computers and unfazed by being in the same grade as him, having skipped a couple grades.
The very same thing Liz had done back as a child but chose to be put in the same year as Asuna.
Sinon didn't bat an eyelash and had simply snorted and told her that she might've fouled everyone else but not her. Which had been relieving in a way and also had opened up a path Liz had never considered in the past.
Sinon, a.k.a Shino, knew a lot about computers and could hand code a different type of software than Kirito. Whereas Kirito was all about games and VR coding, Sinon was in the software engineer field. She preferred to program things like robots, drones, or watches. Which…
Meshed perfectly with Liz being an engineer.
Granted she was a bit rusty since she had been hiding it all for so long, but it didn't take long for the rust to be brushed off after Asuna, Shino, and Silica supported Liz in the rapid reveal of her intelligence. Especially not when she could go another path that her father hadn't gone.
Technology.
The very thing her entire life from SAO forward was built upon, she could test the waters of what kind of advances she could work with as long as she had someone to build the software, she could build the shells and hardware.
Granted she still wanted to major in mechanical engineering like her father, but that didn't mean she couldn't play with the real possibility of what she could do as long as she had a partner to work with.
However, the one thing she hadn't expected as she got older and had to be separated from Asuna, Kirito, Shino, and Silica when she went to college, was romance.
See, Liz had known long before SAO's events, that she was cursed in romance. It didn't matter how much she wanted and yearned for a partner, for someone to walk beside her and let her lean on them and would let her support them when they needed it.
Because it never happened.
People hated her for so long, that by the time she escaped SAO and had finally come out of her shell properly, she didn't try or want to participate in it. Because she didn't want some kind of little puppy love high school romance, Liz wanted a partner, a real partner. Someone who she could see never leaving or abandoning her for who she was.
So despite her age and how much other students had relationships, Liz didn't take it really seriously. She did try, she did try and look for what she was looking for but it never happened. So over time and multiple years between high school and her first couple years of college, she had learned to simply be a casual dater. Not someone to really be partners with or anything, just to have casual dates and experiences with.
Which she didn't count as romance. Because it wasn't real romance to her. It was just something that softened the aching and the pain in the knowledge that she would always be alone. Because nobody wanted to be her partner and she could never find what she was looking for.
So color her shell shocked when she found herself wanting to be with someone, and someone she knew personally.
Years of close friendship after her crash course of the crazy hell that their little group of survivors lived, had slowly without Liz noticing, turned into something else on her side.
Affection, comfort, companionship, want, appreciation, adoration, love.
Liz knew from the moment it dawned on her that she had to back off, immediately. Because for her, there was no way she was going to abandon everything she had built to try a romance. To try something that never worked out for someone like her and muchless between her and a tech nerd who had the world at her fingertips now that she was older, stronger, and experienced.
A tank and a sniper would never work.
At least that's what Liz tended to tell herself whenever her mind tried to stray on her.
Not that it helped.
