I would pay for a spin-off of their relationship together, not gonna lie.
Also, correction: It's always questionable decision time with basically any SAO character I write. Rinko is of course no exception :D
Oh hey wait, this is my longest chapter of this story now, what? XD
These days, it's a flip of the coin as to whether or not Rinko gets any sleep on a given night—probably worse odds than a coin flip, honestly.
On one sleepless night, she decides to explore around the property a little more—not that there's much to see, but on her impromptu hike on New Year's, she did notice one thing she hadn't looked closer at.
There's a shed in the back, attached to the wall of the house. The doors have been frozen shut over the winter, but after a few tries, she manages to yank it open, nearly tripping over herself in the process.
There's not much inside. Upon closer inspection, she finds some tools and other equipment, probably for repairing things if need be. The most outstanding thing in here is a folding ladder.
It takes some work, doing it all by herself, but Rinko manages to get the ladder outside and propped up against the wall. After shaking it a few times to make sure it's steady, she slowly starts making her way up; it's only when she gets to the top that she realizes she has no way of actually getting on top of the roof without either standing on it, the idea of which makes her stomach turn, or sitting on it, which would get her clothes wet.
With a sigh, she shakes her head at herself. "You never do plan anything when it matters, do you…"
Her face reddens further when she realizes she's talking to herself, but it's become a habit that's hard to break these days. Hearing a voice, even if it's her own, keeps her sane up here, when the only other human company only comes out once every few days in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the habit seems to carry into work as well sometimes, and she's gotten more than a few strange looks when she thought she was alone.
With the back of her glove, she pushes some hair out of her face and tosses her head back, only to freeze at the sight above her.
Up here, in the wild mountains away from civilization, the stars are brighter than she's ever seen them. The night sky suddenly is filled with dozens of colors, and she thinks she finally understands why stars are likened to diamonds, millions of them dancing merrily in their own world up there. Tonight, the sky is as clear as it'll ever be.
The stars in Aincrad are different. They designed the constellations themselves, just the two of them, and thought up dozens of quests and fairy tales to go with them. As a matter of fact, it was Akihiko who taught her all the stories behind the real world ones; apparently, he'd fallen down about a dozen rabbit holes about constellation myths while researching for inspiration.
One night, at her insistence, they drove all the way out into the countryside, where light pollution was at its lowest, so they could see the stars in their full glory. He waffled and quietly complained all the way there, and once they got out of the car, she smugly watched him fall under the spell of the stars. Basking in the glory of being right, she happily listened as he spent about four hours telling her every single myth and legend he knew.
Between stories, she asked him why he seemed to find these tales so interesting. He'd smiled wryly, and said, "Because they tell stories of humans. Humans who were lucky, or who were prideful and arrogant and stupid...Those we hold up as legends are the ones more prone to flaws than any other."
A self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps?
Finally, when he'd exhausted his repertoire, the next thing he said was, "Stars live so long that we're barely a blip on their timelines. On an astronomic scale, we don't even matter."
To which she responded with something along the lines of, "Well, maybe to them, we don't. But we can choose to matter to the people around us."
When he turned to look at her, his eyes were filled with the light of a sky full of diamonds. "Ever the optimist," he teased.
"It's not optimism," she argued back, arms crossed; did he know how much he mattered to her? "I'm just saying, it's pointless to care about the astronomic scale. It's anyone's choice of how they want to matter on the scale that we do live on."
And he chose this.
The moon is full tonight, and its light reflects on the snow covering every visible surface. There's the faintest hint of red on her mittens; she knows it's nothing but rust, but in the dark-
She clenches her fists around a rung of the ladder and breathes in the cold, crisp night air.
He made his choice, and she thought she made hers too-
But there will always be more choices to make.
o0o0o
That being said, Rinko could really do with some better decision-making skills, which is something she's learned multiple times in multiple different ways over the last few months. Between her master's research, other lab work, her new project, and her general sporadic insomnia, she lives in a more or less constant cycle of exhaustion.
Higa gives her worried looks when he thinks she's not looking—she's usually alert enough to notice, but still tired enough to not mind so much when he not so subtly takes some busy work off her hands. Sugou has made one or two comments about the bags under her eyes; leave it to him to only mention it when she starts looking exhausted. Even Dr. Shigemura brought it up in passing, which is saying something, because the man has been a shell of himself, basically oblivious to the outside world while either throwing himself into work (like Rinko) or burying himself deep in his self-loathing and anguish at his daughter being trapped in a game he helped develop.
In her defense, it's not an entirely new project she's been working on. The base concept of it is something she came up with about a year ago, as they were finalizing the design of the NerveGear. She's been quietly working on it for several months, although it got lost in the chaos of the SAO launch. Like almost everything else in her life, she forgot about it for some time until she unearthed a messy sketch in one of her old notebooks.
"Shouldn't you be sleeping?"
She ignores Akihiko as he ambles into the kitchen; it's not like he has ever had room to talk on that matter.
His eyebrow lifts when she shoves a notebook at him, but he takes it, leaning back against the counter to read. Meanwhile, she puts her head down on her arms and watches him with tired eyes. Her notes are a little sloppier than they usually are, but he's never seemed to have trouble following her thoughts. Maybe that's why he kept her around; he could read her like an open book, whether she wanted him to or not.
When he holds out a hand, eyes still fixed downward, she just hands him her pencil and listens to him scratching away.
She wakes up several hours later to piercing sunbeams. Too tired to be surprised that she drifted off, she sits up and regrets it immediately when her back protests and a blanket that she didn't remember having slides off her shoulders, making her shiver. The smell of fresh coffee permeates the kitchen from the machine, even though she's ninety-nine percent sure that she didn't put on a fresh pot in her sleep.
After draping the blanket around her shoulders again and pouring herself a cup, she reaches for the pencil and notebook he left on the counter and brushes through some of the pages, stifling a yawn. He left most of her design the same, unsurprisingly; she knew it was good, having worked on the NerveGear for many, many painstaking hours right alongside him and Higa. Most of his contribution consists of a few notes here or there in the margins.
Tucked in between pages are a few sheets of printer paper folded neatly in half. When she unfolds them, it takes her about half a second to realize what they are.
It's a NerveGear. Rather, the schematics of it, annotated with notes in his handwriting. Rinko frowns, looking over it uncomprehendingly. She knows this device like the back of her hand, and she knows he knows that.
It isn't until she muddles her way through another sleep-deprived day at the lab that she looks back at her notes and the NerveGear schematic and realizes that this isn't the NerveGear they designed, not quite.
"I need to sleep," she says out loud to herself, wondering how she didn't notice the glaring differences.
Apparently, Akihiko's NerveGear has a higher electromagnetic output than the regular NerveGears do, as well as more pulse-generated components that would help block out real world stimuli even more, although she can't quite puzzle out why. The normal ones work just fine; they don't completely cancel out all feeling from the real body like this modified one does, but there's so little that does get through that it never really interfered with the Dive feeling.
Perhaps it has something to do with his avatar. Assuming he's using his Heathcliff avatar, his real and virtual bodies are quite different in stature, so maybe the complete blocking of stimulus from the real world would help him use his virtual body better, or something.
She could ask him about it, but these modifications, while weaved into the original design subtly, seem a little over the top for just a slight more seamlessness in the VR experience. Something tells her there's another reason for these modifications, and she's not sure she'd believe his answer if she asked.
Regardless, he gave her the tools to solve the rest of her problems. And although there's no sign of them in his special NerveGear design, he left some scribbled notes about safety precautions and potential long term effects of the increased electromagnetic output. It's enough for her to make the final touches on her design.
"I need a name…"
From his chair in front of his monitors, Akihiko turns his head slightly, a little smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.
"You could always ask Higa-kun for suggestions," he remarks innocently, and she rolls her eyes, seated on his bed in the corner.
"Only if I'm desperate."
A hoarse chuckle rasps in his throat. "He's getting his bachelor's this March, isn't he?"
"Yeah. He's already made arrangements to stay in the lab for grad school, though."
"Mmm."
She lets her head fall back against the wall, arching her back slightly to stretch before slouching back against his pillow with a sigh. "How did you name the NerveGear?"
He blinks slowly. "I just picked an English based name that sounded unique and was relevant to its function and mechanisms. 'Nerve' for how it works, and 'Gear' as a short word that means 'equipment'."
Yeah, that sounds about right. Why does this have to be so hard?
An amused huff comes from his vicinity. "Of all the things that could trip you up," he comments, standing from his chair.
With a familiar heaviness in her chest, she starts to move so that he can lay down, but he just sits down next to her and grabs her notebook, flipping to a drawing of the machine.
"So it's designed for healthcare purposes," he says out loud. "Something to that end could be a part of the name. And then you could mash it together with a physical attribute."
"What if that gets changed, though?"
He shrugs dismissively. "People care more about what it does than how its name corresponds to its appearance."
At his suggestion, she pulls up an English dictionary and thesaurus on her laptop. It's mildly comical, how much this trouble this name is giving her, because he's right; people don't care that the NerveGear is called the NerveGear. They care that the NerveGear has killed nearly a thousand people already.
After some time, probably more than it should take them to choose a name of all things, they've settled on 'medi', from the English word for medicine, and are debating on the second half of the name.
"...Dome, maybe?" she mumbles, idly scrolling through a list of synonyms. "It's kind of like a dome around the user's head…Medidome sounds kind of weird, though...I guess you could also call it a helmet? But I don't think you can shorten 'helmet' and still make it comprehensible…"
He hums, sounding vaguely amused at her persisting dilemma, but he has yet refrained from kicking her out and telling her to go figure it out on her own, so at least there's that.
"Cube?" he suggests. "As in, Medicube?"
She frowns at the design. "It's a rectangular prism. With rounded edges."
Akihiko actually rolls his eyes at that, half exasperation, half affection. "Alright. Cuboid, then, if you want to be picky...So that would be-"
Their eyes meet as they both blurt out, "Medicuboid."
At their perfect synchronization, Rinko startles both of them with a quiet snort of laughter. He blinks, looking legitimately surprised before something distant softens in his gaze, reflecting the light of her laptop screen. It isn't even until he brushes the back of a finger along her jaw that she realizes she's still smiling.
When was the last time-
Bitterness burns in the back of her throat; she's not smiling anymore as she remembers again, who he is and what he's done and-
Sitting cross-legged and barefoot next to her, he murmurs from far away, "I miss your smile."
(But evidently not enough to have stayed)
He doesn't stop her as she gathers up her things and leaves.
If you're a writer or a creator of some sort, you know exactly how infuriating it can be to come up with titles and names sometimes, which is why I often song lyric everything. Oh, and also summaries. 1% of the time, I come up with something good and I feel totally unstoppable, like I'm an absolute genius; 99% of the time, I despise them with every fiber of my being.
Speaking of titles, it took me too long to decide on one for this chapter :'P I chose it to describe the distance between them that they almost tried to bridge at the end. These chapter titles are mostly abstract things anyways, so don't pay them too much mind XD
I was listening to 'Speechless' from Aladdin as I was writing the first part of this, which is why it's got a slightly more uplifting tone than the rest lmao XD Still a not quite happy ending though, as per usual :)
It's 'suggested' at the end of Mother's Rosario that Kayaba provided the initial design and concept for the Medicuboid and Rinko just sent it to developers or something, but it seemed much more in character for Rinko, a far more empathetic person than Kayaba, to want to use FullDive for a better purpose. I don't think he would be against it, and he helped her with it by giving her his NerveGear design as a base, but I just don't see him really caring about it himself, at least not for the sake of the people it would be helping.
Also, Rinko, I adore you, but for the love of god, please go to sleep I'm begging you