All right, let's see how long I will be able to keep up with this updated biweekly schedule… put your bets in the review telling me how long you think it will last~.
One of the reasons for having a monthly update schedule was to allow more time for my beta reader, LightZephyr, to do her beta reading magic. The writing of a chapter takes about a week/week-and-a-half, then I give the chapter to her for the beta reading process and I spend a couple of days after to edit it. That accounts for approximately eighteen days, give or take, so I've given another week-and-a-half as a safety buffer (for example, in case of something suddenly popping up or writer's block or whatever) to be able to maintain the updates.
On a biweekly update schedule, LightZephyr has confirmed that she won't be able to beta read every chapter so here is your warning for the potential of the quality going up and down. The chapter you are about to read just so happens to be one of the chapters where she wasn't able to beta read for me.
I do not own BanG Dream! Girls Band Party nor do I, in any way, shape or form, intend to pretend that I do.
With the avatars of the five girls of Afterglow made and loading into the game, Moca decided to take matters into her own hands. She was not one to easily forget a mistake her friends had made, especially if said mistake could be used as fuel to tease the friend in question.
"Please answer this for the back of the class, Hii-chan: what is the number one rule we need to follow when playing an online game like this~?" Moca asked in a sing-song voice that betrayed the amusement she had in the situation at hand. This amusement managed to reach an even higher level when Moca noticed the slight flinching of her bandmate, "Moca-chan is waiting~."
"I get it I get it, I made a mistake when we played NFO with Ako-chan, I promise I won't do it again," Himari wailed, feeling embarrassed and deflated while Moca was trying her hardest to not laugh out loud. Or, at the very least, not laugh so loud that she'd alert the rest of the people in the building.
When asked by a curious Tsugumi as to what had happened, Himari knew that she could no longer dance around the issue. So instead, the bassist decided to take a deep breath before biting the bullet, "When I first played an online game with Moca and Ako-chan I accidentally called them by their real names."
A wave of silence and understanding washed over Ran, Tomoe, and Tsugumi as they understood the story from that one sentence. Tsugumi even took it upon herself to try and reassure Himari that it would be all right and that she'd be right there to stop Himari if she would be about to say any of their names.
That was, of course, until Moca waved off their worries.
"That was indeed bad of you, Hii-chan, but that was not what Moca-chan was talking about," Moca muttered with an exaggerated sigh, making sure that her forehead was being supported with her hand. After making sure that she had her friends' full and undivided attention by peeking through the gaps in between her fingers, Moca added, "Hii-chan forgot to drop all her items and praise the great Moca-sama. Such an unforgettable and unforgivable sin…"
"I think we should start playing that game before Himari commits a murder," Ran commented at about the same time when Tomoe and Tsugumi jumped in between Moca and Himari to stop the bassist's attack. Trusting her friends to calm Himari down, Ran took on the role of distracting Moca, "What do you know about this game already?"
"Not too much," Moca admitted after a moment's hesitation with a sheepish shrug of the shoulders. Moca had been tempted to play around with Ran for a while but she knew better. While it was true that Moca had been looking forward to play the game Kuroba had handed her, Tsugumi's presence when Moca had been thinking of getting a head start had quickly dissuaded the self-proclaimed genius. Moca did not want to be the reason that the brunette felt like she was being left behind again.
Using Tsugumi as a means to escape Himari's wrath was fair game, however.
"Let's start and see what the game has to offer~!" Moca cheered, walking up to her laptop with a small skip in her steps. Without wasting another moment, Moca clicked the button in the bottom-right of the screen and watched as her laptop's screen lit up in a blinding light.
When Moca opened her eyes again she would be in for the surprise of the day. Her laptop, which she knew wasn't the strongest in the world after seeing what Ako's could do, managed to properly display and showcase the beautiful world in front of Moca. And what a beautiful world it was.
The skies above were dyed in a radiant shade of blue while specks of white Moca knew were supposed to symbolize clouds drifted over in a slow and almost-hypnotic stream across the screen. A single shining orb of light was in the middle of the sky above, the light radiating off the orb properly illuminating everything below it. What impressed Moca the most of this was that the lighting of her screen properly adjusted and adapted the moment when a particularly fluffy cloud moved in front of the sun; the lighting and contrast of the environment around Moca dulled ever so slightly and the shadows around her began to slowly fade into nothingness.
But the sky was not the only thing that had caught Moca's attention. The area that her avatar spawned in could best be described as a grassland area. The view for Moca was filled with blades of grass of varying shades of green as far as the eye could see, the only other noticeable landmark around her were the handful of trees towering above Moca's head around the field. It did not take Moca very long to realize that the grass was tall enough to reach the knees of Moca's avatar.
The way the grass seemed to move told Moca that there was a gentle, zephyr-like breeze blowing through her avatar's non-existent hair. Moca took a moment to close her eyes to try and imagine herself in her avatar's place and it almost felt as if she really was!
Moca's moment of tranquility was soon shattered when several flashes of light around her announced the arrival of her friends.
"Took you guys long enough!" Moca whined playfully when she saw the familiar faces of her friends' avatars. Judging by the lack of response Moca was getting, she knew that her friends were admiring their surroundings as well so Moca decided to do something else. Moca ended up searching through the in-game menu and settings before too long to see if she could gain an unfair advantage over her friends.
"We won't need to rely on the chat system if we are playing in the same room, but if we want to play with nobody around it might be useful to communicate," Moca explained as she motioned to the room they were in. Her friends nodded in understanding and agreement, so Moca moved on to the next point of concern, "Now we need to know what kind of a game we are playing."
"You don't know?!" Himari practically screeched as both Tomoe and Tsugumi, who were sitting on either side of Himari, visibly flinched at the sheer volume.
"I have an idea, but I need two willing volunteers to test out my theory… Chaos and Endy-sama?" Moca asked Tomoe and Ran with a hopeful glint in her eyes. Knowing what question was about to be asked of her, Moca tried to explain her reasoning, "We should all get used to calling each other by our avatars' name. The whole 'don't pull a Hii-chan' thing and all."
"That problem aside, what do you want us to do?" Tomoe asked Moca, the worry practically dripping from her words. Tomoe, much like anyone who had known Moca for more than two minutes, knew how unpredictable Moca could be more often than not. As it so happened, the five girls of Afterglow had been close friends for slightly over a decade. so Tomoe was certain that she could tell when Moca had something sinister planned. For all Tomoe knew, Moca could ask Tomoe and Ran to kiss or for them to fight to the death.
It being Moca who asked them for a favor meant that both ends of the spectrum and anything in between was not out of the question.
"Chaos, stand over here please~," Moca said as she erratically moved her avatar on the spot she wanted Tomoe to stand on, much to the redhead's visible confusion. When Tomoe had made her way to where Moca wanted her to go, Moca walked a little bit away from Tomoe and repeated the motion in the hopes that Ran received the hint.
As soon as Ran was in place a few moments later, Moca directed her attention to Tomoe once again, "Can you go to your menu in the bottom-right, pick the third option from the top and see if you can find Endy-sama's name? When you do, please click on the left button by Endy-sama's name."
While Tomoe was muttering a stream of mumbles as she tried to follow Moca's instructions, Himari attempted to get Moca to tell her what the guitarist was planning. For Himari, the one thing worse than not knowing something was when Moca knew what Himari didn't.
Moca, to her credit, remained quiet. She hadn't moved her avatar since parking Lotus beside Peace and Maiden after Moca had shown Ran where Endymion needed to stand. Even outside the game, the only movements Moca made were to try and see if Tomoe needed her help at all.
"All right, I got it!" Tomoe's victory cheer caught everybody by surprise as they had all been focused on something else. Tomoe did not seem to notice this, so she sounded unaffected by the confusion when she spoke again, "I think this means Ra— I mean, Endymion should have a notification or message pop up or something?"
With Tsugumi watching over her shoulder, Ran scanned her screen to see what Tomoe was talking about. Neither of them needed much time to try and find what they were looking for; the big window in the middle of the screen announcing the message was pretty hard to be overlooked.
"Now what?" Ran asked as soon as she pressed the confirm button, originally intending her question to be asked to the group as a whole but the look she was giving Moca told the guitarist that Ran had directed the question mainly at her. Moca, however, never even got the chance to answer the question.
A navy-blue beam of light exploded from the ground, reaching to and piercing through the clouds fluttering overhead. Before any member of Afterglow could do anything, the same light encircled the avatars of Ran and Tomoe, cutting the two of them off from the remaining three members.
As soon as it started, it was already over and nothing could be done about it. Moca, Himari, and Tsugumi were left standing outside the dome of light that was currently trapping Ran and Tomoe inside.
"Moca-chan! What's going on?" Tsugumi cried out in panic, already rushing to her laptop to see if she could find an opening in the exterior of the dome to reach her friends. Had she been in a calmer state of mind, she would have noticed that Himari was attempting the same thing she was. Tsugumi had gotten very tunnel-visioned in the heat of the moment, only wanting to help Ran and Tomoe escape, so her brain did not process what the others were doing.
Ran and Tomoe, in turn, were looking around them frantically to try and figure out what was going on. Despite being cut off from the outside world, the inside of the dome was relatively well-lit. Everything had a muted navy-blue tint to them, but aside from that both Ran and Tomoe could see what was around them without too much difficulty. The knee-length grass, the wall of light cutting them off from the outside world…
And the clock that materialized out of nowhere in front of both Ran and Tomoe. The unvoiced question as to what the clock was supposed to symbolize was answered when it began ticking down from thirty.
"As Moca-chan suspected…" Moca mumbled softly, trailing off as she took a good long look at the screens of both Ran and Tomoe. Knowing that she would be bombarded with a certain question soon, Moca decided to stay a step ahead and answer the unvoiced question for her friends, "Chaos and Endymion are in a battle to the death, one that will start once the countdown reaches zero. This game has us fight other players, and the fights can't be interrupted until one of the fighters, well... wins. Or lose, technically."
"What Moca is saying is that either one of us has to die before we can leave this place?" Tomoe thought out loud in the hopes that she managed to keep up with Moca's train of thoughts. Tomoe knew that a part of her was hoping she was mistaken, but seeing Moca nod all but confirmed to the redhead that she had to do what she had to do, "I don't like this, but let's get this over with so we can move on to the next part of the game."
"If it is the motivation you need then Moca-chan is here to provide~," Moca sang with a grin, making sure that she maintained eye contact with Ran as she made her announcement. It took Ran a split second to catch on, but before she could try and stop Moca she found a hand covering her mouth as Moca placed the final nail in Ran's coffin, "Tsugu, do you remember a few weeks ago when Tomo-chin got grounded for a week?"
"I… think so?" Tsugumi's response followed soon after, but it was clear that Tsugumi was not very confident she knew what Moca was talking about. Both Himari and Tomoe were watching Tsugumi in mild interest to see where Moca was guiding the youngest of the group while Ran could only hope and pray that she'd live to see the day's sunset. Then, as if somebody flicked the switch, it was as if Tsugumi's face lit up when she figured it all out, "Wasn't that because Ran-chan told Ako-chan wrong information when we'd finish our practice?"
Tsugumi, having realized her mistake, tried to salvage what little of the peace she could but was stopped by Moca covering her mouth as well. Without the ability to apologize for her mistake, Tsugumi could only watch as Tomoe merely blinked a few times as her brain tried to process the information she had just been given.
"I am going to enjoy this…" Tomoe muttered in a dangerously low voice, cracking her fingers before getting in position in front of her laptop and scanning her screen to see what she could do. Unfortunately for Tomoe, her avatar did not have a lot of flashy skills or moves to take advantage of because of its low level.
That did not stop Tomoe from trying to find a way to get back at Ran.
"Ah, Ran and Tomo-chin fighting, we've reached the quota for today, everybody~," Moca couldn't help but smile as she watched Ran look at her skills as well, though not without her fair share of annoyance. With her task done, Moca turned to her friends who weren't currently trapped in a one-on-one fight in-game and added, "Either of you got some popcorn or at least ten buns as we watch Ran and Tomo-chin fight for the eighth time this week?"
"Moca!"
"What? It's not like either of them can leave that fight before it ends anyway," Moca pointed out with a small shrug of her shoulders. Before Himari even had the chance to comment on this, Moca was speaking again, "We need to know what this game is about and what the rules are, right? Besides, with the tension lately between Ran and Tomo-chin they would have ended up fighting one day anyway. Would you rather they beat each other senseless and one or both end up in the hospital, or just kill each other in a game with no consequences?"
"That… fine, you win, Moca," Himari finally relented, knowing that Moca had a point. The last time their stubborn friends were at each other's throats had resulted in Tomoe receiving a black eye and Ran bedridden for the rest of that day. Himari knew that the alternative to Ran and Tomoe sorting out their differences in the game would not be an option, so she tried to change the subject to keep her mind off the issue at hand, "Shall we go grab something to eat and drink then?"
"There's a convenience store down the street I can go to get some drinks," Tsugumi thought out loud, wanting to assist and keep up with her friends. Seeing Moca and Himari nod appreciatively at the thought, Tsugumi's brain went into overdrive to try and think of something to suggest, "Moca-chan and Himari-chan can run to the bakery to get some food for us?"
"Yay for bakery~!"
"All right, we're off. Good luck, Ran, Tomoe," Himari added to her two friends who would be staying behind. She did not get much of a response from either of them, so Himari turned around and walked out of the door with Moca and Tsugumi walking a bit ahead of her.
Himari and Moca soon said their goodbyes to Tsugumi who needed to go the other way before setting their sights on to the bakery. The two girls were walking for a minute or so in silence before one of them finally said something.
"So, um… there's something we need to talk about," Himari said, eyeing her friend to try and see if she could see a reaction out of the normally unpredictable Moca. Unfortunately for Himari, this was not the case, so all that Himari could do was take a deep breath and prepare herself for the worse, "The rest of us talked about it two days ago when Moca had to go home early."
"I know, Hii-chan. Tsugu and Tomo-chin aren't the best at keeping secrets, and when Ran is as direct as she was last night it's clear something's bothering her," Moca sighed with a small smile. Himari went on to say that it wasn't meant to be a secret and that they wanted to include Moca in the discussion as soon as possible, but Moca waved off Himari's words, "It's why Moca-chan got everybody to play this. It's something else we can do together when we all move apart after we graduate in two years, right?"
"Thank you, Moca," Himari voiced her gratitude to Moca. Himari had been struggling to find a way to keep the group together should they all go their separate ways for weeks now; Moca managed to find a possible solution in two days.
'I know you have been hiding parts about yourself, not showing everything you can do… to not make us worried… but have you really grown so much since I last saw a glimpse of who my friend is?' Himari's mind was swimming with thoughts like this as she watched Moca take the lead, a noticeable skip in her steps, 'Do I… or anyone… even know the real you?'
And that is all for today's chapter! I hope you all enjoyed it, please leave a review telling me what you thought, and until next time! Take care!