Simulated Lover

Simulated Universe Gone Wrong (III)

yayy to inconsistent update schedules

Caelus was in a daze, and he didn't know what exactly was happening anymore.

He had just been thrust into the universe's most powerful dating simulator, and while nothing too out of the ordinary was happening so far aside from what happened when he first got into the Simulated Universe, he still had many questions on his mind. Mainly, why the hell was Blade his dad? Did that mean that other people from his life were going to appear too? Blade, or this weird, simulated version of him DID mention Silver Wolf and... some other person that he didn't know about but were there others? Come to think of it, how the hell did the Genius Society learn about Blade anyways?

With all these thoughts clouding his mind, it was only natural that Caelus wasn't paying attention to where he was going. So when he bumped into another person and fell to the floor, it was hardly a surprise. The incident snapped Caelus out of his thought process, causing the Trailblazer to come back to his senses, causing him to instinctively apologize.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know where I was-"

Before he realized who in the hell he was talking to

"You should really watch where you're going sweetheart" a familiar, motherly voice called out, her face becoming ever clearer as Caelus' thoughts were swept aside "We wouldn't want you to get more hurt after the incident yesterday would we?"

Caelus went pale.

First Blade and now KAFKA out of all people? Who the hell programmed this damn dating sim?

"Sweetheart, you don't look so good" Kafka said, touching Caelus' forehead. "If you want to stay home from school today, that can be arranged. I'll tell Papa Bladie to take care of you in the meantime."

Is Kafka usually this nice to people when she wasn't out murdering them?

"It's fine Kaf- I mean Mom" Caelus replied, nervousness coating his voice. "I can manage."

Kafka then did something that Caelus 100 percent did not expect.

She kissed him on the forehead.

"Don't go overexerting yourself too much okay." Kafka warned, a tone of concern leaving her lips. "I'll have to go to work sweetheart after a give Bladie his goodbye kiss, so take care. I'll see you when I get home from work, okay?"

As Kafka continued up the stairs, Caelus felt a warm feeling in his chest.

Safe to say... he didn't hate it.

Feeling somewhat... refreshed from his encounter with Kafka, Caelus continued on his merry way towards the house's dining room. Luckily for the Astral Express member, he wouldn't have to look for long as the smell of freshly cooked pancakes easily revealed its position.

And when he pushed the curtains aside... he saw two faces, one comfortably familiar and the other hauntingly so.

The comfortably familiar face was Silver Wolf (as Caelus expected) but the other face was almost a splitting image of him save for the hair and facial structure. The hair and eye color were exactly the same, and the way she smiled as he entered the room reminded him of the smug smirk he would make whenever he knew that something bad was going to happen, but he was going to let it happen on the pretense that it was funny. From what Caelus could see, they were even the same height!

"Hey bro" she said, giving away her relation to him "You think you can still have children after what happened yesterday?"

What the fuck happened yesterday?

"I'm fine... I think" Caelus replied, trying to keep his responses as vague as possible.

The girl then proceeded to hug the Silver Wolf next to her as she was eating pancakes, causing the girl to react with a little yelp.

"We both know that if you couldn't have kids, Wolfy here would be pretty disappointed~"

"Hey!" Silver Wolf replied, "Don't listen to her yapping Cael, she slept at like 12am last night, she's high AF right now."

The girl's smirk widened "Only because you were talking about-" only to be interrupted by a forcefully shoved pancake down her throat.

And at that moment, the world once again turned monochrome, time stopping as the scene between his supposed sister and Silver Wolf unfolded before him. Caelus nearly panicked, if not for the fact that he felt a vibration in his pocket.

My phone

The Trailblazer opened his phone with haste, with the notification greeting him being from none other than the Game that put him in this situation in the first place. Opening it up, he was directed to a separate application, labelled [Simulated Lover Interface Menu]

And there lay the fabled message that he was looking for.

"Welcome to Simulated Lover's Interface Menu application, managed from none other than your personal cellphone! Here you can keep track of Relationship and Affection Points of the people in your life! But before we do that, here is a run-down of the Affection Point and Relationship Point system.

[RELATIONSHIP POINTS] are a quantification of how close you are to a specific character in the terms of platonic/familial way and appear for every character, while [AFFECTION POINTS] represent feelings in the romantic sense and only appear for Heroines. Scales for both go from one to ten, with one being the lowest and ten being the highest. It is possible to go negative when it comes to both RP and AP, which in the case of RP indicates animosity and in the case of AP indicates that a character wishes for a more platonic bond.

While Affection Points and Relationship Points are intertwined in some ways, it is fully possible to have a high RP and low (or even negative AP) and vice versa, so be careful when managing AP and RP values! Your actions reflect heavily on both AP and RP, so make sure to act wisely!

Polygamy is allowed in this simulation, so long as you manage Heroine AP and RP wisely, so go wild!"

Caelus snorted at that last part. A harem? how ridiculous! It's not like those situations ever panned out in real life, and after all it's not like he ever fantasized about getting triple teamed by Hanya, Guinaifen and Sushang before!

...

On second thought... maybe I should go for it

Pushing that thought to the back of his mind, Caelus fiddled around with the app, quickly finding the app's Relationship Management Menu, where he found both his platonic and romantic relationships. Kafka, Blade and his sister (who he found out was called Stelle) were all at 10 Relationship Points. Silver Wolf's stats were also there, being as follows.

Silver Wolf (Wolfy)

Relationship Points: 7 (He is my bona-fide gaming buddy)

Affection Points: 5 (I feel weird whenever I see him)

Caelus sighed and exited the app, still not knowing what to do with the information that was presented to him. Him exiting the app caused the whole world to spring to life once again, with Stelle's throat being stuffed full of pancake.

"Hey sis" Caelus asked with as much brotherliness as he could muster "You doing good there?"

"Dan Heng isthnt calthed Dang Heng for nothshing" she mumbled, chewing her food while talking.

"You have one handful for a sister, no cap" Silver Wolf said, a smile plastered all over her face "Must be a pain in the ass dealing with her every day."

Caelus chuckled in response, happy to see that Silver Wolf was acting as normal as ever, remaining mostly unchanged from the version that he knew.

"You don't know half of it."

One of my main problems with pre-rewrite SL is that I felt that the characterization of everyone was a bit lacking (esp Caelus tbh). I hope that I managed to fix that with the release of this chapter so that I finally have a solid base to build on once I start getting into some juicy stuff.

It's nice to see that a lot of people are getting excited about this fic's return, really helps motivate me lol. Reviews are encouraged, be it suggestions, thoughts, hype or constructive criticism as long as you're not being a dong about it.

I know people are going to ask about Firefly, but we won't be seeing her until much later. Just let me cook for the moment, I have plans for the cool robot woman.