Omake: Hiromipunk
The case had appeared on her nightstand between sometime between starting her shower and finishing drying her hair, a strange unblemished unadorned oblong of porcelain white, with a single word in silver letters across the top.
Gema(ゲーマー).
"Gamer?" Hiromi spoke the phonetic in english, all while looking around her room for the culprit who placed it. A swift scan through her recent security logs showed nothing, the case appearing between one frame and the next.
"Motoko..?" Hiromi guessed as she began to walk toward the case, peeping under her bed and then into the air-vent grates like a kid checking for monsters as she tried to check for the presence of her strange cyber-shinobi friend. After a long two minutes of nothing Hiromi tried again, putting on a little curl of cute lilt as she peeked into her closet and then out into the hall "Moto~kun~?"
Five more minutes of waiting on her bed left Hiromi pouting and wary as she very carefully plucked up the case and examined it from all angles, running a few random searches that led nowhere on her little desk terminal. Then she popped the case open to see the shard within, an innocuous thing which instantly sent a little tremble of nerves up her spine for some reason as she used some grooming tweezers to pick it up. Hiromi knew academically that she should under no circumstances plug a suspicious shard, as it could contain literally anything from an XXX BD to a Black ICE which would fry her brain like cheap tofu...
...However, whoever snuck in here to plant the case was clearly some sort of ninja who could have easily planted a bomb or just gunned down Hiromi in the shower if they intended to kill her, and kidnapping would have been almost as easy.
Thus Hiromi looked both ways and under her bed one last time before plugging in the shard, flinching as it uploaded a rush of strange incomprehensible code, flickering pixels in Hiromi's vision forming into letters.
Gamer System Initializing.
Allied Gamer found, awarding accumulated XP for assisted actions
Level 3 gained.
Perk Points Available
Stat Points Available
She passed out with the stark white letters floating in the black under her eyelids...
Hiromi woke up to the notifications floating before her eyes with a furrowed brow and a thanks to the corporate kami that she had plugged in that shard while lying on a bed, her gaze locking on the pop-ups before instinctively going to the 'x' to close them which thankfully worked. Then the corporate girl did as any clever cautious future magnate would do and checked for malware, not obeying her first instinct which was to airgap all connections and close down all of her systems to prevent whoever the fuck made that shard from getting into her family's local network or the arasaka main network.
A check on her internal clock told Hiromi that she had been unconscious for over twenty minutes, more than enough time for any lurking cyber-gonk to do whatever they wanted. If she wasn't or in trouble by now then panicking would achieve nothing.
+100 Cold Blood XP gained
...Plus, she really didn't want another lecture from her father on cyber-security and not plugging in suspicious shards, to speak of which the shard was missing. Not fallen out or merely loosened, it was gone along with the case it came in.
+100 Cold Blood XP gained
+100 Cold Blood XP gained
It took Hiromi ten minutes of cycling the meditation her mother insisted on to calm down enough for action, the ding and blipping up of the 'xp' alerts stopping Hiromi from forgetting or moving past the incident, and thinking 'stop' did nothing. Or did it? Thinking about closing all notifications flexed some mental muscle Hiromi couldn't remember getting, hiding the pop-ups and quieting the dings to an easily ignorable blip in the back of her mind, which allowed her to finally shift her focus to dealing with whatever AR gaming hack this was.
Maybe she could go to Motoko for a checkup? It still couldn't escape her head that this might be some weird prank that her favourite crush deeply beloved friend had thought up, and thus going to her would be an admission of weakness? Hiromi resolved to try dealing with it herself, first.
"Gamer?"
She ventured as a guess, thinking the phonetic hirigana as she spoke it in english whilst feeling very silly, before she tried to recall how these AR systems actually worked. Again there was some sort of muscle memory in her head that she couldn't remember working for, so Hiromi flexed her focus there while flicking her eyes as the unseen reflex urged.
A screen flicked up in her eyes. A 'Status' sheet with her name at the top and a mass of numbers underneath, numbers and sigils she somehow understood just from looking at them. Her everything seemed kinda... Low.
"Is Body 3 good?" She wondered aloud, biting her lip while staring at her stats, wondering what the scaling difference was between her 'Cool', which stood above most of her stats at a towering 4, while her 'Intelligence' stood at an assumedly sky-scraper level of 5 with the rest at a vaguely disappointing feeling 2 or 3. Moving her eyes around the menu and flexing mental muscles led Hiromi through tabs that listed her equipment, her chooms, her 'perks', her skills -Again disappointingly low, or maybe surprisingly high?- and her cyberware with its 'affinities' which made no sense, how could you have 0/0 affinity?!
She closed the menu with a mental flex, then re-opened it as she noticed that she had 'points' to spend, a resource to be managed... Yet she hesitated, what were the value-ratios? How many of these points would she ever get? How many levels did she have before a cap? Was there a cap?!
Cold Blood XP continued to blip Hiromi with notifications as she paced back and forth in walking thought, meditating on spending these things which could apparently effect her, if the 'status' screen reflected herself and the points would upgrade it.
And who the fuck was the 'Allied Gamer'?! There was no messaging App built in, much as she tried to find one, which meant that was probably the gonk who teleported the shard into her room.
Hiromi resolved herself, breathing in and then out before deciding to do Arasaka proud. She was a future magnate, she would master this system, and then she would find this 'Gamer' gonk and sicc Motoko on them.
Hiromi slapped a fist onto her palm for dramatic effect before sitting down to do some research on AR systems, games, and similar systems to the one someone snuck into her body.
A quick thing that I'll continue when I have the mental focus to do it justice.