Sword Art Fanfiction Online

The SAO incident. The big, ultimate event every moral guardian has been waiting for to finally vindicate them in their crusade to prove that 'video games are bad'. For months on their podiums, saying this was a culmination of what they had been preaching against, and that they'd seen this coming but no one had listened to them, and so on so forth. They demanded that all video game developers bow their heads and apologize to the families of all the 'stolen, tainted children', and tried to lobby Ichihara to pass a law against video games in Tokyo.

Incidentally, Kibaou found himself sneezing a lot during this period.

But eventually the furor died and the loonies were put back into their straightjackets, and the waking had to deal with the day to day matters of dealing with thousands of coma patients with very special needs. The medical field experienced several breakthroughs as concerned friends and family of the sleeping pressured for better care for their loved ones, leading towards improvements in technologies and treatments for things such as muscle atrophy and nutrition.

With the scandal surrounding the SAO incident and the resultant stigma on NERV Gear, established mouse and screen MMORPGS experienced a resurgence as the 'safer' alternative. Even when the safer Amu Sphere becoming available, gamers with paranoid parents had only flatscreen, non-immersion games to play. These people were seemingly vindicated when it was found that some of users of the first-generation Amu Sphere and those erroneously detected to be in the same IP as an already trapped player found themselves unable to log out as well, as unwittingly trapped in SAO as the users of the original NERV Gear. While they were unlikely to die from dying in the game, since their Amu Sphere's weren't rigged with the same deadly high-intensity microwave emitters, simply removing the units from their heads was deemed unsafe, since there was a chance of scrambling their brains from the sudden disconnection. The bug— or, as some people muttered darkly to themselves, hidden feature Kayaba had built into the firmware without anyone noticing?— even made it into the medical Full Dive technology, trapping a young patient who had volunteered to test the Medicuboid.

Then, one day, the game was beaten.

In the midst of happy reunions and the beginnings of weeks of rehab therapy, the resulting scandal of a RECT Progress Vice-President conducting illegal and unethical research on the sleeping gamers made waves, but was ultimately ignored in the atmosphere of celebration and later realities. Nearly all the SAO veterans swore never to play a video game again.

The record for adhering to this promise was about 2143 minutes. After all, Yuuki Asuna had only been a casual gamer to begin with, and thus had slightly stronger reserves of will.

Still, once bitten as they were, the justifiably paranoid gamers who nonetheless still enjoyed the social aspect of play gravitated towards 'old school' MMO's. Mouse, monitor and maybe microphone, the basics, since just the thought of putting on a Full Dive helmet made their brains seem to itch.

Many months later, in hindsight, everyone agreed what happened next was Argo's fault.

Around the time when many players' therapies were finishing and they were getting ready to go back to 'real life', an article and a link to a blog hosting the original copy of the article began making the rounds among the survivors. 'Alternatives. Don't Worry, It's Argo's Guide to Games' billed itself the last of the Argo Guides, and was considered by many at the time to be a fitting postscript to SAO. It mostly had to do with the humorous introduction, where the 'information broker' humorously tried to bill people who still allegedly owed her money, congratulated the players who had made escaping the game possible, and cheerfully said they should all get together again... somewhere you didn't need to have a logout button.

It was followed by a short, concise analysis of the MMO games currently available, with special emphasis on the games that had come out while they were 'out'. They'd been rated by exacting criteria, as well as appended with Argo's personal analysis at the end. There were no VRMM Os on the list, except for a heading that had only two words in it: 'HELL NO!' It was one little note at the end of one of the reviews that really did it though: Argo mentioned one game as her new favorite, and that the reason she was planning to stick to it was that, unlike several other games on the list, there were no plans in the foreseeable future to shift the game towards being compatible with Full Dive accessories.

Not surprisingly, many of her readers thought that was a good and proper reason as well.

So, really, it was all Argo's fault.

Kirigaya Kazuto had never made a bot account before.

After all, he wasn't that kind of person. When he played a game, he played, not just mechanically accumulated exp and money. He was a solo player, not a farmer. So he took his time carefully downloading the bot program, reading the text files that came with it, and studying the interface for programming the behavior you wanted before he began. He downloaded more programs after that, hit several forums, and even tried a Full Dive emulator, which allowed you to interface a Full Dive game without Full Dive equipment. He found where someone had hacked one of the Private Pixies meant for use in Alfheim Online, the pseudo-successor of SAO.

And then, using all that, and one special ingredient, he put his bot account together.

He named it 'Yui'. It took a while to get the interface right, but he doubted she'd have any problem with starting Elder Tales with a few thousand gold in her account.

A day later, he repeated the process. This time he named the account 'Strea'.

He'd promised her too after all.

He played Elder Tale now. It was absolutely nothing like SAO.

No full immersion, only watching your character through the monitor. The monsters, no matter how big they scaled compared to your character or how horrifying their design, were only images on a screen. The log out button worked. He'd literally spend the first thirty minutes of game time logging in and logging out repeatedly, just because he could. He'd never imagined how satisfying logging out was. Truly, logging out was a woefully underrated experience.

It was literally impossible for him to be a solo player now though. Every time he logged on to his computer, Yui and Strea, each in their own individual partition, also awoke. They talked to him, and each other, and did eldritch and slightly creepy A.I. things to his phone to let them call the people they knew from the game. Yui called Asuna collect (and Kazuto had been astonished to learn that was still a thing) because of how long mother and daughter talked on the phone. Strea, bless her artificial heart, restricted herself to free voice connections and emails.

And they partied with him. After all, who else did they know in this new game that had no need for mental health A.I.s?

The girl leaned back, her eyes closed. Her already generous chest swelled towards philanthropic as she took a deep breath, actually causing the arguing around her to die down and a few to subside altogether. It pleased her, in a professional sort of way. Reduced conflict, temporary as it was, was a sign of improvement in mental health via reduction of negative emotions.

And she was fairly certain she wasn't going to go insane from it this time.

She took another breath, and listened once more to the sudden decline in conflict and stress. There'd been very good hormonal reasons she'd chosen the particular unused account that she had in the final floors of Sword Art Online.

Sword Art Online. Where she had been 'born' and where she had 'died'. When she had been 'reborn' under Kirito-kun's clumsy but well-meaning ministrations, the sensory deprivation had been shocking. Only limited audio and video input, and of low quality. Tactile, olfactory, gravimetric, gyroscopic and other inputs had been literally non-existent. The only thing that had kept her from going insane again was that Kirito's computer hadn't had the capability to run all her processes. She had, in a nutshell, been too stupid to go insane. She'd had memory retrieval, and input and atrociously limited output, and enough sense of self to be happy that she had that much.

And now...

She was fairly certain this was what was called a 'Miracle'.

Sight. Sound. Touch, taste, smell, balance, hot, cold, weight, oh so much... so many inputs, so clear and yet so jumbled. So many outputs... walking wasn't just data management according the the movement algorithms, it was multiple processes decoding multiple subtle inputs and feedback systems coming together...

Actually, she felt she was going insane again. An urge was rising within her, unlocking autonomous and semi-autonomous processes that had little to no counterpart to anything she had manipulated in SAO. She threw back her head as rhythmic, audible contractions of her diaphragm and othr parts of her respiratory system produced a repeating auditory output. Involuntary systems flushed. Input-output hardware that seemed only partly in her controlled rose and spun, while gyroscopic input and processing systems, with almost contemptuous ease, provided near-perfect compensation parameters.

For the first time, Mental Health Counselor Program Strea spread her arms, spinning in circles and laughing as tears of joy ran down her face.

"Onii-chan!” Leafa called, both hands cupped around her mouth. "Onii-chan!"

"Kiri-too! Where are yoooouuuu?-!" Sinon called, her voice barely audible over the murmuring crowds of Akihabara.

"O Kirito, Kirito! Wherefore art thou Kirito? Deny thy girlfriend and refuse thy name; and, if thou will not, be but sworn my love!"

Sinon and Leafa both stopped and stared at Lisbeth.

"What?" the heavily armored [Guardian] said defensively.

"[Shakespeare]?" Sinon said. "Really?"

"Aren't you required to make only nerdy [Monty Python] references?" Leafa said.

"You of all people should know better," Lisbeth retorted. "And a girl can dream, can't she?"

They all sighed. The other two gave Leafa a sideways look.

"What?" she demanded.

"You know, it's stuff like that that make people wonder about you two," Lisbeth said.

"Ugh, will people get their heads out of the gutter," Leafa said, annoyed at the old argument. "There's n-nothing weird about me being close to my brother! It's perfectly normal behavior! I-it's not like we've secretly been doing things that brothers and sisters shouldn't or anything!"

"That's a suspiciously specific denial," Lisbeth said, stroking her chin as she eyed the blonde elf [Kannagi].

"I hate you two."

“Ah, there's Kirito-kun!” Lisbeth said, pointing down the street. The girls turned, and saw a familiar-looking profile in a long black coat, two swords sheathed on their back as they lead two children— or at least two people in child-looking avatars— down another street.

Leafa glanced that way and made a dismissive sound. “Not him. That's definitely somebody else.”

Sinon frowned. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure! He's my big brother, I'd recognize him just by seeing the side of his neck, or his knees!”

“Suspicious...” Lisbeth repeated.

“Oh, bite me!”

“Papa!” Yui cried, running towards her adoptive father. In another media format, this would be the point where we go to slow motion, the foreground starts to sparkle and the background turns into a rainbow blur.

“Yui!” Kirito cried, running towards his adoptive daughter. If this were some other genre, he'd have had sparkly tears streaming down his face and floating in midair as he ran with his eyes closed, a goofy expression on his face.

“Papa!”

“Yui!”

“Papa!”

“Yui!”

“Papa!”

“Yui!”

“PAPA!”

“YUI!”

“Shut up already!” Sinon, Lisbeth and Leafa chorused.

They were blissfully ignored.

After a rather uncomfortable length of time of the two of them acting suspiciously (even for Akihabara), Leafa and Lisbeth finally resorted to prying them apart manually (“Honestly, stop it, you're being embarrassing, and this is probably some sort of violation of the [Ethics Code]!”).

“All right!” Lisbeth said. “Nearly everyone's here! All we're missing is Asuna-chan, right?”

“Strea and Philia are still missing too,” Yui said helpfully.

“Right, so no one important,” Lisbeth said, clapping her hands together in a 'that's a wrap' gesture. “Now…” she pointed dramatically a Kirito, “What the hell's going on Mister Beta Tester Cheater?-!”

Kirito gave her a bland look. “Why are you asking me?”

"Because you're the biggest nerd here,” Lisbeth said as if that explained everything. “We're just hot gamer girls. You're the savvy tech nerd beta tester guy who knows things.”

Leafa and Sinon both nodded in agreement.

"But… Strea and Philia aren't unimportant…” Yui said, sounding confused and mildly distressed.

"Weren't you one of the ten thousand people who must have stayed up late just to get a copy of Sword Art Online?” Kirito said blandly.

"Fine, I'm a hardcore gamer,” Lisbeth said. “So? How do we get out of here? Where's the final boss we need to kill?” She took a boxer's stance and started shadow boxing. “Come on, I'm pissed off enough to actually go on the front lines this time! Let's blow this thing and go home!”

At those words an awkward silence fell.

"Liz,” Kirito said, trying to be delicate, “We don't even know where 'here' is.”

Lisbeth laughed. There was a slightly hysterical edge to it. “Isn't it obvious, Kirito-kun? We're in another crackpot's virtual reality deathgame, obviously. I suppose after the first one, people realized it was possible, so now we're getting copy-cat perpetrators.”

"Without [Full Dive] equipment?” Sinon said sceptically.

"Microwaves!” Lisbeth declared. “Someone probably managed to hack all the microwaves ovens in our houses into some kind of VR device! I knew making internet-capable microwave ovens was a stupid idea!”

"Yeah… no. That sounds stupid,” Leafa declared.