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Old 01-31-2011, 08:16 PM   #12
Tempest Wind

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Re: .Hack//Conviction

((OOC: Sorry, dude, but I have trouble reading tiny text. I'm leaving the size as-is.))

Convincing time to pass by was like convincing the goddess herself to bow to CC Corp's rules and regulations. Despite the fact that "The World" was the leisure activity 9 out of 10 Japanese citizens chose to occupy their free time, the entertainment was limited to the coding.

What really drew people into the game were interactions with other players. Online advertisements that floated in the air like Skywriting declared "The World" the "number one social medium!!" complete with gratuitous exclamation marks.

But where was the fun when your own limited coding and memory rendered interaction with humans too difficult? Other NPCs were blessed with ignorance and a small database of phrases. Mara had no such database and more often felt her words were scrambled as soon as they left her lips.

That was fine. She knew from the day she was "born" that she wasn't a social creature. Macha had a purpose that was carried out, followed by other purposes based on her growing principles. Eventually these "principles" were what got her killed. Mia wandered aimlessly until the day she called out to the nervous Wavemaster who followed her from afar. Then, when her data shifted and changed with the tides of "The World," she wandered again until her new purpose was fulfilled.

She died that day, too. She remembered coming back, but more vividly she remembered the pain of dying yet another time as CC Corp tore her data off of her in their misguided attempt to put Aura under their control.

Mara remembered snips of information: a flashback of the marketplace in the new Mac Anu. She remembered selling some sort of weapon before CC Corp deleted all NPC shopkeepers. There also was something about asking for a login name and password, but she couldn't remember the significance of it all. Then there was the useless gossip transfered from one broken NPC to the next in Net Slums. If one thing never changed, it was a Vagrant AI's inability to pass along information in a substantial format.

Perhaps that was why Mara spent so much time in the Net Slums. After all, she was a Vagrant AI, if she really counted as anything other than an anomalie. But her coding and memory may have been created for the sheer purpose of believing that she was different than the other NPCs.

Her own limitations made it hard to think beyond that concept. She couldn't question Aura's decisions and didn't have sufficient data to process the matter further. And so she spent most of her time among her kind in the Net Slums.

Hooded figures shuffled around as Mara knelt down beside a four-legged figure made of stitched cloth and fur with a portal for a face. She scratched its back and felt coarse fur against her fingers. She wondered if this sensation was entirely caused by a string of data comprising numbers.

Nearby, two rings of light appeared and split apart, revealing an Edge Punisher in bright colors. Mara watched out of the corner of her eye with mild interest and her tail flicked, though she did not move otherwise.

As soon as the Edge Punisher was several paces away, Mara leaned down to murmur to the dog-shaped creature: "One senses the return of a countryman to his kingdom."
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Last edited by Tempest Wind; 02-01-2011 at 09:35 AM.
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