Of Cuteness and Maps

Ever since the A in C Minor tone played and trapped all the ETO players inside the game, things have been rather hectic. Between the situation up in Ezzo specifically, and the chaos all over the place in general, it's still taking a lot of the adventurers time to process.

Nevarri, for instance, has been spending her time with stacks of pen and parchment and drawing out maps of the Yamato areas in general, and compiling data for the ship route to Ezzo in particular, her glasses drooping along her nose as she sighs and flops onto the table, "I miss letting my computer do the mapping for me..."

THe Hunter's Guild is a very, very, very busy place, if we're honest, especially as of late. Trapped adventurer's getting together to exchange tidbits, maps, knowledge and knowhow or try to relink with old friends, are a common sight here.

And then there's the other half of the equation: with no money and the inns full of those who ground their way to room and board first due to a faster understanding of the situation, or pure chance, or luck, many adventurers are without proper lodging. You can count Jazz amongst their number. She's got her pointy hat tucked over her eyes, seated amongst the many others present here, tipped back and napping. She's tired enough to grab what she can.

When Nevarri flops forward onto teh table, it makes just enough noise to startle her back to wakefulness, the tenttacles on either side of her head raising up and wiggling in the direction of the sound before she raises her hat up onto the top of her head again.

The Sea Witch peers around, briefly disoriented, before she utters, "Oh," with a heavy sigh. It's the resigned look of one who just realized she's /still here/.

The Salamander Elementalist takes in a breath as she lays flopped on the table for a few minutes, just stewing for those few moments. Nevarri had learned some years back that it didn't pay to get oneself lost in their own thoughts when there was nothing else to do, so she takes a breath and pushes herself back into a sitting up position, and slaps her face. "Focus.."

It's around that moment she spies Jazuhanzu, blinking a moment, before standing up and stretching as she walks her way over, getting a closer look, "Hey, Jaz... How're you holding up?"

"...still here, apparently," says Jazz, turning her hands over in front of her to inspect them before she pushes her hair oiut of her eyes. It's very long all around , after all.

"Wondering how much longer it is before we're gonna start hearing from customer service or something."

The redhaired Salamander smiles softly as she sets herself against the wall and slides down to sit at Jaz's level, "I get where you're coming from... Nobody asked to be locked inside a video game, and it's so much to process how real this all is..."

Nevarri reaches up and pulls her glasses off her face, turning her bright blue eyes to the undine, that were otherwise hidden behind the glint of the spectacles, "I haven't been able to use the Nero service or any Posting... The message service has been quiet as well. I think after two days, someone out there will have figured out that something's gone wrong... I get why everyone is so anxious to get out."

She smiles and closes her eyes, "At the same time, it's not... There's a silver lining in all of this... This is a whole new, unexplored world... A whole new life, where we can be what we want to be, and our limits from our life before can't hold us back."

There's a deeply dubious look to the Salamander from Jazz.

"I don't see that as a silver lining. I enjoy poking the nooks and crannies as much as the next person but, come on now, we'll be out of here as soon as they can safely unplug us. Chances are they're just limiting inbound traffic to keep us from hearing stuff they don't want us to hear. Nobody's gonna want a bunch of panicing in game. Like... people trapped in a mine shaft. WE just have to wait until the people who can actually do something about... about *any* of this actually do it. In the meantime, we've got nothing else to do but play the game in front of us."

"... that said, something about all this isn't setting right with me. There's ... things that don't make a lot of sense."

Jazz is fr owning, now.

"Well that's the thing, isn't it? We keep talking about it like it's 'Just a game'." Nevarri puts her glasse back on and stares ahead, "Sure, there's a menu interface and everything, and we've got all the trappings of a game... By which I mean all the outward appearances and indications that makes it seem like it's just a game..."

She raises a hand and looks upon the back of it, then into her palm, "I haven't made it a secret, obviously, but I have a severe form of macullar degeneration. I had gone blind by the age of fifteen, and the only reason I've been able to do anything, making guides and putting them on NERO and the BBS's... Is because of the Dive Gear and the VR."

She turns her attention back to the Smol Undine, "This is to say that when I was in the game before I wasn't actually seeing anything with my eyes, but the gear was tricking my brain into thinking that my eyes were recieving information. That feeling that it wasn't actually anything real in front of me was always there."

She shakes her head, "Not anymore though. That sense that there was something faking my brain out is gone. I can see as clearly as anyone else in the world." She then points to her glasses, "These glasses aren't even actually helping my eyesight, they're a relic that's been giving me bonuses."

Blink. Stare. Blink. Stare.

Jazz is staring at her.

"...well, that sucks. That you're blind in real life, I mean." She combs her fingers through her lengthy hair.

"So you can, forgive the phrase, 'feel' that you're seeing a differecen, even if things 'look' the same? God, that sounds weird." She folds her legs onto the sofa comfortably. "I get why you'd feel there's a silver lining, in that case, but..."

"You don't know the half of it..."

Nevarri squints back at Jaz at the 'But'. "But? But what? If we're going to be trapped here, we may as well make the best of our circumstances." She throws her head back and groans, "I don't get why everyone is in a rush to get back home. We have players throwing themselves at Aincrad Tower because some big floating man in a chair in the sky said so, and we don't know whether if they die they'll be able to respawn or not... At least not until someone goes and gets themselves killed."

She then rolls her eyes as another thought comes to mind, "Then you've got Mr. High and Mighty Balmung running around all pompous and full of himself, acting like he's got some great wisdom to share, god he drives me nuts..." She puffs her cheeks in annoyance.

Then she takes a breath, "The silver lining is that the game is still a place we can live in and escape to... I've explored all over Yamato before, but it's not the same as actually living in the world... And when you don't have any real prospects at home like m..." She stops herself, before taking a breath, "It's more than some people could have ever asked for."

"We've been taken to the Flipside by Master Blaster," remarks Jazz, drolly, a reference that's going to go over the head of just about anybody who wasn't born in the States in America, and another sign, beside her accent, that she's definitely not Japanese right here.

"It's different, I agree. We feel... closer to the ground, to say nothing of the fact that it's swapped to a twenty four hour clock and I feel hungry and thirsty and I have to ... well... thank god there's a menu item for it?" She pinches the bridge of her nose. "I don't even know who Balmung is. Supposed to be some kind of big muckity muck, I guess?"

"Master what now?" Nevarri is very much Japanese.

"Though too bad all the food taste like the blandest, least satisfying thing you can imagine, eugh..." She shudders. "At least the raw ingredients still taste normal, which is great but weird..."

She grumbles a bit more about Balmung, "From what I've heard, Balmung is this super famous player from back in the days of a game called Fragment, although why he acts all high and mighty is beyond me, since he's stuck here just like the rest of us."

"Kid's cartoon, bad guy was a guy who flew around in a flying office chair and you know what nevermind it's so compeltely, utterly irrelevant." Jazz pinches the bridge of her nose.

"Raw incredients have taste, but they lose the taste when you make them? That's just... kind of weird. Why do we even HAVE taste here? Why do we get hungry?" She looks down at herself.

"I can feel teh tentacles. /That's/ weird." She picks the end of one up with her hand. It wiggles in her palm.

Nevarri giggles and raises her hand up once more, "I've got a tail and alll these scales, so I'm in that boat too, being a salamander and all." She glances around to the other scattered players. "Anyone who logged in with a human avatar is basically lucky to not have had too many changes happen to them, but everyone else had to adjust at least a little."

"...well, it won't last *too* long," says Jazz, still seeming confident about that, though the tremor in her voice says she's concerned about just how long it might actually take.

She gets to her feet and begins to pace. "I'm not even supposed to be here, if I'm honest about it."

Nevarri bites her lip and shakes her head, "We don't know how long we'll be here. It's already been about two days, pushing three. We could be in this for the long haul, which is why I think the best plan we have is to embrace what the world has presented to us."

A beat.

"Not supposed to be here? How do you mean?" Nevarri pivots in order to watch, head tilted a bit. "Before all this, I was putting out videos on Nero for exploration guides, and I'd just posted my last one up before logging in for the expansion... What were you doing then?"

"I can't believe that. It just doesn't seem possible. None of this *seems possible*, though."

Jazz slows her pacing, though, to turn back to her.

"It's not my account. I was staying with my friend and he set up a character for me to play until I got my own residency issues sorted out." She throws her hands up.

"His idea of a joke."

"It doesn't seem possible, but here we are." Nevarri can't help but shrug, "There's no sense denying what's staring us right in the face."

At Jazz's explanation, Nevarri blinks a bit, before cracking up and giggling, "Well the joke's on him then, now he'll have to make himself a whole new account and buy the game again to play at all." She giggles some more, hoping that Jazz might find the irony of the situation humorous, before sighing, "At least you've got friends to make so you won't be alone in all this."

"I... don't think anyone is going to be logging into play anytime soon after this," remarks Jazz, her expression twisting into a grimace. "We'll be lucky if gaming in VR is allowed at all. It's a miracle anyone wanted to do it after the *last* incident. This one is probably gonna kill the whole VR gaming industry." She shakes her head.

"Yeah, I guess I'm just taking his slot. He could be here instead of me, and honestly, he doesn't deserve that. Neither do I, but them's the breaks."

"Clearly you don't understand how business executives think when it comes to making money from ideas that are bound to end poorly." Nevarri holds up a finger, "Why, some recent news from one of the other publishers was an idea to make extra money buy selling tiny portions of DLC to players, just to keep the money constantly flowing, like skins and such. Tiny-Purchases, or something like that... Can you imagine having to purchase your Glamour from CCCorp when they could just patch it in as an unlockable?" She shakes her head.

She sighs, "None of us deserve this, no... But that's why I choose to remain positive about this..."

"I understand capitalism perfectly fine, but there were a whole lot of thousands of people logged in, and after what Pluto's Kiss did to people last time around, unless they can figure out how to safely /extract/ us from in here like they must be working on, we'll be lucky if they don't shut down the servers and all of us in it before much longer."

SHe chews on her lower lip, biting down hard enough to be painful, thopughtfully.

"Are you kidding? You don't think they'd actually shut the game down with people still logged in, do you? Nobody wants to be the person in charge of pulling that big of a plug! It would be a public relations disaster!"

Nevarri pushes her glasses up her nose, sighing, "It's hardly two and half, they most assuredly won't rush that sort of thing."

"The whole thing is *already* a PR disaster and why haven't we heard anything? They have to have access to their own game."

Jazz starts to pace again, worrying that lip in thought.

"It's a mess. A gigantic, enormous mess."

She drops back into her seat.

Nevarri sighs and leans back in her own seat, "Yes... Yes it is..."

She leans back and looks up, "Anyway, there's nothing more we can do, so at the very least make yourself comfortable while we're stuck here."

"Mmmmn," says Jazz. "I mean, yeah. You're right. Just keep focused on doing what I can, remembering there's players out there in bugged space or in trouble who'll need help. Getting those guys out of that screwed up mess in, what's it called... Ezzo? That seems like a good place to start. ALso, I need pants."

She looks down at her skirts. "/So/ need pants."

"Yeah, the players out in Ezzo are going to need all the help they can get..." Nevarri pushes herself to standing and stretches a bit, "Speaking of which, I need to get back to the maps I was working on. You should help, you seemed to know what you were doing in the tunnels."

With regards to skirts versus pants, Nevarri can't help but smirk, "You say that now, but just remember that Fashion is the true endgame." She extends her leg a bit, and it appears that Nevarri did setup her avatar to be on the shapely side. "I lost all my glamours when crazyiness happened, so I'm going to need to rebuild... I think I'll work my way into a mini-dress."

"Yeah. This is... fashgionable, I suppose," she remarks. "I"m rolling with it for now just in case Benji made it on his alternate account or something." She gives her shoulders a shrug, her coat hanging open enough to get a glimpse of the maid's uniform below it.

"And sure, I can help with mapping. I'm not so bad with it, actually. I made all the maps for my Dungeons and Dragons games."

Nevarri giggles at the outfit, and shakes her head, "Oh don't be like that, it's looks cute on you!" She giggles, "Don't worry, soon enough you'll find something that you find more suiting, you'll see."

She then gestures to her maps, "Well, I was always exploring the games before and making guides, so when I picked a profession for ETO, I chose Archeologist, so I could take advantage of the Cartography skill. While it's gone back to level one, it just feels like it's natural to draw a map and fill in all the details accurately. Which is crazy because couldn't draw anything well even before I went blind."

"Uggggh," says the undien when she's called cute. Her nose wrinkles up, her tentacles curl inwards, her eyes half lid...

... and it all just *makes her even more cute*.

"I am *not* used to being the cute one. Or cute at all, actually."

The red haired salamander keeps giggling, unable to contain her amusement, "Then you should really enjoy being cute while you can, because we've got plenty of time for that."

Nevarri sighs and glances to the other table, "Well, we might as well get back to work on this... The sooner we can get the logistics done, the better."

"Ugh, I hope not," says the undine. She moves to settle in beside the Salamandar and leans over to peer over her shoulder and see what she's done so far.

"I haven't gotten out of town much yet," she adds.

"I haven't really gotten out either, but we'll probably have to go soon enough anyway, so let's get cracking.."

And with that, she starts pointing at her map stuff. They had to make progress fast.