Chapter 3: Friends upon a Time

Savi woke up from a deep sleep and sat on his bed and flexed his body. His bones groaned with pain for a bit, awakening him completely from the sudden shock. He’s getting used to awakening to the pain and actually would thank it for fully awakening him, if it weren’t so damned painful.

Now that he was awake, he noticed he still had the helmet on his head and couldn’t remember how he went to sleep. Actually, he couldn’t remember logging off The Helix. Worried for a moment, Savi turned on the machine.

*AVATAR IS CURRENTLY RESTING*

*TIME UNTIL FULLY RESTED: 10:00.23*

*YOU ARE UNABLE TO LOG BACK IN UNTIL THE AVATAR IS FULLY RESTED*

“I see… The system must’ve logged me off since it would take quite a bit of time for the Avatar to recover… Guess falling asleep in The Helix also caused me to remain asleep here when I was forcibly logged off…”

*GROWL*

Savi touched his stomach which was growling loudly. The last time he ate was right before Diving into the game for the second time and he spent a week in-game. That would be almost 17 hours in real life, not to mention he had logged off asleep for who knows how long. Savi wondered what time it was now.

He took out his phone and saw that it said 11:00 pm of the next day. Savi got a bit worried as he saw that more than 24 hours had gone by since the capsule had arrived and he had not eaten anything since, or even talked to someone in most of that time!

Savi jumped onto his wheelchair and moved towards the kitchen and started to prepare the stove to make some chicken soup.

“Eating something heavy when on an empty stomach can cause indigestion” – he murmured as he prepared the water, noodles, condiments and strips of chicken. Once the soup was left to cook at low heat, he wheeled himself towards the bed and picked up his phone. He checked his Chatroom for messages and found several from a few of his friends.

“So Kris spread the word already, not that I’m surprised. The rest are probably waiting for me to adjust to the game before sending me a message.” – he looked at the status of his contacts and noticed that only LyraNote (Kris) was still online. Since he didn’t have much anything else to do as he waited for his food, he decided to relay his experience to her.

Savi wheeled towards the pot in the stove and served himself a bowl of soup. He savored the soup while in his wheelchair, swallowing the noodles whole without reserve. Hunger was truly the best condiment out there as he felt the soup tasted better than the ones he usually makes. He continued by eating the strips of meat before gulping down the steaming juice.

Savi looked at the phone’s clock and saw it was 1:00 am now. He went to the bathroom to take a bath. Maybe the cool water would cool him down enough to help him sleep…

“Well, that didn’t work much…” – said Savi around 6:00 am having spent a sleepless night. Even the sweet bliss of cold water on his aching bones couldn’t help him fall asleep again after having slept for so long… He really didn’t want to risk reading and forgetting about The Helix again, so he forced himself not to read a book following his friend’s advice. However, he was getting bored simply lying in the bed. He took out his phone and was pleasantly surprised to see his old friend, Dex, online in the chatroom.

After eating two servings, he felt full and cleaned up the bowl and pot which he used to cook the soup. He opened his Chatroom to find an impatient friend.

Savi could never handle Jean well; she was too hyperactive for his tastes. In groups, Kris would be the one to handle her as she has the greatest patience of his group of friends, but she never wakes before 12:00 pm unless she’s going to go to school. Furthermore, Savi dislikes rudely disconnecting like Dex, happened too many times to him when he starts to garble facts and walls of text. Though many consider his facts interesting sometimes, unlike with Jean who simply keeps talking about miscellaneous things and asking questions without giving a chance to answer even of her questions…

Feeling a headache coming to him already, he jumped into his wheelchair after leaving a comment about how he was going to eat breakfast now… He’ll deal with her later.

Savi’s now exercising, or as well as he could with his aching bones. He was doing push-ups at the moment; excruciating push-ups of one per minute. He usually does sixty daily to keep his arm strength, but missing yesterday’s he was trying to continue to sixty to make up for them.

Savi cursed his condition under his breath as he considered his pain and pushed on; he was born with Brittle Bones. Thanks to modern science, it’s possible to relieve the condition slightly, but truly curing it is still a problem. The most usual solution for those with the illness is mostly the use of prosthetic limbs.

Of course with the advancements to mechanical science, the new limbs were just as good as the original ones or even better, however not only were they very costly, but many refused to give up on their limbs in hopes that someday a true cure would arrive that would not severe their ability to feel things from their limbs.

Savi was one of these cases, as he considered the loss of physical reaction to be too much of a detriment for being able to walk and hold things well. He also considered that it was plain dumb for people to think he would live a normal life if he picked those prosthetics, as he can’t get prosthetics for his spine or skull, which were also quite fragile, though not as much as the rest of his body.

Currently, he’s taking some experimental infusion of Type-I Collagen that helps him by providing the collagen his body refuses to produce. While this has helped him rise from a point from which he couldn’t move on his own to actually being able to live alone as long as he drank his dose, he still wasn’t happy with the bitter taste or the pain he still feels in his bones when he forces them.

He’s having it easy though, and he knows it. Some people with his condition end up in much worse situations such as bone mutation, loss of hearing, and muscle deficiency. Well, he did suffer that last one for a while, but he recuperated with time and can move around… Sort of…

Since he didn’t have much to do as a child, being stuck in a bed most of the time, he took a hobby that slowly became an obsession with the passage of time, reading. Since he couldn’t see the world normally, he learned to imagine it whenever he read the stories in his books.

After a while, he expanded his reading to various sciences that picked his interest about the world. Each book he read opened the doors to several more that picked his interest. This kept going for some years, until he suffered his coma.

That week he spent reading his books and just read and read, completely forgetting about everything else that wasn’t important; eating and going to the bathroom. While one would feel that others would worry over his behavior, it wasn’t visually different from what he did on a daily basis; by the time they had noticed he was unconscious.

Soon enough, the doctor would give his parents instructions to only let him read a certain number of books on a daily basis, no more. Savi quickly complained at what he was supposed to do since he couldn’t do anything else! After this, the doctor picked up one of his books and looked at the cover, then asked his parents to come with him away from Savi.

The next day, Savi would be surprised when he got shown a strange coffin-like machine. For a second he though they were going to put him in cryogenic state while a cure was found, but quickly disregarded the idea remembering that while cryostasis was possible in theory, it had failed to maintain the subjects alive in practice.

He was then told about something he had yet to read about: virtual reality. Upon hearing the explanations from the doctor and how he could use the virtual world to do things he normally couldn’t do due to his condition. In his excitement that very day he Dived right into his own personal Terminal which he proceeded to alter with the information he already had.

Unbeknown to him, his parents would also give connection to this Terminal to his cousin Kris, a girl his own age with whom he tried to play with once, but resulted in a fracture… While he wasn’t ecstatic at first, he quickly accepted her as their games in his Terminal became even more fun.

Soon, she would bring up friends of her own to join him and play together.

A few years later, the group would enter their first MMPVRGRPG, or Massive Multi-Player Virtual Reality Role Playing Game. Quite honestly, Savi was the only one who referred the game by its genre, the others simply called it an Adventure Game; and it truly was. There, Savi learned to fight monsters along with his friends and explore unknown places and treasures. He had a lot of fun in those times.

A year ago, some of his friends decided to try out The Helix and from then his group slowly drifted to that Terminal. The last ones left were Savi and a girl he met in the game, Jean. Naturally, he tried to continue playing the game with her, but found her slightly intolerable… Not surprising, really…

Still he continued to try until recently when he went to check out the forums about The Helix out of curiosity. He grew more interested in that world and it’s mechanics as he continued to read the scarce information about it. For some reason, people seemed more interested in talking about the doings of players, armies, and grand events rather than the world itself which was what truly interested Savi.

Last month, he ordered his capsule and downloaded its instruction manual after explicit instructions of his parents to not read anything other than that until the new capsule arrived, to which he complied grumpily.

While he hasn’t read books in some time in real life, he had managed to get a hold of books in the virtual world, which his friends usually prevent him from reading on purpose. Well, he can’t complain about that since they do keep him entertained…

He immersed himself in the tutorial book and before he knew it, it was the day of arrival; he considered the book to be quite large even by his standards since it took him nearly 2 weeks to read it the first time…

Savi was now finished with his exercise and felt quite tired, his bones screaming at him. He rose and walked slowly towards his wheelchair. He operated his remote to move towards the fridge and with shaky hands served himself a glass of milk. The bitter taste caught him off guard for a bit there, but the coolness of the infusion sliding down his throat renewed his strength a bit.

He looked at his phone and saw it was 11:00 pm. He could’ve Dived into The Helix two hours ago, but decided against the idea. He really needed the exercise first.

Savi sat on his bed and picked up the helmet and swiftly calculated his age In-Game to see if his calculations were the same as his actual age In-Game. He placed the helmet on and pressed the button.

*CEREBRAL CORTEX HAS BEED DECRYPTED*

*PLAYER IDENTIFIED*

*SAVIER O. POLLUX*

*WOULD YOU LIKE TO LOG-IN AS XENO?

*Y/N*

“Yes”

*WELCOME TO THE HELIX*

*FARE DE WELL*

Chapter 2: The Village of Sed

I wanted to give the player a slightly different backstory than usual as well as present some new characters without giving too many details about them so that he could meet up with them later on or something of the sort. I can guarantee he will meet with one of the ones that spoke to him today later on. Though that’s pretty way into the adventure, so don’t expect it to be too soon.

My pardons to girls who might’ve found Jeane offensive, if you consider me a sexist please consider LyraNote before commenting that I am so. Jeane is a became of a fangirl of Xeno while he played with her in the previous game, which is pretty obvious due to her preference of him over Dex; though she is pretty funny from a third person perspective you can feel just how annoying it could become to have her in front of you and being unable to ban her into silence… I hope a presented her in that brief moment correctly, but I release the story as it is; with the option of modifying if necessary.

Whether or not she will get to meet Xeno in-game or not, that’s most likely up to Xeno’s friends. I mean, Xeno probably won’t tell her his race or else she’ll appear right next to him, but LyraNote’s a different matter. *wink*

Oh, and schedule for the updates will be Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. Sometimes I’ll update just before those days, but most of the time I’ll update exactly those days.