Chapter 7:
Our Perfect Isekai World is Spoiled by a Demon Girl?!
I watch rather proudly as Sek swings his sword far more confidently than in days past, easily bisecting one of the shadowy apparition training dummies with all the raw strength of his avatar’s chiselled body.
"Hey, that felt good!" he cheers. Eshu is fast to his side, jumping around just as excitedly, "You bet! Learning is so fun!"
Sek blushes at that, "Ya, well, maybe…"
The big Tsundere. Our big Tsundere, or at least he's meant to be. I want to praise him too, but hold back, glancing at my feet and feeling so very small for it. These last couple of days post the ‘big argument’, have been awkward. Lila has been awfully distant from us, and I've struggled to speak with Sek. Eshu sits between us in the evenings and at lunchtime, while Lila seldom hangs out with us outside of training now.
It'd be easy to blame it all on Sek for going too far in the things he said to her, but honestly, I've done nothing to patch things up either. It's not like he's truly wrong. Lila is an NPC - why shouldn't he treat her as an object? But it scared me, the way he so easily said all those hurtful, cruel things. How readily they came to him.
Sek is the sort to pronounce being isekai 'ed as a fix-all; that Escape is a fair, just and generous world where we can live as ‘we were always meant to’ - and it's not that I wholly disagree. Escape lets us run, run as fast and as far as we like. Escape lets us run!
But that's the thing about isekai; we weren't born here. I lived twenty years before this, Sek nineteen and Eshu 'eighteen and a bit' (at least that's what she said after enough pushing. You wouldn't expect that girl of all people to be shy about revealing such a thing). Two decades of ‘me’, of trauma and pain. None of that has gone, and we don't talk about it, never.
Just getting people to admit their age or real names can be a challenge! People lie and pretend so easily here, so compulsively as not to look back for even a second at who they were. My name isn't Ko; that's just my player name. It's Koa. Not much of a difference, I know, but all the cat and neko usernames were taken, and I find 'Ko' oddly cute compared to 'Koa', a name traditionally for boys but more recently neutral. Whether my parents gave it to me for that latter reason or because they wanted a boy, I don't know; there's a lot I failed to provide them. Sek's real name is Kier; his username is just a character he likes. Never call him Kier, mind, he claims that name was left behind and he wants nothing to do with it. Eshu, well, she claims that is her only name, ever the most surprisingly secretive of us.
All these little lies, little acts and performances in order to be happy in this world. Back before, well, I was never really living back then - to say I had religious or political values would have been a joke - but I don't think I was polyamorous. I suspected I was bisexual, but I'd never even kissed a boy! And yet here I am with a boyfriend and a girlfriend. Part of that was Eshu's doing, of course: she found me in this world and gave me the confidence and feeling of security to even consider being with a man, too. She's so strong, Eshu. She's the only one of us playing peacemaker, acting normally around all of us equally. I'm glad, I wouldn't want to ostracise Sek, no matter what he said. That wouldn't be right or fair, we all had too much of that in our past lives.
Past lives - 'were', before, the old world - it makes it sound clean, like we've left all that behind, but have we? I don't think any of us have hazarded to explain it to Lila yet - although with all her tutorial reading, she might be able to grasp it now - but we didn't just give up our bodies and transfer our minds to this world. We were also used as an experiment for a near-lethal chemical cocktail, one so dangerous that it only got approved because studio To-Sua sold it as effectively being used on corpses, not living people.
The drugs were all sorts, a lot of antidepressant type things. While I'd never been high, I imagine the sense of euphoria you feel upon entering this world pumped to the gills with that stuff must be similar. Some people react by binging quests; dragon slaying and demon horde adrenaline-fueled demolition. Others grab the nearest NPC and do unspeakable things they (hopefully) feel less than proud of soon after. I ran around a lot personally. And fell a lot, and jumped and ran some more until finally catching the attention of a fellow young woman laughing at my display before inexplicitly joining me. When she asked why we were running laps of the starter hub, I just laughed right back.
The idea is a boost, because ultimately there's a very real chance that you put a Neet in this world, and well, the noise, the choice paralysis, the lights, the throngs of people, NPCs or not, overwhelms them and they simply find the nearest hole to hide in, like in the real world. The cocktail of antidepressants and arousal and highs lets us get off to a better start, however morally dubious. But even that will fade in time, and then what? What's a few months in this world with a literal liberal dose of liquid courage, compared to two decades on Earth?
Sek is a young man. I understand his feelings of frustration and aggression towards his old life and society and the like - of course I do - but young men like that, heads filled with a constant stream of polarising online content… I just, I worry. What if he ‘was’ a misogynist, or an incel even! Someone who would treat any woman as lesser, an object, not just an NPC woman. Those insults he threw at Lila came so effortlessly to him.
And I know that's unfair, that I'm making a slippery slope argument, drawing massive swings between disparate dots, but it scared me. I really like Sek and Eshu, and Lila too, for that matter, but what could I do if he were hiding that sort of darkness towards women? Could I help him through something like that? How? Me, who hasn't told those two some of the most basic things about myself? I hope I'm just overthinking it, that with a little more time we can reclaim that easy-going mood we'd been developing, I do.
'Ping, Pong.'
"Er, the hells was that?" Lila says, stirring from the corner where she'd been observing us.
"A doorbell, I think," Sek replies.
"Don't those go more like, 'dong-dong’?"
"Ah, no, an electronic doorbell. It must have been a separate artefact from the house and remained even when you put the fort here," I muse.
'Ping, Pong', it chimes again.
"Here, Lady Lila, if you go into the menu like so," I sidle up to our little floating demon and show her through the system options. A screen appears showing the front door.
"Ho! How convenient. Well, anyone you guys recognise?" We all take a look but come up empty. "Then better hop to it," she shrugs.
"What, you're going to trust us with this?" Sek asks rather testily.
Lila frowns, "’NPC’ or one of your so-called 'players', they are going to be expecting a human to answer the door, right? So get on with it."
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