Peridot
I logged out of the game shortly after we reached the capital, and that night I dreamed of the times I had irresponsibly dragged Jade into other games.
Our father had miraculously managed to convince our mother that games and play were important for our development, and he smuggled handheld consoles to us. I was the first to take an interest in those things, and I soon had her joining me as we explored video games, comic books, movies, novels, and animations of all kinds. Inside trucks and planes, in base dormitories and temporary camp tents, we would cling to the screens, and to each other, to the point where I managed to install all sorts of entertainment on Jade's mecha; we would sneak into the giant robot's cockpit to play almost every night.
I dreamed of the rare moments of peace we had back then; I dreamed of the smiles we shared; I dreamed of moments when I felt truly weak.
I dreamed of my twin sister, naked, straddling my engorged penis in that cramped cockpit.
"WAAH!?" I bolted upright, burning up. "What the hell...?" I rubbed my face and looked around my room, stripped of anything unnecessary, to ground myself in reality once more.
Am I too stressed? Was yesterday's gaming session too much for me? I couldn't think of any other reason to dream up something so absurd.
"Clink, clack!" Sounds came from the kitchen.
Jade? I wondered. After confirming it was still early morning, I concluded: impossible.
Slowly and silently, I got out of bed, armed myself with a pistol hidden in a false-bottom compartment of my nightstand, and made my way to the bedroom door.
I opened the door and peered out into the hallway. Once I confirmed the area was clear, I moved up to the kitchen entrance and peeked out from the shadows again.
"Hmm, is this color normal? I thought it was supposed to be darker... And why the heck isn't this candy hardening?! Damn it, he's going to wake up any second, what do I do...?! I-I'll just say I meant to make jam all along."
It was my sister.
With a burn on her wrist, fruit juice staining her clothes, and sugar in her messy hair, she flashed a grin from ear to ear, her eyes sparkling like little jewels.
"Bro! I made candy- jam! I made banana jam for you to have with breakfast," she said.
For a second, my knees went weak and my throat tightened, not from sadness, but from shame.
I owed her so much more than just my survival; I owed her my very reason for living. And yet...
I really am a jerk.
"Thanks, Sis. It looks delicious."
Casually hiding the pistol under my clothes, I sat at the table and spread the "jam" onto a slice of bread.
"Here, I made coffee, too."
The coffee was weak and the jam was overly sweet, and a bit burnt, but still:
"It's the best breakfast I've had in years."
"Really? What's your favorite part?" she asked, resting her elbows on the table and propping up her smiling face with her hands.
"Having you here," I answered immediately.
"C-Come on, Casanova, I've been here for days, you know," she retorted, blushing.
"True. I'm sorry for being such a pain lately."
Turning her face away to look past the counter, she asked, her expression obscured by her dark curls:
"You seem to be in a good mood. Did something good happen?"
"Yeah, I guess so." For a second, I thought about telling her about the adventures I was having in Vanguarda, but Anelise's words echoed in my ears, reminding me of the reason I was playing that VRMMORPG in the first place. "I was dreaming about our childhood and teenage years."
"And since when did those days become the 'good old days'?" She wasn't looking at me, but her tone was playful.
"Ever since we got older. Isn't it like that for everyone? No matter how realistically shitty our past was, nostalgia is a powerful drug. Don't you feel the same?"
"...Yeah, I do. When you dragged me along to play together, it was the only time I could relax, forget about the war and remember that I was the human inside the mecha, not the robot itself. I was so tense all the time back then; you were my only oasis."
I froze. Those words resonated with me, but in the worst possible way.
When we slept in each other's arms- no, no, it couldn't be.
When she bathed in front of me- that's not true!
I knew instinctively that it was true. Otherwise, how could I have pulled the trigger, thrown myself into the line of fire? The sudden attraction I felt for my twin sister when she moved into my apartment wasn't due to stress, but precisely because of the absence of it.
I might well have been a siscon, a guy with a sister complex, all along, and just hadn't realized it because I'd been so tense the whole time.
"But there are some things you can't go back on," Jade said, snapping me back to reality. Turning toward me with a placid smile, she concluded: "Then again, there are others you can. I'm also sorry for being so capricious lately, Bro."
What the hell am I thinking? She's right; there are some things you can't undo.
"It's fine." Realizing it was time to get ready for work, I stood up and placed my empty cup in the sink.
...But what if I'm right? What if I really am the bastard I think I am? Wouldn't it be better to know for sure, so neither of us gets hurt in the future?
I walked over to my twin sister, who was still sitting at the table.
"Huh?" She sounded surprised when I gently tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. "Oh...!" She sighed as I planted a kiss on her cheek.
When my lips pulled away from her face, we were inches apart, staring right at each other. Her eyes were wide; her lashes were so long, and the green of her irises sparkled brighter than the morning sun. Her face so, so beautiful, was flushed a nearly iridescent red, and I knew my own complexion couldn't look much different.
"...Um, thanks for breakfast" I breathed.
"Y-You're welcome" she replied, and I felt her breath against my skin. "Your alarm."
"Yeah?"
"It's going off. It's been ringing for a few minutes."
She was right: a generic ringtone was playing on my phone inside my room; I hadn't heard it over the wild pounding of my heart.
"Oh, right. Time for me to get dressed and head to work, then... bye."
"Bye."
Inside my room, I changed clothes and nearly tore my hair out, dying of embarrassment, regret, anger, and arousal, so much arousal.
A minute later, I headed off to work as if nothing had happened.
▲○X■
"Holy shit, I never imagined Vanguard would have a mission that terrifying!" the radio host said, laughing.
"I swear to you, man! My buddy even got disconnected because his heart was racing too fast! Anyone who doesn't believe it can check out the house, it's an hour away from the capital, tucked away right between those sand dunes," the guest recounted.
"No, no, I believe it."
"The only thing that makes me wonder is... are that pair of weirdos actually NPCs?" the host asked.
"What do you mean?"
"You know, whenever we think of weird duos in MMOs, those two players from Savage immediately come to mind. I think their handles were 'Feitagus' and 'Apocalipta.' I always wanted to interview them, but according to the theorists, they had to be elite soldiers, and since they haven't shown any signs of life in years..."
"No way, did they die?"
"Yeah, that's what people say."
Despite the chaotic morning, which involved yet another car ride spent trying to maintain an erection while simultaneously wanting to throw myself onto the highway and end it all, I smiled.
Savage was fun while it lasted, but the perks for VIP players became absurd. We already had enough of that in real life. That's why we killed the devs' favorite streamer as a form of protest, which got us banned.
"I remember them!" the guest continued. "Like in every game of that type, other players had kicked off an industrial revolution, but those two strategized, moved, and controlled the in-game animals so well that they actually made the community think they were using magic, haha!"
▲○X■
As soon as I arrived at work, I had to pay a visit to the IT team.
"So, what do you expect us to tell the buyers? That the processing power of the units sold has dropped by 12%?" I pointed the documents out to the technicians.
"Look, it's not my fault, okay? We can't strip anything else out of their memory; they run on a million interdependent little systems. These are different models, older, fancy ones." The team lead shrugged.
That meant I had to make a few calls... and take a lot of crap from customers.
It was going to be a long day.
Game Over ☠
Jade
What was that this morning? I wondered, staring at the ceiling.
When he kissed my cheek, he showed a tenderness I hadn't known he possessed. His serious face was so close to mine, his eyes dark green like the heart of the jungle, that ancestral home with an irresistible call to humankind. Irresistible to me, my home.
"Gaaah! What was that, huh?! Peridot!" I shouted, burying my face in my pillow and rolling around on the bed.
"Beep, beep, beep!" My alarm sounded, snapping me out of my reverie after who knows how many hours.
"Ah, it's time," I said, pulling myself together. I had rearranged my entire schedule around this moment: "Time to play Vanguard!"
I put on my full-immersion headset and logged in.
We had stopped playing the night before just as we reached the Empire's capital: a massive city of grand neo-colonial architecture. Every lamppost and parapet, every façade, roof, door, and window, every square centimeter of the city was so richly decorated that one could spend days analyzing every fresco, pediment, and scrollwork detail.
It was a city completely different from the one I'd seen when I first opened my eyes; then, there was smoke, soot, destruction, and dead bodies everywhere.
"Clack, clack, clack, clack!" Dozens of skeletons laughed as they rose from the rubble and leapt out of burning houses.
"What the hell happened in just one day?!" I screamed.
And as if my shout were a starting gun, the monsters attacked.