Digi-Girl, Interrupted

The friendly, if unfamiliar, face was a welcome sight. Shouma smiled weakly, braving a brief shuffle up onto his elbows to get a better look, both at her and the world around him. His left arm throbbed a little, but nothing seemed broken. If anything he felt…lighter? Almost like he was buzzing. ”I…I think so?” he spoke tentatively, his eyes raking over unfamiliar greenery. ”Toto…Kansas…” he gestured at the world around him, hoping she’d get the reference, ”Uh, where are we?” he asked finally, more concerned about the fact that he wasn’t in the public library anymore. He looked up, where he saw nothing but empty sky. No sign of the glowing hole he’d fallen through. ”Not to sound crazy, but three seconds ago I was in a public library, answering fan mail. I like the countryside, but I wasn’t exactly planning a visit, if you catch my drift. Are we near Kamakura? Or Nikko?”

Shouma had already come to the realization that it was likely none of the above, but he was still hoping for a more mundane explanation. This place looked as alien as it felt. And the way he’d traveled here by warp point was not a good sign. It was only then, like a lightning bolt, that he realized that he had been delightfully rude. ”Oh! Where are my manners?” The scrawny boy scrambled to his feet, suddenly no longer afraid anything was broken. He bowed gracefully, deeply respectful since he was meeting a girl for the first time. ”Saito Shouma. Pleasure to meet you. Excuse my rudeness. I was sort of just dropped on my head.” He stayed bowed for a few seconds too long. And when he straightened back up, he saw the discarded little oval device, sitting in the grass, looking gray and sad and lonely.

”Oh! Is this yours?” he held the little device out to the girl, assuming she must’ve dropped it. He’d never seen the little handheld walkie talkie before. It couldn’t be his.

”Mine?” Shouma looked down at the thing in his hand. He definitely didn’t own it. It also didn’t look…pleasant. It seemed dead. Less than dead, even. It seemed like it did belong in the Wizard of Oz. It was leeched of color like a black and white movie. It didn’t get the memo that films were all made in 4K now. In his fingers it almost looked like a bad copy/paste job. It didn’t quite fit in. Still, he held onto it. Worst case scenario, he could find whoever dropped it in this field. If the girl said it wasn’t hers he believed her. ”Well, if you say so, Miss Amelie,” like with the deep bows, Shouma was formal to a fault, ”Guess I’ll hold onto it. But it doesn’t seem to do much. Why would I need it?” He tried tapping the buttons on its surface, but they didn’t do anything.

His question was swiftly forgotten, however, since Amelie began to launch into a…mysterious sentence, to say the least. She sounded like the quest giver at the beginning of one of his RPGs. ‘A dark and mysterious tale I have to tell, but only if you choose to accept it. Or you can leave now and never return…’ He almost chuckled at the idea, but stilled his expression before he could laugh at her. She might think he was being rude. ”So you’re about to say something that I’m going to think is crazy. And you don’t want me to think you’re a loon,” Shouma smiled, ”Miss Amelie, I just fell from a hole in the sky that opened up in the middle of a library! I’m already way past loon and more like permanent psychiatric resident. Nothing you say could make me think less of you.”

His next sentence was subtle, but there was a lack of energy to his words. ”Besides, I have no desire to be at home right now. I think a walk in Oz would do me a lot more good than going back to Shibuya.” There was a story to be told here, if she had the time or the inclination to ask about it. ”Plus I can’t resist a good mystery. Dead walkie talkies, magical skyholes, somehow not being dead after that fall, and this alien not-quite-Nikko zone. I think only a crazy person wouldn’t at least want you to explain first.” He extended the hand not holding onto the walkie talkie, ”So I accept, Miss Amelie. An open mind. Now, tell me what kind of trouble I’ve gotten myself into.”

”Parallel…world? Digital…world,” Shouma said the words, not skeptically, but analytically, like he was tasting them and feeling the weight of them. He looked up at the sky, where the “hole” he fell through used to be (and was now was not). ”Digital. Digital. Like computers. So you’re saying I’m in a computer right now? Like a video game or something?” Shouma’s mouth twisted up into a playful smirk. He knew a thing or two about video games. He knew several things about them, being a well known streamer for exactly that. And while this was starting to seem like more of a survival game of some kind, games had rules.

The digivice meant he was destined to bond with one of this world’s inhabitants, eh? Sounded like a game’s kind of rules. ”Lemme guess, this ‘inhabitant’ I’m supposed to find…he does the fighting for me, because the fantastical animals are way stronger than me? And the inhabitant levels up? Gets stronger? The longer I’m here, right?” Shouma was already imagining how the game was played. He went from being confused to being excited, bouncing from foot to foot and beginning to psyche himself up. ”Oh man, this is totally like an RPG!”

”Do I get to use magic? Is there a deep, dark seated evil I’m destined to destroy? Is there a prophecy?” Shouma just started to tick off the boxes of standard RPG plots. The shock of being in a different world seemed relatively underwhelming, to be frank. He was less concerned, since this girl said she could take him home if he needed to go. So it wasn’t like he was stuck here. He could save and quit at any moment. But one actual question did strike him as terribly important. ”Why me though? I’m not really anyone special. I’m a pretty killer Hanzo, and you don’t wanna come near me if I’m playing Paint Roller, but I can’t really say I’m…unique. If you were picking heroes to save the world, I’m not exactly my first choice, let alone anyone else’s.” Shouma paused then added, ”And where’s your inhabitant, if we’re all destined to find one? Or are you new like me, and haven’t found them yet? Is that the game? First act is everybody hunting for their partner.”

Now that he thought about it, questions flew faster than he could speak them. Just those would do, for now.