UNMASKED (mha)

89

Things started to get better online for Aiko after her interview. Especially after the police backed up her claim. Sure there were still a few people claiming she was violent and should have been expelled. But mostly the Internet defended her. Even praised her. Which wasn't really what she had been expecting or what she wanted.

It was the night of the last weekday of her suspension. Friday night at around twelve. Aiko couldn't sleep and decided to try out a new game instead. A new game that Mr Tadashi had actually given to her when she went to see them after the fight.

Aiko started to realize that his love language was totally gift giving. And he had a LOT of money to use.

Or maybe he was just trying to indirectly buy her love. Either way she was fine with it, because she'd been wanting to check out this game for awhile.

It was a zombie apocalypse game. You would join a server with at ten other people at most and at least five. It could be random or private. You and the other teammates had to complete several missions to try and save humanity from the apocalypse. You could also pause with your whole team and all come back later.

Sounded pretty cool if you asked her.

Aiko sat curled up in her comforter. Wearing a pink tank top and hello kitty pajama pants. She had a single serving of strawberry milk to drink.

She was ready to kick some zombie ass.

There was a bunch of different servers to click on. She ended up finding one that had four out of five players ready. When she kicked in it gave you the option to pick from the servers selection of skins. Both girl avatars were taken so she picked a male avatar with the best stats. Plus she normally gets harassed when playing as a girl.

She didn't bother with her headphones right now, even though she could tell the other four had live mics. She just read through the instructions and read anything that came up in the chat. The others didn't seem too interested in communicating with her though, and she was fine with that.

They started in a ruined building, their first objective was to get out of the building surrounded by the undead and get to a white van across town and leave city limits. All without dying. If you did die then you'd start back at the spawn point in the house and have to start over again.

Aiko briefly studied the controls. Learning what did what. How to walk, how to sprint, how to jump, how to shoot and other important things. She gathered a gun and a hundred bullets from the chests in the room and started to walk out to the balcony by the window to spot some zombies and a way out. No zombies, not yet. In some games like this if they did appear immediately they'd be summoned by something. Probably gun shots.

She turned to the other players who still seemed to be figuring out the game. Jumping on top of stuff and trying to stab each other. Which didn't work because this was a team game.

The two female avatars were trying to collect other items as Aiko was. She opened the chat. Don't shot anything yet, It could attract too much attention.

She typed out. The other Avatars paused and Aiko assumed they were reading the message.

Dont tell me wut 2 do
The male with a T-shirt and blue jeans typed back. His tag was: Copycat.

My bad
Aiko typed back, rolling her eyes

Then he pulled out a gun and jokingly shot at her. It went through her avatar though, he wasn't able to actually do any damage.

Her controller started to vibrate in he palms and the map began to shake along with their characters. Then an automatic video began to play. They had triggered an important part of the game apparently.