Closing the Distance

Growing Up From Afar

Yuuji was 10 years old when he got his first gaming console. It was a gift from his grandfather for him and his brother to share, but Ryomen was never as interested in online gaming as Yuuji was.

Still, the twins decided to make their accounts and went through the console's game shop to decide what games they wanted. Yuuji went with "a cool name with an even cooler animal" for his username, adding in the numbers of his birthday because he thought it was clever—punchingtiger320. Ryomen went with Sukuna. When asked why, he just shrugged and responded that it looked and sounded cool. Deciding that that was a good enough answer, they started looking at different games for them to get.

Most of them were freebies. Being ten and not having a job really limited your buying options. However, there was one game that they were able to get, another gift from their grandfather. A simple sandbox game, one where you can create your own worlds and do whatever you want with them.

Yuuji loved playing Minecraft. Like, a lot. While Ryomen mainly enjoyed playing solo games and doing his own thing, Yuuji thrived in different servers and the unlimited amount of different games he could play within them. There were PvPs, prop hunts, bed wars. Anything a kid could think of, there was a server for it. He had tried to get Ryomen to try playing in these different servers, telling him that there were millions of different things that he could do, but Ryomen would always just shrug and say "I like playing on my own. You go play with people on the internet, that's your thing."

That's probably how Yuuji ended up meeting one of his best friends, an online player in a Hunger Games simulation server.

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Nobara was an only child growing up. She was aware that she was a bit more brash, not really caring to make friends or please people. She did have a friend, but that was all that she really needed. She could have been perfectly fine just going about her business until the day that she graduated high school before finally moving out of her small town.

It was suffocating.

That was probably the reason why she found herself asking for a gaming console. Nothing special, she just wanted to see what the world was like beyond her small town. Convincing her grandmother was the hard part. The dangers of the internet, she heard about it all the time. But Nobara wasn't stupid, she knew that there were millions of creeps just hoping to trick a naïve little kid that they were the same age. Then one day they convince you to meet up, or one day you give in and share your name, and that would be it. Nobara knew that.

So, it was easy, really.

"It's just a single-player game where I build things!" she begged, showing her grandmother the game and the console she wanted.

After a lot of pleading and promising that she wouldn't talk to any creeps on the internet, her grandmother had caved. Nobara sat before the unwrapped present, eyes wide and filled with excitement. It was a big box, it was a heavy box. Nobara wasn't stupid, she knew what it was.

All it took was some quick parental control settings and another promise that she would be safe, and she was set to play to her heart's content. She thought about what her username should be, trying to come up with something based on the things that she loved. It was a long deliberation until she remembered an old toy that she used to play with. It was her grandmother's when she was a kid, and Nobara loved it so much because it belonged to her first.

It was settled, and excitement washed over her as she entered her username: strawdolly.

Yuuji and Nobara had loaded into a Hunger Games lobby one day and, by chance, came across each other early in a match. There was a bit of back and forth until they both realized that neither one of them had very good weapons or supplies and decided to team up together. They played like that for the entire day, working together and trading wins at the end of the match. There was no surprise when he later got a friend request from them on his actual console account.