GEOVRU: III

Chapter 7

A news feed was projected onto the wall, it broke the immersion, but it provided players a nice look into the real world from within the virtual one. The surrounding was the tavern within Phoenix Estate. I was sitting up, leaning on my knees as I stared at the projection. Krystal was sitting on my right side, about two to three feet away from me in a separate chair. The same could be said for Cry, who was on my left. On the projection, there was a woman, probably in her late thirties or early forties, who was standing at an intersection that looked like it could have been somewhere on campus. She was filling in the viewers on previous events that took place just an hour before.

"I'm standing here on the western side of the Global Education Online Virtual Reality University Campus, where Corey Jameson and Frederick Kelly, who are major players in the Terrorist Organization PRAT, have been arrested. These two men that can be seen here climbing into the back of a police van are suspected to have been planning a massive attack on the student body. One of the student's here has come forward, providing information on the subject as he seemed to have been a significant piece of the attack." She over to her left side, and the camera panned over to the right, revealing a twenty year old guy with blue eyes and dirty blonde hair. He looked pretty rugged, wearing a pretty basic jacket with white fur jutting out of the collar, you couldn't see below the waist, but I knew he was wearing jeans. He was me after all.

Krystal shifted slightly sideways in her seat after looking at me for a fraction of a second. Once the blue bar slid into frame, Cry reacted a bit differently. The text was in white letters, my name a slightly larger font than my description.

CAEDES

GEOVRU Class of 2086

I leaned forward slightly and looked at the guy who was recording, then back at the reporter.

"Tell us about these two men, you stated before that you believe they were specifically targeting you?"

"Yes." I responded to her, I laughed at my awkwardness, I had been interviewed before when I won the Forman championship, but you never really get used to it. "I guess it was because I was a pretty popular figure. I'm the leader of a pretty big group, so I guess they wanted to demoralize the player base or something."

"What do you think they would have gained from demoralizing the students here?" she asked me.

I scratched the back of my head and looked around nervously before answering her question. "I guess they thought that if they beat me at my own game, then it would show people that virtual power is nothing compared to physical force. That's what he kept saying anyway."

"Okay then, Caedes. Thank you very much for speaking to us." She said, nodding at me, motioning for me to leave the area.

I nodded in response. "No problem at all." I said back, exiting the screen.

The News feed had aired maybe an hour or two before, the three of us happened to miss it, so we were watching it then. Most of the Crimson Hawks never came back to camp after the interview, and I knew why. The roster for the clan was draining quickly, out of the close to a hundred people, only about eleven people remained including me and Cry, and it was still draining by the minute.

Cry, who had control of the holographic crystal, paused the video playback and looked at me, I looked back at him to notice his utter disbelief. I knew exactly what is was for, Krystal had the same expression last year. I looked back at her for a fraction of a second to see she was still staring in the opposite direction towards the wall. I turned my head back to Cry, who still sat motionless in his chair. I looked him dead in the eyes and spoke to him. "Yeah, I'm a guy." I said through my ironic female voice.