Reborn Online

Impact

It started off somewhere within the game code, a tiny malfunction that happened during the upload of the new data that'd be available after the next patch. One single thing that was not quite right. And from there, it started to move forward within the source code. From computer to computer, it went on and on, selectively going through the gamers as if it was alive.

Features were unlocked to some who were lucky, while others stayed with their own characters being unchanged by the error in the system. The NPCs started to change, their own AIs morphing into something new, something more. Natalia was one of the first although her awareness was made by accident that came to be due to the hands that shaped her were unfamiliar with more complex coding. Because of one person who was working on the team that made the system for creating worker NPCs possible included a broken part of code that only activated if certain conditions were met. But she was still the first.

And as she went on with her daily life, she also felt the error that went through the dimensions of the game like waves caused by a stone falling into a pond.

The error flowed through the in-game universe and then it hit the gamers who were online.

And inside the dining room of one group made off of the former beta testers, the impact was one of the greatest.

There was some sort of... Impulse, that went right through the officers and the Don as they sat down to dine. Thinking of it as a slight lag, each of them checked their connection which indeed did show that there had been a peak, though it was opposite of where it should've been would it have been a regular slow connection spike.

Naoki blinked as he adjusted his tie, still tired from the study group session, he felt like something had changed, but then again it could've been just the game repairing something like the textures. Speaking of the textures... The walls and the items around them looked a lot more... Real than usual.

He sophisticatedly lifted up the fork that he had accidentally dropped because of the spike, and his brows furrowed in confused realisation. He could feel the steel of the fork, and from the looks of it, he wasn't the only one.

»So it was that kind of update..» he concluded as he absent-mindedly placed more virtual food inside his mouth, expecting it to not taste like anything at all.

The rich flavours of the meal suddenly bloomed inside his mouth causing him to stop for a minute, this wasn't right. The game platform didn't work like this. How was this possible?

Near the doors, Natalia noticed the confused looks that the Seven sneaked to each other. She was well aware of her masters incapabilites, after all she had witnessed them struggle with holding items on their hands and picking them up, she knew that they didn't have a sense of feeling. But from their reactions, it had changed. Another thing she knew was that the only reason why the Seven even bothered to eat was because they didn't want to let the chefs down by not eating what they offered, they also had to maintain an illusion of normalcy. And now....

The look on Naoki's face told her that it had changed too. She followed carefully how the male took another careful bite, how the feeling of happiness and glee made it onto that young face.

He could taste the food.

And he was happy about it.

The shadows that always accompanied Naoki seemed to disappear, make room for the blinding happiness that followed each bite he took. Yet Natalia couldn't find herself to do anything but worry.
The Seven weren't like your normal humans, she knew them, recognised that as a fact, because they all lacked certain things. They were as her code said, [Pla/yer]s and therefore there were things that weren't supposed to happen ever. And as someone who had been there for a long time, long enough to get to know each and everyone of them, she knew that this was extraordinary.