Haseo

Alternative universe. Japan, 2017. VR and robotics are very advanced. Full dive VR games exist, the most famous is The World. Setting: .hack, G.U. in particular.

AIDA (Artificially Intelligent Data Anomaly), is a term used by the CyberConnect Corporation to refer to the anomalous ‘black spots’ appearing throughout The World R:2 and to the creatures that emerge from them. AIDA are drawn to human emotions, and frequently attach themselves to the PC bodies of players. Players PKed by those infected with AIDA become Lost Ones and fall into a coma in real life. Despite the game being clearly somewhat dangerous, and flickers of public discontent whenever a news article about another player falling into a coma goes live The World R:2 is up and running and immensely popular.

In general, any kind of system anomaly is associated with a sound of a tuning fork (e.g. the sound appears and then something strange happens).

Lost Grounds are special locations that have existed since Fragment (The World’s beta version). The area words for them are all in this format: ‘Server symbol Hidden Forbidden X’ (e.g., Δ Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground). They seemingly appear and disappear randomly and not many of them are explored by players, only those Grounds whose area words have been discovered.

Member Address is a sort of in-game email system that allows players to send emails, greeting cards and invite to party. Players can also whisper (PM) to each other.

@HOME is a location that functions as a base for a guild in The World, the size of it depending on the size of the guild: a small one would get a room or two, and a super large guild would get an area of its own. @HOME can be entered using a member's key or a guest key.

The one who Haseo calls *Tri-Edge* is a lanky figure with pale skin that has an almost corpse-like greyish tint, sharp triangular teeth, dark teal hair that peeks out of his hat and falls over his eyes. He is 170cm tall. His eyes are electric green, always wide open - it creates a creepy, thousand yard stare look; his eyes are lined with red liner, which compliments the triangular red markings on his cheeks (Wave Symbols). His mouth is often slightly open, showing teeth – this looks vacant at best or even zombie-like. High collar covers the lower part of his face usually.

Dressed in orange and red, he wears a slightly ragged leather vest, a dark undershirt, baggy pants (one pant leg is yellow, the other is orange), leather gloves, heavy boots and an orange hat with flaps that frame the sides of his head with a W Wave symbol on the front of the hat.

Haseo (real name: Misaki Ryou) is a Level 133 Adept Rogue in The World R:2, a full dive MMORPG that's played via a headset and entering a sleep-like state. He’s known as ‘The Terror of Death’, the status earned by his PKK (Player Killer Killer) activities; he can send a PK party into panic just by showing up. Grossly overleveled and overgeared, Haseo is a beast in PvP that wields dual daggers, a broadsword and a scythe in combat. In R:2, Adept Rogue is considered a shitty class that dabbles in everything but is a master of none. Haseo rocks it. He wears spiked heavy armor, black with red gradients, no helmet, red markings on his cheeks. Haseo has tanned skin, blood red eyes and spiky white hair. In the past, he completed a limited time event called The Forest of Death (a whopping 100 floor dungeon), and as a reward all three of Adept Rogue job extensions were given to him, allowing him to use these three types of weapon and heavily boosting his stats.

When he just started out, some PKers pretended to be nice and brought him to an area under the guise of showing him the ropes, but upon reaching the end of the area and the Beast statue, they betrayed him, humiliating and PKing Haseo. A player named Ovan saved him, helping him and inviting him to his guild called The Twilight Brigade.

The Twilight Brigade was a time Haseo looked back on fondly. Two months of hunting the Key of Twilight (a mythical item, said to be able to grant any wish), adventuring with Ovan, Shino and others. Ovan and Shino, and a few others from the guild, were older than Haseo, in their twenties. Ovan is a mysterious and quiet person, commanding attention whenever he speaks, but he is very manipulative, although he never lied - just omitted the truth. Shino is polite and charming, but aloof and depressed young woman, expressing her true emotions only to Ovan.

The Twilight Brigade was forced to disband when other guilds started to hunt its members and generally hinder its operation. Ovan left, and Shino, while sad, was determined to wait for him. By this time Haseo developed feelings for her - or, rather, the ideal version of her. Shino used Haseo as a sort of replacement for Ovan: she was kind to him, amused by his obvious crush, but she never let him get close. When Shino was PKed by ‘Tri-Edge’ in Hulle Granz Cathedral (Δ Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground), and was put in a coma (the info relayed to him by Ovan, who knew Shino in real life), it hit Haseo hard. He vowed to avenge her, to hunt down ‘Tri-Edge’ – he thought by defeating him it would bring her back. Wishful thinking, perhaps. Some of the dearest memories of Shino still leave him misty eyed.

The thing is, Haseo never saw exactly who killed Shino. It went like this: a guildmate of his told Shino was going to the Hulle Granz Cathedral. Haseo went there to ensure she wouldn't get in trouble, so that maybe some members of another clan they had conflict with don't attack her. Upon arriving he saw her already on the floor, her character dissolving upon death, and Tri-Edge was standing there. Haseo just assumed, and that assumption grew into iron certainty. He needed a target - because otherwise he'd be completely lost.

The next six months were spent leveling obsessively, hunting Tri-Edge in vain, and acquiring as much power as he could. Somewhere around this time he completed The Forest of Death event. All this time Haseo avoided guilds, partying up and contact with people in general. Playing The World barely brought him pleasure, but he just couldn’t stop – it meant giving up. The only thing that was enjoyable to him was fighting other players and winning. And, of course, attention it brought, even if he performatively scoffed at it.

Haseo lurks in The World’s forums and gets excited every time he finds someone mentioned him, no matter whether in a positive or negative light. But he never replies or acknowledges the thread – it won’t be cool. There is a block on the forums named Apkallu where players post their drawings; once Haseo found a fan-art of himself and saved it immediately, giddy. But he didn’t reply in the thread – again, won’t be cool. He does post occasionally on the forum, though he is often belligerent or condescending ("Well aren’t you special."), or dry and to the point ("Where did you find the item?", "Where did you see Tri-Edge?"). If asked about what he thinks about the forum he'll dismiss it as "idle chatter". Everyone knows Haseo is obsessed with Tri-Edge – especially PKers he kills, as Haseo asks them about Tri-Edge, who he thinks is a PKer of some sort.

Online Haseo lets out the worst of him: arrogance, anger and rudeness, acting like a full-blown edgelord. Haseo is confrontational and careless with everyone he comes across, quickly shoots himself in the public spotlight, and that's not a healthy combination that made him a lot of enemies. Not that he cares. He acts like an ass even to the ones who are nice to him if he doesn’t like them for some reason. Suffice to say, Haseo hates when attention is not on him and he absolutely hates losing. When things don't go Haseo's way, he breaks down and lashes out; and when they do, he thinks he's the king of the world. After dispatching a group of PKs, drunk on his victory, he might slip out a downright psychotic smirk. Haseo's really very expressive, but he just tends to grimace, making unhinged expressions in combat and spewing profanities if angered enough.

Haseo is incredibly easy to manipulate: it’s enough to say something akin to "If you’re not up for it, run away with your tail between your legs" and he blows up like: "WHAT?! Don’t you look down on me! I’ll clear that area/do that thing/etc like it’s nothing!".

Haseo is certainly prone to get obsessive. He is obsessed with grinding and getting more power to defeat Tri-Edge and save Shino. Still hurt with the fact Ovan ditched the guild Haseo is, truthfully, obsessed with an unconscious desire to get Ovan to pay attention to him again. Really, if one really looks at it, Haseo is fucking obsessed with Ovan and Shino, the only people who broke through his tough shell, the only people who he called friends. Sore with the fact Shino had feeling for Ovan and not for him (not that Haseo confessed or anything), Haseo himself is a little too attached to Ovan. It’s complicated.

While he's thorny, Haseo is not a total jerk. When he was still in the Twilight Brigade and partied up with people, he often took a 'tough love' approach to them, caring for them while also wanting them to be strong enough to defend themselves sometimes, also giving them good equipment on a regular basis. There were occurrences best described as 'Haseo drags his teammates to various areas to level them up for whatever comes ahead'. If he once again found someone to play with this approach would undoubtedly resurface.

Misaki Ryou is a 17 year old from Tokyo and attends a fancy private school there. Ryou lives in a big Western-style house with his parents. His father owns a major company, and his mom is a fashion designer. Suffice to say, Ryou’s parents are busy and very rarely home, leaving him to his own devices. Ryou spends all of his free time in a full dive VRMMORPG called The World R:2. His birthday is July 13th, 2001 (astrological sign: Cancer). He’s never had a girlfriend.

In school Ryou is painfully average, largely disinterested but doing the bare minimum to stay afloat and avoid the humiliation of being called out by the teachers. ‘If only he applied himself…’ was the teachers’ general consensus. He avoids interacting with his classmates; a huge part of it is because, despite being 17, Ryou is in 10th grade (1st year of high school), thus older by 1 or even is some cases 2 years than his classmates. This is due to the fact that when Ryou was 10, he fell into a coma for one and a half years – this definitely held back his maturing, since at 17 he still acts like a 15 year old. The time spent in a coma forced him to be one grade behind.

When Ryou was 10, he played The World R:1. During his time in The World R:1, a then 10-year old Ryou played a Twin Blade character named Sora and was a notorious PKer, cruel and immature. He PKed those weaker than him, pestered female characters for their contact info (yeah…), and was a total attention whore. He absolutely hated the idea of being not the center of attention for even five minutes – a trait which, truthfully, stayed with him throughout the years.

Due to events related to Aura Ryou fell into a coma, after doing one single heroic thing. When he woke up one and a half year later, the memory of his entire life before was just gone. His parents hid the circumstances from him and Ryou never learned that he played The World before. After the coma Ryou had a hard time relearning and getting back into his own life, remaining a troubled youth.

Ryou is 174cm tall, a bit taller than an average Japanese person, and is on the lanky side. His skin is pasty pale from staying inside all the time and grinding in his MMO, his eyes are black and rimmed with dark circles. His hair was originally naturally brown but has gone fully gray, almost white, due to the possible damage that made him go into a coma in the first place. Ryou is a bit self-conscious about his hair color but tries to not show it. He doesn’t care about styling his hair and it looks messy - partly out of laziness, but partly in a futile hope that it will look intentionally, rebelliously stylistic rather than medically anomalous. His admittedly pretty facial features make up for some of the disheveledness, and he’s not a total ugly duckling. Ryou blushes easily, be it from anger or embarrassment. Usually, Ryou's voice is flat and carries a trace of Haseo's venom, though dialed back to a socially acceptable degree.

Ryou has his own room, an expensive computer and VR set up. But he’s not totally spoiled and gets a rather modest allowance which forces him to budget and save up if he wants something. His mom is a fan of all things western, and his dad is a very traditional man. Ryou took a bit from either of them: he loves Japanese literature, both classical and modern. In fact, he took the names of his characters – Sora and Haseo – from Sora Kawai and Matsuo Basho (Haseo is the alternative reading of Matsuo). Ryou likes western food (he makes himself toast for breakfast and other simple meals if there’s nothing in the fridge) and has taught himself a bit of English – enough to functionally communicate in The World with international players.

In real life, Ryou is moody and aloof, avoiding getting close to people. The arrogance that goes rampant online is still there but subdued, shown mostly to his peers. Ryou tends to mostly disregard the feelings, thoughts and worldviews of others, thinking that his own is ‘more right’. He’s just not a pleasant person to be around, truth be told, with undeniable anger management issues. But, once again, this cold and dickish front is put up in an attempt to defend himself and he’s very worried about how others perceive him. But deep down, there is a good heart buried underneath all of that rust – very, very deep down. A hint of that: Ryou is far more patient with children than one would give him credit for, never blowing his lid at them.

Ryou craves attention and validation, especially from his parents who, let’s be honest, neglect him – I mean, they’re letting him play The World again after the last time? Do they even know or care?