Unmeasurable
VR is virtual reality.
What is virtual reality, exactly? Reality that is real, yet a virtual world that feels just like reality—something along those lines, more or less.
That is why people trying VR for the first time often cannot keep their heads straight. It feels far too real, or else the subtle disconnect from actual reality throws them completely off balance.
I was no different right now. Hangang and Ririyang’s voices reached my ears clearly enough, yet the head wearing the VR headset—and the view itself—was locked onto the virtual world.
The result was a bizarre scene: hearing the voices of people I could not see while standing inside a wavering, unreal landscape.
“Oh.”
Wearing the VR gear did not merely let me see a new world. It also let me experience a body that felt somewhat distant from my real one.
Long, somewhat rough male arms and legs—limbs I could no longer meet in reality—greeted me.
I could not stay in that male form for long, however. Beyond simple preference, a male avatar simply would not let me draw out my full abilities at one hundred percent.
According to Hangang, who styled himself a VR expert, an avatar performed at its absolute peak when it resembled the user’s real body as closely as possible. The smaller the disconnect, the higher the synchronization rate, and the better the performance you could deliver.
Of course, the game I intended to play—Police Swat—did not demand especially violent movement. Still, there was no harm in setting things up properly. I had just bought the VR gear; I was hardly going to play only this one title.
“Why are there so many options?”
Avatar setup turned out to be surprisingly delicate work. There were far more than one or two settings to fiddle with.
In the end I only swung my arms and legs back and forth a few times. At that point I decided it would be better to turn the full character customization into stream content anyway.
Hangang had come running from quite a distance to help, and treating Ririyang to a meal came first.
So I ended the VR session, pulled the headset off my head, and returned to reality.
“...?”
Hangang stood in an oddly half-crouched posture, hands clasped behind his back, staring off at a distant mountain. Ririyang was looking in my direction, yet she could not meet my eyes; her face was flushed bright red.
What was this combination supposed to mean?
What on earth had happened while I was away in the virtual world?
They did not seem to have left their seats—the whole point of the gathering had been to help with Kayak’s VR setup, after all. Hangang, playing the expert role, had even answered my questions about whether the arms and legs were moving correctly with solid diligence.
Come to think of it, his voice had been trembling quite a bit while he answered. Something must have happened to the two of them while I was busy confronting a brand-new world.
Had one of them confessed to the other? The guess was not completely absurd. Hangang and Ririyang were a handsome man and a beautiful woman in their prime, and I knew they had interacted quite a bit already. When young men and women spend time doing things together, eyes meet and feelings bloom—that sort of thing happens, right? If a green light had turned on between them, I, as a mutual acquaintance, was fully prepared to congratulate them with enthusiasm.
That guess, however, turned out to be completely off the mark.
I realized as much the moment I heard Ririyang’s next words.
“W-we also faced a new world, you know.”
“Huh?”
“Uh… like every bit of common sense we had just got destroyed? VR—yeah. It was virtual reality in the truest sense. No, wait, this is actual reality, but… that size is real?”
“Kehek—cough, cough!”
When I asked what had happened, Ririyang answered with a perfectly serious face. Toward the end she trailed off into half-muttered words I could not quite catch.
The result left me tilting my head with an even more baffled expression, while Hangang beside her suddenly choked on the water he had been drinking and launched into a violent coughing fit.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine—fine—so just… go over there a bit…”
I stepped closer, thinking I might bring him a tissue and pat his back, only for him to flinch as if he had seen a ghost.
He still could not meet my eyes properly. He did not show it openly, but I felt a small sting of hurt. I had only approached out of genuine concern, yet he was treating me like some kind of germ and putting distance between us.
I felt both disappointed and puzzled. Until the moment he walked into my house earlier he had been bright-faced, meeting my gaze without trouble and even asking me to buy sashimi. The same had been true right up until the VR setup began. Hangang’s personality was never the type to pick and choose people; he was practically a born social butterfly. So why was he now looking so pathetic and slipping away with the excuse that he needed a little air?
Ririyang, the only witness who would know the reason, simply caught my wrist and shook her head.
“Hangang oppa needs some time alone…”
No—why on earth?
“When a person sees something so huge it shatters every bit of common sense they ever knew—when they face something truly shocking for the first time in their life—they need time to pull themselves together, right?”
“...True.”
“This is exactly that situation.”
I was surprised, so just imagine how much worse it must have been for that oppa—
She kept offering only these incomprehensible explanations.
What in the world had Hangang and Ririyang seen that was so enormous it left Hangang like this? Why did Hangang react so violently while Ririyang remained relatively composed?
Questions piled up, yet I decided not to press. Whatever it was, she clearly could not give me a straight answer.
No one can know everything under the sun. Some things are better left unexamined—secrets that must stay secrets. Just like the way I had turned into Camilla overnight.
“Shall we go eat sashimi…?”
Hangang, who had stepped out, returned home about fifteen minutes later. His face looked considerably more settled than before, though he still could not quite meet my eyes.
“You’re hyping me up a little too hard… it’s not even finished yet. I only did the basic installation. Avatar settings, character customization—all of that is still left. I saved it so we could do it together on stream. Pretty good of me, right?”
I suppose you could call it knowingly playing along.
The viewers pointed fingers and muttered that this girl was just using the “gotta do it on stream” excuse to half-ass the prep, yet deep down they seemed pleased that we would be customizing the avatar together live.
People say one thing and mean another; how you package the situation matters more than whether you actually prepared. That rule holds true not only for streaming but for society in general.
Anyway, from this point on it was customization time—avatar setup.
“Alright, let’s start the customization. Gender’s female, obviously? I love male Kayak too—male? Actually, I like that even better… You, go cool your head for a bit, yeah.”
I left the chatters filling the window with their usual useless bait and continued the customization at a leisurely pace.
Hair color: silver-white—neither too pure nor too dull, the exact saturation that suited Camilla perfectly.
Eyes the same. I set them to a deep blue that looked as though the ocean itself had been poured into both irises.
I had memorized Camilla’s hair and eye colors long ago, so those settings took almost no time.
After that I adjusted the hairstyle, shortened the height a little, and transformed the facial features and skin tone until everything matched Camilla exactly.
Every setting slid past without the slightest hitch—height, weight, hairstyle—until something unexpectedly blocked my smooth progress.
“Bust size…? You can adjust this too? It’s important? Ah, of course it is. I know it’s important.”
Camilla’s bust size had never been officially revealed. Even so, long before I became Camilla I had instinctively estimated the size, and now I knew the exact number.
Naturally. My own bust size was Camilla’s bust size.
Yet adjusting the avatar’s chest measurements felt uncomfortably close to announcing my real measurements to the entire audience.
A strange embarrassment washed over me. I briefly covered the screen, set the bust size, then uncovered it again.
“...I don’t know.”
I banned a few viewers who had crossed the line into blatant sexual harassment and moved on to the next step.