Rest (2)
"Log out?"
"Yeah. Tomorrow's my checkup."
At the word checkup, Yeon's condition surfaced in Choco's mind, and her face grew grave.
"Has thy condition perhaps taken a turn for the worse?"
"Huh? No, nothing like that. I just get them regularly every other week. I'm not doing any worse or anything, so you don't have to worry."
"If that be the case, then 'tis a relief, but..."
As Choco let out a sigh of relief, Yeon smiled.
"Are you worried about me?"
"Thou speakest the obvious. 'Tis not as though I am ignorant of thy condition—how could I remain at ease upon hearing of a medical examination?"
"Hehe. Thanks for worrying about me."
Watching Yeon ruffle her hair as she said it, Choco's face scrunched into a sullen pout.
Even if I look like this, I'm the older one here.
She had reminded Yeon of that fact more times than she could count, but Yeon seemed to keep forgetting—no doubt because of how young Choco looked. Still, she had no desire to shatter the mood by bringing it up now, so she simply accepted the touch in silence.
Her body was growing more and more accustomed to those stroking hands. Choco herself had yet to notice.
Hwangbo Yeon watched the shifting scenery with open eyes. Though her body could do nothing on its own, busy hands whisked her from place to place—X-rays, CT scans, and the like. The sheer variety of tests meant going up and down the building, which looked like no small ordeal. Of course, none of that applied to Hwangbo Yeon. She simply sat vacant-eyed in her wheelchair, escorted along by the medical staff.
She would have liked to at least say thank you, but unfortunately, the mouth of a living corpse—conscious, and nothing more—could not form words.
She couldn't tell how many hours had passed like that, but the tests seemed to be wrapping up. They were fitting a virtual reality headset over her head, the kind she hadn't been able to use because of all the scanning equipment.
A brief sensation of being pulled somewhere, and then a pure white space unfolded before her. There, Hwangbo Yeon hopped and skipped and flailed her arms and legs however she pleased, venting the frustration of having been trapped motionless through the entire examination.
Of course, the checkup wasn't over yet. This was an interim report of sorts, if anything. As she waited, stretching her limbs, a screen flared to life in midair with a flash.
Hospital Internal Network — Secure Channel
The person who appeared on the screen was a middle-aged doctor. He was Hwangbo Yeon's attending physician, the man who had been looking after her since her symptoms first appeared in childhood.
"Yes, I can see and hear you just fine."
"I know, right."
Yeon laughed as she answered the doctor, who was putting on a deliberately comical tone. During the last checkup, this terminal had been broken, and they hadn't even been able to hold a proper conversation. Yeon did have her own personal virtual reality device—the Cocoon—but connecting an outside line to the hospital's internal network was strictly forbidden, so that day the doctor had been forced to talk at her one-sidedly.
Having confirmed the connection was working, the doctor put on his glasses, glanced down at the chart in front of him, and spoke.
"Same as usual, then."
"Haha... I suppose so."
Hers was a disease in which a person perfectly fine until the day before could suddenly lose the use of their legs, then their entire body. Even if the results matched the previous exam, it was not a condition you could casually relax about.
As that thought settled over her, the doctor let out a heavy sigh.
"It's okay, Doctor. I'm not having a hard time at all."
The hard part was for the people around her, the doctor included. All she did was lie still and play games—what was so hard about that?
The doctor looked at her for a long moment and started to open his mouth. Then he closed it again and, instead of whatever he had been about to say, brought up something else entirely.
"I don't play horror games anymore..."
"I'm sorry about that..."
Yeon hung her head as the doctor shuddered, looking thoroughly creeped out. It hadn't even been an ordinary horror game—it was one so infamous that plenty of people gave up halfway through out of sheer terror, and she had decided to speedrun it. Whose idea that had been, she couldn't begin to imagine.
It was mine, of course, but...
She still couldn't forget the incident. Mid-playthrough, her heart had nearly stopped, and the entire medical staff had come rushing in. That memory remained a piece of dark history she would rather bury.
"That's such an old game..."
Space War—a title in which humans, bugs, and aliens battled across the cosmos—had come out more than half a century ago. A virtual reality version had been released recently, just as the doctor said, but the only people who would play a game that old were the occasional middle-aged player getting misty-eyed over nostalgia.
"...Anyway, I'm not really into that kind of thing."
The doctor made a show of clicking his tongue, then asked,
"Oh, you know that game too, Doctor?"
Even if she had ended up in something like a vegetative state, a person whose mind was perfectly intact spending all day staring blankly at the ceiling—unable to move of her own will—was at high risk of serious damage to her mental health. That was precisely why the doctor had readily agreed when Hwangbo Yeon first asked to have a virtual reality device brought into her hospital room.
On top of that, there had been a case of someone in a similar condition—conscious, but unable to move—who had suddenly regained the use of their body after being active in virtual reality. With a precedent like that, he could hardly do anything but encourage her.
"Hmm... To be honest, I wasn't that interested at first."
"I met someone precious, you see."
Thinking of the girl who would be waiting for her inside the game, Hwangbo Yeon smiled a small, private smile.
"Hehe... Yeah."
The doctor watched Hwangbo Yeon grinning goofily for a moment, then slipped in another remark.
"Worried? About what...?"
Again today? Hwangbo Yeon looked at the doctor in confusion and ran a hand over her own face. Watching her, the doctor went on.
"...Did I really look like that?"
Had it been that bad? Hwangbo Yeon tilted her head, sifting back through her memories, and soon found she could accept it. Before she met Choco, her state of mind had been close to giving up entirely—of course it would have shown. Thinking about how anxiously the doctor in front of her must have been walking on eggshells, she felt a pang of guilt for no particular reason.
Sensing as much, the doctor waved a hand.
"Well, if you put it that way..."
"Come on, what boyfriend?"
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and spoke in a sly, knowing voice. Hwangbo Yeon waved both hands in frantic denial.
"It's really not like that! She's just a friend—a girl friend!"
"I'm telling you it's true! She's even shorter than me and cute...?"
And then, mid-sentence, Hwangbo Yeon suddenly thought of Choco. The girl she had grown into—tall enough now to reach just below Yeon's chin, her cheeks a little slimmer, her features sharpened. And yet, until a certain incident, she had said she was definitely a man. An adult, even—quite a bit older than Yeon herself...
Wait... if you look at it that way, calling her a boyfriend isn't entirely wrong, is it...?
No. That wasn't it. Hwangbo Yeon shook her head vigorously from side to side, rejecting the thought. She had never even seen what Choco looked like as a man. She didn't know what name or nickname Choco had gone by before Yeon had given her one. Everything she knew about Choco's past amounted to this: that she had played Al Fantasia for a long time, and that she had been a ranker. That was it.
Now that I think about it, this is unfair...
Yeon had laid everything bare—her name, the environment she'd grown up in, the situation she was in. Choco hadn't asked; Yeon had told her of her own accord when they made up. But once the feeling surfaced, it refused to settle.
So cheap. Before she knew it, Hwangbo Yeon was wearing the same sulky look Choco so often made, grumbling under her breath. She vowed that when she got back, she was going to grill Choco about every last thing.
Only the doctor, unaware of any of this, muttered to himself with a bewildered look on his face.
After the checkup was fully over, Hwangbo Yeon logged into her Cocoon and browsed the internet. It had finished earlier than expected, so she had plenty of time—but she couldn't log into Al Fantasia right away. They had put her body through the wringer (by Yeon's standards, at least) examining a body that had been lying motionless in bed for days, and she was supposed to rest for a while.
That didn't mean Cocoon use was banned entirely. If they forbade even that, she would have to spend the whole day with nothing but her eyes open, which neither Hwangbo Yeon nor the doctor wanted. So internet surfing was fine. Games were not.
What she mainly looked up were cute videos of baby animals. From wriggling little balls of fluff to puppies just learning to scamper about on four legs, chasing after people—watching those videos filled her with a happiness that felt like her whole body was melting.
This is heaven...
After watching a few autoplaying videos, Choco's voice from before they logged out suddenly surfaced in her mind.
"Under no circumstances art thou to visit the forums."
"I wasn't planning to anyway... but why all of a sudden?"
"Ask not the reason! Dost thou understand? 'Tis a place with nothing good to see!"
At the time, Choco had been so insistent that Yeon had simply nodded. But there was one thing Choco hadn't accounted for.
Human beings have a wicked nature: the moment someone tells them not to do something, they want to do it even more.
"Just what kind of place is this forum that she'd go that far?"
Muttering this, Hwangbo Yeon turned off the videos, opened a search site, and looked up the forums.
And a vast ocean of information unfolded before her.