Mostly Dead Means Slightly Alive [YGO/SAO FI ft Nihilo]

Disentangling herself from the mess of players became easier once they were distracted fooling around with their Duel Monsters. A few stopped Helewise to ask in general terms where she'd found the NPC, but they still seemed either reluctant to move away from the main gate or disinterested in specifically acquiring undead, so none of them tried to follow her, at least at first.

The streets beyond the gate were sparsely crowded, filled with a nervous energy. Some players seemed to have barricaded themselves in inn rooms to get away from the chaos but several were just milling around, wandering from shopkeep to shopkeep, interactable to interactable, as though by searching enough some hidden escape might reveal itself. Shouts or screams occasionally drifted from the distance, peaking over the white noise of a crowd and making the assembled players twitch a few steps further away from them.

People gave Helewise and the Regenerating Mummy a wide berth. Some outright turned to flee, but most realized after a few moments that she wasn't chasing or attacking anyone and did the tried and true human tactic of 'pretend I saw nothing and move right on'. Yet after a few minutes walking a cloaked form became apparent, weaving its way through the crowds at first, then slipping out of them, into the bubble of open space around Helewise, trotting towards her. Beneath the slightly frayed edge of the hood dark eyes gleamed with a faint hint of green, the toothy smile adding mischief. "Kii-bou said you stood out, don't think I really appreciated just how much. You're 'Helewise' then?"

"Ayup. I'm guessing you're the Argo that Kirito mentioned?" Helewise asked with a smile of her own, minding her teeth but still giving a hint of them. She had a gut feeling this lady would appreciate 'em.

"That I am, guidebook maker and gal in the know~" Her words lilted playfully, but her eyes shifted a little too quickly to the mummy still shambling along next to Helewise. "An' I can see why they wanted us to talk. That's a monster from a card?"

"That he is, a Regenerating Mummy who does exactly what it says on the tin. Hell of a help out in the field." The draconic woman said with a bob of her horned head, blackened fingers idly scratching at a splotchy patch of scales on her neck. Really, she looked like a grilled vegetable, with all the 'charred' spots on her. "Walk and talk?"

"Sure." Argo gave Helewise a moment to start moving again and settled in alongside her, "so what can ya tell me? I've already heard of cards being handed out by some tucked-away NPCs here and there, maybe a questline or two? Let's start from the start."
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To say Argo was thorough would be a gross understatement. Any requirements she noticed for the quest, possible keywords in dialogue, specific capabilities of Helewise' undead companion all taken note of, the girl having pulled her menu open to type rapidly while they spoke, eyes flicking to the little pane of text and holographic keyboard beneath it every few seconds.

The quest didn't have a direct map marker, but it did have a little 'search this area' circle on the map, and so it wasn't too hard to find a familiar alleyway and stack of boxes again.

"Yanno, for an undead lair, I expected this to be a little spookier." Argo commented as they emerged from the narrow passage into the waterway, even without the sun leaking down as it had been during the day, the area still bore a certain serenity, illuminated by a blue-green glow from the patches of moss scattered about the area. The scratching shuffling of bones on stone answered her and she jumped a little, whirling around and taking an involuntary step back at the sight of the Skull Servant, his hood down this time leaving his titular bones on display as he approached.

"Hello. I wasn't expecting to walk the path of the decayed and forgotten like this, but if nothing else, it has done wonders for my understanding." Helewise said with a wan smile, feeling the purple flames ensconced in her chest thrum through her body as she thought back to her 'death' of sorts and subsequent 'undeath', the places where pallid skin met blackened scale smoldering in violet hues like paper pressed to cinders. Yes, she understood what would drive someone to claw out of their grave and get back to their feet, damage and natural laws be damned.

"Swordmaster, Aspirant, your understanding has indeed expanded." Argo managed not to take another step back at the scratching voice but she still shivered visibly, The words shaped without tongue or vocal cords accompanied by the eerie half-whistle of air scraping against bones. "And you bring another with you, much as you once were."

Argo outright froze and the skeletal attendant leaned towards her, hollow eyes sockets still managing the impression of deliberate regard. "Will you too seek to walk our path?"

"How did it do that?" She hissed to Helewise after a moment while the Skull Servant waited patiently. "NPCs don't usually acknowledge other players when you get them into a quest dialogue like that. Not unless they've been deliberately coded for it anyways."

"If she does, I don't think it will be tonight. Although I can see her coming back, she's a curious one and dead men do tell tales no one else remembers." Helewise replied even as she shot Argo a quick wink that hopefully conveyed 'trust me and roll with it' well enough, "For now, though, it is perhaps best to simply consider her a witness."

Again, she may look and sound a bit silly 'LARPing' with the 'NPCs', but if there was the slightest sliver of a chance these weren't just little software props? She'd gladly take the hit to her dignity over causing offense to beings who she was trusting her back to.

"I see…" The rattling voice was soft, "but that is not your decision to make, Aspirant."

Helewise dipped her horned head in silent acknowledgement, taking a step back to let poor Argo take the hot seat.

Argo looked thoroughly weirded out again but straightened to attention, "what she said, I don't think your path is the one I want to follow unless you can follow more than one? I'm not exactly uninterested if ya catch my drift, just don't think 'decayed and forgotten' is for me."

"Not every path conflicts with every other, but some will inevitably close off others, especially now." The Skull Servant explained.

"Especially now?" Argo's eyes narrowed sharply, but the Skull Servant made no move to answer her, watching her with the infinite patience of the dead before finally speaking one more time.

"You would appreciate the tombkeepers, and they would not permit you initiation if you followed our path. Seek them out, though their presence on this floor may be but a scant thing, they can surely be found in the floors above." Argo's eyes widened, and she pulled her little notes window open again, hands a blur as she typed while the Skull Servant's attention shifted back to Helewise. "As for you, Aspirant, you are ready to be initiated, all that remains is your choice of a path forward."

A bony hand extended, three cards popping into existence one after another.

"Ancestral Spirits", an image of a translucent figure dressed in stylized Samurai outfit, a sword hovering before them looking more solid than the rest, the whole of it lined in blue-tinged flames.

"Nightwalkers and their kin", a pale woman in a broad-brimmed hat, a staff clutched in clawed fingers, backed by a crimson moon.

"Or the restless ones, unearthed by our newfound flight", the last card looked quite similar to the skeleton himself, a 'Skull Servant' all bones wrapped in a dark purple robe.

"Which path speaks to you, Aspirant?"

"...The Nightwalkers are a hungry lot, yes? They wouldn't content themselves with the wildlife, would they? And allowing them to feed on myself would be a slippery slope." Helewise muttered more to herself than anyone else, the promise of magic and delicious, delicious lifesteal extremely tempting but the potential drawbacks keeping her taloned fingers from making contact with the card. The Skull regarding her tilted his cranium slightly, but said nothing to confirm or deny her musings, letting her make her choice as she pleased. "As for letting them feed on others… no."

That last thought not only firmed up her resolve, but it made something in the corpsefire creeping over her perk up, an instinct deeper than a simple gut feeling making her blackened hand gravitate towards the ghost card. A haunted sword, but the look on that spirit's eyes...

"You are a monster hunter, aren't you? Not were, but are, present tense. Didn't let death stop you." She whispered, completely entranced as she felt something flare in the burning recesses of her ribcage. It was not recognition, not quite, it was… kinship. That bone deep understanding when you just know the moment you really look at someone.

Helewise took a shuddering breath, forcefully grounding herself, turning to the Skull Servant and bending at the waist, "I am grateful for your help thus far and I would be delighted to take your fellow restless Skulls under my banner, but here and now, the path that truly speaks to me is this."

"Truth of thine own, you and they should venture far together." When Helewise straightened up it was with the spectral Samurai's card clutched in her warped fingers. And if the Skull Servant had any objection to their 'kin' going unchosen, they gave no sign of it. If anything, there might perhaps have been a faint note of approval in that dry voice. "You will not find much else of the Ancestral Spirits here, but should you wish to deepen your understanding… Their order often favored mountains. If anything of theirs survived the Great Separation, you will likely find it among the peaks."

It felt good to have a heading beyond 'get a bath, get a meal, get a bed, get armor, go stab problems'.

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Argo watched her hands fly over the hovering keyboard with an unexpected detachment, her mind whirling with the mingling implications the last few minutes had left behind. Not the summoning or the particulars of the quest, she'd need more data to confirm some of them in any case (were three cards always offered? Was the goal always set at twenty five 'duels'?) but rather, the shift in the NPC. Lifelike in a way most of them simply weren't, and wasn't that an irony when she was talking about a literal skeleton?

Shifting focus, smoothly interrupting one line of questioning with another, then returning to it without so much as a hiccup, SAO's NPCs could be quite lifelike when you let them stick to their scripts and with the way Helewise seemed to slip into the roleplay of it certainly would have made it easy on the AI, but unless this script had some specific interactions for…

Argo took a breath, her fingers slowing on the holographic keys while she watched Helewise claim her new card. Some kind of sword ghost? For a moment she wished she could just open a browser to check the card database before she shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts a little. It wasn't impossible that alternate scripts or dialogue trees might exist to accommodate the presence of additional players, SAO AI were reasonably flexible, but the way the Skull Servant's attention had shifted wholly to her would have needed a whole second branch, and if there was a branch for two players would they then design a branch for three? For four?

More importantly, would they write such potential complexities for every quest NPC? Even if SAO's gamemaster AI Cardinal was an order of magnitude more powerful than anyone expected, that was a tall ask to spread across a hundred floors. To account for every possible state-based flag as well, Argo's eyes drifted to Helewise' horns and tail, the way she almost looked like some sort of partial undead herself, the scales that ran over her corpse-pale skin in blackened patches like burn scars. Was that all cosmetic or–? Actually… Argo straightened as the woman in question turned towards her, the Skull Servant beginning its slow shuffle back into the shadows, its eyes—or eye sockets at the very least—lingering on them as it removed itself from the light cast by the glowing moss.

We should see if we can gather some of it, it might be an alchemical ingredient of some kind. Argo filed that mental note away and raised her eyes to Helewise. "Just a question for ya, though I gotta clarify an assumption I'm realizin' I've been making first, so maybe a few questions really… You didn't always look like that did you? The horns an' tail an' all that I mean, those options ain't normally available for character creation after all. The Alpha version sometimes hiccuped and generated an initial character with one or two traits players aren't supposed ta access, but what you've got is a bit too…"

Argo motioned vaguely up and down Helewise' body. "Yer a bit too thematically consistent, is what I'm sayin'. You understand?" She knew her accent was coming out stronger and stronger in her haste and bit the inside of her lip, trying to mentally walk her speech patterns back towards proper formality again.

"Aye." Helewise sighed wearily, but had that stubborn glint in her eye that told Argo she'd be answering every question even if it got real awkward or weird.

"And you said you got this quest before the whole…" Argo trailed off uncomfortably, trying to put a name to that scene in the plaza, two men announcing their fates, treating lightly things that should be heavier by far, too wrapped up in their own crap (and there was no question that both Akihiko Kayaba and Maximillion Pegasus had some crap going on). It still didn't feel real, like every time she opened the menu the Log Out button might just be there again, like it had all been some sort of horrible prank.

"Yeah. We'll want to sit down for this one, it's… a lot to take in." Helewise said with a small grimace, leading the way with that flaming chest and tail of hers brightening the surroundings just a tad.

Argo had seen faces change in the aftermath of that golden light, and she'd asked a few friends -such as she had at any rate- to confirm that most of them looked… Well, no one was saying 'my IRL face' directly but she'd never have made it to where she was without being able to read between the lines.

Kirito, little bundle of carefully-hidden neuroses that he was, was almost her strongest point against, because he'd been far too blatant in suggesting he'd been given his true face when she reached out, and that more than anything else told Argo it couldn't possibly be the whole truth. Boy's downright allergic to even the idea of openness.

So some peoples' faces, probably some peoples' bodies too, had changed when the old fucks did their thing. Argo raised a hand in a motion to continue only to pause, switching the gesture to a flat palm for 'stop', "one sec."

The moss was, in fact, an ingredient, though her lack of the [Alchemy] skill couldn't tell her what for. Argo turned back to Helewise satisfied, if unwilling to take more than one patch when they were all that provided light in the darkness of the passageway, even with a draconic nightlight to hand. "Sorry 'bout that, go on please? Your character design didn't look like this before…"

"My ongoing theory is that whatever 'reset to your true form' function they tried to run checked my brain through the headset… and promptly faceplanted into how my self-image is pretty much nonexistent. I'm the kind of weirdo who considers bodies basically like clothes, they're something on you and which dictate a bunch of what you can and can't do, but they aren't you." Helewise explained haltingly and just on the edge of a ramble before she forcefully reeled it in, "Either way, it must've made that function hiccup hard. So hard that I got booted into a glitched version of the chargen room with my previous avatar just… slumped there lifeless, and me as an amorphous blob. I got to make a new one to slide into and claw out of there, although I was… not in a good headspace. Scared the shit out of a bunch of players."

"Amorphous blob… You don't mean the hands and all that do you?" Older versions of character creation had just stuffed the player into a throwback to early VR experiments for character creation purposes, a literal set of floating hands and feet with a blank mask where the face ought to be. But 'amorphous blob' wasn't how she'd describe it.

"Nope. I looked like a souped up hitodama, just this floating and flowing mass of glowing purple and green goop." Helewise sighed, turning a virulent green eye towards Argo. Together with the purple fire everywhere… yeah, she could put two and two together. "Everything after that is kind of a blur, I was basically running on pure spite at how those two bastards had taken a big fat piss on the holy grail of gaming and escapism. Pretty sure I just extruded pseudopods at some point to smack things into shape and snag bits and bobs to tack on… ugh, I sound like a fucking loon, even with all the dragon bits as sorta proof I'm not talking nonsense."

"I mean, yer not wrong, but it's not like you've got any reason to lie." Not to mention 'clawing her way out of there' sounded a little disturbingly familiar to Argo, even if the many rumors about 'monsters spawning inside the city' had been distorted by the long game of telephone they took to reach her. "So, settin' aside any questions of truthfulness, did that guy back there treat'cha any different between now and then?"

"Hah, as good as I'll get, I suppose." She said with a rough chuckle, "But as for your question, yes, but I'm not sure how much is just quest completion and how much is… all this." The draconic woman said as she waved at herself, "On the initial meeting he was just a bit curious about me and talked about how I didn't have a pact, plus some of that stuff about walking a path. Called me a Swordmaster instead of an Aspirant, too. He was definitely a hell of a lot more responsive and chatty just now."

There was something else visibly eating at Helewise, with the way she almost kept talking but instead shut her mouth and shook her head, but honestly Argo already had a huge pile of info to sieve through and it wasn't like tracking down someone who was on fire 24/7 would be hard.

Especially as a friend request popped up in front of her face. Argo had been planning to send one herself in the near future in any case so she accepted, the hovering window zipping up into the menu as the little 'currently online' counter updated itself by one. "We'll get a better idea with time. I'll be putting as much of this information out to the players as I can so it probably won't take long to gather a control group."

She still wasn't sure what form the information distribution would take, but with most of the playerbase still in the city… Hm. Pamphlets perhaps? Printing and copying were both possible with generic crafting skills. Distribute them along the main roads and at the gates? It wasn't like she had digital boards to post her guides to any more, but heck, some people who'd tried to push the Alpha crafting skills had discovered the creation of whole in-game books among the myriad possibilities that would eventually become available.

Argo shook her head, too many spinning plates, irons in the fire, however one wanted to put it, she was busy and it looked like she'd only be getting busier. "I think that's all, unless you've got any more info for me? What're you planning after this anyways, back out to the fields?"

"Nah, I've lost my momentum by now. I'm just gonna zombie shuffle to an inn to get a meal, bath and bed and see if I can manage to get anything resembling rest." Helewise sighed tiredly, making her expectations on managing to get a single wink of sleep crystal clear, "Maybe see if I can help remind some of the more scared players that they don't have to go out to fight to contribute. Got a bunch of mats from [Butchering] and having something to keep busy with will do people wonders."

"Good luck with that, a lot of them are still just… Having a little break somewhere around the south end of the city." Argo hadn't been specifically tracking the mobs of people trying to handle their emotions, but she didn't like how close to the edge of the floor she knew some of those crowds had been getting. "Only problem with [Butchering] is that ya still need to kill mobs to skin them, and a lotta players are pretty understandably leery of potentially dying to a bad pull right now."

Her lips thinned and she tapped a knuckle against them in contemplation. "Really, we need to organize some kinda buddy system. One combat spec player and one with crafting skills, or maybe a few, depending on builds."

Helewise's nails—talons, really—rap tap tapped on one of her patches of scales, brow furrowed in thought, "Boards for posting info and team up would be a start, but what would really do numbers is some sort of job faire sort of deal. Set up a time and venue and get everyone vaguely interested to come on over and link up. Easier said than done, though, we can't exactly shoot an 'everyone' ping here."

"Crowds have a way of being self-propagating if ya make a big enough display, but the bigger they get the harder they are to keep on track." Argo grunted.

"I did end up kicking off a bit of one with some of the players waffling by the main gate, when they asked about Regenerating Mummy," Helewise nodded at the undead when she spoke its name, the shambler having stayed by their side and quiet the whole time to the point Argo had almost forgotten it was there. Almost. "And ended up with the lot of them whipping out cards and trying out summoning. Got two of 'em friended, I can send a message real quick and see where that gets us?"

…Yeah, that sounded about right. Assuming that hadn't turned into its own little riot so far. "Sure, message them and let's see what we can do."
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