ACES Online

Chapter 1 - A Bolt from the Blue

Asuna Yuuki had a problem.

Strictly speaking, it was more of a cascade of problems that all stemmed from one very poor decision, but that doesn't sound as succinct over radio, and right now, every moment spent on that, could've been far better used in trying to sort out her problem... her plane was missing a part, which had led to it being on fire, and she needed to leave it!

How today had gone so badly wrong, she struggled to comprehend...

Earlier that week...

Asuna was a model student, and she prided herself on that fact. If you asked her to write an essay and have it back to you the next day, she would ensure it was back to you at the exact time you'd asked for, without a doubt. She would always answer the question she was asked in classes, made sure that her notes were meticulous, and prepared for any eventuality.

What she wasn't, however, was a gamer. Or a pilot, for that matter.

When it came to gaming, she knew enough to know how to use a controller, as well as how to pull off basic attacks in the fighting game that Misumi was fond of, but that was the extent of her knowledge on that front. When it came to flying aircraft, she knew even less. She knew that going too fast was a bad thing, and that long flights were really quite boring. What she didn't know was how to fly a plane, and that was coming back to bite her, right now.

She'd listened to her brother, Kouchirou, explaining ACES Online to their parents over dinner once, and she'd witnessed her mother's apathy towards the project firsthand... or towards gaming in general, actually. Or anything that wasn't ''bettering yourself'' as she'd once put it. He'd rebuked that claim by suggesting that her definition of bettering yourself was in fact bettering your standing in society, and that she should just say what she really meant. The rest of the dinner had been an awkward affair, with very little conversation, but Kouchirou's implication, that bettering yourself wasn't linked to your standing in society, had lit something in her.

A desire to do something more exhilarating. Something like... gaming.

Okay, she admitted she had to start small; it wasn't as if she could just ask her parents to let her go gallivanting off around the world, as tempting as that sounded. She was still the heiress to her family's company, after all. Gaming felt like the perfect way of getting a small degree of freedom, and it wasn't as if she was going to become a delinquent just from playing a few games...

Her mother certainly had different opinions on that, though, having outright told her that any distractions from her studies would be treated harshly, but fairly, and that games were just a way for the unintelligent to pretend they had power before they returned to a life of mediocrity. Asuna doubted that was very likely on both counts, and Kouchirou hadn't seemed all that happy that his own mother was acting like that towards the industry that employed him. Needless to say, he'd become Asuna's biggest supporter when it came to games, which would've been great... had it not been only a few days before the NerveGear launched.

He'd planned to spend about an hour on the system himself when ACES Online launched, setting an account up for both of them, a semblance of cover from their mother, and then let Asuna use it.

That hadn't exactly gone to plan. Kouchirou had been held up at work, and Asuna had been given the go-ahead by him to log straight in and make their account. She'd made an account, and, with an evident lack of experience in MMOs, made their avatar look like her, or as closely as she could, managing to match all but her hair colour, which was now orange, rather than chestnut brown. She did find it odd that a game where players would be in the cockpit of a plane would need an avatar creation system that detailed, but there wasn't one for the planes themselves.