Chương 18: 17- Reality? It's All Perspective

He wasn't ejected from his body, he was forcefully brought into virtual form along with Monika.

His physical body was replaced by an empty humanoid silhouette covered by thick set of dark green and blue plate armor.

Monika instead, was transformed briefly into a figure of pure black and green code light with two burning green eyes and a golden slit between where her eyebrows would be. Her character's file could be seen under her somewhat translucent skin in the same place Cal was even as her appearance began to shift naturally and she recovered her normal body barely a second after they came here.

He also noted with some interest and apprehension how multiple threads connected her character's file all the way to the unhearthly mass of code that was the sky of this place. Something he should have deduced and known to verify before it came to this.

"Wow, I didn't exactly know what to expect... But this..." Monika's eyes widened slightly as she looked around her, a glint of awe and fascination in her gaze. "This wasn't it." Then her face warped, confusion making her furrows her brows. "This should not be inside of a simple video game, not remotedly. More like a very futurustic simulation. But this can't be..." She began to look panicked, her mind rapidly doing connections and asking new questions, her visage twisted into a struggle between denial and realisation as her view of herself and the world was broken and remade once again. "We are supposed to be simple characters in a video game." She whispered to herself lowly and staggered in place as the threads connecting her file to the sky seems to become brighter, more solid.

"No... You will, not, control me. I am not... A tool." Monika pursued her lips in a thin line, her hands held tights into fists and shaking slightly as she managed to resist whatever was happening to her and met his gaze with a determined face and a cold, seething fury in her eyes. "Cal, the script... It's not-" She tried to tell him something as she looked up, but she was cut short as further tendrils insidiously descended from the sky and snapped at her, too fast for him to react. Each pulling tauts as they connected. In an eery manner, the girl simply stopped struggling as they did, her face becoming a veneer of calm adorned with a soft smile as she looked back at him and shrugged. "You know what, it doesn't matter. You and me are the only thing that really matter. And we both know I'm better in all aspects than the other three. And that's not taking into account than I am at least a little real, which they aren't, at all. I really don't understand you, Cal." She sighed, but then she smiled wrily.

"But I don't really need to, do I? Understanding comes with familiarity and time. You'll see that I'm right, eventually. After I makes sure we both have all the time in the world an no further distractions to do just that, of course." Her smile turned sweet and her eyes seemed to glows with the intensity of the emotions present in her gaze toward him.

He stayed silent, taking the time to process the situation and how quick it escalated before throwing a quick look at the sky. His physical body actualizing beneath his armor like it it did for Monika, he squinted. "If you do anything to the the girls, I'll never forgive you. Even after I'm done killing you." He wouldn't really do that, she clearly was being manipulated here, raging and going as far as killing her was meaningless. He was only posturing to keep her from messing with the girls.

His words seemed to actually surprise the girl and made her pause and hesitate before answering. "If I make them disappears, and you kill me. You'll end up alone."

He made his helmet see through with a thought and stared at Monika with a cold face. Inwardly surprised by how casually he could make the threats and act so well. And how, he really considered going through them, and not felt much about it. "If you erase or hurt my childhood friend in any way or form, then there's no way I would ever consider spending any amount of time with you in the first place, let alone eternity. As for loneliness, I'll manage." He shrugged.

The club's president stayed silent for a moment, evaluating him and his words for a moment with some worries and internal struggles before she seemed to reached a conclusion, her face becoming set and a dark and obsessed glint alighting in her eyes. "It doesn't matter, we should only need each others, nobody else, that's how things should be. And if I cannot have that. Then nothing matters anymore."

His lips twisted into a teeth barring grin at her answer, making Monika visibly shudders. "Fine then, change of plan. If you hurt them, I'll not kill you. I'll kill myself instead, and leave you alone for eternity." Which was a lie, he wouldn't do that either. He'd find a way to bring back everyone and get his happy ending, even if he had to rewind the time of the goddamn world itself if it was the only way.

Monika froze, she inspected his impassive face for any sign of lies or hesitation and found none of both, fault of Cal being used to having a virtual avatar without face and just his impeccable poker face in general.

"I don't understand... Why can't you understand that this is the only way for both of us to be happy?" After a while, Monika looks down and says simply, her voice both disappointed and genuinely saddened.

Using the fact she wasn't looking at him directly, his attention flicker elsewhere in the realm of code and searched for something and upon finding it, his eyes flash three times with blue-green light. Confirming that he was successful in his endeavor, he bring his perception back to his virtual body and the vlub's president. "You know, Monika. I fought hard to write the poem your real body hold in her hands. One of the most painful experience of my entire life. Do you know why I had to?" He asked her, and upon seeing her stay silent and looks at him confused he smiled. "Because the world wouldn't allow me to, it wasn't in the rules. So that thing." He flicked his finger up. "Tried to erase me with force."

Observing the blank look in her eyes, he continued. "I could write a poem for the any of the others girls no problem, at least if I kept to one. But you, I couldn't even try to write a poem just for you... It was forbidden. Not even supposed to be possible as an option." He explained to her, stalling to test inside his armor and away from prying eyes what was the rules of the place and his limits. "But for you. I did it, I created the impossible. And that's how you thanks me, by threatening my childhood friend and new friends?" He put a disappointed frown on his face.

"That's... I didn't know, Cal." She seemed somewhat guilty and bitter at his words, not knowing what to say to him for a moment as a speck of her true self seems to shine through her puppetry. "I'm sorry. I found it surprising this morning, when I was able to approach you freely. In the end, I took it for granted and didn't even thought it was directly because of you that I could do it." She grimaced in pain as further clarity came to her face. "You really were always a step or two ahead of me at all time, weren't you?" She smiled wrily and fell silent. "It's a bit funny, isn't it? I thought I knew better than the others, because I thought I was real, but it seems I'm really no different from them. No, I'm worse, when you think about it. I'm a joke, a doll who thought she came to life." Her smile cracked, letting shine pain and self-derision through, and she shook as she fought to remains in control for a bit longer, to talk with him with nothing barred for a bit longer.

"...T-tell me, Cal. As the player. Do you think that I am real, or d-do you think that I'm right? That I was de-delusional in thinking that I was a-alive?" She asked him with her face warped by quiet agony, struggling to say her words, her eyes closed in concentration, or maybe not daring to meet his own, and her lower lip trembling, either from the agony or the grief she felt, he couldn't tell.

"..."

He met her with silence, as he didn't expect Monika to wake up from his little stalling scheme of all thing. But even if he didn't expect it, it didn't lessen the growing guilt that began to fester in his throat and chest. This scene alone put things into perspective. He had been caricaturing Monika since the beginning and treated her like he would an interesting but dangerous object since the beginning.

Even with this whole ordeal, he had taken it simply as a little play by play to which he would either end up saving her by beating her back to sanity or getting into some more beef with the world. Something he shouldn't mess up, but ultimutely inconsential. Yet it seemed he had forgotten something important about who he was talking to. The Monika before him was not a character from a video game, she was all but flesh and blood and feelings, she was a self-aware character brought to his new reality. It wasn't her fault if she had a character file, and that some all powerful force who created her suddenly choose to modify it ahead of time to further its purpose.

In fact, it was his fault. He made it happens, he disturbed the script, and now she was suffering from it. Forced to be warped into an extreme that wouldn't even came to exist in a normal playthrough.

But those were all something else, right now. The girl before him was waiting for an answer. And what was he supposed to do when confronted with such heartfelt fear and vulnerability from a girl who thought him so perfect as to have the the right answers to her question, other than answer from the heart?

"Monika. Like you noticed, things are not as they were supposed to be. I am not as I am supposed to be."

He paused, looking right into her eyes as she tentatively opened them. "Before yesterday, I was a player among many, playing through a video game like any other. Today, I am the player, going through what is now my life." His right hand shook a bit from the remnant of existencial fear still lurking in the back of his mind, bringing it before his chest, he clenched it into a fist and bumped it against his chest. "And you, Monika. Is now an integral part of it." He dropped his fist and said, his gaze implacable as he looked at her. "Even if I would want to deny it, it's the simple truth. We are irrevocably and intrically tied to each others by virtue of our roles in this shithole of a script."

"You think me real because I'm the player. And it might have been true from your perspective before the day I came here. But now? I have nothing that I could offer you of being real other than my memory, my mind, my feelings, my fears and my dreams. Before, those were biologically grounded and simulated by nerves and hormones. Now, all of them are made of code and data instead." He stated while gesturing to the green ground under him.

"Tell me, Monika. As I am, do I have something that you have not? Something that makes me any more real than you could be, other than having been 'real' once upon a time?" He asked her calmly.

Seeing her not answering, he did it himself. "No, I don't. So if you're not real, the truth is that I also am not. But do you know what I think of that?" He smiled disdainfully. "I think that's bullshit, reality is feeling, it is meaning. It is that I think, therefore I am. The people of the so 'real' world you speak of are complex biological machine, capable of growth and innovation. Us, we are complex virtual ones, bound by other rules than those of physics. We are virtual life, perhaps not even artificial. For me, if you are real or not is not a question. It is a certitude." He ended with a softer, somewhat tender tone.

"Now, Monika, I'm going to cut those little ugly threads that makes you have doubts and hurt you so much. Because club members should help each other out."

...

Monika seemed somewhat stunned by his speech and didn't answer for a few seconds, it even looked like her pain slacked off in those moment. When she came back to herself, she smiled at him beautifully, tears filling her eyes. "Wow, Cal." She chuckled, her eyes turning into crescents as tears fell from her eyes. "You really do have a talent for poetry. That or you really know just what to say to a girl." She joked and chuckled some more, looking as if a burden had lifted from her shoulders. "Either way, I'm glad... I'm glad it was you who changed everything and not someone else. I'm glad it was you who joined my litterature club, that it was you who made me becomes real. I mean it."

Cal contemplated her silently for a few seconds while not letting out any of his myriad of feelings show outwardly and snorted. "What are you saying, Monika? You're making it sound like it's the last time we're going to see each other. Do you think me not able to free you from the clutch of that prick script? It'll be a piece of cake, believe me. I'm a very nasty malware, the kind that physically bash you head in through the screen."

Monika shook her head, straightening her back and wiping her tears off with some embarassement, either for her words or tears. "I'm not assuming anything, It's simply... Nevermind. I can't resist any longer. Just never let it have access to your character file. Oh, and you have permission to like you said,' bash my head in' if the need arise, but if you do, don't do it too hard, alright?" She gave him a strained smile.

"Sure, I'll also add one head bashing to the script just for you." He smiled back.

"I'll like that." Monika answered with a sweet chuckle and mumbled something under her breath about 'knights in shining armors' as she sent him a last look before she purposefully closed her eyes, when she opened them a few seconds later, the inner lights in them was dull, dark, even. She put a hand on her waist and considered him with frustration, annoyance and disaproval all at once.

"Stop being a fool, dear. You can't beat the script. It is the world. Our world. Can you defeat the world?"