Book 4: Chapter 8: Patch 2.0: Prime Real Estate

Serra joins in on the tickle-torture by squeezing herself behind the couch. Since it has yet to be fully pushed against the wall, there is enough space for her smaller body to fit back there.

Once positioned, she slips her hands down toward Alice and is quick in sliding her hands underneath Alice’s arms.

Alice jumps from the sudden and unexpected hands now trying to tickle her armpits.

“Ser-Serra! St—don’t take his side!” Alice cries while being unable to hold back her giggling. Her entire body – well, the parts of it that can move are shaking and wiggling around at this point as she just doesn’t have the strength to stop either of them. “St-stop! I’m – I’m going to hit you!”

“Pfftt. You’d never hit us,” Ryouta says, right before getting an especially loud squeak from her. He pulls his face up for a moment to see what Serra is doing, and that puts him in the line of attack for her swinging arms.

Alice’s arm comes smashing right into Ryouta’s face as a result of Serra still tickling her.

She actually hits him hard enough that he tumbles backward a bit and is left with a bloody nose.

“H-hey, are you alright?” Cassandra asks, getting off of the couch to check on him.

“Ah! I’m sorry! I – I didn’t mean to do that!” Alice explains. “Serra! Please stop!”

Since Serra can’t see Alice’s mouth, she has no idea that Alice is even saying something. It is only when Alice seriously grabs onto Serra’s hands and roughly removes them from underneath her arms that Serra gets the hint and stops.

“I’m alright. It was just an accident, and I was totally asking for it,” Ryouta says, wiping his nose onto his arm. “It’s not broken or anything. I think.”

“I – I’m still sorry, Ryouta. This… has happened before. My father tried tickling me when I was a child and I broke his nose. Five times. He eventually stopped trying to tickle me,” Alice explains.

“You’re pretty violent when you’re getting tickled, aren’t you?”

“I do not mean to be! I just lose control of my movements! It is not my fault,” Alice says with a whine and a pout.

“It’s alright. Don’t worry about it. By the way,” Ryouta pauses when he hears his phone vibrate. Pulling it out from his pocket to check on it, he has a text from their internet provider apologizing for the delay and saying that their internet service has finally been activated. “By the way… I’m going to go play FTO. Just got a text saying the internet is on. Gonna set up the computer real quick, connect everything, and check on how things are.” Ryouta sends Oleander a text as well telling him that his internet is finally on.

“Took them long enough. Never heard of internet not being ready before people even move in,” Cassandra says. “Not in modern times, anyways.”

“Your nose, are you – are you sure that you should be playing instead of going to the hospital?” Alice asks.

“It’s just a bloody nose from being hit. You didn’t break it,” Ryouta says.

“But – but I always broke my father’s nose! You should get it checked out!”

“It doesn’t even hurt that much already. Look,” Ryouta says, touching his nose. He immediately cringes from pain. “It’s – it’s fine.”

“Ryouta!”

“If it seriously hurts that bad then we can go,” Cassandra says.

“I mean, does it look broken? You can usually tell from how it looks, right?” Ryouta asks.

Cassandra grabs his face and holds him still to look straight at him. “I mean, it looks fine. Just bloody. It’s not…crooked or anything, but I don’t know if broken noses are always visible. I broke my arm once as a kid and it’s not like you could tell from looking at it.”

“How’d that happen?”

“We were playing soccer at school, I tripped, and let’s just say it bent.”

“That wasn’t visible?”

“Well… it was when it first got bent, but then looked normal when I unbent it. Then it just looked really bruised.”

“That… like, it bent?”

“Yeah.”

Ryouta shudders at the thought. He’s seen videos of similar injuries on the internet before, and he could never handle those videos. Videos of limbs bending in ways that they shouldn’t and anything sad or cruel involving animals are the only kinds of videos that he truly cannot handle.

“Anyways… gonna go game. My nose is fine. If it’s not fine, it’ll be fine,” he says.

“You are too stubborn!” Alice pouts.

“Hey, if I wasn’t stubborn, Nell would still belong to Ull.”

“You – you may have a point, but now is not the time to be stubborn! This is your nose, not Ull!”

“Game time!”

“A-ah! Wait!” Alice shouts after him as he gets up and heads to their new gaming room. Of course, a group that met through gaming is going to have a room dedicated to gaming. “That stubborn man!”

Cassandra shrugs and says, “What can you do? Men hate going to doctors. My dad never lets anybody take him, and none of my exes would go either. Then again, they were all paranoid they’d get in trouble for drugs. I’m used to guys just refusing to ever do the smart thing and get checked out.”

“I am not! My father would go to the doctor’s for even the slightest pains and bruises! Ryouta should as well!”

“What about your dads?” Cassandra asks, looking up at Serra.

Serra signs to them that her moms would drag her dads to the doctors’ whether they wanted to go or not.

“Your moms really had your dads on tight leashes, didn’t they?”

Serra signs that they still do.

While the girls discuss how troublesome men are when it comes to getting medical attention, Ryouta finishes setting up his computer, hooking everything together, getting everything connected to the internet, and digging his virtual reality headband out from one of the boxes in the room that has yet to be unpacked. He really underestimated just how much unpacking there would be. Even with how little belongings he owns, he realized how many useless things he has during the packing process.

He also remembered that there were three boxes in his closet that he never unpacked after moving into his old apartment, and now those three boxes will probably never be unpacked here, either.

“Finally. Haven’t gotten to play in a week,” Ryouta says, slipping on the headband and getting into a comfortable position in his chair. Unfortunately, as soon as he immerses into virtual reality, a warning message pops up asking him to verify logging in from a new IP with his phone. “Of course.”

After confirming his identity, he’s finally allowed to play the game and become Fenrir once again.

He wakes up to the sight of Serra, Cassiel, and Nell all lying asleep on top of him in the hammock. He’s amazed that the hammock is able to hold all four of them in it without breaking down. The only bad thing about this is that he has no idea how to get out from underneath them. “I… don’t suppose that you’re willing to come and move them for me, are you, Overseer? You can do that, right?” Fenrir asks.

Fortunately, the three girls slowly open their eyes and yawn to simulate having just woken up, and then they get out from the hammock one at a time.

It’s creepy to Fenrir knowing that they aren’t really his girlfriends right now even if they’re moving with the same sort of mannerisms that his girlfriends use, but he’s just happy that he won’t be trapped underneath them. “Thanks,” he says.

The three girls climb back into the hammock and cuddle together now that he’s out of it.

And then a familiar but wonderful sound reaches his canid ears.

The sound of heavy, clumsy footsteps rushing down the wooden steps of The Shoebill.

Fenrir braces for what is about to happen next.

Rock comes into sight, charges right at him, and leaps up! She sends him sliding back a bit but, thanks to bracing for her, fails to knock him over. “Hey there, girl. You been a good pup?” Fenrir asks her with the kind of voice only used on babies and animals.

Rock barks and licks his face.

“You haven’t been doing anything inappropriate with Shogun while I’ve been gone, right?”

Rock stops what she’s doing, looks away, and walks back up the steps.

“H-hey, what’s – why do you seem so serious? Why won’t you look at me? Rock?”

He doesn’t get an answer.

“I’ll let you snack on a cannonball.”

Rock turns around, rushes at him, and starts licking him again!

“You’re a silly dog. So, seriously, you’ve been behaving, right?”

Rock looks away again.

“You’re lucky I love you. At least use protection.”

Rock tilts her head.

“There isn’t going to be a litter of rocky foxes running around, right?”

Rock tilts her head in the other direction now.

With a sigh, Fenrir gives up and says, “Come on, let’s go check things out.”