Ammokkx

Nexus: The battle for one's memories.

"Sora-kun!"

It was Haruto. Just a little distance away, dressed casually for the cooling weather, was Haruto. He ran up and grabbed Sora's arm. "Let me look at that," he demanded, 'that' being the fist Sora used to punch a tree with. Haruto's face twisted with concern. "You're bleeding, man! Why'd you do that? What are you even doing here?" he asked, concern on his face.

"Ehehe, for the same reason you are, silly! We both know you heard him say 'battle!'" a second voice came from Haruto's direction. His face went pale. Haruto's eyes drifted to Wolf.

"No way! You too?" he said, pulling his hand back to dive into the inner pockets of his jacket. From it, Haruto pulled the same kind of card Sora was holding.

"Hiiii~!" a rather effeminate boy cheerily greeted from within its borders. "You know, normally I neeeever feel any Commanders around here, so I was, like, super surprised and excited when I found one. But then it turns out it's Sora! You only just bought a deck!"

Haruto sighed. "What a mess... I'm sorry for dragging you into this, Sora. I didn't think you'd be selected as a commander when I recommended those decks to you," he sheepishly told his friend.

"Pfu! It woulda happened sooner or later, Haru. We come to our commanders one way or another- hey waaaait a minute... didn't you say you wanted to battle?" the yet-unnamed Avatar excitedly swapped topics. "You know, you know, Haru loves battles! You two should totally duke it out!"

"Hey, calm down... we have to keep Sora-kun's feelings in mind," Haruto made sure to chastise his partner, who playfully put a finger to his bottom lip. Haruto looked back at Sora, a serious expression on his face. "But... I would really like to battle you. I didn't get a chance to do so earlier today, but now's perfect right?"

Nexus: The battle for one's memories.

"Oh, that sounds good!" Lumia eagerly agreed with Wolf and Sora. She turned to Rui to say: "Let's do it, Nee-chan! You should totally take them up on that offer!" but she didn't get much further than the word 'you'. When Lumia had turned to face her Commander, Rui had turned her head down. Even if Sora couldn't see Rui's face, Wolf could maybe spot her expression from where he laid... as could Lumia. Rui was gritting her teeth. "Nee-chan?" the avatar called out to her, concerned.

"Why...?" Rui softly spoke, her voice slightly cracking. She had her hands clutched tightly on top of her lap. "Why are all of you okay with this?" she continued. Rui stood up from her bed (accidentally tossing Lumia onto the floor in the process) and looked back at Sora. It wasn't her usual kind, collected expression. Her face was something she never showed Sora. Genuine anger. Rui yelled "Don't you get it? We're betting our memories!" at him. She averted her eyes from Sora briefly to look at Wolf. "Didn't you explain it to him?! That if he lost, he'll just lose more?!"

"Nee-chan, please calm down!" Lumia tried pleading from her new comfy place on the wooden flooring, but they fell on deaf ears.

"I won't! Because I... I can't do that!" Rui hysterically kept shouting, grabbing her head as if trying to placate the voices coming from inside. She continued to chew Sora out: "I-! I have memories I don't want to lose, Sora! How could you... could you just... casually dismiss them? Don't you care what happens to me? What happens to you?!"

Rui, shaking like a leaf, pointed to her door. She choked out "Please, just... just leave," and waited for him to do just that. "Go!" she urged him again when she sensed his hesitation. Once Sora was outside her doorframe, she weakly muttered: "Thank you for the ice cream. Good night," and closed the door on him. Rui slumped back against it, curling up into a ball and burying her head into her knees.

"...Are you okay with this?" Lumia asked, seeing Rui's pitiful state. The Avatar wasn't feeling great about this herself. Rui weakly shook her head. "I'm sure he didn't mean anything bad. You can still apologise and-"

"And what? Can't you see he doesn't care about me?" she bit back. "You chose memories dear to me, right?" Rui looked up and glared at Lumia. "You took everything I knew about him! I... I know he's important to me, but that's it! But he doesn't seem to care at all... so... the memories we shared... he doesn't..." Rui whimpered. She hugged herself as tightly as she could.

"...Do you have a wish, Nee-chan?" Lumia asked. "Sora-kun probably has one, you know? A wish he wants to make true no matter what," she continued. Rui didn't respond. Lumia wasn't sure whether or not to keep talking, but did so anyway. "Let's get your memories back, okay? I'm sure he wants that, too." she said. Her Commander looked up, eyes red from the tears welling up.

"I don't want him to forget me, Lumia..."
"He won't. We'll make sure of that."

Nexus: The battle for one's memories.

"Oh? So you don't think I'm any fun, do you?" Rui narrowed her eyes as she butted into the conversation. The older sister leaned in closer to stare into his eyes for the remark. She waited a bit for his reaction, but couldn't keep a straight face for long before starting to snicker. Rui backed off and winked at Sora, then pointed down to the Avatar on his lap. "Honestly, he seems just like you. You two won't have any trouble getting along at all," Rui told them. Lumia, having been ignored for a little too long, raised her voice to grab everyone's attention.

"Hey, wait, hold on!" she said. "If he's Nee-chan's little brother, does that mean I have to call him Nii-chan?" the card said, putting her two index fingers to the temples as if she's thinking really hard. She opened one eye to look at Rui. "...! A-ahaha, I'm joking of course! Sora-kun is fine enough, please don't glare at me like that!" she quickly backpedalled.

Rui sighed. "Really, though... you don't need to worry about me, Sora. I'll be fine. If I didn't work this hard, my grades would drop. Besides, you have more time to spend with your friends if you don't have me hovering over you at all times, right?" she looked back at him with a smile. "You know, you're really popular with the girls. They're always asking about you," she continued, "and it's no good for your big sister to get in the way of that, right?"

"That's... kind of creepy, actually." Lumia off-handedly interjected. Another glare from Rui caused her to go down on her knees and apologize profusely for the comment.

Nexus: The battle for one's memories.

Rui sat on the edge of her bed, Lumia in one hand as her other was filled with the seven memory coins. "Are... are you okay, Nee-chan?" Lumia carefully asked her Commander, staring up at Rui from the card she was contained in.

"...Nee-chan?" Rui repeated in a confused tone.

"Oh, um, sorry! Do you hate that? It's just, you seem so much more mature than me and, well, I thought... maybe you'd want to be called that instead of 'Commander'..." Lumia hurriedly apologised, trying to back down from her statement. Rui just shook her head.

"I don't hate it," she replied back to her Avatar, who breathed a sigh of relief. Lumia answered back that she was worried having to come up with some other thing, but Rui didn't really look back in her direction.

'It's been a while since I've heard that...'

Rui looked back down at her open palm. Five of the seven coins were still dyed black. Five of her memories were still gone. No matter how much she sat and thought on it, none of them were coming back to her. As Rui was preoccupied thinking about it, Lumia suddenly began to panic about from inside her card.

"Nee-chan! I feel another commander nearby!" she suddenly yelled. Rui flinched and shot upright, dropping the coins in her hand by accident. The seven of them vanished into thin air as soon as they left her hand. Rui wanted to ask Lumia what she meant but didn't have the time to as her door suddenly flung open.

"Rui, don't open..."

A pause. "Sora?" Rui stammered out in shock, seeing him hold onto an Avatar just like her.

"You too..." he answered back to her. Rui gave him the softest smile she could muster.

'It's still "Rui", huh...?' she briefly thought to herself. "I'm sorry. I wanted to see what you got me and, well..." Rui looked down at Lumia. She turned the card to Sora.

Inside of it, Lumia awkwardly rubbed the back of her head while giving a wave. "Ahaha... what the heck, right?" she sheepishly said. "I didn't expect Nee-chan's little brother to be a Commander, too."

Rui turned around and closed the starter deck's box, putting it on the floor next to her. "You can sit down if you need to. I don't mind," she said to him as Rui did so herself. She put down Lumia on her lap, looking at Sora's own Avatar. He seemed much more confident, relaxed even, compared to Rui's. She gave Sora a bit of time to sit down in her desk chair, come take a seat next to her on her bed or to just keep standing there in the doorway. She wanted to ask him so many things, but for now, she looked back down at the card on her lap.

"She told me her name was Lumia." Rui said. Lumia nodded fiercely. "What about you?" she asked Sora's Avatar directly after raising her head up to meet his gaze.

Discord vs OOC

It shouldn't be a case of "Versus" at all. Discords and OOCs compliment each-other. OOCs are slow by nature due to having to refresh the page to see if someone has said something, leading to a lot less immediate feedback like you'd get from a chatroom. That said, the fact it is slower lends itself just that tiny bit better to thinking out what you say, as well as being a good place to store important discussion points. Any public questions should definitely go through the OOC, because then the GM's answer is also able to quickly be accessed again.

And also,

<Snipped quote by POOHEAD189>
I see your point but I wanna ask you this--how is it all too different from when we used mIRC or Skype or Chatzys or Titanpads/Etherpads/etc?

@TGM

What?

Skype is missing the easy tabs of discord as well as being more annoying to get people into a group chat to begin with. You need to go out of the way to exchange contact addresses and then add someone, while with Discord you can just toss out an invite link to anyone who's willing to spare the time to join it.

Chatzy is primarily a website, not an app, meaning you always have to have a tab open you need to check, as well as generally not having nearly the slick UI or QoL features Discord does.

Pads are even worse in that aspect. I literally never saw those used for OOC banter outside the context of the collab post that was trying to be created, so you have to question how OOC the banter truly is.

Discord has the perfect elements of a clean UI, easy to join, easy to moderate, easy to set-up and easy to separate program. While I'm sure a better chatroom app could be developed, Discord is currently the perfect storm to en-masse reroute discussion from OOCs into its own chat. It's almost an extension rather than a replacement; a "fourth tab" as you would. It has the benefit of being live, not based in a web browser and you can customize how many notifications you want to get from it.

The only downside to discord is that it is an app, and you do need an account, so some people are just not going to want to bother and that's fair. It's still a vastly superior experience to the mentioned three with features or elements to it they lacked and are crucial to the kind of shift we see now.

Newbie here, please be gentle

<Snipped quote by Ammokkx>

Assuming that you're seiso, @CandyMaid, I recommend avoiding the 1x1 section. Think the writing equivalent of Florida Man.

@FilthyWeeb

1x1 isn't just a villainous hive of 18+ degeneracy, weeb. There's enough PG13 in there too.

...then again, I feel my argument would be a bit more persuasive if this wasn't the first thing you read when checking it out right now

Newbie here, please be gentle

names like "CandyMaid" always make me curious what the type of person who posted it is like. I always suspect degenerates like me first, but actually this is pretty wholesome. I need to assume less bad intent.

Welcome to the site; I've no doubt you'll fit right in.

Introducing purrfection

I really like your icon.

That's all, have a nice day.

Nexus: The battle for one's memories.

Rui's head was bobbing and her eyes half-shut as she kept writing and writing. She'd gone through history, literature and was now memorizing her kanji for Japanese. If Rui kept this up any longer, she was going to collapse over her desk. She didn't stop even though she knew this. Until she could write them without thinking, all the while not making a single mistake, she couldn't stop. She kept going, and going until there was a knock on the door.

"Mom?" Rui instinctively let fly, jumping a little from the sudden sound. She turned back in her chair to look at her door. Nobody answered Rui and neither had it opened. She got up and approached, but when she opened it nobody was there to greet her. Down at her feet, though, was a small container, a note and a box. Rui crouched down to pick them up.

"Maybe we can play. Enjoy the ice cream."

"This is..." she muttered. Rui shot back up. "Sora?" she shouted down the hall. No response. Well, he must've been in a hurry... couldn't be helped, she thought. She carried the gifts back into her room, starting with the icecream. She opened it and though it was a little melted, still looked good. It was one of those types that had a wooden spoon included. She scooped up a bit and chowed down. It was good. Really good. Well, it was a little weird to be eating ice at this time of year, but she was happy he'd thought of her at all. Rui pushed herself up against her bed to enjoy it even more. 'Maybe I can get something for him in return...' she thought to herself. Well, not like Rui had any idea what boys of his age liked...

Though the ice cream had been her first concern, Rui hadn't forgotten about the other gift. She looked a bit closer at the box once her snack time was over. She read the text on the back. It said: "Enter the world of Nexus with the Yellow Rebellion starter deck! Use powerful incantations to swing the tide of battle in your favour! Each starter deck contains 1 avatar card, 10 colour..." and so on.

The card images shown for advertisement kind of look like what she saw those other students playing with earlier today. Was this popular in Sora's class? Rui felt a little excited to discover it. It'd been a while since she'd done anything with her brother. Although she needed to study, but... just a little was fine, right? Thinking like that, Rui took off the plastic wrapping and gently opened the box. There was a little rulebook tucked in there, to the left of a deck of cards. Rui went for the rulebook first, quickly skimming through it. "Attackers... traps..." she mused, trying to quickly comprehend the gist of it. Rui looked back inside the box, towards a card that had been tucked underneath the rulebook. "And this is... an Avatar, right?" she continued talking to herself. Pulling the card closer to her face, nothing actually seemed to be written on it. She'd think that was weird, but before Rui got a chance to do that, her head started to go misty. The world around her spun, twisted, until black flames burned away the environment around her. It left her with nothing but an empty void, at which point Rui felt all strength leave her body and collapsed.

---

~~Kajitsu's Butterfly 華実の蝶~~

In the next instant, her eyes snapped open again as she was somewhere completely different. Somewhere familiar. Rui was standing in front of the entrance to the playground she visited earlier in the day... but not only that, somebody else was standing in front of her. Another girl, one with strange clothes and two animal ears were twitching on the top of her head. "Gooood morning! You're my new Commander, huh?" the girl said in a cheery, upbeat tone.

"C-...Commander? What are you talking about? Where are we? Who are you!?" Rui replied, a bit panicked from the sudden shift in scenery. The other girl waved her hands in front of her, seemingly in an attempt to calm Rui down.

"Calm down, calm down, it's fiiine! I guess you could call this place, um... your memories?" she sheepishly answered. "As for me, well, I'm your new Avatar from today! My name is Lumia and it's nice to meet you!"

"My... memories?" Rui could only respond with confusion in her voice, looking around the area again. Nobody was here except for the two of them.

Lumia looked apologetic, scratching the back of her head as she said: "Well, it's no wonder you're a bit confused right now... here, look at this," the animal-eared girl said, opening the palm of her hand. Inside were seven small, golden coins which floated up in between the two of them. "We're in this place because there's a strong memory associated with it. Each of these seven coins contains a memory of the past. Some of them will turn black soon, and when that happens, you'll no longer be able to recall them, but..."

"Wait! What are you talking about?! Why would I... how do you expect me to believe something like that!?" Rui yelled back at Lumia, overwhelmed by the situation. "Even if that's true, you... how could you do such a thing?" she angrily snapped at her.

"Wait, please calm down okay?! It's not all bad!" Lumia desperately attempted to placate Rui. "Even if you can't remember right now, some of these coins will remain gold. You'll keep those memories. If you want to get the others back, you have to look for and battle other Commanders in a game of Nexus... if you win, one of the coins turns gold. If you lose, another one of your memories is lost when the coin turns black. And, if you turn all of them to gold, I'm allowed to grant you a wish! Any wish, honest!"

"That's... no, I don't want to!" Rui yelled back, defensively hugging herself. Lumia shared her sad look.

"Ahaha... I guess you wouldn't, huh? However... you were chosen. Even if I don't want to, I don't get to choose this either..." the girl said, swiping her hand to the side. One of the coins slowly burned out its colour, turning its lustrous shine an ashen black. Rui felt a sharp pain course through her head.

"Please... stop... I don't want this..." she begged, but Lumia was just as powerless to stop it. Rui clutched the sides of her head as another coin turned black. She could see the images of her past vanish and burn out before her eyes, faces of people she knew get muddled and irrecognizable. Four coins had tuned black so far and another one started to turn. Rui looked up around her as the playground started to fade, flickering away slowly as if being erased from existence. "No... I..." she fumbled for words she couldn't find. A little distance away she saw a little Rui and a little Sora. Rui was crying, but she couldn't remember why. Sora was hugging her.

"...?" She couldn't make out her own words.
"...!!" Neither could she Sora's.
"...promise...!" Only a little snippet of hers made it through at all.

"Promise? What promise?" the adult Rui muttered to herself, desperation written clearly on her face as she dropped to her knees. She could see herself smiling and hugging Sora back. She felt an empty sting inside her heart. "It's important to me, but... I can't remember..." Rui continued to babble, burying her head inside her hands. The coins stopped turning black; five had turned in total, leaving Rui with only two. Lumia and her were left in nothing but an empty void. Rui couldn't see how the other girl was looking down at her with pity.

"From today, you're my Commander. And... I'm sorry."

Nexus: The battle for one's memories.

"New ice cream parlor. I'll reheat dinner." was her brother's response. Rui dropped her arm to her side.

"Well, I guess he's just like that..." she wistfully muttered to herself. She felt a bit uncomfortable laying down, though. "Ah, right... my coat." Rui mused, pushing back against her bed to get off it. She changed out of her uniform, then shuffled over to her working desk. Some light rehearsal in the short time she had before dinner couldn't hurt, she thought. Though she took the initiative, fatigue settled in even before she got to work. It was the same routine every day. Going through her notes right before school, diligently paying attention to class, then when she got back home she studied some more. Rui opened one of her textbooks, on the page she left off at, with some notepaper next to her to write on. Her pencil smoothly slid across the surface of her paper, the movements like an automaton. The minutes ticked by as she mindlessly memorized, up until her mother came into the room.

"Dinner's ready, Rui."
"Mm. I'll be right there," she replied without meeting her eyes. When her mother had gone away, Rui looked up at the ceiling and let out a sigh. She got up and joined her family at the dinner table. The food looked good and she thanked her mother for making it, but no matter how tasty it would be, her mind would always be elsewhere.

"Did you get any test results back today?" her father asked, as usual.
"No, not today. I think we'll get some at the end of the week," she half-heartedly replied. It was always the same song-and-dance. Rui's mother gave her a compliment because she'd seen her study, Rui thanked her and then father would point to saying just hard work wasn't enough. She needed to make absolutely sure her results stayed at the top of the school. This conversation always played out between the three of them and Rui could do nothing but nod along. She briefly shot a look at the empty seat next to her. It was doubtful the conversation would've played out much differently had someone been seated there.

Rui didn't want to spend too long at the dinner table. She excused herself as soon as she'd finished and retreated back into her room, back to her desk. Back to her studies. Back to endlessly writing down the contents of her lessons. It wasn't just enough for the girl to get good grades; everyone expected her to get the best grades. So Rui rehearsed her lessons just one more time and when she was done, moved on to the next. Then the next.

"I'm so sick of this..." she bitterly mused to herself, but didn't stop working. Even if she hated it, Rui didn't have much choice but to keep going. Her parents wanted her to excel, so she obeyed. That's all there was to it.