Chapter 60 - Mastermo Meets Hasumi

[...]

Alvi was silent. 

Zhihao looked around the train trying to find something that could possibly provide a hint for them, but it was truly just a normal train with nothing wrong at first glance. 

Zhihao looked at the other coaches and found a few other people sitting on the train, but they were all asleep. 

While Li Ling and Alvi were having a fight over who was cuter, Zhihao stood up and looked over at the other coaches and the faces of the passengers that were all asleep. This was a bit weird and alarming. 

Why were they all asleep?

After playing T..I.A.D. for months, Zhihao had found a cheat to know if a character was important or not. If the NPCs were important to the plot of the story, they'd be good looking and would talk more than the others while on the other hand, the unimportant characters that contributed nothing towards the main story and were named 'Killable characters' by Zhihao would usually have a plain face that was easy to forget. This was probably done because the developers found it hard to give the killable characters a rememberable face. It was just hard work to come up with faces and especially if you wanted all the faces to look different. 

Other games would always use the same face for most of their characters with a bit of tweaking here and there, they would change the color of the hair and the clothes the characters wore, and voila, they had a new character. This was one of those things that made T.I.A.D. special and different than the rest as each and every character in this game had a different face. 

Sometimes Zhihao would find himself wondering if the faces were based on real people, but then he would push the thought aside because it was illegal to use people's faces without their permission and to have all of them consent to the idea was even more impossible. 

When Zhihao looked at the faces of the sleeping passengers, he found them to actually have a forgettable face with indistinct features. They were all unimportant. Zhihao had only looked at a few and he wanted to check everyone just in case there was actually an important character here, but before he could do so, he heard a girl calling out to him. 

Zhihao looked at the girl who had quite a pleasant face to look at.

This girl was surely an important NPC1. 

Li Ling also noticed the girl coming over towards them and he immediately stood up, putting his fight with Alvi on a pause.

[I'm still cuter.]

"..."

Everyone had eyes, they could see who was cuter.

The girl had an old phone in hand and seemed to be happy to have spotted them. 

Zhihao was a bit wary of such characters who'd approach them happily. After his last meeting with RoRo, Zhihao really felt like the people that looked the most innocent were the most dangerous. 

"Hello! I'm Hasumi."

"Hello, I'm..." Zhihao suddenly remembered that they were supposed to be given a character in this level, but they'd have to wait ten minutes for it. He could very well give her his real name but he didn't want to know what was the penalty for going OOC1.

Li Ling stood beside Zhihao and looked down at the girl. The two players were too tall for her and they needed to look down, whereas, the girl named Hasumi needed to look up at them. However, no matter how short Hasumi was, Alvi remained shorter than her with the height of a ten-year-old kid. 

Hasumi, "I'm sorry if I came up to you too suddenly. I was actually getting paranoid for no reason so when I saw you three, I couldn't control my excitement."

Li Ling, "Paranoid?"

Hasumi scratched her neck as she spoke with some embarrassment, "It's nothing."

There was nothing such as nothing in a game where a character walked up to them and said something. 

Zhihao, "We promise not to laugh. Will you tell us?"

Hasumi suddenly looked up at Zhihao with a glint in her eyes, "Could it be that you guys think it's weird too?"

"What weird-" Zhihao's question was cut short by Li Ling, who stopped him by interfering in the conversation. 

"We found it weird too." Li Ling winked at Zhihao and Zhihao understood the man wanted him to play along. 

They were supposed to have a role in this level so if Zhihao were to carelessly be clueless they might just hit the alert for OOC. 

Hasumi sighed in relief, "Thank god someone else noticed it as well. I was starting to think it's just me."

Alvi who was a bot should not have been able to communicate with an in-game NPC, but it seemed neither gaming rules nor coding rules applied to her as she immediately decided to comment on the situation, "What did you notice?"

Zhihao looked at Alvi in shock, he wanted to ask the bot how it can communicate with this girl but he couldn't do it because if he openly questioned it, he would be heard by Hasumi who would immediately realize something was wrong and as Alvi had already explained before, the players can go OOC in secret but if they were to do it in front of a character, they would immediately be punished. 

Zhihao bit his tongue and held in his curiosity, thinking that he could ask Alvi about it later. 

"The train has been going for longer than expected. It only takes about fifteen minutes for me to reach my station but the train has been going nonstop for more than 20 minutes now." Hasumi seemed to have considered them to be in the same situation as her so she wasn't shy with telling them all about what she thought or worried about, "I don't remember falling asleep but when I came to notice that it was taking longer than expected, I looked around only to find everyone sleeping."

Zhihao wanted to ask where the train was going, but if he were to be playing a character that was traveling inside this train, it would be stupid for him to ask since people usually knew where the train they boarded was heading. Once again, he couldn't clarify his queries in fear of the OOC function. 

Li Ling seemed to have found a way around the OOC function, "Which station did you board this train from?"

Zhihao suddenly found that although they couldn't ask straightforward questions, they could still find a loophole and work around the damned rule. If they were to ask the girl where she had boarded from, they'd have a general idea of where this train was going. 

When Zhihao saw the old model phone in the girl's hand, he was sure that the time period in which they were was old, definitely more than twenty years. With that as a clue, the next clue Zhihao found was Hasumi's name and face. She looked to be Japanese and had a Japanese name so they were probably in Japan. With all that put together, Zhihao could now confidently say that they were on a train in Japan that used to run more than twenty years ago. 

Zhihao had always wanted to time travel, he just didn't think he'd be time traveling in a virtual game like this. 

Hasumi seemed to really be sweating a lot, she seemed to be a bit too creeped out by everything that was happening. 

Zhihao was not exactly calm as well. He had bigger worries. The system had told all players to stay alive for the first ten minutes of the level if they were to be given the background information through which they could be able to play and have a chance of solving the mission. 

Zhihao had only one worry and it was related to why the system had warned them this. To put it plainly, Zhihao didn't trust the system enough for this. He was worried that at any moment the sleeping people may rise and attack them as zombies. He looked around the train and it really did give out a creepy vibe, especially with the dim flickering lights. 

Did trains even have such out-of-service lights?

Hasumi, "Shin-Hamamatsu station. We are in the Shizouka prefecture now."

[Ding~ We are on the Enshu railway line in Shizuoka, Japan.]

Zhihao suddenly found out that even though the players couldn't go OOC, Alvi could do whatever she wanted. These were the perks of being a bot and Zhihao felt oddly jealous of it. 

They now knew where they were but they knew nothing about what they were supposed to do or what they were to do with this sudden information. 

Before the two players could ask her anything any further, Hasumi continued, "I went to check the driver but I couldn't see anything. The windows are all blacked out."

"I see." Zhihao thought it was best for them to quietly wait for now. 

Suddenly the train entered a tunnel and started to slow down. 

Hasumi, "That's weird."

"What?" Zhihao questioned. 

"There aren't supposed to be any tunnels on the way."

Li Ling, "Do you travel by this train often?"

Hasumi nodded, "I use it to travel to and from work."

Zhihao looked at Hasumi with an unreadable expression. This woman has given a to of information that they didn't ask for. She gave her name and details of what train, she uses to go to work, she even readily told them the station she boarded this train from. This woman was really not afraid of anything. At this moment, Zhihao was highly wary of this woman. She seemed either too stupid like the main characters of horror movies who die too soon or if that wasn't the case, she was probably the antagonist that was trying to fool them. 

The train started to slow down and eventually came to a stop. Hasumi looked at the station name and seemed to be a bit skeptical about it as she didn't get off the train but after a few minutes passed and the train still didn't move, she typed something on her phone and reluctantly got down from the train.

Zhihao didn't know if he should follow her, but after Alvi kicked him forward, he decided to get down from the train as well. The four people got off on the station named Kisaragi. 

"That's weird" Hasumi commented again. 

Zhihao felt like this woman's vocabulary was restricted to those two words. Every time she said "That's weird" Zhihao would feel a shiver go down his spine. It wasn't like they were in a horror movie but with everything that seemed to be wrong with this train and station, Zhihao couldn't confidently say this wasn't a horror level. 

Li Ling, "I've never heard of this station."

Hasumi, "You're right. I never realized there was such a station on the way."

Zhihao, "What should we do?"

Hasumi, "Let's walk around the station."

Zhihao decided to let the NPC lead the way since he didn't want to do something OOC. He didn't know the world background of this level, and he didn't know the genre, so there was really nothing he could do. If there was a character like Hasumi whom they were supposed to meet and who was willing to lead them, he would naturally let her lead the way. 

They just had ten minutes to pass before he could know what was going on. Ten minutes didn't seem to be that long. They had probably already burned a few minutes on the train so by the time they roam around the station, they were bound to pass the next remaining minutes. 

Once the mission and their character background were given, Zhihao was found to know what he was supposed to do next. 

The station was empty with not a single soul in sight. They tried to look for the timetable but found nothing.

Zhihao noticed that this girl was worried about the creepy things that went on but every once in a while she would pick up her phone and text someone. 

If she had a phone, at such a moment, she should be calling for help not texting and this, Zhihao found weird.