Waking to Another Sky Ch1 bit – Raid Aftermath

~ crossovercreativechaos

You poor kid. “I’m sorry,” Janet said softly. “You knew them?” Fourteen out of forty-eight, what the heck is a raid – oh god. She just lost a third of her friends. Damn it, kid, go ahead and cry.

Asuna swallowed, and jerked her head in a too-familiar nod.

“I had to know that, and you had to tell me.” That’s not a friend. That’s… it can’t be what it looks like. She’s too young to be commanding anyone!

“Most of the clearers know each other,” Asuna said, voice almost steady. She glanced at the redhead, and nodded.

He gave Asuna a sympathetic smile, then stuck fingers in his mouth for a chaos-piercing whistle. “Oi! Min’na-san! Find your party members, let’s get a headcount! Then check in with your guild. Make sure nobody’s still stuck.” He nodded toward the black man. “Merchants on Agil. Knights, your vice-commander’s deputized me for right now. Fuurinkazan… eh, what’m I saying, can’t lose you guys if I tried, we have got to get a pizza later-”

That drew grins from the five young men who’d held the perimeter. Interesting. Atsugi? Janet wondered. Does he mean Japan, or our base there? I think there were a couple Marines who got caught in the game… oh. I think we just found them.

Which made things even more bewildering, if they had. What was a Marine doing letting a girl take the lead?

“Everybody who wasn’t in the raid….” The redhead shrugged. “Eh, stuff happened, we’ll go over the details later.” He bounced a little in place. “And in case anybody missed that-”

“Japanese,” Daniel blurted out, as the redhead broke into a swift staccato of words. “That’s why it sounded so weird! The vocabulary’s Abydonian, I think… but the grammar’s Japanese.” He hesitated. “Sort of?”

“Stuff happened?” Sam exclaimed. “Fourteen people are dead. How can you say that?”

“We knew the raid was going to be dangerous. Thirty-eight hundred people have died, ma’am.” Agil crossed his arms with a grim finality. “It’s been a long two years.”

Asuna took a step forward, focused on their archaeologist. “What is Abydonian?”

“Better question,” Jack put in, relaxed as if he dealt with thousands of confused people every day. “Where’d your friend Kirigaya go?”

46 thoughts on “Waking to Another Sky Ch1 bit – Raid Aftermath”

    2. Um… Not to be crass, but the military is diverse, and there are still US states with very low marriage ages. The only thing that would worry Jack is “two foreign minors get married without parental consent.”

      Basically, without their consent being given upfront, your parents can end the marriage as long as you are a minor, although usually it is not done. (And of course you could always remarry upon your majority.)

      JAG or other lawyers would be interested in where the kids’ bodies were when they married. It looks like that would be Colorado instead of Japan?

      Colorado is a common law marriage state. Aheheheh. And there is actually no age requirement for that, as far as I can see – unlike ceremonial marriages that require parental consent (16-18 years old) or parent and judge consent (under 16, no lower limit).

      So yup, all they need is the testimony of friends that they have consistently represented themselves as married, and they are married.

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      2. Hold the presses… Apparently Colorado does not recognize common law marriage of minors. Now.

        But at the time of the story occurring, it looks like you still could.

        If worst comes to worst, there are some states where minors can get a marriage license without parental consent, or with a judge’ s consent.

        Either way, though, the kids would still be subject to their respective parents, since they are minors…

        Except that… many Colorado laws presume that the marriage of a minor emancipates the minor!!

        You can become an emancipated minor in Colorado in some other ways, but Kirito and Asuna are not US citizens or refugees from Japan. I do not see that one flying too well without significant pulling of strings, and Asuna’ s parents probably could pull strings in the opposite direction.

        So actually, the Stargate admin would probably be pulling for Kirito and Asuna’ s common law marriage to be recognized, so that they could deal with them as emancipated minors. (Unless it were clear that they were incompetent, in which case the Stargate JAG would be roadblocking all over.)

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      4. Colorado also recognizes “putative spouses” – people with a good faith belief that they are legally married, but who actually are not. This gives people certain rights in the case of a divorce, custody battle, etc., along with a few protections.

        I do not think this will come up, but it should protect the kids from being prosecuted for having sex with a minor under the age of consent if that were a possible. (And obviously that could not even happen until they woke up.)

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      7. *Wry G* I doubt it would come up easily, given they’ve only been married a few weeks, weren’t loud about it, and still originally come from Japan. So they wouldn’t talk about it much – since Asuna is a year older that Kirito, which apparently is considered a bit scandalous!

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  5. And the mass blink and ‘who?’ are going to be entirely serious. Because no one in the game knew Kirito’s IRL name. But that’s not how it’s going to come across as at first, and a few stubborn idiots are going to insist that the survivors are being deliberately obtuse about the names.

    Also, everyone knew that raids were dangerous. The fact that people died? That wasn’t a new day. It was sad, but I think the fact that it was fourteen at once when they hadn’t lost someone in a boss fight for a good few levels that was the shock. These aren’t modern civilians anymore, not even the low levels. They’re more along the lines of older ones, where your gatherers, hunters, and fighters went out every day and you knew they might not come back.

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      1. Well in non VRMMORPG it is very rude to use someone’s RL name if you aren’t being private or among those who already know it.

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      2. *Nod* And in SAO it tended not to come up at all because so many people were just trying to get through the day in Aincrad. Bringing up the “real world” could distract you enough to get you killed.

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      3. In canon, Asuna and Kirito exchange irl names after they defeat Kayaba, while everyone is being logged out. They tell each other so that they can find each other when they get out and continue their relationship offline.

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  6. …So, if I’m reading this right, are you saying that Klein is a Marine-or at least his friends are? Because that would be kinda cool, and explains why Furinkazan didn’t loose anyone. (I think I remember it being mentioned that Furinkazan didn’t loose anyone anyway…that might not be cannon though…)

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    1. >…So, if I’m reading this right, are you saying that Klein is a Marine-or at least his friends are? >
      Nope pure civvies. It’s just the way they are acting that makes Janet think they are military. Which is why them letting Asuna take the lead is confusing her.

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      1. She said she’d heard about a couple Marines getting caught up in SAO. Previous snippets let us deduce that Klein’s ancestry is mixed Japanese and either American or Commonwealth, and that he was raised more in the other culture. If Klein was living in Japan as a civilian, his friends that he games with are more likely to cluster ethnic Japanese. If he was living in Japan as a Marine, his friends are more likely Marines and hence probably have a wider distribution of ethnicities. Janet can see them, and guess from that.

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      1. >In this AU, yes,>
        Wait, Klein is military instead of an office worker in this AU? That’s going to be messy because Jack and co are going to try and work through him as he’s an adult, was in the armed forced etc etc. And he’s going to be going “No you need to work through Asuna, she’s the overall boss here.”

        And they’re not going to want to do that because his a teenager and just a civvie, what does she know?

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      2. And they are insulting her to heaven and back by dismissing her and that is going to get his hackles up. And Kirito’s. and Agil’s. And Fuurinkazan. And Argo. And Thinker and Yulier, who are another sticky couple who married in SAO but not IRL. And for guild leaders, how hard will it be to stop being in charge of their guilds?

        That’s one thing that gets me about LH return to earth fics, because they ignore the time difference and/or they don’t account for how the characters would absolutely have changed from before, because they ignore the twelve to one time. It’s a peeve. Because there is so much potential in have people missing for a year, only to return all grown up, and some of them are freaking out because they were married to a Lander who didn’t make the crossing, or people who are teenagers again, the same age as before the crossing, or they aren’t and are in fact a decade older then they should be…

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      3. I really would like more good LH returning to earth fics, yes. Especially since one of the things Shiroe’s worried about by the end of season 2 is how to handle people who just can’t adapt, flat out.

        Janet and the nurses made a decent impression. Jack not taking the person who chose to talk to them as seriously as he ought to… did not. Eep.

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      4. There seems to be two responses to Jack opening his mouth: you laugh at the sarcasm or you try to kill him. There is no gray area.

        Depending on how long it’s been since he got stranded and potentially left a pregnant not-wife behind, I may be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt about his mental state. The survivors have no way of knowing that and so won’t.

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  7. She’s too young to be commanding anyone!

    Even now I understand that there are a fair number of seventeen year olds enlisted.

    48 is around platoon size, and in extended conflicts there is a long history of sometimes very young people being promoted to effective command of them due to ability.

    Now, Janet is a Air Force, and maybe the wrong age for such to be on her radar. And thoughts can be full of visceral reactions that are not necessarily what one would conclude after studying the matter.

    Plus, Asuna’s commanding raids probably has major differences from commanding an infantry platoon in Vietnam or WWII.

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    1. Foolish. Good choice of word. I would say it would be something along theblines of pissing off the Dread One. Like you didn’t just take a crap on his lawn, you smeared it on his door and waited till he could get a good look at you and THEN mooned him. Just saying.

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  9. “Where’d your friend Kirigaya go?”

    Always a good question through seldom easy to answer.

    Because even his friends will tell you that Kirito is like subatomic particles – you can know where he was or where he’s going, not both.

    And I second that someone ought to remind Jack that they might not know each other by their real names. If you are lucky, their avatar name will contain elements of their real name like Kirito’s does but you will get some where it has nothing to do with it. And besides the fact that it is bad gamer etiquette to use someone’s real name (you are breaking character – plus you gave away personal info that person might not have wanted you to), they might have other reasons for not wanting to give out their real names to just anyone. And despite the stakes, you probably still find some hardcore role players in the SAO survivors.

    And Asuna might be too young to command anyone under normal circumstances but I think you can agree that she has NOT been in normal circumstances.

    Maybe it would help if they stopped considering them like teenagers and other civilians who were playing a game that turned nasty and treat them more like people who got stranded in a hostile alien world where it was either grown up, get skills, or die. And sometimes die even if you had all those things.

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    1. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on though. They knew mentally that the players were doing dangerous things. However they were also standing as custodians over helpless comatose patients. It’s hard to parse a vicious killer with a previously peaceful body.

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      1. Also, they don’t have information on the game beyond Beta and “many people dead”. It’s maybe been ten or fifteen minutes since the log off. And they don’t have the game names for folks, only the real names.

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