A Bit of Re:Rise Fanfic

~ crossovercreativechaos

Still flattened from getting paperwork filled out on Saturday, so… have a ficbit I’m hoping to finish soon. (My hope is that a small bit that’s not very plotty will get sore brain back into the groove to get back to the plotty stuff!)

Systems, Update

Summary: Going to Eldora changes you. He should have known it was too good to be a game.

It’s the avatars. Although they don’t know that until later. The avatars change everything.

GBN’s new update is everything the hype claimed. The VR worlds are more detailed. The sensation of having a physical body is more solid. More real; to the point that if Hiroto thinks about it, he can feel the pull of his avatar’s hair tie holding back dark blue strands.

It’s odd. Even a little distracting, at first – though not enough to interfere with his missions. Nothing ever is.

So if the temple Freddie had summoned them to seemed truly ancient, if the dimension seemed so painfully real, from the youngster’s hot-fur scent to the shattered moon with its belt of debris like white diamonds in the sky-

It was GBN’s first Story Mission. Of course the programmers would have put their hearts into making it perfect.

(So perfectly, breathtakingly imperfect; sand shifting underfoot to turn unwary ankles, Freddie’s half-stammered admission that maybe there weren’t twenty One-Eyes after all, the heart-stopping blue of the sky streaked with clouds. Eve had wanted to go beyond the galaxy. If any remnants of her electronic soul still lingered in GBN….

He has to look. He has to try.)

Not to mention they’d all been thrown out of the Mission almost the moment the first battle was over. Leaving him no chance to explore the new dimension. To look at that sky, and drink in that perfect, jewel-deep blue. There was no way he’d let that stand.

So he keeps going back, no matter how odd the Story turns.

After all, he has no reason not to.

I’m just a wanderer. So long as it takes all four of us to enter the Mission… I’ll wander with them.

At least, that’s how it starts.

Then, things… get subtly odder.

Little things. Like not being able to summon their Gunplas to a battlefield. Fortunately, they check that bit of game function before they try to defend the village.

It’s annoying, but Hiroto can see how that would add to the story part of the mission. It is, as Kazami might say, more Gundam-like. They can’t just zip in and out of Gunplas as they see fit. Like any UC Gundam soldier, they have to have their machine with them to pilot. Otherwise, they do a lot of walking.

Hiroto doesn’t mind the walking. After all, you can’t get physically tired in VR.

Except they do. A little. Which just makes it a better match for reality, if you can feel the burn from climbing yet another hill, and stop to catch your breath at the top. It’s worth feeling a little tired when he gets out of VR, for that sense of being there.

A/N: Re:Rise canon, injuries to the avatars on Eldora transfer to the players. Bunnies looked at that, and pointed out, exercise is a low-grade “injury”, that’s how you build muscles. So… that goes interesting places!

38 thoughts on “A Bit of Re:Rise Fanfic”

  2. Oooo! And if they never pick up on that, until suddenly they do, well. There are subtle differences that come from constant exercise. And if they never pick up on it…

    I do admit, I’m starting in Builders instead of Re:Rise, just easier to get to and it leads into the other. (It’s like the longest prologue ever.) And it is amazing the little hints that I’m picking up because I know it’s Isekai bound. But, I’m also scratching my head because the protagonists are not those you’ve mentioned. I really hope things will make sense when I’ve gotten that far…

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    2. All four series have different protagonists. Build Fighters is Reiji and Iori, I liked greatly. Build Fighters Try is the same continuity as the first, and has a fresh team of three.

      Divers starts with two friends, and slowly increases the core team.

      Re:Rise is same continuity as, a sequel to, and references Divers, but so far we are seeing the folks who were adults in that, I suppose so that they don’t have to update the designs of the middle schoolers and the JK. (I’m not sure if not updating designs/VAs is a deliberate stylistic choice, or a budget issue, but some lampshades were hung on it in some of the OVAs that showed up on Gundam info.)

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  3. a) 25 eps are up on the official Gundam Youtube channel, Gundaminfo.
    b) There’s also a load of stuff uploaded, and looking viewable. Gundam movies, Unicorn, two seasons of Iron Blooded Orphans, a new translation of Z…
    c) I’ve been slow and dysfunctional, haven’t finished watching yet. So I haven’t read the fic yet, and will probably hold off on reading it and commenting.
    d) Re:Rise is definitely spoilers for, and builds on, the first season of Divers. I’ve just seen the episode that gets into the thing about May that COQ did not want to spoil; it is foreshadowed if you have been paying careful attention, and have seen the previous season. I’m not sure how necessary the previous season is, it might not be.
    e) One of the commentators here, I forget if it was Solid Shark, commented on a theory that the two Build Fighters seasons, and the two Divers seasons, are not in the same continuity. I haven’t had time to investigate, but it looks like there might be a way to do so. Hinata’s boss in re:rise, and the Meijin’s friend in Build Fighters Try, have at least similarities of character design.
    f) Again, my theory is that there is a shared continuity that goes before build fighters. I’ve a vague memory that years ago, when I was still reading manga online, I saw a manga project involving Gunpla and a pre-angelic layer level battle system where the gunpla did not become animate.

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    2. That was me, yes. I admit I can’t prove they’re separate continuities, but the differences seem odd if they are supposed to be one and the same. The Gunpla game in Build Fighters is called Gunpla Battle, whereas in Divers the pre-GBN game is called GP Duel. Could’ve just been a competing game or something, but it seems strange to me to use a different one if there’s meant to be continuity.

      More tellingly, re-checking the one episode in Divers where GP Duel is directly used, the system refers to “PLA-NET Coating”, not “Plavsky particles”. Considering that Plavsky particles were a very big deal in Fighters–breaking a stadium by accidentally creating a stadium-sized replica of A Baoa Qu, anyone?–that would a _very_ peculiar change to make, IMO.

      Not saying it’s impossible they’re connected, but the evidence we see indicates–to me, at least–expy, rather than continuation. (For the record, I don’t mean to be argumentative, I’m just trying to clarify my position.)

      Oh, you’re correct that there was a prior Gunpla production of some kind. Mobile Suit Gunpla Builders Beginning G. I don’t know much about it, but it appears to have been what inspired the later Build Fighters, rather than being directly connected. From what TV Tropes says, it was more akin to Build Divers, except with a standard video game instead of VR.

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      1. I’m not trying to be argumentative either, and I don’t take you as being argumentative.

        I think it is an interesting puzzle, I’m not seeing any information yet which forces a conclusion, but I’m not quite excited enough by the problem to go grab everything and watch it agin carefully myself.

        Anyway, one of the supplemental materials apparently claimed that Turn A was the chronologically last Gundam Series, and that all the others happened before it. I find it interesting that build fighters and build divers, etc, are definitely exceptions to this. I’m a little curious whether Sunrise has internal discipline enough to know whether and how everything fits together, or if each of the timelines has people ‘throw stuff together’, and Sunrise could produce a traditional Gundam that does not fit into Turn A.

        There are some properties where the canonical contradictions mean I feel to pick and choose from canon, and there are some properties where I don’t really care what the official canon is. It is a little interesting that I still care about Gundam, despite having no intention of watching NT dubbed in English, etc.

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      3. Though, I’ve actually come around to the different continuities theory just now, but for a different reason. Or two.

        Build Fighters, at least the second season, establishes a ‘Gunpla is freedom’ ideology.

        Build Divers, is much more regulated. Several items in the second season jump out, but the first season seems to be the same; The gameworld pays attention to traditional Gundam canon, and allows for less of the individual variation of BF and BFT.

        I may be wrong, but it seems like the Bearguy kit was a result of the first season of Build Fighters. If the build divers game sticks to Gundam canon, the bearguys in the Build Divers game may imply that Build Fighters is fiction in Build Divers.

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  4. I’m actually going to have to watch a gundam show now, aren’t I? This looks nice, though as you yourself said there’s not a lot of meat to it yet. But you write some really good into another world stuff, so I’m gonna be hopeful.

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  5. I have no familiarity with this show and am only posting because I have a fanfic question and therefore, this is loosely:

    How off-the-books are Dr. Ishida’s visits with Hei? I can imagine there are two versions of his chart because the billing department can’t very well be allowed to see the one that mentions the supernatural.

    This came because I finally realized I could write a story about that if I figured that out or someone told me.

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      1. When you wrote this, I instantly thought of Dr. Procrastinator, who wasn’t a physician and didn’t have doctorate and she would. Make us. WAIT. For her to enter her handwritten psychotherapy notes into eCW.

        eCW stands for eClinicalWorks, the electronic health records software the healthcare facility where I work uses. When you generate an appointment, you generate a blank progress note (progress note=unit of chart devoted to patient encounter) with a skeleton of headings with things like the chief complaint, which is probably filled in by the provider for them in this system, and the billing notes, which can be plopped in directly from the appointment window and are invisible from the progress notes windows once the note has been locked. Not to mention everything in-between. Those are at the top and bottom of the chart, respectively.

        I can still remember glaring at the screen as I saw that only those two things were filled out. Especially since I had to get past a breakglass to do that. Every. Time. I wanted to check to see what to fill in the empty claim with. I had to type in a justification like, “pnote review” to get past the breakglass without looking like I’d read it for no good reason. I’m not aware of EHR software that will stop you as you type, “adfdasfa” out of frustration instead.

        As a billing and coding analyst, I have to do this, and familiarize myself with breakglasses surrounding employees’ accounts.

        One of them had a real doozy. We could enter her name into the Patient Lookup, see an entry, click on it, and get told that to get past the hub–which had a picture of her on it, by the way–we’d have to contact an administrator.

        The actual administrator couldn’t do anything because the culprit was a coworker who was furious over our lackadaisical attitude towards patient privacy and wouldn’t take “we need to get her claims out the door” for an answer or even tell me what was done wrong. The employee wanted her to stop, too.

        Back to the fanfic: I have only begun to scratch the surface of how healthcare is reimbursed in Japan.

        It started by accident when I decided to one of the Lori’s Story lessons at JPod101. It had her visit the doctor and wonder what a hokenshou was. That’s a Japanese health insurance card, by the way. The podcast also said that foreigners have to get them to avoid being billed astounding fees.

        If the following means anything, then healthcare facilities in Japan have to send stuff classifiable as claims to whatever their payer is that will indicate what was treated and what treatment was provided:

        Click to access 279_291.pdf

        The preceding means that they use diagnosis-related groups for their acute care hospitals like we do. These facilities, in the US, at least, have to send out claims to get paid. At least, that’s how being reimbursed on a per-diem basis works when you’re an FQHC-lookalike like my facility. If it’s Kancare, it’s always going to be $166.01, for instance.

        That said, there’s a lot of crap in that article. Like not explaining that DRGs, in the US, at least, came with DRG maximization until the US Justice Department cracked down on that in starting in 1993. They realized that most Medicare Part A claims for pneumonia specified it as high risk so they’d get reimbursed at a higher rate.

        My source for that bit about DRG maximization is an old coding school book that I threw out recently because it was over ten years out of date. I don’t remember the title.

        Maybe Ishida could just make his notes short, to the point, and not lies. I can’t think of anything else besides either that or a secret chart.

        Or maybe he could do the equivalent of what it turns out you have to do to code treating someone for getting their foot caught in a bear trap in the US.

        You see, you can code, with the ICD-10-CM, exactly what injuries the foot sustained, where the patient was when the injury occurred, and in what capacity the patient was there, but the section where you find codes along the lines of “hit by bus whilst a pedestrian on a sidewalk” doesn’t have anything just for bear traps so you have to settle for “Contact with unspecified machinery.”

        I have no idea exactly what goes on a Japanese insurance claim. I just know it’s not ICD-10-CM, ICD-10-PCS, CPT, or HCPCS codes. In fact, only the US uses the ICD-10 for medical billing purposes.

        I also don’t know what their equivalent of HIPAA is.

        One more thing: did I miss an answer to the question of how Dr. Ishida reacted to an honest description of Hei’s diet? I’m asking because after years of reading progress notes regarding overweight over-eaters, I shudder to think what would happen to Hei if he had someone normal controlling his diet at an inpatient facility.

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      2. I’m not worrying about strict medical coding. Karakura already messes with that given how many people are injured by Hollows.

        As for diet – Dr. Ishida is familiar with people who use a lot of spirit power. Hei uses lightning. Ishida’s not at all surprised he has an appetite.

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      3. You know, in the past, I have found that eCW is perfectly happy with just the injury being coded without the cause, location, or what you were doing. If you just put down, “bitten by a dog,” the claim won’t go through.

        It was my professors who said I had to add that other stuff.

        There’s no way a precise code could be used, anyway.

        I am starting to wonder to what Mrs. Sasajima thinks. Japan expects your doctor to your employer whether you’re fat. I am taking this to mean Ishida would either have to tell her or lie.

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      4. I honestly don’t know why you’re fixating on this, but given it’s not important for story purposes, I do not intend to touch the subject.

        Not to mention part-time employees tend to skate under the radar for a lot of things.

        FYI, if you’re going to leave comments on a post, it’s polite to have them refer to the post itself. Going off on a completely unrelated tangent is annoying.

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  6. Heh. Sounds like this Hiroto would love a Gundam game as made by Kayaba Akihiko. Leave out the death game aspects, and the level of detail Aincrad got being applied to GBN would be right up Hiroto’s alley.

    ‘Course, that’s kinda what he got, in a way. Including, possibly, the “death” part. Though I notice the series never did really answer the question of what would happen if they were shot down while in Eldora. Shido Masaki’s situation wasn’t quite the same thing (what with his real body flatlining while his avatar wasn’t quite in lethal danger).

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    1. The series didn’t answer it directly, no, but given ep 9 and 10 serious injury does translate over, and that implies the possibility of a bad enough hit being fatal.

      Shido… my headcanon? Everyone who visits Eldora is running one mind in two bodies. It’s likely that every one of the DiVERs is effectively in a coma as long as they’re “on the mission” – there’s “no one home” in their original bodies. Hiroto and the others can just transfer back and “wake up”, and no one notices.

      But their minds are still somehow linked to their original bodies, and Alus “wedged” Shido’s into his avatar so it couldn’t log out. And… I’m not entirely sure his avatar wasn’t in lethal danger. He was fighting the mind control. We don’t know how Alus did that, but it can’t have been healthy. I could see fighting the control being possibly fatal.

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      1. Sounds like the .hack series and the concept of “liminality”–except making a heck of a lot more sense, since the technology involved in Re:Rise really does appear to be capable of that. (I’ve probably written essays by now on why I don’t think .hack makes sense.) That does seem to fit with how Re:Rise depicts things. Kind of a pity that we never seem to get an outside look at the real bodies of anyone logged in, other than Shido.

        And yeah, good point about the potential lethality of fighting the mind control. To quote The Matrix, “The body cannot live without the mind.”

        It does beg the question, though, of exactly how much oversight there is of the VR technology. Even without Eldora making things real, you’d think there’d be some regulation of technology that essentially renders the user temporarily comatose. While I suppose it just might not be within the series’ scope to worry about that, it still strikes me as odd. Sword Art Online at least goes into great detail about controversies and safety features, but I suppose it might just be down to those details being relevant to that series’ plot lines, whereas Re:Rise is more concerned with giant robot action.

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  7. I admit I wrote off the Builders/Divers series, as I guess not “being serious enough”, but then I find the “real” Gundam series to be too full of carnage, grimdark, sociopathic/psychopathic characters, and frequently a dearth of a positive future. While Builders strikes me as too much like sports anime, which tends not to interest me much (though “Run with the Wind” caught my eye), I might give it and Divers/Re:Rise a closer look…

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    1. It is definitely has various genre features of sports anime and ‘cardboard/plastic ad copy’. Which are genres I like.

      It also has a lot of the good qualities of regular Gundam. What it lacks is the political worldbuilding stuff.

      Which in my opinion is often a weak point of traditional Gundam, I tend to prefer ignoring the political talk, and focusing on the explosions.

      Though, I would argue that the traditional Gundam worldbuilding is the result one would expect from letting the technocrats and the futurists have too much say in how society functions. 🙂 Real world societies are more mixed, and that makes it more difficult to achieve that degree of horrible. The different flavors of lunatic often enough cancel out.

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  8. Something that definitely doesn’t get enough attention in stories: footing.

    Imagine the swordsman charging across an empty field at top speed?
    I wouldn’t recommend it.
    Even if you don’t step in a gopher hole, tall grass has a surprising amount for drag/friction and it can occasionally twist into a spontaneous snare around your foot.

    Now imagine being on a slope, with wet grass, or crumbling ancient steps, or rocks.
    It should be a lot more common to have the fighters flopping around on the ground in combat.

    Now imagine a VR game that not only allows, but encourages people to flip around doing parkour, without any stretching, and they develop reflexes that *really* don’t apply to the real world.
    “Why are you in the hospital again?”
    “Did you know that old handrails sometimes wobble?”

    Notably, the story “This Quest is Bullshit” on Royal Road does pay attention to footing, with the MC having high mobility… and a reputation for falling on her face.

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    1. Oh trust me, I could go on for hours about my own head canon on VR and muscle memory. So far, Bofuri is the only one that’s done anything with it. If SAO had been what I’d thought it was, I like to think it would have gone there, especially because Kayaba was so dedicated to making his world real.

      …I really, really, really missed the romance story aspect of SAO until the marriage proposal. It’s a talent.

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      2. The SAO anime and presumably LN/Manga does give something of a nod to “muscle memory/ingrained reactions” that were instilled in the players through the forced long-term VR immersion. Kirito as the POV character, remarks at times over having to supress the behaviors he’d aquired in SAO.

        There’s also the sparring match with his sister in the dojo, where he soon comes up on his physical limits as a convalescent, and physics as a whole, when using his “Aincrad style” vs his sister’s Kendo.

        In the arc playing the VRMMO Shooter, he does his reflexive flourish with his laser sword.

        Also, in the LN post Ballet of Bullets/Sinon’s arc and post Ordinal Scale for the anime, when Johhny Black (Laughing Coffin) attacks Kazuto and Asuna on the street one night after visiting the Dicey Cafe, Kirito instinctively tries to draw a sword, as he registers the threat. He then uses his umbrella to stab Johnny in the leg. Alas, Johnny uses poison/muscle relaxant, which was more effective, setting things up for the Alicization Arc.

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    2. Real life shows that “charging across the field” was done by many groups. Yes, there were also accidents, but sometimes the calculation comes out “it’s worth the risk”. Of course, the records also show that sometimes the calculation was made, but when the action was taken it turned out to have been wrong.

      Also, as a separate note there, what you’re used to affects how risky something is. Some people can run/dance/etc in high heels, because they’re used to it, but you put someone else who isn’t used to it into high heels and they’ll be tripping all over the place even on good surfaces, despite being normally more graceful and agile than the one who was used to high heels. And that’s ignoring how the equipment you’ve got may affect it. I can run on mountainsides with loose rocks everywhere, as long as I’m barefoot, but the last time I twisted my ankle (not badly, I still caught myself in time so it only left me walking gingerly for a couple hours) was running in that same terrain while wearing sneakers, because the sneakers damped my ability to feel what was under my feet without being able to protect my ankle like hiking boots would have.

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      2. One classic example where footing mattered (and was part of the calculation) was the Battle of Marathon. Both sides calculated the risk, and it turned out to be worth it for the one, and really bad for the other.

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      3. There is a lot of variation in “charge.”
        Depending on the troops, armament, and formation, a “charge” on foot would often be a slow jog by civilian standards.

        Modern troops, with firearms, often move faster simply because they are rushing from cover to cover individually.
        If they trip and fall, then they just “take cover” at their new impromptu location.

        Now imagine this.
        You were part of a shield wall.
        You were pushing, hitting, being hit, for a while.
        The ground is churned up and muddy.
        Your sword is a blunted, notched, lump of metal.
        You are bruised, exhausted, and limping.
        The line is messy, and you see an enemy (if you can tell the difference,) what do you do?

        Anime: You both pose carefully. You wait. A leaf falls. You vanish! …and appear behind them. A dozen glowing sword slashes appear on their body and they fall with a dramatic wail.

        RL: You shuffle forward carefully and flop at each other menacingly. Let the one with better endurance win.

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      5. While that may happen too, I think you’re going too far in the opposite direction just to “not be making this mistake”, and thus making the mirror mistake. Yes, we have lots of records of people in various battles (and other fights) throughout history doing the “shuffle and flop” you just described. We _also_ have lots of records of other people in similar situations managing to actually get a respectable charge going, and actually managing to avoid plastering themselves across the ground in the process. You’re right to call out the anime end as being exaggerated, but don’t make the mistake of exaggerating in the opposite direction as overcompensation.

        Also, for a related thing, don’t forget that endurance hunting isn’t _slow_, just because it’s not “full speed sprint”. It still has to be fast enough that you catch up with the animal before it’s had a chance to recover, so generally still involves some degree of running (or maybe a better term would be “loping”). Check out the Tarahumara who participated in the Boston Marathon, and competed favorably there. Sure, some plenty of people were faster than them, but it still goes to show that “slow” is a relative term there.

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    3. A number of contemporary sci-fi/fantasy series in print, with significant military/combat segments, make a point of giving some focus to footing as significant factor in the events. That even a small creek has tactical significance, because of how difficult it becomes to navigate a bit of terrain a few people might navigate with ease, becomes a significant obstacle when you have hundreds (or thousands) of people involved, with slippery mud getting churned up, bodies of the dead and wounded underfoot, the literal “fog of war” of dust and/or gun smoke.

      That formations of combat troops mounted or on foot, have to plan the pace of their approach, lest they be exhausted before they even reach the enemy lines. So, all those endless charges across open terrain we see in videomovies never happened in that way, unless it was by inexperienced/poorly led or trained forces.

      Which at times meant marching stolidly through the carnage, when the enemy had weapons that out ranged yours, or you couldn’t fire back without expending your weapons, and/or fatally slowing your advance.

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      1. True, tho that bit about “which a few people might navigate with ease” is significant here, since the original comment was in regards to _individuals_ getting “bad habits” from the game, and thinking they can do parkour (or even just run across a grassy field). And while it is true that a large army may not be able to do that without turning the field to mud, that’s specifically because of how many of them there are tromping through it. An individual may be able to do it just fine.

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  9. I recall a scene from one of “The Culture” books, “Consider Phlebas” or “Use of Weapons” I think, that had a side character rjn fatally afoul of ingrained habits. The character in question was quite used to using Anti-Grav devices in getting around over terrain, but then the party visited an Orbital Ring, where the ship landing platforms were open to the atmospheric envelope. He thought he’d clever and just jump over the side, to bypass the elevators or whatever system was used to access the “ground levels”. Unfortunately, centrifugal “gravity” has nothing to do with mass based gravity… The character had plenty of time on the way down to reflect on his life choices.

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    1. Ironically, the character likely wouldn’t have made the same mistake if the orbital construct in question would have been something like an O’Neill Cylinder, or a Bernal Sphere, where access is usually through a zero-g/free-fall section, that might have given him environmental stimuli to adjust his behavior patterns, even if he were to charge off ahead.

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