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Rinko and Ako had rediscovered an old sandbox game lately and tried to get everybody on-board playing it. They had successfully gotten Lisa hooked after the latter found that it was possible to make cookies in-game too, amongst many other recipes. The whole crafting aspect was right up Lisa’s alley. Sayo was more in it for building stupid things in creative mode, because, well…Sayo was a constructive person – she couldn’t leave things in disarray, even if they were just a cluster of digital pixels called “nodes”. While Yukina was interested too (she wouldn’t admit it, however), she was too unskilled for this sort of thing to get very far. On survival mode, she would die within three seconds, either falling off a cliff or drowning in the nearest body of water or somehow walking into the spawning spot for an exploding cactus. Even on creative mode, she could manage to get herself stuck forever in quicksand. And so, Yukina settled instead for watching Sayo play this evening. Sayo decided to start a new world so Yukina could have fun offering her input.
Their character spawned in a jungle river valley. Two steps ahead was a steep incline up a narrow mountain, a short ways behind them was a meandering river. Sayo couldn’t remember who it was – probably Ako – who had once brought up the hypothetical situation of what would happen were Roselia to be stuck in the Amazon. They decided that Ako and Sayo would be hunters (Sayo stressed again that she was skilled in archery as an art form and that it had little to do with shooting actual moving beasts in the wild), Rinko would make their clothes out of leaves and whatnot, Lisa would cook their meals, and Yukina would…stay in their hut and try not to get lost. Maybe it was that indignant conversation that caused Yukina to point at the monitor with a frown.
“Sayo, this is not a good place to build.”
Reasons aside, Sayo agreed. Sayo preferred biomes with more varied vegetation, like apple trees and strawberries and…potatoes. Even though on creative mode she had access to all the different food nodes, she still liked to farm potatoes the old way, and craft them into fries. Part of the fun of the game was to see how many chests of fries she could fill. She had once built a house entirely of stacked chests of fries. It was secretly her favourite world.
Sayo walked their player downstream along the river. It was more jungle and river and jungle and river, and it had started raining, the plop plop background sound grew in intensity. Yukina looked like the virtual rain offended her. As such, Sayo decided to cheat a little. It wasn’t as though turning off damage at the start wasn’t already a cheat anyway. She granted herself the privilege of moving fast and flying.
“Ooh…” Yukina muttered, seemingly impressed when their character lifted into the skies. Though it was just a world of pixels, the view was rather breathtaking. The narrow valley dropped beneath their feet and now they could clearly make out the height of the slender, vined jungle trees and the bends of the river, its width variable as it proceeded downstream. They followed a tributary to its mouth where it merged with a large body of water – the game’s equivalent of an ocean.
“What about here?” Sayo asked Yukina whether this was a good place to build. The seaside was considerably drier. Actually, much drier, as the beach was barren and the hills backing it were brown with little else other than magic mushrooms. It was considerably flat and would be easy to build on though, but Yukina was unimpressed.
“Let’s cross the ocean.”
“Adventurous as always, Minato-san.”
Sayo pressed the up arrow key and they advanced towards the spotless horizon. The yellow square that symbolized the late afternoon sun was descending, its light fading to darken the game window. Sayo used another cheat to change the time back to 6 am in the morning. She didn’t need to be a second Yukina – that was how Yukina had managed to get stuck in the “unlimited quicksand works” last time.
They came across some small islands here and there before reaching a new continent. Sayo liked this one. There were sunken ships offshore littered amongst coral reefs. The beach blended into flat meadows that transitioned to rolling hills with deciduous forests full of fruits and flowers. Perfect place for her potato farm.
“Let’s go higher,” Yukina said.
“Eh?” Sayo was reluctant, especially knowing that her favourite crop would drop off in availability above the tree line. “But this mapgen correlates altitude with temperature, so the mountaintops are rather uninteresting…”
Such was the game’s strange geographical rules. You couldn’t question the reason why some things were surprisingly reflective of real-life while others were just ridiculous.
Yukina didn’t seem to care either way though.
“We are Roselia, Sayo. We aim only for the highest.”
Sayo chuckled. “Well, if you say so…”
Sayo moved up along the tallest hill, which ran into a mountain range. They flew taller still, right up to the very top where there was perpetual snow and the peaks jabbed out from the clouds. The colours were sombre, the whites of snow, browns and blues of frozen dirt, sprinkled with purple-cored frost trees, pale crystal spikes, and surreal-looking healing trees bearing golden fruits. Sayo picked the nearest mountain top to land and proceeded to clear it out. “What should we build first?” she asked as she did so.
“A balcony. Right there with a view of the valley.”
“Sounds like a great idea.”
Sayo started laying out the floorboards. They first went with “seastone”, which was white with dark grey marble-like patterns. It looked good on their inventory but spreading it over a large surface gave it too much complexity that it was honestly a little dizzying to look at. Yukina might have also mumbled something about it being “Mitake-san’s garage aesthetics”. Or it could’ve been “garbage aesthetics” – Yukina was using the English term and Sayo wasn’t sure if she heard it right. They then tried the far more mundane cobblestone, but that just looked like the floor of a jailcell, so they decided on a wooden texture instead for a more homey feel. They first tried the light-coloured aspen wood to match the snow. It looked boring. Then they went with a bolder reddish-brown acacia, which surprisingly matched the purplish-blue frost wood fencing Sayo put up at the edges. Agreeing with Yukina on this colour scheme, Sayo began work decorating the balcony - she dug a hearth in its center, lined with the seastone they had ditched earlier, and encased it in glass. On either side they put some furnishings, tables with a lantern on top and chairs on the sides. Yukina at first wanted just two chairs, imagining the home for the both of them only Sayo supposed, but Sayo reminded her that they should save some seats for the rest of the Roselia members as guests. Seeing as five was an odd number and Sayo didn’t like the dissymmetry of their otherwise perfect balcony, she added a sixth…for Hina, she supposed.
“Sayo,” Yukina called as Sayo was about to get started on the house proper.
“What is it?”
“The balcony needs some plants.”
They were far above the tree line and the only things that grew were “frost trees” and “healing trees” – things that didn’t exist in the real world. Sayo wasn’t sure if planting anything else would grow on the ice soil.
“What kind would you like?” Sayo asked anyway.
“Blue roses.”
Sayo searched their inventory. No such thing existed. The closest was the blue geranium and planting a single one into each snow-covered node looked miserable. Sayo texted Rinko for a solution, and Rinko suggested a furnishings mod that gave potted geraniums instead. They restarted the game with the new mod and filled the dirt just below their balcony edge with them.
“How is that?” Sayo asked.
Yukina nodded with satisfaction.
“The impossible made possible. I like it.”
The balcony took surprisingly long to build – then again, Sayo was a noob in the game unlike the likes of Rinko and Ako who had been able to rebuild a pixel version of Hogwarts on survival mode. By midnight, reality time, they had finally made progress on the main house, at least put up some pale blue ice blocks as the walls with pillars of glowstone that looked rather spectacular in the dark. Yukina seemed to love it. It might be a little flashy for Sayo’s personal preferences, but if it was for Yukina, then she found it acceptable. After all, Yukina was a diva, born to stand on the stage – having a bit of that aesthetic for their virtual home was suitable. Yukina called it “fleeting”. Since when did she learn that term from Seta Kaoru?
It was getting late, but Sayo liked the look of their house so much that she decided to push on just a little further – they had an off-day tomorrow anyway. Yukina said that she wanted the space next to the balcony furnished as a sitting area and Sayo agreed. It would be a shame not to take advantage of the view offered by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that Yukina had suggested. At first, Yukina was quite interested in picking items to furnish the area – a TV set for watching concert DVDs, bookshelves for Sayo, a glass box with bronze edges to serve as their coffee table with low cushions instead of chairs around it to sit on, and Yukina’s strongly-requested wool carpet. It took a while to place the carpet though; after several minutes of Yukina saying “ah” to every mistaken placement that Sayo had to fix, she became silent and leaned onto Sayo’s side from where she was curled up on the couch. When Sayo finally finished patterning the carpet to satisfaction, she noticed Yukina had fallen asleep.
“Minato-san, let’s go to bed now. You’ll catch a cold if you sleep out here.”
At Sayo’s gentle pats on her back, Yukina shifted awake and rubbed the sleep away from her eyes to pretend to have been attentive this whole time. “Have you done placing the carpet?”
“I have. Do you want to see?”
Yukina turned to face the monitor where the game was still running, the player avatar standing still at the edge of the now fully-furnished sitting area. Everything looked beautiful – well, as beautiful as pixelated items could look anyway – but Yukina probably loved the carpet the most, seeing as Sayo had patterned it like a calico cat.
Yukina touched a finger to the screen to trace the cat ears, then relaxed back into Sayo’s arms.
“Do you like it?” Sayo asked.
“Cute,” she answered with a smile.