Chapter Two

A Chapter by Karnas9

David's new friends learn that he is stepbrother to the popular Kobayashi girls. After school, they create characters to play in Alpha World, Wil's post-apocalyptic sci-fi RPG.

David had been hanging out with his new friends for almost a week now, every lunchtime, and usually going to someone's house after school to play Starchase. It was lunchtime on Friday, and they sat together at the edge of the commons again.
"Guys," Wil said suddenly. "Guys. Guys." His voice rose in pitch, clearly excited. "It's Miko Kobayashi!"
"Wil has a mad crush on Miko Kobayashi," Walker told David.
"Guys," Wil said, "she's coming over here."
That got their attention. All four looked in the direction Wil faced, and David saw that Miko was indeed approaching them, wearing her usual fashionable school clothes and carrying a tote bag, smiling warmly.
"Hi, David!" she called to him as she came close. "Are these your new friends?" Four pairs of eyes turned on David, who said "Nee-san, hi. Yes, these are my friends. This is Mike, Walker, Ben, and Wil." He gestured to each as he named them. "Guys, Miko is my stepsister."
Shocked silence from all four. Wil's eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head.
"Hajimemashite," Miko said to the four, bowing slightly. "It's good to see David making friends. Yumi and I worried about him being alone all the time."
"Ha- hajimemashite, Kimiko-senpai!" Wil stammered, bowing much lower than Miko had.
"Jesus, Wil, get a grip," Walker muttered to him.
"Just Miko, please, Wil." Miko smiled even more broadly. "You don't have to call me 'senpai'. Are you in David's Japanese class?"
"Wil and Ben both are," David told her.
Miko nodded. "Well, it's nice to meet you all. See you around." She turned and walked away. David's friends all stared at him.
"Dude," Mike said. "Way to bury the lead."
"You live with Miko and Yumi?" Wil's voice had risen to a squeak.
"I told you I had sisters," David said defensively.
"You never said they were the Kobayashi sisters!" Mike accused.
"Yeah, that's pretty major," Ben said.
"David." Walker's voice was calm, and he gazed at David with a neutral expression. "Explain, please."
"My dad met their mom in in Tokyo three years ago on a business trip," David told them. "They fell in love, got married last summer, and they all moved in with us. Not much else to tell."
"Not much..." Ben began. "You live with two of the hottest, most popular girls at school, and that's 'not much'?"
"Words fail," Wil groaned.
"Guys, they're my sisters. They have their own thing going on, with their own friends."
"But you live with them," Wil said. "In your house."
"Again, sisters," David repeated.
"Step-sisters," Mike clarified, grinning. "They're not your blood."
Walker held up a hand. "Mike, let's cool it with that talk."
David didn't care for the implications of Mike's grin. "Mike, let me write you a reality check that you can take to the bank: in the real world, hot stepsisters don't throw themselves at their horny stepbrothers. That only happens in porn."
"I'm just saying," Mike shrugged. "It's a classic trope."
"That's just it," Walker told him. "It's a trope, something that happens in stories. And you're being disrespectful to David, and to the girls."
Mike looked contrite at that. "Sorry, David."
"So what's it like living with them, then?" Wil pressed.
"Like I said, they have other friends they hang out with. But as I also said, we do brother-sister stuff like watch movies or play games. Miko likes video games, so we play together on the Playstation. Yumi's really into music, especially heavy metal, so we listen together. Her favorite bands are Nightwish and Within Temptation, but I've just recently started turning her on to old jazz fusion from the seventies."
They stared at him, and he realized that he'd just blown their collective minds. "What?"
Wil looked at David with new respect. "So you've been sitting here all alone, reading sci-fi, and all along you've had Miko and Yumi Kobayashi at home to hang with? No wonder you didn't need us."
Mike looked slightly disappointed. "But why don't you hang out with them at school? They're like celebrities here."
David shrugged. "They have their own friends. They don't need me tagging along. Besides, I don't feel comfortable in that crowd. Jocks and popular girls... no thanks." He nodded to Walker. "You know what I mean."
Walker nodded back. "I do."
"You're, like, a cool geek hero," Wil murmured.
"Don't make it weird," David said. "They're just my sisters."
"I can totally see that," Mike said. "But they're also totally hot. It's only natural for us to think about it."
"Mike," Walker's voice carried a warning tone.
David sighed. "Look, they're not just hot girls. They're good people. And they're my family. So let's drop it, okay?"
The group nodded, understanding. Walker clapped David on the back. "You're right, man. Sorry about Mike." He shot a glare at his friend. "He's a good guy, he's just... sixteen, you know?"
"Aren't we all," David agreed. "So, who's house are we playing at today?"
"How about yours?" Wil suggested.
David glared at him. "Miko and Yumi probably won't be there. Still want to go to my house?"
"We were going to Ben's house," Walker said, "and as far as I know, that's still the plan." Ben nodded.
"Okay, guys," David said, "We can play at my house. Not today, but next week. You understand, though," he added, "you're on your own getting home. I can't drive you back to Kingsgate."
"No problem," Mike said. "We know you live near Walker. We can manage. One of our parents can get us."
"Okay, then," David said. "Monday at my house, then."
"Guys," Wil interjected, "I've got Alpha World ready to go. We can start playing tomorrow, as soon as we roll your characters."
"Awesome," David said. "What do we need to know before we roll?"
"Not much," Wil said. "Just decide whether you want to be a human, a mutated human, or a mutated animal. Mutants have special powers but also might have defects, and humans have other advantages."
"Privileges, you mean," Walker said.
Wil was taken aback by this, but then nodded. "As you say," he conceded. "Anyway, I thought we could get the character generation done this afternoon. I know the plan was to play Starchase, but if we could wrap up the preliminaries today, we can start the actual game tomorrow at my house."
"I'm down for that," Walker said. "Shouldn't take more than an hour or so, right? We can still play a game or two of Starchase after."
The others agreed, and it was settled.

After school they piled into David's car and he drove them all to Ben's house. They gathered at the gaming table, but instead of Ben bringing out the Starchase set, Wil produced a couple of notebooks and a bag of dice.
"Okay, ready?" he asked. "Remember, you can be a normal human, a mutated human, or a mutated animal of your choice."
David and Walker elected to be humans, Ben a mutated human, and Mike a mutant badger.
"You two are brothers," Wil told David and Walker. "Your family name is Greenfield. What are your first names?"
"Emil," Walker said.
"And I'm... Pilgor," David decided.
"Okay then, Emil and Pilgor Greenfield." Wil pondered for a moment, then continued: "You're both young men. Emil, you are a man in full, almost halfway into your twentieth year which is what your people consider the age of adulthood. Pilgor, you have just recently turned eighteen and are considered still a boy, but on the cusp of manhood. Roll your stats."
David rolled three regular six-sided dice for each of his attributes, which Wil allowed him to assign as he liked rather than keeping them in the order rolled. Wil also had him re-roll any die that came up a one, ensuring that no score would be lower than six.
Pilgor Greenfield ended up with high strength and intelligence, slightly better than average dexterity, average constitution and radiation resistance, and slightly lower-than-average mental resistance. Walker's character Emil had high intelligence, constitution, and dexterity, with lower scores in the rest, but nothing lower than a 7, which was his strength score.
Next Ben rolled stats for his character "Dar," plus a four-sided die for physical and mental mutations, getting a two for each. "Pick from these lists," Wil told him, "or if you have another idea, tell me and I'll say if it's acceptable."
Ben selected increased strength and tough armored hide as his physical mutations. For mental powers he chose illusion generation and mental cloak. He could cause others to see, hear, and even smell things that weren't actually there, and he could likewise make them not see things that were.
"Okay, now I choose your defects," Wil told him. "Your physical handicap is that you have no sensory nerve endings. You can't feel anything physical."
"So I'm immune to pain?" Ben asked.
"Yes, but it's not such a blessing as you might think. You can be attacked from behind and not even know it, or take other injuries unaware."
Ben nodded. "Okay. So what's my mental defect?"
Wil considered it. "Fear response. You're afraid of..." he paused for thought, "...birds. At the mere sight of anything with feathers, you flee in terror."
"Bird phobic, huh? Okay, I guess I have to live with it."
Last came Mike's turn. "I'm a badger," Mike said. "My name is Longclaw."
He also rolled two physical and two mental mutations. "I'll give you heightened intellience for free," Wil told him. "One of the games I used as a resource to craft Alpha World required players of mutated animals to use one of their picks on it, but I'm not so rigid. We'll just grant that you have human-level intelligence, and you still get two mental mutations of your choice."
"I'll take increased size and speed for the physicals," Mike said, "and telepathy and telekinesis for the mentals."
"Okay, you're about three times the size of a regular badger - about a hundred pounds or so," Wil said. "Your natural claws and teeth are formidable weapons, but you probably won't be able to handle any artifacts - no swords or guns for you.
"Your physical defect is poor vision," he continued. "You can't clearly see anything that's more than fifteen feet away. And your mental handicap is a complete mental block. You can't interact with, or even see..." again he thought for a moment, "...cats. Any kind of cats, they just don't exist to you. They can literally be tearing you apart and you won't notice them."
"Well, I hope we don't run into very many cats, then," Mike said. "But now I'm sure you're going to have some cat encounters just for me."
"Don't worry, Longclaw," Ben said, "I'll have your back. I'll keep the cats off you."
"All right then," Will concluded. "You have your characters. Now in Alpha World, most humans don't like mutants, they consider them monsters. So you'll start out as two separate groups that will have to meet up. Tomorrow we'll begin with Walk- I mean, Emil and Pilgor, the Greenfield brothers."
He tucked his notebooks and the new character sheets away, and nodded to Ben. "All right, let's play Starchase." Ben brought out the game and began setting it up.

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