@TGS

The things you have to know about TGS are as follows: 1. The booths for the good games are always busy and unless you know someone who worked on them or are willing to shove people aside, you're in for a long, long, long wait. 2. The booths for less publicized games are almost as crowded and the ones crowding them are usually snobs who think they're cool because the game they're crowding isn't as publicized as others. 3. The girls working those booths do NOT want to talk to you and they're not gamers. Most don't even fake it well. They're beautiful and the people putting on TGS will pay them for it. It was this or a different con that wants random good-looking women walking around. At most, they've played Tetris or something. And 4, they have small demos for things that should have it's own show.

Thats what I see right now. Its like a big tower connected to smaller pod things. For some reason, I kept finding myself walking by it so I decided to hang out and take a look. From a distance. A few other people are interested too and some stop to ask the creator (who could have easily been one of the girls in thing to know #3) about it. By the time they walk away, their eyes are practically crossed and they seem to be in a slight daze. That must be one complicated machine; the look of it alone is repelling casual onlookers. The woman by it looks a bit disappointed and bored, so I decide to pay her a visit. My presence doesn't change her mood.

I ask her about it and she gives me a vague answer. "Its virtual reality," she says. She must have dumbed down the answer, which both insults and relieves me. "Wanna give it a try?" If she can explain things like the workings of VR to people without batting an eye, it probably works. "Sure," I tell her. At her instructions, I get into a pod and it closes. Seconds later, a very cheerful young blond girl greets me and welcomes me to 'Gacha Gacha', asking me to choose what I want to do. The menu has various adventures of a violent nature and dating. I'm not really a violent person, so I choose dating.

The create-your-date menu is very extensive. Given the limited number of options for what I wanted to do, I thought this was a prototype or an incomplete version, but the choices are mind-boggling! Six hundred hair options, over twenty times that in available clothing; types of eyes i'd never seen; and an age range of 10-150. Body types you could alter manually! This is an impressive game! Swallowing hard, I create for myself a virtual Sakura-sensei, or I try to. I can't quite get the right eyes/glasses combo, and the curve of her hips is just slightly off. The virtual-me, which is very detailed and accurate in it's own right, tells my 'hostess' that I can't find what I want, and suddenly everything gets fuzzy. Not like static, just really unclear.

A sharp jolt of electricity causes the real me to jump up. The loud BANG on the pod cover causes the woman to open it and let me out, along with a headache and a string of mumbled swears. After I tell her what happened (leaving out who I was trying to make, of course), she only sighs and says 'jeez, again?'. I start to leave but my vision suddenly goes black.

Then, I was at home.