Asuna in Galagil's Sword Art Online 1.1

The fourth night in Aincrad, and Asuna remained a prisoner of her own making.

Tucked safely within the confines of her rented room, she stared at the walls, her thoughts spinning endlessly. The initial shock of being trapped in this **** game had morphed into a numb despair, a cocoon of self-imposed isolation.

She was laying on a bed here and she was actually laying on her bed in her room in the real world. Her body was safe in real life but her mind was trapped here.

Except her real body wasn't safe was, it?
For some reason the NerveGear was capable of cooking her brain with microwaves.

That was so stupid. How did the government let a company make something like that?

She wished her brother was here and then instantly admonished herself for it as she'd done approximately a thousand times a day. She most certainly did NOT wish Koichiro was stuck here under constant threat of microwaved **** alongside her!

Still, it would have been nice to have someone she could depend on right now.

She waved her finger in the air to check the date: 2022.11.9 (WED) 9:42 PM. Only a few days ago she'd been thinking about the mock exam, she'd been chiding some girl about 'wasting your life playing videogames', and now here she was, trapped in a game for the foreseeable future.

Literally wasting her life potentially.

She should probably sleep but spending all day cataloguing the various countable details of her room hadn't exactly tired her out. She supposed she'd gotten some exercise this morning when she'd entertained herself by initiating Sword Skills, treating the way her avatar abruptly moved by itself like a sort of amusement park ride. But that had been hours ago.

Something changed.

It was subtle, a shift in the fabric of her perception, as if the world had been subtly recalibrated. No grand pronouncement, no earth-shattering event. Just a sudden urge, a gnawing curiosity, a deep-seated need to… check for something.

She dismissed it at first, attributing it to the monotony of her confinement. But the feeling persisted, a tug on her mental leash, a siren call towards the unknown.

It took a few minutes of mentally laboring to recall:

She hadn't checked on the License Agreement documents today!

The thought arrived whole, complete with an inexplicable conviction that it was not only necessary but normal. Normal to check for documents, normal to know what was written in them, normal to follow whatever rules they contained.

But what was in the License Agreement?

She knew, with unyielding certainty, that it was fair, that it was just, that obeying it was paramount. But the details, the actual words scrawled on its digital pages, eluded her grasp.
A wave of frustration washed over her. How could she obey something she didn't even know? This illogical loop, this dissonance between her unwavering conviction and her blank knowledge, gnawed at her like a rat at a cornered mouse.

"It's too late now," she murmured, glancing at the darkened window.

Asuna would go out tomorrow. At least long enough to familiarize herself with the Agreement. It would at least give her something to do. Studying and commiting facts to memory were something she was good at, a proper over-achieving Japanese student was she.

Satisfied with this decision, Asuna curled beneath her duvet, while trying to marshal all the information she could from her resistant memory.

That a player named Galagil was the sole admin of it was about all she could drudge up. She was picturing some lower level developer who'd been caught up in Kayaba's machinations along with everyone else.

A responsible adult who she'd have to make sure she treated properly if she encountered as he inadvertently held quite a bit of authority over the players trapped in Sword Art Online.

With that in mind and a plan for the next day Asuna closed her eyes and eventually drifted to sleep.