.Hack//New Testament Chapter 3

It was my sister who started the argument.

Actually, perhaps the issue was with me. Perhaps it was different from how I remember it. Everything changes based on how one perceives it.

Anyway, it was a Sat.u.r.day in November and we were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table.

Our parents were away at the time. I was trying to eat the fried rice my sister had made for lunch with a spoon. To be more exact, it was a ceramic soup spoon.

“This fried rice is good. Tasty,” I said.

First I expressed my grat.i.tude. It was only natural for a person.

“Really? Thank you,” my sister said.

Then I made a request.

“Could you get me a regular spoon?”

“Why?”

My sister looked at me with a genuine gaze. I think she still held some sort of respect for her older brother.

“This is hard to use. It’s hard to eat with. I can’t scoop up the rice with this.”

She blinked. Just then the flicker of respect disappeared from her eyes.

My sister scooped up some rice with the ceramic spoon and put it in her mouth.

“You’re just clumsy.”

“That’s true, I admit that I’m clumsy,” I said patiently.

“But, it’s another matter altogether that the ceramic spoon is too hard to use as regular tableware. There is a major flaw with this spoon.”

After I said this, I remembered that this ceramic spoon and rice dish came as a set that my sister bought as a souvenir for me in Chinatown during her sixth grade school trip the year before.

I was rambling on so much that I couldn’t stop myself.

“The ceramic spoon that is commonly used in j.a.pan should primarily be used for soup. In China, different ceramic spoons are used for different purposes. There is a ceramic spoon for soup and there is a ceramic spoon for rice, but…”

I showed her the ceramic spoon in my hand.

“…for some reason, in j.a.pan only ceramic spoons for soup are sold. Whether it’s ramen, soup, fried rice, sweet and sour pork, or mapo tofu, we’re forced to use this ceramic soup spoon with every Chinese dish.”

“So?” said my sister.

“What good does your useless knowledge do us in the end?”

So?

Useless?

What a conceited remark.

As her brother, I can’t resist saying something. It would probably cause problems in the future, I thought.

“Hand me a normal spoon.”

“Go get it yourself.”

I got up, retrieved a big spoon from the cupboard and returned to my seat.

I didn’t say anything after that for what felt like an eternity, but that wasn’t the case for my sister. She made a further suggestion.

“Your view on things is too malicious. You’re too narrow-minded.”

“You sure do use a lot of big words. Where did you learn them?”

“You may look nice on the outside, but inside you’re a rotten person.”

It seemed as though I had just entered a place I shouldn’t have set foot in.

This sort of thing seemed to happen a lot lately. Even though I had said something absurd, she was quietly seething over it.

But I felt that it was half her fault. If I don’t know what landmines to avoid, I can’t deal with that.

For a while we both kept silent.

Eventually I finished eating and took my empty dishes to the sink.

My sister spoke behind me.

“My friends are coming over tomorrow.”

“They’re coming over?”

“We’ll be studying together. Don’t interrupt us.”

“I have never interrupted your friends.”

My sister did not respond.

I suddenly became concerned and asked a question.

“How many people are coming over?”

“Three.”

“Only girls?”

My sister could only muster a couple of words to this question.

“One girl.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“Hmm what?” my sister snapped.

“Hmm, I see, that sort of hmm.”

“You’re always so quick to treat people like they’re idiots,” my sister said angrily.

“That’s why I can’t make any friends.”

“Oops, how awful. I’m so sorry my little sister got hurt by my words.”

My sister finished eating her fried rice and drank her gla.s.s of water.

Then she took a breath and looked right at me.

“Liar,” she said.

I’ll write briefly about my family.

My father is 40 years old.

He works for a small-scale trading company. It mainly deals with volunteer organizations expanding across the country and due to this, we get fed up with frequent job relocations.

My mother is also 40 years old.

She never complains about how often we have to move. Perhaps, she may have grumbled to my sister and I and we didn’t understand why, but at the very least I never heard her complain.

She is a housewife, and she is an integral component in my father’s job transfers. She deals with arranging the packing and moving. Without her, I doubt my father would be able to prepare for a business trip of two or three days, let alone move.

My younger sister is 13 years old.

Lately she’s become rather impertinent. She nags and picks fights over things that don’t even matter.

That’s my family. They’re all good people.

If someone suddenly witnessed the eldest son writing strange things on another family member’s face, doubtless a considerable fuss would be made.

One more note about my family. We have no pets.

A long time ago we had a hamster, but during one of our moves, his cage broke and he escaped through a crack. We have no idea where he went.

Perhaps he found a field of some sort and lived out the rest of his life there.

Due to my father’s work, I am accustomed to moving. I experienced three moves during my elementary school years and one in junior high. A high pace of once every two years.

In the back of my desk drawer was a collection of colorful postcards I sometimes received from cla.s.smates. On each was written a heartfelt message from a cla.s.smate whose face I have now forgotten. I rarely reread them.

If I were to commit a serious spur-of-the-moment crime at some point in the future, I feel like I would probably be sought after in each location.

“I play an online game,” said Yasuhiko after school, a soft smile appearing on his face.

It was the first time she spoke like this.

“An online game?”

“It’s been appearing on TV a lot lately. It’s called ‘The World.’”

“Oh,” I said in a vague tone.

Then I remembered.

The game had been released about three years earlier, but commercials for it were constantly playing and recently the number of copies sold exceeded twenty million.

“Why don’t you give it a try, too, pal?” asked Yasuhiko.

“Pal?”

This level of informality bothered me.

“Getting connected is easy. I’ll set it up for you if you don’t know how. You like games, don’t you?”

“No, not really.”

“I’d like to encourage people like you to play The World.”

“My gaming itch is more than satisfied by GIGA. I don’t need any more games and I don’t think I want to play any others anyway. Not to mention that it sets the bar for an online game too high.”

I think it’s the case for most people, but games were just a way to kill time for me. Possibly, for some, games are a little more than that, but they are well within the margin of error.

“Oh, yeah, I agree.”

Yasuhiko nodded with an expression that said ‘I know everything.’

“But those are the type of people I want to recommend The World to.”

Oh, I see. So that’s his strategy, huh?

I changed the way I responded.

“An FMD, was it? A Face Mount Display. Goggles you wear on your face. If I saw someone in my family wearing such a weird device, I would die of embarra.s.sment.”

Yasuhiko was at a loss for words. Then, he found some.

“That’s okay. You’ll get used to it.”

“Why don’t you invite other people?”

To Yasuhiko, who eagerly kept trying to persuade me, I named some of the people in his group.

“No, they’re useless.”

“Why?”

Yasuhiko did not answer the question.

“I get the feeling that going adventuring with you would be interesting,” he said instead.

“Besides, I think The World is suited to you. If you play even just once, I think you’ll definitely like it. You won’t be able to put down the controller.”