The artist's model part 2 (For TheWamts)

John smiled as he saw Lia get her license, when he saw she didn't notice that she had to pay he kept smiling.
"Okay excuse me." He would mosey on over to the machine and put his hand into his coat.

With swift hands that were perfected by painting he quickly slotted some cash in to pay for Lia's card.
"Now what am I looking for?" he said to himself as he came up with his ID

NEW PILOT?

Name: AFW_artist
Password: ****** (ILVLia)

Two cards had slotted out the machine once John paid for his, again with a swift slight of hand trick.
"They're a little hot mind, fresh out of the oven." he said with a smile as he handed her card to her.

"Alright let's go in. If I remember the pods are linked so we can do voice chat over headsets, hard to believe but this was made in 2006." he said as he opened one for his girlfriend.

Lia was embarrassed that she forgot to pay and that before she could correct her mistake, John had already paid for her. "Oh! You didn't have to do that, Um... how about when we get lunch I pay then?"

Walking inside the pods, Lia saw a lot of complicated looking buttons, but the controls were pretty simple after blinking past all the flashiness. Ok! Let's try this out!. But... then she remembered something. "How do I play?", she called over the built-in microphone, a little embarrassed that she had to ask how to play what looked to be a fairly simple game.

"Okay there should be a pair of large joysticks in front of you, that's how you'll fight. They represent the left half and right half of your mech so..." John said as he looked over his own pod.

https://2img.net/h/i179.photobucket.com/albums/w297/clementgx/IMG_0206.jpg

Just then the tutorial appeared, it stated that to move forward you pushed a car accelerator pedal at your feet.
"Ah there you go, it's a lot simpler than I thought. You just use the pedal to go forward and those joysticks to steer. In fact I think I see you on my radar, look to your top right and I should be a green dot." he said as he made his way to her.

"Umm... OK, here goes!", She cautiously moved one joystick, and then the other, and sure enough, the screen that was projecting her mech's vision changed. "Wow... this is actually really cool!"

Staring at the map-looking thingy on the top right, Lia saw that there was a green dot, as John had said and moved towards it. The game mechanics made it impossible to fall over, so she at least didn't lose the game before even getting to see John ingame.

"I can see you Lia!" John said as he advanced his mobile suit towards her.

"So since we're green dots that means we're on the same side, red dots are the bad guys." he said.

"Okay let's work on combat, if you're holding the joysticks then there should be a trigger like button on one of your fingers. Since we're just training we only get the gatling lasers, they don't hurt much but fire enough and you can tend to get the last word in most arguments with it."

"D-don't fire them at me though! You get a penalty if you hit your teammates, hit anything else though." he quickly said to her.

"Bad guys! Got it!", and lost in the moment, when John told her how to fire, she had already pressed the button... while she was facing towards John, before she could hear John telling her that there was a penalty for friendly fire.

"S-sorry! I didn't mean for that to happen!", sounding a little distressed, as if she had shot at John in real life, and not on a simulator. Trying to make up for her mistake, she realigned the sight to see all the red dots, all of which looked like a scrapyard reject. Thinking that the aim was as good as it got, she fired her guns towards them, only to see that they were indeed, very inefficient. "Man, this game is hard! If this is just the training, what are the actual levels like?"

John's cockpit vibrated, like an electric shock ran through it making his arms numb a little.
"It's okay babe, luckily my shield shall protect me!" he said in response.

"Well it's only hard cause we've never done this, the real levels are actually against other players. But we tend to be able to get some really cool toys to play with." he said as he aimed at the training bots.

"You should also be able to swap weapons, a button that's near your thumbs. It changes your weapon to a sword and shield, if you don't trust your aim then trust your sword I say."

With that Mr Carnaby would change his weapons and rush towards an enemy, doing a graceful sword slash that was akin to a brush stroke.

"But I think we'll skip playing with others if that's alright Lia, let's wrap it up!" he said as he got behind the enemies to allow Lia to get her attacks in.

Lia listened to John's explanation with some interest, taking note when he said something about a sword, but for the most part with just staring at how detailed everything was on the screen. Like it really was 100% immersive. She saw that John had charged in on the baddies, and figured that she should help, and so she fired her gun at them.

With all the enemies gone, they had completed stage, and a message popped up indicating the same thing. "Ok! Where to next?", she asked her boyfriend after Lia got out of the pod and finding him.

Once the game was over John stepped out, stretching as he did "It felt nice but odd to be in that thing." he said.

"There should be a bookstore somewhere near here, they have all sorts of genres." John said as he took her hand in hers.

When they got there it was a 2 floor store filled with many different books from romance to manga.
John smiled as he picked up that was called "Murder on the orient express."
"Ah a classic crime thriller that, one that takes the normal ending of it's genre and twists it. The arguable culprit was the one who was killed and the killer was in the right to do it." he said to her.

"Well let's take a look around and see what there is my dear, I'm sure there's something for everyone." the art student said with a smile.

"I never really had any time to read anything when I was younger. My life was kinda... too busy for that, you know?", Lia said, a little uncomfortably. "But jt's never too late to start a new habit, I guess!"

Taking John in arm, Lia marched into one of the shelves, marked English Novels - Fantasy, when she saw a book whose cover attracted her eye. It was entitled "Gardens of the Moon",

Flipping into the back cover, she read the summary and found it very interesting. "You know, I never really thought about it, but there's a lot of English stuff here in Japan. Ah well, that's probably for the best, I wouldn't be about to speak a word to anyone if it wasn't like that, haha!" She would take the book and keep it in hand, while hold John with her other hand as they continnued through the shelves.