Doce watched General Grievous's torso spin wildly and noted his apparent double personality.<span style="font-style: italic">It doesn't seem like an act,</span>she thought.<span style="font-style: italic">That would mean his avatar is having a much greater effect on him than Lucy did with me.</span>She stared intently at Julian as he recounted his experience.<span style="font-style: italic">And here's another example of an avatar's muscle memory kicking in during battle. That one is easily explained as game programming, but could by magical in nature. <span style="color: #0080FF">So shite...</span></span>she shifted her gaze to tails,<span style="font-style: italic">there's this guy.</span><br/><br/>Curious as always, she opened up her user interface and sent Tails a friend request. "Ho?" she muttered when it wasn't rejected upon launch. She continued her experiment by sending Kirito a friend request. She frowned when it wasn't rejected. However, if she checked her pending friend requests, it read:<br/><br/>Lucile<br/>Rukia<br/>Tails [pending]<br/>JDizzle383 [pending]<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Hmm... 'JD'? Not 'Kirito'? But Tails is still Tails. Meaning, at the very least, he has no registered player name... And this is his real body...</span><br/><br/>Despite how seriously she was taking this, Doce had to laugh when Jack opened his mouth. "'Why so serious?'" She said, grinning at the alternate Joker. "But I'll counter you on the whole 'it's all magic' thing. Imagine, say, that the orbs are crystalline drugs? Activating on skin contact so that if you think of crushing it, it sends you into this shared delusional fantasy of ours. Upon death in a the game, the delusion ends. You have an uncrushed orb because you never crushed the first one. After that, subsequent attempts to crush the orb are stopped by you yourself, still being influenced by its chemical effects, until after the 1 hour time period. If you don't believe a shared dream is scientifically possible, then maybe the whole thing is a delusion. I mean, none of us have met in the real world, right?" She paused to look at the purple man and Tails. "Except for you. But Tails is a fictional character, and could just be a delusion that follows you into the real world. Has anyone else there claimed to see him also?"<br/><br/>She ran a hand through her hair. This much processing was starting to push on the limits of her mental capacity. She started tapping her foot to refocus herself. "Of course, I can't prove any of what I just said, but my point is that it's too soon to start disregarding possible explanations. I'd<span style="font-style: italic">rather</span>this be magic, since otherwise I'm either psychotic or on drugs right now. It was science, magic, and luck that saved us in the Beta. I'll keep myself open to all of them, so I don't miss something when the time comes."<br/><br/>She paused as another thought hit her out of nowhere. "As for who's real and who isn't," she said to Jack, "tell it to that voice in your head."<br/><br/>She needed to let her brain cool down for a minute, so she sat against a wall and pulled her knees to her chest. She saw a flicker in the corner of her eye and turned to see her mana bar, down two points.<span style="font-style: italic">No way...</span>she thought.<span style="font-style: italic">Did I think so hard that it drained my mana? The fuck? How is that a thing?!</span>she sighed.<span style="font-style: italic">Whatever. I'll deal with it later. </span>