Kristopher scratched his head, thinking over his latest patient's trauma. He had recorded the session and was now re-analyzing their conversation, making notes every now and again. 

Bring! The loud noise in his ear shocked him, he jecked back from the desk instinctively. He pressed the accept button on the earpiece, resolving to turn the volume down in future whilst working. 

"Hello?" he asked, hoping it wasn't his obssessive compulsive patient, calling for the hundredth time this week to reconfirm her next appointment. 

"Hello Daddy! What time are you coming home?" a girlish voice responded. 

"Kanan, Daddy's working right now. At about six o'clock, okay?" 

"Mummy says hi." his daughter continued, ignorant of what Kris had said. He was unsure if she had even registered that he had talked. 

"Well say hi to her for me okay? And everyone else." 

"Okay," the high, childish voice complied. "I love you. Bye!"

The background noise was almost deafening. Kris smiled, the house was always a riot. They had three adopted children (who had  a wide circle of friends who seemed to be magnetically attracted to the house), he and J0annê were unable to have their own. The child he had been talking to was Kanan, his sister's child, named after her late mother. Kris and Kanan had been extremely close, and Kris had eventually ended up marrying someone who could have been her twin. In fact, their personalities were practically interchangeable, as it was. 

Kanan had committed suicide after being gang raped and finding she was pregnant. Kris had been slashed on the stomach trying to defend her and was left to die as they dragged her away. He would have killed to save her, but he could not save Kanan from herself. 

After the culprits had been apprehended, Kris and Kanan had spent the next few months in hospital. Kris went to see her the minute he was able, only to watch her jump out the third floor window. He had ran downstairs, unheeding of the staff's calls not to go so fast, he would tear open the scar. And he watched, helpless as his sister bled to death. The rapists families stood about, muttering stupid apologies that did nothing to bring her back. In his fury, he lashed out at them, screaming wordlessly, wanting to render them apart, to kill, an eye for an eye. Before he was restrained, some fought back in self defence and he somehow got hit in the eye. He was almost blind in his right eye now, and wore a monacle to help rectify it. He had tried corrective surgery at first, but they overdid it and it was now forever stuck that way. He was let off by the court on claims of overwhelming grief. It wasn't him who had fought, wasn't Kris. It had been another man altogether, as if he were two men in one body. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of that other man, but he firmly pushed him back down into the deepest recesses of his mind, never to let him out. 

Kanan was saved from her mother's womb, and lived the next five months in an incubator. Kris had claimed her, she was the first child to be adopted byJ0annê and he. The small child was an innocent everyday reminder of her mother, and looked just like her, luckily, for Kris knew that the other man would emerge if he ever saw a trace of her father, and he could not control that other. 

Ironic, really, for a psychiatrist to have demons of his own. He was supposed to be a pillar of support, and get rid of people's anxieties. The twenty-eight year old rubbed his brow, unable to concentrate on work. 

He took out a VR, one of his patients was the director of VR V!$0®$, and had given it to him as thanks. 

When he was younger, he had been quite an experienced gamer, but he gave it up about seven years ago. This would be the second time he used it. He took out the recording chip in his ear, which was currently droning on about the patient's wife. The yellow visor just gave enough space for his monacle to fit. He joined the first game he saw, hosted by someone called Gojyo, six others were there already. Lastly, Gojyo entered as well and they went to the character creation page. 

Dokugakuji:wot r u ppl playing as? 

Sanzo:23,m 

Kris was called Hakkai online, his son's name. He added that he would be a 21 yr old, also male, and each player put theirs in, ending up with two females and six males, a little gender biased, he thought. 

One half of the page was chat, and the other was for character creation. Kris put in green for a favourite colour and left the rest blank. The good thing about the VR V!$0®$ was that it drew information directly from your brain, using your deepest desires, nightmares and memories to create a character. It was also completely hack-proof for safety, and programmed only to one person, or it could be passed around with total memory wipes. It had been absent from the mass market for ages until the government had finally given it the okay. 

Everyone seemed to choose a younger age range, the oldest was twenty-five. Kris chose twenty-one because he would be fresh out of university, and both Kanan and J0annê would have been in his life. Then again, there was no higher level education in ancient China. 

Daymien would have been happy with that. His oldest son was nearly fourteen and despised school. They had adopted him at the age of eleven, as it was still mostly babies that got adopted and they wanted to give other children a chance. His last child was another boy, a sixteen year old who had only come into the family a year ago. Haunami was a lovely boy, and he actually looked like Kris! 

Taking off the eye glass, and rocking back on his chair, he polished the monacle absently on his shirt, waiting for the other gamers to finish.