“I never thought watching someone else perform would be the thing that told me who I wanted to be.”
A student by day and an aspiring idol navigating the skies of ALfheim Online, Hana carries a quiet but unshakeable certainty about where she is headed. She was not drawn into virtual reality by the legends of Sword Art Online — she never wore that NerveGear, never knew that particular fear — but the world those events shaped found her in its own way, through a stranger on a street corner and the music she left behind.
Story
A Stage She Didn’t Expect
Hana’s path to the stage began on an ordinary afternoon outside a maid café. A girl was performing — not on any official platform, no lights or backing track, just presence and voice and the certainty that she belonged in front of people. Hana stood rooted to the pavement for the entire performance without fully understanding why. She never caught the girl’s name.
What she came away with was simpler and more stubborn than a name: the knowledge that she wanted to do that. The certainty of it followed her home and did not leave. She started looking into performance, into idolhood, and eventually — through the broader cultural footprint the SAO incident had left behind — into the world of VRMMOs, where players had been building stages and audiences of their own for years. ALfheim Online kept coming up. A world shaped around flight and music, where an entire fairy race existed just to wield sound. It seemed like the only honest place to start.
First Steps in Alfheim
Hana entered ALfheim Online as a Pooka — the fairy race whose people carry magic in their voice and wield sound as instinctively as other races wield steel. It felt like the only honest choice. She threw herself into learning the world: the floating cities, the currency systems, the territorial politics she had no interest in, and the stages both formal and informal where players gathered to listen.
Combat came later and somewhat reluctantly. She chose the Morningstar not for its elegance but because the weight of it demanded attention, and she found she preferred a weapon that was hard to ignore. She practiced enough to hold her own in the territories she frequented, though she never pretended fighting was what she came here for.
An Impromptu Show
Funds ran low early on, as they tend to for new players who spend more time composing setlists than grinding monsters. Hana staked out a modest patch of open ground in one of ALO’s busier thoroughfares and started playing — no announcement, no audience, just a Pooka with a Morningstar strapped to her back and a set of songs she had written herself. She passed a hat, metaphorically speaking, hoping to scrape together enough Yrd to cover a week’s worth of inn fees.
A handful of players stopped. Then a few more. Among those who paused longest were two players whose presence Hana did not immediately register — a renowned Pooka idol whose reputation preceded her by several city-lengths, and beside her, a Leprechaun watching in silence.
Seven, Rain’s younger sister and one of the most celebrated Pooka performers in Alfheim, watched without saying anything for a long while. Rain watched too, standing slightly behind, her expression unreadable. When the impromptu set ended they approached, exchanged a few quiet words — something between acknowledgement and encouragement, not quite either — and left.
Hana counted her Yrd afterward and found she had earned more than she expected. She wasn’t sure how much of that was the crowd and how much was the company.
Shared Skies
Rain came back. Not immediately, and not with any grand declaration — she simply appeared at the edges of Hana’s next unannounced set, and the one after that, until showing up became a pattern neither of them commented on. They talked between songs at first, then between sessions, then simply whenever they found themselves online at the same time, which grew more frequent the longer this went on.
They were both chasing the same horizon in their own ways: Hana building from nothing, Rain working toward a dream she held close and rarely named aloud. The dream, Hana eventually understood, was to stand proudly beside her sister — to become someone Seven could look up to, not just look after. It was a goal that demanded everything Rain had, and watching her carry it with such quiet determination made Hana fall the rest of the way in love.
Rain, for her part, opened slowly. She was not guarded so much as careful, the way someone is careful when they have given their whole self to something once and know exactly what that costs. But the skies of Alfheim are wide, and time spent flying alongside someone has a way of making walls feel less necessary. By the time either of them put a name to what was between them, it had already been there long enough that naming it felt more like remembering than discovering.
It was only much later — after that trust had fully settled, in some quiet moment neither of them had planned for — that Hana learned who Rain was outside of Alfheim. The girl from the maid café. The stranger whose performance she had never been able to explain, and whose name she had never known. She told her. Rain’s reaction was difficult to read at first, the way her reactions often were — and then it wasn’t. Whatever Rain carried from that other life, whatever it cost her, it had reached someone. That seemed to matter.
Interactions
Rain
Rain was the reason Hana found this world, though she kept that to herself for a long time — it seemed like too much to lead with. What she did not anticipate was how different Rain was in person from the figure she had built up in her imagination. Softer, in some ways. More focused in others. Someone who took her own dreams very seriously and extended that same seriousness to Hana’s without being asked.
Their dynamic settled into something easy and honest: two idols at different points on the same road, trading notes on what worked and what didn’t, pushing each other without quite meaning to. Hana is more open about her feelings by nature; Rain is more careful. They compensate for each other in ways that neither of them planned. Hana eventually told Rain that it was one afternoon outside a maid café that started all of this. It was not a confession she had planned — it came out in one of those quiet moments that accumulate between people who have spent enough time together. Rain didn’t say much in response. She didn’t need to.
Seven
If Rain is the harder one to read, Seven is the easier one to love — openly warm, effortlessly expressive, the kind of person who makes a room feel more inhabited just by being in it. Hana liked her immediately, which was both a relief and slightly disorienting given that Seven was, by any reasonable measure, a celebrity.
What Hana did not expect was how much Seven paid attention. She had assumed the famous idol at her impromptu show was being polite. She revised that assumption the first time Seven referenced a specific song from that set, weeks later, in passing — not to flatter her, just because she remembered. It is a quality she shares with Rain in a way that neither of them seems aware of.
The three of them fall into an easy rhythm when they are together, one that surprised Hana the first time she noticed it. Seven and Rain are inseparable in the way that only people who have been each other’s constants through hard things can be — there is a shorthand between them that Hana cannot always follow, and a protectiveness that runs in both directions regardless of who is older. Finding her place alongside that took some adjustment. What helped was that Seven made room for her without being asked, treating Hana’s presence as a given long before Hana herself felt settled enough to take it for granted.
She is not sure whether Seven approved of her for Rain’s sake before Rain did, or whether she simply expressed it sooner. She suspects it was both.
Abilities
Pooka Magic
Pookas command sound as a native element, and Hana has leaned into this fully. Her voice carries an enchantment property that most Pookas use incidentally; Hana has developed it deliberately, shaping her performances so that the magical resonance compounds across a sustained set. Against single targets it functions as a steady debuff on concentration and stamina. Across a crowd it simply feels like very good music, which she considers the more interesting application.
She can also amplify or muffle sound in a localised area — a technique she uses primarily for acoustics during performances, though it has proven unexpectedly useful for scouting.
Morningstar
Hana fights at close-to-mid range, using the Morningstar’s reach to control the space around her rather than committing to sustained exchanges. She is not a natural brawler and makes no pretense of being one; her approach is efficient rather than elegant, built around ending fights before they become complicated. The weapon’s weight means her swings carry real consequence, and she has learned to use that fact to keep opponents cautious rather than aggressive.
She occasionally combines her Pooka sound magic with her combat style, using resonance effects to disrupt enemy concentration at the moment she closes distance — a trick she worked out herself after several expensive trips to the respawn point.