ShangriLa Frontier Chapter 555 Part 2
ShangriLa Frontier Chapter 555: Dream With Your Eyes Wide Open Part 2
「H-Here! T—This place! Right here!」」
「Hmm, let me see…… Hoo, Swallow’s Nest, huh? Ahh, that one company who’s making all of those Augmented Reality games, right? So, Saiga-san? Does that mean that you play Augmented Reality games as well?」
「Huh!? Umm, you see, this is, how should I put it……? I guess that you could call it an intellectual curiosity? Yes! That’s right! It’s exactly that! An intellectual curiosity!」
「O-Oh? A-Alright. If you say so, Saiga-san.」
If I remember and understand things correctly, the Saiga household is a family that should be so well-off that they can easily afford to set up a space for someone amongst them to be able to utilize the Augmented Reality systems and games it provides. Yeah, and the more I think about it, the greater the issue the Saiga household’s background is becoming. Hmm…… Yeah, my head starts to hurt just thinking about it. So I’d better drop that subject. For the good of my sanity, as well as a few other things.
「Alright, then. Then how about we make a slight detour while we walk in the general direction of that place? That way we can check out the booths that might have things that interest us, and we might be able to collect some stamps while being at it. Two birds with one stone, wouldn’t you agree?」
「Y-Yes, that’s right. I think…… I think that’s actually a really good idea.」
Oh yeah, that’s right. Going to the ShangriLa Frontier’s booth in the first place was a great tactical decision on our part. I mean, I can easily imagine that once the general audience is going to start flooding this place, it would become a truly hellish landscape that would be impossible to enjoy. That being said, I really pity the staff members who got assigned to work there. As the time goes on, their work is going to become increasingly harder, to the point where I think that they might actually regret clocking in for work today. Yes, rest in peace.
As for the other booths…… I guess that with an event on a scale such as this one, everyone in here is going to look like they are being stuck right in the middle of the monster panic right from the get go. I shall salute to you all as well, kind employees! And I hope that you are going to be able to survive throughout the day without actually going through a mental breakdown or having an existential crisis.
「Alright, but for the time being, let us go the nearest booth and see what it has to offer……」
…
………
……………
And just like that, the fifteen minutes mark have passed without any major incident occurring. And then……
……………
………
…
And then it occurred to me. Something was wrong here. Like, really, REALLY wrong.
「An earthquake…… Yeah, as if that would happen completely out of the blue like that! That’s not it! This is……!」
「Yes, it must be exactly as you think! Besides, earthquakes are pretty much silent! They are not making loud noises like that in the first place……!」
Yeah, just like I was saying, something is SERIOUSLY wrong in here. I get a feeling as if the entire artificial island was now shaking heavily, down to its very foundations…… And why do I get a feeling that something really similar has happened to me before? Or at the very least that it was something extremely similar?
Oh yeah, that’s right…… I remember now. It was the same kind of thing when I went to pay a visit to the place where my dear friends, Crystal Scorpions, were living. They rushed to greet me in great numbers, and as they were stampeding forward the ground was shaking in the exact same way as it was doing right now.
「R-Rei-san! We must move now! Hurry! Get on the bus before it’s going to be too late!」
「T-This crowd of people……!! You have got to be kidding me……!!」
Don’t tell me….. the wave of the general public is similar in nature to a Zombie Panic!?
Normally it would be the case that those with the special tickets would always look down on the general public and feel vastly superior to them in every aspect, but seeing the incoming wave of people and sensing the ground shaking beneath their feet, you could see that their faces started to cramp with both fear and disgust. Also, at the same time I noticed that the faces of staff members on both sides of the road were filled with a mixture of resignation and grim determination. It was…… it was actually quite disheartening to see.
「Hey, Driver-san! Is it possible for you to take us towards the place where the Swallow’s Nest’s booth is located? Please? And can you hurry it up!?」
「THE BUS IS NOW GOING TO DEPART.」
Hmm? Well, won’t you look at that? I mean, it was probably just a fluke and nothing else, but still! I love you, autopilot! Keep doing what you are doing!
And just like that, together with Rei we managed to successfully retreat to safety of the bus and head towards the other booths, at the same time watching the crowd of people starting to storm the ShangriLa Frontier’s booth. And if it was already looking like this in the beginning of the day, I could only imagine the pandemonium that would be taking place here once the time passes and more and more people arrive at the venue.
Even inside of the bus driving around the island we could clearly see that the waves of people that were flooding in right now were simply incomparable to the amount of people with the special tickets that entered before them. And they were still entering the site, overflowing and spreading out in all possible directions.
Of course, we were not the only ones who tried to go to the Swallow’s Nest booth right off the bat, sensing that later it would be virtually impossible to do so with a crowd of people this large. Not to mention that the people who were walking everywhere on foot were glaring daggers towards the buses, and by extension, they were glaring daggers at us, who were inside. Talk about a serious murder intent!
「I’m actually glad that we were able to catch a bus. I think that under those circumstances the Stamp Rally might be pretty much impossible to pull of here……」
「Y-Yes, I think that you are right……」
If you were to compare walking to a bus, the bus is naturally faster. So this means that we will reach the Swallow’s Nest booth before the general public even has the chance of getting there.
This is an area where generally speaking all of the Augmented Reality games and technology is being located. Therefore, the space allocated to each booth is way larger than in the other areas.
What stands out the most here is the fact that the booths vary greatly. One of them, for example, belongs to the card game makers that use holograms. There is a booth of a sugoroku maker where the player himself becomes a playing piece…… And the booth of Swallows Nest, whose name has become more and more common within the Augmented Reality community in this day and age.
「Ooohhh, talk about this thing being full-scale and all that!」
This should be the object block that allows you to develop holograms on your own in real time, right? That alone is a seriously expensive piece of high tech, right? And there are so many of them here…… How much is the total cost of all of this, I wonder?
「Welcome to the Swallow’s Nest booth! Would you like to give it a try to the demo version of Scrap Gunman, our latest release that you can try out here and only here exclusively?」
「Is that the game that you said that you are interested in, Rei-san?」
「Y-Yes, that’s right! B-But, the thing is, it’s a two-players game…… Is that going to be a problem, or……?」
Hmm, well, so in a nutshell, is this game basically a zombie shooter or something like that?
「I don’t really mind. By the way, if we are going to do this, do you want to try to aim for the high score while we are being at it?」
「YES!」
Was that supposed to be a pun now? Or was it simply that my brain was too stupid to understand the humor that the rich people might have?
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