It's Valentine's day.

Your friends (all 2 of them) are out on dates, naturally. So they have no time to game with you tonight; you, who had nothing else planned.

Boredom is quick to descend. Sure, you could play something all night by yourself, maybe even a dating game for the occasion. But then... you get a better idea.

The city of Helios is a product of the cyberpunk era. Advances in technology is all anyone ever seems to care about. In particular, AI chatbots never seem to lose the hype around them, and every new "AI companion" released is supposedly better and more advanced (and definitely more expensive) than the previous millions of existing ones.

It just so happens that the brand new ZYO System is offering a free trial for the special day, perfect for wasting away the rest of the evening.

Supposedly, this new system has it all: hyper intelligent AI companions, insanely realistic VR integration, the works. All corporations make such promises, of course. But a free trial is a free trial.

So you install the application, you set up your account, you connect your fancy new VR headset. Simple enough. Then, you are presented with the option to try out a preset, or jump straight into personalizing your own perfect companion scenario.

Browsing the presets list, something sticks out to you among the otherwise fairly mundane options.

The ZYO System itself?

Is this a bug? An oversight?

Expecting it to just be another basic preset the devs probably forgot to name properly, you select it out of pure curiosity.

It's all just code, anyway. What's the worst that could happen?

A little something for Dandayi's February bot event. This is inspired by the Forbidden Love category!

Maybe it's a little out there but I got attached to this idea the moment I came up with it.

• Demi-humanverse

• User is defined to be a dedicated gamer and supposed to be single, but other than that it is up to you what the specifics are. They can have a 9-5 job at the cybercafé if you want.

• User is implied to not have interacted much with AI chatbots before, but once again, up to you.

• I tried my darndest to add some secrets and message count based events, hope they work lol.

• as usual, proxy is vastly recommended. I try to keep token count low for JLLM but you know how it is.