Alice Tale in Phantasmagoria

When I woke up, there was nothing familiar surrounding me.

I was confused, but I had one idea.

I am a very imaginative person.

"...eh? Another world? Seriously?"

Yep, I am very imaginative, but hearing my voice say it, it"s really nothing but foolish.

Wait, waitwaitwait, there was an even more important truth in my voice.

Exactly, my voice.

You want to know what"s wrong with my voice?

My name is Arisugawa Akito

Eighteen years old.

I"m a student who moved to Tokyo just this spring to attend university.

To calm my nerves a bit, let me reminisce.

About what happened yesterday...

 *

Until I finished high school, while living out in the boonies, I entered a club, applied myself and lived an overall vigorous student life.

I"d played soccer since I was tiny and I spent a large part of my youth on it, too, but in the last tournament of my third year in highschool, we lost and I burnt out.

Afterwards, I buried it under studying, fulfilled the condition for leaving home by qualifying for a rather good university and began living alone.

Well, so far, everything was good.

But by that time, I was so burnt out you wouldn"t believe for an eighteen-year-old. I couldn"t get myself motivated to do a~nything anymore.

I only went to university for the opening ceremony.

Then I unquestionably turned into one of the enrolled students on the verge of becoming NEETs[1].

But while I had no motivation, I certainly had more time that I could spend on my hands.

At that point, I encountered online games.

Creating new characters that would become extensions of myself, acting out a new self in virtual worlds was quite exhilarating.

In no time at all I was caught and played game after game, all month long, even cutting down on sleeping time.

University?

I never went.

Ah, sorry, the opening ceremony. I did go there.

Which is not to say that I have issues communicating with people.

It"s just a bother, you see!

D-don"t get the wrong idea, alright!

Well, not like any of that matters.

Anyway, I particularly liked fantasy-themed MMORPGs.

Fantasy.

That"s good.

Since long ago I"ve liked reading books when I was tired, I loved submerging myself in my fantasies.

On nights with movies from Ghibli or so I could fantasize so much, I was all fluffy inside from happiness.

There may not be any Aetherium[2], but I did float as I pleased inside my head, you know?

Right, I loved running through fantastic worlds.

As a new me, that is.

And like that, I wandered through many worlds as many characters and lived a fulfilled university life, but there I found one experiment I wanted to try.

——I want to try playing a girl.

It"s alluring, right?

And, knowing how rude it is, don"t you sometimes think you"re better than a girl at acting like one? Meaning an ideal one, in the mind of a man like me.

Well, I had such a slight obsession with changing myself.

Creating personas?

So I decided.

I was going to become a girl cuter than anyone.

Then I searched for an appropriate online game and finally arrived at "New Life in Another World", a rather relaxed-seeming representative of its kind.

The name was una.s.suming, not going for an extreme impact or anything.

That"s what I liked about it.

In that game, I was going to make my debut as a girl character.

I spent quite a bit of time on character creation.

There were all kinds of races, but to begin with I decided on a half between human and elf.

Age fifteen.

I wavered for a while over the hair color.

Two hours, maybe?

You can"t go wrong with blond.

However, red is cool.

But pink is cute.

Blues are also cool and give good vibes.

Still, exactly because it"s a fantasy world, going with black after all has a point, too.

I wavered.

I wavered and wavered and finally went with the other safe option, platinum blond.

In short, I picked silver hair.

Long, straight silver hair.

It was quite cool and I liked it.

The eyes were a bit slanted and had that strong-willed look.

I set their color to amber.

Just 160cm for height, and a slender, model-like figure.

b.o.o.bs are filled with dream, but for this character it felt excessive so I gave them a moderate size. Yep, my pickiness led to a good result..

With that I finished setting the appearance..

Time spent: ridiculous.

But you can say I managed to create the most beautiful girl I could.

Next came setting the character"s attributes.

There was a large number of cla.s.ses and I wavered again.

Just which one was appropriate for this beautiful girl?

Grabbing a sword and standing on the frontline was fascinating, but I decided to leave it for another time and wanted to pick a magic cla.s.s after all.

Firepower or healing, that was the question.

Due to the strong-willed expression, it had to be firepower, right?

So it had to be a prodigiously offensive cla.s.s.

I picked Mage and went on to spending the points.

No matter how I set them, I"d probably be able to get quite strong through leveling, but apparently the first points decided the direction the character would take.

I again wavered.

There were 5 attributes, and I could spend a total of 10 points to bring their values up to 5.

Strength, Endurance, Protection, Agility, Mind

I was to allocate the points in these five entries.

If I spent them equally, all would get to 2.

In short, it should be alright to think of 2 as the average.

3 was a bit superior.

4 was quite excellent

5 was genius-level.

Hmm.

I don"t like being a jack of all trades.

So min-maxing it was!

Strength 0, Endurance 1, Protection 0, Agility 4, Mind 5.

That completely used the 10 points I had.

MUAHAHAHAHA.

Truly the defensive power of paper.

I was going to live on Agility and Mind - which was probably magic attack power – alone.

And, of course, beauty.

The next step was setting special abilities.

There I could get special abilities by allocating points, but I only had 3 this time.

There were a ton of options, but I decided on "Latent Potential", "Double Cast" and "Cast Time Reduction".

I"d already decided on min-maxing after all.

n.o.body would be able to defend against my attacks!

...but if I didn"t find someone to be my shield, and soon, wouldn"t I die from one tackle from a slime?

Oh, well.

I could always use my Agility to dodge.

Finally, I finished all the trials and tribulations of creating this character.

I clicked "Next" and got a popup t.i.tled "Welcome to another world!"

"Do you believe in other worlds?"

YES NO

Hmm, that"s a Yes, yes.

Because I"m a pure boy dreaming of other worlds.

Without wavering, I clicked YES.

"Then, have a nice life."

That was the last message.

I think.

I think, because at that point my consciousness stopped.

 *

Reminiscence Over.

"..."

Hmm.

I"m getting a very, very bad vibe here.

It"s not a cheap trick like dreaming or hypnosis, definitely not.

This meadow I"m sitting on? The softness and smell are certainly natural.

In the first place, where is my one room apartment, my home and my castle?

I"m not half-asleep.

My vision is clear.

Nothing is blurry.

No problem.

Alright, I finally made my resolve to clear the issue that had given me my first doubts.

I readied myself and said something once more.

"Ahh. Test, test?"

... I heard an unbelievable lovely voice.

Coming from my throat.

I combed my hair that felt a bit odd.

Long. It was also glossy and smooth and silver.

…

I touched my chest.

They were moderate, but definitely filled with dream!

... I touched them again.

I-I"m not doing anything dirty, alright!?

This is important!

This is important!!

It"s really important, so I repeated it.

There was an absence between my legs.

"...eh?"

EH?

Can you understand my despair right now?

Only barely did I manage to not fall unconscious again.

But I pulled myself together.

I got up.

My old height was 175cm.

"What"s with this line of sight, so low..."

This is so weird.

...ahhh, yes, yes, I"m one-sixty, right. I know that.

I was just a bit negligent.

Furthermore, I also know something else.

No, I have no idea how to deal with it yet, but let"s admit it:

"I became a woman..."

I only thought I"d play a girl, but it looks like I became one in another world.