Prologue
As a galgamer, everyone should at some point want to become the main character.
The setting where the girls already likes you when the game starts; the highly sought after girls and your girl companions- you have already went through their key events and got to the good end; even if the girl character is rather hard to interact with, you can still rely on achieving different events to turn their att.i.tude from spicy to sweet. If such a thing exists in this world, I honestly think it would be the best ever.
But you know, the real world is never that smooth.
As a senior high school student, if you still cannot distinguish between the 2D and the 3D world, you are screwed. As a result, in front of other people, you cannot just pull out the last year’s popular galgame ‘Eternal Innocence’, point to one of the main heroin and say things like ‘I really like x.x.x, I love you!!’ At most you can say ‘It would be great if a girl like x.x.x exists in the real world; but then again, even if she does exist, she probably won’t like someone like me. Ahaha…’ Actually, saying things like this in public is enough to make other people uncomfortable. If you cannot distinguish between what you can and what you can’t say, you will have a hard time surviving in the society.
In the real world, the probability that you gain a stepfamily by one of your parents marrying another person (and he or she has kids around your age) is almost nil. Even if you have a childhood friend who is of different gender and is your neighbour, by the time you two enter high school, chances are you will enter a different high school than she does; those school romance scenarios won’t happen. There is no idol in school, nor would you crash into a transfer student one day on the street and meet each other again in the cla.s.sroom. There is no undercla.s.sman that is in trouble and needs your help, and all those supernatural characters…well they go without saying.
I am not just talking about myself; you can ask your friends about it and they will tell you they never met anyone like what I just described. If someone does insist that they did encounter something similar, I suggest you quickly ship him off to a mental ward to get treated.
The world is just like that. Aaa, reality is so boring. No matter how you face the computer screen and imagine, the world won’t pop an ideal character in front of you. No matter what sorts of disillusion you conjured before you sleep, when you wake up the next day, there won’t be a childhood friend calling you to wake you up.
Honestly, who created this d.a.m.n real world? It can’t even grant the wish of one single person. All in all, if by chance I finally meet the creator, I will, as a representative of all galgamers, give him a blow powered by the deepest cry of our soul.
Which is why this will be the first and the last time I will reply to this kind of spam email.
“Do you want to change your world?” Armed with a casual topic, the content is actually “You can become your ideal person, or you can become the main character. If you are interested please hit this b.u.t.ton.” What a concise and annoying letter. If you take these topics seriously you are a loser. Even thinking about it is wrong…I think.
After I prepared myself and hit the b.u.t.ton in the email, a dialogue box popped up.
“Please enter the media that will serve as the basis of the new world.”
This is actually pretty well made, but I am still not expecting anything. Anyway so I took out my favourite game disc. I really am not expecting anything. [TL thoughts: tsundere(point :p ]
I put the disc into the DVD drive, and the program chooses the drive as its source. Now that I think about it, what would happen if I put a console game disc into a computer?
I pressed the OK b.u.t.ton, and another dialogue popped up. This time it is a progress bar. After I waited a few minutes, the bar became full, and the content of the email started to change. The email now has many option settings. Even though I didn’t count how many, but judging from the size of the scroll bar, the list seems to be very long. There are so many of them that I started to think that the effort put into making this email is excessive.
The first option is “Would you be the main character?” h.e.l.l yeah. The next option is “Please select the characters that will appear.” Everyone. “Whose age will be the baseline?” Mine. “Please set the scenarios for each character.” Use the game’s as the guide.
Just like this, I evaluated the questions while thinking along the lines of ‘the email can even read the names of the characters from a console game disc! Amazing.’
Finally, the last question is “Are you sure you want to change the world?” After I click “Yes” the setting phase finally ended.
After I hit the “Start” b.u.t.ton, the screen changed drastically. Many windows popped up and covered the entire screen. At the same time, some of them have logs quickly flowing through them. All in all the screen looks just like a very nasty computer virus. But at this stage I can’t do anything about it anymore. Furthermore the program didn’t trigger the resident antivirus scanner, so I let it be.
After about ten minutes, there is only one window remaining. In it there is a percentage frame. Inside the frame is the word ‘client-server’, along with an English percentage bar being slowly filled up. When it reached 100 my computer suddenly went ‘bang’, and then it blue screened [TL thought: next time, use Linux].
Ahh man, what is this for…
I still don’t know what the email did, or why did I went along with it. There is not much I can comment on with a single blue screen, so I figured I will just restart the computer.
And then, when I cut off the power and attempted to restart the computer-
There was no warning, my surrounding changed. In the instance that I thought why does my own room look fuzzy, the whole room, or rather, the entire dimension, became a white room that extended down the horizon.
“…Recovering from a terminal error. Continue to process request. Gene pattern verified. History verified. Name of individual, identified by reference, is Takenori Tsuduki.”
[TL thoughts: Windows alone is enough to crash the world. :o ]
A robotic voice can be heard from somewhere. Should I be thinking how it knows my name? Even though there are too many places that seem supernatural, but a supremely suppressing feeling tells me everything is real. Even though I am not sure what is going on, thanks to my surrounding (or lack of), I wasn’t scare.
“Setting has been accepted. Please verify the changes with your voice.”
The setting has been accepted- does that mean this is the continuation of the email?
“The partial world of media ‘Eternal Innocence’ has been projected. To continue please answer ‘Yes’; to abort please answer ‘No’. Please note if no is selected, the program will abort, and there will not be a second chance to change your life.”
I am not sure whether this is real or not. When the mail came things were weird already, and I don’t understand the reasons behind how that worked. You might say that this is only an ambiguous dream, but when you are in the middle of this mysterious scene, its trustworthiness is a lot higher than when you are merely choosing the settings in a email.
To be able to make part of the game world come alive is my wish, or should I say it’s my disillusion.
Maybe this really is a changing point in my life.
To be granted of my wish…
I couldn’t help but reflect on myself.
I am not a bad person, but nor am I the kind of person that can be described as very nice. My mark is around the median, my athletic ability is average, both my look and my body size are normal. Other than me being an otaku, I am an extremely common and uninteresting high school student.
And I hate myself for being that.
That’s why I didn’t hesitate at all,
“Yes”