Hey, you there. Are you getting enough sleep?
Are you eating your vegetables?
Are you making sure to exercise?
I had been eating my vegetables, at least...
That day, I woke up to the sun shining brightly outside my window. I berated myself for having fallen asleep even though I had intended to pull an all-nighter and cursed myself for having added more pages even though the deadline was the day after tomorrow. Suddenly, I realized my body wasn’t moving quite right.
Oh no. What’s happening? Is this because I haven’t been getting enough sleep? Am I ill? No, no, calm down. Let’s just check if I have a fever first.
But when I went to put a hand to my forehead...
What’s with this hand? It’s so small and pudgy. Am I a Kewpie doll now?
The room I was in had a high ceiling, and there were pictures of fairylike creatures drawn all over the place. The walls were a peppermint green accented with patterns of white and gold. Both the pillow and canopy of my bed were decorated with frills... Wait, a canopy?! I’ve never seen one of these in person before.
This was definitely not my room. Just what was going on?
Heart beating wildly, I tried to sit up, but just like before, my body wouldn’t move as I wanted it to. Usually, an adult wouldn’t have cried over something like that. I might have gotten a bit teary-eyed, but all-out wailing? That was something you stopped getting away with once you started middle school.
And yet, cry was what I did. It almost felt instinctual, the tears spilling from my eyes before I knew it. I couldn’t stop them either.
“Oh my, Lady Deirdre. Whatever is the matter?”
From beside me appeared a young girl with pale skin and large blue eyes.
Oh, she’s white?
I’d passed by foreigners in the streets before, but I’d lived such a sheltered life that I didn’t have a single non-Japanese friend. Having a foreigner suddenly so close startled me. She gave me such a fright, in fact, that I forgot about crying.
“Don’t worry. I’m right here. Did you have a bad dream?”
She was talking like you would to a baby. I recognized her tone—that was exactly how I spoke to my friends’ and my sister’s kids. It was hard not to instinctively put on a baby voice when talking to younger kids...or cats.
I took those pudgy little baby hands of mine and opened them, closed them, opened them, closed them.
Well, these are definitely my hands.
I was so confused that all I could do was laugh.
“Aww, she’s laughing! She’s so cute!”
“Dana, don’t shout like that. You’ll scare the young lady.”
“But she’s just so cute, Cynthia.”
And now there was another girl, one with red hair. They were both very cute themselves. Judging by how they were referring to me and by the clothes they were wearing, they must have been my maids.
Pulling off being a maid was an immensely difficult feat— Wait, this isn’t the time for that.
Why was I in this situation to begin with? What day was it? Where was this? Who on earth was I?!
✦ ✦ ✦
I had been a logistics operator working for a manufacturer—just a run-of-the-mill office worker. There had been a period of time when I’d really wanted to rise up the ranks and had started attending programming lessons, but then I’d realized how much I valued having free time for my hobbies. I’d ended up quitting.
To tell the truth, I’d actually published my own short doujin before. I hadn’t been a real fujoshi, though. People shouldn’t just assume that all women who are otaku have those interests. Not that I’d necessarily been against that perception of me. I might have had one foot in that world at some point... Was that enough to have been considered a fujo? I supposed it made me a half fujo.
I’d had so much free time as a student, but the moment I’d become a working adult, the amount of time I’d had for my hobbies had dropped dramatically, and that’d meant there was no way I could sleep if I wanted to meet the deadlines. Consuming energy drinks to make it through all-nighters had been the natural course of action.
I’d preferred surfing the net to going outside. Whenever I had gone out with a friend, I’d tended to treat it as a special event. Holidays had meant spending time at home by myself. At work, I would remain at my desk for the whole shift; back home, I would lounge around until I went to bed. Even on weekends, I would spend the whole day sitting in front of my computer.
Exercise? I’d always had to climb the stairs at the station on the way to work so I’d thought that would be enough...but then apparently, a blood clot had formed and caused a blockage in my brain. My memories surrounding the situation were hazy. I just vaguely remembered hearing someone say something along those lines.
What did they call it? Economy class syndrome? I’d known that it was bad to stay sitting in the same position for long periods of time, but time flies when you’re fully engrossed in something. There’d been days I hadn’t left my seat other than to go to the bathroom.
I had still been just shy of thirty. I felt so bad for my parents. At least I’d asked my younger sister to make sure that she was the one who got rid of my computer. I would’ve felt so much worse if they’d ended up reading what was on it. Either way, I was already dead, so there was no way for me to apologize to them.
Now, I appeared to have reincarnated, free of any worries, into the body of a rich family’s daughter.
No, really, I felt so guilty. If it were possible, I’d have gone to visit my family in their dreams to say both sorry and thank you. If only I could’ve become a guardian spirit for my niece and looked out for her until she was all grown-up...
I spent a couple of days wriggling around, but nothing changed. In other words, this wasn’t a dream. This was reality. I had no choice but to live in this world whether I wanted to or not.
I have to strengthen my resolve. This time, for sure, I would live a proper life, act as a daughter should, and fall in love! It didn’t have to be all dramatic like in the fairy tales. Just a normal romance would do me fine.
I wanted to marry someone I could be myself with! We’d have a nice, stable relationship and live a long and peaceful life together!
Now that I’ve been given this chance to give my life another go, I want to experience love!