“You simply must tell me what sort of product your estate uses to polish the banist—”
“Melody!” Anna grabbed the mad maid by the shoulders.
“Anna?”
“Melody, does a maid discuss her house’s internal affairs?”
That struck Melody like a punch to the solar plexus. Her complexion waned. “What… What have I done?” Melody hunched like a criminal marching to the gallows. “I have no words to express my shame. I’m a disgrace to our profession.”
“D-don’t be so dramatic. Simply learn and grow.” Anna had only meant to slow her down, not utterly crush her. “Everyone makes mistakes. Ensuring they don’t happen again is what’s important. That’s how we improve. What’s more, you have Lady Anna-Marie’s praise and respect. Someone with that honor has no business losing their nerve over something so trivial. Now, chin up! This is yet another step toward becoming a more perfect maid!”
“Yes. Yes, Anna, you’re right. The world’s most perfect maid doesn’t stay down when she falls!”
Anna’s pep talk worked wonders. She learned a little something from this experience as well: Never bring up maids around Melody. Ever.
With her charge finally calm, Anna listened to the rest of the story. Even when she understood the full picture, though, she couldn’t wrap her mind around why someone so obviously not the heroine was doing heroine things.
The way we got here is different, but everything still somehow fits into the narrative, she reflected.
Melody said the same things as the heroine but for fundamentally different reasons. She’d taken a different path but still found her way to the men and done exactly what the heroine would have. It boggled the mind that reality could work out exactly how the game had, as if by some cosmic coincidence.
The oddities didn’t stop at today’s event either. There was the attack at the ball not long ago. Despite ostensible deviations, everything played out (almost) exactly how it should have. Events were following the plot, and yet the sum of their parts did not amount to the actual plot at all. Then there was the girl Christopher had run into on the first day of the academy. It should have been the heroine, and instead it was a black-haired…
“Melody, did you happen to go to campus on the day of the academy’s opening ceremony?”
“Hm? Oh, yes. I had to deliver something my lady had forgotten.”
“Did you happen to run into anyone at the time?”
“I did, as a matter of fact. Just as I was turning a corner, I recall running straight into a handsome boy with dark hair. I still wonder who that was.”
Mystery solved. Anna wanted to scream. Again, the event happened, but instead of the heroine, it was Melody? But at the ball, it was Luciana who was the heroine. Then Melody’s the heroine again today? Suddenly, her universal force theory wasn’t sounding so crazy. So there is something mandating these events, just in an awkward, incomplete sort of way.
As far as Anna knew, her and Christopher’s meddling had prevented the heroine from appearing as necessary for the narrative, but events and story beats were still unfolding, regardless of her absence. Perhaps some unseen force propelled the plot. Certain things made more sense that way. That force could randomly select someone—whoever best suited any given moment—to play the part of the heroine.
God, that’s straight up the worst possible scenario. It meant any random bystander could suddenly carry the weight of being the heroine. And they wouldn’t have any of the powers of the Saint.
Anna glanced askance at Melody. A date event was one thing, but what if this was one of the combat encounters? And against the Dark One’s thralls? Melody wasn’t a mage. She couldn’t defend herself. Such a matchup could only end one way.
Dead end. Game over.
Otome games were, in essence, a kind of simulation game. They simulated choices and branching paths. Make the right calls and get a good ending. Mess up and get a bad one. Really screw up, and the heroine would die outright. A dead end. It was up to the player to decide which they wanted to see, and because it was a game, this came at no personal risk. There was no actual danger. Good ends didn’t marry you to anyone and dead ends didn’t put you in a hearse. Because it was a game.
This, however, was not a game. This was real life. Real life did not care for balance, whether or not the main character was around, whether or not they could overcome the odds. The story would simply go on unimpeded.
Anna shook her head. Thinking too much again. Baseless conjecture. She had no proof for any of this, but neither did she have any proof against it, and so she could not entirely dismiss it. The plot might trundle on without the heroine. It might not. She had no way to know.
“Are you all right?” Melody asked.
“Hm? Oh, yes! Fine!”
She had to remember not to get lost in her head. It made her prone to missing what was right in front of her, such as the currently more pressing issue: what to do about Melody.
I can’t just send her on her way, can I?
Unfortunately, the Debonair Day of Roguish Romance did, in fact, come with a potential bad end. Whether they were headed toward it depended entirely on the actions the heroine took in the next few seconds.
“Allow me to thank you again, Anna.” Melody dipped into an elegant bow. “I ought to be fine on my own now. I’ll be on my—”
“Wait!” Anna held out her hand, blocking her way.
“Y-yes?”
I knew she was gonna go with that choice! I totally called it!
Melody was truly an impressive girl. In no time at all, she’d sussed out the most direct course to the worst possible branch of this event. Were this a visual novel, Anna’s sprite would be swapping to its “shock” variant and her background would be some kind of stock beta flash. Why? Because of genre tropes. Best not to question those.
You only got a bad end for this event if you didn’t pursue it. Despite the fact that the writers had gone out of their way to prepare an entire script for the date, they’d given players the option to skip it entirely, thus triggering the bad end. Perhaps they were masochists.
Seriously, I feel like the norm is to have the boy force you into it anyway. Whatever happened to playing hard to get? Good lord, Christopher’s an invertebrate in every iteration!
This Christopher was an entirely different person, granted, but Anna did not particularly care about the details when it came to dissing him. Everything was perpetually his fault, now and forevermore. Because she said so.
I can’t let her go. If she leaves…
If, after being rescued by the prince, the player selected “I’ll be fine on my own,” they would find themselves accosted again by the same men. The heroine would hear them shouting at her and turn back.
Then the screen would go black, displaying only the following dialogue.
“Finally found ya. You really gave us the runaround, little lady. And after we were so nice to ya.”
“Ha! They gotcha good with that juice, though.”
“Shut your trap! You! Girl! This is all your fault. And now you’re gonna make this right or we’re gonna do something we both regret.”
And then the text window would vanish, making way for the next screen-filling message.
And no one ever heard from her again.
BAD END
The worst part was that it was designated a “bad end.” Not a dead end. The implications were chilling.
Who puts something like that in a game for school-aged girls?! Did the rating system not catch that?!
Granted, many considered the game’s realism a point in its favor, and one couldn’t argue with the markets, but that was irrelevant where real people were concerned. It went without saying that Anna could not let whatever happened beyond that black screen come to pass.