What you are about to read could be described as something generated by a defective AI, but I will object to that charge on grounds of insanity. And frankly, I think that is a more accurate description.
On my 24th birthday, I received an unexpected marriage proposal from a childhood friend. It was something straight out of a galge, and I had also completed my first web novel, which I had been working on since the age of sixteen. Things were finally turning up and I felt that my hard work was paying off. A notification went off on my phone.
PM123> “Congratulations on your 1000th chapter!”
PM123 was one of the few regular readers of my story, but I had no complaints since I knew it wasn’t a particularly good story, although writing it had taught me enough that I knew I would do a better job when it came to writing my next story and world. This was another thing that I had to look forward to.
Desires come and go, so you should grasp them while you still have them. That’s something that Colombina, the heroine from my favourite galge, from the route written by my favourite VN scenario writer, said to the protagonist on a starry night on a distant planet. These were words I believed I could live by.
My occupation was of no relevance to me. It was simply a means to pay for my hobbies. Although I was grateful for my job at a major American mobile company, as I had finally been able to buy my own place, it didn’t mean anything to me more than a means to my pay cheque.
My own abode was a simple one-bedroom flat, but an otaku’s room is his castle, and now I could adorn it without having to worry about my landlord not liking my itabeya decor. I bought the top-of-the-line dating simulators from the land of the rising sun, splurged on lewd figurines of characters adorned in sukumizu and maid outfits with frilly underwear that I could freely resist the temptation to look under. It was no easy task to import them without getting caught. The final touch was the visual novel posters, something I could definitely not get away with in someone else’s property.
On the night of my birthday, I was putting up a poster of Colombina/Kurumi, my favourite bishoujo character, from a galge called Rondo Veneziano. Now, normally Kurumi wore a stupendous red and white maid outfit but Ponkun the character designer for the visual novel had decided to give her a more traditional, throwback moe look by putting her in a red bunny outfit strumming an electric guitar for some official promotional art. I found it a tad referrential conceputually but I could not argue with the resulting visage. Now in order to save money for my essential needs (i.e. otaku goods), I had purchased a ladder from a shady online website, and as it happened I was standing on said ladder while trying to pin the giant poster on top of the ceiling above my bed.
The placement was so I would always wake up to a familiar sight of my oshi every morning. I had purposefully chosen a house with a high ceiling to maximise the number of posters I could add, so I had to stand at the very top of the ladder.
I was in a particularly good mood because I had published the final chapter in my web novel. My final thought before the end was that perhaps next I could work a bigger project than a novel.
This is where my future as a human came to an end, the ladder suddenly buckled and folded like a piece of paper launching me back all the way to my bed. It was not a bad fall, and I watched the poster as I arched down backwards, except that my head hit the met headboard of the bed. I lost my vision for a second but then I was fine. It was already late, so I waited till the next morning to do a checkup at the hospital but nothing turned up on their tests…
By the time a competent doctor looked at what was wrong it was too late. After only a week, I laid paralyzed in bed with a headspitting headache. The doctors were very candid in our meetings; both they and I knew that I was dying, and I, for one, appreciated that there wasn’t any pretence that this was not so. It may have been cold, but it was better than having any misguided hope. I did not regret the selfish way in which I had lived, nor did I long for anything more than an ordinary death.
Soon the pain was mostly gone but with it my sight was gone as well, as the sickly and clean smells of my own paralysed body and the surroundings permeated my mind, I thought it would have been better if I had died while looking at that poster but perhaps I shouldn’t have hoped for such a romantic death. If I was not going to get better, which was evidently so, then I wished for death to take me and be done with it.
