Slippers, Ceiling Fans, and a Body That JIGGLES?!

Three minutes before the world cracked—and even before she ended up in someone else’s pajama-clad, earth-girl body—Rei was fighting a Level 74 mechanized wyvern while trying not to die.

Not exactly an ideal Tuesday.

“Plasma bolt!” she shouted, her gauntlet firing a stream of searing blue light that barely grazed the beast's chrome-plated tail. “Stupid overgrown toaster!”

She somersaulted backward, landing on the hood of a burned-out hovercar, panting. Her heads-up display was flashing red warnings across her vision.

Vitals low. Neural sync destabilizing. Dimensional Rift detected.

“Wait—what rift?! No-no-no, you don’t just casually toss in a dimensional rift, you toaster-faced narrative engine!” she shouted at the sky.

That’s when the tear opened above her—a crack of glowing code splitting the atmosphere like a broken screen. For half a second, Rei saw something impossible: a girl, in bed, wearing a hoodie and surrounded by books. Their eyes locked for the briefest, strangest moment.

And then—

FLIP.

Rei’s next memory was of cotton sheets. Soft pillows. A fan spinning lazily above her. And her face pressed against something… suspiciously soft.

She groaned. “Ugh… did I survive? Am I in a hospital—”

She pushed herself up—and froze.

Her hands were small. Smooth. Unscarred. And her chest—

JIGGLE.

She stared down.

“Okay. Okay, okay. Calm down. I’ve been hit by mental scramblers before. Hallucinations happen. It’s fine.”

She glanced around. Shelves full of manga. Posters of anime boys with gravity-defying hair. A plush alpaca in sunglasses. A mirror across the room reflected an image that made her throat seize.

A girl. With messy brown hair, big round glasses, and a too-large hoodie.

“That… is not me.”

She blinked. The reflection blinked. She waved. It waved.

“I’m in someone else’s body.”

A beat.

“AND THIS BODY HAS SQUISHY BITS.”

She grabbed a pillow and screamed into it.

After about five minutes of muffled screaming, she sat up again, face flushed and deeply confused.

“Okay. Think, Rei. You were in the middle of a fight. Something about a dimensional rift. Maybe that girl was the cause?”

Rei paced back and forth—well, stumbled, really. The legs in this new body felt clumsy. Too soft. No muscle memory. She opened a window and was greeted by the terrifyingly calm suburbia of Earth.

Birds chirped.

People walked dogs.

A cat stared at her like it knew everything and judged her anyway.

She shut the window.

“This place is way too peaceful.”

That’s when her connection synced. She felt it—a faint mental link humming at the back of her mind. A connection to someone else.

“...Hello?” she said aloud, trying to project her thoughts through the link.

A few moments later…

“Whoa… this body feels so weird and squishy. Are these... real boobs?”

“Wait—are you hearing me?” came the confused reply in her mind.

“Yup. And you're in my body now. Which means… lucky you! You're the protagonist of a collapsing apocalyptic world.”

A pause.

“W-Wait. You’re Rei?!”

“Bingo. And you—whoever you are—are now the only person standing between humanity and extinction. No pressure or anything. I’ll just be… here, chilling in your room, trying to figure out how this microwave works.”

“I didn’t want to be the protagonist!”

“Tough cookies, new me. It’s your turn to save the world. I’ll be cheering you on from your cozy little bedroom. Hopefully, your microwave still works.”

Rei collapsed onto Aya’s bed and stared at the ceiling.

“Great. I go from plasma rifles and skyscraper battles to fuzzy socks and algebra textbooks. This is the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals.”

But deep down… she smirked.

Maybe, just maybe, this wouldn’t be so bad. After all, it wasn’t every day you got to see what life was like on the “reader’s side” of the story.

And besides… she could already smell something delicious coming from the kitchen.

“...Is that curry?”