Redo, please!

"Any chance we can do a redo?" I asked Leilei.

"Re-what?!" demanded the Sock Puppet with Kosuke's voice. "Minori, can't you tell it's me? Kosuke Satou!"

I buried my face in my hands. It was truly as I feared. 

"What are you doing here?" I snapped. This was such a pain; I was quite comfortable leaving my past life behind me, entirely. Dealing with someone from it, especially someone like Kosuke, was the last thing I needed right now.

"What do you mean 'what am I doing here?' I'm here for you!"

"But why?!"

He looked hurt. As far as the button eyes and fuzzy sock features allowed him to express emotions, anyway. "Minori... don't you remember the oath I swore?"

Oath? hmmm, oh yeah...

"I'll follow you until the ends of the Earth... and beyond..." He did say that, didn't he?

The dork.

"I honestly did my best to forget..."

He went from being a lively little sock critter to freezing, completely motionless with his mouth hanging open. Then his legs slowly split until he sank down unto his butt. He continued sinking down all the way into a prone position, with the same distraught expression stuck on his face.

"Oh no, your new doll! Is he broken?" asked Leilei, squatting down and poking at him with a cautious finger.

"I just... I just thought you'd be happy to see me again..." muttered Kosuke, despondent and monotone.

That just shows how much you know about me... I almost said it aloud, but he seemed to be already having quite the difficult time, and I didn't want to push him over the edge. Still, he claimed to like me, yet it was clear he knew nothing about me, which meant that his feelings for me were based on a false idea of me. It was like he expected me to behave like some basic girl side character in an anime centered around him.

That simply wasn't going to fly.

Plus, he was a dork. Which, in the panorama of irksome qualities that made up Kosuke, was actually the closest thing he had to a redeeming quality.

"Wait a minute..." I just realized something essential: "why were you reincarnated as a minion, why weren't you born as an actual character?" I honestly didn't even want to talk to him, but I did find this situation rather intriguing.

"Oh yeah, that... well... it's kind of a long story..."

"I'll make some tea," said Leilei after I gave her a questioning look.

I didn't want to force her to have to sit through this in her own room. Although I was planning on getting my own room after this ritual, I realized that the last thing I wanted was to be left alone with this clingy loser.

"I'm listening," I said cooly.

"Alright, well, yeah I was welcomed by this weird ephemeral ghost."

Ghost? I didn't remember a ghost. "Which faction did you select?"

"I guess I didn't get that far. The ghost asked me which one I'd prefer and I just continued insisting that he tell me how to find you."

"What are you talking about!?" None of this made sense. 

There wasn't any ghost, you just selected a faction, then your race, then your class, then you'd be reborn into this world. Well I think that's how it happened... actually, I don't remember making any decisions. My first memory of conscious awareness was inside the womb of my flower mother...

 But I was reborn as the character I'd already made, so maybe it just scanned my subconsciousness to see which character I would choose? Why wasn't the same true for Kosuke? He didn't play so much in the other world, so maybe his character creation was a bit more involved?

"You know, the Curator?" he said.

"What did he look like?" I demanded. 

Clearly he was confused. There was no "Curator" in this game. The closest thing were the faction starting guides, like Puca.

Kosuke, however, seemed to be referring to some kind of meta entity...

One that didn't exist—or shouldn't have existed...

"He kind of looked like an emoji... or maybe a theater mask, with a striped suit and top hat."

Sounded super generic, and also too far removed from the typical Witch Kraft character design.

"Wait, so how did you end up not being born as a real character?"

"That's what I was getting to. I was so insistent to the Curator that he tell me where you were, that he eventually showed me a map with your exact location, in order to try to shut me up. He said the map was a magic portal map and that he could give me one as well as other, exclusive in game bonuses—if I agreed to work with him..."

Okay, that was super weird, but I didn't want to interrupt so I kept silent and let him continue.

"Since he'd already pointed to where you were and told me it was a magic map, I just sort of flew into it. Then I appeared right above you. I was hovering over you for quite some time, screaming your name, but you couldn't hear me..."

The creepy little stalker! 

"Then I realized I didn't have a reflection so I must have been a ghost or something and then I heard other spirits. When I called out to them, they could hear me. They explained to me that we were "Lost Souls." Basically, we had to wait until someone was preforming binding rituals on krafted minions, which we then had a chance to animate in order to return to life. So I'd been waiting on you to do the ritual on the doll, so that I could fulfill my promise to you. I said I'd follow you.. well, here I am!" he swept his arms around himself as if he were presenting something of indispensable valuable.

"Why didn't you just chose the same faction as me, then chose to be reborn as a Behemoth? Then you could have actually turned into something useful, powerful even, instead of a junk doll made of scrapped useless materials that I'm going to throw away as soon as I unlock a better schema," I said in a cool tone with my arms folded.

His face became despondent once again as he slowly sank back down onto the floor.