28 - Club Room Interlude / Double Trouble (1)

The familiar sight of the club room greets me, as I open my eyes.

"—just saying," comes Valerie's voice, fading in, "the whole thing rubs me the wrong way. You finish a route, you get a romantic ending for one of the side characters, right? Happy ending, let's say, for the sake of argument. But then what's next? You start from the beginning, go for a different girl. And then, whatever memories you made with that earlier girl—they're just gone. Don't you feel sorry for her? You've effectively erased your own history."

"No," argues Alex, "you don't get it. They're not canonical per se, but they are in spirit. The reader exists separately from the MC. The MC might not remember, but you do. That's the important thing."

I raise my head from the club room table, rub my eyes drowsily.

"Oh. Odd-kun's up."

"Morning, sleepyhead."

Alex and Valerie sit across from me, arguing about some dumb shit nobody cares about, for the nth time.

Sunny and Moeka are by the CRT, playing a fighting game or something.

… So, basically, everybody's doing what I remember them doing, right before I conked out.

(… And how long ago was that? … How long was my fucking nap, exactly?)

The first thing I do, post-nap—(and now, Reader—I can't explain why I'm about to do what I'm about to do, but the urge to do it is so irresistible that I … well, you'll see after this parenthetical intrusion)—is shoot up from my seat, and scream:

"WEBNOVEL! WE'RE IN A FUCKING WEBNOVEL! LIGHT NOVELS! ISEKAI CONTEST!"

I point to the ceiling. "Look! An address bar!" Then I point to the floor. "Or down here, if you're on S*f*ri! … And if you're on PC, then—hey, did you know you can open this up in Reader View and the text becomes copyable!?!? … But you might have to scroll down a bit so you get the #page-2 to show up, before Reader View works!!"

The club room is silent, as I stand there, manic and panting.

Sunny and Moeka drop their controllers, and gawk at me from the TV, heads turned back, stupefied.

Alex and Valerie, on the other hand, look at me like I'm a piece of shit on their shoe they stepped in.

Alex, disgustedly: "… Odd-kun, you can't just say shit like that out of nowhere, unprompted. You're not being clever or funny. You have to use fourth wall breaks sparingly."

Valerie, grimacing: "Yeah, that was really fucking jarring, Odd-kun. If you're gonna go meta it has to serve the plot, or at least be funny. Nobody likes it when you just break their immersion for no reason. Maybe leave the smug, self-aware commentary to Ry*n R*ynolds."

I scratch my head. I have no idea why I just said all that.

"I have no idea why I just said all that," I say. (See?) "… It feels like I haven't been able to say stuff like that in a really, really long time. … Weeks? Months? Years, maybe? (… At least 10K words' worth of narrative timelapse, in any case. At least.)"

Alex pushes his glasses up. "Dude, you break the fourth wall all the time. Trust me—we'd notice if you stopped doing it all of a sudden. (Also, it takes you weeks to read 10K?)"

Valerie: "Yeah, I'm pretty sure you were being meta like, right before your nap. I mean, I guess I could go back and check. … But I kinda … just … don't feel like it."

I sit back down.

I notice that our club table has been segmented into sections. Kinda resembles one of those Japanese-style open-office shared workstations I see all the time in AV, I mean AV, I mean AV, I mean totally normal office dramas.

"… Did you guys do this?" I ask, pointing to the dividers.

Valerie and Alex shrug.

"No? I think it's always been like this," says Alex.

Has it …?

Well, whatever.

I start taking down the dividers, as Alex and Valerie resume the conversation they were having before I woke up.

(V: "Anyway—that's why I finish the girl I like, and stop there."

A, sputtering: "What!? You're missing out on the True End! That's the emotional culmination of the entire experience! It's the entire reason you sit through 90-plus hours of girls going 'Uguu~' while nothing happens!"

V, smirking: "Hey. Hey. Hey, Alex."

A: "… What?"

V: "Your precious M*v-L*v is an iskeai."

A, seethingly: "Fuuuu-uck you.")

Sunny and Moeka continue playing their game, and—

… Wait. Hold on.

We're all accounted for, right?

Alex, Valerie. That's two.

Sunny, Moeka. Four.

… And me. Makes five.

That's all of us, right?

Right?

I shake my head.

Alex: "Odd-kun, you good man? Maybe you should tell Jessica to lay off the steel chair hits to the head."

I wipe the drool from my mouth. "N-no, don't worry about me. No drain blammage here."

"You used that joke already."

I groan. "What do you want from me? There's only so much original material I can come up with. I'm not a comedian, I just watch a lot of gag anime."

"Good, 'cause you'd be really bad at it."

"At watching gag anime?"

"Fuck you."

"No, fuck yoooo-oouu."

"Thanks, So*lja B*y."

Sunny, turning his head around, smiling as he always does: "Hey, guys? Do you think you can tone down the language? There's a child in the room."

The rest of the day passes by uneventfully.

As far as the IWC is concerned, it was just another 'ordinary' day, in Point Parallax.

As we leave for the evening, I can't help but notice the plaque on our door, the one inscribed with our club name.

ISEKAI WAITING CLUB

A strange feeling grips me as I stare at it.

An anxiety that I can't place, a dissonance I can't resolve, no matter how hard I try.

"We, uh … When did we get that made again?" I ask.

"I'm pretty sure we always had it," shrugs Valerie.

… Did we?

I stare at it for a bit longer, puzzled.

"Hey," comes Alex's voice from inside the club room. "Anyone know why we have a random ID badge on our desk?"

He steps out of the room, swinging an ID badge on a lanyard. (Kinda like the one I used to have, back in the real world. You know—for the job that fucking killed me?)

"Maybe it belonged to one of the goddesses?" suggests Valerie.

"Okay, well, number one, the goddesses don't have badges. And number two, this picture is of some … girl. With fox ears."

Alex passes the ID badge around to the other club members, even Sunny and Moeka, but nobody seems to know where it came from, or who it belongs to.

When the badge passes to me, I read the name under the photo.

… Advent.

"Any idea who that is?" asks Alex.

I stare at the badge for a long time.

Then I shake my head.

"I dunno," I say. "Never seen her before in my life."

*

A few days later, we're hanging out in the club room.

Alex and Valerie are fighting each other with large foam pool noodles.

Moeka is at the table, scribbling with her crayons. Now, I think she's drawing Hannibal—but I can't tell if he's crossing the alps, or feeding R*y Li*tta his own brain. (… I don't know why she would be drawing either scene TBH.)

Sunny's sitting by the window, doing absolutely nothing, and loving every minute of it.

I'm standing near the door, admiring the scene, looking proudly over the club that I built, single-handedly, from the ground up, nobody to help me at the start, certainly not Alex, who wears dumb, stupid glasses, and who likes to do fucked-up shit like steal the strawberry from my cake that we got last night for dessert in the cafeteria.

Anyway, as I stand there and ruminate over what a benevolent, forgiving, and non-petty (plus handsome) Supreme Leader by Divine Right I am (I decided just now that that's my official title), the club room is suddenly shaken by cacophony of pounding and hammering coming from what sounds like the room next to us.

Like a construction crew just started work next door or something.

"What the hell is that?" asks Valerie, who has to yell over the noise.

"Moeka hates loud noises!" screams Moeka, her hands over her ears.

"Is L.I.M.B.O. renovating or something!?" shouts some stupid motherfucker who can't keep his fork to himself.

And just as I'm about to walk over next door to see what's going on—(no, really, I was totally about to do it. What, you think I'm afraid of confrontation? You think I'm the type of person who would lie awake back in the real world because his neighbors wouldn't stop blasting music at 4am in the morning and I was too afraid to speak up? IS THAT IT!? IS THAT THE PERSON YOU THINK I AM!?)—the wall separating our club room from next door begins rattling with a series of blows, like BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!, one after another, each impact cracking the plaster, until—

—until the entire wall collapses, in a cloud of dust and debris that engulfs the entire club room, leaving us hacking and coughing, waving the air in front of us.

When the dust finally settles, at least enough for us to see, what greets us on the other side of the now-missing wall, is a pair of green-haired elves.

… Twins, from the looks of it.

One with long twintails, in a skin-tight pink, legally-distinct pl*gsuit, her arms crossed, eyebrows V'd determinedly.

The other one, with shorter hair, a braid down one side, stands there with a sledgehammer in her hands, looking slightly apologetic.

I gesture wildly. "… What the hell is all this!?"

The elf in the mech pilot suit scoffs, flips her hair. "What does it look like we're doing? … Our room's not big enough. So we're expanding."

The other elf, the one with the sledgehammer bows slightly, looking uncomfortable, perhaps embarrassed. … She doesn't actually say anything, however.

Ms Twintails places one hand on her hip, and gestures with the other, as if to say, Oh well, it can't be helped.

And then she tells us, simply:

"… It's your own damn fault. You all were in the way."