Prologue: Is It Wrong to Pick Up Guys off the Street?

Part 1

The karaoke machine refused to shut up.

At eleven at night, its tinny speakers looped the same overwrought heartbreak ballad until the notes felt like a personal attack. The three of them were draped across the faux‑leather couch like survivors of a romantic shipwreck, each in a different stage of emotional dehydration.

Sera sat bolt‑upright, phone clutched in a white‑knuckled grip. Her thumb flicked through a text thread with surgical precision. She pinched‑to‑zoom on a yellow heart emoji until the pixels blurred into a jagged, glowing accusation. Her thumb hovered over one message—We need to talk—trembling just enough for the neon‑purple light to catch it.

“I should’ve noticed sooner,” she muttered. “His syntax shifted. He never uses the yellow heart unless he’s lying.”

Across from her, Erika lay sprawled in a nest of snack wrappers. She didn’t move, except for the slow, mournful crinkle‑pop of the potato chip bag she was clutching like a therapy animal. Pressed to her chest was a crumpled sheet of paper; even through the grease stains, the city seal was visible.

“It wasn’t even a real restraining order,” Erika groaned into the upholstery.

She lifted the paper and inhaled—waaay too deeply.

“Just a ‘formal warning.’ Who calls the police over a little scent‑sampling? He smelled like aqua bergamot and dark temptation. I just needed a reference point.”

“You broke into his dorm to sniff his gym clothes,” Sera said without looking up. Her voice was flat, precise—an autopsy report delivered in three syllables. “That’s not a reference point. That’s a felony.”

Erika flushed, then forced a laugh that came out as a dry, hacking cough. “It was RESEARCH,” she hissed, burrowing deeper into the couch as if it might finally swallow her.

Meanwhile, Olivia had draped herself dramatically over the low karaoke table. Her cheek was suctioned to the sticky, soda‑stained wood with a wet thwack, her limbs dangling with the limp ragdoll physics of an RPG hero awaiting a revival spell. Every few seconds she blew a weak puff at her bangs, but they stayed plastered to her forehead—a tragic‑heroine pose failing in real time.

“My date fled,” Olivia whispered into the table. “Full sprint. He didn’t even look back. He just… became a silhouette against the setting sun. And then he ghosted me.”

Sera exhaled and set her phone in her lap. The motion was small but absolute—the kind of exhale that closes a cold case. “Olivia,” she said, courtroom‑dry, “you tried to force him to cosplay as a magical girl.”

Olivia peeled her cheek off the table just enough to pout, neon from the monitor painting her eyes a ridiculous pink. “I thought all boys liked cosplay! It’s a staple of the genre!”

“Not when you’re the one stripping them in a public park,” Sera replied, and the line landed with the soft, heavy thud of a verdict.

Olivia collapsed again with a tragic groan, swallowed by the karaoke machine’s soaring final chorus. For a moment, none of them spoke. Their collective humiliation settled over the room like a weighted blanket filled with wet sand.

The machine finally hit the last note—a long, agonizing violin screech—and died. In the sudden quiet, the only sound was the rhythmic crinkle… pop… of Erika’s snack bag.

Cruelly accurate.

Sera rubbed her temples until pale crescents marked her skin. “Three heartbreaks. One night,” she said, small and clinical. “Statistically, we’ve defied the laws of probability.”

Erika peeked over her “Formal Warning,” eyes narrowed. “Are you saying we’re cursed?”

“No.” Sera straightened, her movements brittle, her voice losing even the pretense of humor. “I’m saying the common denominator is us. We aren’t unlucky, Erika. We’re the disaster.”

The words didn’t land like a joke.

They settled like a truth they’d been avoiding—slow, heavy, humiliating.

For a moment, the room felt like a mirror held much too close.

Part 2

The silence in the karaoke booth stretched on—thick, heavy, and smelling faintly of cheap citrus room spray and regret. The kind of silence that usually preceded a total mental breakdown or a very expensive therapy session.

Then the couch groaned.

Olivia jolted upright, her cheek peeling off the sticky tabletop with a wet, Velcro‑meets‑duct‑tape rip. Her eyes weren’t just open—they were bloodshot, frantic, and glowing with the kind of revelation usually found at the bottom of a ramen bowl.

“That’s it,” she declared, voice trembling with either heartbreak or divine madness. “I’ve figured out why we keep failing.”

Sera didn’t look up. She was too busy scrubbing a smudge off her phone screen with the hem of her shirt—aggressively, obsessively. Squeak. Squeak. “Because we make terrible decisions.”

“No,” Olivia insisted, wobbling to her feet on the uneven couch cushions. Her shadow loomed large and shaky against the neon‑purple wall. “We keep failing because this world is nerfed. The mechanics are broken. And I should know.”

Erika let out a long, wheezing groan and pulled her hoodie over her head like a funeral shroud, tightening the drawstrings until only her nose poked out. “Oh no. Here it comes. The reincarnation monologue.”

“Listen!” Olivia spread her arms like she was summoning a chorus. “In my past life, I was Oliver the Magnificent. A Harem King! My charisma stat could make a stone statue blush. Women fought duels for my favor—men wept when I left the tavern!”

Sera finally stopped scrubbing and looked up, her expression a perfect mask of exhausted skepticism. She held her phone up to the light, checking the reflection. “Olivia, you can’t keep blaming your love life on a fictional past existence. You were an only child who watched too much late‑night isekai.”

“I have memories, Sera!” Olivia clutched her head, fingers tangling in her soda‑matted hair. “Vague, golden‑hued memories of dramatic sunsets and women with very large… plot relevance! But then I woke up here. In this Low‑Spec reality.”

“That’s just every isekai anime ever,” Erika muttered from inside the hoodie. She kicked a plastic maraca on the floor. It clacked weakly, like even it had given up.

“Look at this place!” Olivia gestured wildly at the cramped four‑by‑four room. “Where are the affection meters? The event flags? How am I supposed to know if a guy likes me if there isn’t a glowing pink heart over his head or a ‘Confirm Relationship’ dialogue box?”

She slumped back against the wall, her dramatic energy leaking out like a punctured balloon. For the first time all night, she looked less like a fallen king and more like a girl who just wanted to know the right buttons to press.

“Real life doesn't have a walkthrough,” she whispered.

Something in the room softened—just a fraction, but enough for Sera to pause mid‑polish.

Sera snapped her phone shut with a guillotine click. “If that’s the case, we could just date girls.”

The karaoke room went dead. Even the air conditioner seemed to hold its breath.

“I’ve run the calculations,” Sera continued, slipping back into her detective‑noir monotone. “Even if there were an equal number of straight men to women, we would be the last three women on the planet to be selected. At least if we dated other girls, we’d understand why we’re being rejected. I’m flexible.”

Erika’s head popped out of her hoodie like a startled turtle. “Sera! I get that you’re spiraling into cat‑lady probability math, but you know there is nothing better than a sweaty man fresh out of the gym for me. I have standards. Pungent, muscular standards.”

“It’s a valid proposition,” Sera muttered, though she didn’t sound convinced.

Both of them turned to Olivia.

She was quiet—chin in hand, tapping her cheek thoughtfully.

“A Yuri route would simplify things,” she mused. “Better character designs. Stronger subtext. But no.” She shook her head, resolute. “I refuse to abandon the main quest.”

She climbed onto the table, her boots making a sickening syrup‑slick squelch.

“For the Goddess of Affection,” Olivia proclaimed, “I will conquer romance the proper way!”

Erika stared up at her, unimpressed. “And what exactly is the ‘proper way’?”

For the first time all night, Olivia hesitated. Her shoulders dipped—just a fraction, but enough to reveal the crack beneath the theatrics.

“I don’t know,” she admitted quietly, tracing a sticky ring on the tabletop. “I pray to her, but she hasn’t responded. No pings. No notifications. Just… silence.”

The room held its breath with her.

Then Olivia straightened, spine snapping back into place with the determination of a character who skipped three development arcs.

“But!” she declared, thrusting a finger skyward. “If real life won’t give us romance flags, then we’ll create them ourselves.”

Sera squinted, deeply concerned. “Create… flags?”

“Exactly!” Olivia’s grin was wide, unhinged, and dangerously hopeful. “We treat dating like an RPG. A structured progression. A Heroine’s Journey! We don’t wait for ‘The One.’ We hunt for XP until we’re too high‑level to be ghosted!”

Erika froze mid‑chip. “You want us to… grind for affection points?”

“Precisely!”

Sera exchanged a look with Erika—a look of pure dread. But beneath the logic and the cynicism, a tiny, irrational ember of why not? flickered to life.

After a formal police warning and a failed public‑park stripping incident, “Leveling Up” was practically the most sane idea they’d heard all night.

Almost.

Part 3

The longer they talked, the more Sera’s left eye began to itch. A sharp, nagging irritation—the physical manifestation of a logic‑driven brain trying to process pure nonsense.

She dug into her backpack, searching for eye drops. Instead, her fingers brushed something stiff. Cold. Unnaturally heavy.

She frowned and hauled it into the neon light. “What…?”

It was a book. But not just any book. It looked like a relic unearthed from a garage sale at the edge of the universe. The cover was sun‑bleached to a sickly pastel, featuring a 90s anime heroine winking with a thumbs‑up so aggressive it felt like a threat. The title was printed in chaotic bubble fonts that screamed budget desperation.

Is It Wrong to Pick Up Guys off the Street?

Erika slowly sat up, snack wrappers sliding off her lap like autumn leaves. She squinted at the cover, nose wrinkling in a suspicious sniff. “Girl… I know we’re at rock bottom, but I didn’t think you’d go that far.”

“I didn’t!” Sera sputtered, holding the book at arm’s length like a biohazard. “I’ve never seen this in my life! Someone must’ve shoved it in my bag while I was checking train schedules.”

Olivia gasped—a sharp, rattling sound of divine revelation. “A relic…”

She slid off the table with a heavy thud, boots sticking momentarily to the syrup‑slick floor, and reached for the book with trembling reverence. As she lifted it, a fine cloud of gray silt puffed from the spine, drifting through the purple neon like ancient curse smoke.

“It’s not a relic,” Sera snapped, though her voice lacked its usual bite. “It’s trash. Literal garbage someone used my bag to dispose of.”

Olivia ignored her, brushing dust from the cover with the tenderness of a priestess handling a sacred artifact.

Erika leaned in, nostrils flaring. “Smells like a basement full of unrequited love. And damp cardboard. And… is that VHS head‑cleaner?”

“Exactly!” Olivia’s eyes sparkled, reflecting the manic wink of the anime girl. “Destiny always smells like desperation! Don’t you see? The Goddess of Affection heard my plea. She’s sent us a sacred grimoire to guide us through this nerfed reality!”

Sera rubbed her temples, feeling a migraine pulse in time with the blinking REPLAY light. “Olivia, it’s a cheap dating manual from the dial‑up era. It was probably written by a guy who hasn’t seen sunlight since the Sega Saturn launched.”

“Then why,” Olivia whispered, voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush, “did it appear in your bag at the exact moment we decided to rewrite our stories? In the RPG of life, Sera, this isn’t trash. It’s a Key Item.”

Sera opened her mouth to argue, but the logic died in her throat. In this room, at this hour, “magic” felt just as plausible as their actual love lives.

Olivia flipped the book open. The pages groaned—a brittle protest of yellowed paper seeing light for the first time in decades. Inside were diagrams that looked like they’d been traced using warped parchment and a dying ballpoint pen.

Olivia’s eyes widened. “This is it.”

“‘It’ what?” Sera asked, already regretting the question.

“The path!” Olivia declared. “The Goddess has provided the walkthrough!”

Erika raised her hand tentatively. “Or—and hear me out—it’s garbage. I'm 80% sure I see a mold stain on page three.”

Olivia waved her off and turned to the first chapter.

“Listen to this,” she read, trembling with the kind of excitement usually reserved for SSR gacha pulls. “‘A true heroine does not wait for the encounter; she engineers the spawn point. Step 1: Establish Visual Contact. Level 1 Quest: The Gaze of Fate.’”

Erika's stomach drop.

Sera let out a low whistle. “The Gaze of Fate? Sounds like a great way to get a second restraining order.”

Erika groaned. “I’ve got class at eight. If you don’t need me, I’m leaving.”

“No,” Olivia declared, thrusting the book skyward. The 90s heroine on the cover seemed to wink harder in the flickering light. “It’s a structured progression! A path forward! No more ‘accidental’ stalking, Sera. No more ‘unauthorized’ sniffing, Erika. We follow the Guide. We level up. We win.”

The karaoke machine gave a pathetic electronic click. The screen went black. The timer hit 00:00.

In the sudden darkness, the three “losing heroines” stood in a loose circle. The bargain‑bin book seemed to glow faintly in the streetlamp light leaking through the grimy window.

Sera exhaled a breath she’d been holding since the triple heartbreak began. “Step one is just… making eye contact?”

“Easy, right?” Olivia grinned—bright, unhinged, yet dangerously hopeful.