Chapter 1: Caffeine and Humiliation

Part 1

The college quad was alive with noon energy—sunlight glinting off the fountain’s spray, a portable speaker thumping somewhere in the distance, and the unmistakable smell of cafeteria curry drifting across the walkway like a sensory warning. Students lounged on blankets or power‑walked to class, iced coffees sloshing in hand.

At a rusted metal table near the edge of the quad, two girls slumped into their seats with the collective aura of people who had seen too much and slept too little.

Sera dropped into her chair first, gripping her venti iced coffee with both hands like it was the only thing tethering her to the mortal plane. She stared into the swirling cream, watching it cloud the dark liquid like a gathering storm.

“I’m running on caffeine and humiliation,” she whispered into the lid. “Mostly humiliation. And the caffeine is losing.”

Erika slid into the seat beside her, adjusting oversized sunglasses that hid what she insisted were “seasonal allergies” and not the puffy aftermath of crying over a police warning. She stabbed a wilted leaf in her salad with the intensity of someone confronting a personal enemy.

“I’m running on nothing,” Erika croaked. “My soul left my body around 3 a.m. I think it’s still in the karaoke room.”

Then Olivia arrived.

She did not slump. She did not wilt. She did not look like a girl whose romantic life had imploded twelve hours earlier.

Instead, she plopped her tray down with the sharp clatter of a magical girl entering her final transformation sequence. With theatrical ceremony, she reached into her bag and placed a heavy, sun‑bleached object in the exact center of the table.

Sera recoiled, her chair screeching against the concrete. “No. Absolutely not. Put that ratty thing away before someone calls an exorcist.”

Olivia ignored her, sliding the grimoire forward like she was presenting the Holy Grail.

“Ladies,” Olivia said, clasping her hands under her chin. Her eyes glittered with dangerous, unearned confidence. “Welcome to the first official summit of Operation: Fix Our Pathetic Love Lives.”

Erika lifted her sunglasses just enough to glare with one bloodshot eye. “If someone sees us with that cover in public, we’re going to end up on a watchlist. It looks like it was written by a serial killer who loved magical girls.”

“It’s not a book,” Olivia corrected, her voice dropping to a reverent hum. “It’s a script. It’s destiny.”

“It’s garbage,” Sera countered, tracing the water ring her coffee cup had left on the table. She tried to make the circle perfect, her finger trembling just enough to blur the edge. “Garbage that somehow infiltrated my backpack. It’s a literal manifestation of my bad luck.”

Olivia flipped the cover open with a flourish. The yellowed pages groaned, smelling faintly of damp cardboard and decades of loneliness. “Trash can still be divine, Sera. Even the lowest-tier mob has the potential to drop a legendary item if the RNG Gods are on your side.”

“That sentence alone should disqualify you from dating human beings,” Erika muttered.

But Olivia was already reading, her finger tracing the archaic font of the first chapter.

LEVEL 1 — Establish Visual Contact

LEVEL 1 — Establish Visual Contact

A true heroine does not wait for an encounter; she engineers the spawn point. Lock eyes with your target for exactly three seconds to initiate the Courtship Protocol.

Olivia looked up, her expression borderline manic. “See? Simple. It’s basically a tutorial.”

Erika snorted, finally taking a bite of her salad. “Three seconds? That’s just long enough for a man to realize I’m judging his pheromones. I usually need five for a full scent profile.”

“Exactly,” Olivia said, leaning over the table. Her shadow fell over Sera’s water ring. “We need structure. We need a system. No more ‘accidental’ stalking, Erika. No more ‘unauthorized’ unzipping of feelings, Sera. We follow the Guide. We level up. We win.”

Sera took a long, skeptical sip of her coffee, the ice rattling against the plastic. “Olivia, eye contact is not a 'system.' It’s a basic biological function for everyone who isn't us.”

“Then it’s perfect for beginners,” Olivia said brightly.

Sera and Erika exchanged a long, silent look—the kind shared by people who know they’re about to walk into a burning building because the alternative is standing in the rain.

Olivia leaned forward, lowering her voice like a spy revealing state secrets. “Look around. The quad is a map full of potential targets.”

Erika stiffened, nostrils flaring as she unconsciously scanned the breeze. “Don’t call them targets. It makes me feel like I’m about to commit a felony. Again.”

“Fine,” Olivia said. “Prospects.”

“Worse,” Sera groaned, rubbing her temples as a migraine began pulsing in time with the fountain’s splash.

But Olivia was already scanning the crowd with the cold, focused intensity of a sniper in a dating sim. “There. That group by the fountain. The one with the headphones. Perfect test subjects.”

Sera nearly choked on a piece of crushed ice. “We are not test-running romance on random guys during the lunch rush!”

“Why not?” Olivia asked, her voice reaching a pitch of pure, unadulterated hope. “We agreed to try something new. Don' you want to to change our bad ending.”

“No,” Sera corrected, though her resolve was softening under the sheer force of Olivia’s enthusiasm. “We agreed to consider the possibility of thinking about entertaining your idea.”

Olivia grabbed Sera’s hand, her grip surprisingly firm. “Please. For the sake of our future. For the sake of narrative progression. For the sake of my sanity, which is currently held together by this book and a prayer.”

Erika sighed, letting her sunglasses fall back into place with a definitive click. “She’s going to keep talking until we say yes, Sera. And I want to finish my salad in peace.”

Sera stared down at the book. At the ridiculous, winking anime heroine on the cover who seemed to be mocking her. At Olivia’s desperate, shining eyes.

She exhaled a long, defeated breath.

“Fine,” Sera whispered. “We’ll read Level 1. But the moment someone mentions a restraining order, the party is over.”

Olivia lit up like a festival lantern, her entire aura vibrating with victory. “Excellent! Then let the training begin.”

Erika groaned, burying her face in her hands. “I already regret being born.”

Part 2

Sera regretted everything the moment her sneakers hit the grass.

From the safety of the metal table, the quad had looked manageable. Down here, it stretched before her like a sun‑drenched minefield. To her left, a frisbee sliced through the air with predatory precision. To her right, theatre majors practiced stage combat with alarming enthusiasm. Every student felt like a potential witness to the social crime she was about to commit.

She clutched her iced coffee, the condensation chilling her palms. “Okay,” she whispered. “It’s just eye contact. Three seconds. I’ve held eye contact with a PowerPoint slide for longer than that.”

Behind her, Olivia stood on the bench, pumping a fist like a coach at a championship game. “Believe in the protocol, Sera! Access your inner heroine!”

Erika didn’t look up from her salad, though she adjusted her sunglasses with a single finger to better witness the impending catastrophe. “You’re walking toward your own funeral. I’ll make sure the obituary mentions you died for a book with a clip‑art cover.”

Sera ignored them and scanned the quad for someone—anyone—who looked safe enough to survive three seconds of mutual staring without calling for backup.

Her gaze landed on a guy sitting under a sprawling maple tree. Oversized headphones. Thick textbook. Highlighter moving in steady, rhythmic strokes.

Perfect, Sera thought.

She marched toward him, her stride stiff and mechanical, her joints moving with the fluidity of a rusty folding chair. She stopped exactly five feet away, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird trying to escape a cage.

He didn’t look up. He was highlighting a sentence with a neon‑yellow marker, utterly absorbed.

Sera cleared her throat. It came out as a pathetic, dry squeak.

Nothing.

She tried again—a louder a‑hem that sounded like a structural failure in her lungs.

Still nothing.

Panic bubbled in her gut, hot and oily. She fumbled for her phone, thumb slipping twice before she managed to open the stopwatch app.

“Three seconds,” she muttered. “Three thousand milliseconds of meaningful connection. Just… look at him.”

She took two bold, aggressive steps directly into his line of sight, effectively blotting out the sun.

The boy finally looked up. His eyes—magnified slightly by his own thick glasses—met hers.

Sera hit the stopwatch. Click.

One second.

Why is he looking at me? Does he know I’m timing him? Is there something on my face? Is it the humiliation? He can see the humiliation, can’t he?

Two seconds.

His eyes are brown. No—hazel. Wait, is it rude to check the color? I’m staring. I’m definitely staring. This is how predators look at gazelles right before the neck‑snap.

Two and a half—

Her internal server crashed.

The silence between them thickened into a pressurized chamber. She needed to say something—anything—to prove she wasn’t mentally unstable or a high‑functioning serial killer.

She panicked.

Her mouth opened, and instead of a “Hello” or “Do you have the time?”, she blurted—at full, theater‑fire volume:

“HELLO I AM NORMAL.”

The guy flinched so violently his highlighter streaked a jagged neon line across the entire page, bisecting a benzene ring like a chemical crime scene. “What?!”

Sera’s fight‑or‑flight response chose “clumsy retreat.” She pivoted—badly. Her heel caught on an exposed tree root. She stumbled forward, balance disintegrating. Her iced coffee launched out of her hand like a caffeinated projectile.

The cup hit the grass with a dull thud, but the contents followed a perfect, tragic arc—splattering directly across the boy’s pristine white sneakers.

“Oh my god—I’m—I’m so sorry—the gravity—I didn’t—” Sera babbled, her face turning a shade of red that shouldn't be biologically possible.

The young man didn’t wait for the apology. He scrambled to his feet, clutching his ruined textbook, and backed away with a look of pure, unadulterated terror. He didn’t say a word; he just turned and fled toward the library like Sera had threatened his entire bloodline.

Sera stood frozen in the maple tree's shadow, coffee dripping from her fingertips onto her own shoes.

Olivia and Erika arrived a second later. Olivia patted her shoulder with the somber gravity of a general visiting a wounded soldier. “Good effort on the initial lock‑on. Terrifying execution on the verbal delivery.”

Erika winced, glancing at the stopwatch still clutched in Sera’s trembling, sticky hand. “You didn’t even make it to 2.8 seconds. You choked at the finish line.”

“I think I traumatized him,” Sera whispered, staring at the spot where the young man had vanished.

“You traumatized me,” Erika noted, sniffing the air. “The scent profile of this encounter is 'Latent Panic.' It’s giving me a headache.”

Olivia flipped open the grimoire and scribbled something with a sparkly pink gel pen. “Okay! Data point gathered. Sera’s primary debuff is 'Over-Analysis,' leading to a 'Catastrophic Logic Spiral.'”

“That’s not a debuff,” Sera snapped, finding her voice through the shame. “That’s just my personality.”

“Exactly,” Olivia said cheerfully, tucking the pen behind her ear. “We’ll patch it in Level 2. But first…” She turned toward Erika, eyes gleaming with the light of a true taskmaster.

Erika stepped back, sunglasses slipping down her nose. “Oh, no. No, no. I’m a researcher. I’m in the support class. I provide vibes and olfactory data. I don’t do front‑line staring.”

Olivia’s smile sharpened.

“Erika,” she said, “you’re up.”