Chapter 1:

What Would I Wish For?

One Wish They Never Wanted


When Takuma sat up in bed that morning, he felt a lot...lighter. Almost as if gravity had suddenly been nullified for him, and only him.

For some reason, he had some kind of sinking feeling that was - what was it called? Oh yes. Déjà vu.

Groggily, he rose from the nest of blankets he usually resided in at night and snatched up his glasses and phone from the edge of his cluttered table. Momentarily, his eyes darted over the assorted clothes strewn about on the floor near the closet, then the shelves of dog-eared books and finally the figures (both male and female, despite the stereotype male otaku only lusted after female characters) lovingly placed at the wall edge of the table before he located the things he was looking for.

As he caught sight of his reflection, all he could do was utter an almost inaudible scream. While his reflection shared the same dark, unmanageable shoulder-length hair, paler-than-what-could-be-considered-normal skin and mud-brown eyes he usually had (plus a small beauty spot under his left eye that was normally hidden by the frame of his glasses), he couldn't resist immediately loathing the slender bishonen, draped in his deep blue pyjamas and looking quizzically back at him.

Just as he was about to nestle back into bed in confusion, an amber haired fairy the size of his palm (which was slightly smaller than it used to be) fluttered into view on her golden dragonfly wings and squeed. "The reversal spell! It worked!" Her leaf dress, the same colour as her wings, fluttered around her while her wings created tiny breezes around her.

"...reversal spell?" Takuma finally managed to utter after a long silence, noting his voice had become a bit higher than it used to be. He readjusted himself so that he sat on the end of the bed furthest away from the table - his height was still the same as before, judging by how his eye level still perfectly matched the lowest shelf (the shelf was exactly opposite him).

The fairy cocked her head, as if she expected him to be happy about this, with her turquoise eyes sparkling and her petite, angular facial features pointed right at him. After she nodded briefly, the way Takuma imagined a pigeon would, and perched on a precariously stacked pile of manga on his table, one of many towers. She kicked the air with her bare feet aimlessly as she began to gabber on at a pace that was nearly untrackable. "You tried to squash me, so I cast a reversal spell on you in revenge. Basically speaking, the reversal spell causes any number of random aspects of the spell's target to become the opposite of what they were before, but with some control, it is possible to pick and choose the randomness. That being said, I didn't do that this-"

"So this is your doing?!" Takuma hissed, cutting her off.

The exact incident in which the two encountered each other was a day ago, where Takuma was out on a shopping run - in his typical outfit of white shirt, jeans and neon runners - and accidentally stepped on a winged creature. After peeling it off his shoe, he continued on his way to the convenience store while heeding the creature no mind.

As he browsed the manga in the store, he came across a lone blonde girl in the nearby high school's grey blazer, skirt and knee-high socks standing in the aisle, absorbed in a volume that looked to be -

- yup, it was "The Familiar of Forty", his favourite series.

"You like this series?" the girl broke the silence incredulously with her ice-blue eyes piercing his, realising he was peering over her shoulder on tiptoe like an idiot. Or a stalker.

Too taken aback to even speak, he nodded and ran off to pay for his things before he could blush any more than he already did.


chesarka
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