Chapter 2

“Hmm! This ramen smells divine! Hey, when can I eat it?”

“Not yet, you glutton. You have to wait two minutes for it to fully cook.”

“That seems like a fairly arbitrary number to me. One minute is surely enough.”

“It is, if you’d like to eat it al dente.”

“I don’t care if it’s al dente or al mushy, I’m really just starving!”

“How the heck did you turn out like this…”

After deciding that this girl was indeed my OC Mana, against my better judgment, I decided to just prepare more gacha ramen for her; otherwise, she might just vanish out of sheer starvation. Did I feel guilty of making my OC eat this as her first meal? A little bit. Was it enough to make her go outside to buy proper food for her? Not really.

“By the way, since you were born out of ramen, couldn’t this be considered cannibalism?” I asked.

“Would it be weird if Momotaro ate peaches? Can you really say Aphrodite never ate an oyster once in her life?” She said with the most serious tone I had heard from her so far.

“…You’re unbelievable.”

As she waited for the ramen to cook, I peered into her smiling, happy-go-lucky face.

Damn, she really is gorgeous.

If not looking like my OC wasn’t enough, her real face was so beautiful and her body so well-proportioned she would give any model a run for their money.

“I’m tired of waiting, creator!” She suddenly said, opening the lid, letting the smell of… I guess chicken waft from the broth. “Hmm, that looks yummy!”

Did she actually pull a decent gacha ramen out of that pile of crap?

“Hey, don’t call me ‘creator.’ I have a name, you know.”

“Right, right. I’ve introduced myself, so why don’t you go ahead?” She said as she played with the chopsticks I gave her.

“Oh, well. My name’s Juwon. Nitrochilla is my online handle.”

“Nice to meet you, Juwon!” Mana said, excitedly.

And yet, she made no move to actually eat.

Hmm? Why isn’t she eating? Wasn’t she starving?

She was just holding the chopsticks, playing with them like a child. Holding them in one hand, then one in each hand, never quite holding them properly.

Finally, she looked at me, her eyes pleading behind her glasses. “Hey, can you tell me how to use these?”

“…Huh? You don’t know how to use them?”

“Hmm… guess not. Like, I know what chopsticks are, but I can’t seem to… get it right.”

No matter how she held them, they always slipped out of her grasp.

“Oh, well, you just do this,” I said, demonstrating how to use them with my own pair.

“Seems like a very inefficient way to eat noodles to me. But I’ll try.”

And try she did. After a couple of attempts, she finally managed to grab a bit of noodles, which, due to her unsteady grip, were threatening to slip back into the broth.

“Oh no! Come here, little noodles!”

With too much swiftness, she bent over and tried to bring just that tiny bit of noodles to her mouth. But right at the worst possible time, they just slipped out of her shaky grasp.

Right into her significant cleavage.

“Ahh! It’s slipping down my boobs! It’s hot!”

And without any decorum whatsoever, she just reached into the gap and fished out the noodles by hand.

“Well, I can’t waste it now!”

…And proceeded to eat it.

“Hmm! What the hell is this? This is much better than I expected! That’s delicious!!”

Meanwhile, I was flabbergasted.

“Huh? What’s that face for?”

“You… have you no shame at all?!”

Those noodles weren’t supposed to be girl-flavored, you know?!

Apparently, that was enough to make even this absolute slob of a girl blush. “Ahh, right. I forgot you’re a guy. Eh-eh, did you have a good time staring right into my boobies? Come on, just admit it, they are pretty nice, aren’t they? Here, I’ll even let you have a good view.”

And she bent forward, pushing her chest up with her arms.

I had to turn my face away.

“You think I’d be turned on by someone who eats noodles straight out of her cleavage?!”

“Buh-uh, you’re not fun, Ju,” she said, straightening her back. When I looked back at her, she was soaking up whatever leftover broth she still had in her cleavage with a paper towel, entirely ignoring my presence.

“But this is a real problem,” she said. “I can’t eat ramen like this.”

“I guess I could give you a fork…” I said as I began to get up.

“No need. I can just drink it like this!”

“You what?”

“Well, down the hatch!”

And then she proceeded to gulp down the entire cup in one go. Broth, noodles, mushrooms, whatever—she drank it all down like a snake eating an entire rat.

“Wha—What the hell are you doing?!”

“Ahh! That hits the spot!” She said, patting her stomach. “A bit hot, though.”

“Of course it’s hot! You’re supposed to let the noodles cool down in the air!”

“Ah, really? Well, what’s done is done!”

And she proceeded to burp like a sailor.

“Hmm? What’s wrong, Ju?”

I was in complete disbelief.

My OC—Mana—was a complete and utter girl failure.

And I made her that way. Ultimately, she came from that stupid sketch where I had fun drawing her in casual clothes and being lazy.

…This is all my fault, isn’t it?

⬡⬢⬡⬢⬡

My earlier observation turned out to be incorrect, so let me set the record straight.

Mana wasn’t just a girl failure. She was an even worse glutton on top of it. I took my eyes off her for a few minutes as I left the house, and she was already snacking on something else.

“Oh my god, what’s this?! This is amazingly good! The sweet and sourness balance each other perfectly!” She said, with her hand wrist-deep inside a pack of sweet-and-sour candy I had stashed away somewhere.

“Are you on a mission to ransack my entire kitchen?!”

“Sorry, sorry. But you have so much yummy stuff everywhere, I couldn’t help but reach out to it!”

“I mean, it’s just candy. Is that really so amazing?”

I expected Mana to blurt out her now usual stream of babble, but this time she paused and adopted a particularly serious look.

“Can you blame me? I just spawned here out of the blue. I have no memory of anything beyond whatever thin ‘lore’ you gave me. It’s a miracle I can even speak.”

“Oh… right. Sorry.”

She had spawned here as a fully formed adult, but the lore I gave her was incredibly sparse in retrospect. She had no particular tastes and no experiences. Mana was an almost perfect blank slate, little more than a baby.

And just like a baby, she had no conception of decorum whatsoever.

“Nah, it’s fine. Whatever miracle made me become ‘real’ is already good enough in my book.”

“And there are absolutely no clues left to figure out how this even happened,” I said as I sat down.

What I had left the house to do was to check on that vending machine I had pulled the SSR Girl-Flavored Ramen out of. And no surprises there, the machine was completely gone now. I tried searching online and even joined one of those groups that hunt down these things, but although people knew of that particular gacha ramen machine, everyone doubted my story of a figurine popping out of the cup. I wouldn’t dare say that a real-life girl was actually born of said figurine.

Basically, we were completely stuck.

So why did someone make that machine and put such an OP item inside? Could some supernatural organization be just right under everyone’s noses? And why would they just give people the power to make random characters real?

“I know what you’re thinking,” she began saying, “but don’t even consider making a move on me.”

“…Excuse me? I wasn’t thinking anything like—”

“Sure, sure. You were thinking that maybe a god sent me your way to cure your chronic loneliness—but I’ll tell you right now, Ju. I’m not such an easy girl.”

“I didn’t even think about that! Geez.”

Sure, I made Mana to look pretty attractive, but—

I took another look at her. She really was as pretty as a doll.

But her finger full of sugar residue told another story.

Yeah, she’s about as unsexy as you could get.

“Oh, the candy’s gone. Do you have any other snacks around?” She asked, entirely changing the topic.

“You’re unstoppable, aren’t you?”

Sigh.

“Ah-ah, don’t sweat it. I’ll probably just disappear today, and it’ll be like I was never here. And you’ll have a great story to tell!”

“As if anyone would believe me.”

As Mana got up to sniff out some other snacks, her words weighed heavily on me.

She’s far too okay with just vanishing… that’s a bit sad.

Sure, she was the complete opposite of what I expected my OC to be like, but come on, even I wasn’t so heartless as to hope for her disappearance.

I guess all we can do is wait.

Just as that thought left my head, though—

Crash!

Mana tripped and fell spectacularly onto the floor right as she reached the kitchen.

And somehow, she managed to send an empty glass right onto the floor.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch. That hurt!”

“How did that even happen?”

“Eh-eh. I tripped on my foot!” She said, shooting me an “oopsie” smile.