Jan 13, 2026
Since we seem to have reached the end of the first "chapter" and at least of the currently available text, I'll be a little more verbose in this comment and not just go with "Ah, we're probably in Italy since Italian and English are the language classes and the currency is Euros".
So, having the story thusfar and the pitch synopsis to go by, what is there to think?
In the matter of praise, you've done an excellent job escaping one of the traps that the pitch seemed to set. Kaede is not just "Hollywood average", she clearly has some issues and it is earnestly surprising that she would be selected for a critical, greater-scope sort of task the way the synopsis and to a lesser extent genre tags insist she will be.
At the same time, despite the narration being first person and her self esteem being in the gutter, there are clearly ways in which Kaede is an exceptional person -- not ways that do her any favors right now, but it gives something to act as the hook, the source of interest and the foundation for the belief that there can be a reason.
On the other side, the idea that this is two centuries in the future is a little hard to feel. I get that we're in a remote village (with "remote" placed in air quotes at least once) that has some degree of luddite practices given the conversation regarding phones, but I hope that if and when (further hopefully, when) we see the world outside of town, there's more imagination regarding what 2225 could look like beyond this isolated sub-setting.
I also must say, at this point, I look a little oddly at the genre-tag promise of comedy. Here we have Kaede, struggling to get through normal life and tasks that others find basic coming back to... not a broken home, but clearly one that's under a lot of tension if her parents are fighting as often as she reports.
The sense of atmosphere I've mostly gotten off of this would remind me of Serial Experiments Lain in that it's an isolated -- and isolating -- experience. The world that Kaede interacts with is small, constrained, and threatening, while the inner world that she relates in her consideration of everyday activities is vast but also very much impersonal. There are lighter and more comforting moments, but you find those in other eerie, isolated, mysterious works as well, especially at the start. It doesn't seem like the kind of environment in which comedy would really thrive. But, in that respect, I'm almost certainly getting ahead of myself; we've yet to catch up with the concept that leads this thing off (or so it seems; the mission to go buy fruit was couched in the same sort of terms)
