Chapter #58I'm the Trash (Wo)man! by: Hole   You see a pair of human looking legs sticking out of a pile of trash. Upon first look, it seems like a pile collapsed onto whoever these legs belonged to. Welp, not content to leave a damsel in distress, you grab onto the girl’s ankles, made much easier by how thin and small they are, and pull her out. With a bit of effort, you give up because you’re still as weak as you were in your previous life and call for Hotaru to come and help.
Once she’s able to bring her robotic strength, you and her are able to pull the mystery girl out in a completely equal effort. That’s when you find out it’s-
“Ava?” you say.
“Who?” Hotaru asks.
“Oh, uh… Her name tag.”
“Oh, right. I keep forgetting our uniforms have those. Since I never wear mine.”
“Wouldn’t trade our local nudist for anything.”
“Tihi. I wouldn’t want to deprive you or the world of all this robot.”
“Seriously, we should probably help this girl.”
“Yeah, good call.”
You both crouch down and you try shaking Ava awake. Aside from being a bit dirty, she seemed completely uninjured. And she looked the same as she did in the game, except for the fact she had a purple circular tattoo on her forehead. Given Ava’s ‘quirks,’ you assumed it was one of her weird occult things.
Well, with her here, you try shaking her awake. Then she stirs. You see her eye open, then close again. Then she pulls on you with a hand. “W-water…”
“Um. Do you have any?”
Hotaru shook her head. “Here, let me carry her-” As the robot reached to the smaller girl, said girl pushed her away… Then she tried again, only to be pushed away again.
Ava then turned over to you. “Take me… help me… You specifically… please…” she said weakly.
“Uh… I guess I’ll take her?” you say a little confused. You hoist Ava onto your back, who is luckily very light. “I’ll take her to the nurse or… maybe a vending machine. Whatever helps.”
“Cool. Want me to come with?”
“No,” you hear whispered into your ear.
“No?” you repeat without thinking.
“Ah, alright. I’ll keep working here then,” Hotaru said.
“Uh, right, right. I’ll be back once I’m done with her, okay?”
After a confirmation from Hotaru, you carry Ava out of the trash disposal. Once the door closes behind you, you feel a stirring on your back.
“Is she gone? Good.” Then Ava hops off your back, perfectly healthy and fine.
“What? You’re okay?” you say.
“Yeah. Thanks for going along with my bit. I just had to get away from the machine.”
“The machine? You mean Hotaru?”
“Yeah, obviously.”
You raise an accusatory eyebrow.
“Oh! No no,” Ava starts, “I don’t have a problem with robots specifically. I just don’t feel comfortable around people whose minds I can’t read.”
“Wait, mind reading?”
“Yeah?” Ava said, confused at your confusion. She pushed up her hair to show her tattoo. Upon closer look, in the center of the circle was a dot and dash in the rough shape of a person. Then you realized it was a person surrounded by a purple field. “I’m a psychic. See?”
“Oh. Is that a…” Then your exposition memories kicked in. Psionics was a well observed phenomenon in select species. Though very few humans experienced it themselves. Thus your character, Shujiko Kou, had very little knowledge beyond that. So your confusion was still in character. “Sorry, I never really met a psychic before. I thought humans weren’t psionically inclined.”
“MOST humans aren’t, but I carry a special psionic gene. 1 in a billion humans have it.”
“Huh. Okay…”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Uh, well. It does sound a little fantastical,” you say while having a cyborg, a robot, and a four boobed alien as girlfriends.
“Then I’ll prove it. Think of something, I’ll read your mind.” Ava’s tattoo then started glowing.
“Uh. Alright.” Before you could even conjure up a specific thought-
“Aha! You’re thinking about how cute and petite I look.”
“Oh. Uh-”
“And now you’re surprised at how I could even read your most internal thoughts.”
Okay, maybe she was a psychic.
“And now you believe me. Yes!”
“I… guess I do.” So Ava went from a conspiracy theorist to a psychic in this world, huh?
“What do you mean from ‘conspiracy theorist to psychic’?”
“Huh?” Oh right, she’s still reading your mind. Maybe you should stop thinking about-
“I’m originally a character from a dating sim?”
“Uh-”
“And you’re actually a man from the 21st century?”
“Well, I-”
“And this whole universe was created solely from a wish you made to be in a modified version of the game’s universe?!”
“Wow. You really can read minds.”
“Oh, right.” Ava’s tattoo dimmed down.
“You actually believed all that?” you say, hoping for her to go that route, but knowing Ava-
“Yeah. It’s your genuine thoughts and memories after all. Is the whole universe a game still? Am I real? Are you still real? Were ghosts real in-”
You hear the door slide open from behind you and out the corner of your eye, you see Hotaru come out. You quickly pulled Ava’s chest-height face into your Ava-height chest and muffled her ramblings.
“Hotaru! What’re you doing here?”
“I wanted to check and see if you found your way alright. What’re YOU doing?”
“Uh…” You thought as fast as you could while ignoring the shorter girl’s struggle for breath. “Turns out she just needed some water. I’m helping her uh… warm up because she also had hyperthermia! Turns out there was a cooling packet under that pile.”
Hotaru stares at you as she processes your explanation. “Welp. You’re the human here, I guess. You need help?”
“Nah, I got it. Head back in, I’ll be right with you in a minute.”
“Sure thing.” With that, Hotare left you alone to release Ava from your boob suffocation.
After taking several heaving breaths, “Hah… Can you import cryptids into the world like a mod?” Ava continued her questioning.
You, though, grab her by the shoulders. “Ava, listen! I need you to promise me: NEVER tell ANYONE about this!”
“W-But the people have to know this sort of thing-”
“You just can’t, okay? I can see you’re taking it alright, but I don’t wanna know what’ll happen if everyone, especially my girlfriends, find out everything they’ve ever known was made by a stupid guy’s wish. I can’t let that happen, so PLEASE keep this between us?”
Ava blinked and looked back at you. She didn’t need to read your mind to tell how desperate you were at this moment. “Okay, fine. It goes against everything I stand for to actually KEEP a big secret like this, but fine. I’ll keep it between us.”
“Thank you, Ava. Thank you so much,” you say with an indescribable amount of relief.
“But I still got my own curiosity to satiate! So, if I wasn’t a psychic in the game, how did I read people’s minds? And how would I find ghosts without-”
“I know you have a ton of questions, but can they wait?” you interrupt. “I don’t wanna keep Hotaru waiting on her own.”
“Hrmmm…” Ava pouted unsatisfied.
“Okay, Saturday! We’ll have a date on Saturday.”
“A date?”
Oh shoot. You didn’t mean to call it that. You were still in dating sim mode.
“No one’s… ever asked me out on a date.” Suddenly Ava seemed flustered finally.
“Uh… Sure.” Well, you were probably going to ask that anyway. Might as well get it over with. “You know a private place where we can talk?”
“Hm. There is one…” Ava thought out loud.
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