(editor sama: [ ])

[The normal bracket is just the author]

 

“Mmmmmmmph”

A girl with brown hair stretched her arms and legs as she woke up. She yawned in relief as she sat up from her bed. Her cheeks were flushed bright red and slumped over as she got used to  her surroundings and the feeling of just waking up.

 

Her name was Eri.

 

It was Saturday and Eri was about to move out to a new place due to a recent incident that involved a black van with the words “free ice cream” haphazardly spray painted in faded white on the side with newspapers covering the back windows driven by a guy in a fully red mascot costume with muffled screaming coming from the vehicle, according to her older sister. “Unbelievable! I can’t begin to understand how someone as SICK as that guy would even THINK about giving out the HEAVENLY treat which is ice cream for free!” Eri quoted her sister in mockery. Kameko ( her older sister) was horrified to the point of trauma at the audacity of such a person and decided to immediately move house as a result.

 

After experiencing the morning sun’s glaze, Eri prepared to meet her sister at their new house. She walked onwards (avoiding fillers) packed the boxes for the movers later, and started crossing the lonely sidewalks and the never ending rows of bushes, moving blindly towards the general direction of the new house. A bookstore by the sidewalk caught her attention, the tall glassy exterior ensured that the grand total of 7 customers were shown to everyone else outside the shop. It had been quite a while since she had seen one, and her curiosity forced her to enter it. 

 

Wondering around, she spotted an outlandishly designed book. She picked up the book, as if hypnotised by it’s strangely charming design.

 

 Eri kept silent, flipping the book nonchalantly while examining it more carefully than a surgeon with a 100% success rate does on his patient.

The book was presumably designed to look old and tattered. She compared the book in her hands to the other books on display, which contrasted heavily with the book she was carrying.

The cover of the book featured a black haired man wearing a crown loosely and two ladies seemingly in competition for the man, tugging both sides of the man’s sleeve like a life or death tug of war. One had striking rose red hair, in contrast to the other one with hair of a silky white, both seemingly important to the story.

She flipped the novel over to the back, 

“The heroine will venture to save the hearts of the people around her in this magical quest of love and redemption as she travels across mountains and oceans to find peace and resolve to everyone around her”

She then flipped it to the front noticing that she had missed the title which was hidden in plain sight when compared to the rest of the book

 

~Welcome to Arthland~

Eri placed the book back into the shelf and bid the store goodbye. She quickened her feet to meet back up with kameko, with the constant rhythm of footsteps giving a distinct sound through the streets at (mach 0.00045 speeds defying the speed limit)

 

“BAAAAAM!!!” 

“Ka-nee!” 

The front door slammed open so hard one would think that the fbi had just paid a visit to onii-chan. A bigger ‘Eri’ sat surprised with half of her taiyaki ice cream in hand and the other half strangled around her lips, as if she was wearing some extremely thick industrial glue . Her eyes were wide open in surprise. She licked with delight the remaining ice cream off her lips like a child licking candy from inside a black van labelled “free ice cream”(before disappearing forever from their parents)[ and it seemed like her memory was the same.]

She had a brain freeze.

[life hack: free ice cream truck = free sweets]

Kameko put her hand on her head and reenacted the scene from every tragic love story….

Kameko laid down on the floor. The pain that she felt was indescribable to anyone besides herself. It was an otherworldly experience. In the span of infinite yet not time, she had found out the meaning of life, the universe and the true meaning of every atom of the dessert that has transcended the mortal realm. All Kameko could think of was the frozen cream, and the true reason for its existence. It provided her with enlightenment and allowed her to properly ascen-

“Kameko!”

Kameko looked up from her daze on the now ice cream covered floor, her mouth littered drool and homemade frozen cream combining to form quite the messy sight. Eri looked questioningly at Kameko, wondering what went wrong with kameko’s brain cell count and how it just grew half than room temperature in a span of 3 seconds. As kameko came to her senses, the clock showed 3: 30pm. Kameko’s eyes widened and she grabbed a plastic bag while tugging tightly onto her ice cream. 

“I’ll send you your novel later!”

Eri’s head tilted up as she saw that kameko didn’t carry the dumbbell of doom with her and instead the bag filled with ice cream. 

“WRONG BAG NEE-CHAN!!!”

Her warning fell to deaf ears as her sister disappeared into the distance. Eri grabbed the Dumbbell of Doom and tried to hoist the strangely nicknamed bag, not listening to what the people who had tried carrying the bag have warned time and time again.

 

After a few hard earned steps, Eri was red from exhaustion and the strain of her legs. Stumbling and wobbling towards kameko’s workplace, she threaded through calories, her jelly-like muscles taking a beating. She could have called kameko, but she knew that the driving kameko would have probably unnecessarily used both her hands to pick up the phone, taking her hands off the steering wheel and ending up crashing and killing 2 families and their pet cat named john.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaa” With the sound of relief equivalent to a child finally finding the way out of a haunted house, Eri dropped down on the bus seat, droplets of sweat formed by the intense exercise dripping down her forehead.

‘Ding’ The birthday present that Kameko sent her some time ago had just finished downloading and Eri, with time to spare, started to read the file that Kameko sent her.

“What is this trash of other worldly proportions?!”

“How many times are their personalities going to change?”

“Why are all of their hair rainbow coloured?!!!”

“When did the duke fill in all the main roles???????”

“Why did the story devolve into nothing but the name of the duke repeated over and over?”

“How many mirror and bath scenes do we have of this duke?!”

The story was too much for even Eri, who was forced to take breaks in between sentences to save the last sliver of sanity she still had reading whatever Kameko had sent her.

One more mention of the duke’s name and Eri would have gone on a riot. With her inner pitchforks bursting forth, Eri grumbled until she reached the bus stop near kameko's workplace. Eri stopped herself, taking deep breaths, and as usual, she bottled her anger once more.

 

The cold wind met her warm face as a freezing yet dry wind blew by, even though she left home in the afternoon, the sun was already setting and ready to slack behind the horizon  (it is like this sometimes in Japan according to my research). Kameko’s job was somewhere in a skyscraper near the mountain side, being alone and secluded, there were little to no artificial lights around, which was quite the unusual place. The streets were saturated with darkness, the sunlight blocked by the mountain. A needle-like structure that pierced the sky came into view, the tower of crushed hopes and dreams the company stood by was what kameko needed (in eri’s opinion) . The sky was truly the limit for Kameko (and that was a skyscraper). 

Eri ate the air as she headed towards the building. She felt like she was going to burn her chances of ever having a prominent role in this company for being Kameko’s sister. It was a company that was known for being biased for those that had a good family record instead of looking at the individual’s achievement.  Eri stumbled around the darkness, dreaming off and being in the dark was a bad decision as she stepped on countless things before remembering what a phone was. 

‘Click’

Eri tried turning on her phone’s flashlight, but since the time  Kameko tried to outwit Eri by saying her phone’s flashlight was brighter, In which Kameko acted like an idiot and stabbed Eri's phone’s flashlight. 

While irritated and distracted, Eri tripped on a pot hole making her fall arms first into a bumpy black road. The dumbbell of doom only made the fall more painful. Eri noticed something frightening. In the corner of her eye she saw a car, lights shining as bright as the sun shone on the black road so brightly that it gave Eri enough vision to see who was in the car.

 

Inside that car was a wimp that just got his driver's license and his Son. The man looked panic stricken as his 6 year old Son got out of his seat and from the side he slowly turned the steering wheel towards the direction of Eri’s head… and all the white faced Eri could do was close her eyes and hope for the best as she saw light through her closed eyes.

(it really paled in comparison to the randomness of the last version)

(the next chapter is the original draft, so skip it if you want, it's not cannon)