With work getting in his way these days. The Otaku accidentally woke up late this morning, so now he’s rushing to avoid being late to school. His only hope is to catch the late train, which he get to way too early. There’s still some time until it arrives, but there’s something that catching his attention at the moment.
The sounds of music being played way too loud enters his ears. With the lyrics, he knows that there’s only one person responsible for this.
Otomore is sitting down atop a bench, next to her bag. He wonders if she’s going to be on the late train as well. Most likely, since he doesn’t know if she’s the type of girl to skip school. She may be a gyaru, but that and a delinquent are two seperate things.
That girl is yawning, having just recently woken up, just like him. How she’s doing that, while having music blasting into her ear is a mystery to him.
While looking at her, she opens her eyes as she’s yawning…
“Ah…” Things get a little awkward.
“…” The two of them just stare at each other. Things are getting a bit uncomfortable, the otaku is very much wishing that the train would arrive right now. Though, he knows that this is entirely his own fault.
Lucky for him, the train does make its arrival at this moment. So he has an excuse to look away from her without saying anything. Quickly, he enters without looking back, though he knows that she’s following in. Since they’re going to the same place.
The train ride fills him with utter unease. He’s doing everything in his power to avoid even glancing in her direction. That girl probably thinks he’s a weirdo or something.
Even though it only takes minutes. The ride feels like it’s taking a millennium for him. After this dreadful ride, the train stops and they get off. If only they weren’t going the same way. Also, if only she didn’t get off first, where he’s now right behind her.
He feels like he’s in an impossible situation. Where he either stays at the same pace, but looks like he’s following her. Or speed up and overtake her, but it might appear that he’s going to do something bad to her.
All these decisions in his mind, but it takes far too long for him to make a choice. So instead, he ends up just walking like this until they arrive at school.
“…” She turns around, basically blocking his path. He thought that he was going to be safe at home base, but now she’s going to say something. “Were you staring at me?”
“I… I was, but I didn’t mean to!” He confesses to her immediately. “It was an accident, I promise.”
“But why?” She asks, to which he isn’t really sure how to answer. “Is there something on my face?” She rubs around her face, wondering if that’s the case.
“No.” He stops her. “It’s not that, it was just… Your music, you play it really loudly.” That explanation makes a lot more sense for her.
“I see… So it has nothing to do with my looks?”
“No?” He says, which would partially be true. This girl was really cute after all.
“Cool.” She says back to him simply. Then she turns around to enter the school. This girl is really odd to him. Trying to explain her motivations is near impossible, but probably not a big deal… Probably...
Are you planning to do an edit pass over the whole series once you finish? There's a bunch of small typos that I'm putting down to just maintaining the release rate.
I wasn't planning on it, but if you think it's super distracting. Then I'll probably do a run through if I have time in the future.
@bigbear51 it's little but obvious things mostly... Borked pronouns, an occasional missing letter or word, things like that. I figure an advantage of this format is that it should be possible to get it near perfect without too much edit work.
The example that prompted me to comment on this chapter:
Otomore is sitting down atop a bench, next to her bag.
But the same girl is named on day 82 as:
Now the girl known as Otomi is left alone once more.
Unless her name is Otomore Otomi, I figure the times she gets called Otomi are an error... It's a pretty minor detail but also the type that readers might take as an unfair sign of the overall quality. And so far I am liking the story.
@kaithar I'm glad you're enjoying the story, but I'm really sorry about that error. The first 30 days were written almost two years ago. Back then, her original translation read Otomi in the original story. Then, when the original artist gave her a proper name of Otomore. I went with that since this is still a fanfic at the end of the day. I'll certainly go back through that and make the proper changes.
@bigbear51 Aaah, that explains it, happens a lot when an official translation comes out after a fan translation has made some progress