The short version is that I highly recommend this story.

The basic plot is a classic Isekai-broke-my-egg-and-I-fell-in-love-with-my-long-time-friend. Which would make it just like hundreds of other stories, but that's being quite unfair to this unique tale.

For one, Tali isn't just Isekaied, she's a professional Isekai-er. The image of a clinical research lab painstakingly recreating Truck-kun hitting someone is funny, but also you know that's exactly what they would do. Take something magical and bind it with graphs and procedures until it can be reliably tapped like any other resource. This is a large part of the plot, most of the characters are very bad at expression. The language reflects this, almost no one speaks more than one sentence at a time. And every word is analyzed for it's use as armor or as a weapon. Everything cuts, everything is aimed and judged by how it lands. It's a profoundly neurodivergent style, it is hard to realize that these people are human, many show no real emotion until chapter 10. But that's kind of the point, they are devoted to a process where they kill someone for science and hopeful profits.

The Isekai world itself is also special. On the surface, you have various beastfolk and hardy dwarves working in the mine. But this mine is more reminiscent of the Southern Reach or it's ancestor Roadside Picnic. The interactions in that world are bizarre, focused around some kind of metal that interacts with the world in ways that no one understands.   It has a dream-like quality.

Finally, it is profoundly transgender, even if it never uses the word itself. The break isn't simple, it's a pattern of things getting worse for our hero (ine) and a realization that one way or another this is something she will need to deal with, her only choice is whether she prepares herself or tries to bury it again. Once it happens, there is a mix of relief and guilt that is all too real. Nothing here is soothing, it gets right to the heart of dysphoria and how it affects you.

There are lots of what the characters in the story call "alarmingly effective sentences". The writing has so many great phrases that I could list, but I won't do all the work for you here.

I think the way this story hits me can be described in a dialogue used many times within:

"That is not reassuring"

"It isn't meant to be"

Read More