Wait, I'm going to die at this rate!
I mean, sometimes I don't even get time to go home; I just nap on a pile of tablecloths in the storage room. What a life!
Inconceivable!
I have decid—
"Watch the table! Are you blind?! Goodness…" I poked Joseph's head as I stepped out of the ballroom into the hotel's loading bay.
Ahem. I have decided to no longer be a lapdog for the wealthy. Yes, I'm quitting.
AFTER today's gig. I don't care if I go hungry and die; which, let's be honest, seems likely either way.
Actually, I plan to sell my late parents' properties and antiques they collected, but still.
As the old saying goes; when there's a will, there's a way.
Sorry, Mom and Dad, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.
Yes, this is a motivated walk to a new, healthier livin—
"Scott, watch out!!"
My assistant's voice came a little too late.
CRASHHH!!
"Obara Jesus!!"
I wasn't looking at the road, too busy plotting my life as a free man, when some rich guy's shiny black SUV slammed into me.
The impact was so hard I think I spoke a different language.
Before I could even think, "Fuck, fuck, fuck! That was an expensive vehicle; I hope I didn't scratch it!" I was launched into a web of low-hanging electrical wires and tangled like a human Christmas ornament.
I saw red, white, and then some rainbow, I think.
My whole body vibrated like a cheap massage chair as my vision tunneled and blurred.
And just before darkness took me, my thoughts were…
"If it were just the SUV, I would've managed. I take a lot of calcium. But who in their right mind leaves live wires out in the open? Someone call the police and avenge me!"
Please, God, don't let anyone take pictures of my fried corpse. Am I making a weird face? I was supposed to travel to Japan, at least once in my life… I guess that's wishful thinking now. Actually, I bet it had always been wishful thinking.
***
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
The sound of the clock's hands moving has always been oddly soothing to me.
The moment the minute hand touched twelve, my golden eyes slid open.
"It's time to get out of bed, Nagisa!"
"You didn't need to say that, Mom! I'm already up!" I called back, turning my head toward the mirror resting on my shelf.
A pretty, pale girl looked back at me, with a small birthmark just below the left corner of her lips. The chest area was still, well… a work in progress, but I figured one could make do with what was available.
"You can stop fondling them now," came a voice from behind me.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. "Hey, Yasuna! I warned you not to sneak up on me!" I yelled, my face burning red.
The brown-haired girl in a sailor's uniform stepped out from the shadow near the corner of the bed, revealing the rest of her body before folding her legs beneath her.
"You still have that old habit of fondling your boobs to make them grow?" she asked, raising a brow. "That doesn't work in real life, I've told you."
"Th-that's not what I was doing, idiot!"
This pesky intruder was Yasuna, my childhood friend who somehow found it appropriate to infiltrate my room whenever she pleased.
And wait—she was already dressed and ready for school at six-thirty? I envy that diligence.
Leaving her to her smugness, I got myself ready as well. I brushed my teeth, hopped into the bathroom for a quick wash, and slipped into my uniform.
Glancing at the mirror again, I felt embarrassed a bit… If this reflection wasn't as cute as it was, I think I might have died of mortification a long time ago.
"Don't cause any trouble, okay?" Dad called out as we bolted from the house.
"We won't!" I laughed with a wave.
As usual, we were late—mostly thanks to my reluctance to bathe quickly.
Even after fifteen years, I still couldn't bring myself to do it properly right from the start. Some parts of me had become more… prominent, and that wasn't exactly helping matters.
Nevertheless, my life was going great…
…Ah, forgive me for leaving you in the dark like this. I'm Yamigami Nagisa, a perfectly ordinary Japanese middle schooler living in Tokyo with her wonderful family. I've made plenty of friends (and a few enemies), and of course, I've had more than enough opportunities to binge on anime and manga.
Although, my slime deity (Chaos Creator) doesn't seem to exist in this version of Earth. Very unfortunate.
You've probably guessed it by now. Yes, I am the same good-looking, diligent, and respectable Scott Peterson—the Event Setup guy! Yay! Hello!
Hm? You thought I had died with my tongue out and my eyes rolled in like a shot deer?
Well, that electric shock was a real game-changer; all hope for survival blinked out in an instant.
A small note from experience: death by electrocution is literally heartbreaking; not particularly gentle to the heart, especially since it has the nasty habit of stopping it entirely. A very harsh lesson to learn firsthand.
But after the pain and trauma passed, I opened my eyes to find myself not in some fantasy realm as a slime, but in a hospital.
Okay… urban setting. No big deal.
Haha. Not like I wanted to see some dragon in a cave, or learn magic with my adventuring party of cute girls, but okay. I'm not complaining.
However, small detail, it turned out I was female now.
Life has been rather interesting as a girl—especially considering I still have all my memories intact. I've been seeing the world in ways I never could as a man.
Some of those ways are wonderful. Others… were inconvenient, to say the least. I don't want to go into details.
And I still can't stop wondering whether childbirth is part of the contract. Don't have an answer to that one yet.
Speaking of answers, I would very much like to know why I ended up reincarnating here.
Or… did I even reincarnate?
Okay, probably yes. After all, I was roasted alive by a tangle of wires. But the exact mechanics of how this reincarnation thing works remain a complete mystery.
Am I supposed to defeat some great Demon Lord? Save a princess locked away in some distant nation? Or was I simply granted a second life for no particular reason at all?
I hope it's the third.
But all those questions remain stubbornly unanswered. Still, since I get to slack off, watch anime, play games, and cause mischief in between, I'd say it's a bargain I can live with.
Youth is a wonderful thing!
Although, I will admit, the part where I had to learn Japanese entirely from scratch was not so wonderful.
Maybe it was thanks to having a young, flexible brain that I picked it up quickly, but still… it was a chore.
Kindergarten (well, the short time I spent there) was a breeze in terms of studies, though pretending to be a baby took a surprising amount of effort.
And even now, I still have to act more "girly" than I actually feel, just to avoid seeming strange to everyone.
Still, that makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite, but what can you do?
Nevertheless, I had mostly accepted my fate as another person in another world. This was my new beginning as Nagisa.
*
BREAK TIME IN SCHOOL
"Hey, Nagisa-chan, wanna hang out after school?"