Chapter 2: Arc 1, Ch.2: Totally not interested, nope

It’s still there, was my first thought at waking up on Monday. Mondays were shitty anyway, and this wasn’t making them better. Disgruntled, I grabbed my school uniform and went downstairs after washing up.

My sister patted my shoulder in passing, but otherwise the house was messy with all of us hurrying to get ready and no one really noticed my troubled face.
My parents were off to work, of course, my little sister and I to school. My brother and Haru were going to college.

Only on the train to school could I relax for a short moment, taking my time to look through some of the data entries.
Not because I believed that the menu was anything normal - but curiosity killed the cat, and I was curious to see what my brain had created there.

The rest of my family had similar numbers to my sister. My parents were at a full 100, my brother at 97 and my little sister at 95. It felt like high numbers, but the small differences made sense. My little sister wasn’t as close to me as my older one, she was going through a rebellious phase.

My friends were interesting as well. They all gathered around 60 to 70 points, their bar coloured green contrary to the yellow of my family. My acquaintances had a gray bar, their points ranging from 20 to 40. The people I mutually didn’t get along with had a black bar, the points having a minus added to them.

I didn’t look at the love interests.
Ignore, ignore~
That section isn’t there at all. I can’t see it.

Other people entered the train, mostly students. I always entered the last wagon on purpose. I would have to walk a bit, but there were pretty much no students in here, just adults filling up the seats. I wasn’t interested in mingling with the others, so this one was nice and quiet.
Since none of my friends took this train, I felt uncomfortable being surrounded by the other groups, and besides, I could always catch a seat in the last wagon.

Someone sat down next to me. I opened my eyes slightly, catching a glimpse of my school’s uniform. I had taken a different train than usual because I was late, but I was surprised that there was someone else who avoided the bustling of the other wagons.

I opened my bag to fish out my phone, using the chance to glance at the person next to me… and needing all my willpower not to flinch away with a squeak.

Taizou Mizuki was quite famous at my school. Good at sports, incredibly good-looking.
Also, not putting up with any shit at all. He had a fierce glare when he wanted and closed-off aura, and if he talked to you at all there was a good chance you were just getting a lashing because it seemed that he wasn’t too fond of just conversing for the sake of it. He would talk if necessary, but I had never heard him make idle chatter.

That didn’t keep the girls from swooning over him, in all kinds of ways. And by that, I mean that the larger, fujoshi half was going crazy over the fact he had a somewhat amicable relationship with our handsome student council president.

Girls mostly ignored me even when I was around, so I caught a lot of their conversations. And they say it’s guys who have dirty minds...

Anyway, while I might have managed to stop myself from flinching and squeaking, I was still staring at him wide-eyed for more than a second before I turned away. Long enough for someone to notice it, especially someone as sensitive to stares as him.

Taizou’s dark eyes moved over to me - I swear the temperature dropped by two or three degrees - and narrowed. His black, smooth hair fell out of his face. I swallowed at the annoyed tone in his voice.
“What?”

Couldn’t you have ignored that happening, please??

The place next to me was the only one open so it wasn’t that weird for him to sit down next to me, making my reaction overboard.
Of course he’d be annoyed if someone looked at him with his jaw dropped - he was, after all, just a normal student that had enough troubles getting rid off all his followers.
I opened my mouth, panicked. What the hell was I-

[Taizou Mizuki: “What?”
(Please choose what to say.)

• “Nothing.”
• “I’m sorry for staring.”
• “I didn’t expect to see you.”]

…The UI in my sight changed, displaying a textbox at the lower half that made me freeze. While my eyes flitted over the text, reading it, the world seemed to pause.

I was stunned and confused and Taizou’s eyes were lowering for every split second I didn’t answer. In a panic, I blurted out one of the displayed options, the one that I had been staring at.
“I didn’t expect to see you.”

The sentence lit up, then the UI part vanished.
Taizou tilted his head with a frown. “Is seeing me on a train to school that weird?”
Of course it isn’t--
Ah geez! I should have apologized for staring!

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No, wait, what the fuck had that even been? And-
Yikes! He’s still waiting for me to answer...

I fumbled with my words, explaining. “Uh, of course not, just that you’re kinda like a celebrity at school and-”

His frown grew deeper, my voice quieter.
I swallowed, then awkwardly coughed. “Uhm. Sorry. Yeah, that was stupid. There isn’t anything weird about this, actually.”

I could hear him exhale slowly, half a sigh. The sound tickled my ears.
His frown eased a bit as he leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes. “Exactly.”

With this, the conversation was finished and I hurriedly stared at my bag, trying to relax my tensed muscles. Instead of peeking at him, I tried to think about what just had happened.

That looked… a lot… like a dating sim?
Dialogue choices? And a menu that shows your relationship with people?

Was I already that desperate that my mind was supplementing a dating sim UI to my life?
At least it had been useful since I was sure I would have blurted out ‘Nothing’ otherwise, which would have been a blatantly obvious lie. I had seen people react like that to being caught staring by Taizou and it had pissed him off badly, every time.

So, in a way, that dialogue choice had probably helped me avoid a much more awkward development.

I was fidgety, but I forced myself to sit calmly. The menu opened as I had stared at it. Scrolling down, to the uppermost entry of the Love Interests section.

Taizou Mizuki. The guy that just caused my brain to freeze over.
The entry opened. I absolutely had no way of knowing the information written down there, but I greedily read over it. A lot of parts were marked with question-marks, a tooltip showing up when I looked at them. [Information not yet accessible], was what it said. Likes and dislikes, for example, were locked.

His description read [Student. Due to his cool nature paired with good looks, Taizou Mizuki is generally seen as a very attractive person. Does not easily open up to people.], something that I agreed with.

I closed my eyes for a moment before daring to peek at the bar and popup.
“3/100. Is not really aware the host exists.”
...Sad, but not unexpected. A small button to the right of the bar that I hadn’t seen anywhere else yet caught my eye and I let it open. A new window covered the menu, displaying our previous conversation and then a short text in brackets below.

[Caught staring in the train while on the way to school. Admitting to the fact and not trying to avoid it was an acceptable choice. The target was confused by the host’s explanation, however.]

That. Was. Fascinating.

Target? As in, Capture Target? Did I actually get a dating sim UI? Had I snapped completely?
There was still a week until my examination since I didn’t give them a reason to make it seem like an emergency. I was just hoping my brain wasn’t mutating or anything. Who actually believes in shit like game systems appearing in real life?

On the other hand, the thought of what was going on with me was very scary, so I took the easier route:
Just acting like a novel protagonist.

Yay! I have a game system! I’m gonna gather points with the gorgeous school mate and date him! Haha!
Totally normal, right? Because that happens to people. Yup.

Couldn’t there be, like, an introduction text somewhere? When would those choices be triggered and did the system have more uses? Save points? CG album? Stats? Why didn't I get an info text about how this worked, anywhere?

As I bullshitted my way through the uprising panic, the train ride continued. The more I convinced myself to just think of the system as normal, the calmer I got.

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