NewEden/Jobrrr-Ao3-Wata-Oshi-Fan-fiction-files

“I’m sorry, I thought you two were already…or….I don’t know.” They were already dating by this age in the world I came from. This isn’t my fault !

“Us? US!? What are you talking about? Seriously? You think something is happening between us? She doesn’t even look at me! Have you seen how she acts around you, how she acted just five minutes ago?” Pepi is nearly pulling out her hair. For the life of me I can’t figure out what point she is trying to make.

What does this have to do with Loretta? Pepi told me she fell for her first. She was the one who made the first move. “Loretta-chan? What are you talking about, you’re the one with a cr—?”

I am silenced as she forces her hands over my mouth. “How did you figure that out and not figure out that Loretta has had a massive crush on you for like the past five years!” Pepi explodes, her eyes wide.

I can feel the heat flush down my body. “Loretta has a what!?” I exclaim through her hands.

Pepi groans and uncovers my mouth. “Oh my gooooood.” She buries her face in her hands. “Yes. I don’t think she even realizes it but she acts like a puppy around you. You could tell her to kill a man and she would, no questions asked.”

Why am I only hearing about this now?! Has she….Oh God! Pepi, why did you never tell me?

“What?!”

“Oh good, you really haven’t been replaced by an alien. It’s still you.” The tension finally breaks as Pepi starts to laugh. I can’t help but bristle since she is laughing at me . How was I supposed to figure out that Loretta had, has, a crush on me ?!

I do my best to glare at her, and she does try to stifle her laugh. But before long I’m laughing alongside her. “Oh goodness, I really can be dense, can’t I?”

Pepi, more calm now, finally relents.“Sometimes you can be, and other times…” She shakes her head.

Fine, I can accept that. “You should tell her.”

Pepi frowns, clearly not fond of that suggestion. She turns away. “I don’t know how you figured that one out, Claire-chan.”

To be fair, I didn’t. I just walked in on you two getting very familiar with each other’s lips. It wasn’t even news by that point either! I was just the last to know ! “I don’t either. Maybe it is post-revelation clarity?”

She lets out a wry laugh. “Oh? Well whatever caused your big breakthrough, I doubt it will help with my situation. I can’t see that musclehead figuring it out anytime soon.”

“Well, obviously . That’s why you have to tell her.”

Pepi does not look convinced.

“I think you two would be good for each other.”

She rolls her eyes. “Just ‘cause the gay made you stupid and happy doesn’t mean…gah! Look, she doesn’t even think of me that way!”

“She doesn’t think at all, Pepi! If you want something to happen, you will have to make the first move.”

She groans. “Look, I don’t need your advice okay? Just be weird with your otaku girl toy or whatever and don’t breathe a word of this to her.”

“Fine. I will acquiesce for now, as long as you don’t try anything funny with Rae,” I warn her.

“Fine, it’s a deal.”

Well. I had planned this to go better , but all things considered I think I handled that well. Mostly.

“Okay so, you know how we showed you videos, right?” Rae breaks into an explanation as we cross between campus buildings. She had mentioned anime in passing and I was curious, so I asked for more details. People keep referring to it around me for some reason.

“Yes, so it’s like that?” Photos are already one of the more impressive things I’ve seen. Videos are on an entirely different level. The technology here is so advanced that it feels like magic to me a lot of the time.

“Sort of, yeah. So, what we’ve shown you so far was mostly just recordings with maybe a few extra edits thrown in. Oh right, you don’t know what those are either. Ummm, to keep it very simple, edits are kinda like when a painter touches up a painting after it’s made, only with photos or videos. So then anime, which is short for animation, is like doing that without the photo part, or recording a video because it’s all hand drawn, or something like that. That’s a really oversimplified explanation but let's start small.”

Rae takes a quickie breath. “Anime is animation from Japan, which was actually inspired by early western animation, and then it took on a life of its own and now it’s an entertainment genre in its own right. Well, there are actually lots of genres in anime. It’s often treated like a single genre but that's really reductive; it's like calling theater a genre. You had theater in your world, right?”

She is talking so quickly, but she obviously cares about the topic and is very happy and eager to share. Adorable. Rae had tried to explain some of these things before in our old life, but the context of seeing some of these things in person is helping me understand them far better.

And if Rae wants to ‘ infodump, ’ as she calls it, I am very happy to oblige her.

“Yes, we had theater, and I can understand how it would seem strange to consider it a genre in and of itself. After all, there are comedies, dramas and tragedies and so on.”

“Yes, exactly, anime is the same! So anime has a lot of works—it’s been around for over half a century and in the last couple of decades the amount of published works have increased a lot. Not all of it is good by any stretch of the imagination but there is good stuff there if you are interested. We should watch some together sometime! Not just anime but movies and other shows too. There’s far more out there than just the educational stuff we showed you when we were trying to ground you in the basics.”

“It looked like there was a lot to see on that ‘you tube’ too.” I had noticed what looked like dozens of other videos on the side of the screen when Rae was showing a few to me earlier.

“Oh, yeah, there are a ton of videos on YouTube, but let's be careful— that’s a whole other can of worms. Remember what I said about the internet?”

“It’s full of lies?” Is that what she is referring to?

“Yes,” Rae sighs, looking extremely disappointed, though not at me specifically. She always looks like this when the internet lies comes up. “There are a lot of people spreading misinformation online and you don’t have anywhere near enough context to know what’s true and what’s not.”

“Yes…” I wish I could say I am surprised, but Rae mentioned things like this back in our past life too.

“YouTube can be really bad with that and it can be hard to tell the good videos from the bad ones even when you have lots of experience.”

“Shouldn't lying like that be…I don’t know, subject to punishment?”

“Wouldn’t that be nice? But the question of who gets to determine what content is good and bad is a tricky one. For a long time being gay was considered… well abnormal and unhealthy. Back then it would have been considered lying to say it was okay…”

“Violence by numbers, then.” I murmur to myself.

“What was that?” Rae asks.

“Oh, it was something you once said to me. I’ll just rely on your and Catherine-chan’s guidance for now when it comes to things on the internet.”

“There are a lot of cute animal videos if you want a safe place to—”

“Francois-sama.” Rae is interrupted by a smooth voice. We both turn, and it’s a young Thane Bauer. I had forgotten he used to wear his hair long.

Rae looks annoyed to have been interrupted. I try to send her a sympathetic look. “Just a moment R—Oohashi-san. Hello Bauer-san, how can I help you?”

Thane looks slightly nonplussed. Perhaps he was expecting a different reaction. “Oh, well, I just want to respond to you from the other night in person, now that you are not so…inebriated.” Oh no, what did the other me say to him? He is trying so hard to be polite. “I apologize, but I must politely decline, Francois-sama.”

Oh thank goodness, that makes this much easier.

“Thank you, Bauer-san, you have nothing to apologize for. If anything I wanted to apologize if the way I acted has made you uncomfortable.”