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“Hey, sleepyhead.”
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"Hey César, wake up."
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“Classes ended like twenty minutes ago. If you sleep any longer, they’ll lock you inside.”
“Everyone’s rushing out, and you’re here, moving at your own pace. Sometimes I think you live in a slightly different reality than the rest of us, you know?”
………
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Hey… are you crying?
Her voice is clear and firm, carrying that polished authority only Luna can manage without sounding arrogant. I open my eyes, blurry, and the world focuses on her.
She’s standing next to my seat, hands on her hips, leaning over my desk. The sunset light filtering through the high classroom window wraps her silhouette in a warm, golden aura, but her eyes— the color of a clear sky— watch me with a mix of exasperation.
It’s Luna’s voice, sharp and decisive, leaving no room for argument. I squeeze one eye shut, then the other, and the world comes into focus in fits and starts. There she is, leaning over my desk with her arms crossed. Her uniform, as always, is impeccable—the navy-blue vest perfectly buttoned. Even her hair—blonde, bright, styled into those ridiculously large, elegant curls falling down both sides—moves with discipline, as if it obeys invisible rules too. They’re almost as big as she is; it must cost a fortune to maintain hair like that, not to mention how hard it must be to live with it, surely would be fun to live with that body.
She’s the class president, a rising promise in astrophysics, a published author, and as if that weren’t enough, she’s also studying to become the future head of her parents’ telecommunications company—the kind of girl whose life seems planned out from the day she was born. And me, César, I’m just the sleepy lump who’s fallen asleep again in the last class.
“Classes ended fifteen minutes ago, César. Even the teacher already left. Was your dream really that interesting that you missed dismissal?” She looks at me with a mix of annoyance.
Her blue eyes narrow for a moment. I catch the tiniest shift in her expression, a slight hesitation in her usual certainty. “Hey…” she says, her voice lowering a notch, losing its authoritative edge for a second. “It looks like… have you been crying?”
The question catches me so off guard that all I can do is stare at her, my mind blank. Crying? In dreams, maybe.
I blink, shaking off the fog of my own story, of the characters trapped in my head. I sit up, a bit disoriented, and feel the stiffness in my neck from having slept on my arm. better to stop looking at her directly, just in case she sues me for harassment,
“Ah… yeah. Sorry, Luna. I stayed up… working on something.”
My fingers instinctively tighten around the printed pages covered in notes. The book in my hands was nothing more than the place where I kept the ideas I’d use to write the next chapter of my novel tonight.
But she wasn’t looking at my eyes anymore. Her attention, sharp as a laser, had landed on the pages my fingers were clutching against my chest.
“Ah, yes. That,” she said, and her voice regained all its firmness.
“The manuscript. The final revision. You said it would be ready today, César. My meeting with the editor from Galaxy Publishing is tomorrow at nine sharp.”
A cold knot formed in my stomach. Her manuscript. Her novel. Her bright literary future, as certain as everything else in her life. I quickly shoved my own book into my backpack and desperately started searching for another, much thicker one covered in red annotations—syntax corrections, pacing suggestions, margin notes about characterization. It was just a service. A commissioned job. The smoke that allowed me to finance the small bit of personal happiness I had set aside in my life.
“Sure, Luna, yeah,” I murmured, handing her the pages with a strange feeling of being stripped of something. My fingers brushed against hers, briefly. She didn’t even notice. She was already flipping through the pages, her eyes scanning my comments with the speed of a processor.
“Good,” she said without looking up. “I hope you were thorough. This contract is important. Publishing an academic essay isn’t the same as publishing a commercial novel. The standard has to be impeccable.”
Impeccable. Like her uniform. Like her tie knot. Like the path she had laid out ahead of her. I nodded silently, my throat dry. While she checked that every chapter was in order, my mind drifted to the browser tab I had open at home: my web novel, War Dragon Chronicles. Forty-seven views this week — most of them bots. Two comments, one of them a scam attempt to steal money from me. Years of building a world, polishing every sentence, drawing maps and character sketches in cheap notebooks. All that, for a handful of ghostly visits.
And yet, the money she was paying me for this quick edit — a job that for me was mechanical, almost superficial — would let me commission that illustration of Tamamo, one of my characters, from an artist who was doing me the favor of designing her for a crucial scene in the novel, where she hugs the protagonist to tell him everything will be okay, that she will never leave. The moment is far too important to be left with just words. Though I’d also have a little left over to buy that Rory figure whose aesthetic had inspired another character who accompanies my protagonist.
“You underlined a lot of the dialogue in the third chapter,” she commented, frowning slightly. “Is it that bad?”
“It’s… effective,” I said, choosing the word carefully. “But it sounds a bit like forced exposition. The characters aren’t talking, they’re delivering information. It was just a suggestion.”
She finally looked at me then, and in her eyes there was no gratitude, only evaluation. As if I were a tool that had, surprisingly, detected an imperfection in her material.
“Effective is what I need right now. But I’ll consider it.” She closed the manuscript with a sharp thud. The sound echoed in the empty classroom like the door slamming on an opportunity that wasn’t mine. “I’ll transfer the rest of the payment tonight. As we agreed.”
As we agreed. A cold deal. She got the final shine for her literary jewel, ready for display. I got the means to secretly keep feeding my invisible work, my meticulous and beloved failure. But it wasn’t her fault — how would she know that I’m a writer too, if I only publish for ghosts and the voiceless?
“Thanks,” slipped from my lips, an automatic, hollow word.
She nodded, already putting the manuscript into her impeccable leather folder. “Don’t fall asleep again, César. The janitor locks up in half an hour.”
After she left, I started gathering my things. The room was completely empty. For some people that would be creepy or strange, but for me, in that moment, it felt pleasant — like no one was rushing me, like I could sit and enjoy the quiet of this small moment. For about five minutes I imagined walking through that door with friends, talking about strategies to beat that difficult boss, or maybe planning to grab something to eat at that new café that opened…
But for that, I’d need to have friends to do those things with first…
It’s not that I don’t have people close to me, it’s just that they have their own interests and ways of being, while the way I am doesn’t quite match with them. One of them loves motorcycles — clearly his passion. I like cars. He has a driver’s license and his own bike; I take public transportation. Another one is very social, always looking for a girlfriend and going to every party he can find. I just want to get home early to keep working on my project.
It’s hard trying to please others when I can’t be myself. I just get tired of trying so hard when I won’t get anything back for the effort.
But a moment of rest can’t last forever — you always have to go back to the world you don’t want.
As I leave the classroom, I hurry to catch the bus at full speed. I have to get to work on time for another day of the same old thing.
I’ve been working at the same company for over a year now. Not that long in the grand scheme of things, but long enough to learn what the future there is going to look like.
And that bright future… isn’t.
Basically, I work as a video game tester. Sounds cool, right? I thought so too when I saw the job listing. When I signed the temporary contract, I couldn’t even imagine what was really coming. Then the first week of work arrived — the nerves trying to learn everything quickly, the even bigger nerves about not making mistakes so I wouldn’t get fired, the superhuman effort to land a permanent contract and get some sense of stability in my life.
I managed to get it. But once some time had passed and the honeymoon phase ended, I could see the problems that had always been there — problems I’d been too busy being nervous to notice right away.
My job really isn’t a big deal. It’s just showing up, seeing which video game you get assigned, testing the different areas, and if you find a bug, writing a report as professionally as possible explaining how it happens so the developers can work with that. It’s not an essential or truly productive job. I’m sure that if my company shut down and the whole sector collapsed, nothing in society would really change. But a job is a job—at least it lets me live in exchange for something. Every day a new title arrives, a new challenge. Some days nothing happens and you’re stuck playing a horrible game for endless hours. Other times a game comes in so broken that I don’t stop using the keyboard all day, writing non-stop.
But no matter how much effort I put into my work, it will never be recognized. At the end of the day, it’s just a faceless report lost among countless others. My name never appears in the credits of any game. There will never be any real recognition. It’s also become clear to me that no matter how much I work or how hard I try on those reports, I’ll never get promoted. There are only three contract tiers: Quality Tester, the lowest contract, just writes what they find; Lead Tester, who reviews the work of the others and assigns the workload; and Manager—well, everyone knows what a manager is. My problem is that to them I’m not social enough, so I can’t move up to Lead, and obviously I’ll never be Manager. That’s for people like Luna, after all—people with pedigree.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
After working for a couple of hours, lunchtime arrives. All my coworkers gather in their groups and sit together at the cafeteria tables. I just heat up my food in the microwave and sit in whatever empty spot I find. I check my novel while I eat, wanting to see how it’s doing after publishing my latest chapter. There’s always that illusion that this time I tried harder than usual, that this time all that effort will finally pay off—the dream I sacrificed for, the hours spent researching locations, the times I planned out on maps where the protagonist would move, the time spent imagining how that magic spell wouldn’t create a plot hole 30 chapters earlier or in the next 200. But when I check the page on my phone, I only see 10 new views. There’s one like, so maybe someone read it… I think. It could also just be the usual bot that likes everything. It seems this wasn’t my moment either. Maybe if I write the next chapter better, my luck will change.
Hit by the same realization as always, I go back to work again. I anxiously watch the clock like a countdown to quitting time. My coworkers joke about how I’m always waiting for the exact hour to leave—and it’s true. More time here is less time in my room.
The bus was a stagnant time capsule. Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes that didn’t move toward a destination, but sank into a kind of gray, vibrating limbo. Every sudden stop was a dull scolding; every red light, a collective sigh of resignation. I pressed myself against the window, feeling the cold glass on my forehead. Outside, the city dissolved into patches of light and shadow, like an impressionist painting made of exhaustion. Two women behind me talked about promotions and dinner plans; next to me, a guy with headphones laughed silently at a video. I was a canned ghost, just another lump being transported from one point of suffering to another. The worst part isn’t the aching body—it’s the mind. You leave work already drained, and the commute squeezes out whatever little was left, like wringing a dry peel. I reached my stop with the feeling that my brain had been washed with white noise and torturous waiting.
Walking the three blocks to the building was automatic. The apartment lights were yellow squares on the facade, each one a life, a story. Mine was on the fourth floor, the window with the blinds halfway down. I climbed the stairs with leaden feet.
The apartment door opened with its familiar creak. Silence. The heavy, empty silence of someone who lives alone. But inside the loneliness, I feel a sense of peace, like the nightmare of being awake during the day has finally ended. I hang my keys on the nail, drop my backpack by the door like a discarded shell. Here I don’t have to fake a smile, or control my breathing, or make myself small—the freedom of being alone with no one judging every step.
My parents… well, their house is on the other side of the city. A place of spotless walls and even higher expectations. There, my teenage bedroom was a correctional cell: white, minimalist, no “distractions.” Every figure I secretly bought was an act of rebellion that, if discovered, ended in lectures about wasted money and “when are you going to focus on something serious.” My siblings—the programmer and the engineer—are the portraits hanging in their trophy room. I only appear in the family photo from a few years ago.
But these walls are mine. This is my refuge, my bunker, my cave against the storm that is out there.
The Nameless Kingdom, because it exists almost only on my nights under the moon.
I open my bedroom door and the world changes. It’s not big, it’s cluttered, but every centimeter is territory reclaimed from gray reality. The air smells like vanilla from a cheap diffuser and new plastic. I close the door behind me and rest my forehead against the wood. A long, shaky sigh comes from deep inside. Here, I can breathe.
My eyes adjust to the dim light. The moon-lamp over my computer, huge and spherical, gives off a warm, milky glow, as if it had trapped a piece of quiet night. It’s the first line of defense against the harshness of fluorescent light. The lava lamp next to the desk bubbles lazily, shapeless, colorful forms rising and falling in an eternal, useless, hypnotic dance. My bed is a nest: mountains of pillows of different sizes and textures, covered by a fluffy comforter and a plush blanket soft as the skin of a fantasy animal, the only thing close to a hug I will get in my life. It’s the place where I sink in and stop existing for a few hours.
And then there are them. They. My silent companions.
The shelves are crammed. PVC figures capturing moments from shows, expressions frozen in determination, joy, or melancholy. Tamamo, with her nine tails spread in an explosion of orange and blue, smiles mischievously from her privileged spot on the shelf.
Rory Gremory with her giant halberd, Lament of Sorrow, twice her size and her small childlike body while also being lustfully developed while forever trapped in her 12-year-old body, her age when she was sacrificed, curves that didn't match that age. Dressed in her sorrow gothic lolita outfit, innocent but also mature and lustful I love so much, looks on with a seductive smile as if she wants to devour her beloved immediately for how lustful but true her love is, while holding her weapon ready to split an imaginary enemy in two.
This particular figure is from an illustration was created by the author after the events of the novel, when Rory had become the complete Goddess of Death and War—when the entire world feared her very existence, and merely seeing her meant the end of a life, when she had already reached a thousand years old as a Goddess capable of altering reality for fun.
It depicts the ending, when she is at her loneliest, when she longs more than ever for a connection with someone—anyone—but, as the Goddess of Death, everyone is too afraid to even look at her, even Rory romantic interest and the protagonist of the anime Crimson Covenant, Kaito.
It is the ending where she is trapped inside the very prison she built for herself after confessing her feelings and being rejected by the person she loved, when she left the mortal realm to never return again, simply because she was a goddess—something she never wanted to be. She was forced to become the Goddess of Death instead of the Goddess of Love or Fortune to save others but not herself. This figure have now ten years with me, on the high and my regular lows, she had always been with me trying to resist my family on my young and now on my solitude of my adulthood, and I like to think that she es from moment later of her series, where she find me and get to stay with me forever as lovers, as equals, two being meant to be alone now reunite and together forever.
There are more—many more. Knights with their spears or swords, a fictional banner they all fight under together. A girl special operations squad dressed in casino bunny suits, but with realistically modeled weapons, posed as if they’re checking their gear, ready to help me through another afternoon of gaming—battle companions from those times I used to play capture the flag against the opposing team. Mages with their staffs, elves with their bows, a life-size little fairy—her experience and knowledge would surely help me defeat that dragon still waiting for me in the dungeon near the end of the game I’m trying to finish.
Some of those figures are from series I never even made it past episode two of, or never bothered to watch at all. I liked creating their stories myself, imagining how they related to me or to my novel. Each one represents a story that mattered to me, a world I wished I could live in, an ideal of beauty, strength, or simple tenderness that this reality denied me. They are the inhabitants of my little kingdom, the silent witnesses to my nights of writing and my quiet breakdowns, the main readers of my novel.
It still hurts that I spent money on them—but not that I have them by my side.
I take off the clothes of the day, that second skin soaked in frustration, and put on an old sweater and loose, shapeless, comfortable pants. I collapse into the desk chair in front of the computer; over there is the VR headset, but I will not use it today. The black screen is a portal to another kind of refuge, and also the battlefield for my soul.
I turn it on. Blue light washes over my face. Automatically, almost by neurotic reflex, I open the stats page for my novel. War Dragon Chronicles. Visits today: 67. New comments: 0. A dull lash hits my chest. I expected it, but it always hurts. Hope is an atrophied muscle that refuses to die completely and spasms painfully. I close the tab. There won’t be a new chapter today.
Instead, my hand, almost of its own will, guides the cursor to my browser icon and types the address of my favorite figure shop. It’s a ritual of desperation. The screen fills with colors, with promises in resin and PVC. “Pre-order open.” “Limited edition.” “Includes smiling face and angry face.” My eyes scan the catalogs and stop on a new Tamamo figure—this one wearing her final outfit, the moon royal goddes outfit, the same one she wore when she sacrificed herself during a betrayal to save the story’s protagonist.
She was an evil goddess, just like in her legend, and had been trapped for millennia in a cursed stone. In the game’s story, Star Fantasy, which takes place long afterward, the protagonist—the player, me—whom I chose to be an android from an alien race, ends up on Earth and eventually saves her. That’s where you find the cursed stone and help her escape her ancient prison. Feeling appreciated for the first time in her existence as a goddess, Tamamo begins to accompany the protagonist on all his adventures. Maybe she was evil, but her story arc in the game is about redeeming her actions and becoming a good person, trying to live like a human alongside the protagonist. She was my favorite character in my favorite video game. I spent countless hours trying to raise my relationship with her until we reached lover status.
But my story wasn’t the one the developers wanted for their ending. During a visit to an onsen in Japan, Tamamo calls the protagonist outside a hotel almost as old as she is to reveal her true feelings of love. She stands there in her autumn orange kimono, holding a paper lantern. Then the final villain appears suddenly with a weapon capable of completely erasing souls from existence, denying even an afterlife to its victims. Tamamo shields me from the attack at the last moment. I watched her evaporate in a beam of light that vanished forever with a single, “I’m sorry.”
Out of anger, I finished the entire game that same night without sleeping until the next day, but the ending was unsatisfying. The villain is defeated, the situation improves—but Tamamo never returns, leaving a bitter taste that still haunts me even now.
That figure of her holding the paper lantern is absurdly beautiful, but also includes the rare red hand fan, her goddees object and most powerful possesion. And it costs… about what Luna paid me for the edit, plus a little more that should go toward this week’s food. The memory of that moment is sad, but I feel like if I buy it, I’ll get the chance to truly protect her this time.
A knot forms in my throat. I don’t need it. I have dozens. But… what if this is the missing one? What if filling this last empty space on the shelf, acquiring this final impossible beauty, gives me—even for an instant—the feeling that I’ve won something? That I’ve finally earned a trophy in a game where I only lose. This isn’t a purchase—it’s an exorcism. An attempt to soothe the void with an object, to fix my failure to save her.
My finger hovers over the “Add to Cart” button. The light of the moon-lamp reflects on the screen, layering its soft round glow over the crisp, commercial image of the sorceress. I take a deep breath. The room is completely silent, broken only by the dull gurgle of the lava lamp. My figures watch me with their eternal smiles and glassy eyes.
I press the button.
A digital click, a real sigh. There’s no joy—just a momentary, poisoned relief, immediately followed by a stab of guilt. “Money wasted,” my father’s voice whispers in my mind. “Another one, César? What are you playing at?” Rory’s stern gaze seems to ask.
Tamamo would probably feel disgusted seeing she’s condemned to live with the hollow shell of the being who once rescued her. I don’t think she’d be happy to see me again—me, my room full of even more figures. Maybe she’d start fighting with Rory or the bunny squad. Or maybe she’d thank me for saving her. I hope at least that lets me sleep a little easier tonight, knowing the effort of my shitty job rescued her from her ending.
I turn off the monitor. The room sinks back into the soft dominance of the artificial moon. I get up and walk to the nest-bed. I fall into the pillows, sinking into the softness, pulling the covers up to my nose. From here, looking at the illuminated ceiling, the room feels like the inside of a calm spaceship. I put on a background noise video—it’s nothing more than the sound of water running through a river. I turn on the night lamp; I hate total darkness. The dark blue tone makes my room feel like a city, like a camp in the middle of a bioluminescent forest near a river.
The bunny squad is on guard tonight. The fairy seems to be telling stories about how this place reminds her of her home in the fairy kingdom. The knights are checking their weapons and getting ready to rest. Rory is nearby with her axe, but even she is tired of being violence. She stays close to feel something other than being the demon goddess of death and war. At least here she can simply be Rory, the one who falls asleep first.
In the original story she’s nothing more than a child sacrificed to the god of annihilation. She’s revived as the goddess of death and war, in love with a human she’s forbidden to even be near as a goddess. I don’t know if here she’s in love with me the same way, but I like to imagine she is—maybe even more. She’s probably happy not to be feared, that her dangerous power is only part of who she is, not her whole existence. Maybe she’s happy with the rest she can have here too. I like to believe she’s truly in love, but keeps up that strong facade to help me hold myself together—and that when the chance comes, she’ll throw herself into the attack without hesitation.
Tomorrow will be another day. Another trip in the time capsule, another edit for Luna, another bug report for a game no one will care about. As soon as I close my eyes, I start thinking about my novel—what the next chapter could be like, what kind of cool battle I could create, how to make it all make sense. Those thoughts, and the half-certainty that Tamamo was saved today, are what make it easier to sleep tonight than on other nights. I even end up dreaming that I was as beautiful as Tamamo—that she herself was happy that I was a girl just like her.