“And…here, uh, here you…go,” the hypnotized landlord seemed close to passing out as she handed me the keys to the apartment.
She looked like she was really struggling against it, which either meant she had a fiercely strong will or her human greed was simply raging against the criminally low rent that Swirlyeyes had convinced her to go down to.
Looking down at the keys, I gave a sigh, before motioning the landlord off to go get her mind suitably warped for my stay. Overlord didn’t want me getting bothered anymore than necessary and wanted to make sure I was safe and free from suspicion.
“I was pretty safe and free from that back home,” I muttered, unlocking my room door and walking into my vacation home, before I blinked at my new abode. “Holy shit.”
It was huge. I looked around at the grand entrance and did a slight double take back into the hallway, trying to figure out if I was being pranked. Did Earth apartments get this big? I’d actually never seen any bigger than one of the alliance’s broom closets.
A troupe of Silent Knights, my armored sword-wielding and shield-brandishing protectors, came in after me with boxes full of my stuff, like my clothes, my favorite snacks, and my portfolio of drawings.
Not that any of the drawings were worth much, or I wouldn’t be moving at all, but they were good for slowing down Champions. Or, of course, helping them train. Just the thought of them using my monsters as training dummies…no, no, I don’t have time for those thoughts.
“Ok, just start moving everything in,” I motioned my Silent Knights past me, letting them begin to organize things according to how I liked them. Honestly, I didn’t, well, I wasn’t really comfortable with how much space I had.
There was a huge open air living room that had a stairway that went up to an upstairs bedroom, but it was all, ugh, just way too much. My room at Armageddon Alliance was small by design, everything compact and no windows. It helped me think better, everything around me in sight.
This studio apartment had a huge set of windows, thankfully with the curtains drawn right now. I didn’t want to see the outside world just yet. Teleporting in with the help of one of my Doormen had been a godsend, definitely one of my best monsters.
Too bad he was such a hard design to pull off, it really cramped my hands up and recently I could never get his doorknob head just right like I wanted…ugh, I needed to stop.
The sound of shattering helped break my downward spiral and I finally had to delve deeper into…new home and figure out what my Silent Knights had broken.
“Metal bodies, empty heads.” The simplest words I could use to describe my most common creations plagiarized from my more talented younger self.
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Thankfully, it had just been a vase that a Silent Knight had knocked over while walking to the bathroom. Nothing valuable, at least not to me.
I thought about getting them to clean it up, but that was probably just an exercise in futility. They’d make more of a mess getting it all put away and I’d have to listen to them fuck around and find how much shit there was to break here.
For all of what the name implied, they could be really loud.
Laying down on my favorite couch in the living room, the newly put up black-out curtains keeping the whole apartment nice and dim, I realized that I’d need to get some monsters to clean up after them. Maybe an Inkling…? No, no, not another stupid Inkling.
“If I make another Inkling, I think I’ll fucking snap,” I said to no one in particular. I was alone and it was my fault. What did I expect? For Dad to just ignore how much of a fuck up I was for my entire life? I was only 18 and I could already feel Overlord getting tired of my shit.
Twisting so that I resting on my stomach, my face deep into the throw pillows of my old and worn out piece of furniture, I sighed as I heard more glass breaking in the next room over, “I need a vacuum cleaner…”
Or, a very soft idea hit me, a vacuum cleaner monster. I blinked, that was the worst idea I’d ever had, but also the first idea I’d had in a while. Maybe that could be like my new thing? Making machines into weird anthropomorphized monster machines?
First a vacuum cleaner and then, uh, and then…fuck, I’ll see how the vacuum cleaner thing goes and then I worry about the rest of this.
Besides, how hard could it be to design a vacuum monster?
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“Fuck,” I softly said more out of habit than anything else, tossing another piece of half-formed trash over my shoulder. I was tired, I was hungry, and nothing was feeling right about this fucking design.
And worst yet, I was making a mess trying to clean one up! And I was so fucking tired, had I already thought that? It was so true though, I just wanted to sleep, but if I slept and I woke up and this idea was gone…
I snorted, looking at the lines of my next attempt. "Was it even really here to begin with? God, this shitty idea wasn't even good and I still can't draw it. Ugh, someone just kill me now."
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Unfortunately, none of the Silent Knights around me heeded my words. None of my monsters would ever hurt me, even if I sincerely asked them to. Not that I ever had, of course…
It just wasn’t working. I was thinking it’d be cool for the vacuum monster, I was calling him Vackal in my head, would be like this dog-esque thing, like a happy little cleaning pet monster. The harsh angles of the machine just weren’t meshing well with the fur parts…
It didn’t look good at all. It looked like a horrible mess. If I brought it to life, it’d probably do its job and then terminate itself.
“Well,” I said, giving up, “I guess it’s time to do what I always do when art fucks me over.”
It was time to send my Silent Knights and my personal Doorman to go get me some food while I found some stupid TV show to binge for the next few days. Anything would do, as long as the Thespian Champions weren’t involved, they were self-absorbed assholes.
Standing up from my chair and stepping away from my drawing table, I looked down at it and rubbed my finger alongside my name carved into the wooden surface. It was crude, childish, but I always liked having my names on my things. It made them feel more like they were mine.
“Damnit,” I said, wiping my cheeks. I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself, this vacation was supposed to fix things, not make them worse.
I needed some food.
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I was probably quite the sight by the time the sun came up, not that I really noticed it with the black-out curtains keeping my living room nice and dim.
Not like, you know, a good sight. Like one of those exhibits you see at a carnival where people come to laugh and point at the really tall man and his super short wife, or the bearded lady and her footlong arm hair.
Swaddled in my bed sheets that I pulled from my moving boxes and half-watching, half-gazing through the Thespian Network’s most recent drama-thriller fantasy show, “Those Who Come Back,” I would laugh at me if I had the energy.
Short, barely reaching 5’2”, with pasty pale skin that was an unhealthy gray on a good day and short black hair that barely reached past my ears, but still managed to get tangled in knots like a sailor had gotten a hold of me.
An opened and empty box of chinese food was on the table in front of me, stolen from some place a few cities over.
Yeah, this was the life. Doing exactly what I always did, but in a cool new apartment that was too big and I hated it and I wanted to go home, but I wasn’t good enough to go home and Dad…
I sighed, feeling my back crack as I pulled myself up from laying down on the couch at an odd angle for the last hour or so, “If this is just a slump, I hope I die before I reach rock bottom.”
Maybe I should make a monster that can speak and talk with me, because otherwise, I get the feeling I’m going to go insane before I ever have the courage to go out and actually see the world my Dad thinks will inspire me-
A swift trio of knocks came at my door, sending a pulse of fear up my spine and into the back of my head, my eyes widening as my breathing stopped.
Was that an intruder? A Champion that had found me out? My Doorman shouldn’t have been traced back to here! It was impossible, there was probably a reasonable explanation to-
Another swift trio of knocks made me stand up, instinctively whipping out my sketching pencil. Even if I couldn’t draw if my life depended on it right now, even if my finished pieces were upstairs…I could still stab someone to death.
And then a voice came through the door like a tinkling of bells, “Hello neighbor! Are you up yet? I heard that you moved in!”
I blinked.
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Charlotte Suzuki was taller than me. That’s the first thing I noticed as my cheerful neighbor introduced herself, thrusting out a plastic container filled with cookies that smelled strongly of oatmeal.
“I hope you like raisins! My mother always said that any gift to a new neighbor should be a healthy one, so after I overheard the landlord talking about a new tenant yesterday I rushed back up to get started,” she said, continuing to detail everything that had gone into this gift for me.
She was dressed up in overalls, but not ones that looked like they’d ever seen a farm. With stylish embroidering, a yellow frilly top, and bright pink crocs that I couldn’t help glance at when I opened the door, she stood nearly a head above me, looking down and chattering endlessly.
“And what’s your name?” Her eyes were bright and blue and they startled me with how they seemed to widen with her question, as if they were ready to catch my answer out of the sky.
I swallowed, beginning to feel my nerves act up. This was, uh, this was too much. Too much for today, especially in the morning.
I could feel her looking at me, judging the way I was still covered in blankets. I knew I should have put on something, maybe a bathrobe. Did I own a bathrobe? Maybe I should have just taken a shower.
And if I opened the door, she might get a chance to look inside and see the mess that the Silent Knights had made and, fuck, she might just actually see Silent Knights. It wasn’t like they were stealthy, shit.
“Your eyes are really pretty.”
Nope! My body reacted faster than my mind could.
“Juliet!” I distracted her with my name, before grabbing the box of cookies out of her hands at the behest of my empty stomach, before closing the door and locking it again.
Hands shaking, I prepared myself for the angry knocking that was sure to follow that fucking disaster of interaction, but after a minute of waiting, I realized that I…must be in the clear?
“Hah, hah,” I tried to calm my breathing, realizing I was close to hyperventilating. This was bad, fuck, how was I supposed to be inspired by the world when some chic hick had me this close to a panic attack!?
And what did she say? About my eyes? I stood up and ambled over to a wall mirror that had come with the apartment, staring into it.
Staring back, were my pair of solid black eyes against the white of my sclera. I couldn’t even see where my pupils were in the solid coal-colored dots, so…so I didn’t know what she meant when she said that.
“She was fucking weird,” I agreed with my reflection, who nodded with me.
At least the cookies smelled good.