“I kinda forgot all about you,” Yumeji said out loud as if the doll looking back at him could hear what he was saying.
He grabbed the doll and brought it over to the kitchen table. He took another sip from his soda as he analyzed the strange object before him.
“How the hell did you get in here, anyway?” he asked the doll. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t receive an answer.
Things don’t tend to just appear somewhere for no reason. He wasn’t an expert in all things scientific, but he was pretty sure that teleportation still hadn’t been invented, yet. And even if there was such a thing as teleportation, someone would still have had to choose to teleport this strange little doll into his apartment, of all places, which didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
“What the hell should even I do with you?” he mumbled to himself as held the doll in his hand and looked it over once more. For a moment he thought that it might be one of those spycams or listening devices that a friend may have snuck into his apartment as a prank, but that didn’t seem likely. There was no zipper or compartment to be found anywhere on the doll’s body where something could be hidden inside of it, plus he didn’t feel anything as he ran his hands over it. It was just a simple, handcrafted, doll that appeared magically in his apartment.
Thinking about it for too long made his head start to hurt. He couldn’t ask anyone about it, they’d think he was weird. And what advice could they even give him, anyway? Oh yeah, mystery dolls appear in people’s apartments all the time, here’s what you do about it. Extremely unlikely, he thought. He placed the doll back on the table, accidentally knocking his soda over in the process.
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“Shit,” he exclaimed as he rushed over to the kitchen counter to grab a towel. He stopped the soda from spilling onto the floor, sopping it up around the table’s edges as best as he could. The doll was soaked, so he carried it over to the sink and set it down to let it dry. It seemed a shame to spill on such a well made doll, he thought, but then again it wasn’t even his. It’s not like he cared about it or anything.
He was much more concerned about his soda. It was his last one, and he barely got to drink half of it. He felt like dropping to his knees, he was so defeated. There were a lot of trials and tribulations which he could put up with facing in his daily life, but not the loss of his soda. Some people had coffee, some people had religion, and Yumeji had soda. That’s what got him through his days. Almost without skipping a beat, he grabbed his wallet and keys and rushed over to the local convenience store to grab a replacement.
A short while later he came walking back to his apartment with a few bags in hand. He needed to do a little shopping, anyway, so he picked up a few essentials while he was at the store. He found a new flavor of his favorite soda, some sort of weird cherry/peach blend called Wild Cheach, and was excited to crack it open as soon as he got back to his apartment.
He wouldn’t be thinking about soda for much longer, though, as he came walking up the stairs and saw something unbelievable. He wasn’t sure if what he was seeing was real, or if he had been hit by a truck somewhere along the way back from the store and been isekai’d.
“U-uhm… hey, excuse me,” she said shyly as her face turned beet red, “c-can you let me inside real quick?”
There was no denying it now, his eyes weren’t deceiving him. She was real, and she was talking to him. Standing there in front of him, knocking on his apartment door, was Namiko Toro, wearing nothing but a towel.