"A Perfect Monday to Stop Having a Normal Life"
6:47 AM. The apartment room of Hoshino Ren, third floor, Tsukino Apartments, Tokyo.
The world is a fair place.
This was the foundational belief that Hoshino Ren had operated on for seventeen years. Work hard, get results. Don't bother people, people don't bother you. Sleep at eleven, wake up fresh at seven. The beautiful, predictable law of cause and effect.
Ren valued the predictable above all else.
So when her alarm went off at 6:47—three minutes early because she'd forgotten to reset it the night before—she opened her eyes calmly, reached for her phone, turned off the alarm, and stared at the ceiling of her apartment, which was plastered with manga posters.
Normal. Perfect. Predictable.
Then she noticed the ceiling was glowing purple.
"...Huh."
Ren blinked. Once. Twice. Three times.
The ceiling was still purple. More precisely, there was a circle of light roughly the size of her wardrobe door pulsing in the air above her bed—about a meter off the mattress—emitting a soft hiss like a can of soda being opened.
She grabbed her blanket and pulled it back over her head.
Sleep. This was definitely a dream. Her brain, overtaxed from reading isekai light novels until midnight, had finally staged a revolt.
Five seconds passed.
"—nobody asked you to place yourself there, floor!"
The voice—clear, high, full of affronted surprise—forced Ren to pull the blanket back down to her chin.
In the center of her room, standing directly on her blue IKEA rug (purchased three months ago, two thousand yen, on sale), was a girl.
Her silver hair fell in perfect waves to her waist, like a shampoo advertisement shot in a fantasy kingdom. Her gown—if it could be called a gown, given that the lace, gold embroidery, and gemstone accents together probably outweighed Ren's entire wardrobe—fanned out across the floor like a blooming flower. In her left hand, she held a staff tipped with a glowing violet crystal.
On her face was the expression of a queen who has just been informed that her throne had been repainted chartreuse.
The girl surveyed Ren's room—manga posters, stacked books, the perpetually overcrowded desk, the wardrobe that couldn't quite close—with an expression that could only be described as 'barely contained aristocratic horror.'
Then her violet eyes met Ren's.
A pause.
"You," said the girl in the tone one uses to address a cat that has just scratched an antique sofa, "who are you, and why are you occupying my arrival portal?"
Ren stared at her.
"...This is my room," Ren replied.
"Impossible. This is the coordinate point Miriel calculated for six months. This location was supposed to be unoccupied."
"It's not unoccupied. There's me. And that Fullmetal Alchemist poster."
The girl glanced at the poster. Her expression did not change. Then she straightened her posture—which was already very straight—and produced a sound that Ren, in a different context, might have described as 'remarkably beautiful.'
"Very well. As Her Royal Highness Seraphine Elara von Iskar, First Princess of the Kingdom of Iskar, Heir Apparent to the Throne of Elvareth, and Holder of the Covenant Seal of Three Realms—"
"Hold on."
Seraphine stopped. One eyebrow rose a single millimeter. "...Yes?"
"You're standing on my charger cable."
A very long silence.
"...GUARDS!"
Two more portals opened. The first ejected a short-haired girl in full plate armor—completely full, including a visor that covered half her face—who immediately dropped into a combat stance and drew her sword at entirely the wrong target (Ren's wardrobe).
The second deposited a bespectacled girl in a blue mage's robe, who emerged still reading a thick notebook and showed no awareness whatsoever that she had just crossed between dimensions.
"Preliminary report, coordinates accurate," the bespectacled girl murmured without lifting her head. "Mana levels stable, no temporal distortion, landing point—" She finally looked up. Her eyes swept the room quickly. "—located within a residential structure belonging to a local inhabitant. Interesting. Not a variable I'd accounted for."
"LYRA!" Seraphine wheeled on the armored girl. "Stand down. There are no enemies here, only—" she glanced at Ren, "—an uninvited local inhabitant."
"YES, YOUR HIGHNESS!" Lyra sheathed her sword—and in the process knocked against Ren's bookshelf. Three manga volumes fell.
"THOSE ARE LIMITED EDITIONS—"
"AN ARTIFACT!" Lyra snatched one of the volumes with eyes shining. "Your Highness, there are illustrated artifacts here! These must be—"
"Put my manga down."
"—protective talismans or possibly ritual guides—"
"PUT IT DOWN."
Lyra put it down. She looked bereft.
The bespectacled girl—Miriel, apparently—was now circling the room slowly, scribbling in her notebook. "Minimalist structure. Functional. Numerous illustrated mediums affixed to the walls—likely cultural iconography or social status markers. The thin black rectangle on the desk may be an altar or..." she approached Ren's laptop and tilted her head, "...a local variant of a soul-capture device?"
"That's a laptop."
"Lap-top." Miriel wrote something down. "And its function?"
"Work and watching anime."
"Translation spell failure on the final word. Could you repeat it?"
Ren took a slow, deep breath.
She sat up in bed, blanket still around her shoulders, hair a disaster, and surveyed the three otherworldly beings who now occupied her six-square-meter apartment.
In one corner: a princess standing in a way that made her look like she was being painted for an official portrait at all times.
In another corner: a knight lovingly picking up objects from the floor with shining eyes.
In the middle: a mage tapping her walls and recording the results.
Ren looked at the time on her phone.
6:52 AM.
She still had to be at school by eight.
"Okay," said Ren, in the flat tone achievable only by someone whose soul has partially vacated the premises, "does anyone want breakfast first?"
✦ ✦ ✦
⚡ Five Minutes Later — The Apartment Kitchen
"WHAT IS THIS THING SPITTING FIRE FROM ITS HOLES—"
"That's the gas stove, please don't touch the knob that—"
CLICK. WHOOOOSH.
"—that one."
A cheerful blue flame ignited on Ren's two-burner stove. Seraphine lurched backward half a meter, staff raised and ready to cast. Lyra had drawn her sword again. Miriel wrote something while pushing her glasses up her nose.
"A miniature fire portal," Miriel murmured, "controllable via rotational mechanism. Remarkable. The energy output appears artificially regulated. This isn't magic—so what is the power source?"
"Gas."
"Gas?"
"Natural gas. Piped through the walls."
Miriel wrote something very long and very serious.
"Your Highness," Lyra approached the stove with the caution one reserves for wild animals, "allow me to verify its safety first—"
"Unnecessary," Seraphine cut in, with dignity unshaken despite having nearly tripped over the doormat moments earlier. "Fire is a base element. Even in this peculiar world, Her Royal Highness need not fear—"
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
The smoke detector in the ceiling went off. Lyra reflexively delivered two combat strikes and nearly took out the light fixture. Seraphine raised her staff. Miriel looked up and wrote 'ceiling deity alarm bell' in her notebook.
Ren turned off the stove, grabbed the broom, and prodded the smoke detector's reset button with the handle until it went quiet.
Silence.
"This world," said Seraphine at last, in a very controlled voice, "is extremely loud."
"Yes." Ren put the broom back. "Welcome to Japan."
✦ ✦ ✦
📱 Eighteen Minutes Later — Back in Ren's Room
Ren had managed to cook rice and a tamagoyaki without further incident—largely because she had instructed her three guests to sit on the bed and not touch anything.
Lyra sat perfectly upright in the corner of the bed and stared at Ren's phone on the desk with the focused wariness of someone expecting it to attack. The phone buzzed with a LINE notification from the class group chat.
"The artifact is moving on its own," Lyra reported.
"That's my phone. A notification."
"Long-range communication artifact?" Miriel guessed from her corner, still writing.
"...More or less."
Seraphine, who had somehow migrated from the bed to Ren's desk chair—and was sitting in it with the posture of someone who believed it was a throne—was watching Ren with an unreadable expression.
"You aren't surprised," she said finally.
Ren glanced over. "Hmm?"
"Three people from another dimension appeared in your room this morning. You didn't scream. You didn't faint. You didn't run. You made eggs."
"I did pull the blanket over my head first."
"...That is a remarkably calm response."
Ren thought about it while scooping rice onto a plate.
"I read a lot of light novels," she said finally. "If you read enough stories about people getting pulled into other worlds, you start to realize that when something impossible happens to you, there are two possibilities. One: it's a dream and it'll end by itself. Two: it's real, and panicking won't help."
Silence.
"...And you're certain this is the second?" Seraphine asked.
"The smoke detector was too real to be a dream."
Something moved in Seraphine's expression—too quickly to read, but Ren had the vague impression that, under the right lighting, it might have been described as almost-smiling.
"I have already stated my full title," said Seraphine. "It was lengthy, but you're welcome to note it down."
"I remember the 'von Iskar' part."
"That is sufficient. You may address me as Your Highness."
"Seraphine."
This time the expression wasn't vague. Seraphine's left eyebrow rose approximately two millimeters—which, on her personal scale of expression, Ren would later learn was equivalent to a normal person's jaw hitting the floor.
"You just addressed a regnant princess by her given name."
"You're in my six-square-meter apartment. Royal protocol may need to adapt."
Seraphine held her gaze for a long moment.
"...Miriel."
"Your Highness?" Miriel looked up from her notebook.
"Record this: the local inhabitant displays a level of audacity entirely disproportionate to the square footage of her residence."
"Noted that twelve minutes ago, Your Highness."
✦ ✦ ✦
And so it began—somewhere between a smoke alarm, three manga volumes nearly lost to a well-meaning knight, and a single plate of tamagoyaki divided four ways.
Hoshino Ren had not planned for any of this. She had planned for ramen on Friday, a quiet weekend, and seventeen more predictable years.
What she had not planned for was the way the silver-haired princess kept looking at her—like a question that hadn't decided yet whether it wanted to be asked.
For the first time in a very long time, the smallest part of Ren—the part that had always loved how quiet things were—found itself thinking that unpredictable might not, actually, be the worst thing in any world.
✦ End of Chapter 1 ✦