I Already Know All of That
When I thought about it, I had never really had a home of my own.
In my previous life, well — my parents had given birth to me, at least.
They'd looked after me under their roof until I grew up.
I couldn't remember the details very clearly, but the place I ended up with once I started working...
...wasn't mine. Just a rented room.
Calling it a house was a stretch, honestly. A tiny room with a bathroom attached, and a kitchen and washing machine you shared with everyone else.
What was their slogan again?
Something about making a space where students and office workers living on their own could eat together so they wouldn't feel lonely?
Not that anyone actually cooked for you, of course.
Ah, right. They called it a gosiwon.
No soundproofing whatsoever, and sometimes the rain leaked in.
I think I even swore I'd scrape together every last bit of money and buy a place of my own.
A few months later, though, once I sat down and tallied my paycheck against what was piling up in my account, I realized that even if I died and came back, owning a home would still be impossible.
Except it wasn't.
If you died and came back, it was possible!
Granted, that skipped over a rather long process: dying, going to another world, living there for hundreds of years, tearing open a rift between dimensions to save my own heroine, and then, out of nowhere, being given a physical body thanks to other people's faith.
But if you boiled it down to the point, it was true.
Die, come back as a beautiful girl, and you get a house!
Maybe it was because I'd never had anything I could really call my own over in that other world. Having a nest of my own felt really, really good.
Over there I'd been a wanderer without a home, after all.
Ah — so maybe I ought to squeeze every last drop of enjoyment out of this house content, as a kind of compensation?
First, flop down on the living room sofa.
Don't so much as twitch a finger. Just lie there.
You couldn't do this kind of thing outside. It was only because it was home that you could sprawl out, completely defenseless!
"Mmm, the cooling isn't really on, so it's a little warm. Aren't you two hot? Shall I turn on the air conditioner?"
"An air conditioner... what is that?"
"Ah. It pushes the hot air inside out so the room gets nice and cool. This thing here."
"Hmm. I'd be grateful if you would."
"Hehe, grateful? I'll show you how to use it, so watch along with me."
Apparently the two of them considered the air conditioner more important than lying down.
I couldn't feel the heat, but humans were another story.
Beep, beep. Yegyeong pressed the air-conditioner button, and the moment it made a sound, Helena flinched, her hand shooting toward her pistol, her whole body going rigid.
Yegyeong froze right along with her.
Helena wasn't the type to start shooting at random, though. Once she realized the noise wasn't a warning of danger, she lowered her hand, looking a little sheepish, and only then did Yegyeong unclench as well.
They didn't have to be that scared. I'd stretched out my thought-form and held Helena in place so she couldn't draw.
"This red button turns the air conditioner on and off. These up-and-down arrow buttons adjust the strength of the airflow, so you can decide how cool you want the room. There are timer functions and things like that, too... I'll walk you through those when we actually need them."
Of course, that power was invisible to human eyes. Yegyeong didn't notice a thing and just kept explaining the air conditioner.
Helena, on the other hand, shot me a faintly complicated look.
I can control myself, so why are you grabbing me? Was that it? Or was she hurt that I hadn't trusted her?
Well, it wasn't as if I'd pinned her so hard she couldn't do anything. Rather than grabbing her and holding her back, I'd just given her a light hold — more of a come on, snap out of it than anything.
If Helena had shaken it off, that thought-form would have scattered without a fight. She simply hadn't had the will to, so it hadn't come to that.
"Anyway, that's the air conditioner. Ah, and that over there is a refrigerator. It's a piece of furniture that keeps the inside cold so food doesn't spoil, and so drinks stay chilled."
"Mm. Like an icehouse. Our world had tools for making and storing ice in the summer, too. This looks quite a bit more efficient, though. How a box this thin can produce that kind of effect..."
"Oh, you had something like this over there? That's a fairly developed world, then. Plenty of people have never even seen one of these. Next is the kitchen... I'll explain the kitchen when we cook later. Ah, and this is..."
Oblivious to the faint current running between Helena and me, Yegyeong kept introducing the furniture around the house.
She'd clearly appointed herself our guide on the assumption we wouldn't know any of it. Fair enough — Helena wouldn't recognize most modern furnishings.
Helena was sharp, though. Anything Yegyeong explained once, she grasped immediately and learned how to use.
If she weren't that clever, she never would have picked up how to fire a revolver — or how to reload one — in a single sitting.
And so Yegyeong, in high spirits, led Helena around the house. With the living room and attached kitchen in the center, they went back and forth between the rooms on either side, explaining even the shower, the bathtub, and the shampoo in each ensuite bathroom.
...Wait a second.
A bathroom attached to each room, plus a shared kitchen and a space for eating and resting.
This was basically the same layout as the gosiwon I'd lived in.
Just cleaner, fancier, and built for two.
Caught in that oddly complicated feeling, I was wriggling against the sofa when Yegyeong, mid-tour, poked her head out toward me.
"Hmm, but Yeonmin, are you sure you don't need to learn any of this?"
In Yegyeong's eyes I was just as out of place with modern conveniences, so of course she'd think I ought to study up.
But it was fine.
I already knew how to use all of it.
Air conditioner, refrigerator, TV, hair dryer — I'd used all of them in my previous life, hadn't I?
The only things I didn't know were the security system and the purification unit. And even those I could inspect just by lying comfortably on the sofa and stretching out my thought-form for a peek.
Learning over someone's shoulder? For me, that was the same as learning properly!
Ah, there was a time I'd thought of a physical body as nothing but a limitation. Lying here like this, though, it was just so comfortable.
And I could do everything from here, couldn't I?
Hehe. This might actually be something humans would envy.
"Yes. I already know all of that, you see. Hehe."
"Ah, I suppose you would."
Drunk on that little sense of superiority, I beamed at her.
You two can't do this, can you?
Yegyeong didn't seem to think much of it, though. Did I not even look smug? Did this just seem natural...?
Well, everyone kept calling me a goddess and all. Maybe they figured Goddess Yeonmin simply knew everything.
Ah, that could be a problem.
What if, later on, there was something I genuinely didn't know, and they just skipped the explanation and moved on?
Then again, I could just ask when the time came. Not knowing wasn't a crime, was it? Nothing to be embarrassed about, either.
Learning was what mattered!
So I lay on the sofa, unable to do much else with my arms bound, and just rubbed my stockinged legs together while I waited for the two of them to finish looking around.
Come to think of it, these stockings.
They'd been on my legs since yesterday. I was starting to wonder if I ought to take them off and wash them.
I didn't sweat, sure, but I'd been walking around. There had to be some dust on them.
At least they were pantyhose, so they wouldn't slide down. Small mercies.
"I think that's everything I needed to explain. If anything else comes up, please feel free to ask anytime."
"I see. Even so, getting cooler hasn't done a thing about this sticky feeling."
"Ahaha, well, it doesn't actually clean your body. If you've been sweating, you still have to shower it off, don't you? Why not try the shower while you're at it? In summer, stepping out of a shower into the air-conditioner breeze is its own kind of heaven."
"I suppose I should."
The two of them finished the tour and came out of the rooms, and Helena looked at me, just... staring.
If she was going to shower, she ought to have headed into the bathroom. Why was she looking at me all of a sudden?
Ah, wait. Don't tell me?
"Um... do you want to wash with me? Hehe, then you'd have to untie this rope, too..."
"No. I don't particularly want to. I'll go wash up."
"Um, Yeonmin. I'm sorry, but I think you'll have to make do with the purification unit. It does clean away waste completely, so..."
I'd thought it might be a perfectly legal chance to see two beautiful girls naked. Unfortunately, neither of them seemed the least bit interested in bathing with me.
Well, I wouldn't have peeked at their bodies anyway. Still, watching Helena recoil like that and Yegyeong look so awkward left me in a bit of a mood.
So I pouted at the backs of their heads, and, with the spiteful thought of just you wait until you come out, stretched my foot toward the air-conditioner remote.
My hands were tied, so it had to be a foot.
The distance from the sofa to the table was farther than I'd expected, though. I stretched my toes a little more, just a little more...
And in the instant I tried to work those barely-grazing toes with extra delicacy, a hideous, wrenching pain slammed through my calf.
"Kyaaaaugh?!"
"What's going on!"
"Hah — what's wrong...?"
The scream tore out of me before I could stop it, and Helena and Yegyeong came flying out of their rooms. They must have been just about to step into the bathroom — both of them half-undressed — and I was grateful they'd come looking for me anyway, but the sensation in my leg was too awful to think about anything else.
"M-my leg feels weird...! It feels like the muscle is twisting...!"
"Ah. Looks like a cramp."
"I don't know what a 'cramp' is, but... loosening the muscle should help. Hah, Yeonmin. What were you even trying to do with that frail body of yours... I should have noticed when I saw you lying on the sofa like that."
Yegyeong diagnosed me on the spot. Helena, for some reason, blamed herself in a thoroughly apologetic voice as she massaged my leg.
She seemed to be under some strange misunderstanding.
I absolutely could not tell her I'd gotten a cramp trying to grab the remote with my foot, so I just quietly let Helena press into my calf and pull my toes up and back.
Thankfully, thanks to her hands, the cramp eased before long.
Next time, I am never stretching my toes like that.
This body... its physical abilities were sneakily terrible.