Why Don't They Sell the Super Hot Loli Store Manager?
"Talking to girls is hard."
"What about me?"
"Jasmine is an exception…"
Oh? So that means he thinks I'm manly in my own way?
This guy has good taste.
Even after becoming a body this lewd and female, he can still see that my mind is holding firm?
"I-I wouldn't mind staying like this a little longer."
"Hnn…"
Honestly, maybe I was the one looking at him through a wall of prejudice.
When I thought about it, the things I'd hated — that chestnut-blossom scent his body gave off, the Affection Gifts — none of them had anything to do with who he actually was.
…Looked at rationally, he might turn out to be a pretty decent friend. A newbie, sure, but a decent one.
"A-all right. That's enough. We have work to do."
"Okay."
And he listened so well, too.
He didn't know anything, but once you told him, he just did it.
Of course, I'd still have to figure out eventually why he was so fixated on me — but he probably had his reasons.
"Take this."
"…Sugar?"
"Yes."
In this world, sugar was used as money — oddly enough.
Not that people traded actual sugar cubes. They used paper bills. The bills just had the equivalent sugar value printed on them, that was all.
"From here on, we're raiding the convenience store."
"…Convenience store?"
His expression was growing harder and harder to read.
Not that I could blame him. Back when I was a game newbie myself, I'd spent plenty of time wondering why the hell it had to be a convenience store.
But after nearly two years, you just get numb to it.
"They sell decent stuff there."
…When a newbie shows up, the first tip you give them is this one.
Technically I could just buy everything myself and hand it over, but it wasn't hard enough to bother. The whole strategy was simply: buy everything on the discount rack.
The fixed stock was expensive and mostly mediocre, but the random items that refreshed every day were essentially clearance goods — always cheaper than list price. Sure, if you didn't need a particular item it was a waste, but this was the kind of game that made you use every last scrap of material, so stocking up never hurt. Which was why the meta became "just buy everything you see, just in case."
"Welcome!"
That was Femme — the character you always saw when you used the shop.
She gave off cute part-timer vibes, but she was actually the store manager, and fairly old. Not grandmother old, but she filled the role of the aging spinster loli character.
"I'll take everything on the discount rack."
"What!? Th-thank you so much for your patronage!"
Yeah — if you bought out the whole display, you got that exact interaction line.
The gacha was outrageously predatory, but details like this were why the game had thrived.
So when was this cute convenience-store noona finally getting a full illustration?
She always seemed like she had some kind of secret.
They called it a convenience store, but it sold every weird thing imaginable.
The game's equipment — Collection Items — didn't look like weapons at all. Strange books, games, even grotesquely shaped Haniwa figurines all counted as Collection Items…
Well, most of them drop from dungeons, so selling them isn't that weird.
The real question was why it had to be a convenience store.
Other convenience stores were completely ordinary. Only this one stocked bizarre merchandise. And single-stock discount items that completely changed every day? That made no sense.
In a game it was a common system, so you just accepted it — but here it was carrying over into reality.
"What are these vending machines?"
"Those are dungeon drops themselves. Put in the matching coin and you can buy from them. Just pay us a small fee each time you use one."
…So these were the coin shops.
Certain content dropped its own currency coins, which you spent on fixed items. That was the lore reason you spent Sugar every time you used a coin shop — the vending machines belonged to the store, so they charged a usage fee.
The first time I saw that, I thought the devs were completely unhinged about reclaiming Sugar… turns out it was just setting detail.
Not that the Sugar involved amounted to much. They wouldn't have built a whole system just to scrape up less than a won a day in real-money value.
…Then at least give us a convenience-store storyline. Why keep this place locked down so tight?
"What's this?"
"Ah — that's the Flowers character series. Super popular."
…Right, that existed.
Otaku properties always had some cute side-character series for merch, and Princess Fourmi was no exception. Easy to make character goods out of, and they slotted naturally into the world as trendy accessories.
Flowers was, in-setting, a children's anime about cute flower-themed characters. Behind the scenes, though, it apparently had surprisingly brutal lore and a fair amount of sex appeal for a kids' show.
Kids liking slightly cruel or grotesque things was normal enough — but the sex-appeal side had a world-specific explanation.
In this world, the concept of "sex" didn't exist at all.
Obviously. A world of only women — the idea of men and women coupling made no sense. So anything "lewd" in the Princess Fourmi setting was just two women doing things that felt good to them, in their own way.
The closest thing to a household system existed because Minor Units were obligated to adopt and raise at least one child from the state. So the usual pattern was two women who had built affection through intimate acts forming a household and co-parenting their adopted kids as two mothers.
…And where did the state's adoptable children come from?
The Queen, of course.
In Princess Fourmi, human children hatched from eggs, and those eggs were laid periodically by the Queen alone. The exact method and principle weren't fully known, but that was why she was called the Great Mother.
In the end, every character who appeared in Princess Fourmi was a blood sister.
…Ah. I'd gotten carried away again talking about lore I liked.
Anyway — even the "lewd" stuff couldn't cause any real trouble at a young age here, so there was no cultural push to regulate it for kids. That was just how the world worked.
Settings this detailed are what make a game fun to obsess over.
And apparently they sold the merch at the convenience store, too. Flower character plushies, random character keychains in egg-shaped packaging — the works.
…Though everyone around here used password door locks. Why would anyone need a keychain?
"Do you like them?"
"Not really."
"I guess this sort of thing isn't your style."
"I like Jasmine more."
"……"
What kind of shameless thing was this man saying?
Did he have no sense of time and place?
It was a fairly cold season, and yet my face suddenly burned hot.
"Is there anything else you need?"
"No, this should be enough."
"Thank you for your patronage!"
On the way out we each picked something ordinary to drink.
I hadn't really planned on drinking anything, but my face was so warm I needed something to cool it down.
…The cider here was pretty good, actually.
"So?"
"So what."
"The convenience store."
"…There was a lot of weird stuff."
"Every day, you just buy the discount items from over there. Simple, right?"
"All of them?"
"If they're on discount, yes."
"Okay."
Anything else would need more thought, so I'd have to come along and guide him through those purchases.
Honestly, though, I wasn't confident I could explain every single useful item one by one. Newbies were supposed to grow through trial and error — the problem was we didn't have the luxury of making those mistakes right now.
"So what is this?"
"Ah — would you put it in the warehouse for now?"
"It goes in?"
"Yes."
The warehouse accepted anything that originated from dungeons. Affection items, Collection Items — all of it. And everything we'd bought at the convenience store today had come from dungeons.
"There are Affection Items in there too… but most of them are only +1, so the effects aren't anything special."
Even so, being able to buy them for that little Sugar was a blessing, so of course you bought them when they appeared. I just hoped a missing Collection Item would show up in that slot instead.
…Well, back then Affection Gifts had never really been scarce, so of course I'd thought that way.
Bluntly speaking, Affection was a resource you could just whale for if you ran short.
Some Collection Items were hard to farm because of combat-count limits. Affection Gifts, though — if you needed them, you just spun the gacha until they mass-produced. Money melted, but the deficit got filled.
Of course, there's no gacha now, so even a +1 Affection is precious.
In the end he was looking at me with an expression that clearly meant, Then what about the rest of this stuff?
…At a glance it was the same blank face, but if you watched carefully you could catch the subtle shifts. Was I starting to get used to him?
"Do you know about Collections?"
"Collections?"
"The items themselves don't do anything, but if you gather every item on a certain list, your abilities go up."
"Ah."
You could register Collection Items to a character without limit, but you could only have a hundred of them in the active state. The basic way to build stats through the Collection system was packing those hundred slots with as many completed sets as possible for the stats you wanted.
…The problem was that Collections were per-character, and you couldn't remove them once registered.
If you also accounted for swapping specs depending on the situation, you ended up with the insane requirement of registering a certain number of general-purpose Collections on every single character.
On paper the equipment was free, so it looked like you could set everything up for nothing. In practice the volume required was so massive that free farming could never cover it. What you actually did was buy Fragrance — the stamina resource — with real money, skip battles with it, and run a kind of pseudo-gacha.
"You know how to give them, right?"
"Yeah. Same as before."
"Ah — save them for now. Generally speaking, it's better to put them on a DPS unit."
"…Okay."
So he had wanted to give them to me after all.
Once you handed one over you couldn't take it back — what was he even trying to do? And he looked that disappointed about it? I genuinely could not read this guy.
"Haa… Want to touch my hair?"
"Yeah."
…He'd listened well just now. A reward this small should be fine.