Hope Contained in a Box
"So I thought I had to give up. I believed it was impossible for food that satisfied me to satisfy anyone else."
But the fried ice cream was a perfect bullseye of her tastes — meeting every condition she wanted — while still carrying a flavor the majority could enjoy. For the first time, it was a dish that came close to hope: the hope of sharing something together.
"Would it be all right if I tried making this?"
"Yeah. It's not hard."
What was this? Gourmand cooking with a smile that bright? I had never seen that side of her before. Even in her Princess Awakening story, she had never smiled quite so radiantly. In the game, the protagonist simply acknowledged her hobby and showed consideration for what she ate, and that alone had been enough to raise her affection all the way to Princess Awakening…
It's completely different now.
This time, she had half-abandoned the dream in her heart — and we had not only tried to solve it for her, we had actually handed her the first real clue. That was why she could smile from the heart.
"Please try some."
"Mm. Yeah, this is good."
Especially important: the ordinary fried food and the fried ice cream were completely separate. There was no disgusting collision of the two flavors bleeding into each other. The fried ice cream itself was nutty and sweet, genuinely pleasant to eat.
"It's delicious. Wow — this is a dish Gourmand made?"
"How is it? Huh? What the hell, this is actually good? What's gotten into you?"
Even Tobacco and Cocktail reacted the same way. Gourmand's expression melted into something close to pure emotion. Well — at this rate, this Deadly Battle would be no problem at all.
"Um, Master."
"Hm?"
"Would you come to my house for a moment? There's something I want to show you."
…Still, what I really wanted to know was what story would come next from a Gourmand reacting like this — something that had never existed before. Was it a scrapped setting that never made it into the game? Or simply a story that hadn't been released yet, something scheduled for after the second anniversary…?
I did my best to rein in the swarm of theories racing through my head and decided to examine the story itself first. Honestly, what mattered was the benefit this would bring us — not how far it diverged from the original plot.
The story's already completely different anyway.
Last event, we had deliberately kept things as close as possible so we could claim the rewards. The Royal Guard was already far removed from the original storyline. But we were growing faster than we ever had in the game, weren't we?
"This place…"
"The kitchen's a bit of a mess, isn't it? Please, come inside."
Whether this was a discarded setting or material for a future event, as long as I could find a way to milk it dry and put it to real use, it didn't matter if it was different.
…So what on earth was this?
"Ah — would you like to take that? I don't think it means anything to me anymore."
"…Chocolate?"
Something like chocolate wrappers filled a box to the brim. My first thought was Affection Gifts, but it didn't resemble any item I knew. Even the Affection Gifts you bought with Choco — Gourmand's was chocolate chicken — so the design couldn't possibly look like this.
"It's kimchi chocolate."
"……"
Please. Eat something normal.
Of course, it didn't seem like she had bought it intending to eat it. The moment Master reached for it, it went straight into storage.
"Jasmine."
"Yes?"
"…What is a Variation Item?"
"Excuse me!?"
Why was that coming up here of all places? Seeing that the kimchi chocolate was classified as a Variation Item made my head spin. And since the gift target was Gourmand, that meant a Variation of Gourmand existed.
A Valentine's Day Variation, huh.
A Valentine's Day Variation… Right before I transmigrated, Tobacco (Valentine) had just been released, but I had never once heard of a Gourmand Variation. Which meant it was either a Variation scrapped before release, or one that simply hadn't launched yet at the moment I arrived.
"Ah — I should have explained Variation Items to you. I'm sorry."
…I needed to start with the explanation.
Princess Fourmi had a system called Variation characters. Same character, but a completely different skill set and concept, sold as a new version. Most Variations were limited-time.
Lately the game had gone completely insane, selling nothing but limited Variations back-to-back.
Anyway, Variation characters could also be unlocked without gacha. Limited characters often had no other acquisition route, but some were given out free through events. What you needed for that were Variation Items — extremely similar to Affection Gifts. They were essentially the materials that completed a Variation state. Gather every material and gift them, and the Variation character unlocked.
Functionally identical to Affection Gifts, really.
Raising a Variation character's star rank also required feeding it Variation Items. Since Variation characters shared affection with the original, this was a parallel affection system designed to let you unlock a character and push her all the way to 4-Star without using regular affection.
"Mm. Got it."
"By the way — where did you even get this?"
"…It gave it to me. From here."
In answer to my question, Gourmand produced what looked like a laptop. She couldn't have meant she bought her personal item online. The design was a little strange — clearly not an ordinary machine.
"…It's a communication device I happened to pick up a while ago."
"You picked it up?"
"Yes."
At first she had thought it was just a discarded laptop and brought it home to save money. But strangely, whenever she asked it something, it answered.
…That was extremely suspicious.
"So when you used it, it gave you that kimchi chocolate?"
"That's right. I told it I wanted a way for other people to share my tastes. It said that would be quite difficult, but if I paid a price one piece at a time, it would hand things over little by little."
And this chocolate had been the reward. The price, in reverse, was answering whatever the people on the other side of the laptop wanted to know — truthfully, without lies.
"It wasn't particularly hard. Most of the questions were basically common sense."
"Then why are you showing us this? Shouldn't you keep communicating with them and see it through?"
"No. Master already found me a method."
So there was no longer any need to search using this route. If we had a use for it, she wanted us to take it and use it ourselves.
"Ah."
That was why she had invited us to her house. Something stronger to believe in and follow had appeared, so she discarded the old path without a shred of regret — and, thinking it might help Master, decided to give it to us.
Then the correct assumption is that this laptop and the Variation Item were originally the results of a Valentine's Day event that would have come later.
I still wasn't sure exactly what the laptop was for. It could be some kind of new system, or a critical story device. This game always wove its event stories into the main plot, after all.
"Yeah. Thanks."
"Hehe…"
"I'll think about other dishes too. It might take a while."
"That's fine. For now, just this fried food alone can be used in all sorts of ways. Please take your time finding them."
"Okay."
Fried food really was broken. Not only could you swap the ice cream flavor inside the fried ice cream for endless Variations — the ordinary fried sides you ate alongside it had a huge range of ingredients to choose from.
"Somehow, things went in a direction I never expected."
"Yeah."
Honestly, lately I had only been stacking up resentment toward Gourmand. But after she broke down crying and poured out pain she had never shown before, then later smiled so brightly… she had started to look a little pretty.
"Don't you think so?"
"…I wouldn't know. They all feel the same to me."
"Pardon?"
"Aside from Jasmine, they all feel fake."
"Hmm. Is that so."
I was always curious about that. What did he mean by "fake"? Did he know I had transmigrated, call me real because of it, and label everyone else original NPCs — game characters — as fake?
That doesn't track. He knows almost nothing about the game.
Even for a total newbie, his knowledge was empty. Whenever I tried to probe him casually, he just gave me the dumbest expressions and the weirdest answers. Completely useless.
…There will come a time when we can lay everything out in the open.
The part where he said he liked me, at least, seemed genuine.
Ha. Solving the problem I had been most worried about left me exhausted this early in the day. Maybe we should head back to the lodgings a little early.
"How do you feel?"
"Yeah. Good."
And so we went straight to bed at a fairly early hour, starting to work off the fatigue piled up from the recent stretch of tight food research. Sometimes you had to sleep deeply like this and let the body rest.
"Nngh…"
My eyes opened inside the warm heat of us holding each other. I had slept long enough that my head felt foggy, so I carefully slipped free of his arms.
…He must have been really tired.
"Ah, right. We still had this."
Yesterday I had been so exhausted I just went to sleep. I still hadn't checked the laptop Gourmand gave us.
…But where was I even supposed to use this?
She said if you ask a question, it answers anything?
There was one thing I had been curious about, actually. Princess Fourmi had a fair amount of unused dummy data, and among it was a pretty interesting plot hook: something called Noah's Perfume Bottle Project. A project that would let people escape and survive when Perfumery was destroyed. Most players assumed that if the service ever shut down without a proper ending, the characters would board that project for a final send-off — a pure MacGuffin. But now that I was fighting for survival here in person, I couldn't help wondering whether running in that direction might be an option.
And as a fan, I just wanted to know.
Information regarding the existence of Noah's Perfume Bottle Project and methods of utilizing said project.
I typed my question into the laptop exactly as it was and pressed Enter.