NOVEL NEXT Cycle 23 (11)
Dear Diary,
The last marble race of the cycle was today! Staab won it, which, I’m happy for him. Of course, I won the championship gold, so nya. But good for him, getting the last win.
Kimi ended up winning silver in the championship, so tradition dictates we can’t be friends until the cycle ends. I think it’s a dumb tradition, but oh well. It’s only for a couple weeks at most.
We helped Mika dismantle the last racing course thing, and it feels kinda weird to see all the pieces of the courses just stacked in a corner of her living room. Before, she’d always melt them down, so there wasn’t any trace of them when the players got here. But now, we don’t really want the players to know that we have, like, lives that don’t revolve around them, so we have to hide the tracks.
It’s kinda weird that we all feel that way. Like, it’s obvious that we’ve been physically changed. And there are certain things we know now, like how to access our inventories, and how to do our jobs. But this is just a feeling, an emotion. And if our emotions on “don’t let the players know we have marble races” has been changed (or as Lilly says, “implanted in us”), what other things do we feel that we wouldn’t normally?
We sort of know about some things. Like, talking about our lives before we got here feels… uncomfortable. And talking about how we died is straight-up impossible. We don’t talk about it. We just don’t. There are certain questions we never ask, and if we dared ask, no one would dare answer.
But it boils down to, how much of our personality changed when we got here? Are we- am I the same person I was as a human? If I’m not, does it really matter? I mean, I’m happy as I am here. I’m happy with my friends, and cooking, and marbles. So, is being happy all that really matters?
…Wow that got deep.
Anyways, since the marble races are over, the first players will be down soon. Tomorrow I’m going to write up a new menu and hang it up. There’s a virtual menu that pops up when a player opens my icon, but at this point it doesn’t have half of the things I can actually make on it. Besides, I like having a physical menu. I might ask Mika to make it nice and pretty for me.
She’s been playing a lot of music lately, now that she has a guitar. I can hear it when I leave all the doors and windows open, and it’s pretty good. She doesn’t always get the notes right, and sometimes she’ll just play the same song over and over again for hours, but still it’s kinda cool. We don’t have any kind of music player here, like a radio or youtube or whatever, so this is the first time I’ve heard real music in months. I’m not going to complain.
Anyways, I need to figure out what’ll happen if Mika draws something in blue, then it becomes mine. It’ll probably become green, but you never know.
Goodnight, dungeon!
