My Life Can't Be This Gacha

There's a countdown at the top of the screen, counting down to the end of the event. You glance at it every now and then. @green18271 is down in the dungeons doing his best to get himself a few more potions. You're pretty sure he's nowhere near running on empty with all the ghost-players now basically farming for him whenever they're online - you certainly aren't out of health or MP potions - but that's probably just his way of destressing.

You ponder, briefly, the idea of destressing by farming. It's a strange, incomprehensible idea. It's admittedly less stressful than having to occasionally say "no" to la_llorona88, who keeps suggesting increasingly implausible ideas.

At least you managed to negotiate @green18271 down to only turtling for a day, you think, though you're still not sure what exactly the game plan for the next day will look like. Probably more turtling, if nobody can come up with a strategy that isn't "teleport onto somebody vulnerable and beat them into submission".

(Granted, that has been a winning strategy so far, and one that 1OODB has used a lot. Still.)

Which is, to be fair, the reason you're turtling. The odds are good that people are going to notice there's only the two of you left in the guild and come looking for trouble. So you hang out in the guild hall, respond noncommittally to la_llorona88's latest idea ("no loroan"), keep an eye on the minimap in case the rogues report people coming in, and alt-tab to the subreddit for news...

Whoops. Somebody's definitely noticed your Grounding Ring. It's not quite the top thread, since the thread is just somebody asking about a bug where they couldn't target spells in a fight, but the screenshot is definitely you this time. Some people jokingly suggest turning it off and on again, and other people have other suggestions.

So far nobody's just come right out and said "grounding ring" (and a quick search of the subreddit shows you that nobody has mentioned it ever since the patch announcement), but it's probably just a matter of time until somebody says it, and then you'll get your shiny new probably-game-breaking toy nerfed.

An alert sounds, and you hurriedly alt-tab back to the game window. Whoops, incoming.

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"What the heck," you say to @green18271 three minutes later, "what the heck what the heck-"

"Dunno," he says, while your clerics heal you. "Didn't expect that."

"There's just two of us left! We're number, ah -" you check the leaderboard, "we're in fifteenth place out of fifteen guilds still surviving! That's last place! Why are they still teaming up to fight us???"

"We used to be number twenty three out of twenty three," says @green18271, descending into the dungeons again. You very much suspect he's stuck in a one-step-forward-one-km-back situation regarding his potions supply.

Still. Destressing through farming.

You will never understand.

You just check the subreddit, where there's a new megathread following the grand event finale. And yup, there's 1OODB, listed at last place amongst the survivors. Somebody's already putting in the work listing out surviving members of each surviving guild, too. That's dedication, you think.

(Which, as a commenter points out, is 15th place out of hundreds of guilds.)

There's also a betting pool going on, with people offering reddit silver and reddit gold.

Another alert, but this time it's not an incoming attack, just a notification: two guilds just mutual-killed each other, so now you're thirteenth place out of thirteen.

Thirteenth on a Thursday, just one day off. Also, you think, it'd be nice if a few more guilds mutual-killed each other - you'll get the hat you want as long as you end up within the top ten, though higher is always better, right?

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There's no sense taking turns going offline when it's just the two of you, because there's just absolutely no way you're going to want to wake up in the middle of the night... okay, middle of the early morning... to respond to a raid.

Still, you try to stagger it a bit, so you wait until @green18271 has been offline for a few hours before you, too, log off and get to bed.

The next day you wake up, and @green18271 already has a list of targets, because of course he does.

"Collated from the reddit," he explains, while you sort the targets list - average surviving member level, number of surviving members, and a bunch of other numbers, and he's even highlighted the ones he thinks you can take on the most easily.

"...Florida Elvis?" you say in the end, rather dubiously. They're the closest in terms of strength to you, though that doesn't mean much when you're still last place amongst the survivors - they're still a fair bit stronger than you.

Suspiciously, @green18271 is taking this whole "let's go blitz people" thing way too easily. So as you head out with your little contingent of healers and buffers and scouts, you casually ask him about his potion stocks.

"Nowhere near enough," he grumbles, but you notice there's no real irritation behind it. Looks like somebody got a good breakfast, you figure, but you decide not to ask more about it. You figure you'll get the good news later, anyway - right now, as the teleport circles spin up, you've got a rival guild to Slipper down.

You arrive to find a battle already in progress: it looks like you're not the only people to think FloridaElvis looked like a good target to go after. So you activate the Grounding Ring and go in, Slippering anybody who gets near you. Your mouse-hand flicks about with incredible speed, so none of your cooldowns or potions are wasted, and you find yourself even managing to use the little bit of knockback to keep targets from escaping @green18271's poison clouds.

FloridaElvis is defeated without (you suspect) either you or @green18271 ever actually laying hands on their players. This is because even when the alert goes up to signify their defeat (and also that you've moved into tenth place), the people you're fighting don't stop attacking you.

You grit your teeth and keep Slippering them, driving them back into poison clouds while they try to attack somebody who has effectively no hit box at all. You're not even sure what guild they're from.

Activation times run out, your HP drops precipitously before your healers catch on and save you, teleport circles spin up -

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"So how many potions do you have left," you prod @green18271 again, the two of you safely back in the guild hall. "Unless you were up farming all night?"

"Not enough," he repeats, checking the leaderboard. "Huh. Ninth now."

"Oh?" you say. "Wah. Ninth eh!"

"Yeah," he says, and then everybody's scrambling again as teleport circles spring up outside your guild hall. "Well - here we go," he mumbles, and then the two of you run back out to fight.

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You're staring at the giant skull and crossbones floating above your head, and above @green18271's head. Guess he wasn't quite ridiculously immortal enough, yet.

"Well, locked in at eighth place, anyway," he says.

"Ah, still good what," you say happily, re-checking the event information page for the rewards. There's the hat you wanted, plus some extra goodies. Not a windfall windfall, but it's still a damn good sight for a relentlessly f2p player like you. "And now can go back rest again."

"I suppose," he says, dryly. "There's another six hours until the event ends anyway, so I guess I'll go get a nap."

"You didn't sleep last night! I knew it!"

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8 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

Introducing rolls! Currently, you get one roll at the end of each arc. Using a roll allows you to summon waifus summon a Stand-like being, with behaviour and abilities based on a random person from the cast list. These assistants start out as immaterial, weak beings, but they can be improved by repeat rolls or other methods you haven't unlocked. You can also save up rolls - a 10-Roll will allow you to pick a specific person (and unlocks other things), but it'll take a while to get there.


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A/N: Whew, finally out of the MMO arc! No vote this round, unless you want to spend your spins or roll! The Rabbit Hole arc will start next update.

The day after the MMO event results are released is the day you finally get a chance to go putter around the house doing the chores you've been neglecting for more than a week - sweeping and mopping and going out for groceries and laundry. It's amazing how little you actually got done without Ma and Pa to call you off the computer.

You wince. You've tried WhatsApping them or messaging them on Facebook. No luck, either way. You wonder if the MMO event thing would have gone against Pa's warning. He would probably have called you if it did, right?

It's also kind of surprising how quickly chores get done when the only rooms needing any cleaning are your bedroom, the computer room, the bathroom, and the kitchen. The living room is... well, nobody's used it, and most household dust is human skin, and there haven't been any humans in there for awhile now.

That you know of. You've seen that creepypasta about the dude who secretly lived in the other dude's house and got caught on camera when the house owner got weird about the missing food and put in a camera. But you've lived in this house for n years now and you're sure there aren't any secret rooms anywhere. Maybe the store room under the stairs, but that place is so full of dusty old junk that you'd admire anybody who could tahan( tolerate) staying in there for more than twenty minutes.

By the third day you're back on the computer, idly browsing Wikipedia in between showing off your new gear on Omima Online. Most of it was premium stuff - double EXP cards, cash tokens - but you've got the limited edition winners' hat skin and now your AUNTY 24/7 banner is extra sparkly. It also acts as an extra inventory bag, which is very convenient for @green18271: in the wake of the event your guild has been getting more membership applications, which means a higher level guild, which means a whole bunch of stuff that @green18271 is having a great deal of fun working on.

You are having fun showing off your extra sparkly banner.

You also appear on the Omima Online subreddit, of course, here and there. Somebody DMs you to ask you to do an AMA, and you divert that off to @green18271. Somebody - well, a bunch of people - ask if you'd like to sell your account to them for holy shit that's a lot more money than you'd ever spend on Omima Online where do these people get it, but you laugh and leave them all on read. Then you start looking at other subs. Then Wikipedia. Then TVTropes.

Then, and entirely randomly you swear, you wonder what happens if you search Wikipedia for 'pink hair'. Five seconds later you already have, and you're kind of boggling that there actually is an entry except it's a stub. A blank stub, that's still somehow an actual entry instead of having been cleaned up and taken away. Isn't Wikipedia always asking for server money? You'd think they'd be better about cleaning up useless pages.

Then you check the page history just in case there used to be something interesting in there before.

There's a bunch of things. Lists of pink-haired people in history. Pink-haired people in popular media (most of it is anime, which you figure - yeah, but occasionally there's somebody with pink hair in a movie or a pop star or somebody). A couple of papers written back somewhen about the cultural symbolism of pink hair and linked to, for some reason. All this crammed in between edit wars back and forth, but the page is currently locked with no reason given.

Huh. You start down the rabbit hole, then. There's that list of allegedly pink-haired people to start with. And that paper about the cultural thingy, which is just a pdf from the University of Shanxi and then another from the same author but a few years later and in collaboration with a museum in Italy.

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So there's a reason the theory originated in Shanxi. It turns out one of the earliest found pink-haired people was... "Wu Zetian???" you say out loud, your voice slightly croaky from not having talked to any actual people in days. Voice chat doesn't count. "Wu Zetian had pink hair?"

You check Google Images. Nope. Black hair through and through. Every portrait of her shows it.

The paper says that obviously she dyed her hair to fit in. (You figure you'll probably want to do that too. Eventually.) There's bits and pieces of letters and orders and servants' diaries or records that the paper says support the theory. It looks like it could fit, but it also looks like it could mean something else. You can't judge, you don't read wenyanwen( classical Chinese text) at all. For all you know it could be just some weird thing, like that chicken chicken paper. But it got published... right? No? You can't tell. It's just a pdf file.

There's other people, scattered about. Nikola Tesla. Some random queen in Egypt, peasant-born, you can't even pronounce her name. A French cave drawing from 3000 B.C. that they say depicts a warrior-priestess.

No way. No way no way.

And Pa and Ma obviously knew, right. That's why Pa called you at the park. There's not much mentioned about what happened to the parents of those people. You think Tesla's family did fine, but Tesla himself... ouch. Not good. And Wu Zetian didn't exactly lead a fun life herself. You don't want to be Wu Zetian.

There's probably other stuff, actually, but. Okay. Somebody had to have told Pa and Ma. You've never seen them research all this stuff. Is it like, given out in hospitals to all new parents? "In case your child ever develops pink hair, call 999?"

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12 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

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Here comes the new arc! Amanda's starting to figure that this whole pink hair thing miiiiiight be a little bit bigger than just her. But how big? And what's to be done about this?

What does Amanda do?
[ ] E-mail the author of the papers, telling them you've got pink hair.
[ ] Go to a government hospital and tell them about your pink hair.
[ ] There's a subreddit dedicated to pink-haired people. Make a throwaway account and ask them for advice.
[ ] Write-in (subject to veto).

Something unexpected happens:
[ ] Era has boyfriend troubles.
[ ] Ma sends a message.
[ ] Freak weather traps everybody indoors.
[ ] A representative of Omima Online contacts you.