Jeanne Simatupang, a writer struggling with depression and the loss of her best friend and caretaker is confronted by her best friend's doppelganger, and the recently killed off main love interest in her web novel, Helena Hart, who wants nothing but her painful death, or a happy ending to the story she has been putting off.
Can Jeanne ever learn to truly love herself and her work again? Can she reconnect with her missing best friend? And is there a way out of this mess that doesn't lead to becoming Helena's living chew toy?
Inside of a crowded two room apartment, a young woman was hunched over in her bed, staring transfixed at a laptop screen almost as dusty as the rest of the room, silent and unmoving save for the occasional clacking of a keyboard.
Marie's grip on her blade tightened as she crept up on the farmer, his neck seemed soft, and his stance seemed relaxed and thoroughly unprepared. This was a man whose body was hardened not by war or callous violence, but by a life of tilling the rocky but fertile soil near blackreach forest. Not a man you'd expect to see tear another limb from limb, but he was part of the mob nonetheless, who hacked off pieces of her love as trophies, reagents or talismans to carry back to their own homes.
A monster's heart, vile and contemptible when it beated within its own chest, but a precious protective talisman or reagent outside of it, doubly so if it as the rumors say, still beat outside of it.
There was a moment of pause as the woman reviewed her own work, and found it wanting, pressing against the old laptop's faded backspace as she simply concluded that it seemed too monologuey, monologey? Her girl was traumatized and was about to do something mildly concerning but she didn't want her to sound like a supervillain, well, not yet anyway.
It was on a sunny day like any other that Marie entered that man's farm with sword in hand, she didn't know his name, or at least tried her best to forget it even whenever it came to mind. She still wasn't sure if she could do it if she had his name, even after everything they said he'd done, she wasn't there for it of course, not because she couldn't bear to look, but because she had to make her escape (or else her sacrifice wouldn't have mattered).
But she had heard the rumors, of the members of the mob, the men and women who ripped her body apart in the end, for talismans, reagents, the lot, because a monster's body was only valued after its death.
Another pause, was this too impersonal? Too defeated? This was revenge she was writing for sure, but it was a shaky one still overly burdened with morality, not the righteous bout of cleansing but ultimately hollow and self defeating spurt of violence she should probably be writing about.
I mean, wasn't Marie supposed to be enraged here? This was one of the men who tore her lover's twice dead body apart! Maybe she should scrap it all again, and start over again, yes, maybe something in media res this time. With a bit of thought, a farm became an empty street, the day turned into night, and a page magically became blank again with a stroke of a few keys before her work continued.
'There really wasn't much thought put into it' Marie realised after the fact. He was simply standing there, drunk off of his mind and waving her heart around in his hand as if it was a mere trophy, boasting to a mostly empty street of the great monster that had recently been slain (by his hand and no one else he might add) after getting tossed out of the bar. She had, without really thinking, simply drawn her blade and cut him down where he stood, and took the heart, hand and all.
'This wasn't working', Jeanne thought, as her eyes darted between the fragmented pieces of the narrative she was still struggling to piece together and held it up to the poetry in motion already fading from her head, and it made her… fidget, delete another line, write out another sentence, look up whether a word meant what she thought it does, glance over the outline again and again, anything to avoid giving up.
Until a faint but insistent knocking on her door snapped her out of her fugue, her eyes immediately snapping into her new focus, as her hazy mind and tired body wondered why someone would dare to interrupt her at 1 AM in the morning. Was there a fire somewhere in the building? Or was a freak tornado coming to wipe the slate clean? Either way she didn't know why they had to bother her about it.
She had half a mind to ignore it and get back to her work, but the knocking only grew louder, the sound stifling any stray thoughts and moments of almost genius her addled mind had tried to reach. Until with a loud groan, Jeanne turned over in bed, ungracefully scrambling onto her feet, sending plastic bottles and empty instant noodle cups clattering onto the dusty, sticky floor as she made her way over.
Along the way Jeanne realised that her body was more tired than she expected, and even with the righteous indignant rage doing its best to keep her propped up, by the time she arrived at the door she was already out of breath, and her body felt heavy as she pressed it against the door with a notable thump.
She took in a deep breath as she peered through the small pinhole, and saw the familiar form of her next door neighbour Vera with a worried expression on her face, now framed by short red dyed hair that made her miss the greens and blues of last month.
Muffled as it was by her door, she could still hear her say, "Jeanne, are you there?" or something along those lines, it was getting a bit hard to focus on anything really, but Jeanne could still feel herself letting out an affirmative grunt as she unlocked the door and swung it open, nearly falling flat on her ass in the process.
The first thing she noticed was that the lights in the hall weren't broken as she originally thought, the sun was shining in the sky already, and it seared her eyes a little as it filtered into the hall through the nearby window. The second thing she noticed, as Vera moved forward to catch her, was Vera's casual state of dress. She had nothing but a long daster covering her body, and there was still a slight oily sheen on her face, making it abundantly clear that Vera had decided to check up on her first thing in the morning.
"Whoa! Are you okay?" Vera asked, as she pulled back, letting Jeanne steady herself against the now opened door.
"Uh, yeah?" Jeanne lied unconvincingly in a weak voice, putting on a slight businesslike smile as she craned up to Vera's face.
"Are you sure?" she asked again, squinting a little into the unlit mess that was Jeanne's room, "You're looking pale as a ghost Jeanne, you sure you don't need any help with any-"
"No, no I'm fine, I'm fine!," Jeanne said, half yelling by the end of it, "Um, I mean, I'm okay, I'm just a little, tired, is all."
".... okay, it's just that I haven't seen you around for a little while, and if you've come down with something from your business trip you know you could always ask me t-"
"Hold on, what business trip?"
"The last few days, right? The lights were off so I assumed you were out of the house."
"No I've been right here actually."
"Oh."
"Yeah I've just, been busy okay? And what's all this about anyway?"
"Can't I just check in on my favorite authorly neighbor every now and then?" Vera said, half teasing and half asking.
"I guess, but that can't be all right?"
Vera looked away a little, ".... no, well don't take this the wrong way okay? I would have checked up on you either way! You've been gone for long enough that I was thinking of calling the police on your house y'know? But actually there's a party downstairs tonight and I was wondering if you wanted to come with me?"
"A… party?"
"Yeah! Did you know that someone moved in next to your unit recently?"
"N-no? When did that happen?"
"Last week apparently! But our new neighbor's been pretty busy so she hasn't been around much so she wanted to make up for it to all of us. She handed out these flyers all over the place yesterday, didn't you get one?" She said, holding up a predominantly blue plastic flyer that made Jeanne suddenly very conscious of a familiar material scrunched up under her feet.
"No, but that's a little weird isn't it? Who does that these days?"
"Well I think it's really sweet actually! Most people who live in apartments these days," she coughs loudly as she mutters, "especially around your age," before continuing with"Just act like their neighbors don't exist really, so it's nice to know that someoneelse your age's got good manners."
There's a slight grimace on Jeanne's face as she notes, "I guess… but I dunno if I want to go to a party, you know I'm actually still a busy wit-"
"And I think she'd be your type too."
"What."
"Your… friend, she broke up with you right?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Your friend, you know, the nice tall lady with the long black hair who used to stay over all the time, she broke up with you right?"
"Uh…"
"Oh, wa-was that supposed to be a secret?" Vera asked with genuine confusion in her voice, before she continued with, "Or did I… nevermind, I'm sorry just, give it some thought okay? You look rough Jeanne, I think you could really use a break to help you uh, get through whatever it is."
"Secret? No we weren-I'm not going through anything okay? I'm fine! I'm perfectly fine!"
"Okay, okay, look you don't have to come or anything, but just take the flyer at least, I'm serious, you could use a break," she reaches out with the flyer, brushing it against Jeanne's unresponsive arm a couple of times.
"No just… Thank you for checking up on me alright? But I'm not going."
"Okay," Vera said, pouting a little even as she pulls her arm back, "You know I'm only doing this because I care about you right?"
"Sure, good afternoon Vera."
"Jeanne it's 7 in the mor-" Vera said, right before Jeanne closed the door on her, and let out a long sigh, as her foot ground against the various flyers on the floor. Her neighbor was… overbearing sometimes, well, most of the time actually, she always means well at least, but really all she wants right now is to be left alone again.
She locked the door once more, her mind idly focusing on the sound of footsteps moving away as her body slumped down to pick up the trash from her floor, sorting through unpaid bills, ISP ads, and laundry and catering services until she spots one almost gleaming blue flyer among the new pile, and she found herself picking it up instinctively. Her eyes widened the moment she saw the woman on the page.
She was unmistakably her, but also not, the woman on the page had her hair, her face, and her frame, but her skin was paler, she carried herself differently, arrayed herself in a suit she never would have worn, and her eyes shone with a brilliant green that she never had. All of this under a different name too, 'Helena Hart' her best friend's doppelganger in the flesh.
It was a trick, it must have been, a bit of photo manipulation or camera work, a cruel joke played on her by… who exactly? Who would even stand to gain from any of this?
It was a question with no real answer, and as her eyes glazed over the fuzzier details, all of the little words on the flyer that eluded her all of a sudden, Jeanne muttered a simple, hopeful, "But what if it was really her?" to no one in particular. Before she stumbled back, the exhaustion of a day without night pressing full force against her mind and body as the flyer slipped out of her hands, and her legs forgot what standing felt like.
Her throat was dry, her stomach was eating itself, and her head bounced 'gently' off a full plastic bag as she fell flat on the hard floor. She blinked once, twice, and forgot that her bed was a few steps away.
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Author's Notes:
Le Vie De L'auteur is a Romantic Comedy with isekai and horror elements about an author falling back in love with her work, and learning to climb out of the deep hole that is depression with all of the troubles that implies.
It's a story I'm really looking forward to reveal over time, so the only things I'll to say about it right now is that I promise to update it slower than J>K Scanlators but faster than NN Scheherazade, that my last romance work ended with the other leading the main character into a highway that swallows her up and turns her into an asphalt statue, and that I wrote this because I think Pyramid Head is the conventionally attractive monster people go 'Okay but hear me out' about.
The Cover Art is by Hopsspring on Tumblr btw, they do really good work!
Also out on Royal Road soon yes hello I am lamarckianenterprises Royal Road people.
Jeanne's foot twitched a little again, the only sign of life outside of her laboured and unsteady breathing as she laid down on the cold and dusty floor with her face pressed partly against a full plastic bag.
It wasn't a restful or entirely voluntary sleep, but it was certainly a deep one, and while everyone else went about with their day to day lives, Jeanne simply laid nearly motionless against the floor, too drained to even toss and turn around in her sleep, while her dreaming mind attempted to sort through the mess that was her night and… all of this.
Her mind cycled through a few of them, her dreams growing more coherent as the hours passed, and her body prepared to drag her kicking and screaming back into alertness. Just before she woke up with a slight groan and an intense pain on her neck and aches all over her body, Jeanne could vaguely recall the outlines of her latest dream.
She was some sort of secret agent then, touring the capital city of a recently discovered and presumably highly advanced and magical underground civilization. It wasn't clear who sent her, names, faces, anything more clear than some vague appearances and an outline always eludes her in the morning, but she was here to end their world, there was a certain trick to it, a fountain somewhere she needed to desecrate. Also her family was with her somehow, it was a little embarrassing.
She made it work somehow though, kept her family and the country's suspicion at bay as she cracked safes and stole whatever lives stood in the way between her and the fountain's location. And she was just about ready to shut the whole thing down too before she suddenly became very aware of how hungry she' was, and decided to try out an all you can eat buffet she found nearby.
At first she simply stood in line with many others whose faces and names she could not recall, but she grew increasingly desperate as one delectable plate grew into four or five, and the gnawing hunger in her stomach only grew. She cut in line, she pushed others out of the way for another slice of steak, or a plateful of fries or fried chicken or salad or just about anything until by the end of it she collapsed in an empty room, and tried to lick the floor clean of an errant ketchup strain.
Coincidentally she was very hungry when she finally awoke with a groan, wincing slightly as she slid one hand up to cradle her neck, a plastic bag full of oddly squishy trash it seemed made for a poor pillow, and the floor was about as cold and hard as you'd expect it to be.
She let out a sigh, as she opened her eyes to stare at the dark ceiling above, she had slept yes, but she hadn't had a moment of rest, her body was still cold, heavy, and most of all hungry, and it took everything she had just to sit up and stare blankly ahead for a moment, trying desperately to remember if she still had something edible in the house.
Until her eyes glanced at the discarded invitation once more, and with a slight frown, she unceremoniously crumpled it and tosses it towards a nearby dustpan, before she made the mistake of stretching her limbs, and propped herself up against a nearby wall as she limped along to a small single door fridge besides a stained and plate covered kitchen counter.
Only to swing it open and find its shelves barren save for some old sauce stains, and a handful of freeze dried shallots resting against a distant and forgotten corner. She briefly considered eating them raw, but thought better of it, and she pressed her full force against the fridge's door to slam it closed.
She shambled over to her bed, kicking away the tissues and empty cans strewn about the floor before she unceremoniously tossed herself back beside her laptop, and whipped her phone out in search of anything that could catch her eye on the food delivery app.
She knew she needed to keep costs down, her job was…. Still satisfying in its own right, but with the way things were going it seemed like she was already on her way out anyway, so she filtered out the more expensive options first, nothing from a named brand, and certainly nowhere further than 5 kilometres. It needed to be warm and filling too, none of that western poseur crap, which cut out one of the only two restaurants in the apartment complex, the only one she liked at that. And well, it'd have to be something she could eat without a plate or spoon and fork of her own because she wasn't even sure where she'd even begin cleaning those up by now.
So in summary, she wanted a warm and filling meal that could completely satisfy her hunger in one go, from a indonesian restaurant that's cheap enough that she wouldn't feel guilty for splurging, but expensive enough to provide its own spoon and fork as a default, and it needed to be within 4 kilometers of her apartment with an at least 4.5 star review, and it all had to be here right now or she would starve to death. In short, she spent an hour scrolling and frowning at delivery prices whenever it breached the single dollar range.
It took a little while for Jeanne to realize something, it was 6 PM already, and that meant something, although she had trouble remembering what it was exactly outside of a vague sense of dinner time. It wasn't until she popped open her messenger app, and sent the latest in a long stream of unread messages to Widya (a simple, "Can't decide what to order lol" that made her smile for a brief moment) that her eyes glanced over her silent best friend's profile picture for long enough to cause something to click into place in her mind. The party, Helena's party started at 6 PM.
The thought made her blink a little, parties meant people, more importantly it meant talking with or more accurately being talked at by people, which sounded exhausting to say the least, also she certainly didn't look, smell, or dress like anyone you'd want to see in a party in the first place, and she didn't want to hear whatever god awful music people think is popular now either.
But parties also meant free food and drinks, just waiting for her an elevator trip away (which was also free), and hell, the whole thing sounded like it'd be a bust anyway, only extra social weirdos or old folk like Vera (no offense) would ever want to attend something as weird as a stranger's week late housewarming party. So chances are high that she could just show up, stick to Vera like white on rice to ward off the four or five (max) other people that bothered to attend, and slip away as soon as she's picked her second plate clean with none the wiser.
It was a foolproof plan! One that made her take her first shower in days, and pick out something resembling an outfit out of the unorganised mass of black and gray clothes that was her closet, before she put on something resembling a smile and stepped out into the brightly lit hall, and hurriedly locked up behind her just to keep herself from changing her mind at the last moment. She still cut it a little close at the end, but thankfully it didn't take too long for the elevator to arrive after she repeatedly mashed the button, and the best part? There was no one else inside to ask if she was doing okay.
Author's Notes:
Kind of a half chapter this time but I just wanted to let people know that I'm still writing for this, got caught up in a few other projects and normal work.
The one I'm really looking forward to is this mecha yuri webcomic project I'm working on with a friend which is progressing slowly but smoothly (we're still making concept art and better defining the rules of the setting). It's going to be pretty cool, about second generation castaways stranded on a waterworld making a living by scavenging the wrecks of ships that come down from above and figuring out what your own purpose in life is now without letting other people completely define you.
He doesn't want me to call it a yuri work though because the main romance isn't introduced until fairly late, but the joke's on him because I'm the head writer and I've tricked him into agreeing to make all but one of the major characters so far women anyway so it still technically counts if you agree with certain Japanese academics.
Probably won't come out before the latter half of the year though, so until then, look forward to seeing Jeanne suffer through a packed party instead!
There was no music, but she could hear people talking down the hall. It was well lit, empty with the same cheap white tiles as every other hall in the complex, and there was a banner tucked away near the elevator door advertising some church service here that she hadn't heard of before on a different day.
And at the very end of it all past the little laundry places and the bathrooms? A public gym that's apparently closed at night, and the 'small' gathering she was looking for, which had grown large enough to take up the entire auditorium next to the gym, and sprawled out to annex the surrounding territories a little with tendrils of talking, walking people.
Social situations, you see, were never really Jeanne's strong suite. Part of the reason why she went to such great lengths to preserve her anonymity as her work's author even after getting published, outside of the obvious risk of being outed as a blatant potential homosexual in this country, was simply to avoid dealing with any sort of public scrutiny or gathering whenever possible.
It just wasn't her thing, if it was a heated online forum post or a discord watch party or whatever? Sure, but a real party with real strangers and all? She'd be better off gracefully bow out now and pigging out in that cafe downstairs with okay katsu and fries instead of embarrassing herself around all of those people. These thoughts, and others like it were running through her head as she held the lift's door open with her body, staring almost blankly ahead until she heard a man's voice behind her say, "Um, miss?" loudly enough to snap her back into alertness with one-two steps outside of the now rapidly closing lift.
Twisting around in a blind panic as the door slammed shut behind her, Jeanne darted for the lift's buttons, mashing the button just a little too slowly to keep it from heading down. She almost cursed out loud, but thankfully there was another just a few (dozen) floors above her, all she had to do was wait for a few moments and-She craned her head back, just to see if anyone was giving her weird looks for being the weird mess she was, only to stare right at her out of all people.
She was dressed in a neat navy blue blouse with white waistband pants, a more formal look than she was used to seeing her in to be sure, but it was a weekday, and she couldn't mistake that bleached red hair and easy smile for anyone else's. And long before the other lift had a chance to show itself, she could see Vera's smile widen from across the room as she started waving at her, and with an awkward grimace, she turned around and mashed the button a few more times, as she heard a familiar voice calling her name draw closer and closer. Until she felt a firm palm smack against her shoulder that made her let out a loud yelp and almost jump in place.
"Hey!" Vera said, from close enough behind Jeanne to make turning around a little awkward.
"Uhhhh," Jeanne replied with her best forced smile on her face, her shallow breaths taking in Vera's… pearish scented perfume, as she is forced to contend with the woman from up close. "Hi?" she said, while staring at her face the normal amount.
"I didn't think you'd come! You should have said something, I could have picked you up you know?"
"I wasn't, I just got here actually, but uh, why would I need you to pick me up? We live on the same floor…"
"Well, you don't like crowds right? I figured that you'd get scared off once the party gets started if you were by yourself, but if you had someone to introduce you to people it could still be fun?"
Jeanne shrugged, "I guess? I don't know, I'm still wondering if I should just go home, it looks like the party's full up anyway."
"After coming all this way? Come on! At least stick around for a bit, say hi to our host, she's great by the way, looks even better in person," Vera winked as she said that last word obviously enough to cause her other eye to squint a little in turn. "And grab something to eat for dinner, you look like you haven't eaten in days."
"Just a day actually…" Jeanne mumbled under her breath.
"What?" Vera blurted out, giving Jeanne a slightly concerned look.
"Uh, nevermind," Jeanne coughed, "How is the food?"
Vera takes a step back, looking thoughtful for a moment before she frowned, "The food is… oh you wouldn't like it actually. It's good but it's ethnic, German or Dutch or something European like that, mostly meat pies."
"I could go for pies right now," Jeanne blurted out..
"Really? I thought you didn't…" Vera's expression brightened for a moment as she remembered something, "Oh right! KFC! Someone brought along a whole bucket of it with them earlier, should still be some around."
Jeanne raised an eyebrow, "Original or crispy?"
"I don't know, both? He didn't bring any rice though," Vera replied with a shrug.
Jeanne sighed, "I guess that's fine? Is there anything else?"
Vera shook her head, "Nope, just pies, but they're pretty filling, you should stay away from any that have a flag though."
Jeanne raised an eyebrow, "Why? Are they that bad or…"
"No they're…" Vera trailed off, before seemingly realising something as she exclaimed, "Actually wait, your last name is Simatupang right?"
"Uh, yeah?" Jeanne said in response, unsure of where she was going with this.
"Oh yeah of course your people wouldn't, nevermind, I just assumed you would be… I mean it's pork," Vera said, not too deftly swapping between various topics with the assumption that Jeanne would understand,
"Yeah, I mean I guess that's why she's hosting this in a church right?" Jeanne said, as she glanced at the nearby sign.
"Oh right, I didn't think about that, and she is european. Honestly I'd be surprised if she wasn't christian actually."
"Uh," Jeanne thought about saying something about the decline of religiosity in the west, but thought better of it. "Yeah."
"Anyway we should probably grab some before they run out, come on!" Vera said, before turning away and motioning for Jeanne to follow after her as she made her way through the crowd.
The lift doors behind Jeanne opened up at that moment, letting her spare a glance back at the four or so people milling about inside, before with a heavy heart and an empty stomach, she simply shook her head at no one in particular and followed after her apparent guide.
___________________________________________________
The inside of the church seemed like it would be spacious under any other conditions, if everyone here was lined up into neat rows, and the long table Jeanne could catch fleeting glimpses of through the crowd wasn't there, she was pretty confident that they could fit another dozen or so people inside and still leave plenty of space to walk through without the ocassional bump and grind. But then again it wouldn't be much of a party if they did just that.
And it could be worse! While the whole room was crowded, she could spot a pocket out near where she assumes the pulpit is that's absolutely teeming with the masses or however you'd really say that.
She wondered if a band was getting ready to play or something, before she heard Vera's voice, note, "You know, usually it's bad manners to start eating without meeting the host first, but I couldn't bring you to her right now even if I wanted to."
"Is she not around?" Jeanne asked, with a slight hint of disappointment in her tone of voice.
"No she's crazy, I thought she'd only invite her new neighbours, you know, you, me, the cute couple that lives at the start of the hall, you'd think right? But she must have handed out invites to the whole block or something, because it looks like every guy in a mile radius is here tonight."
Jeanne looked around, she hadn't noticed it before but there did seem to be a lot more men around than women here, "I guess? Why can't I meet her though?"
Vera chuckled, "Just think about it Jeanne, a hot foreigner lady who can afford to rent out the entire auditorium for the night, and buy a truckload of fresh meat pies like it was nothing invites you to a 'housewarming' party? What guy in their right mind wouldn't go after her?"
Jeanne blinked for a moment, before it dawned on her, "Oh, oh! That'd explain the-"
"The dozen or so guys buzzing around her like flies at any given moment, you can see them already right?" Vera noted, as Jeanne's eyes catches a glimpse of the top of someone's head, adorned with straight black hair jutting out from the middle of the crowd.
She frowned, "Yeah… Guess I'll have to wade through all of that if I want to thank her…"
Vera shook her head, as she brushed past a man trying to take a seat, "Oh don't worry you'll get a chance to meet her soon I think,"
"Why?"
Vera gave Jeanne another blatantly conspiratorial wink as they closed in to the table, "Because she's not interested, in any of them I mean, I think she's just trying to be polite."
Jeanne winced a little before she said, "How can you be so sure?"
"Because the party barely started an hour ago Jeanne, and most of the men she's spoken to are outside, drinking," Vera said, with the kind of smile that meant she expected her to connect the dots together.
"That doesn't, mean anything?" Jeanne said, already too distracted by the scent of food all around her and the clattering of plates to read through the really obvious innuendo.
"Jeanne, she's single, and she isn't interested in any of the guys here, I'm not saying she definitely is but do I have to spell it out for you here?" Vera said, in a slow and easy to understand tone.
"I, Vera you know I'm n-," she coughed, fidgeting slightly as she tried to figure out exactly why Vera was so sure that she'd be interested.
Vera gave Jeanne a weird look, before she blinked, looked around a little, and seemed to realise something, "Oh, oh! Yeah, of course you wouldn't b-normal women wouldn't, uh, maybe you should get some pie for now? I should probably get back to my friends."
Jeanne grimaced a little, but she didn't move to stop Vera, instead all she did was grab a spare plate from the table and try not to think too hard about anything other than the spread.
__________________________________________________________
Vera was right, cold meat pies really wasn't her thing, despite her fancy foreign name Jeanne was an Indonesian through and through, anything she couldn't drown in rice or the poor substitute that was noodles or fried potatoes might as well be a snack for how quickly it passed through her system. But beggars couldn't be choosers, and they all smelled great anyway.
She picked up a few slices of a slightly mushy looking pie she assumed was pork, and stared dejectedly at the overturned buckets that once contained fried chicken for a moment, but there were only two buckets for the whole party anyway, she couldn't help but wonder if Vera was being a tad optimistic there.
With her bruner (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) secured, Jeanne took a cursory glance for anything that resembled a seat, or failing that an empty enough space would do, somewhere she could focus on eating above all else. And she found one, an empty seat in an easily accessible corner placed right beside a young woman dressed in a security guard uniform who seemed to be minding her own business with her tablet.
She sat herself down beside her wordlessly, figuring that she'd understand why the moment she saw the plate she held in one hand, and the metal fork she was hurriedly using to cut into the pie and stuff a piece of it right inside of her mouth.
The crust was soaked through with pork fat by this point and crumbled apart in her mouth near instantly which wasn't a surprise, but the taste though? It was… sweet somehow, enough to give pause as she took her first bite and wondered if there was a mix up, yet bits of tender lukewarm pork also made their way to the forefront after just a moment of chewing.
"Is it any good?" a gruff voice asked to her right, the security guard she presumed.
"Uh, it's pork," she replied, after properly swallowing her first bite, turning her gaze slightly to the security guard, who seems busy with her tablet still.
"I know, but is it any good?" the guard asked without bothering to look up, tilted away as it was, Jeanne could only barely make out a few glimpses of something moving in colour on the screen, but what could she be watching that didn't require sound she wondered?
She took another chunk out of one of her slices and bit into a softened piece of pear as she mulled it over, "Hm, it's a bit too soft by now, and surprisingly sweet? A bit spiced, but not cinnamon, I'm not sure what it is... It's not what you'd expect from a pork pie at all… But in a good way! I think I'd order something like this if I knew I could get it fresh,"
"Huh, interesting, most of the people I've talked to seem to hate them actually," the security guard said, tilting her tablet just enough to show Jeanne a white number near the top of the screen, CCTV footage maybe?
"Oh really? That's a shame, would be kind of a waste to have to throw all of these out…" Jeanne said in between bites, already straining to get as much of it down her throat as possible.
The security guard shrugged, "I suspect that it's because the pies are a bit too-"
Immediately getting what she meant, Jeanne cuts her off with, "Ethnic for their tastes?"
The security guard nodded along, giving Jeanne a glimpse of her brown eyes as she fired out a, "Yeah! That! She should have just ordered some nasi padang or something, would have been a lot cheaper too, but you know, the host makes whatever she wants to make. It's good to see that someone likes them though, if you eat enough, maybe I won't have to eat pies for the rest of the month, yeah?"
"I-I don't think these will keep tha-wait, makes? She made these?" Jeanne blurted out, a slightly horrified expression on her face as she glanced over at the table full of mostly intact pies.
"Do you know any bakeries around here that'd make pork, peach, and cardamom pies? Because I sure don't," the security guard said without missing a beat.
Jeanne shrugged and grimaced a little, "Well you can find just about anything online these days."
The security guard shook her head, and the tablet too, it's a little confusing, "Yeah but they're unbranded though."
Jeanne thinks back to the table for a moment, trying to recall absolutely anything about the pies themselves other than their pielike shape and scent, "Oh, yeah I guess they are, weird."
There's a slight smile on the security guard's face as she said, "I know right? Who even has the time for that anymore."
Jeanne blinks, as she downs another forkful of pie, "Helena apparently."
The security guard nodded, as she simply let out a, "Yeah."
There was a brief pause, before Jeanne offered up a topic of her own, emboldened by her stomach no longer eating itself, "So, do you actually work here or?"
"No, I thought this was a costume party, and I decided that I needed to look like I smelled faintly of piss," she said, while tugging on the collar of her slightly off yellow security guard uniform shirt.
"Uh, sorry?"
"Why would you be? It's not like you're not my boss right… right?"
"N-no?"
"Good! Because you'd probably fire me if you were," the security guard said in a flat, matter of fact tone, before immediately trying to laugh it off.
"Uh, why?" Jeanne asked, even as a bit of self awareness finally kicks in, and her gaze settles on the guard's name tag that was obviously there this whole time. Her name was Sandi apparently, like the apartment complex they were in, funny coincidence that.
"Because I'm not supposed to be here, duh!" Sandi said, finally looking up from her tablet for a moment to look at Jeanne.
Jeanne raised an eyebrow at that "But aren't you keeping watch here? Making sure they don't damage or steal church equipment?"
Sandi blinked at Jeanne out of confusion, "What? The equipment they keep in marked boxes in an unlocked room with no cameras over the week? No one can pay me enough to care about that man, no I'm supposed to be on patrol right now."
Playing with a chunk of her pie for a moment, Jeanne ventured to ask, "So… why aren't you?"
Sandi shrugged, "I mean I am, sort of, I'm using this tablet to flick through CCTV screens just in case anything happens"
Jeanne coughed around her latest bite before she blurted out, "But you just told me that the church doesn't have any CCTVs, wouldn't that mean a lot of other places don't have coverage?"
Sandi let out a quick, "Yeah."
Continuing her offence, Jeanne asked, "So what if something goes missing or someone gets mugged or killed somewhere you can't see?"
Sandi shrugged again with a placid expression on her face, "I mean I can't be everywhere so, rough."
Staring deep into Sandi's face for a moment, Jeanne stammered out, "That's, that's not."
Seemingly oblivious, Sandi continued with, "And what am I supposed to do with a mugger or murderer anyway? It's not like I'm armed."
Shooting Sandi an utterly confused look as she tucks away the last of her pie, Jeanne quickly asks, "Couldn't you ask for help? I mean at least all of you have batons."
Without blinking, Sandi simply utters, "Yeah, I do."
Jeanne's eyes start to widen as she realises that she is on the brink of discovering something truly horrible, "Wait, how many guards work the night shift in this apartment building again?"
Without a single hint of irony in her voice, Sandi states, "Including me? 1."
Jeanne's expression turns into one of disgust and horror as she follows through with,"And how many cases of theft or missing packages get reported here every month?"
Sandi blinks, and opines, "Ma'am, you don't pay me enough to keep track of that shit."
Jeanne quickly blurts out a, "No wait, I'm not your boss I'm just saying, don't you think that's a little messed up?"
Sandi stares deep into Jeanne's eyes, and states, "That they'd hire one security guard for an apartment building and still pay her minimum wage? Yeah, definitely."
There is another brief moment of silence, as Sandi turned her gaze back onto her tablet, and Jeanne awkwardly looks around the room, before the latter coughs, and says, "Uh, well good luck with that, I think I'm going to… get dessert, is there anything like that here?"
Sandi nods, and with a business-like smile says, "Yeah thanks ma'am, I think there's still some ice cream in one of the beer coolers."
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Author's Notes: I think some of the most fun that can be had in Slice of Life and Romance genre fics is watching how well or poorly your characters play off of each other, and I fully believe that the ideal non formal dialogue in fiction should match the tone and form of one in reality as closely as possible, disordered from the outside looking in but actually structured by its own weird sense of internal tangential logic.
And so this is why this chapter is actually coming in three parts instead of the two I said it would. But then again chapters are arbitrary constructs after all, I have seen longform formally published 100+ or so page works divided into two neat halves, so what's stopping me from making the next third a quarter?
The spread looked mostly unchanged by the time Jeanne returned with an empty plate in hand. The empty KFC buckets were gone, replaced by a scattered mess of dirty plates and glasses strewn about the end of the table, and there were still enough meat pies left untouched to feed that lazy security guard for the rest of the week.
Knowing how they were made almost tempted Jeanne to take another slice along with her, but getting that third slice down was a bit of a slog already, and she figured that taking a slice only to abandon it without finishing would probably be worse. So she simply passed by the whole pile and unceremoniously put her plate away on top of another's, and she cracked open one of the big blue coolers beside the table that she hadn't noticed before, and sifted through the ice for her options.
Mentally discarding every alcoholic drink outright she could find (not that there were a lot of those left) as she was pretty damn sure that she couldn't handle them right now anyway, Jeanne was disappointed to find that her options were limited to sodas she probably couldn't handle, and the exact same brand of sweetened tea that she had been drinking since she was 5, but curiously, not a single bottle or gallon of water in sight.
She just… expected something more exotic somehow after tasting one of the pork pies of all times, but then again their host was only human after all, what man or woman alive in this world could resist choosing 'the one drink for every occasion' over anything else? Or however that tea brand's old motto actually goes, it's been a while since she's seen it printed on anything actually, which made her feel old for some reason.
She fished one out, cracked open the little ribbed plastic cap to take a long swig from the vaguely brown coloured and mostly odourless sweetened 'tea' within, and took mild comfort from it having the same kind of alright taste it's had for decades. Before she finally looked up from her own little world and realised that the people around her were looking right past her, and she could hear them murmuring. A woman a few feet away asked her friend if she should get the recipe, a man in the crowd across her is discouraged by his supposed wingman by a off colour joke about him trying to find a sugar mommy at his age, and another seemed to have been wondering what the fuss was all about until his friend elbowed him in the ribs.
That shifting mass of hanger ons and suitors around Helena that she had seen earlier, the one thick enough to obscure almost her entire body, it was heading right here, and the mere thought gave her half a mind to drop everything and turn tail to run, but left her with the other half to hear a very familiar voice call out her name from not too far behind her, followed by the dreaded words, "This is who I was talking about earlier."
Jeanne's heart started to pound in her chest, she had half a mind to pretend that she hadn't heard Vera, that she was talking about someone else, or to just bluntly cut and run out of pure panic, but the multitude had taken its hold. She realised that the people around were starting to look at her awkward, lumpy, barely colour coordinated self now, and it kept her locked in place as she imagined what they must have been thinking about her. Were they disgusted? Confused? Disappointed? Or simply amazed at their host's politeness?
It was something she would have dwelled on for hours if not days after the party, if she hadn't felt a familiar hand turn her around in place by her shoulder, bringing her face to face with Vera once more, who simply asked, "Hey, are you good? You spaced out for a moment there."
"Uhh," Jeanne said, struggling to look Vera in the eye or face or pretty much anywhere outside of the top of her head and hair, which she had to admit was starting to grow on her, especially the way it seemed to weave about like a shimmering flame in this light…
"I'm okay, just a little tired I guess," she eventually managed to stammer out, taking a step back, catch something, or rather someone in the corner of her eyes, and very suddenly deciding that Vera's face was actually perfectly fine to stare at now.
"Oh, yeah this was kind of a lot wasn't it?" Vera asked, mostly rhetorically as she quickly segued into, "Well, I know you're tired, but there's someone I think you should really meet before you go, at least for courtesy's sake you know?" She looked straight into Jeanne's eyes with those big black eyes of her's without a hint of malice, it made her squirm in place.
Because in the corner of her eye she could see her, the woman of the hour. Tall, pale, and handsome in a dark green turtleneck and light brown trench coat combo that would look patently ridiculous on just about anyone else, especially in the tropical heat, but she made it work somehow, she just did. And God, she must have been wearing that for hours hasn't she? But there was barely a bead of sweat in sight, does she have a sweat stained handkerchief hidden in that dumb coat's pocket? Or was she just, cool, like a block of ice gently melting in front of her, or no, more than that, towering, like one of those glaciers that will doom us all one day if she and everyone like her didn't do… something I don't know.
It vaguely occurred to Jeanne that she had been staring for a while, at that face of her's, oddly familiar at parts but not, as if some cruel goddess of beauty had taken a look at our heavenly father's handiwork as he put his finishing touches on Widya's already photogenic face, scoffed, and boldly declared that she could do better. Briefly at her green eyes, before she darted her gaze down to her wry and confident smile, at her neck all swaddled up by her long black hair in that big dumb trench coat's overly exaggerated and popped collar. And at the rest of her form, at the bottle of sparkling water held in one mostly long fingernailed hand, at her long legs all bound up with black slacks, and the dark green platform heels that made her tower over everyone else more than she already did for no discernible reason other than a simple desire to look down on everyone around her, who were mostly men.
It took a little longer for Jeanne to look back up, and realise that Helena was staring right back. And she finally remembered that Vera was talking about meeting her, in this room, with all of these people around, in her frumpy clothes with no makeup, with her hair that had just finished drying, and in this slightly squishy body that was just about ready to pass out again an hour ago. She wished earnestly at that moment, that she could die at this moment, and be reborn as the pig that was slaughtered to make that pie for her failures up until this moment in life.
She saw Helena take that first step towards her and very quickly snapped back to staring into Vera's comfortingly familiar face as she stammered out a, "Oh uh, a-actually this is a little awkward, and it's been fun! Yeah I met som-an interesting woman here but actually I really really need to get going because my deadline is actually coming up so-" She very suddenly stopped when her eyes darted to the side, and realised that she could see a trench coat within ear shot, towering above her, forcing her to pivot into an awkward smile and, "Uh I meant hi! Hi uhhhh, nice party?"
"Thank you, I'm glad to hear you're having fun," the woman said, in a surprisingly low voice.
"Yeah," Jeanne said, not particularly in response to anything.
"I'm Helena by the way, Helena Hart, oh, but you probably already knew that from the flyers," the woman said, before she took a sip from her bottle of sparkling water, drawing Jeanne's attention to her ruby red lips.
"Yeah," Jeanne flatly said again, still blankly staring up at Helena's face. She was a lot taller up close it seemed, and it made her wonder if she could even reach neck level if she stood up on tiptoes.
"And you're…" Helena pauses for a moment, before she notices Vera beside her and has a flash of recognition in her face, "Oh! You must be my next door neighbour! Jeanne right? Sorry I know Vera was just talking about you, but there's just so many new people around here."
"Yeah," Jeanne said again, before she blinked and stammered out a, "Uh, I mean, yeah I live in 519, that's right beside your's I think?"
"The one in the corner right? With the double-wide windows? You know I asked my realtor if they still had any of those units up for rent before I settled on mine, must be real nice to get all of that sun every morning huh?" Helena said without missing a beat.
"No, I actually keep mine covered for most of the day…" Jeanne said, trailing off before she coughed, and added, "Uh, because it gets really hot inside otherwise, global warming am I right?" she laughed at the end, a little louder than she intended to.
Helena blinked a little, as if Jeanne had said something very strange in response, "Huh, interesting."
The conversation petered out for a moment, as another member of the crowd around her struck up a conversation of her own with Helena, something about her clothes and where she got them, which Jeanne mostly tuned out of outside of a slight note about how she made them herself or something. Instead she turned to Vera, who had taken a few steps away to help herself to another beer, and desperately mouthed out the words, "Help! I don't know what to say" at her.
Vera visibly shook for a moment, as if holding back a slight laugh, before she took a few steps closer, and half mouthed and half whispered something along the lines of, "I don't know, talk about your job or something."
Jeanne blinked in confusion at Vera's response, before she whispered back, "What job?"
Vera took another swig of the cheap green can beer, before she bluntly said, "Aren't you an author?"
Jeanne's eyes widened as she realised something, and very suddenly and loudly blurted out a, "What? How do you know that?"
"Know what?" Helena said, now standing very close to Jeanne all of a sudden, causing her to let out a little yelp. "Oh! Sorry about that, are you okay?"
"Y-yeah, yeah, I'm fine," Jeanne said, backing away a little as she repeated that same lie. "We were just uhhh…"
"Talking about how well her work is going! Did you know that she's actually a famous author?" Vera said, without a hint of irony or sarcasm in her voice.
"Wait no uhhh, I wouldn't say that I'm famous really I'm more of a uh," she looked around wildly as she desperately tried to think of an excuse, "I think she's talking about a few articles I've written for a uh news site… Yeah!"
"Oh, well that's interesting, were you a columnist or?" Helena said vaguely gesturing with her water bottle.
"No, no, no Kompas used to have this free blog thing attached to their site that anyone could post to and it was uh, I just wrote romance book reviews…"
"Ah okay," Helena quietly said, threatening to cut the conversation short once more.
"What about you? I've heard that fashion design can be a really cut throat line of work these days," Jeanne ventured to guess.
"Oh what makes you think I'm a fashion designer?" Asked Helena, in the custom made trench coat and turtleneck she insisted on wearing in a 30 degree celsius night.
"Don't you make your own clothes?" Jeanne simply said.
"I do, but it's because all of the clothes that are on sale these days are, pardon my french dogshit, if you have the time and the right tools and know how it's always better to make your own than settle for that plastic crap they sell in supermarkets and malls," Helena said with a hint of actual venom in her voice, before she glanced at Jeanne's generic band t shirt and coughed, "No offense."
"Uh, none taken? Sorry," Jeanne said, already very conscious of how underdressed she was before this conversation.
"No, no it's fine. It's just a… how would you say? A special interest of mine, I understand that not everyone would have the free time to spare on learning how to conceptualise and make their own clothing and outfits," Helena continued, gracefully
"Oh yeah, I think I'm good with my hands but I wouldn't even know where to begin with something like that," Vera helpfully noted.
"Exactly! Oh, but as a fellow artist you'd understand right? Even though we work in entirely different fields, me with needle, thread, and sewing machine, you and your…." Helena trailed off a little as she tried to recall what Jeanne said earlier.
"Romance novels and blogging sites," Jeanne added.
"Yes, that. I'm sure that you as a fellow artist would understand that even if the rest of the world doesn't appreciate our work, the great pride we can take in the act of creation is enough satisfaction on its own to make it worth the effort."
Jeanne thought for a moment, before she simply shook her head, "Hmm, no I think I liked writing more when I was still a kid."
"Why is that?"
"Because people praised me for it no matter what I made back then, these days they mostly yell at me if they think I get something wrong in my own work, like I'm a failure just because I'm not doing exactly what they want," she said, a little more seriously than she intended to, before she laughed and said, "I can't, uh, claim to be as pure or selfless as you it seems…"
Helena smiled down at her,"Oh, don't beat yourself up about it, I guess the validation of your peers is important in its own way, especially when you've made your passion your work."
Jeanne shrugged, "Something like that."
"Which is still something to be proud of you know," Helena continued, as she continues her fiery speech, "I think no matter how well I can knit a sock or sew a pretty jacket out of whole cloth, I don't think I could ever live off of my art here, that damage has already been done, there's no market for true craft anymore outside of catering for pretentious rich fucks. But you? You've managed to carve out a little niche for yourself in the cultural consciousness, sure some people hate you now but you've left your mark in the world already, and I think that's really cool actually, no one can take that away from you."
Jeanne isn't quite sure why, but she was smiling a little, at least until she brought herself back down with, "Well actually, people have started talking about training a machine to automate creative writing from now on."
Helena scoffs, "Really? Fuck this world is depressing."
Jeanne lets out a sigh, "Yeah…."
There is another brief pause as they simply simmered in their own resentment, before Vera broke the ice to say, "You know, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say this but you speak really good Indonesian for a foreigner."
"Oh thank you! I'm glad to hear that my hard work is paying off and I'm not just making a complete fool of myself here," she said, adjusting the oversized and pointy collar of her trenchcoat a little.
"Yeah you, well I wouldn't say you're almost fluent but it's pretty good, how long have you been here again?" Jeanne said,
"I think today would make it about… three months? I've been practising ever since I got here," Helena said, without a trace of sarcasm in her voice.
"Wait, just three months? But that's impossible," Vera blurted out.
"Oh, well it's because I knew how to speak Malaysian already, and Indonesian is basically the same thing right? Just a local dialect," Helena said, pausing for a few moments before she noticed the slightly weird look a guy near her had, "Sorry, a friend of mine told me that would be a very funny joke."
"No it's kind of…" Jeanne trailed off as she tried to think of something.
"It's not really bad it's just, not really funny?" Vera added, before she coughed a little.
"Hey uh, this might sound a little awkward, but where did you get that anyway?" Jeanne finally asked, pointing at the bottle of sparkling water in Helena's hand.
"Oh, this?" Helena asked, holding the bottle up to Jeanne's eye level, "I just fished it out of the water cooler earlier, why? Did we run out or?"
"Maybe? I didn't see any earlier, it's fine if we're out I just wanted to drink something else that's nonalcoholic," Jeanne said, glancing at the can of cheap beer in Vera's hand.
"I think I still have some back in my fridge, but since we're neighbors you could probably just go home and drink a glass at home right?" Helena asked, before she took another swig from the half empty bottle in her hand.
"I uh, ran out of drinking water at home today, and I don't think they're still delivering tonight so...Well, I can just get some more tea I guess," Jeanne said, still holding the emptied bottle she picked up before in her hand.
"Hmm, well I'm actually getting tired of walking around in heels already so I was thinking of going home and changing, and since we're already running out of something as basic as water I might as well do it now. So I guess if you don't mind helping me bring a box or two down before you turn in for the night?" Helena offered, drawing Jeanne's gaze down to the platform shoes the already towering woman was wearing for inscrutable, perhaps fashion geek related reasons.
Jeanne nodded and said, "Yeah, sure, when are we doing this?"
"I mean you're thirsty now right? I still have some people I need to say goodbye to, but you can wait for me near the lift," Helena pointed out.
"I'll uh, do just that then, see you there," Jeanne blurted out in response, before she hurriedly turned around and made her way through the crowd and out of the party as fast as humanly possible, paying no heed to Vera's smiling face, or the judgemental stares of the people she brushed past until she could finally breathe a sigh of relief next to the elevators.
It gave her a brief moment of respite, even if her mind almost immediately started to wonder if Helena and the rest of the party were laughing at her back in the party, and whether she should cut her losses and head home first anyway, but thankfully Helena arrived as soon as she got an elevator, and she managed to play it off as not wanting to hold her up any further.
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The elevator trip up was short, uneventful, and mostly held in silence, without Vera to push her along, or really anyone else to distract her from Helena's presence, Jeanne was very conscious of the attractive woman staring directly at her who had to lean against the elevator's railing from a few steps before it just to not bump her head against the ceiling. All she could really manage to say was a few words about how much she liked her pie, which was met with a swift 'Thank you' and not much else.
"What do you actually do for a living anyway?" Helena eventually asked, breaking the silence once more as the elevator doors opened, and the two made their way down the hall.
"Uh, like Vera said, I'm a writer," Jeanne noted, trying to cover her tracks once more.
"Well yes, but you can't make a living just out of writing a few reviews right? That's a gig, not a job, so I'm wondering what you actually write for a living," Helena said, probing a little insistently as they walked.
"Well it's a little… promise not to tell anyone?" Jeanne asked, glancing from side to side to make sure that no one else was listening.
"Not a soul, swear on my life and all that," Helena mimed zipping her mouth shut, which was a surprisingly cute gesture.
Jeanne sighed, before she finally said, "It's a little embarrassing, but something I started writing when I was younger got big all of a sudden a few years ago, I don't make a lot of money by Am-Eu-Foreign standards, but I make enough to get by from it all, I'm just, not sure if I like it much anymore though."
"Oh?" Helena raised an eyebrow at that.
There's a slight frown on Jeanne's face as she continued with, "Well, like I said I started making it when I was a lot younger right? So there's a lot of cringy stuff I've written over the years building up there, and while I'm getting paid to rewrite a lot of the earlier parts for the published version it's just, it still feels like a lot to read through and have to constantly reference you know?"
Helena nodded, "Right."
Jeanne continued on without restraint,"So I'm thinking of ending it all soon, I've already started moving towards it you know? Cleared the board of some of the uh, more questionable decisions I've made, but some of my fans were really attached to what I had before apparently, even if it was all junk."
Helena simply coughed at that, prompting Jeanne to continue with, "Oh uh, sorry, I don't know what came over me," before trailing off into nervous laughter.
"No it's fine, I just did not expect that," Helena said, as they both lingered in place for a moment.
"Sorry, I think I'm just going through some… should I go?" Jeanne asked, fidgeting a little with the hem of her sleeve.
"It's fine, you're fine, just, hum," It took a bit before Helena finally replied with, "Well, I'm usually not someone to play Devil's Advocate, but, have you heard about the term 'one man's trash is another man's treasure'?"
Jeanne gave Helena a weird look, "Yeah, it's one of those English phrases my middle school Mandarin teacher hated."
Helena nodded, before she started rambling on with, "Right, so what if all of that years if not decades of built up lore and 'junk' as you put it, all of the decisions you regret and find questionable now, what if all of that jank was what drew them in to the series in the first place? Not because they're approaching your work, which I'm sure must be good on the face of it to garner so much attention, insincerely or anything, but because there was just something, earnest and unhinged about your early work that they just can't find in anyone else who's more tied down by the conventions and mores of the genre after building up the years of experience and publishing ties that you have and carry with you now?"
Jeanne blinked, stopping a little in place as she tried to process all of that, before she simply replied with, "You sound like a redditor right now Helena."
"A what?" Helena asked, as she fished out her keys from a coat pocket, or rather searched for them.
"Nevermind," Jeanne said, as they finally arrived at the plain and mostly unmarked brown wooden door of unit 518, identical to almost every other in the hall save for Vera's security door covered exception. "Oh, is this your unit? 518 right?"
"Yeah, but you know, I meant what I said Jeanne," Helena said, as she fished out her keys and deftly unlocked the door, "They liked your work for a reason, maybe you aren't as bad as you think you are."
"Uh, thanks I guess," Jeanne said, as the door to Helena's unit swung open, revealing a dark but quickly lit room beyond with what appeared to be a normal looking couch and fully stocked kitchen inside with curiously not a bookshelf or TV in sight, it made her wonder what Helena did for fun in her spare time, at least until she saw a sewing machine tucked away in the corner.
"Well, feel free to make yourself at home I suppose, the fridge is in the back, and so are the drinks I mentioned," Helena noted, heading in first and already leaning against a nearby wall to try and reach the straps of her shoes, something that Jeanne vaguely considered offering to help her with before she realized how weird that would sound.
"Oh yeah, um, excuse me," Jeanne states, manoeuvring out of the way of Helena, while fumbling with her sneakers a little to slip right out and deposit them somewhere vaguely near the entrance to avoid dirtying the shiny wood panelled floors.
Her eyes naturally wandered along the way, away from her host for once, she was looking for pictures, hidden books, half eaten bags of cereal, mugs both decorative and recently used, little plastic figurines, the little things that makes a house a home essentially. Only to find little more than two consciously closed doors, a neatly ordered pile of cloth, and well organised spice racks in a clean if obviously well used kitchen. So she was well organised and she really enjoyed cooking and sewing clothing, big whoop she already knew all of that just from asking.
It wasn't until she could look past the counter itself, and checked the fridge for its contents that Jeanne finally realised that something was off. She could find bottles of wine, beer, sauces from across the world, and cartons of milk all tucked away in the fridge or the exact kind of cupboard she never bothered to use in her own apartment because it seemed intentionally designed to forget things inside, but she couldn't find a single drop of mineral or even sparkling water, neither in a box or bottle.
She was just about to speak up, and ask Helena if she had just forgotten about how much she still had left when she heard the front door lock at the other end of the room, and heard her familiar voice say, "Gods, did you really have to be this much of a shut in?"
Jeanne's heart started to pound in her chest, as her mind and gut instinct clashed on whether she should turn around, or simply remain in place as something moved towards her.
"I mean come on, an author of your calibre should be out there doing book signings with your face and name plastered on billboards everywhere instead of hiding in a shithole apartment like this? Did you know how long it took to track you down? Three months Jeanne, three months!" as the voice of Helena, if that's who she even truly was, continued to rant and rave at her, Jeanne spots a nearby kitchen knife, and steels herself to try and fight her way out.
"And who do I find at the end of this journey? What sort of monster was the one who ruined my life? Literally just, just, just, youuuu," Helena's voice is abruptly cut off as Jeanne panickedly turns around and attempts to chuck a gleaming knife at her, only for her hand to slip on the handle and cause it to clatter off of her chest.
"Did you just try t-? Alright, okay, yeah I have to hand it to you, if you hadn't fucked up at the last moment that could have hurt me if I was just some obsessive fan," Helena somehow seemed to truly loom over Jeanne at this moment, she wasn't sure if it was just her mind playing tricks on her out of fear, but her face seemed inscrutable somehow, too distant and shrouded in shadow for her eyes to make out anything except her opened mouth, "But unfortunately, you made me out of sterner stuff."
The giant that was Helena held a gleaming golden circlet in the shape of a serpent eating its own tail in her hands, and as she raised them up to her head, her arms seemed to grow longer, and the sound of crackling and snapping bone was still audible beneath her booming voice as she simply declared, "I am not a failure," and placed the circlet atop her head.
Everything else happened all at once. Helena's pale skin began to melt, dripping down from everywhere except the top of her head, where it seemed to harden into something resembling porcelain, exposing the flayed but oddly rubbery flesh of her exposed mouth and lower jaw, while deep metallic blue paint seemed to wash over her pearly white teeth, her eyes melted into nothing but shadow, and her straight black hair seemed to cut itself at precisely shoulder length.
Her clothes seemed to flow away as well, briefly exposing her breast before her skin and fat melted away, and a pair of fully formed arms and hands burst through her chest, seemingly taking the place of the much larger and longer pair still holding the circlet in place in their long, clawed fingers. It didn't take long before amaranth coloured cloth seemingly tore itself out of the air, weaving itself into a set of thick robes that covered her body, while her arms were bound in cloth that arranged themselves into golden accented white gloves.
And yet the sight of all this inspired not only fear, but recognition from Jeanne, who looked upon the beast's true form in wide eyed wonder, and simply thought, "Ah, so I have finally gone insane."
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Author's Notes:
Yeah.
Work on chapter 3 is progressing, but slower than the like, three chapter 2's I ended up writing since I forgot to write a more proper outline before finishing 2, it might come out this week though, and I'll definitely try to avoid repeating the month long gap between 1 and 2.
For now just have the lovely new cover art by @hopsspring on tumblr and a substantial edit to how chapter 1 opens because I got a comment that it doesn't quite manage to convey whatever my original vision for it was in a way that might turn off a lot of new readers, and I think I have a better handle on how to characterize Jeanne now.
Her heart was still beating unsteadily in her chest, and the air still felt almost cool in that awkward, non committal way you only get from keeping the windows closed during a rainy night. She reached out to brush her hand against the faux black stone countertop, and it felt cool, the surface was smooth and free of dust and grime, and there was absolutely no give at all when she pressed her palm firmly against it, these were all good, and understandable things.
One thing she couldn't wrap her head around though, was what exactly was standing there in front of her. At first she thought Helena was just one of those mentally unstable fans you know? One of the like, several hundred or thousand really dedicated people who kept on praising her. At least right up until the moment she stepped out of line and needed to be shoved back in with a litany of death threats and comments that her editor has tried and failed to convince her to stop reading for weeks.
But uh, fans don't melt off their own skin, or grow a secondary pair of arms, or grow in height enough to bump and scrape their crowned head against the apartment's admittedly low ceiling, but you know who does? Helena Heart, the deathclad tyrant, the smiling reaper, the one who weaves flesh and bone, and the main character's girlfriend from Jeanne's hit fantasy web novel and apparent life's work, Unchained Hearts, the one she just killed off a few months ago. Except, that doesn't make any sense now, does it?
She heard Helena cough from somewhere far above her, but she tried her best to ignore it as she tried to think this through. If this was a dream she reasoned, it was one of the most coherent and logically consistent dream she's had in years. Which didn't seem possible for a creatively burned out husk of a woman passed out on a trash bag, unless dying just added a creative spark that you couldn't find anywhere else she supposed, but she wasn't doing that bad, and she had another good reason to believe that this wasn't a dream.
Helena, the woman, beast, or whatever it is you'd call the freakishly tall four armed flesh wizard thing staring down at her with an eerie stillness right now, she had an extremely well defined shape and name unlike just about anyone she could remember seeing in a dream, one that survived the second glance she inflicted upon it.
Her lack of eyes, the snake circlet on her head, the four arms and amaranth colored robes, her flayed flesh left bare wherever it was untouched by porcelain or cloth, they were all still there just as she last saw it, except her outer, or shoulder arms? Whatever you wanted to call them, they were resting on her waist now, possibly to indicate annoyance or impatience or something, it was a little cute actually.
"Lost for words?" a voice from somewhere above Jeanne said. "I'm not surprised. I would be too if something I thought of as mere fiction appeared in the flesh. Especially since you, you write of magic, but you have never experienced it have you?"
Jeanne craned her head up, almost standing on tiptoes to stare at the beast's porcelain skinned? Masked? Face with thoughts still churning in her head. "Uh, hmm," she withdrew back into herself as soon as she started to speak. What the hell can she even say here? Nod along and admit to being a useless shut in who sneered at people who actually believed in this sort of stuff? Pretend that she knew a lot more than Helena is willing to give her credit for? No, she wasn't even sure if she was talking to a real person.
Instead Jeanne reached out with one hand, and very purposefully grabbed onto Helena's gloved arm, and pressed firmly against the soft cloth, quickly finding some resistance in the form of the hard if still somewhat malleable plastic flesh underneath. It was cold, but not altogether unpleasant, and her hand lingered there for a while, still kneading as her own gaze drifted up and down the monster's body from head to toe, taking in every little detail until something finally clicked into place just as the arm was pulled away.
"Your robes, they're all wrong," she finally blurted out, before Helena could say anything.
"What?" Helena finally said, as she ran her other shoulder-arm's hand along where Jeanne touched, smoothing out the creases that formed in her glove.
"They're all… look I understand that making a new dress wholesale every time you transform is probably a lot harder than I could probably imagine, but couldn't you have put in some effort for your big reveal?" Jeanne bluntly said, "No offence, but I've always imagined you wearing something more regal is all, and not in a, not a… bathrobe."
"Y-you wha?" Helena blurted out. "Really? That's what you're going to do? Grope my arm and then complain about what I'm wearing tonight? You're not going to try and make a run for it? Or break down crying and start apologising for everything you've done to me?"
"I mean what's the point? You're not real," Jeanne flatly said.
"Huh?" Helena craned her head down a little to look at something closer, presumably Jeanne's face, but it was a little hard to tell what with her eyes being black voids and all.
"I mean you can't possibly be real, you're a hallucination, you've got to be, I mean come on, just think about it for a moment. I'm at the lowest point in my life right now, I think my best friend's left me, and I'm just not sure what I've really been doing for the past five… god, has it been five years? It's just, I'm barely sapient right now much less attractive, and I only went to your party because I heard there would be free food alright? How am I supposed to believe th-I mean you're a beautiful woman alright? And I mean really beautiful, so what would you take me home for? I mean it doesn't make any sense, no sense at all," Jeanne ejaculated, pacing around the kitchen a little as she spoke without pause.
"You had like, one-two dozen guys to choose from back then, and god knows how many women there would be into it, Vera included probably! God I have no idea why she knows I write this shit, did I leave a tab open or?" Jeanne instinctively started grinding her fingernails together as she spoke, "And yo-you just have to look like her too didn't you? At least until you did the molten wax thing which looks really cool in person! And God, everything else about you is just, you're almost perfect alright? Better than what I imagined but it's all just."
"No, no! I don't care about the magic, I don't care about whatever months long revenge plan you definitely have, because I know that no matter what happens to me now, I'll wake up inside of a hospital room sometime next week, and make Vera cry when I turn crosseyed and start babbling," Jeanne finally stopped talking, notably panting for breath as she leaned against the fridge.
There was a long moment of silence, before Helena finally said, "Are you done? Because that…that explains a lot."
"Huh?" Jeanne said, looking up at Helena once more.
"About you, about the state of the world I lived in, and why everything kept getting worse no matter what she did, and why the little bastards you sent to kill me are still running around unpunished," Helena said, in a calm and measured tone that still made Jeanne wince for some reason.
"It's because you're completely incapable of not looking a gift horse in the mouth aren't you? I can see why you would be terrified of me after my transformation, but you weren't even bothered by that were you?" Helena pointed at Jeanne with one of her chest arms as if to punctuate that last statement.
"Well I mean, it was a little scary, but you're still a hallucination so," Jeanne said, mostly to herself as Helena continued to speak over her, making an x shape with her two shoulder arms as she continued with, "No, you were too busy thinking you've gone insane and started hallucinating after getting invited to another woman's room, because your clothes look ugly and you haven't properly groomed yourself in weeks or something after your girlfriend or whoever dumped you?"
Jeanne froze in place before she stammered out, "H-hey!"
"You know most people would see this as getting their foot in the door right? Help me out with a few simple chores, get a moment or two alone to scope out my apartment for any signs of an unseen lover and ask the sort of questions you'd be too embarrassed to ask in front of the hungry crowd, like how long I'm planning to stick around, whether I really live alone here, and what my number is," Helena opined, slowly circling around the kitchen counter to approach Jeanne.
"I'm uh, not great at small talk so," Jeanne said, again, mostly to herself, as she instinctively backed away from Helena's looming form.
"But you know what? This is great, it really is. Here I thought you would have some well reasoned philosophical grounding, an underlying theme resonating throughout your work about man's inherently self destructive and ruthlessly tribalistic nature even in the face of the end, or something about how a belief in objective morality and a ceaseless pursuit of purity can baselessly snuff out genuine attempts for redemption. Riveting and respectable stuff I'm still not sure I could have made you abandon without force," Helena said, with a hint of excitement at the very end that made Jeanne suddenly very aware that she was being backed into a corner.
"Uh, thank you? Wait, no that wasn't a com-what do you think made me kill you then?" Jeanne said in rapid fire succession, her eyes darting around the room.
"You're depressed, aren't you?" Helena stated, in a blunt matter of fact tone.
"What? No no, that's going too far I think even for a figment of my own imagination, I really don't want to be one of those people who self psychoanalyse like that, I know I've had a bad week… or two, but I wouldn't say that I'm depressed," Jeanne said, unconvincingly.
"Have you heard yourself speak Jeanne? I don't think I've heard you say a single good thing about yourself. I get that this could just be a rough day for you, but I don't think I'm reading too deeply into things when a woman who looks like she's long past caring for herself starts aggressively putting herself down every time someone mentions her."
"I uh, don't know what to say to that," Jeanne said, while looking down at her feet to try and not focus too much on how close Helena was.
"Look, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, I personally think you're a right bastard. You've given me all of these… feelings, thoughts, desires for a woman I had to live with, bound me into letting them simmer and build up for months until you finally let them boil over, and you what? Let us have barely two weeks of joy before you killed me off? If you weren't like this in person I would have considered reaching out and crushing you like a grape," Helena said, leaving a little pause that let Jeanne's gaze naturally linger onto her overly long and gloved shoulder-arms.
"But, I meant what I said earlier, in this hollowed out and confusing world you've managed to push your head out of the water and scream loud enough to hear. Your work is good, or at least good enough to get people to feel personally attacked when I died, as questionable as that sounds it's certainly something to be proud of."
"Thanks I guess?" Jeanne said, daring to look up at Helena's face once more.
Only to find her practically lunging towards her with one outstretched shoulder-arm, pinning her firmly against the fridge behind her before she leaned right in to say, "But if you don't at least try to turn your whole life around and give Marie the happiness she deserves, I am going to tear out every single bone in your body outside of your skull, break them into a circular wire frame, and stitch your still living flesh and organs around them so that I can use you as a biodegradable trash can."
"Uh, w-wha?" Jeanne blurted out, trying and failing to wriggle out of Helena's grip, as one long finger forces her to look up at her captor while she spoke.
"As fleeting as her presence was in the several hundred years of life you have given me, she was still the light of my life until it was snuffed out by a few strokes of your pen! Do not think for a single second that I would ever let you give her anything other than the happy ending and life that she deserves after she gets out of the mess you put her into."
Wriggling her chin out of Helena's grasp, Jeanne takes in a deep breath before blurting out, "B-but she's not even real! Even if I accept that you're really here, and talking to me, she isn't!"
Jeanne could feel Helena's finger switching tack a little, moving to wrap around her throat and apply firm and insistent pressure, "She's just, just words on a page! Bullet Points in an outline I started working on when I was an edgy teenager! A 2D JPEG on a cover my publisher paid some guy I've never met personally a couple hundred dollars for!"
Helena's response comes in quick and loud, her large arm grasping firmly onto Jeanne's body as she shook her back and forth like an etch and sketch, "I don't care if she's not real to you the way the sun or your sharply dressed neighborly aunt is! I don't care if I will never see her again outside of the few words I can tell are distinctively hers on every single page you write! I am not going to let you ruin her life for the crime of existing in your depressed mind!"
Jeanne lets out a gasp as she is violently shaken about, her mind scrabbling to try and find steady ground to defend her life's work from despite it all, "I'm n-I mean everything's already set in stone! This isn't entirely in my hands anymore! I've gone fully professional now! All of my notes, all of the little scribblings on a page I've made since I was 16, all of it, every single damned thing including the ending needs to go through my editor, I haven't written it but it's already approved!"
The shaking stops, if only for a moment, as Helena simply tilts Jeanne's body up to stare up at her porcelain masked face as she said in a seemingly calmer tone, "And there's no way to change that? Nothing you could say to your editor about changing your mind?"
Thinking that her words have finally found purchase, Jeanne simply states, "W-well I wouldn't want to sound wishy washy right?"
This is met with a long sigh, and a brief glimmer of hope as Helena's grip seemed to loosen, only for her grip to shift to grasping firmly onto Jeanne's right arm as the other shoulder arm reached for her left, "Alright, trashcan time it is, did you know that your world has discovered some interesting new ways to keep a head alive for hours and days without the rest of the body? There's a lot of medicines and fancy training and equipment involved that I can't get here on short notice, but I think with magic I can do this for you."
Staring up at Helena with eyes the size of dish plates, Jeanne violently wriggled and writhed in place, struggling to throw her off as she blurted out, "Wha-wait! Wait! Uh, I mean even if I wanted to change it I really wouldn't know what to replace it with! There's a reason why it hasn't been updated in over a month! I've been stuck on the same goddamn chapter ever since my best friend left me okay? I'm a mess! I'm a complete loser! I'm the most worthless piece of shit that's ever lived! But please-please don't kill me."
"Why should I? If you can't even write anymore then what's the point?" Helena bluntly asked, still struggling to pin her down without damaging her fridge.
Thinking as fast as she could with part of her mind still firmly focused on wriggling and squirming around in place to ward off Helena's other hand, Jeanne's mind finally remembered something, a bit of vaguely generic advice a disgraced psychiatrist gave in a video that her weird american ex online friend sent her after learning that she was depressed, "Uh, well uh, I! I can think of a good reason to change it now! If, if you'd give me a moment to speak."
With one finger already loosely wrapped around Jeanne's left arm, Helena let out a sigh, and simply said, "You know what? Fine, what is it now?"
Struggling to stare directly ahead at Helena's face despite herself, Jeanne stammers out a, "What, what if we, I mean, what if after a long period of soul searching where I uh, took the proper time out to deal with my mental health issues? R-right? What if after all that, once I've… sorted out my room, started going outside more, and changed my eating habits? What if I realized that I had taken a wrong turn, that I wanted to give Marie a properly happy ending after all? Would, wouldn't that work for you?"
Helena let out a disappointed sigh, her grip already tightening once more as she said, "No, that's dumb Jeanne, you can't affect lasting change to your mental health just from what? Getting some exercise, cleaning your room more, and eating healthier? Where are you getting all this from? A self help book?"
Still in a blind rush, Jeanne counters with a panicked, "It doesn't need to be lasting! F-for you right? You only need me to be happy for long enough to write the ending you want, something pleasant I can pitch to my editor and commit to having her review and accept!"
There's a brief pause, as Helena simply holds Jeanne in place, before she finally says, "I suppose you're right, but, how can I be sure that you won't try to wriggle out of pursuing your own happiness? You said it yourself didn't you? You've been stuck like this for a month haven't you?"
Still very much aware of the position she's in, Jeanne resorts to a desperate, impassionate cry of, "T-then help me find happiness damnit! Force me to eat three square meals a day! Drag me outside whenever you want to! Make me spitshine every damn inch of my apartment every day! Whatever the hell you think you need to do, do it, just don't-, just don't kill me alright?"
Another pause, as Helena simply stared down at Jeanne for a while, before she finally laughs, "Gods that has to be the most pathetic thing I've heard in years, you can't even ask for help normally can you?"
Squirming a little in place, Jeanne simply notes, "Y-you can literally tear out my spine one handed."
Helena cranes her head slightly at that, "Right, well I suppose the fact that you're this willing to compromise and beg for your own life in the face of certain death is a step in the right direction"
Finding a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, Jeanne quickly stumbles forward with a, "Yeah! If I was really depressed I'd just let you kill me right?"
Helena surprisingly, simply shook her head, loosening her grip on Jeanne a little as she states, "Not everyone who's depressed is suicidal Jeanne, and I would have let you live for far too long for it to count as merely 'killing' you, but you have a point, as I was going to say, if you are willing to go that far then I suppose I have nothing to lose from humoring you for a little while."
Jeanne, by this point, is simply reduced to nodding along as she is allowed to slump back down onto the floor, "Uh, yeah…"
Helena continues with, "I mean what can you really do against me anyway? Call the cops? Make a run for it? A shut in like you?"
Jeanne awkwardly laughed in response before saying, "Yeah…"
Helena takes a step back, leaning away once more to not loom over Jeanne as threateningly, "But if all you really need to turn your life around enough to give me everything I'd want is what? Three square meals and a clean house and body? Then I wouldn't mind cleaning up or throwing a hot meal at you every now and then for a month or two, at least it'll let me keep a close watch on you to make damn sure you're really trying."
Jeanne has that awkward smile on her face again as she replies with, "Oh! Well, thank you?"
Helena rests one of her shoulder arms onto the nearby countertop, casually scraping off a bit of the stone with the edge of her finger, "And of course if nothing changes by the end of the month I could always still turn you into a trashcan, couldn't I?"
Jeanne blinks a little, still keenly aware of how cornered she still is as she notes, "Uhhhh."
Helena very suddenly leans forward once more, one of her chest arms reaching in to grab Jeanne's chin, "You said it yourself didn't you? I could do whatever I wanted with you to make sure you're taking this seriously."
Jeanne squirms around a little in place, trying to look away, "I uh, I don't think that I'll be happy as a trash can."
Despite her lack of lips, Jeanne could tell by the tone of her voice that Helena was smiling somehow, "Then just get happy enough to write Marie's happy ending for me before the end of the month, simple as that."
Jeanne swallowed a lump in her throat, before she finally asked, "Umm, h-how happy does it need to be?"
"That's a good question," Helena noted, stopping to think for a moment before she continued with, "Well I wouldn't want you to do something as extreme as bringing me back to life, that'd be a bit upsetting for all of your fans I think, and me personally."
The turn surprised Jeanne a little, at least until she continued with, "After all, would the Helena Heart on that page be myself? Returned to your fictional world at some unspecified future date? Or would I remain trapped here while I am forced to watch another me live out the idyllic life I know I will never have? That's the sort of question I hope I'd never have to answer."
Jeanne blinks a little, thoughts still swarming in her head as she simply asked, "Well, what do you want then?"
Helena lets her grip on Jeanne's chin slacken as she says, "I think I wouldn't mind seeing her struggle, don't get me wrong I wouldn't want to watch her suffer any more than she has to, you've put her in a difficult place Jeanne, and I don't think she's going to get out of it scot free."
"But," She said, taking a brief pause for emphasis, "I want you to take whatever pit you've doubtlessly planned to cast her into, and I want you to turn it into a tunnel Jeanne, with a light at the very end that she can follow until she comes out battered, bruised, but not broken."
Jeanne looked deep into Helena's void eyes as she continued with, "I want her to at least start finding the sort of peace I only started to seek near the end of my life, I want her friends and family to be there for her no matter what, at least most of them, and I want her to be able to love again Jeanne, or well, at least theoretically, I think it'd still be weird if I saw it happen now."
Jeanne remained silent for a while, before she finally notes, "I… hum, I'll have to think about it a bit more."
Helena shrugged, the slightest bit of movement in her otherwise immobile form causing Jeanne to instinctively squirm, "It probably wouldn't be a harder sell than what you were already planning. Knowing you, you were going to do something tragic and poignant or whatever by steadily driving her out and away from everyone she's ever known and loved and harrying her with assassins and temple knights at every turn until she finally broke and became a twisted reflection of me weren't you?"
Jeanne opened her eyes once more, nervously coughing as she simply said, "Well… she would have had a cool design at least."
_______________________________________________________
This one might be a little rougher than the previous chapters if I'll be honest, but I think it's inherent to taking the mostly comedy based idea of the manic pixie dreamgirl and treating it at all seriously. It's a hump I could probably beat back down later but it's one we're getting over at least.
And as always, if you'd like to support Le Vie's continued development, or get more direct access to me you can always drop a donation into my Patreon at LamarckianEnterprises Patreon.
As we have introduced most, if not all of the major characters in the work, I have decided to post character profiles with a bit of background info to help people better understand the characters and dynamics involved.
Also work on chapter 4 will progress a little slowly because what I've written so far will require me to update the skeleton outline of chapter 4 a lot from what I originally had planned, and also if y'all like the thought of this continuing on for a longass time then you're in luck because I am adding more chapter outlines as we speak to better flesh out and express the main dynamic.
Name: Jeanne Simatupang
Age: 25
Gender: Female
Occupation: Self described full time writer
Description: The main character of this work, Jeanne is a depressed young woman who's self esteem is built on a house of sand, with an eating and exercise habit more reminiscent of a corpse you offer libations to in order to honour the deceased's spirit than a real living person.
Likes: Assertive women, Eating good food, yuri genre work, fantasy stories that aren't isekai, reading
Dislikes: The Sun, Going Outside, society's expectations of her as a woman, foreign media that still queerbaits in 2024, cooking, waiting in lines or traffic, most dogs really
Front Door: Standard size varnished wooden door completely identical to every other apartment door save for the deadbolt inside and the fact that no one has ever bothered to polish or dust it in the past year.
Name: Helena Hart/Heart
Age: (Fundamentally different calendar system)
Gender: Female
Occupation: Living art piece???
Description: A witch and undying monster/self objectified work of art who originates from the world of Unchained Hearts, a popular ongoing fantasy webnovel written by Jeanne. In her first life she sought immortality in order to make enough time to pursue her many interests and arts, and yet ironically spent most of her first decade or three as an immortal ruthlessly attempting to conquer part of the world to liberate man from the weakness of their own flesh or something silly like that, after one too many close calls with a hero of old she reconsidered her priorities in life and left, assuming new names and identities as the years turned into decades. A final death to protect her love interest at the hands of an angry mob backed by agents of the goddess of the sun has sent her over to the 'real' world for reasons unknown.
Likes: Baking, Travelling, Earnest people, Life, Reading, Medicine, Sculpting, Eating, People watching
Dislikes: Idleness, Aging, the limitations of the human form and society, People who won't take care of themselves
Front Door: Standard varnished wooden apartment door, recently polished.
Name: Bidadari Sandi Agung
Age: ?? Seems Young
Gender: Female
Occupation: Nighttime Security Guard
Description: A security guard Jeanne met at the party who seems to have a very low opinion of the apartment's administration, she claims to be the only guard they've hired for the whole building but that can't possibly be right, right?
Likes: ???, ???, ???
Dislikes: Her Job, ???, ???, ???
Front Door: Normal
Name: Vera Lin
Age: 40+
Gender: Female
Occupation: ???
Description: Jeanne and Helena's supportive next door neighbor. She's a nice if sometimes overbearing person and seems to be a good cook based on the not too few times she's offered food she's apparently made too much, but Jeanne doesn't know all that much about her personal life and schedule, at least not to the extent that Vera seems to know her's.
Likes: An orderly home, Colouring, trading gossip, hanging out with friends, parties, cooking
Dislikes: ???, ???, ???
Front Door: Black painted metal security door installed over a sturdy nonstandard metal door. A button near the door rings a wireless doorbell.
Name: Widya Novindasari
Age: 24
Gender: Female
Occupation: ???
Description: Jeanne's best friend, unofficial collaborator, and rock of many years, or at least she was. They had a big fight about the exact direction of Unchained Hearts after Jeanne revised her proposal for an ending last month despite her advice and opinion, and it led to Widya walking out of her apartment and life, hopefully not for good.
Jeanne messages her at least once a day, although she has yet to receive any reply, nor seen any sign of her messages being read, she is confident that one day Widya will forgive her just like she's had all those times before.
As a completely unrelated aside, Helena's appearance, and general relationship with Marie are loosely inspired by Widya herself, a fact that she is well aware of and found a little flattering apparently.
Likes: Reading, Jeanne?, Travelling, Cooking, Romance, Helena
Dislikes: Jeanne?, Messy Rooms, Drama, Tragedies apparently
Front Door: ???
It wasn't the sound of loud calliope music that finally woke Jeanne up, but the violent shaking and shuddering of the phone on her bed once the alarm finished its first cycle. The sudden, but continuous stream of movement beside her head that seemed to not let up no matter how long she tried to wait it out convincing her to finally open her eyes with a groan, and paw fruitlessly at the general direction of the snooze button before finally rolling over to try and shut it off properly.
The first thing she noticed is that she was up at an ungodly time, 6:13 AM to be exact, far earlier than she usually does, which seemed a little weird, especially since the alarm was simply marked as 'I guess' in her clock app.
The second thing she noticed was that she was still wearing the same black jeans and grey shirt she wore to the party last night, or well, at least she thinks she actually went to the party. She had sent an (unread) message to Widya saying that she did, and she can definitely remember going, but she could also remember a few other things that made her question whether any of it ever happened.
Namely, the fact that she can definitely remember going to their host's home, and feeling her heart pounding in her chest, and her own jaw slackening in awe as she sloughed off her own skin and grew into a giant monstrosity of a woman before pushing her into a corner and threatening her with extreme violence if she didn't… start exercising? It all felt like a metaphor or a misremembered dream, or well, it had to be right?
Before Jeanne could really dwell on it much further though, she realized that she had more pressing issues to deal with, namely that her throat was dry, her stomach was growling, and her skin had that uncomfortable dry sweat stickiness to it. She needed a shower, a drink, and a warm meal in no particular order, and with nothing but empty bottles in her apartment, and distinctly remembering the indecision that drove her to heading downstairs in the first place, Jeanne figured that she could at least think it over in the shower.
With a sigh, Jeanne rolled ungracefully out of her bed, kicking away the loose pile of discarded instant noodle packets and cans that had accumulated on the floor as she shuffled towards the shower, briefly taking a moment to dig out a new black shirt and vaguely grey pants out from her closet along the way before she tossed everything she was wearing to a pile that was probably too close to the squishy trash bag from before, and simply tried to enjoy letting the cool water wash over every part of her.
Instead, as soon as the momentary bliss of feeling last night's dust and grime start to wash away down the drain passed, Jeanne's mind immediately started thinking, and not about her breakfast either.
'What if' her mind thought without prompting as she scrubbed herself down with a loofah, 'What if this was the dream, and our memories of meeting that monster was our waking life?' It seemed like a strange thought, at least until her brain reasoned with, 'Think about it, since when do we set alarms? How did we get here even after talking to her? Do you remember the motions of actually walking home and turning into bed in the exact same outfit as last night, or did we simply wake up in bed because that's what we'd find the most comfort in after passing out or something against her fridge?'
She blinked a little as she let the water wash over the soap that clung to her body, trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy as her mind continued to wander 'And what day is this even? Since when did we set alarms? And what for? This all seemed almost too normal.'
Jeanne ground her nails a little out of anxiety, before she remembered what she was here for and started to work some shampoo into her straight black hair, while cursing herself for forgetting to buy more conditioner again. 'Of course,' her mind reasoned, as it shifted tracks back to the dream idea, 'she could just be overthinking things again, quite frankly there's no reason to believe that anything really happened the way she remembered it last night.'
The thought perked Jeanne back up again, as she put her head under the shower's stream once more, 'She's had this conversation before right? But she must have gotten it wrong before, it must have all been a dream, a nightmare borne from frying her own mind through her monomaniacal focus on continuing her work, and the mild trauma of exposing herself to the direct charms of a slightly attractive woman who just happened to look like her best friend and presumably wallowing in her own sadness before sleeping after completely failing to leave an impression on her (which also conveniently explains why she doesn't remember much before the presumed dream.)'
And yet, despite it all Jeanne still couldn't help but wonder, 'If this was all just a dream, why would my neck feel a little swollen where she picked me up and squeezed me?' she pressed her hand along her neck, wincing a little at the slight puffiness.
As she moved on to brush her teeth, Jeanne realised that her thoughts were going nowhere fast, was this a dream? Was all of it just a stress induced hallucination or a nightmare? Her mind kept going round in circles, and all she was sure of was that she had at no point put any real thought into what she should get for breakfast.
Blinking a little in the slightly grimey bathroom, Jeanne wondered if there was some way to prove that any of it really happened without bluntly knocking on Helena's door for answers, only for her to realize something, Vera was right there, at least for the early bits, and well, she did say that she could come to her for help with just about anything right?
Figuring that she could kill two birds with one stone, and at the very least being able to prove the reality of her waking self by forcing herself to endure something as normal as asking her neighbour about last night's party while probing for interesting breakfast options. Jeanne toweled herself mostly dry, got dressed, and took a mild detour to snatch her phone before she shuffled out of the front door, wincing slightly at the morning light as she stepped into the hall.
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The hallway beyond her apartment door was disappointingly normal. A cursory probe with her big toe told her that the white tiled floor was about as hard and cold as she expected it to be, and apparently still a little dusty at this time of day.
Looking up to the ceiling, it seemed to be the same barren off white it always was, and the lights were off, as is expected for this time of day, with the only light coming from the sun as filtered through a big and perpetually half opened window that marked the end of the hall she lived in.
The view outside the window seemed normal too. She could make out the faint impressions of a small dirt road mostly hidden behind the concrete wall, and a little village somewhere down the hill that was shrouded partly by a dense bamboo forest. She could see a few kids still milling about down there, or maybe they were adults, it was fairly hard to tell from this high up.
Feeling just a little uncomfortable at how normal everything continued to be, but resolving to see this through nonetheless, Jeanne put on her best slightly awkward fake smile, and approached Vera's door, absentmindedly knocking on the imposing black metal security door over it, and finding it to sound surprisingly thin despite its purpose. She wondered what would drive someone to go out of her way to install something like this, and she gave it a cursory bump with her foot to test how solid it actually was, only to wince in pain when the answer turned out to be 'enough'.
With a sigh, Jeanne reached out to press the doorbell, or well, brush against it. The doorbell was this big flat button shaped red and white plastic sensor thing that didn't actually depress, or really seem to do much of anything at all from the outside. This gave Jeanne plenty of time to think while she let her hand linger in place, about the terrifying mess that was her memories of last night, about the hunger still burning in her gut and the palpable sense of weight that her still tired body has, but mostly, she thought about the unassuming door beside her own apartment's, the only one she remembered walking into last night.
Some part of her is dimly aware that all of this could be resolved if she simply turned around and knocked on that door instead, and accepted whatever awkward conversation or fight that could bring. That logically speaking, the worst that could happen outside of not getting a response or Helena telling her to screw off and never talk to her again, would be having her stare down at her judgmentally as she ranted about the weird dream she had about her last night, before she mentally filed her as 'one of those people', whatever that meant.
But before Jeanne could do much more than think and look vaguely uncomfortable at what is otherwise one in a long line of nearly identical wooden doors, she heard a loud clicking sound as the one in front of her swings open, the sound of muffled cursing very suddenly cutting off as she is brought almost face to face with Vera, only barely visible still behind the security door's metal slats.
"Oh, it's just you, I mean uh, good morning Jeanne! You're up early," Vera said, her voice sounding a little hoarse this morning. For some reason Jeanne couldn't help but notice her slightly dishevelled hair through the bars, did she just wake up?
"Hi I uh, apparently I set an alarm for mornings last night, not sure why I had it though," Jeanne said, genuinely still unsure of where to place herself or what to look at with the door still covering most of Vera's body, she settled on squinting at her face.
"Well, it's a good habit to pick up, you know I always told my daughter that waking up early would be good for her, go outside and get some exercise, or a bit of breakfast before she goes to school," she scratched the back of her head. "Well, I told her to wake up a little earlier than 6 AM, but we can't all be schoolchildren."
"You have a daughter?" Jeanne asked, blinking slightly in surprise.
"Oh right, yeah I don't think you've met her, she doesn't really come over as much as she used to, you know how teenagers are," Vera asked, still boring straight into Jeanne with her eyes.
"I uh, I really don't," Jeanne said, fidgeting in place.
"They're loud, hungry, overly emotional, and they think they always know better than you because they saw a post on Reddit or something once, and now I'm 'cringe' and 'emotionally damaging her Italian friends' for complaining about how no one makes precracked spaghetti for some reason," Vera suddenly blurted out.
"Uh," is all Jeanne could muster.
"I mean just think about it right? It'd save so much time and effort, all of those minutes you'd otherwise waste on making sure the overly long noodles actually slide into the pot normally and don't just burn up on the sides? Gone! All you have to do is crack open the packet, pour in a bit of oil and salt into the water, and wait until it starts to boil," Vera continued, before she coughed, and notes, "God now I kind of want some spaghetti now, what were we talking about again?"
Jeanne paced a little in place, "Uhhh, my new alarm? Wait no I'm uh, I was going to ask if you wanted to have some breakfast together?"
"Oh! Well why didn't you just say so? I don't usually eat this early but if you've brought something over we can-," Vera squinted a little, before she almost whispers, "Wait, you're not getting breakfast together?"
Blinking a little, Jeanne finally rubbed two braincells for long enough to reply, "With who?"
"Nevermind, I guess that would be moving a little fast even by today's standards huh?" Vera looked into Jeanne's eyes for a moment, before she moved to unlock the security door, "Anyway, what do you want to eat? I can't cook anything other than noodles, but there's a lot of good breakfast food around here if you're fine with paying for delivery."
"I'm uh, not sure? Been a while since I've ordered something this early," Jeanne said, as her gaze wanders down to Vera's comfy looking red and black or dark brown patterned daster that rendered most of her body into that familiar vague blob.
"Well you can't go wrong with chicken broth porridge, I know a good place near here that delivers, I think it's called… Bubur Rijaya or something? The ones they make taste pretty good, but they always send them in these terrible little plastic packages you kinda have to squeeze the porridge out in, you can never get it all out properly," Vera notes, after thinking on it a little.
Jeanne whipped out her phone as Vera spoke, quickly finding the porridge shop on her food delivery app of choice, it had a 4.1 star rating which seemed low, but she figured that Vera probably knew what she was talking about as she ordered a few bowls and held the screen up for Vera to see, "That sounds good to me. Could I uh, come in? I might need to borrow a bowl."
"Oh yeah, sure, just," Vera stepped aside, giving Jeanne a better look at her apartment as she walked inside for the first time in a long while.
It was cramped, the already small confines of the apartment's living room being hemmed in from all sides by plastic containers and wooden or steel shelves containing the sundry dross of everyday life. There were lots of pictures of herself and friends hanging from the walls or propped up on a shelf, some with a woman young enough to probably be her daughter, little knick-knacks and decorations from all the places she'd been or gifted things from including this creepy looking porcelain kabuki mask that overlooked a round wooden dining table turned desk in the center of the room.
On the desk itself there was a sleek and professional looking metallic red laptop covered in butterfly and rainbow stickers, right beside a pile of papers, books and a tote bag full of something that made Jeanne keenly aware of how little she knows of what Vera does for a living. She took a seat in the cheap plasticky chair across Vera's much more comfortable looking office chair, took in the scent of her morning cup of tea, and idly wondered how she managed to keep her walls looking clean as she stared intently at her phone screen for any sign of life from the delivery driver.
"So how was your night anyway?" Vera asked, breaking the brief moment of silence between them as she rifled through a nearby cabinet for a bowl.
"Hm? Oh, it was… actually I've been meaning to ask, I know this is going to sound crazy but did I leave the party with Helena last night?"
Vera raised an eyebrow, setting two wide shallow ceramic bowls down on the table before she took a seat, "Yeah? I was going to ask how that went. I mean you two spent the whole night together right?"
"No we uh," Jeanne paused for a moment, still sorting through her memories of last night with that in mind. "We just talked I think, honestly last night was a little fuzzy in general, I think I was a lot more tired than I thought I was, you know how it is."
"Yeah, you seemed a little touch and go last night, I'm glad that you were feeling up to it though, it's good to meet new people every now and then, especially after… you know," Vera trailed off, as if not wanting to say the quiet part out loud.
Jeanne blinked a little, before she very suddenly realized something, "What? Did you mea-Vera I'm not a, I don't know why you uh, I mean Widya and I weren't like that."
"Hey I wouldn't judge you if she was, it's 2024, there are worse things to be than another woman's ex-girlfriend," Vera said, shrugging it off.
Jeanne stammered out, "We were-are just friends okay? Just really close friends, nothing more, nothing less."
Vera squinted at that, before she said in a slow, and easy to understand tone, "Just a very close friend, who goes to your house almost every day to feed you, cleans your house, hang out with you, and proofread and edit your life's work for free?"
Jeanne blinked again, "Y-yes."
This prompted a deep sigh from Vera, "Oh God, that poor woman."
Jeanne blurted out, "H-hey I mean, I didn't ask for any of that okay? She just went and started doing it all on her own I'm not, I didn't force her to do any of it,"
Vera leaned forward in her seat, staring Jeanne in the eyes as she said, "I'm just saying, at best you've led her on for years, and at worst you've treated your biggest fan as a borderline live in slave. Honestly I'm surprised that she didn't leave you sooner."
Jeanne simply sat there for a few moments, before she finally let out a weak, "Um…"
Vera let out a deep throated laugh at Jeanne's obvious discomfort, "Don't worry, I'm not really judging you, I just, I mean, God. The gayest women I know have been practically living together for three years and nothing happened? Unbelievable."
Looking very firmly down at the floor, Jeanne let out a quiet, "I uh, don't know what to say to that, sorry…"
Vera leaned back again in her seat, "Oh don't apologize, not to me anyway. Have the two of you spoken at all since the breakup?"
Jeanne sheepishly shakes her head, "Well, I've been trying to keep in touch but uh, no, she hasn't answered any of my calls… or read any of my messages."
Vera let out a sigh in response, "I guess that ship has sailed then, which is a real shame. You know I really liked having her around? She always had a funny anecdote, or some cool recipe to share, really helped make this feel more like a neighbourhood than an apartment block you know?"
Jeanne stammers out a surprisingly passionate, or perhaps desperate, "Well I mean, it can't be over just like that right? Sure it's been a couple of months since I've last seen or talked with her, but we've been friends for years! I just, I just need to keep in touch, and we can work things out again. I mean this isn't even the first time this happened!"
Vera looked a little uncomfortable as she tried to tamp down Jeanne's aspirations with, "Ehhh, I wouldn't get your hopes up, if she ever feels like talking to you again she will, but aren't you basically just harassing her by this point?"
"Well I mean uh," Jeanne blinked, as her mind finally caught up with her mouth.
Vera coughed, before she continued with, "Look, just give her some space alright? You have other things to worry about anyway."
"Like what?" Jeanne asked.
Vera squinted at Jeanne, before she said, "The tall German or something woman who's completely your type who moved in next door and seems interested in you? You know, the one you stayed with for the entire night apparently?"
"Helena is…" there was a brief pause, as Jeanne's mind scrambled to describe what she thought about her in normal sounding enough terms, "I'll be honest she's terrifying,"
"Oh? Go on…" Vera said, her interest clearly piqued.
Only to be met with the blunt force of Jeanne's almost panicked sounding rant, "I'm not even sure how to describe it, she's just, intense? Unreal? Like, how often do you meet people like her around? I'm not just talking about her looks alright? Although that's part of it because she's just… She had a sewing machine in her apartment! She says that she uses it to sew all of her own clothes, who does that these days? And all of the pies in last night's party? She said she made all of them herself? How? When would she have the time for that? And I still can't believe someone like her would even, well ok I guess she did tell me why she wanted to talk to me but it's a little uh, I mean its ridiculous alright?"
Vera took a sip from a glass of water near her, and simply asked, "What? Does she just like chubby Asian soccer mom looking women or something?"
"Uh, what? No she uh," Jeanne stopped to think for a moment, before she finally settled on, "I guess you could call her a fan of my work?"
Vera chuckled in response, "Oh, small world huh? I guess that's just one of the perks of being an internet famous writer."
Jeanne raised an eyebrow in response, "I guess? But that's a little… wait actually how do you know that I write Unchained Hearts anyway? It's not exactly an open secret."
Vera steepled her fingers in response, leaning in close enough to almost press against them as she explained, "Oh in one of your social media posts from January you took a picture of a cone of hazelnut toffee ice cream you had bought during a rare outing didn't you?"
Jeanne blinked, "Uh, what does that have to do with anything?"
Vera started to smile in an off-putting way, "While you took the time to properly cut the wrapping's logo out of frame, what you didn't know is that the red and brown object barely visible in the blurry background was still readily identifiable as a fountain that I remember was a popular date spot in the year 2019!"
"Wait wait, the fountain? How did you find me from a fountain?"
"The brand colors Jeanne, the colors of the wrapping paper around the cone matched an ice cream brand with a store in that very same street. And since your post noted that your editor loves to buy ice cream here I simply waited every day for a week until I finally saw Widya and struck up a conversation that allowed me to put two and two together just as planned."
Jeanne simply sat there, for a moment, her mouth agape until she finally managed to stammer out a, "Ar-are you serious?"
Vera chuckled, and leaned back into her seat as she said, "No I'm ju-."
Jeanne cuts her off again with a, "Holy shit do you know how bad this is? If a single picture could do that then doesn't that mean I'd have to take everything down?"
Vera seemed a little concerned when she tried and once again failed to interject with, "Jeanne I was jus-"
Only to be cut off by Jeanne thinking out loud with, "Especially if you could, I mean no offense but if all it took for you was waiting until you got lucky then who else should I worry about?"
Vera tilted her head slightly, before conceding with, "Well okay maybe you should be more careful about this but Jean-"
Which did nothing to stop Jeanne from cutting her off again with a frantic, "Should I move? I mean she managed to track me down as well right? The two of you have been, okay maybe one of you have been nice about it so far but what if another weirdo shows up at my front door or sends me a weird package or something, how would I even sto-"
Vera reached out to grab onto Jeanne's shoulder, before she half said half shouted, "Jeanne! Jeanne! I was just messing with you! Widya told me that you write for a living, but I didn't know what you wrote until you told me! I just thought you two were a nice lesbian couple or something honestly!"
Jeanne blinked before letting out a flat, "What."
Vera shrugged as she continued with, "Yeah. But really, you should stop posting personal pictures if you're trying to remain anonymous though. I'm not joking here, did you know that a Japanese celebrity almost got stabbed to death a few years ago when a deranged fan spotted a building in a reflection in her eye or something? That's messed up right? And it could happen to you if you're not careful."
Jeanne had a weird expression on her face as she tried to process all of that, squirming slightly in place in relative silence for a while until she finally said, "I uh, thanks, but look, putting that aside. How am I even supposed to deal with her then?"
Vera squinted at Jeanne as she replied,"What? Your fan? Helena? I mean, is she underaged? Are you coercing her with booze or violence or promises of wealth and power or appearances in your friend's shows or something?"
Jeanne scoffed before replying with, "No? Of course not!"
Vera shrugged, "Then what's the problem?"
Jeanne thought for a moment, as she tried to think of a normal way to put it, "Well, what if I'm just not good enough for her? What if she has uh, unrealistic expectations of me and where I should want to take things?"
Vera scoffed, "Sounds like you'll need to talk things over with her to figure all that out then, you know, like you probably should have with Widya."
Jeanne looked away for a moment, "Uh, well it's not really the same as uh, nevermind."
There was a brief moment of silence, as Jeanne looked down at her phone to check on the delivery, only for her to let out a sudden curse, "Great, the restaurant cancelled on us, would have been nice if there was an actual notification for this sort of thing but I guess not."
Vera shrugged, "Happens, I guess if you're still fine with porridge there's always that other place, Bubur Sumber Bersama or something, weird name but it's about as okay I guess."
Just before Jeanne could respond, or even type in the other restaurant's name, her phone shudders in her hand as she receives a message from an unmarked contact that simply read, "Good morning Jeanne, did any of your alarms work? If they did, would you mind having breakfast with me today? We have a lot to talk about," alongside a profile picture that showed a very familiar looking woman smiling down at the camera.
It raised a lot of questions, such as 'how did she get this number?', 'why is she asking me this?', 'and just what did I do last night to deserve this?', but the only one she bothered to ask out loud was, "Hey Vera, what should I do if she asks me out for breakfast?"
Vera blinked, before she suddenly stood up and bluntly stated, "Leave, just go, now. Tell her you're coming and get ready, just don't even apologize to me, just go!"
"Uh well, are you sure? I mean we kind of already made pla-" Jeanne stammered out, before Vera immediately cut her off with, "If you insist on sticking around just to buy me something to eat for breakfast I will chuck that thing straight into the trash you hear me? Straight into the trash. If you're too scared of messing up or too tired to turn on the charm as much as you think you'd need to, that's fine! Just don't pretend that you're blowing her off for my sake!"
Jeanne looked intensely uncomfortable as she squirmed in place for a moment, before she let out a weird but frustrated seeming sound and finally stood up as well, "I, okay! Okay! But if she eats me or turns me into a trashcan or something when I mess up it's all on you okay?"
Vera scoffed, already moving forward to try and nudge Jeanne towards the door, "A trashcan? Jeanne, Jeanne, she chose to hang out with you for the whole night over everyone else in that party, I really don't think you could mess this up even if you tried. Now get out of here, before you change your mind."
"You'd be surprised," Jeanne said, even as she willingly follows along, pacing a little in place as Vera sets to work with opening both doors.
"I'm sure I will," Vera said, as she swung the security door out, "But hey, thank you for visiting alright? And for coming to last night's party, even if you did spend most of it eating."
"Well uh, you're welcome?" Jeanne noted, as she stepped out into the hall again, and spared a glance back at Vera and her little home.
"I guess I am. Goodbye Jeanne, tell me all about it later okay?" Vera said, as she moved to close the security door behind her.
"Uh, yeah, goodbye," Jeanne said, before she took a deep breath, and took the first few steps towards Helena's door while using her hands to smoothen the creases in her black shirt in a vain attempt to feel a little less underdressed and underprepared, even as she pointedly walked past her own without a single thought of stopping.
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One clear positive of living at least vaguely around the capital is that you get to experience a wide breadth of breakfast menu options from all over the country, chicken broth rice porridge with peanuts, boiled chicken chunks and garnishing is probably the closest you'll get to a 'default' option though outside of instant noodles, you can find a restaurant or stand selling it pretty much everywhere in the morning. I usually just drink coffee though.
Funny story, but I might have to scale back my promise of posting two chapters a month from now on because I am currently in the process of planning and drafting a proposal for an italian restaurant/cafe I will hopefully be running and cooking for in the future. I won't be abandoning this of course but I will have to juggle it with writing for Azure Desert (The mecha webcomic about salvaging wrecks in a waterworld) and running a hopefully succesful restaurant full time, you know how it is.
Speaking of reverse-isekais and characters coming out of books to threaten bodily harm against their creator, have you ever read Inkheart? It's a book which I suppose can be summarized as "A man has the power to bring out characters from books he reads out loud, accidentally summons the absolute worst villains and banishes his wife and cats to the fantasy world and he and the author of the book gets kidnapped by the bad guys to help them build their criminal empire."
I think it'd be kind of funny if Jeanne has heard of or read the book.
Inside of a crowded two room apartment, a young woman was hunched over in her bed, staring transfixed at a laptop screen almost as dusty as the rest of the room, silent and unmoving save for the occasional clacking of a keyboard.