My Life Can't Be This Gacha

[pantherasapiens]

Spoiler: Tactics Tiebreaker

1: Split the party: half the guild will head outside to hold ♕Crown♛_Babalon off while the other half sets up to nuke anybody who gets into the guild hall.
- [X] You go outside.
2: Everybody in: the entire guild stays in, attempting to force ♕Crown♛_Babalon to run through the bottleneck
-[X] Ghosts newbs no good for fighting, but can make bombs? Mines maybe? Set in main hall so first room Mass Port strike fails instead of Babylons pwning us.
3: Everybody out: the entire guild rushes outside, maximising the space you have to attack them.
1d3 = 3

Spoiler: Free roll

[X] Improve your defence. 1d100 = 67

You emerge from the dungeons into the guild hall to see it emptying out in a hurry: people responding to the announcement in maybe the most human way they can, which is to go outside and see for themselves.

@green18271 stands in front of you, and you can almost feel him droop in resigned exasperation. The entire guild rushing outside of the guild hall to meet an oncoming enemy horde, especially one that's most likely a ♕Crown♛_Babalon attempt at striking down enemies before they get too badly outstripped by their rivals, is absolutely not his ideal battle strategy.

Definitely not what he intended by "everybody get to base", in any case.

But, props to him, he doesn't waste any time trying to herd people back inside. Instead he runs outside, too, and you follow him... after a while.

Because, for whatever reason, you just got a free roll that spawned an item in your inventory - ★★★ Grounding Ring - and you equip it. It's hardly even noticeable on your character avatar.

You alt-tab for a moment to look it up on the Omima Online wiki, and that's why you're one of the last few people to get out of the guild hall.

It's a daunting sight, even knowing what the Grounding Ring does: there's the Omima Online members, ghost-players mixed in amongst the living players and busy casting buffs or dropping mines and wards - a thin ring of defenders three or four players deep in some places and just one player deep in others. And then there's the giant wedge of ♕Crown♛_Babalon members visible on the horizon, the main column approaching steadily while small bands of five or six players break off from it, looking to strike from less-protected directions.

The first few splinter bands engage in eye-grabbing flares of CGI special effects as spells, special abilities, and item activations all go off at once. You pop a haste potion, kind of wishing you had more (but you'll never admit it to @green18271), and dive The Slipper-first into the nearest fight.

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The Grounding Ring is an Easter egg from a bunch of patches ago, the end of a very long chain of fetch quests back when Omima Online was very new and the developers hadn't quite got the hang of game balance. The wiki article says it's an inside joke amongst the programmers that got turned into an actual item.

All the Grounding Rings from back then have gotten patched up and gotten renamed Grounded Rings, and the wiki makes a special note of how much salt that incited from the playerbase. Grounded Rings are still powerful, but they're not as game-breakingly powerful as the Grounding Ring.

Which you have.

You crash into battle, The Slippering everybody who even looks vaguely like a caster. Firstly because The Slipper's knockback and mini-stun, when helped along by haste, effectively stunlock the casters, and secondly because you figure the Grounding Ring's effects will be less noticeable against casters than against melee fighters.

Not that you want to hide it, except maybe you sort of want to hide it, maybe? You're not sure how much people are going to notice it.

But you charge into battle anyway and the Grounding Ring activates the moment the enemy wizards and druids notice you The Slippering them. Spells come whizzing in and filling up your screen with flashy effects, and nothing happens to you as you happily piak your way through their ranks.

The Grounding Ring's effect is very simple, in theory: it temporarily makes the game engine treat your player character as ground. For one thing it means your hitbox is one pixel high, but for another it means that anything that doesn't affect terrain, also doesn't affect you. It means you can't be healed, but you don't need healing if you're untargetable.

The Grounding Ring's effect lasts just long enough that by the time spells affect you again, you're already halfway through that little band of wizards and alchemists and they're out of MP and consumables - and once the wizards are down, you turn around and make short work of their meat tanks.

Which coincidentally takes about as long as you need for the Grounding Ring's cooldown to run out, and then you pop a few more potions and wade into the next band down.

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It's a battle of attrition on ♕Crown♛_Babalon's side and desperate defense on your side. The ring of defenders gradually shrinks as players die and turn into ghost-players, and battles coalesce around you and a few others, all looking very much the same: a few live players fighting each other, while ghost-players buff and heal them until one side or the other goes down, at which point they call for more live players to continue the fight.

la_llorona88 is one of your supporters. She is a terrible support because she didn't bother training any of her support skills and focused purely on her nukes. She pops weak shields and weak buffs on you, but most of the time she fills the chat up with complaining about the enemies that got the drop on her and shanked her about half a minute into the fight. You're too busy fighting and not dying to respond (though your Grounding Ring makes that extremely easy for your supports, which you suppose is why la_llorona88 has all that time to rant in chat).

You keep going, though, your concentration of the fight narrowing down to whoever you're busy beating down (the enemy casters learned long ago to try to steer clear of you, while you've already run out of haste potions to stunlock people with) and the active/ cooldown timers on your Grounding Ring.

Then at some point you look for the next enemy to beat down and there isn't one.

Huh?

You look at chat.

la_llorona88 is busy gloating. Most of the ghost-players are starting to log off, which is understandable given it's been a very tiring few minutes and also @green18271 is likely to start checking leaderboards and proposing a new grinding schedule for the newly-ghosted players.

You decide to do the same thing. ♕Crown♛_Babalon is unlikely to commit another bunch of their forces to beat you up right away (you hope). And besides, you're hungry.

You decide to put off jabbing at @green18271 for until after dinner.

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Spoiler: 10 roll

[X]10 ROLL!!! 1d100 = 90
-[X] ★★ Slipper
-[X] ★★ Pen
-[X] ★★ Pocket notebook (the paper one, not the electronic)

You don't like calling it your power, because saying that makes your brain auto-complete with "-comes great responsibility!" and you're only 18 and you don't want responsibility.

Plus Pa said not to go out and do things, and while you might have protested at the time, you kind of don't mind being told to veg out for a bit?

But your powers are still real. You somehow glitched or something Omima Online into dropping a game-breaking pre-patch limited-edition equip onto you, which is almost certainly the only reason your character isn't a ghost yet.

You've got a pretty nice scarf and a bottle of fabric softener you don't want to think about.

And now you have a pen that is absolutely the fanciest pen you've ever seen. Like, this is not that RM1 Kilometrico ball-point pen they sell down at the stores, the kind where the ball sticks or the ink leaks or the case cracks if you hold it wrong.

This one has a shiny transparent case and the ink inside just about glitters. It's the kind of pen you see in those fancy artsy videos, the kind that make you wish you had any kind of art ability whatsoever. As it is you struggle to draw a recognisable Doraemon, so it's kind of a waste for you having such a pretty pen. It's also kind of ruined by the tiny basketball sitting on top of it, but you don't see any way to remove it.

Maybe you'll resell it on Carousell or something, you think, as you pick it up -

- nowayjose.

A fountain pen with a transparent body, filled with gold-flecked pink ink. There is a little glass basketball on the tip of the case. Once per day, this pen may be used to autograph any sports equipment. The autographer gains peak human proficiency with that equipment while the autograph lasts. Up to five items may be autographed at a time.

Click to shrink...

It's not the most useful thing ever, because neither you nor your parents ever really bothered with sports other than your time as a pengawas. But - wait.

Does your mouse count as sports equipment? E-sports is totally a thing, isn't it?

And if not, you can still go shopping later...

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1 SPIN AVAILABLE!

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...well, now.

Amanda autographs (pick up to two):
[ ] Her old running shoes. (Gain peak human sprinting speed.)
[ ] Her computer mouse. (Gain peak human actions-per-second.)

The Omima Online event goes on, and surprising events abound! (pick one):
[ ] Somebody approaches you to buy your account - and the Grounding Ring. You'll lose your account and all the contacts/ perks associated with it (plus your chance of winning this event!), but you'll be several thousand ringgit richer.
[ ] ♕Crown♛_Babalon asks you to defect to their guild. You'll have a higher chance of winning the event, but you'll lose contact with @green18271 and the other 1OODB members.
[ ] @green18271 and la_llorona88 come up with A Daring Plan, mostly consisting of what sounds like in-game assassinations. You have no idea how they managed to cooperate on this.
[ ] Omima Online pushes an ill-timed game patch, and both your Slipper and Grounding Ring get nerfed - but @green18271 finds new advantages in it.

 

[pantherasapiens]

It looks like one of the other properties of the fountain pen is that it can sign anything that counts as sports equipment, like the grubby old running shoes that you haven't put on since probably the last time you did kawad kaki( marching exercises) . Not like they're dirty since you always wash them after practice, but they've been (in Carousell terms) "well-loved", and the glittery pink ink really stands out on their side.

It also stands out on your mouse.

On a whim you try and autograph the CPU tower, but the ink just doesn't catch on it at all, even though it's perfectly fine on the mouse. Doesn't even smudge when you rub at it with your thumb.

Your power things are weird.

You deliberately put that thought aside as you make dinner - more leisurely today than usual, since Era FaceTimes you in the middle of it to complain about family drama and you wind up lying on the sofa making sympathetic noises while the soup and rice cook.

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"Aiyo, too much again," you mumble to yourself an hour later. FaceTiming with Era while cooking meant you accidentally cooked about three times as much food as you actually need - which would be a normal portion, if Pa and Ma were still around, but isn't any more. You scrape the rice into a Tupperware for the fridge and reheat the soup so it won't go bad overnight.

You wonder what Pa and Ma are up to. It's been over a week since you last saw them, and since then... nothing at all, except that one phone call.

You frown. Another reminder of these powers you have that you're still not sure what to do with.

Back to Omima Online, then. At least there you kind of know what you're doing.

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Nope, you don't know what you're doing.

Specifically, you don't know how the hell la_llorona88 and @green18271 managed to get together and hash out any sort of agreement at all, let alone an agreement to assassinate guild founders.

There are a lot of exclamation marks and (primarily wink and thumbs-up) emojis flying about until you herd them onto the Discord server for a voice chat.

"What," you begin, "in the hell?"

"It'll be super cool!" gushes la_llorona88. "We totally checked it out. Green says the math checks out!"

"...it mostly checks out," says @green18271, in the tones of somebody who has been completely betrayed by the universe. "Lot of ifs, and we'll have to hope they're not expecting something like this from the last time we ported right onto people and started a giant war." Voice chat doesn't allow for a lot more nuance than text chat, but you can hear him side-eying - side-voicing? - la_llorona88.

"Oh don't worry. It'll be awesome! It works out to, like," and then la_llorona88 is expounding on what you and @green18271 both feel is a very rosy picture of what she thinks will happen.

In the meantime @green18271 is texting you the actual details of it. A lot of it revolves around the Grounding Ring making you impossible to target. It actually sounds doable... with a lot of ifs, yes, but.

"So? So?" says la_llorona88, and you can almost hear her bouncing in her chair.

"Sure," you say, giggling at the strangled noise @green18271 makes. "When do we start?"

la_llorona88 giggles too. "Probably tomorrow," she says. "Gotta get the gang together!"

"You know," says @green18271 dryly, "we still have to find where the targets are and hope they're online."

"Didn't we just camp outside their bases and wait for them to appear last time?" says la_llorona88.

"Not a lot of guilds doing big raids any more," says @green18271, his mood clearly improving now he's found something illustrating the impossibility of the proposed plan. "Makes them harder to find."

"Well, you'll figure something out I'm sure!" says la_llorona88. "Rogue scouting or something!"

@green18271 says "Sure."

la_llorona88 giggles. "I'll go tell them then!" and disappears from the voice chat almost immediately after.

"Tell who what?" you say, having been browsing the Omima Online subreddit while they were talking.

@green18271 makes a noise. "The rogues, of course." He pauses. "Well, might as well go farm while they're doing their thing..."

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@green18271 and la_llorona88 are both correct, sort of, as it turns out. It's true that big raids like the ones you launched against SASUNARU 4EVA, or the last-ditch attack that ♕Crown♛_Babalon launched against you, have largely fallen out of favour, for a variety of reasons. There's a long post about it on the subreddit that your eyes just glaze over.

The remaining guilds (all twenty-plus of them, how the heck did 1OODB manage to live into the last twenty-odd guilds on the server you wonder) are still very active, though these days things seem like they've gotten sneakier. One guild disappears overnight when its guild founder just disbands the entire place and joins up with one of the other guilds, quickly followed by the remaining guild members who aren't snapped up elsewhere. One of the other guilds gets ambushed by three guilds while out farming and barely escapes - but they're weakened enough that they don't last very long after that.

You're kind of vindictively pleased to notice ♕Crown♛_Babalon, along with Threenity, got eliminated at some point.

But eventually one of the rogues stationed near enemy guilds raises the alert: one of your targets has appeared on the map, and alone for whatever reason.

Everybody goes except @green18271, because it would be ridiculous for your guild founder (no matter how ridiculously immortal) to get killed while you're trying to kill somebody else's guild founder.

The teleport spins up, you and your guild members land where the rogue planted the beacon, activate the Grounding Ring - and then everything starts going to hell. Teleport circles appear around you and your allies - it's a trap! - and a bunch of rogues decloak mid-backstabbing your allies, only to get backstabbed themselves by other guild teams decloaking and/or teleporting in.

In no time you find yourself frantically holding off a bunch of enemies, your mouse hand getting tired as you target each one in turn to ministun and knock them back, protecting your allies while they fight their way out. It's a short, vicious battle, and it ends when xXOwOXx runs in with a teleport scroll and pulls the lot of you to safety.

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"Did we get him?" asks la_llorona88, when all of you are safely back in the guild hall and recovering.

"Check the leaderboards," says @green18271. "But yes, you did. Or somebody did."

"Woo!" says la_llorona88. "I am a genius!"

"Eh," you say. "You almost die okay? Should have put obs wards."

"Almost but didn't!" she says, and you don't begrudge her the good mood. "So who's next?"

"Cannot so fast right," you say. "Nobody will dare to go out alone already."

"He wasn't alone either," she points out. "Still died, 'cos we're awesome and I am a genius!"

@green18271 posts a .gif of a bearded man telling her that the word she keeps using, does not mean what she thinks it means.

"But there was a good idea in there," he admits.

"See," begins la_llorona88.

"...mirror images should trigger the same ambushes from other people, if they also forget to use observation wards to check."

"That'd make your build very different," you note.

"Not that much," he says. "Let me double check something. You guys go farm first."

la_llorona88 logs out almost the moment he says "farm". You do a shrug emote. "Okay."

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As it turns out he hasn't finished double checking whatever it is when you finally log off and go to bed, and you're mostly occupied for the next morning and afternoon with housecleaning.

So when you log back in you see him in a whole different set of equipment.

@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: so this is a lot less immortal, but it'll do for now
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: mirror images last 60 seconds, invisibility and wind walk last 30 seconds each
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: would be easier if i ws a rogue bt this works too
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: din think u wud actually do it
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: lorona will b so hp
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: ye
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: tts y we're doin it b4 she logs in 2dae

You pick your jaw off the tabletop and watch him round up a bunch of people, distributing invisibility potions, and then setting out the strategy.

Then he activates the mirror image and invisibility, walks the mirror image out, and the invisible army follows along behind. One problem with his build, though, is that the mirror image doesn't have a very good movespeed. With people being leery of launching attacks near guild halls where reinforcements could appear at any time, this means the mirror image will nearly run out of time before you're at any decent distance from the guild hall.

...or so you'd think, when a previously-invisible rogue decloaks, backstabs the mirror image into a poofing cloud, and then recloaks before anybody can attack them, leaving the lot of you standing about looking at each other.

@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: ...next time we bring obs wards too

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The second time, an hour or so later, works a lot better: @green18271 drops observation wards every now and then, and the real him accompanies the group rather than staying safely back in the guild hall.

It works in two ways: all of you can see the enemy rogues tailing you whenever they get into the range of the observation wards: never for too long, because they know that if they can see you then you can see them, but they can tell it's the real @green18271 in there. There are a few people who want to split off and put down the enemy rogues, but @green18271 tells them to stay back and pretend they don't see the rogues.

There are a few seconds, about a minute and a half's walk out, when all the enemy rogues drop out of range of your ward. That's when @green18271 pulls the switch. It's right on time, because soon the rogues reappear, coming in for another attempted backstab.

You decloak, engaging one of them. Some of the other tanks in the group also appear, blocking their way. So that, as expected, is when teleport circles start appearing, and that is also when people start lobbing death wards, poison clouds, and AoE spells where the enemies are going to appear.

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It doesn't work all that well, either, you have to admit. You're not even sure it worked better than la_llorona88's strategy; sure, 1OODB took less losses this time than from la_llorona88's plot, but this time you weren't fighting the enemy guild leaders either.

And with the size of your guild, "less" losses is still pretty significant. A short tally tells you that your guild's living members are...

...oh dear. There's just five of you left. @green18271, yourself, and three members who don't count since they haven't logged in in four months. Not that they'd be any use even if they came online tomorrow, since they're all low-level players anyway. Which makes it effectively the two of you.

Still in the top twenty! And supported by a whole bunch of people producing potions and stuff for you!

Except there's an announcement: the event closes in two days.

Guess things are going to get real busy...

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A/N: are they still in the MMO arc
Why yes, yes they are >_>;;; but not for much longer!

Aunty 24/7 is probably mostly hard carrying the guild at this point, but then she is literally impossible to attack for a lot of the time...

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6 SPINS AVAILABLE!

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Two days remain! You're going to have to come up with some way to get to within the top 5 on the leaderboards if you want that loot. (You'll still get some loot just for surviving the whole event. Just not as much, and not the hats you really wanted.)

[ ] Turtling will maximise your survival and force them to come fight you on (mostly) your grounds.
● Staying put isn't going to advance you in ranks unless the higher-ranked guilds come knocking on your door - at which point you'll have different problems.

[ ] Be aggressive! Be, be aggressive!
- [ ] ...towards the lower-ranked guilds.
● You're confident you'll be able to take them out without much danger, but this won't advance you very far up the leaderboards.
- [ ] ...towards the higher-ranked guilds.
● Much more dangerous - but much more rewarding.

 

[pantherasapiens]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still. Destressing through farming.

You will never understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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8 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

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

Spoiler: Current roll odds

30%: @green18271 (makes low-risk actions more rewarding)
20%: la_llorona88 (makes high-risk plans more likely to succeed)
10%: xXOwOXx (improves stealth and awareness)
10%: Ben (improves mobility)
10%: Che Din (odd-jobs man)
10%: Che Mat (can carry stuff)
10%: Era (applies medical treatment)

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Spoiler: 9 Nov 2019 4/x vote results

You kind of just hang out on reddit and Wikipedia and TVTropes all the time, soaking up useless knowledge and giving back some in return.
● You've got sixty tabs open and counting, but this particular rabbit hole is hitting a bit closer to home than usual.

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

 

[pantherasapiens]

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

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

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

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

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

You are having fun showing off your extra sparkly banner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No way. No way no way.

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

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

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

12 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

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

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

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

 

[pantherasapiens]

⬆ pinkaunty247 • 0 points
⬇ Hello, I'm new here! Just got my pink hair a couple weeks back. How did you guys cope with it?

Click to shrink...

You look critically at the new post on r/pinkhair. It's mostly about people who got their hair dyed pink, but there's a sizeable number of people who've apparently done the same kind of digging you did and more.You want to ask those people for help, but you don't want to reveal too much about yourself. You also don't want your thread to be flooded with helpful directives to suicide hotlines, family therapists, or "just get a wig" comments.

Actually, a wig might be useful if you want to go out someday without getting attention from all over the place. You open a new tab for Lazada, take a horrified look at the prices, gain a new respect for cosplayers, and close the tab. Maybe you'll just keep using that headscarf instead even if it gets hot and sweaty.

You start editing the post to try and filter down the comments. It occurs to you a bit too late that maybe it would have been easier to frame it as asking for a friend, sort of. Actually, not too late. You delete the thread and make a new one.

⬆ pinkaunty247 • 0 points
⬇ Hello, I'm new here! Found this paper talking about famous people in history with pink hair but what about modern times? Trying to learn more about the pink shadow cabal here. Also do governments do anything about them? Never seen a pink haired prime minister.

Click to shrink...

There, you think. That sounds more likely to get you the kind of advice you want, right? Yeah. That should work. You hit post and check the time. It's afternoon-ish, which means most of the American users should be asleep. You won't be getting responses for a few hours, maybe a few days even. You set the notifications to ping you if/when you get a response, and leave it be.

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The first response comes in that night but u/conspinkracy has latched onto the "pink shadow cabal" part of your post and ignored everything else. It's… kind of educational, in the sense of that you didn't think anybody would seriously imagine a network of pink-haired people and their (subordinates/ puppets/ families) pulling the strings of every major government and organisation on the planet. You definitely don't think Ebola had some kind of true, sinister purpose against anti-pink-haired people or, for that matter, that African people were somehow specially threatening to pink-haired people. Are. The name makes you suspect this is a throwaway of some sort that they use just for this sub. You downvote them and move on.

There aren't any new responses that night, other than the occasional upvote, downvote, or bot-moderator auto-response ("Welcome to r/pinkhair! Please check the sidebar for rules. We're partnered with r/HairDye and r/FancyFollicles…").

What does happen, the next morning, is that you wake up and wonder if your circadian rhythm is super off, because of how dark it still is. Then you hear the low rumble of thunder outside, the beating of rain on the rooftop and against the window, and the shriek of somebody's oversensitive car alarm, set off by the thunder.

Oh, fuck, you think as you sink in to your soft, warm, dry bed. Forgot to take in the laundry.

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You're soaked from the knees down from going out with an umbrella to pull the laundry hanger around to the porch. Thank goodness Ma insisted on getting a hanger with wheels instead of the fixed line thing Pa prefers. The clothes are soaked completely, of course. You decide you'll let them drip dry on the porch before taking them into the house to drape on chairs and blow-dry.

You've found you can barely see across the road to the neighbours, let alone to the end of the street, except when the lightning strikes and lights things up in silhouette. Wind whips the water about, but the road is flooding up to at least curb level and the drain covers are spouting water instead of draining it. One of the silhouettes that you see is a large fallen branch in the middle of the road. Pa was always on about the trees overgrowing the road, though he complained more about them blocking street signs and traffic lights. You wonder how long it'll take the Majlis Bandaraya Ipoh( Ipoh City Council) to go deal with it.

Probably a week at least. Or never, given somebody will go move it before they get around to it.

Either way you're back in the house, nursing hot Milo and eating cream crackers for breakfast while you scroll through reddit on your phone. There's a new post, from r/flamingos_are_the_new_black and it's more or less everything you wanted. There are highlights from leaked NSA files, some more papers you hadn't found (and not by the same Shanxi author), a link to a separate megathread, links to paywalled news and research articles ("but you can just use Web Archive to get around most of these," notes the post), and at the very end it just says: "Be careful, okay?"

Something niggles at you. You scroll up to u/conspinkracy's post. You scroll down to the new post. A lot of their sources are the same, even if the conclusions are wildly different, because u/flamingos_are_the_new_black hasn't made any conclusions other than "pink haired people exist and at least four major governments know it and are watching out so be careful". Which includes, you check, Britain, and that dates back to pre-colonial times. Funny, you'd always heard the legal and educational systems of Malaysia got copied over from the British, but you'd never heard anything about provisions for pink-haired people.

Still doesn't really answer why Pa and Ma ran away, and that's not really a question you can ask on reddit without immediately giving yourself away, throwaway or no. Still, it is a throwaway, without any links to you.

And besides, there's a lot to settle down and read, and to think about. After all, you're not going anywhere with the way the rain is going on outside. So you boil some more water for some more Milo and settle onto the sofa.

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"The rainstorm is expected to continue for at least fourteen days," says the newscaster on TV. In the background are scenes of flooded kampungs, cars floating down the roads, abandoned shops and houses, and people huddling in school assembly halls. "The Perak government has announced relief measures for those affected." The screen shifts to some old guy in a songkok, talking about food banks and nasi leak packages being handed out. There is a brief mention about money handouts. There is another old guy in a songkok, identified by the chevron as an ustaz( preacher) , railing about the LGBT community.

You tune it out and go to r/Malaysia instead for better, more useful news.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

16 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

Reddit responses are kind of a mixed bag, but you think you've got pretty much everything you're going to get from this thread, unless…? Choose three actions over the next seven days:
[ ] Thread necromancy: it's not quite necromancy if the thread just hasn't received any new attention in the last three days, but you could bump it for more attention and hope to get more focused resources. (Choose up to one topic to focus on.)
- [ ] Especially ask about any governmental requirements for parents or relatives of pink-haired people.
- [ ] Especially ask about the early lives of famous pink-haired people.
- [ ] Especially ask about Official Interest in pink-haired people.
- [ ] Especially ask about special abilities of pink-haired people.
- [ ] Especially look for other pink-haired people to talk to.
- [ ] Write-in particular topics of interest.
[ ] New post: reveal yourself as one of the mythical pink-haired people and see what comes out. You'll probably be asked to provide pictures as proof, but it's easy to mosaic your face, right?
[ ] E-mail the author of some of those scholarly papers, telling them you have pink hair.
[ ] Go to a government hospital and tell them about your pink hair. In this weather??? Hahaha no.
- [ ] Call a hospital, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
[ ] There's a neighbourhood committee looking for volunteers to help distribute food to the older residents. Volunteer to do good deeds, even if it's uncomfortable.
[ ] Maybe all that anime stuff has a point. Binge anime with pink-haired main characters.
[ ] Start going through Malaysian laws looking for anything to do with pink-haired children. You're not sure where to start, but you have faith in your Google-Fu if not quite your grasp of formal written Bahasa.
[ ] You really haven't seen another living being in too long. Socialise with:
- [ ] Era. (She's off at university, so you'll have to make do with video calls. Still better than nothing.)
- [ ] Ben.
- [ ] Che Din & Che Mat.

10-Roll! Choose at least three items to put into the roll. (Amanda is hoping to get a wig, but would probably be happy right now with a really good umbrella.)
[ ] Plan Name
- [ ] Item 1
- [ ] Item 2
- [ ] Item 3
- [ ] Write-in.

 

[pantherasapiens]

Spoiler: 10-Roll

★★ Hat + ★★ Umbrella + ★★ Boots + ★★ Raincoat + ★★ Comforter + ★★ Wok + ★★ Value Pack of Instant Noodles + ★★ Microwave + ★★ Kettle + ★★ Flashlight + ★★ Bucket + ★★ Rope (shitty) + ★★ Swiss Army Knife + ★★ Pool Floaties + ★★ Recorder + ★★ Hair Dye? + ★★ Desktop fan +10 ROLL!1d100→62 = ★★★★★ Raincoat

A transparent blue raincoat with bright red dice patterns along the edges of the sleeves and hood. The raincoat generates a spherical field entered on itself that strongly repels liquids and weakly repels wind.

Click to shrink...

In the moment of weird no-going-back-now lucidity as the bright circle unfolds underneath the pile of stuff on your floor, you wonder if you should take the comforter back. It is pretty cold these days, with the wind and rain outside going at it hard enough that you don't even need the air-conditioning anymore.

But, you think, there are spares. A spare. Probably, if Pa and Ma didn't take it when they left. You don't remember if they took it. But the bright light engulfs the haphazard pile and fades away, leaving behind a blue poncho with bright red dice patches along its edges.

You pick it up. It feels nice. It's light, but strong, and it's transparent but not the kind of shiny that says "cheap plastic". And a poncho will come in handy when you leave the house.

(You look out the window. It's late morning, but it's as dark as night out there.)

If you leave the house, you decide. Right now you feel like a pack of Maggi with eggs.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲


The rain keeps on going. Sometimes it lightens to a slight drizzle, or fine mist, and then you can see a dull yellow spot in the sky through the clouds. The rest of the time it feels like your house is the only one left in a hissing gray void.

It's when you're doing your laundry that you notice the miraculous nature of the new poncho.

(You've already modelled the new poncho for the 'gram, of course. You got thirty-two likes for it and three spambots in the DMs.)

The rain can hardly get near you before it gets slowed way down, hangs for a moment in the air near you, and then zips right back out away from you. The lashing wind turns into a very mild, gentle breeze. This also applies to the puddles of water on the floor, which scatter off to the edge around you as you walk so that you're walking in a sort of hula hoop of water. The repelled rain forms a filmy bubble around you, like one of those giant hamster balls you've seen on YouTube. You consider going out on the streets like this. It would, you feel certain, be very impressive and get a lot more than thirty-two Instagram likes.

"That's dumb, Amanda," you tell yourself. "Don't do dumb things, Amanda." You go to unload the washing machine and as you take each item out, the moisture rushes out of the clothing to join the filmy bubble surrounding you. So you have an armful of instantly dry laundry, though it's still wrinkled and cold. You hadn't considered that your powers (which you are quite resigned to thinking about, now) would be so useful in this way.

(A very quick check shows that this water-repelling effect doesn't extend to anything inside a bottle, even if the bottle is opened. Soy sauce doesn't flee at your approach, until you pour some of it out into a spoon. The same thing happens when you turn on the tap. So you won't be doing any cooking with the poncho on any time soon.)

That night you sleep badly. The spare comforter you found just doesn't smell right. It smells stored and dusty, unlike your comforter. You feel you should have used the spare comforter rather than your own one. It is also scratchy, and there is a thread loose that snags on your toe.

The next morning you drag it down to the living room to Febreeze and air it out. It still does not smell correct, but you'll have to put up with it until the weather warms up.

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Three days after the last response to your thread on r/PinkHair, you bump it for attention, making sure to tag u/flamingos_are_the_new_black since they were so helpful last time. And then, just to make sure they know you did your homework and aren't just bumping for attention or whatever, you ask for extra information on. Um. Not Wu Zetian because all the Shanxi papers are about her and if you ask he'll know you haven't been doing the reading properly. Not that there's a lot of women on the list for some reason. Uh. You go back through your search history, trawling through your recent Wikipedia pages. Oh there you go!

"…do you know anything more about Queen Pebajma?" you add to the end of your post. "Wikipedia hasn't got anything much." Which is at least partly because Pebatjma was all the way back in the 8th century B.C. and probably because they didn't really care a lot back then about where their queens came from as long as they came from… somewhere. But this one's particularly notable because of how Egyptian royalty tended to marry their relatives, while Pebatjma just seems to have come out of nowhere. "Or anybody else really, I'm wondering about what happened when they first got their pink hair." At this point you're just an "asking for my friend in Canada" away from exposing yourself, but again, throwaway.

You hit send.

Then, to not feel guilty about all the work that u/flamingos_are_the_new_black put into getting you all those links (but 90% of them aren't useful to you because you don't live in the Western Hemisphere), you do some other Googling instead.

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The first problem is that there are fifty acts per page on the official Attorney General's Chambers page and there are 17 pages. On the 17th page you find that acts 822 to 827 aren't yet uploaded. So that's only 821 acts to glance at and sort through. Luckily there is a search bar, because every database these days has one.

You key in hair. No results. Pink, colour, and (on a whim) rambut all also have no results. You frown. Environment. Yup, the National Environmental Act (entry 127). Of course the search bar wouldn't cover the contents of each act. That would be too useful. You'll have to filter it by hand and hope you guess right. Or open all 821 acts and search them all.

…honestly, maybe you'll just do that. There's time, and also you've had more tabs open than that before, that time when you'd newly discovered TVTropes. You sigh and get to right-clicking.

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You're somewhere into the mid-hundreds by afternoon, with no sign yet of any laws pertaining to pink-haired people. You've got a whole bunch of keywords to search for, because wouldn't it just be a pain to find nothing and realise it was because you hadn't been searching for whatever way it's referred to in the law? Also because you don't really reckon there's a law that says "if your child wakes up with pink hair one day, run away as soon as possible". But just in case.

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I Just Want a Normal Life Dammit is an anime about a girl, pink-haired from birth. She has parents. Maybe Japan has different laws. Or the studio just decided to have it that way, it's a work of fiction not a documentary dammit. And she doesn't have powers that consume her possessions to produce new, weirder possessions. Instead she gets a series of men and women throwing themselves at her. The first few are her neighbours and friends.

By episode five (which you watch while making dinner) she's the centre of a messy love dodacehadron featuring two warring ninja clans, a giant robot and its piloting AI, her childhood friends, and the mayor's daughter.

You skip ahead. The anime is four seasons long. The preview of every season has a more and more crowded cover. You sigh and settle in. You can't decide whether you'd rather have her "powers" or your own.

Magical Girl Godoka is even worse. You definitely don't want her life. Thank god your pink hair only kicked in when you turned eighteen. Fortunately the series is only 13 episodes long, though it's got three movie accompaniments and a mobile phone tie-in game. You bookmark the movies for watching.

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In between episodes of anime you open new tabs, search the law for anything pertaining to hair, children, pinkness, evacuation, or superpowers, and find nothing. In between that you check up on r/PinkHair. Your browser search bar is already autocompleting your address to that thread whenever you so much as type "r" into it. There's very little there to add on, but u/flamingos_are_the_new_black, rather apologetically, links you to the biography of Amelia Earhart instead of Queen Pebatjma. You'll have to buy it off of Amazon (at a terrible price!) because it's not yet freely available, though. Or hope that Popular or MPH carry it.

Your mind is made up for you when you check the fridge and realise there's almost nothing left to cook. You go shopping for groceries - remembering to find a cap to cover up at least most of your hair - and stop by the bookstores on the way. None of them carry it, but Popular has more manga with pink-haired protagonists. You buy the first collections of three different series.

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By the end of the week you have another 10-roll ready and very little to show for your time. The law has almost nothing about it. Come to think of it, it's also not like you got shown the legal codes of America or Britain or wherever - instead you got shown leaked files from the NSA, news and research articles, and the other megathread.

You suspect that - in Malaysian terms - whatever it is, has to do with the ISA( Internal Security Act) somehow. Not that Pa ever got mixed up with them! …that you know of. Hmmm.

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13 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

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A/N: whoa, this update really got away from me. Quarantine does weird things to the brain. What day is it even? Do days even exist anymore?

Also. You guys voted for her to consume her comforter. Wow.

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Oof. Bad rolls all around. But knowing what doesn't work is the first step to knowing what does work. But there's always next week.

Actually, come to think of it, what did Pa do?
[ ] He was a government engineering consultant.
[ ] He helped run a minimart.
[ ] He was a Kemahiran Hidup( life skills) teacher.
[ ] He was a house painter.

And what will you do now? The rain is still going on, though you now have a ★★★★★ Raincoat to mitigate most of it. Still, going out with the ★★★★★ Raincoat will definitely reveal your supernatural powers… (Choose three actions for the coming week.)
[ ] New post: reveal yourself as one of the mythical pink-haired people and see what comes out. You'll probably be asked to provide pictures as proof, but it's easy to mosaic your face, right?
[ ] E-mail the author of some of those scholarly papers, telling them you have pink hair.
[ ] Go to a government hospital and tell them about your pink hair. In this weather??? Hahaha no.
- [ ] Call a hospital, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
- [ ] Call a police station, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
- [ ] Call a lawyer, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
[ ] There's a neighbourhood committee looking for volunteers to help distribute food to the older residents. Volunteer to do good deeds, even if it's uncomfortable.
- [ ] Go with the ★★★★★ Raincoat. If you got it, flaunt it.
- [ ] Use a spare umbrella. You'll get slightly wet but that's part of doing good deeds.
[ ] You really haven't seen another living being in too long. Socialise with:
- [ ] Era. (She's off at university, so you'll have to make do with video calls. Still better than nothing.)
- [ ] Ben.
- [ ] Che Din & Che Mat.
[ ] Attempt to find out more about the ISA's likely response to pink-haired people.
- [ ] The ISA response is likely to be similar to the British response. Look for news about the British… NSA equivalent…?
- [ ] You don't know what to do but you'll try anything. (Write-in strategy.)
[ ] Write-in. (Subject to QM veto.)

10-ROLL! Select at least three items to put in. Please select items that would plausibly exist in Amanda's home.
[ ] Write-in.
[ ] Write-in.
[ ] Write-in.

 

[pantherasapiens]

Spoiler: 10-Roll

★ Old Digital Pet + ★ Red-blue paper 3D Glasses + ★★ Swimming Goggles + ★★ Scarf + ★★ Sling Bag + ★ Energy Drink + ★★ Pop-Pop "Firecrackers" + ★★ Cili Padi + ★★ Water Bottle + ★★ Dice + ★ Lock of Pink Hair + 10 ROLL!1d100→64 = ★★★★★ Sunglasses

A pair of glasses with small oval lenses. The frame is green satin, with smoked blue-gray transition lenses. The glasses can be activated, enhancing Amanda's sense of temperature for up to an hour with higher sensitivity towards heat. Amanda can prematurely end the activation, which converts sources of heat (°C) in line-of-sight into sources of heat (Scoville) for the remainder of the duration. Once activated, the glasses cannot be reactivated for another two hours.

Click to shrink...

Your first thought, when you see the glasses left behind by the light, is: oh, god. Professor McGonagall glasses. And they are, too, in shape if not in colour. Still, they're really pretty. But they're super weird. You activate them and unsurprisingly the hottest things in the room are you and your computer. You end the activation and touch your computer.

It feels cold, in the sense of temperature. But touching it makes your fingers sting and burn like you've been handling chilli. Rather hot chilli, at that. And you can actually still feel the stinging radiate out from the computer. You grumble. That's one hour of Internet gone.

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The Magical Girl Godoka OVA runs in the background on the TV. It's the second time you're watching it. The fight scenes are really cool, okay? You just hope it doesn't mean you are going to end up in a fight like that. For one thing…

You start checking the other anime titles you have. I Just Want a Normal Life Dammit has fight scenes between the would-be haremites, but the protagonist does a lot of getting into trouble too. Magical Girl Godoka - well, 'nuff said. The same for the other save-the-world type plots. There's one, Lighter Than Pink, where there's a whole horde of pink-haired people with superpowers. And.

You wonder if you should've signed up for karate back in secondary school, instead of becoming a pengawas and ending up doing all that marching. If the anime or manga are any indication you'll just discover some weird mass of hidden talent if you try, anyway.

But there are no indications that the pink-haired people in real life have ever had to engage in intense quasi- or flat-out supernatural battles. Or none so far. And (you cling to a well-worn maxim) people are just too dumb as a species to keep on with a conspiracy this size. Especially in the age of the Internet.

Yeah. You're super unlikely to have to kamehameha your way out of a fight any time soon. That's good. None of the stuff you have would be useful for that anyway. Back to research.

The closest British equivalent to the ISA is their National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit - the NDEDIU. But it was formed in 2004! Way, way after Malaysia got out of it. So the ISA can't have come from there. Actually, come to think of it… the ISA only got enacted in 1960 anyway, three years after independence.

So maybe the ISA didn't come directly from Britain. Whatever, it was most likely still inspired by something similar. You do more searching. It's quite discouraging. The Malaysian ISA (and, to be honest, other police branches) have been very actively disappearing and murdering people. You're about 80% sure Altantuya wasn't pink-haired, after all. But searching for people disappearing in Britain just gets you lists of kidnap victims and heartfelt pleas by their friends and relatives.

People don't just… get disappeared by the police? Or by the uh MI6 or something? What does Britain even do? There's hardly any news. In fact all the current British news is about the general election and how terrible (or wonderful, depending on the website) it is that Johnson won. Nothing about pink-haired people in Britain.

Surely there's something! You just can't find anything about it online. No wait. You can. Totally did. You return to the post from u//flamingos_are_the_new_black. There it is. It's not a direct link, it's just a brief comment buried somewhere in the NSA leaks (because oh, wow, they were totally tapping the British embassies, is that even allowed), a phone transcript.

It's not very much. It's actually just a couple of lines of phone transcription, one person thanking the other for handling the Voy case, but the reply is interesting - "Oh, no trouble at all. He wasn't pink, you know." - and sends you right back to the British statistics, because the Voy case is one of those kidnapping cases, no apparent resolution, just occasional Facebook posts from his family.

That does not help much. It just tells you that the British people have something about pink people. And also that you're possibly maybe in danger of getting disappeared for no apparent reason.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

The new ★★★★★ Raincoat opens up new vistas of opportunity for you while closing off others. You could theoretically walk all over the neighbourhood now and never fear getting wet, but your Internet browsing has made you slightly paranoid. Slightly? Is it paranoia if they're really out to get you? You kind of think it doesn't matter as long as the ISA doesn't catch wind of you, but there's a lot of ways they could do that. A neighbour who sees you, for example.

Agh! Overthinking won't do anything. You throw the ★★★★★ Raincoat on and step out into the porch. It's heavy enough rain that you're all but invisible to anybody but the closest neighbours on each side anyway, and even if they see you they won't see you, just a hazy shape in the middle of a watery film. Good luck getting pictures through that! So you bravely bravely go all the way to the post-box and grab all the stuff inside it, feeling like there's eyes all over you as you do it even if there's no logical way they should be able to. You grit your teeth as the hairs on the back of your neck tingle, then turn and rush back into the house with your face on fire and your hands full of flyers and leaflets.

Most of them are the generic useless stuff. Real estate agents, home tutors, insurance salesmen, loan sharks. Some of them are bills, but there's already been a payment credited in and you can toss those aside without caring. What stands out to you are the shoddy leaflets. They're printed on A5 sheets that clearly used to be A4 sheets until they got ripped in half, probably with a ruler instead of scissors. They're black and white, with a bunch of clumsy hand-drawn hearts and sad faces around the borders. There's a wrinkly thing at the bottom that you can't figure out.

Then you read the leaflet. Oh. Neighbourhood food deliveries to the old people by a group called the Friendly Food Pandas, no relation to the actual FoodPanda. You hadn't thought the rain would be that bad for them, it's only been a bit over a week. But good karma is good karma, you suppose. Now that you've read the leaflet you realise the wrinkly thing on the bottom is probably supposed to be a smiling old woman in a panda suit (?) holding a lump of presumable food.

Well, you don't mind going out for a bit. You've spent way too much time on the Internet these past few weeks and it's making you unreasonably paranoid. You look up at the second storey of your house where you already pulled all the curtains closed (just in case). Yeah, going out would be a good idea. With the ★★★★★ Raincoat. And, uh.

Well, just in case.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

Beep beep-beep beep beep, BEEP BEEP goes Ben's car horn, audible all the way from your gate. You roll your eyes and press the button for the automatic gate for him to roll into your driveway.

"So? Go where?" he says, rolling the window down instead of getting out of the car. "Shopping?" Then he sees you in your bright blue raincoat with the bright red dice patterns. "Eh wah stylo Milo ah! But no need wear like that what!"

Okay, maybe you had deliberately not told him why to come over for lunch. And it is for lunch! Technically.

You hold out to him an umbrella, and his face scrunches up into a puzzled frown. "Amandaaaa…"

"Beeeeeeeeeeeen…" you say, mimicking his tone. "Come come it's for your own good!"

He rolls up the window and throws the gear into reverse. You fix your smile on him and press the button to close the automatic gate. He pitches forward and smacks his forehead into the steering wheel. "You never tell me anything," he says accusatorily, switching off the car and getting out. "Thought you say want to go lunch some more."

"Yeah," you say. "Do good deeds first. Then lunch." When he makes a face, you add, "Eh I belanja( treat) okay?"

"Yay!" he says, suddenly much more enthusiastic.

Then he gets even more enthusiastic when you've locked the door and pulled him out of the little side gate. "How?" he says, when his umbrella is made completely redundant by the powers of your ★★★★★ Raincoat. "How how?" he all but squeals, running to the edge of your little bubble and sticking his hand through the film. It goes out and gets wet. It comes in and gets dry. He takes out his phone to record it and that's what makes you snap.

"I dunno okay! Just happened." A night of sleep and comfort food helped you wake up a lot less scared of being suddenly disappeared than you were yesterday after all that research. But you still feel nervous, like the world is tilting weird. "Dunno how come also. Just happened," you say again.

"Damn cool okay!" he says, happily. "Eh want to call Che Mat and Che Din -?"

You have a feeling that he's going to squeeze as many people into the bubble as you let him get away with.

"No!" You pause. "Maybe later," you amend. Later, when it's not raining. So, much later.

"Lunch?" he says, fingers hovering over his phone screen.

Hopefully he'll forget by then. Or you'll distract him. "Maybe," you say noncommittally.

"Eat where?" he says happily.

Oh god. Why didn't you get that thing the Men in Black have? "Dunno yet oi faster walk! Don't play with phone!"

"Yes aunty," he says, looking bullied.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

The Neighbourhood Food Pandas are, as you expected, a group of aunties. It's a pot luck, which you hadn't expected - they're ladling out rice and noodles and curry chicken into a series of Tupperware containers with addresses stuck on each lid. You stow the ★★★★★ Raincoat away before you get to the house and crowd together with Ben under the umbrella, because the aunties will not (you know this with all the instinctive certainty of your heart) react like Ben did, and all the old people won't get any lunch.

It smells really good, though.

One aunty beams at you and Ben as you ring the bell, even though the gate is open. "Oh hello! Amanda, right? Right on time!" She pops a few Tupperware lids shut, running her finger around them to tighten the lids. "Three containers, then come back okay? Got a lot extra! We always make too much."

The other aunties join her in a chorus of agreements and disagreements, the way aunties always do, and you escape with Ben. You hadn't really thought there were so many old people in the place, but then your Taman (and, honestly, all the ones around for a good kilometer in every direction) are all what Pa used to call "mature estates". By which he meant that all the houses were at least forty years old and the people in them were mostly retired. You think there's enough food there to feed thirty old people, or fifteen Bens.

"Finish deliver then can go back eat right?" says Ben, holding all three containers while you pull your ★★★★★ Raincoat back on. Instantly the water on you and the umbrella rushes away, re-establishing the bubble. Ben frowns as he passes two containers back to you. "Eh like this how to read the road signs ah," he says. He has a point. Sort of.

"Google Maps," you suggest, looking for a way to hold the Tupperwares without burning your hands - the food inside them is still hot. And fragrant. "And I know where this one is anyway, it's just two roads down."

"Got car," says Ben, but he doesn't press it because he's back to playing with the bubble again, sticking his elbow out through it and watching it dry.

You roll your eyes.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

Lunch with the Friendly Food Pandas is very… well. You get introduced to them, forget all their names, and just call them all Aunty. They all remember your name but not Ben's, and they first call him your boyfriend and then your friend, unsubtle meaning evident in all their eyes. Ben remains blissfully unaware to a point that you think he has got to be doing it deliberately, gorging himself on noodles drowning in curry chicken.

Things wind down as the food diminishes. The aunties clean up by foisting Tupperware containers of leftovers on you and Ben. There's nothing much to say except that you'll see them tomorrow. They talk about continuing to do this even after the rain stops - it's fun, and it's been so long since they saw people your age around.

Yeah, you think. That's the result of living in a mature estate.

That night you pull back your curtains enough to look out on the sky. Huh. Looks like the rain's starting to lighten.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

10 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

"Quarantine makes you productive" hahahaha no ;-;

Anyway, Amanda's starting to realise there's danger involved, and also is starting to make friends with the Neighbourhood Aunties, and she's starting to hit the limits of what she can learn with nothing more than Google and a UniFi broadband connection.

But as Amanda herself would tell you, Agh!

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

Ben hasn't forgotten the ★★★★★ Raincoat the way you hoped he would, though he's at least refrained from posting it on Facebook, Instagram, and everywhere else he can. He totally wants you to at least let him tell the other folks in your circle of friends!

Note: you're pretty sure that he'll think weird things if he knows he's the only one who knows.
[ ] Pretend Era already knows. (But don't actually tell her.)
[ ] Pretend Era already knows. (Then tell her and only her.)
[ ] Swear him to secrecy. Only you get to tell them. (And you don't tell them.)
[ ] Swear him to secrecy. Only you get to tell them. (Then go ahead and tell them.)
[ ] Let him tell them and back him up if they ask.
[ ] Let him tell them, but pretend to know nothing about it.
[ ] Write-in.

The Friendly Food Pandas have asked you back to help. It's both fascinating and tiring…but there are things that a network of Aunties can learn and do that you can't.
[ ] Keep doing it, even after the rain stops.
[ ] Only do it until the rain stops.
[ ] This was a one-off thing. You're not going back.

You feel like you're hitting the limits of what you can find out via Google and Reddit, but you'll give it one last chance…
[ ] New post: reveal yourself as one of the mythical pink-haired people and see what comes out. You'll probably be asked to provide pictures as proof, but it's easy to mosaic your face, right?
[ ] Go to a government hospital and tell them about your pink hair. In this weather??? Hahaha no.
- [ ] Call a hospital, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
- [ ] Call a police station, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
- [ ] Call a lawyer, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
[ ] Write-in.

10-ROLL! Select at least three items to put in. Please select items that would plausibly exist in Amanda's home. Please also note that she no longer has a microwave, kettle, or pool floaties… though she does have a replacement comforter that she's finally getting used to the smell of.
[ ] Write-in.

Amanda's also feeling kind of uneasy ever since getting pointed to those links about possibly getting disappeared. And Ben. Ugh. Maybe her powers can be useful here…?
[ ] Amanda would like something that makes people forget her.
[ ] Amanda would like something that makes her hard to disappear.
[ ] Amanda would like something that hides her.
[ ] Amanda doesn't know what she wants.
[ ] Write-in. (Subject to QM veto. Please ask for something that makes sense.)

 

[pantherasapiens]

Spoiler: 10 roll

★★ Rubik's Cube + ★★ Beyblade + ★★ Watercolors + ★ Ancient snack bar + ★★ Ruler + ★ Eraser + ★★ Magnifying glass + ★ Costume jewelry bracelet + ★★ Shirt + ★★ Scarf + 10 ROLL!1d100→34 = ★★★★ Brooch

A brooch of silver and lacquered ceramics. When activated, it broadcasts everything the wearer sees and hears into electronics within ~1km radius. This broadcast lasts while the wearer is awake.

Click to shrink...

All those old toys you had and then threw away when they got boring? Finally useful for something. You dump the Rubik's Cube, still only half-solved after n years of on-and-off attempts; the Beyblade that somebody gave you for a birthday present and was never touched other than to remove it from its packaging; and a plastic costume jewelry bracelet that you wore, like, once. For some performance when you were in kindergarten. Good God, why did Ma still keep it in the sewing kit biscuit tin?

But the bright circle spins up and takes away all the ridiculous stuff from your childhood and leaves behind…

…yeah. You bet it'll be real difficult to disappear you when everybody within 1km or so can see and hear through your eyes and ears. Unless you get knocked out, or put in a bag, or something. Still. It's something, as long as you remember to put it on whenever you go out. You think. You stick it in your purse. That's probably close enough to unforgettable.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

"Amandaaaa!!" calls Ben. He's earlier than he was yesterday. You roll over on the bed and groan. Why is he here so early? Ben shouts again: "AMANDAAAAAA!!" You pull yourself up with a grunt. Even though you've just been lying on the bed browsing Instagram for an hour instead of doing anything productive, you still feel like you barely rested at all.

"COMING!" you shout, but the next moment your phone lights up and starts playing the ring tone. Ugh. Ben. "COMING!!" you shout into the phone and immediately hang up. Then you let him in.

"Morning Manda!" he says, entirely too cheerfully for any time before lunch. He looks around. "Eh yesterday the raincoat where ah?"

Oh. So that's what it is. Damn it. You'd hoped he'd forgotten. Fine time for his one brain cell to wake up. "Dunno." You stare at him.

"Oh there!" he says, and swoops on it, hanging on the back of a chair. "Anybody can wear?" he asks, spreading it out. "So cool~!"

You squint at him. "Whatever." You pad into the kitchen to make yourself something hot to drink. Behind you in the living room Ben pulls the ★★★★★ Raincoat on, snaps a selfie, and - wait a minute that's not a selfie he's -

"BEN." you say, in your frostiest Aunty Voice, just as he's marching out the door into the rain with his screen recording himself. "WHAT YOU DOING AH."

He freezes mid-step, one foot still in the air, and hops around to face you with a guilty look. "…TikTok?" he says. And quickly rushes to fill in the void of conversation. "Look, setting only friends, see? And it'll be cool, like super special effects! And and -"

"No!" you say, because letting it get out via TikTok would be the death of any kind of sensible self-esteem you have, and also because you don't want to tell Ben that you're kind of maybe getting ready to get ISA'd at some random point in time. "Just… don't tell! Can?"

Ben squints at you, then droops in defeat before your Auntie energies. "But it's so cool," he says. "If no record can still play?"

"Only if you don't tell anybody," you say. "I'll tell them myself."

"Okay!!" calls Ben, already excitedly dashing out into the rain.

Then your brain catches up to your mouth. You'll tell them? You'll tell who what? Oh god. How do you - Instagram? There's already a post there of you in the raincoat. Is it too late to pop a comment on it that says "btw this raincoat is magic"? Because it is. You don't know what Ben is thinking about it. You finish your cup of cham, extra sugar, no milk, and go out to the living room to see Ben trying to trap water by jumping on puddles. …okay, maybe you do know what Ben thinks about it.

You blow on the hot cham and sip. Yeah. You'll tell them yourself. First, though, it's getting near lunch time even if you're only just getting breakfast, and the Aunties will be waiting.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

You let Ben wear the ★★★★★ Raincoat today as a reward bribe for his silence, though you still make him take it off a few streets away so the Aunties don't catch sight of it. Instead they get an eyeful of the two of you huddled together under an umbrella. The house is a lot more visible today, too. There are bright lights blinking in a pattern all around the porch and there's a phone in a bowl playing Christmas carols.

"Amanda! So nice to see you again," gushes the Head Aunty. "And your friend!" Wink, wink. She thinks she's being subtle. "Did you enjoy the food?"

(You only mentally call her the Head Aunty because she's the one who started the Friendly Food Pandas and it's her house being used as the food distribution hub.)

"Yes, aunty, thanks," you say, returned the cleaned Tupperwares to her. Ben has the grace to look embarrassed and mumble that he'd forgotten to bring the Tupperwares back. Of course he did. He'd go and forget the Tupperwares and remember your ★★★★★ Raincoat.

"Oh don't worry! We've all got so many Tupperwares anyway, my husband always complains no more space in the store room but you know he also don't use that room anyway!" The Head Aunty waves Ben's apologies aside and finds three more Tupperwares, already loaded with food and addresses. "The rain's going to stop soon but we're doing such good work for the community, you know! I really want to keep on doing this!" She beams.

"Oh," you say, loading the Tupperwares onto Ben. "That's really nice."

"It's the kampung spirit," she says with great satisfaction. "And I'm thinking about doing dinner, too!"

It sounds like she's planning to start an entire catering business, you think as you and Ben get away to start your rounds.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

The lunch menu for the day seems to be economic rice. There's brown rice with chopped beetroot in it, stir-fried brinjals in oyster sauce and fried shallots, eggs and baked beans, and beef stir-fry with spring onions. There's bubur chacha for dessert that the Head Aunty made herself. The secret is in marinating the sago with the santan and draining the sago out just before heating, she says.

You think the sago is a bit chewier than usual, but hot dessert is abnormally comforting when the skies are grey and the wind is whipping your pink hair into your face.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

"Harlo? Sim and Sim Solicitors, good morning."

"Hello, uh, I'm looking for Mr Sim senior?" You spent fifteen minutes before the phone call trying to go over your mental script. It's going to pieces in the imaginary face of the Sim & Sim Solicitors receptionist. "There's something I need to ask him about."

"Need to book appointment," she says. "Consultation fee RM 200 per hour."

You had not expected this. You rack your brains. You'd chosen a lawyer firm in KL specifically because it was so far from Ipoh. "It's very urgent," you try. "Can put me through to him?"

She sighs, the long low sigh of a woman who has to deal with a hundred people asking for special urgent treatment every day before lunch. Then she says: "Why so urgent? Criminal case we don't do. Divorce, S&P, inheritances -"

You channel the way Ma acted at parent-teacher meetings. "It's my little boy! He woke up with pink hair this morning. I thought should report."

There's a pause. There's a short playing of the Canon in D.

"Good morning, miss…?" Mr Sim senior, you assume. He sounds old, anyway.

"Mrs Pang," you say. The only Pangs you know were a pair of twins back in Form Two. "My son woke up with pink hair this morning."

"I see. Well, you know that you ought to distance yourself from him, quickly. You should contact the government at -" and he starts rattling off numbers to report to and resources you need to pick up (you notice that the list includes burner phones and caller ID blockers). You jot the numbers down. When he asks for an address you make one up and add a KL postcode to it. "…and that's it. I'll send Miss Tang to your address in case you need any help."

"Thanks so much," you say sincerely.

"You're welcome. And please hurry. I'm sorry about it. I'm a parent, too." He does sound sorry about it.

You hang up, breathless. Are you already reported? Pa and Ma certainly did the rapid distancing thing, and they've - as far as you can tell - changed their numbers. But you've certainly not seen any form of police attention in your area, much less targeted at you. So maybe they're on the run, too.

The rain's stopped and the sun is shining like it's trying to make up lost time. You put the ★★★★★ Raincoat away and get ready to go see the Friendly Food Pandas. Ben doesn't turn up that day, making an excuse when you call him.

Well, you'd kind of expected he was only there to play with the ★★★★★ Raincoat, really. At least he's returned the emptied Tupperwares. The Aunties give you sympathetic looks when you turn up without Ben and in a sombre mood, and at lunch three of them corner you to comfort you with anecdotes of the worthlessness of the men in their lives. You're treated to stories of ex-husbands, business associates, children, and others. Then they offer to matchmake you with somebody better.

The rain comes back in the evening, but only as a light drizzle. It'll probably be all gone by the next day or so, but… ergh.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

It turns out the easiest way to tell everybody is to… do what Ben was going to do anyway. Not the TikTok, you mean. The video thing. You wait for the night to come and the street lights to come on. You put the ★★★★★ Raincoat on and step outside, your phone up and filming yourself. There's you, in the living room, crossing the door out into the porch, so far, so good, and then you step out of the porch into the rain, and your background dissolves away into a blur of rushing water. You flip the camera POV from from front-facing to rear-facing, bringing it nearer the boundary. You reach out with your free hand to try to pull water in, and make sure the camera sees it as the water flees you. You pan down to show a puddle, and by the time you've walked to it it's bone-dry, only refilling itself after you've passed by it.

You escape the streets, ending the video recording as you pass back into the porch and do a last pan over yourself: nearly two full minutes of walking in the rain and there's not a drop of water on you or your clothing.

Then you do the hardest part of it and WhatsApp the video to Era. Then to Che Mat and Che Din.

Hey, so you need to know something. Please don't tell anybody else. I MEAN IT. EVEN YOUR PARENTS.

The messages start coming in fast and furious after that.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

7 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

We're approaching Christmas, but Amanda doesn't have much to celebrate. At least she's started to come clean to her friends, but how much is safe to tell them? Or perhaps she should tell different people… different things.

How does Amanda answer her friends' questions?
[ ] Tell Era:
-[ ] The full truth.
-[ ] The partial truth. (What do you leave out?)
[ ] Tell Ben:
-[ ] The full truth.
-[ ] The partial truth. (What do you leave out?)
[ ] Tell Che Mat & Che Din:
-[ ] The full truth.
-[ ] The partial truth. (What do you leave out?)

Phoning the lawyers produced some results.
[ ] Follow up by calling the MCDF( Civil Defence Force) and pretending to have a pink-haired child.
[ ] Leave it alone. There's not much more you can learn from this line.

What else does Amanda do, if anything?
(Note: she's already wearing the Autographed Running Shoes out and has the ★★★★ Brooch in her purse.)
[ ] Write-in.

 

[pantherasapiens]

You switch off the phone and toss it on the bed. Your heart is still pounding with adrenaline. Well, the secret's out to Era and Ben and Che Mat and Che Din. If you're lucky they won't actually tell anybody, not even in the "hey what if I had a friend who" way.

…you should probably tell them that too. Just in case they also start searching for pink haired people on the Internet. Maybe not. You're not entirely convinced the Ches know how to Google. Anyway. Ugh. Too much thinking, you're circle-thoughting again. Need… fresh air. Yeah. It's night, it's raining. You throw on the ★★★★★ Raincoat and make sure the ★★★★ Brooch is safely in your purse. Just in case.

It was a dark and rainy night… It's the 一个风和日丽的早上( On a morning with lovely weather) of schlocky horror. But it is a dark and rainy night. You don't plan to go far. Just… enough time to calm down away from the phone. A short walk, avoiding the street lights… no. Near the street lights. Stay in the light. Bad things happen in the dark.

Ugh, you're even overthinking your walks now.

You wonder if - just hypothetically maybe - you can spend like, handcuffs or duct tape on rolls. It'd be an easy way to get out of -

AAAAAAA. Stop thinking that. Stop thinking ISA thoughts. Think calming thoughts. The rain washes down and flows into a hypnotic film bubble over you. Inside your water-bubble the outside world is muffled and blurry, like looking through one of those old uneven glass panes. Breathe in, breathe out, watch the lights ripple and flow through the water.

Okay.

You go back home. See, nothing happened. The house is not broken into or on fire. Everything's still locked up and untouched. You're perfectly fine. The phone is still on your bed where you tossed it. You boot it up.

It dings for a solid minute. Half an hour of missed calls, missed WhatsApp voice or video calls, DMs on Facebook Messenger and Instagram and reddit - you hadn't even expected Era to remember your reddit handle - and even regular SMSes. Who even uses regular SMSes anymore?

Almost all of them are Era. The messages start out "call me WE NEED TO TALK" and devolve into longer and longer strings of "?!?!?!?!?!" or "HELLO GIRL U THERE ANOT". The Ches seem to have just tried messaging you once and then stopped. And Ben has left you on read. Ugh stupid Ben!

Then your phone starts ringing. Right. Era probably saw ticks start turning blue. You pick up the call before you can think about it. "Hello?" you say, as if you didn't just turn Era's world upside down by revealing to her the weird supernatural thing you can do.

"YA'ALLAH AMANDA WAS THAT REAL?" screech-whispers Era. "WHAT HAPPENED?! WHY YOU NEVER TELL ME?! YOU NEED USTAZ( preacher) OR NOT? BOMOH( witch doctor) ?"

You definitely do not need an ustaz. You're pretty sure an ustaz would just screech Quranic verses at you and anyway you're not Muslim, Pa and Ma would have a fit if you went to an ustaz or bomoh -

"THEN TEMPLE LEH? YOU CAN GO TEMPLE KAN?!"

- you're pretty sure the temple monks don't do like, kung fu film-style exorcisms either. At least you've never seen them do one.

"YOU NEVER SEE DOESN'T MEAN THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT." Era's screech-whisper slowly dies down as she, too, takes deep breaths. "When this happen? You got any nightmares? Things missing? Memory loss?"

"That one is Thailand ghost story only happen one, can?" you screech-whisper back at her, waving your hand uselessly at the air. "Real life not like that!"

"Amanda Wong," says Era in a dead calm voice, "real life nobody gets pink hair on their birthday and starts summoning magic raincoats."

You put one finger up, open your mouth, close your mouth, and put the finger down. Right. You hadn't shown her everything. "Not just raincoats. It's all kinds of things okay? Put more in, better thing comes out, not always but usually?"

"What you mean?" She's quieter now. You wonder if she actually knows any bomohs. "Tell me everything."

"That's what I was going to do! Then you tell me call ustaz, call bomoh, go temple!"

"Okay okay! Never mind that one! Tell me first!"

So you do. Starting with your birthday.

"And Uncle and Aunty?" she says, when you're finished.

"Dunno," you say. "They called me once but after that, no more."

She's so quiet that you check to see if the call accidentally ended, but it didn't.

"Anything you need? I can ask my mother send you some food…"

"No. No need, I can cook lah, how you think I live ah? My birthday in November, now already December…"

"One month one phone call?" She sounds aghast.

You sigh exaggeratedly to make sure she hears it. "I can cook, Era. And still got water, got letrik( electricity) , it's fine."

"You say like that." She sighs, too. "Anyway you tell me if got anything you need, my mother now stay at home very free. Every day call me say faster get married., want cucu cicir( grandchildren) , as if I come to study nursing to catch husband."

You point out, very reasonably, that she did catch her boyfriend at school.

"That's not the same!" she says, mock scandalised. "Then you leh? You put all the barang-barang( things) together then can get new things right? Can get boyfriend anot like that?"

"How ah? You think I take some random men and put together ah? Or I put Ken dolls?"

"Achelly that one not bad idea…"

"No. No. No. You learn what thing at school? Why you try to corrupt me?"

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

The conversation with the Ches goes about the same, except they ask if you're limited to raincoats (no, you're not, you say.) and whether - if they give you stuff - you could do up stuff for them (maybe, you say, and Che Mat's voice gets very speculative). But you tell them to not tell anybody about it. You plan to get your hair dyed and to lay low and all of that. But they had better not go and blab.

Che Mat is quite indignant at the implication that they would blab. "You know that time in Form Four you go and climb the roof I also never tell anybody, remember?"

"Yeah yeah remember remember!" you say quickly, to get it over with.

"And that time you ask Gregory to pose for your Form Three biology lab book -"

"Stop making me remember!" you practically shriek. This was supposed to be a conversation about getting stuff for your Spins and making sure they kept your secrets! How did it end up like this?

"Yah! And that time you cheated the class seating plan!"

You cover your face in shame at the antics of your younger and more foolish self. "…okay okay thanks."

"Lunch tomorrow?" says Che Mat. "Or you want to go and dye or what?"

"Dinner," you say, after some thought. Dyeing your hair black shouldn't take long.

"On!" says Che Din, gleefully. You feel sure that this cannot end well.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

Getting Ben to promise never to tell anybody about it or post pictures or videos of you with pink hair anywhere, ever, forever, is a matter of blackmailing him with the ★★★★★ Raincoat. Or your other "cool items" that you refuse to tell him about until he promises, pinky swear pretty please, extra cheese.

"Because if you tell anybody then people will come and steal everything," you say in your most threatening voice.

"But you already wear in the street," he weakly protests.

"Rainy day nobody can see!" you shoot him down. "Anyway you promise or not?"

"Promise promise!" he exclaims defeatedly.

"Good," you say happily.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

The Ches meet you at the Marrybrown with a bulging duffel bag. You raise your (newly-blackened) eyebrows.

"Wah your hair!"

"Yeah, dye then become blacker than black. See before what."

"Look like student who kena caught by guru disiplin( discipline teacher) on first day of school."

The Ches giggle at each other.

"What's that?" you ask, pointing at their duffel bag to get their attention off of your matte black hair, even though you share their sentiments. At least people aren't looking funny at your pink hair.

Che Mat grins. "Something lah. Nanti you tengok( later you see) ."

You frown. The Ches are good at keeping secrets but by god they're little blackmailers in progress. "You order already?"

"Now order lah," says Che Din. "You want what?"

The duffel bag turns out to contain… stuff. Most of it is simple household things, but there are several things in it that shoot your eyebrows up. "This looks expensive oi," you tell them, fishing out a few mint-looking Hot Wheels toy cars. "And what is this."

"Old phone," supplies Che Din helpfully. "Still working. We check already. The charger also in there."

You can see where this is going. You should at least be thankful they clearly believe what you're saying (and that they didn't bring somebody along to try to exorcise you or something). And you are, after all, getting dinner out of it.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

There's a little invitation in your post box from the Head Aunty, done up in the same style as the Friendly Food Pandas invitation. She's having a buffet at her house on Christmas night, you're invited to attend, and she really hopes for you to attend.

Huh. You shrug. Sure, why not. It's not like you've got anything else to do.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

8 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

Welp, so that was a thing! I keep telling myself that the plot will start going Properly Unrealistic soon but so far haven't had the heart to launch Anime Protag-ness side effects. Soon(tm).

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

The Ches are asking for favours. You think helping them will also motivate them to keep on keeping the secrets, but that they might also keep coming back for more. Still, they're bringing you stuff to use, and they haven't said when they'd like anything back…

The duffel bag contains about twenty ★ and ★★ items, with the only items of note being four ★★★ Limited Edition Mint Hot Wheels toys. You also have a ★★ Motorcyle Engine (from Che Mat) and a ★★★ Smartphone (from Che Din).

[ ] Spin for them. (You'll automatically use the ★★ Motorcyle Engine for Che Mat and the ★★★ Smartphone for Che Din, but you'll need to choose what else to use for them.)
- [ ] Che Mat:
-- [ ] 1 SPIN. (Write-in list of items.)
-- [ ] 10-SPIN. (Write-in list of items. Incompatible with using a 10-SPIN for Che Din.)
- [ ] Che Din:
-- [ ] 1 SPIN. (Write-in list of items.)
-- [ ] 10-SPIN. (Write-in list of items. Incompatible with using a 10-SPIN for Che Mat.)
[ ] Don't spin for them. Save it for yourself.

Socialising at the Head Aunty's Christmas party brings you into close contact with a bunch of people from the neighbourhood and beyond. (Pick two.)
[ ] Pakcik( uncle) Arif used to go fishing with Pa every couple months or so. He reminisces about a small fishing village Pa always wanted to retire to...
[ ] Ben is there too. You're not sure how he got the invitation, but he did.
[ ] Farhana is a fellow NEET, which explains why you never met her before. It turns out she's a conspiracy theorist and a hoarder.
[ ] Harinder is a gossipy policeman, complaining about inter-departmental politics and new transfers.
[ ] Aunty Kwan, a weekly Zumba class participant with Ma and suffering from empty nest syndrome, wants to talk to you.
[ ] Madam Priya is a schoolteacher with a deep interest in fortune-telling. You can't get away from her.

CHRISTMAS EVENT! Pick one:
[ ] For one week, Amanda regains three SPINs a day instead of the usual one.
[ ] For one week, Amanda gets to re-roll any SPINs or ROLLs with a result of less than 40. (If the re-roll result is also less than 40, it is similarly re-rolled, until the result is at least 40.)
[ ] For the next roll, every material Amanda uses is treated as if it were one ★ higher than it actually is.
[ ] Anything also can lah.

 

[pantherasapiens]

Spoiler: 10 roll

★★ Motorcycle Engine + ★ Skateboard + ★ Bicycle + ★★ Sport shoes + ★★ Roller Skates + ★★ "The Flash" costume + ★ Kite + ★ Red Bull (the drink, not the animal) + ★★ Goggles + ★★ Firework rocket 1 pack+ 10 ROLL!1d100→85 = ★★★★★ Transmission Fluid

A 5-litre bottle of transmission fluid that enables the engine to perform at 100% efficiency over the next 6,000km. Loses its effect if diluted.

Click to shrink...

Rooting through the old duffel bag brings up weird questions - that you do not want answered - about what exactly the Ches have been shopping for over the years. The bike is your own, a rusty old thing that hasn't seen use in years, but the "The Flash" costume looks like it's sized for a kindergartener. And the packet of fireworks, which is very definitely very illegal.

And when the flash of light has died away, you find a bottle of oily fluid left behind. You know what it's called and what it'll do. You just don't know what it would normally do. You hope Che Mat is okay with having lost an engine to get a, uh, this.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

There's a song that you once heard on one of your parents' CDs and have never been able to find again. If it weren't that the chorus is stuck indelibly in your brain (and that you have absolutely no musical talent), you'd have thought you'd imagined it. "It's warm here and sunny - there's no ice and snow. It's Christmas in Malaysia, the kind that I know." [1]

The weather has been doing its absolute best to make up for the week-plus of torrential rain you had only - what was it, a couple of weeks ago? It's been hot and muggy despite the best efforts of your air-conditioning [2]. You leave your house in the thinnest and airiest clothes you can wear in public, plus an umbrella and the ★★★★★ Sunglasses. The reflection of the sun in the windows still blinds you and you're sogged in sweat within two minutes. People shamelessly walk around in public with those tiny USB-powered fan attachments on their power banks or phones, or clog the shopping malls for the free air-conditioning.

The shopping malls, completely unironically, are playing the stock Christmas playlist - the one about winter wonderlands and snowball fights and Frosty. You've been avoiding those the way you've been avoiding anywhere with too many people, even if you've figured out how to tie your hair up and hide it under a cap or scarf.

Just in case. Your ★★★★ Brooch can do a lot but it probably wouldn't stop a bunch of determined adult men.

Christmas Day itself is... also hot and muggy. You stay in your room all day playing Omima Online with the air conditioning on full blast until it's almost too late to shower. You run the water for five minutes until all the hot water is gone before you step into the lukewarm water and then shiver your way through dressing yourself in your comparatively chilly room.

You can hear and smell the party at the Head Aunty's long before you see it. First the roar of outdoor dehumidifers going at full blast, then Christian Christmas music coming from Bluetooth speakers. You smell barbeque and satay and roast lamb. There is a massive row of tents that stretches the entire width and nearly the entire length of the street, covering the tables and chairs arranged on the road. There are regular lights and blinking Christmas lights. The cars (both of the Head Aunty's household and of her visitors) have occupied every parking space for several streets around. The catering buffet fills her porch. Outside on the road are the stalls - satay and barbeque and roasting lamb, but also chendol and aiskrim potong( lit. cut ice-cream) and chai-tao kuey( lit. vegetable-head snack) .

The Head Aunty looks entirely un-Aunty-like in her makeup and expensive-looking dress and shoes. Her hair is done up in the style you usually only see on Hong Kong drama taitais( wealthy aunties) . She spots you and waves at you in greeting. "Merry Christmas!" she greets effusively, and you notice that she somehow isn't drenched in sweat the way you are and a flash of envy shoots right through you. "Such a lovely day, isn't it? Come in, come in! Is your friend coming too?"

The thoughts Lovely day?!?! and NO BEN run smack into each other and you say: "Uh-"

"Maybe next year!" she says, "please help yourself!" and she's off to the next guest. Feeling like you've dodged a giant bullet, you grab a paper plate and load it strategically. [3] Then you look for a table as free of aunties and uncles as possible and plop yourself down at a table where the only other occupant is a girl. She has thick glasses, a hijab, and she is going methodically through her salad. Literally. She has separated it out into its component vegetables and is eating only the purple cabbage, avoiding the corn and green peas.

[X] Farhana is a fellow NEET, which explains why you never met her before. It turns out she's a conspiracy theorist and a hoarder.

Click to shrink...

She notices you looking, and she glares at you. You kind of wish you had your ★★★★★ Sunglasses on right now, even if it's already dark.

"GMO," she snaps, like it explains anything.

Your face betrays your confused thoughts.

"GMO," she repeats, prodding the corn and green peas with her fork. "America put pig genes to kill Islam." [4]

You instantly regret everything that made you sit down here. You're pretty sure that if the corn and sweet peas are haram then the cabbage she's eating should also be. You do not want to say it.

"I don't think America would want to do that," you say, wondering if she would accept Wikipedia as a source.

"They've been doing it for over thirty years," she says. "All the food from America is full of pig genes."

You look at your plate. Well, at least you can be sure that the breaded prawns are locally sourced. "...nice to know, I guess," you say.

"Farhana." she offers. "Hello."

It takes you a moment to realise she's stopped talking about the pig genes and started introducing herself. "Amanda. Just over there." You wave your fork in the vague direction of your house. "Nice to meet you too." Surely Head Aunty will forgive you your lie. A dreadful gnawing curiosity grows in you, wondering what in the world made her come to a (GMO-filled, Christian-music-playing) Christmas buffet dinner.

You suspect you will never find out, because at that moment the playlist switches to a jazzy cover of O Holy Night and Farhana makes a face and dives into her purple cabbage. You're wiser than to ask why, so instead you fall back on: "So, you working or studying ah?"

Her reply is muffled. " Tada."( tak ada, lit. do not have) She comes up for air, still making that face. " Menganggur( unemployed) , but looking lah. But susah cari( hard to find) . Sebab Soros."

Soros? In your confusion you miss the opportunity to head her off. She begins talking about Soros. Somewhere in there you find out that Soros (and only Soros) is the reason she can't find a job. Instead she spends her time looking for cheap thrift bargains on the Internet that she then resells on mudah.my. But Soros has struck again and now her home is full of stuff.

Stuff that, you think, she could really use a buyer for.

Spoiler

Unlocked new action: Shopping with Farhana! Farhana's house is full of strange baubles she acquired from the Internet. It's not great or even good quality stuff, but if you just need to buy a bunch of cheap things to throw at a ROLL...

[X] Madam Priya is a schoolteacher with a deep interest in fortune-telling. You can't get away from her.
[x] Harinder is a gossipy policeman, complaining about inter-departmental politics and new transfers.

Click to shrink...

Listening to Farhana is thirsty work even when you're not doing most of the talking. You leave to get a refill and when you return to the table Farhana and her plate of segregated vegetables have gone, replaced by an Indian couple. They're talking a mile a minute in Hindi or maybe Tamil, you're not sure, but the moment you sit down they both turn to you. They both smile. He's lean, moustached and thickly bearded, and veiny-armed. She's plump and radiates a teacherly aura.

"Merry Christmas!" she chirps as you approach and sit down. "I'm Priya and this is my husband Harinder."

"Merry Christmas," he says. His deep bass voice rumbles tiredness.

"Sorry about that," says Priya, rubbing his bicep. "It's been a long day for him."

You only nod, having no experience whatsoever with long work days. You've always assumed they'd be something like long school days. "Merry Christmas."
"You look tired too. Long day for you? I thought only policemen never got a day off. Lucky I already knew that when I married Harinder!" Priya shoos flies from her food with one hand while still rubbing Harinder's bicep. Harinder makes a tired little smile. Hash tag relationship goals, you think, except for the whole working on public holidays thing. "Yeah," she says, looking closer at you. "You look really tired. Want to talk about it?"

You don't feel tired. Sweaty and a bit uncomfortable and maybe a bit grateful that Farhana's gone off wherever maybe, but tired? Maybe it's your eye bags - you haven't really been keeping the most regular hours. [5]

"It's okay to rest sometimes," offers Priya. "We all get tired, and it's the winter solstice."

"Priya," says Harinder, and then rattles off a long string of dialogue that you don't understand. You sip at your drink awkwardly - you're too polite to play with your phone in front of them, but you don't have anything to contribute to their chatter. "Sorry," he says again eventually. "It's her job hazard. I always tell her." He sighs into his drink.

"Helpfulness is a virtue, dear," says Priya. "I'm a teacher," she says to you in an explanatory tone. "SJK All Saints."

Your teacher-senses weren't lying after all. "I was from SM Lee Rubber," you offer in return.

Priya perks up. "Oh! Do you know Madam Lee Sin?"

You do know Madam Lee Sin. "I had her for chemistry, but only in Form Four." You'd accepted intellectually that teachers must have lives outside of school and tuition classes, but it's still weird thinking of Madam Lee Sin as having friends. Even if those friends are other teachers. "I don't think I had her in Form Five or Six."

"No," agrees Priya. "Politics, I think. You'll learn about that when you start work."

Harinder looks up from his plate again. "Priya," he says.

"Yes, dear," says Priya. She gives you a conspiratorial look - Men! - and explains. "It's like that at Harinder's too - Harinder, dear, it's fine," she says, and he goes back to his food with a defeated look. "I told him it was going to happen, you know, and he didn't believe me, but the cards don't lie."

You blink.

"It's destiny, you see," she says. "I learned from a real certified guru from Mumbai and," and she's off. You're not sure how much of it to disbelieve. Normally you'd disbelieve all of the stuff she's saying about card divinations and star charts and things, because... look, who believes that sort of thing anymore anyway. But here you are sitting with a BROOCH that could, if you wanted it to, broadcast Priya and Harinder and the Head Aunty's entire Christmas buffet over every TV, radio, smartphone, and Bluetooth speaker in the taman. And at home is the RAINCOAT, and Che Mat's... thing. So you really aren't sure how much of it to believe. Priya eventually winds down with, "and so I'm now also a certified guru for card reading and astrology. Isn't that nice?"

"That's really interesting," you lie completely smoothly, and take a sip from your cup.

Priya beams with acknowledged accomplishment. "So you see, if you ever want to talk about anything," she says, and slides a business card at you. It looks like a stylised playing card, except the figure on it has eight hands. On the reverse side is Priya's name, phone number, and email address.

Spoiler

Unlocked new action: Card Readings! Priya is a certified guru of card reading and astrology. You don't know how accurate she is, but she says the cards led her to you, so... maybe there's something there? You can ask her to do readings for you or give you advice.

Harinder finishes his food. "Drink refill, Priya?" he asks, taking her empty cup.

"Sprite, dear," says Priya, smiling.

"Amanda?" he says, taking your empty cup.

"Um, water chestnut, thanks."

He disappears in the direction of the buffet drinks table and Priya looks at his behind with a smitten look. You have to admit he does have a nice butt - definitely not like the usual overweight traffic cops you see directing traffic when a light breaks down.

"He's such a good man, but good men don't have easy lives," sighs Priya. "Department stuff, though, don't tell him I told you."

"I won't," you promise. "Politics, right?" Most of your experience with politics is the stuff you see on the news.

"Yeah," she says, stabbing her fork into her plate in the most vicious display you've seen of her in the last (oh god has it been) two hours. "He's really the most senior officer in the branch, but they started bringing in people from other branches - not even the same type of people, you know." She sees your confused look, and explains. "Different divisions, so it's not like they're helping him do anything, and they just call everything top secret classified while they take over everything."

You're only even more confused.

Harinder reappears with refilled drinks. He's also got a can of Anchor for himself, which he pops and gulps from as he sits down. He burps a bit, and excuses himself with a flash of white teeth under the bushy moustache. "Ah, that's good," he sighs. "So what were you ladies talking about?"

"Nothing much," says Priya with deliberate unconvincingness. She gives him a flirty look. "Just my wonderful handsome hubby."

Ew. But also, hash tag relationship goals.

"Handsome hubby still not getting promotions," he grouses. "F- Stupid new transfers can't do anything but ask for men." He tosses back more Anchor. "At least I have my lovely talkative wife at home." And now they're both giving each other soppy looks. "And tomorrow off, since I had to work today because they couldn't do a job rotation schedule if their fat asses depended on it." The soppy looks intensify. You wonder if his bicep will bruise from how hard Priya is gripping it. Maybe he's into that -

Bad! Bad Amanda! Time to go home! Look for an excuse!

"That was really great," you say, standing up and trying hard to look tired. "But I have to, uh, find my parents..."

"Merry Christmas!" says Harinder, looking like he's finally getting into the Christmas Day spirit at 10pm on Christmas Day and only after a huge dinner followed by a beer. "See you around."

"Call me!" says Priya cheerfully. You wonder what exactly her cards told her about you.

Head Aunty sends you home with a Tupperware of fruit salad and a door gift that includes an invitation to her church service on New Year's Day.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

When you get home there's a small package by the door. It contains a box of new Adidas running shoes, several packs of sports socks, and a dry-fit t-shirt. There is also a small framed photograph of the three of you standing around a birthday cake - your most recent one, because your pink hair is super obvious in it. Pa's smile looks stressed and Ma's eyes are already turning red in it. 'Merry Christmas Amanda. Miss you. Love, Ma & Pa' is written across the front of it in Ma's handwriting, in black marker.

The package has no stamps or anything on it to indicate how it was delivered or where it was delivered from, and postmen don't work this late anyway. It almost had to be a hand delivery. But-.

You gather up the stuff and lock yourself in the room. You stare at the photo and the gifts. You - you're crying. You miss them, you don't know where they are, you don't know when you'll see them again - and you're pretty much sure they're not at the kampung, but you also don't know what to do to find them or get back to normalcy or anything.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

You didn't get much sleep, but you still wake up early on the 26th anyway because... whatever. Circadian rhythm something wonky something. And also because the doorbell is ringing.

You look out.

You say: "!!!"

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

oh my god it's been four whole months since last update ugh

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

[1] That song also actually exists (it's called "The Christmas I Know" and was written/performed/recorded by a short-lived musician duo and - as far as Google can tell - has been lost to memory). It's the most accurate song I know about... well, Christmas in Malaysia. One day I'll track the CD down in my parents' house and get it.
[2] Lee Kuan Yew once called air conditioning the greatest invention to come to Southeast Asia. It's not much of an exaggeration.
[3] No carbs, no chicken, no vegetables, heavy on the seafood, beef, and sweet snacks.
[4] No conspiracy theories were harmed in the making of this update. I think.
[5] Omima Online is running a Christmas event, of course, but it's the same one they run every year: limited-availability mobs with special drops for a limited-availability shop and some themed loot. You already have most of the good stuff but you're helping the guild newbies [6] grind - which means Aunty 24/7 is back on duty.
[6] There are a lot of guild newbies. Having placed so high in the guild vs guild event kind of brought you a lot of fame.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

0 SPINS AVAILABLE! ( For the next roll, every material Amanda uses is treated as if it were one ★ higher than it actually is.)

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

Who's out there?
[ ] The Ches, impatient to see what you've got for them.
[ ] A group of men in police uniforms and an unmarked car.
[ ] An aunty you recognise from The Friendly Food Pandas.
[ ] A postman, holding a package.