The Littlest Prison

"Urgh… Blerg…"

His face above a bucket, Noah was vomiting once again. Of all the times for his camera to play tricks on him and his controller to act up, they had to wait for the first day he had cake in ages.

"Urgh…"

Why yes, it seems he wasn't used to his new body yet. He still had the occasional panic attack when he would wake up and feel the nausea, but he thought he had gotten used to it after all this time. Reality was a harsh mistress, though.

"(Those tears… what happened to me?)"

When his nausea calmed down a bit, he thought back on the events earlier in the day. Why did he feel so happy when that maid said he could talk as much as he wanted? Sure, it did bother him to be condemned to eternal silence because of some dumb curse, but why did he feel THAT happy?

It was almost as if…

"(It was as if I had waited for someone to say that to me all my life…)"

It wasn't an exaggeration. This was how he truly felt—a profound longing that he didn't know existed inside him, for years.

But he had been Vasilisa for only a few months. There was no way he could have something so strong ingrained in him in such a short amount of time, right? Besides, he hadn't cried ever since…

When was the last time, actually? First year of high school maybe? Well, that was something he didn't need to remember.

When the tears rolled down his cheeks, it almost felt as if it was someone else who was crying. Someone deep inside him.

"(... What am I actually?)"

This was a strange question to ask oneself while holding the bucket that unwillingly took on itself to hold the contents of one's stomach, but he was seriously wondering about it at the moment.

From his point of view, he was Noah, a 21-year-old college student. Lean, a fan of video games and books, and with a history of not having a girlfriend equal to his age… + a few months, if that counted.

His body, though, was a 14-year-old girl named Vasilisa. He quickly accepted it as part of a sort of roleplay mindset but this, the "he" people could see, was truly, indubitably a "she." Vasilisa wasn't Noah, yet Noah used her body.

How could something like that happen?

Well, his hypothesis was that, if they were to be compared to PCs, his mind, Noah's mind, was a new OS installed into Vasilisa's hardware.

However, this interpretation disturbed him deeply.

What this could mean was that everything in this body was still just Vasilisa's and that some event just changed the connections in her brain so that she thinks she is someone named Noah or believes that the original Noah and she were the same person.

After all, you can really just copy an OS again and again, copy a whole hard drive onto another, and then throw the original away; the possibilities are endless.

What if he was just memories in a body? What if the true Vasilisa was just made to believe she was someone else? How could he prove without a doubt that he was the same person as the one who drowned that day? Did he even drown? Maybe the actual Noah is still alive in his world and he is a copy playing make-believe?

No, Noah might actually not even exist in the first place. Now that he thought about it, some of his memories were hazy. He didn't remember his family name, for instance, even though most people used to refer to him using that instead.

Thinking about it, people here didn't seem to have family names either. What if they created his mind and the only error they truly made was not knowing people from his world had family names?

Wait, even admitting they didn't create him and that he isn't part of some experiment, how could he be sure that anything he remembered about his old life wasn't actually a fabrication? Did he really play Penultimate Fantasy? Did that game even exist? In fact, did he even exist before waking up her—

"B-Blurgh… Urgh… Blargh…"

No… No, maybe he was a bit wrong. The last time he genuinely cried wasn't that day in high school. It was right now in front of that bucket.

Noah could exist.

He could have somehow been placed into this body in a way that would somehow justify him as being the same as before.

But whatever the truth, he couldn't know it. Worse, he couldn't live without knowing it.

Being locked into his room? What a joke. That would be a way bigger prison than his current body!

"N-No… Not… again…"

His lower stomach started to hurt, a sign he learned to fear in those few months.

Again, his body was attacking him. It always was, truly. Contrary to the lady of this house or the maids, it could do so relentlessly for as long as he was alive, and he would have to deal with it.

———

"Good day, mistress…"

Opening his eyes, Noah heard a rustling of papers. Standing close to his bed was the pink-haired maid holding her trusty notepad.

"Ah… Vasilisa, yes. I brought your breakfast."

"..."

He looked in the direction of the cart full of food. Again, that maid had prepared too much food for one person.

Well, that probably wasn't a problem though—he saw her gobble all those things like some sort of dark hole the day before. If he didn't ask for a few, she would have probably eaten them all.

Good then, he didn't feel like eating anyway. All he wanted was to sleep all day if possible. But it seemed the maid wouldn't let him do that.

"Sigh… I see it in your eyes," she said with her usual tiredness. "The same look as the students in adventuring schools when they realize adventuring is more than just killing monsters and getting famous… You want to skip your lesson today, don't you?"

He nodded slowly. He could still learn everything another day, couldn't he? Well, not that it could answer his questions or bring back his old body, though.

This was so useless.

"What coïncidence, me too..."

The maid pulled the chair she brought the day before and sat close to the bed.

"That being said, I can't just come here and sleep because you don't feel like learning. I am paid to teach you, you know?"

"..."

How was that of any concern to him? He just wanted her to leave. If he could pay her himself, he would have just handed her a check and that would have been the end of it.

"So I will talk about random things from my time as an adventurer so that if someone passes in front of the door, they think I am actually teaching you. Is that okay?"

"... W-Wha… Whate…"

Whatever, he tried to say but gave up in the middle of it. Trying to talk with this body was mentally tiring him.

"... Okay, I guess," said the maid sitting more comfortably in her chair. "Now, which should I choose? Hm… Ah, what about… the time I went to that dungeon which you can only enter if you are naked?"