Short stories

Chinese New Year 2020 special

In an ordinary streetside building, right on the 20th apartment on the 20th floor, there lived a young dude, Chase, and his little in-house neighbor, Ritacha, otherwise nicknamed as, Rat-chan. Unlike other house rats, she possessed a human body with rat features, such a pair of tiny rat ears, without human ears of course, a slender yet flexible tail, and one of her cutest features, three pairs of whiskers on her cheeks.

Her place of residence being in a refurbished doll house that Chase had found outside the apartment building trash chute, and he, as the engineer of the house, cleaned and redesigned the inside, putting in miniature furniture made of the same materials as human sized ones would be.

As for her personal things, such as clothes, all designed by herself. Because watching an hour of sowing lessons on the television a day can really get you to learn a thing or two.

The Lunar New Year was coming up in a week. But the house was, well, still very dull-looking.

"CHASE! GET UP!" Rat-chan screamed into his ear on his bedside.

"Ow... " his eyes slowly began to open, waking up to the sharp high-pitched sound in his right ear.

Chase moved his body up, rubbing his eyes and giving a yawn. He tilted his head down to look down to Ritacha, who was already in her "cleaning outfit", a white maid dress with a pink apron, arms akimbo, a wagging tail and twitching whiskers, clearly upset with Chase.

"Come on, it's already 9! We still gotta clean and decorate the house. "

"Alright alright..." his voice filled with a coarse reluctance.

It was Wednesday, and the Lunar New Year was right on Friday, so they really only had two whole days to make preparations. If Chase didn't ask for the days of leave, then they would pretty much be celebrating in a messy and dull 1 room home. Well at least Chase would since Rat-chan had already tidied up her doll house, just that there weren't any miniature sized decorations.

He quickly washed up and changed into his own cleaning attire, aka, his engineer work outfit, because unlike Ritacha, he didn't have a good sense of fashion, but did was good at multi purposing pretty much any object he sees. (in fact he somehow found a way to use a hand sized plushie as a sprinkler for the plants he had growing by his balcony)

Rat-chan was already waiting outside the toilet, with a bucket, a mop and all the cleaning materials for the house. Yes, in fact, despite her slender and small figure, she is capable of carrying things 4 times her body mass.

"So, shall we start?"

Using a large soaked cloth, Rat-chan wiped the table tops and chairs extra thoroughly, ensuring that when she was done they had a shine to them. And being tiny, she helped to clean the small corners of the house, even though they would go unnoticed by most people. Chase, being of normal human size, handled the areas where she couldn't reach the windows, ceiling fans and unsafe places like electronics.

Lunchtime came around, but they were only halfway done with the cleaning, since Chase had made quite a few messes when cleaning the living room.

"Chase, why do I smell something burning?"

"Huh? Oh wait... " he hurried to the kitchen, only to see burnt meat on the non stick pan.

"Crap... " he switched off the electric stove and quickly moved the pan off to the side.

"Is this still edible?" The two of them stared at the 70% blackened piece of produce, cooked till it was unrecognizable. Chase took a knife and attempted to cut it, but instead of the tender texture expected from any piece of cooked meat, it was pretty much a warm rock that the blade of an eating knife could not penetrate. As such, it was tossed into the trash right away.