The Villainess Doesn't Want to Deal With This Shit

Chapter 2- Parental Problems and Unfamiliar Familiars

I woke up the next morning still in the room of the person that is not me. I had really hoped that this was all a dream but…

I spent the next month holed up in that room, crying. No one could handle me, the doctors reassured the two people that were not my parents that there was nothing physically wrong with me, but nothing could console me.

My life, my whole life, my family back in Kentucky, my friends… Kate, who if Kallen was to be believed, should have been here instead of me, all of that left behind, never to be returned to. I mourned for myself.

Kallen returned every day after the doctors left, no matter what I said to him. I raged and screamed and cried, blaming him. He still came back every time.

He probably assumed I wouldn’t help him if he left me like this.

“You should calm down now. You’re making it hard for the servants to leave the manor or for supplies to get in. Do you want to trap the whole manor here with you?” Kallen said one night as I sniffled miserably from beneath the covers.

“What do you mean?”

The god or whatever sighed. “Do you not notice the things going on around you? Do you not look out the window?”

I finally poked my head out from the covers to glare at him. “What does that have to do with anything?”

He just gestured to the large window that was closest to us. Cautiously I slid out from the bed to pad over to it, opening the heavy drapes for the first time since my arrival in this world.

The night was dark beyond it… but no, it wasn’t night. It felt like something shifted in my vision until I realized I wasn’t looking at a pitch black sky, but at a wall of… something that was pressed up against the other side of the window. Something that had thorns. “What are those?” I gasped, and the vines outside my window shifted as if reacting to being noticed. As they did, the bright light of day flashed between them for a brief moment before being obscured again. So it wasn’t night like I thought, then. I kind of lost track of time during my month of mourning.

“What do you mean, what are those? You created them.” Kallen scoffed. “You’ve surrounded the entire estate in terribly thorny vines.”

“But… Celeste can’t do that.” I looked down at my hands, clenching them. “I mean… yeah, she has a power, but… Creeping Vine is a mental power, not a… physical one.”

Kallen frowned at me from his perch on his bed, then I blinked and he was beside me, grabbing one of my fists. That in itself was odd. I’d noticed in the month I’d been here that Kallen… didn’t seem to have an actual presence. He couldn’t grab or hold things, his weight didn’t crease the bed that he preferred to sit on, and the maids didn’t even look his way when they entered the room while he was there.

It was like a ghost could suddenly grab my hand. Weird. I snatched it back out of his grip with a glare.

He sighed like I was the one being ridiculous. “I need to assess you. I assume you meant that Celeste had something different in the game?” I wrinkled my nose at him, but let him take my hand again.

“She- I- had a power called Creeping Vine. I think it was really just a way to extend play time, an excuse for a mini game. It was basically like slow moving mind control. You’d see in each male character’s flashbacks the event called ‘Planting of the Seed’ where they would have skin contact with Celeste, and that would, well, plant the seed. Slowly it would grow in their minds, basically infecting them with obsessive tendencies towards Celeste. In the game, each time you had a romantic event with a character, you would have to take time to use the heroine’s power to prune away at the vines invading their minds until they were free from the possession. But they weren’t physical vines. It was a mental power, a flip of the coin to the Heroine’s ‘Mending Vine’.”