#i might send shirahama through Ray's route and insert tashiro at some point in there ����

[kagiura-akira]

well okay ofc I have to go ask abt debugging shirahama. one time when I was trying to 100% the mysme routes I was like “oh let me set up 707’s entry route so I can start at his branch and get the bad endings” and then I romanced him so hard in the initial days that it was literally impossible for me to get one of the bad ends

Lmaoo YES because I would LOVE TO TALK ABOUT DEBUGGING SHIRAHAMA. Also worth noting I COMPLETELY skipped through the suggested playthrough order the first time I played mysme and went straight for 707's happy ending 😂 last I was working on was Jaehee and I had just gotten her first bad ending (you skip off to be in love with Zen instead lmao) and that was 3 years ago SO I'm a little Rusty™ at the game descriptions, hence the need for refresher courses.

The first thing he noticed was that the game wasted absolutely no time in throwing him right into his objective: collecting those colored little hearts and hourglasses—though he couldn't say he fully understood what the latter was for. When he'd asked the first time he incidentally got one, the system was silent.

“System, do you have a tutorial mode?”

...

“You could at least acknowledge me,” he grumbled. He tried for at least a good 10 minutes to get the thing to answer him until it dawned on him.

“The system will now respond to ‘Jesus.’"

It really wasn't kidding, was it? Suddenly he felt a strong urge to bash his face into the apartment's granite kitchen counters.

“J... Jesus,” he muttered reluctantly.

“Assistant menu open. Please choose from the following options:

1. Open story summary

2. Check hearts/hour glass balance

3. Open CG progress menu

4. Set character profile”

“Uh, ‘open story summary’ I guess.”

The story certainly was an odd premise, albeit novel for its time. The disembodied voice explained the death of the owner of the apartment and the gist of the whole “RFA” chat, with brief descriptions of its characters. It was kind enough to offer a suggested playthrough order, but he wasn't in a state of mind to start with the male love interests, so Jaehee it was. After fumbling around with the user settings to update his name (Kyouko, for the sake of making it less jarring) and picking a preset profile picture, it was well into the afternoon when he finally opened the app. The group was active—he must have counted at least ten existing chats from earlier in the day.

Shirahama had always been cool and casual when it came to DMs or texts. Despite his otaku nature, he wasn't as “chronically online” as some of his classmates, especially Miyano or Tashiro. His plan was to introduce himself to the chat slowly for a few days—get to know them better and such so his sudden presence didn't seem like he was looming over their chat too much. They were always chatting every few hours, so it would be weird if he was suddenly online all day every day. It was already weird enough that he was using a dead person's phone. His non-pressuring strategy usually worked well enough to win over most NPCs, so he kept his strategy to play it cool, and it got him moderately positive responses. Everything was working just fine.

That is, until Day 5.

After four full days of carefully inserting himself into this group of friends, with seven more to go until the end of the route, Shirahama found himself unexpectedly in the worst case scenario.