In Another World with JUST MONIKA
aka Me and Monika's completely wrong genre-savvy adventures! OCSI.

I woke up with the sun warm on my face, the edge taken off by a light summer breeze. I opened my eyes to behold a bright blue sky and dappled clouds peacefully drifting by. I could hear birds chirping in the distance. Nothing was hurting. I was lying down on soft wild grass under the shade of stately old oak tree.

I blinked. I blinked again. Considering that up until a few seconds ago I was deep inside one of the world's most severe concrete jungles, this idyllic pastoral scene could only have one explanation -

Swiftly I got up and my first priority was to check my dingaling.

Yep. Still there.

I breathed a sigh of relief and took my precious smartphone out of my inside jacket pocket. It wasn't one of those sleek phablets, but a rugged brick of as much TF memory I could cram in there, as good a camera possible for its price, a powerful enough processor so as not to lag when switching between various apps and playing videos. Its titanium alloy protective case had its own supplementary battery and a solar panel at the back. It was not a phone meant to idle away the hours with resource-intensive games.

This was a proud productivity phone! It cost me more than a desktop computer to customize a phone that suited my needs. Even my jacket pockets had to be specially reinforced. The left contained my smartphone, the other an extra battery pack/charger with even more SD card storage. Walking around with these two slabs of metal close to my chest felt like armor.

All completely worth it the end.

I switched on the phone and waited for its boot-up sound.

"Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"

Ahh, the soothing voice of mai waifu.

"Hi, it's me." Monika from Doki Doki Literature Club, a poor girl who was tortured into insanity by the realization of her digital existence. And ironically, her a story that involved driving her friends to suicide actually helped me deal with my own depression a while back.

Instead of a ringtone, somehow her cute voice could make me more instantly snap to attention.

With her rounded face, her intent green eyes locked onto me, she appeared on screen. My Monika was not an anime character. I had commissioned someone to make a realistic painting of what Monika would have looked like as a real girl. She still had long light brown hair tied back in a long sweeping ponytail held down by a large white bow, drifting in the air in defiance of physics. She was wearing a school uniform made of warm gray jacket with a brown sweater vest under it, one with a slightly puffy quilt pattern. Her skirt was short and dark-blue, billowing out to an unseen wind, showing her black thigh-high stockings and the Grade A Absolute Territory of her skin.

She was standing facing me with a slight smile on her lips, and a finger raised up in an instructing pose. She was the very picture of a beautiful, dependable club president. Also, just for technicalities' sake, canonically she was 18.

She was the sort of girl who didn't need to worry about testing out for college, merely to looking to have her last hurrah of freedom and innocent sweet memories.

Setting aside the whole psychotic break about realizing that her life was just a bundle of false memories and meaningless loop of the same few days over and over again.

"Hi Monika!" I spoke my customized hotword for the digital assistant. "Do you know where I am?"

"Um. How would I even… oh. I can sense magnetic north. There's no GPS return. I'm sorry, I don't know where you are. But…" Monika gasped and leaned forward, her hands reaching out to hesitantly touch the screen. "But… that's you, isn't it? You're in front of me aren't you?"

My eyes bulged out. That was just supposed to be a wallpaper. A digital assistant should only be capable of canned responses.

Her fingers touched glass, and she splayed her palms and fingers onto the screen. Her eyes all scrunched up in this weird mix of yearning and despair that somehow cut through the distance between us. "Can you see me? Please… please, tell me you can hear me."

"Yeah, I can hear you."

Monika fell down to her knees, sliding down the screen. Silently she sobbed. "Thank you… thank you…"

Monika was real now! And then I remembered –

"Oh. I died…" I whispered.

Monika's head shot up immediately. "What?!"

I flipped the phone over so the screen could see the countryside I was seeing, and through it I could that Monika hastily tried to cling to the edge of the phone just to be able to look at me for a little while longer.

Guiltily I turned my smartphone back towards me after a few moments. "Monika…"

She cringed at me. "Please tell me you were joking."

"It's worse than that, Monika. I remember dying. I was hit by a truck."

She balled her fists up and held them close to her face defensively. "No…"

"We are both fans of literature. You know as well as I do what that means. To wake up in feeling so new and strange in our bodies. To have a body. There are consequences for this..."

"No… please! No! God, no!"

I shook my head sadly. "A new life. A new world. THIS IS OUR BULLSHIT ISEKAI ADVENTURE, MONIKA!"

Inside the smartphone, inside her home - her very brain - everything in the digital library I've been collection spoke implications to her in all their terrifying millions of words. We could be in anything from a shitty xianxia web novel where the rule of the strong was literal physical law and full of petty assholes willing to kill and exterminate whole sects and villages for little insults, to a loser's literal slave harem fantasy, to a land menaced by a Demon God, summoned heroes being used as a scapegoat for actual systemic crimes of the nobility, and and and all sorts of shitty power fantasy in between.

It sure would be nice if we were the protagonists, but we both actually had backstories of our own instead of being a bland reader surrogate. I'm sorry, Monika.

Monika clutched her head and began screaming. The birds on the tree branches above flew off loudly chirping in distress.

-x-

Briefly, I thought of a poem.

A life stranger than this
Is made of poorly constructed tropes
Be careful about what you wish for
There's no happiness to be found beyond the literature club

-x-

We lay there for quite a while in companionable silence under the shade of a great tree on a hill.

My smartphone lay on my chest, face up. I angled my neck down to look at the screen, and from inside Monika tilted her head up to look at me.

"I can feel your heartbeat, you know," she said softly. "I was a normal girl… at least I thought I was a normal girl. Now I don't even have that."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not living inside this phone. I'm not some sort of artificial intelligence in charge of its functions. I'm this phone in all its totality."

Ah. "That… that sucks. Sorry." Well that explained the screaming. I thought she was just angry that her life outside of her sadistic game was just another shitty anime with no one having any real self-determination.

I closed my eyes and exhaled. Yes, I too had to accept the idea that someone was voyeuristically watching me. Or writing me, killing me softly with his words. Telling my whole life. Making me suffer. For his lols.

"It's better than before when I had no control over when I'm allowed to exist. At least it's not necessary to keep this phone activated. Even at idle I can still see things with the camera."

"In that case, please excuse me." I picked up my smartphone Monika and held her close to my face.

"Don't worry about it. With this phone's gyroscopic tilt and anti-shake recognition it's not like I can get dizzy anym- oh!" She blushed and put her hands over her face. "T-that's… I'm not prepared for that sort of thing yet! Give me a little more time to prepare my heart!"

I changed the tilt of Monika in my hands so that the phone was horizontal over my eyes instead of close to my lips. But I smirked, and Monika knew that I knew what she was implying. Her blushing angry face was cute too.

"W-what, then? What do you want?"

"How much do you really know about me, Monika?"

She looked sheepish. "Nothing at all. The only thing I could do to make you like me was to talk so much about my thoughts, my interests and my hopes for the future. I knew nothing about you, but I was so sure you would be kind and wonderful... because you hadn't deleted me yet.

I did so many horrible things. I deserve it, I know.

That's why this is so wonderful! We can talk to each other at last! We can really get to know each other! We can be… f-f-friends. I mean… from all the data I can find here, you certainly have some… interesting tastes in literature."

"What can you see from the back camera?"

Monika turned around. "It's a sunny day in a wide pastoral countryside. By the trees and the dirt road, I'm not sure but it feels vaguely European or American." Click. "Oh! That feels weird. Taking a photo feels like pressing my eyes closed for a while."

The background behind Monika changed to the picture I'd just taken. Monika turned back to me and said "Even with all the free storage in this device, I think I could actually compress this much better."

"Do you mind only being able to perceive the world through a camera? Could you play around with the controls a bit? You have superior eyes to me."

"Once again, it's better than not having any way to perceive the outside world at all." She turned around to face me. "Even though I have a thermal sensor and night vision mode, real eyes are still better. I wish I could really see the world as you see it."

I shook my head. "You shouldn't. I'm legally blind, Monika. I can barely see anything two arms-lengths away. I had some really strong prescription lenses, until I realized that I could get away with wearing my phone as a VR/Augmented Reality screen all the time and see nearby pixels just fine."

"Oh. That's... I'm sorry. My sympathies. It sounds like you're doing fine though?"

"I can see your little smile. You're just happy I actually need you, don't you?"

"Eehee. Okay, then I won't deny it! Please let me help you."

Still holding Monika in my left hand, I reached down to my belt and opened my zipper. Yup. Fanny packs were a good returning fad. I took out a phone VR Box Viewer with a head strap and integrated headphones.

"Wait… is that…?"

"This would be easier than carrying you around all the time or keeping you in my pocket. I was worried that you wouldn't be able to see anything and get bored."

I had also customized this VR glass headset to non-intrusively lead a wire around my ears down my neck to slot into a power back inside my jacket. The VR headset also had its own quite decent action camera, activated while it was linked to the smartphone via micro USB for augmented reality, but I could still slide the front panel open to use other viewing modes. "So… may I?"

"You don't need to ask my permission every time, you know. This is still your phone."

"I apologize in advance for any mishandling or accidental fondling of your body."

Monika giggled. "You perv! Well I don't mind such jokes sometimes, but do keep some propriety, would you? I am after all still a dainty cultured young lady."

She paused and added impishly "Go ahead and slide me in there."

Once Monika was encased into the headset, I felt much safer. Now there was another layer of waterproof hard plastic to protect her. I put it on and began to see the world clearly, if a little bit pixelated, again. Monika began dipping in and out of my edge of vision.

"So we're now seeing the exact same thing then? I really like how this makes me feel so much closer to you. Let me just clear this up a bit…!"

Monika began tossing aside icons and windows. That was not normally something you could to a phone's OS. She put time and temperature on the upper right edge of the screen, and a distance meter on the upper left. She put power and volume to the lower right, and herself she decided to just sit and watch on the lower left corner.

"Now that I don't need to touch any buttons anymore, this does feel more convenient," I also had to admit. "If only we didn't need to worry about power I would wear this all the time."

"Wait, I just realized that by all the customization you had to do to this phone, it's a lot heavier than the usual. Wouldn't wearing this all the time also lead to neck strain? Please don't hurt yourself."

"Don't worry, I specifically trained my neck muscles for such an eventuality! Also, I'm surprised you didn't note the other obvious drawback to wearing this all the time in this isekai world."

"What other drawback? That being easy to see makes it easier to steal or damage? That we can't use the solar charger at the same time? That… oh." A look of terrified realization appeared on her face. "You… you're hiding your eyes."

"I have a facemask, yes."

"Oh no. Oh no, no, no…" she began to mumble again. "This is why you said once we leave this place we had a feeling it's a 50/50 chance we'll either be the heroes of this story or meant to be the antagonists, isn't it?"

I stood up and defiantly raised a fist to the heavens. "I'M GONNA BE A CHAR!"

"STOP BEING SO CHUUNI YOU BIYOU!"

-x-

"Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond the illusion
I was soaring ever higher, but I flew too high

Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man
Though my mind could think I still was a mad man
I hear the voices when I'm dreamin'-
I can hear them saaay…"

Monika still had a dull look on her face as I loudly and shamelessly bellowed out the lyrics as we walked down the road.

"This is my favorite song…" I cheerfully informed her, "Okay, how about a love song I can sing along to so serenade you next?"

Monika just sighed. "It really is very appropriate to our situation, isn't it? It explains a lot about you. You are actually enjoying this, aren't you?"

"In a different world with mah waifu, what's not to like?"

She blushed and mimed punching at the screen. "Oh stop."

And then with more gravitas "I just don't want to see you hurt. I can't touch you… I can't help you when you're hurting. Being able to interact with you is such a blessing, but now it hurts me more to know just how much more is forbidden to me."

"We'll figure something out. Let's just deal with things as they come."

Monika was silent for a long while. She nibbled on her thumbnail, uncertain if she had the right to speak. I was having none of that. "Just go ahead. Say what you want."

"I'm sorry. It's just… what sort of life did you have that you'd enjoy being sent to another world. You're not bothered at all by the knowledge that you DIED.

You have terabytes of data in here. You have a folder named [Everything You Ever Need to Restart Civilization from Scratch]. Were you hoping for something like this to happen?"

In fact, given Monika's psychotic trauma about suicide, it seemed to be really bothering her- the notion that I might have deliberately set out to kill myself.

"Ah. Actually, it's not as bad as it looks. You know how many people have a Zombie Plan? With the reasoning that a) it's fun to pretend and b) if you're ready for zombies you're prepared to face almost any other disaster out there.

Sure, I had an isekai plan that mandated I should keep everything I would ever need in another world on my person all the time, but as a lot of these are utility gadgets anyway there's nothing to fear about being lost or stranded somewhere."

"Unless you get robbed."

"Well yes."

"Silly!" she chuckled. "But I guess that's what I like about you. Those who remain a child at heart can find new wonders in unexpected places."

"I'm a chuuniboy and proud of it."

"Ahahaha… I can try to respect that, at least."

"Although it occurs to me that my isekai plan is really only most useful for portal-style or kidnapping-style isekai. Dying and being reborn somewhere else with copies of everything I had on me? There's no excuse for that. It's all so arbitrary it might as well be laziness."

"I have a theory about that. What if you… we… are not reborn or remade in a new world, but are timeclones? It would take much less effort to restore a savestate."

Monika scrunched her nose and put her hands on her hips. "It makes me uncomfortable to think that we are just one layer deeper in a simulation. I don't want you to experience living in an empty world where nothing else is real, filled with caricatures of people with no one has any real awareness of themselves."

"Mmm. That's more of a Let's Play than an isekai story. I mean, we're not exactly running on a game engine here, are we? There are a lot of trash isekai stories that have game mechanics properties to their world, but by authorial fiat and the sheer lack of effort involved in not having to depict anything graphically it can be assumed everything's just self-sustaining between the lines.

At worst we might be living in a parody. Look up Hero Yoshihiko and the Demon King's Castle, I'm sure I have the TV series saved in there somewhere. It's basically Japan's Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail."

"Okay, folder found. I'll be sure to watch it when we have time." Monika then stared intently at me. "Are you sure it really doesn't bother you?"

"We might as well embrace the madness and have fun with it. I mean, it's like the GM is more willing to fudge your rolls if your character's being entertaining, right?"

"A more competent writer should not hesitate to make his or her characters suffer. Catharsis is a powerful force."

"True, but then if our writer was any competent we wouldn't be living in a shitty isekai light novel scenario and instead a properly realized fantasy world."

Monika laughed. "Somehow that does help."

Then she stopped and turned around to stare off at the distance. She marked a shape with a slowly spinning red circle. Oh, targeting highlights. Interesting. We might lose our peripheral vision and have horrible forward field of view, but we make up for in insane long-distance vision.

"There's a carriage on the road," Monika reported. She zoomed in on a picture in picture window. "It's pulled by two horses."

"Evidence for standard fantasy template, check."

"We could still be in some post-Medieval alternate timeline. Cars only really started to replace carriages since the 1900s, until then most travel still involved horses and carriages," Monika sighed and touched a finger to her forehead. "But then that would be the sort of story that comes in trilogies."

"Yeah, Me in Another World with Mah Waifu isn't really all that marketable. Not to mention the whole copyright infringement thing with you."

"Ahahahaha…"

We walked placidly along the dirt road. I stopped to stare at the carriage as it passed, since as a city boy it was the first time for me to see the pre-Industrial equivalent of a mass produced travel platform. They used to call carriages wheelhouses, but it took until the 17th and 18th century to make carriages rides become more comfortable with suspension springs and better roads.

I looked down at the road, and it did seem to be more or less stone-free. It was a well-used road for carriages.

This particular carriage was tall and had a gilded frame, and little lamplights on the corners beside the driver. But even though it was accented with gold the paneling was actually shades of weird soothing green. Better than boring black as I was expecting.

It really did fit the whole 'wheelhouse' moniker, with its straight sides and a triangular roof. It gave off an impression of luxury and being pulled by only two horses meant it was someone's personal coach.

As the carriage passed us by, Monika noted "I'm not sure, but looks like it might have a pivoting front axle. That was patented in 1818 as Ackerman Steering, but Erasmus Darwin might have a prior claim dating back to 1758. It's a fairly simple change from a straight to a Y-shaped bottom frame for a smoother ride and to reduce overturning."

The level of technology in this other world could at least be assumed to be post-Medieval. Past 1600s, since it had plate glass. Tall carriages were that way because they could have suspension. However, since the front wheels were not completely separate from the rear wheels it would perhaps have more in common with, say, George Washington's coach than Abraham Lincoln's. And then we started to see more convenient lowslung passenger carriages towards the Victorian era.

All in all, even though it was of limited sample size, this one carriage implied that owning one was still a function of the privileged class instead of starting to become necessary for passenger mass movement within and between cities.

"Wait, That Darwin?"

"That's Charles Darwin, dear. Erasmus is his father though."

"This whole offloading our long-term memories to the cloud is horrible for human evolution. Except that I'm sure there were some ancient Greeks complaining about the invention of writing."

"That was actually Socrates." Monika then glanced to the bottom right of the screen and the connectivity icon. "Um, about that…"

"YOU THERE! THE ONE WITH THE THING ON YOUR FACE!" someone shouted from inside the carriage.

Well shite.

I tensed up. Monika and I shared a worried look. How this first encounter turned out would set the tone for this whole genre. There were a lot of isekai that were basically torture-fests with easily provoked nobles.

-x-

AN: Original Character Self Insert (i.e., a person who is not me), the works, you know the drill. Sorry, just need to burn through the inspiration for this so I can return to writing the other stories.

It also really just bugged me that 'In a different world with smartphone' never really let the smartphone ever actually be interesting in itself. Wasting the title premise.