I floated out from Shintaro's living room and into his bedroom, hair messy and draped in a dressing gown, an eyemask pulled up over my forehead. 

"Hm? Time... off?"

Shintaro's slumber-filled response reminded my sleep-addled self that asking him was an exercise in futility. He wasn't in charge of what I was doing. That was the Grand Storyteller. And I wasn't in a hurry to report a form for leave of absence to her any time soon. Even if I did, I'd have to then fill in one of those equally annoying return to work sheets and mark the time on the rota and calculate the subtracted time from my hours. In essence, what the Big ST doesn't know won't hurt her. As long as there's someone to keep the logs in tact and do the right paperwork then nobody bats an eyelid. Keep up appearances and all that.

The imminent changing of seasons was upon us. June 1st had arrived, and by some miracle, my charge, Shintaro Kiriguchi, and yes, this is Shintaro Kiriguchi, there's no doubt about that, had managed to survive an impressive 2 months. I mean, look at him, nobody would be able to tell he's actually an alien at a glance. Wait! I mean... nobody... would be able to tell he's a... lean guy with those baggy clothes he always wears! Aheh...

Speaking of logs and 2 months, turns out I've been neglecting mine for a while, since like April. Something someone said back then struck a chord... and suddenly, all motivation to make note of what I was doing as a Story Spirit left my body, and before I knew it I'd been neglecting it. But here I am again. I promise it's not just because I have a review coming up and I need to make it look like I've been doing something.

So, for completely unrelated reasons and entirely because I want to, I'm going to do an update on some of the big moments in Shintaro's journey between my last log and now, before continuing on in a more linear manner going forward.

"Time off? Are you asking to be deactivated?" queried Shintaro, tilting his head, turning back to face me, his legs crossed as he intently fiddles with and searches through the music collection that he'd been rinsing his way through ever since he got ahold of it. "Do you have a switch somewhere that you can't reach?"

Quiet, Shintaro, I need to collect my thoughts. Although... this is a nice excuse to put this off for later.

Shintaro's grasp of Japanese had been improving. His swanky automatic translator doohickey had been doing all the legwork for him, but as you'd expect from machine translation, it fell flat when it came to idioms and sayings. Without an understanding of the culture, we were and still are at risk of getting caught out. I did consider trying to convince people that Shintaro was half-European... but if there was anyone out there who actually wanted to follow up on that claim, we'd be in even deeper hot water. He's by no means ready to blend in yet, but it has become easier to pass off his weirdness as plain weirdness rather than an inherent lack of understanding.

"Nare?"

"Huh?"

Shintaro had started sliding his hand up and down my back, and I felt a chill shoot through my spine, and darted away, clutching my hands to my chest.

"Wh-What are you doing?"

"Looking for your switch. You said you wanted time off."

I lower my guard. Even us ghosts don't like being touched without permission, y'know. 

"No, like, like a break."

"A break.... Oh, I see, a break. A break from what?"

"This, I guess?"

"Wearing my dressing gown?"

"Yes. Wait, no! I like it. It's warm. No I mean a break from narrating."

"You can do that?"

"No. Wait, I mean, yes."

Best not to let him know that I'm not supposed to be doing this.

"Of course I can," I continue, "it's my story, who's to say I can't sit back and let it happen for a bit?"

"I suppose that makes sense... but I've never seen any narrators in any anime taking a break."

Anime was another new obsession that Shintaro had gained on top of music. The first one he watched had been a DVD which he found in the cabinet on the shelf below the RayStation II games, one featuring the girl with black pigtails and the flaming blue eye that hangs from Shintaro's keychain, and also on a poster plastered on the wall beside his desk, oh and also he had a figure of her on his windowsill. It was safe to say that Shintaro had been a fan. Fortunately for him, the RayStation also plays DVDs, so there was no new piece of human technology for him to grasp this time. He did seem markedly upset that the content on these discs was not as interactive as games, though. And that was a lack of control that soon translated into a lot of verbal confusion.

"What is happening? How did she go from looking like that to looking like that?" he'd ask, flabbergasted, making a variety of wild motions and size-and-shape-referential gestures with his hands. "And why did she do that? Were they not talking normally in the last scene? Why are they fighting now? And what kind of place is that? Why does that human have a tube of liquid sticking out of her arm? I thought humans ingested liquids through their mouths? Are they supposed to be an alien? Are they all aliens? Is this a documentary?"

As it turns out, the fantasy genre becomes even more fantastical when even the aspects that are supposed to seem normal and real are alien to the guy watching it. But, one comment, after he began to settle, was the one that showed me that this would be the beginning of a long term fascination:

"...I wish I could be as cool as her."

The dark-haired, slim, hoodie-wearing anime girl with a flaming blue eye had planted a seed of inspiration in Shintaro. Finally, fiction had left an impression on him. He finished the whole series in a single night.

And, you know, I'm happy for him, but my god was it a challenge to wake him up the next day for school. I had to tape his eyelids open for homeroom. Believe me, I am not going through that again. No anime after midnight on a school night for Shintaro.

...I'm not his mother. I'm not his mother!

On weekends, though, even I get in the mood for a bit of relaxation. There's a lot less pressure on those days. Shintaro stays home for most of the day, and only ever goes out the house to join me shopping. Well, I guess it's more like I'm guiding him on how to manoeuvre his way through the process, but it's no harder than doing it at school. Taking Shintaro shopping is low-investment. People who work minimum-wage at Mawlsons aren't paid enough to question whether their customers are aliens or not. And I honestly doubt that he's anywhere close to being the weirdest patron they've had. So interactions with Shintaro are more like playing a game of The S*ms than anything else. Of course, just like The S*ms, things can and do go wrong, but nothing that can't be fixed by just brushing it off and trying something else.

Since we both spend a lot of time at his place, Shintaro and I have already been making our way through the AmePuri Kiss series. Not that I... enjoy the series or anything. It just so happens that we may have bought every game in the series in the past two months, and are already waiting for PurinSoft's next announcement.

The first to cross off the list was finishing the rest of That Kiss We Shared Over Pudding. While it was a satisfying enough experience, having selected Iwaizumi's route first, nothing else could top it. We also both agreed that Mayu's route was the worst.

"How could a human be so easily and simply attracted to another human without questioning it? And how could the player character be forced to act so oblivious to her advances? If they were honest about it from the very beginning, the whole experience would have been 2 hours shorter!"

Yeah, not sure you quite realise what position you're in. Might be a little early to introduce him to the phrase 'pot calling the kettle black', huh...

It was the weekend after we earned the achievement for unlocking every route in the game that Shintaro, once again failing to progress much further in Plastic Screw, this time attempting Plastic Screw 2: Daughters of Freedom to no more success, that I proposed we go out and buy more AmePuri Kiss games. I would argue that the more philosophical story in Plastic Screw 2 made it even more of an overwhelming experience, because after he shut the game off he was lodged in the folds of the floor cushion like a boulder. I'd done Shintaro the courtesy of searching the nooks and crannies of his apartment for any spending cash, and in my perusal had found an envelop labelled 'emergency funds' beneath his sock drawer, alongside a receipt for an electronics exchange store. Rest in peace, RayStation IV, you will be missed...

It was questionable whether what we were planning to use the money for was really an emergency... but given that the money is technically Shintaro's and this was technically Shintaro, then... I think it's only fair that I ask the man himself. So I did.

"Do any of the other 'games' include Iwaizumi?" he asked instantly in response.

"Yes," I clarified. "All of them."

Shintaro came home that evening with not one but two more AmePuri Kiss titles. One was the very first game in the series: Ameagari Princess no Kiss, for the RayStation I. The clerk had recommended that one, given that, since the first game had less girls in it, in terms of how much of the game she takes up, this one had the most Iwaizumi for your buck, or, yen. It was also in the bargain bin, being for a console that at this point was only owned by nostalgic middle-aged dads. On the obi that the case still came wrapped in, it proudly announced that the game had finally received a console port. A quick search on my informational databases revealed that AmePuri Kiss had started out on the PC98 home computer during the '90s. This fact soon became evident once we booted up the game (another handy feature of the RayStation II is that it's also backward compatible. You can't beat retro). It had a crude pixel art style, limited colours, uninspired backgrounds, minor animations (if any) and an awkward art style. Looking at them, it made me think that if any of these girls had existed in real life in the forms they were depicted as in the game, they'd probably be more likely to caught out as aliens than Shintaro. Shintaro himself didn't seem to mind though, probably as the consistency of the human form wasn't exactly something he took into account; we all looked weird to him, after all. That was, until we reached a certain point in the game.

"...Who is that?"

[???: H-Hello there... I'm new in town. Nice to meet you. My name is Erika Iwaizumi]]

Erika

Iwaizumi

I'd never seen Shintaro's jaw hang so low.

"...This is Iwaizumi? It... It can't be. Is she some sort of imposter?" His hands clutch around the controller and sweat beads trickle along the grips. "I can't accept this, Nare... It's not possible. Who replaced her?"

"Well, if you think about it, the Iwaizumi we know is actually the replacement. This one is the original."

As if I'd injected him with deadly divine wisdom with that statement, he froze in shock, and remained in absolute silence for the rest of the playthrough. We finished her route, which was a simple enough task as there were only a few plot-decisive decisions to make and the flags for picking her route were obvious. The final shot showed the faceless black-haired male protagonist sharing a kiss with Iwaizumi in the midst of a summer rain storm, rendered in as much detail as the artists and hardware at the time were capable of.

I remember the controller tumbling from Shintaro's limp hands.

"Give me Iwaizumi back."