“Don’t drink that!” I ordered loudly as my best friend Rebecca deFree raised a teacup to her lips. 

She flinched at my shout and turned to give me an inquisitive look. I sighed internally as I gazed at her gentle beauty which encased an even gentler personality that could never fathom that someone who claimed to be her friend could have possibly just slipped poison into her tea. 

“Honestly, Clarissa, you are going too far! How dare you accuse me of poisoning Becca’s tea. Why, Becca and I are practically family!” a snooty voice bleated from across the small table.

I narrowed a glare at the pretentious woman who I'd seen slip something into Rebecca’s tea and yet had the gall to accuse me of lying. I didn’t bother holding in the decidedly un-ladylike snort and I sneered darkly.

“Since when does being a romantic rival make you ‘practically family’?” 

“Clarissa, Lady Graycine isn’t a romantic rival. She and Edmund talked things out and we’ve all decided to be friends. I trust her,” Rebecca said with an angelic smile pointed at the blonde who could barely even fake a smile in return. 

“Ha!” I exclaimed with a huff, snatching the teacup from Rebecca’s delicate fingers before she could take a sip. And here I thought I might actually live past 30 this time around, I thought with a resigned sigh before chugging down the tea in two gulps. Graycine’s mouth dropped open and a look of bitter rage marred her admittedly pretty features. 

Almost immediately my throat began to tickle, prompting me to cough. The tickle quickly turned into a burning sensation that went up my throat into my mouth and nose, and soon even my eyes were burning. My light cough was turning into a lung-expelling hacking and after a while, I began to register the slightly metallic taste of blood in my mouth. 

“Clarissa? Clarissa!” Rebecca sprang up from her table and rushed to me, tears already beginning to gather in her beautiful lilac eyes. “Guards! Call a doctor! And arrest Lady Graycine!” 

I could hear the sound of fabric fluttering and high-heeled shoes clacking across the stone path, signaling that Lady Graycine was trying to flee from the garden. My vision was growing fuzzy as the burning sensation in my throat became so intense I wondered if I’d even be able to talk. 

“Be-Becca,” I gasped out between coughs. 

A few strands of silver hair fell across my forehead as Rebecca turned back to look at me and alternated between begging me to hold on and apologizing for not believing me. I let out a few ragged coughs before letting my lips lift into a smile.

“Don’t be so naive, Becca. I won’t be there… to look after you… anymore.”

“Clarissa, no! Guards, where is the doctor?! And call for a priest as well!” 

Using the last of my strength I reached up and touched Rebecca’s cheek. Tears splashed onto my chin as Rebecca turned to look at me again and I gave her my most brilliant smile. 

“Be happy, Becca. Don’t… miss me… too much…” My throat was slowly swelling shut and my strength was quickly vanishing. 

“No! Don’t die, Clarissa! Please! I’m sorry!” 

Well, this is a much better death than drowning. Quick, to the point, painful for sure, but all in all not too bad, was my final thought before my life as Clarissa Rennata, best friend to the heroine of a romantic fantasy novel, came to an end. 

* * * * * *

“...so you’ll have to make your own dinner tonight, understand?” 

I blinked and looked around to try and identify where the female voice was coming from. My vision swam a little after coming out of the most recent memory that my mind had unlocked without warning. You’d think after eight times I’d get used to the flood of memories as my past lives all came crashing into my mind like a tsunami bent on destroying everything in its path. But no, it was as disorienting as always and for a second I couldn’t even remember what my name was. 

“Teagen! Answer me when I’m talking to you!” the clipped voice demanded. I blinked and looked up at my current foster mom, my seventh in the past 5 years if my memories were right. 

Ah, that’s right. Teagen is my name this time. 

“I understand, Mrs. Simmons,” I responded obediently, looking up at her from my spot on the living room carpet where I had been coloring in a princess-themed coloring book. “I hope you have fun with your friends.” 

Mrs. Simmons blinked mutely for a moment, obviously shocked that I wasn’t throwing a fit about being left behind by myself. Although since I was only eleven I really had every right to be upset. However, Mrs. Simmons and her husband had made it clear that fostering for them was just a way to get a little extra money from the government and a way to brag to their friends about how charitable they were. Now that my past life memories had come back I had given up on acting like a child. 

As if she was afraid I’d change my mind if she hung around, Mrs. Simmon immediately opened the door of the small apartment and firmly shut it before I heard the lock sliding into place. Once the click-clack of her heels walking away couldn’t be heard, I immediately pushed away the coloring book and sat up. Silently I positioned myself into a meditation pose by crossing my legs and gently resting my hands in my lap with my fingers intertwined and thumbs touching. After a few minutes of deep concentration, I released my breath and flopped onto my back, splaying my legs out in front of me. 

“No qi energy to be found, huh? A little disappointing but not unexpected,” I said out loud as I crossed off the possibility of being in another wuxia story. 

Suddenly I let out a gasp and sprang to my feet. Running as fast as my stubby legs would carry me I dashed to the bottom drawer of the kitchen next to the fridge where the Simmons’ left me snacks and easy-to-make food for when I was hungry. My hands were actually trembling as I slowly reached out and pulled the drawer open. When an orange square package came into my view I fell to my knees and raised my fists in triumph. 

“Long live ramen!!” I squealed with delight. “Modern time-period stories are the best!” 

I quickly snatched up the package of noodles and began dragging a chair from the tiny kitchen table next to the stove. Within minutes I was staring at a steaming bowl of chicken-flavored ramen noodle soup. 

“Shoyu flavor would’ve been better, but oh well. Itadakimasu!” I exclaimed excitedly while clapping my hands together exuberantly. I felt a little unorthodox eating ramen with a fork instead of chopsticks, but this was California and the Simmons’ didn’t use chopsticks, so I didn’t have much of a choice. 

After feasting on ramen noodles and slurping up the over-seasoned broth exuberantly I leaned back in my chair and gave a contented sigh. Alright. Now I need to figure out what story this is, I thought to myself as I mentally reached way back across almost two hundred years of accumulated memories to my first life as a Japanese bookworm (although some would have called me an otaku… but I digress). 

My first life that I could remember I was a typical high school student. I got good grades, had nice friends, and spent time with my parents. But whenever I had a free moment you would find my nose buried in a book. It didn’t matter if it was a printed novel, webcomic, manga, manhwa, manhua, web novel, or even a story-based game; if there were printed words I lapped it up. 

In my second year of high school, my class went on a mountain excursion together. It was just another day messing around with my friends and enjoying not being in class together. That is until my best friend Aika decided she wanted to take a picture on the other side of the safety barrier. I told her it was a bad idea, but I followed her past the safety barrier right up to the edge of the cliff. After taking only one picture a heart-stopping crumbling sound came from beneath us. Instinct took over and without thinking I pushed Aika back and away from the cliff. Looking back on it, I definitely should have hugged her and pulled us both back. Unfortunately, I didn’t so I wasn’t able to move away before the ground crumbled away underneath me and I found myself crashing down the mountain ultimately to my death. 

I wasn’t sure what triggered it, but memories of my first life suddenly flooded my mind while I was getting ready for my first day of high school in my second life. Maybe because I’d been a bookworm who thoroughly enjoyed isekai stories, waking up in someone else’s body with both memories of my past life and the current life hadn’t been overly shocking to me. However, when I realized that this body’s best friend had the same name as the heroine in one of my favorite yakuza-themed shoujo mangas I was a little freaked out. Mostly because “my” name just so happened to be of the friend that took a bullet for the heroine towards the end of the story. 

Even so, the heroine Reiko-chan was too sweet for me to abandon. In the end, I followed the storyline voluntarily. When my plans to keep Reiko-chan from being kidnapped failed, I didn’t hesitate to throw myself in front of her and take the bullet a rival gang member had shot. 

Surprisingly, instead of dying properly that time, I once again woke up to find myself in a different story I read in my first life. And once again I was cast as the tragic best friend who died while saving the hero/heroine of the story. 

“Was that really such a prevalent trope? This is my tenth life already…” I couldn’t help but ask myself as I searched my memory for any stories that I had read in my first life that took place in modern California. Nothing really came to mind right away, but that wasn’t super surprising. I was way better at remembering characters than specific settings and details like that. “I guess I’ll just have to wait until I find my best friend in this life,” I decided before rinsing my bowl out with slight difficulty and putting it in the dishwasher.   

Even though Teagen had lost her parents at a young age and was bounced through seven foster homes because of her volatile temper tantrums (which were expressions of the emotional distress she had suffered), this really wasn’t a bad start to a new life. Modern plumbing for one thing was just about the most wonderful invention in the universe. And if the peaceful life from my memories was accurate there was no war, plagues, human experimentation, or evil mages that I had to worry about. 

Maybe… maybe I finally landed in a slice-of-life? My heart raced at the thought of such a mundane existence, but I tried not to get my hopes up too high. As long as I didn’t have to fight any more hellhounds I would be grateful every single day. 

After a few weeks of being left at home while my foster parents were either at work or hanging out with friends, I was beginning to get bored with summer vacation. It’d taken an embarrassingly long time for me to figure out how to work a TV remote (the last time I lived when TV was even invented the world was set so far in the future that I had a chip implanted in my brain that turned on whatever I wanted with a simple voice command) but I eventually got the TV working. It took me a while to figure out how to change channels, but once I found it I spent long hours listening to the news as I exercised in the cramped living room. Life experience had taught me that no matter what genre I was in, it always paid to be physically fit. You never knew when you’d have to run away from a rogue annihilation robot or a pack of goblins, after all. 

“In local news, the intersection of Main and Harvard Blvd has been completely closed due to an unidentified black orb.”

I froze in the middle of a squat and stared at the image on the screen. The “orb” that the news anchor was trying her best to describe without sounding like she was on drugs was actually more of a circular indentation in the air that seemed to pulsate with energy. My mouth dropped open and I sprang forward, pressing my hands against the TV screen and staring at the strange phenomenon floating five feet off the ground in the middle of what must have usually been a busy intersection. 

“No way,” I breathed out, leaving a cloudy spot on the TV from my warm breath.