"Once I rose above the noise and confusion

Just to get a glimpse beyond the illusion

I was soaring ever higherrr, 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.

Mmm. My life was not really something I would miss, but it was not all that uncomfortable either. I wondered if some god was watching how much I was tempting fate and decided to do something about it.

"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 the 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 after 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 low-slung 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.

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