F-Rank Puppeteer!! But I'll be Queen, and I'm not a narcissist!!!!!-Chapter 203: Password

"...So this is the golden apple tree..." I murmur, looking at the tree planted in the center of the garden at Esther’s mansion. After our "little" BDSM session, I came here with her.

She even helped me take a bath and was very affectionate with me—so affectionate it was weird, but it wasn’t bad. I actually kind of liked all the playful affection she gave me; it made me feel truly loved.

Now I’m looking at the tree, the tree I got by making a deal with Esther. I’d sort of forgotten about it, but I’m supposed to always accept Esther’s romantic or sexual advances without refusing.

"After our fight, I didn’t even get to think about this..." The golden apple tree looks like a common apple tree, except it’s shorter, with leaves of a more vivid, healthy green, and its shape is more symmetrical and less chaotic than a regular apple tree.

’I can pick the fruit easily...’ I reach out my hand and pluck an apple. The tree is already full of these incredible fruits. The purity of this fruit is so good and the material so suitable that a single apple like this can become a standard puppet without me needing to add anything.

Crunch!

I bite into the fruit, taking a chunk. One alone won’t hurt me. The taste is still kind of weird, but I think it’s pretty tasty. I throw the fruit on the ground and grab another, biting off just a piece and repeating.

’The fruit only has an effect with the first few bites...do I want to test it?...’ I want to see what happens if I’m under the effects of many, or at least that’s the excuse I use for this strange impulse I feel. So I pluck it, bite a piece, and throw the fruit on the ground.

’It’s weird, why do I want to eat these fruits so much...’ As soon as we arrived at the mansion and I saw the apple tree, I couldn’t stop thinking about eating this fruit, and now I’m compulsively eating more and more of it.

I lose so much track of time that when I come back to myself, I feel nauseous with an apple in my mouth. I look at the ground covered in half-bitten apples. I ate so many I want to throw up.

"I-I’m not going to get sick from eating so many, right?"

[Golden Apple] An angelic item from the continent of the angels, this fruit resembles an apple with the highlight being its beautiful shade of pure gold. It has the ability to force the evolution of certain things, though with a high failure rate.

’What exactly am I so compulsively trying to succeed at?’ I feel like my body is searching for something, so I force myself to pick up one more apple and bite it even though I want to vomit from all the apples I’ve already eaten.

"..." I grab another one. Now I’m panting, but I feel there’s something I need to do. I don’t understand where this behavior is coming from, but ever since I saw this tree, I knew I needed to eat the fruit again.

"...J-Just one more..." I drop the fruit, panting as I grab another. I’m breaking out in a cold sweat, and only now do I realize how swollen my belly is from all the fruit I’ve eaten. But I still bite down, hearing the nauseating sound of the fruit. At this point, my jaw hurts, so I don’t even chew, I just bite and swallow the whole chunk.

"O-One more won’t hurt..." I try to grab another, but suddenly someone grabs my hand as I clutch the fruit. I look and see Esther staring at me, shocked. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"What the hell are you doing!! How many of these did you eat? Do you know how dense and full of Hikishin a single one of these apples is?! You’re poisoning yourself by eating so many!!" She squeezes my wrist, making me drop the apple. She sits me down on the ground while looking around as if counting the apples I ate.

"I-I just..." I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know why I did it. It just happened when I saw the apple tree.

"..." Esther picks up one of the half-eaten apples and stares at it for a moment, but while she’s distracted, I grab the apple she took from my hand and bite it. She watches me eating and snatches the apple from my hand.

"EVELYN? Evelyn?!!...evelyn...evely..." I feel everything going dark, and I can’t hear her anymore. But as everything fades to black, my body finally calms down, as if after so many apples I had gotten the success I was seeking, even though I don’t know what that effect was.

"..."

"..."

"...U-Uhmm?!! Aaaahhh!! Esther, it’s not!...no...w-what?" I quickly get up, trying to apologize for my strange behavior and find a justification, but when I look around, I see a messy room.

Energy drink cans and pizza boxes scattered everywhere, and my old gaming setup, the same one I customized with my parents’ money—the one they got mad about because it increased my screen time even more.

"Ugh, what a bad smell." I cover my nose, sensing a strange odor of sourness and sweat.

"Did my room really smell like this?...My...my room?" Something seems to shatter when I finally realize it: this is my room on planet Earth.

"...?" I look at my hands, Evelyn’s beautiful, soft hands. I look at my back—I still have my tail, and the weight of my horns is still on my head.

"H-How...T-This doesn’t make sense..." I quickly get up from the bed and go to the computer, turning it on. Next to the computer, I see the 5 copies of the game, each one the diary version of the original game, but the diary copy number 6 is missing—the one I had gone to buy and died before playing.

"T-This isn’t..." I pick up the copy of Evelyn’s game and look at the cover. The cover has changed. Now on the cover is Evelyn with horns and a tail, but in the game, Evelyn never showed her dragon features in any route—the features I only gained after mentally maturing as a dragon.

The Evelyn in the game never truly matured, not even in the routes where she loved Grace. She was always full of hatred for the people around her who scorned her.

"Why the cover...wait..." I boot up the original game on my monitor, but the interface has completely changed. The game, which had a cute cover with Grace as the poster and all the romantic targets in different poses around her, is now completely different.

"...W-Why is the home screen covered in blood!!?" This isn’t a horror game. Before, the screen had lots of colorful, animated tones, with pink borders, but now the home screen is full of blood on the floor with a darkened border in gray and black. Also, even though the 6 route targets still exist, Grace is not in the game.

"...W-Why can’t I load my saves!?" I try to load the saves in the game, but nothing loads, and the new game button doesn’t work either.

"The developer login I bought! It should give..." I open the game settings and go to the developer tab, where the game’s developer allowed players who paid a certain price to have access to extra features and certain in-game commands.

It was mainly so players who loved the game but didn’t want to repeat unnecessary things could manipulate the game’s stats to better control events, and you could only use the tab if you had 100% completed the original game, which was my case.

"Password...what was my password?..." I try to remember what the developer login password was. I need it to reset the game, but when I try to remember, I realize something horrible.

"W-Wait...what...what was my name? The password was my name...b-but..." I don’t remember my name. This makes a few tears stream down my face.

"M-My name...my name isn’t Evelyn...my...what was MY NAME?!" I try typing various names I remember, but none are accepted by the developer login. It says the password is incorrect even though I remember the password was my name without any additions.

"W-What the hell is going on here!!? Why did the game change? Why can’t I remember almost anything from the past..." I back away from the computer as if it were a dangerous monster, only now realizing that I barely remember the past except for some general things.

"..." The blood-filled screen and the expressions of the characters in the game disturb me more than I expected.

’Is this the golden apple’s fault? But why? What does the golden apple have to do with this? Did I really return to Earth? Is this a dream?’ I try to pinch myself, but it really hurts.

"M-Mom! Dad!!" I realize they might be here since it’s my house. I quickly run from my room, desperately opening the door, completely ignoring the fact that my non-human appearance is not at all suitable to show my human parents.

"...MOM!! DAD!!!" I run through the hallways I know so well and reach the kitchen, and I immediately see the two of them. Mom is cooking, and Dad is reading a newspaper. This makes me sigh with relief at the common sight, until they both look at me.

"..." Both of them have no "face." The silhouette is the same, the appearance is the same, everything is the same, but there is no face, and I can’t remember what my parents’ faces looked like.

My father’s black hair, my mother’s short brown hair, the physique of both identical to what I remember, but their faces...I don’t see them.

"Honey, please don’t run in the house, you know it’s dangerous. What if you slip?" My "mother" scolds me with the tone I still remember she used, while my "father" turns his attention back to the newspaper, leaving the situation to my mother.

"I-I...what’s my name?" I ask, terrified by all this.

"What are you talking about, honey? Your name is Evelyn."

"...No! I’m serious...what’s my name?" I ask again.

"Honey, aren’t you feeling well? I’ve told you many times, honey, you should leave your room to go for a walk. Do you want to go to the doctor if you’re not feeling well?" she says, worried about me.

"N-No!! I don’t WANT to!" I yell at her—an automatic reflex from the past when I would stupidly yell at her because her worry always seemed like criticism to me, even though she was only genuinely concerned.

"I-I’m fine..." I run back to the room with tears in my eyes. I was always such a bad daughter. They were always good parents who worried about me, even though I never gave them the value they deserved.

"..." I close the bedroom door and return to the computer, opening the Developer Login.

"..."

[Password:******]

"My name..." I start typing, begging any god that exists to tell me the password is wrong.

[Password: Evelyn]

"..." I press the computer’s Enter button and wait. It takes a second for the computer to confirm the password as correct, opening the control panel.

"H-Hahaha, what kind of madness is this? My name isn’t Evelyn...t-that wasn’t my password..." I see the developer options, but I can’t even pay attention, I’m so disturbed by all this.

This place feels too real. It can’t be a dream or an illusion. But then where am I? There’s no way this is really happening, right?