AnimeCon Harem 15: 15 pt S (Patreon)

/// Short segment this time, have a lot going on IRL right now. S is for Stephanie!

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Brian is ok

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Chloey btfo the creeps

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Brian will jus need time 2 heal.

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Healer ppls hav him n a deep sleep or smth

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Will call u sumtime today??

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Whnvr u dont has class or whtvr

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Lmme no ok?? We all miss u

Stephanie stared at the new text messages with red eyes and she forced herself to take several deep breaths. It was proof, at least. Evidence she could cling to that this past weekend actually happened and wasn’t a product of her imagination or a psychotic episode. When she’d woken up this morning she’d hurried over to the mirror to ensure that her hair hadn’t gone back to blonde. There were only one or two photos in her phone of AnimeCon, and the only good one was a group selfie Stephanie had with Brian and Kelly in the courtyard area of the hotel there.

She’d spent a good deal of the long car ride back staring at it through her tears.

Her tidy little dorm room with its minimalist white decor felt sad and empty, because there was no life to it. Returning to college felt so empty and meaningless. The prior goals she had worked towards without real energy or enthusiasm felt pointless and restrictive. Stephanie didn’t want to hide away anymore, and the quiet librarian assistant life laid out for her no longer held any appeal.

I came back today so that I wouldn’t miss my nine o’clock class or my eleven-thirty one—and, here I am. Skipping them both, Stephanie thought with a listless sigh. I don’t care about them. They don’t matter to me. Being on time, the whole HAVING PERFECT ATTENDANCE thing I was so anxious about in the past—what was the POINT?

She was simply sitting with her knees drawn up in the chair at her desk, listless gaze traveling back and forth between her phone and her computer monitor. The post-con depression Brian had warned her about hit like a truck, and it felt like post-con despair. After tasting the forbidden fruit of love and anger, after having finally experienced both sexual intimacy and physical violence, there simply was no return to her old normal life anymore. The everyday routine was dull, dry, and completely colorless, and Stephanie couldn’t go back to it. It didn’t fit her anymore, her experiences and hopes and dreams and ambitious could no longer be crammed into the path she had walked before. She couldn’t go back to it.

I refuse to, Stephanie grabbed her mouse and brought it back up to her search bar.

It went without saying that the first thing she did was hunt for Brian’s accounts on social media. He was surprisingly easy to find—his username was Oberon—but the results were also disappointing. For the past three or four years, Brian’s online presence was almost as sparse as Stephanie’s. Perhaps even worse to discover, after perusing the history of his main timeline, it seemed as though Brian’s page had been sanitized into nothing but a sock-puppet account whose sole purpose was to share and reblog a certain Chloe-Ravioli’s posts, which seemed to mostly be articles related to feminist activism. In the scant few photos of him she could find, he looked tired and unhappy. There wasn’t even an Emily Rivera or a Cerulean in Brian’s friends list—Emily was nowhere to be found!

Determined, angry, and a little embarrassed at how obsessive she was acting, Stephanie kept scrolling all the way back through the years until she found his high school era posts. Finally, after clicking through each post and hunting, she found a connection to Emily that Chloe apparently hadn’t managed to delete, and only because it was a stray comment on a photo Brian was tagged in that was on someone else’s page.

Cerulean Seas: They Don’t Think It Be Like It Is, But It Do

With a wave of relief, Stephanie clicked the ahegao anime face that was Emily’s profile picture through to her friend’s page and found—memes. Anime memes, video game memes, bits and pieces of popular culture repurposed into reaction images and jokes, with three or four images posted up every day. Not spotting any actual real pictures of Emily, but increasingly certain this was the correct account, Stephanie tabbed over to see posts Emily was tagged in and finally discovered photos with her familiar friend appearing in them.

Oh right, she had DARK hair, before—before all of this, Stephanie remembered with a small smile.

Immediately jumping out at her was an old picture of Brian giving Emily a piggyback ride, which Stephanie instantly right-clicked and saved to her own computer. They were younger in the picture, Emily looked especially punkish, and Brian had a gorgeous grin and was wearing a cook uniform—an apron, a Marino’s Pizza polo, and a matching hat. In other pictures of some sort of LARP campout, Stephanie found Emily posing with Rebecca—whose account was tagged under the moniker Mara Thorferra. Stephanie immediately visited Rebecca’s page, and even sent her a friend request.

Several minutes later as she was continuing to creep through the pages of Brian and Emily’s friends in search of familiar faces, Stephanie saw a notification indicator pop up at the top of her screen with an insistent red ‘one’. Before she could even click on it, the indicator jumped to four unread notifications, and when she finally opened them up, she could only blink in surprise.

Accept Cerulean Seas’s friend request?

Cerulean Seas has tagged you in a photo: Fo34.png

Cerulean Seas has tagged you in a photo: AnimeCon_20XX__Friday_Photos_242.png

Cerulean Seas has tagged you in a photo: Flamituff Cosplayer.jpeg

While this was happening on her computer monitor’s screen, her phone likewise buzzed with incoming messages.

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: bruh is that u

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: i mean

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: BABE

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: not bruh

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: FORCE OF HABIT

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: lol

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: u hav zero pics of urslef on there wtf

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: ur [Stephanie Brandt] rite?

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: u just added Rebecca?

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: like secconds ago

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: tryin to bring us alltogether

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Kell deleted all hr socials sometime back I guess

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Shes just got an old malusmusica account I managed 2 find

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Goes by KELLY KILLY

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: But cant see her stuff on their til she accetps my fren reques

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: But shes at work now so yea

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: How u???

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Im at that same hotel still. Diff room tho

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Jus goin through all the animecon photos thatr up

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: Lookin for us and crying rn bacsiccaly

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: It cool if I call???

Cerulean Seas has tagged you in Sunday Morning Gazette’s post Cosplayers Flock to AnimeCon.

Cerulean Seas has tagged you in a photo: AnimeCon_20XX__Saturday_Photos_651.png

Cerulean Seas has tagged you in a photo: AnimeCon_20XX__Saturday_Photos_650.png

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: ur not rlly in those last 2

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: But Brians darkumasku is

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: thot u’d want 2 see

♥ iXi Cerulean iXi ♥: It cool if I call???