A/N: This is my first published fanfic, so please keep that in mind while reading it. Accordingly, reviews are very welcome. If this story does well, I might even expand on it (maybe make it part of a trilogy or something, i'm not entirely sure yet). I do not own DDLC, that honor goes to Dan Salvato. While I admire Dan for creating such a story, I still dislike that he never gave Monika or the other Dokis (but especially Monika) a happy ending. I would also like to give due credit to the owners of the various DDLC mods referenced in this fanfic. Thanks for helping to keep the DDLC community going!

As a treat for those who have played the DDLC Encore mod, the school is named after Monika's favorite flower from that mod, the Japanese Camelia. This flower is called Tsubaki in Japanese, and is supposed to represent humility, discretion, and perfect love. It also amused me to make the initials for the self-insert main character MC, despite the fact that the game's MC will also make an appearance in the story.

Sunday

It had all started out as your typical Sunday evening for Matt, looking over his school supplies, and making sure that he had everything that he needed for the second half of the school year, at his new school, Tsubaki Academy. After giving everything one last look, and confirming that he did in fact have everything that was on the list that he had been given by the school for third year high school students, Matt turned, his blue eyes gazing upon the only picture of his parents that he still had.

To most people, they would have seemed like a typical Japanese married couple who loved each other very much. Both of them had been in their early thirties when Matt was born, and both of them looked younger than that, his father fully Japanese, while his mother was half-Japanese, half-German. Unbeknownst to Matt, while she had spent her entire life in Japan, she had faced discrimination from many members of Japanese society, who thought that people like her would be the death knell of their ancient, harmonious, and homogeneous society and culture. Indeed, Matt himself had been teased and taunted by his classmates for his western first name. In Japanese name order, his name was Chiba Matthew. For most people, Matt would allow them to call him Chiba-san, and for those who had become his particularly close friends, they could drop the honorifics so customary in Japanese society, and just call him Matt.

Unfortunately for Matt, there were not all that many people who he felt close enough to that they could drop the honorifics that went with his name. In fact, he could only count one such person, his childhood friend Sayori. After Matt's parents had died in horrific accidents of which Matt was the only survivor, Sayori's family had taken him in, and raised him, even maintaining Matt's old family home as the courts had directed. Indeed, he was supposed to have spent the entire school year at the same school that Sayori was attending, but due to a massive miscommunication at Tsubaki Academy, they had misplaced Matt's paperwork, and thus Matt had had to attend a nearby public High School for the first half of the school year, only now being able to transfer to Tsubaki Academy to learn alongside Sayori. In fact, when he had been laying flowers and paying the proper respects to his parents earlier today at the anniversary of their deaths, Sayori had accompanied him, laying her own flowers at their headstone, and paying proper respect to the deceased.

Sitting down on his bed in his parent's old house next to where he had laid out his school gear, Matt reflected on how empty that the house was; and even though the old house had all of the books, knick-knacks, and other things that signified that this was a house that had been lived in, Matt had the entire place to himself, thanks to the legal system. For complicated legal reasons, he wouldn't have to pay any utility fees or taxes on the house and property for at least a decade yet as the prefecture would assume those costs, but it was still as if he could feel the ghosts of his parents wandering around the house, doing daily things before vanishing, and appearing somewhere else in the house to do it all again. Indeed, the hairs on the back of Matt's neck had been standing up the entire time that he had been here, but he had never really believed in ghosts. This led him to disregard his body's own reactions, feeling only anxiety, directed more at the circumstances that had brought him here, than anything else.

Back a few hours ago in reality, Matt had just finished playing Doki Doki Literature Club on his laptop for the fiftieth time. All this time, he had been looking for a way to save all of the girls, or at the very least, to save Monika herself. Matt had scoured internet search engines from end to end, tried all sorts of combinations in the poem mini-game to appeal to Monika, and had even tried writing to Dan Salvato himself, but had only gotten a generic response back from DDLC's creator, telling him that there never was a way to save the girls, and that he had been getting tired of so many people asking him this same question. Matt had even tried moving Monika's character file to a special folder, complete with a message written in Python for her that he had wildly hoped that she would have at least noticed and read, but all to no apparent avail. Matt had been enchanted by Monika's twin Emerald colored eyes ever since he had first 'met' her in the game's clubroom, and had actually developed a crush on the Emerald Eyed Goddess. While he had been hopeful that he could find a way to make her fondest wish come true, he also was realist enough to realize that such a task would take a phenomenal amount of work; work that no scientist or group thereof in reality had even attempted, much less accomplished.

Thus it was that when a demonic looking carbon-black arm and hand had silently pulled him into the screen of his laptop against his will, he had found himself in the MC's own bedroom upon awakening from the experience. The fact that he had seen the MC's own body looking back at him in the mirror when he checked made his already palpable confusion worse. Finding out that he had been given memories of MC's entire life alongside Matt's own memories from his own reality, now that had been what had really shocked him. In the face of so many shocking circumstances, Matt passed out on the restroom floor.

Awakening sometime later thanks to Sayori's worried cries and screams, Matt went with her to pay the proper respects to 'his' deceased parents, after promising her that he was alright. Given that Sayori was here with him, he didn't want to let on to her that anything was out of the ordinary. He needed to talk to Monika, but Sayori would be the key to safely doing that, since she had been the one to invite and introduce the game's protagonist to the Literature Club in the original game, and many of the mods thereof. Since she was MC's childhood friend, he had to try his best to make sure that he didn't slip up, and give away that he was not MC. At least, not until she'd gotten him in touch with Monika, anyway.

When the pair had reached the cemetery where the headstone of MC's parents had been respectfully installed, Matt was the first one to lay flowers at the headstone, clean it, and then pay his respects to the deceased in private, while Sayori stood at a respectful distance. If there were an afterlife, Matt wondered what MC's parents would think of this. After all, while he looked like their son, he was not their son. Would they still feel honored that he had come to pay respects to them, or would they think that this whole affair was some kind of farce? For his part, Matt hoped that they would come down on the former part of the equation, rather than the latter. Given the new reality that he had been abducted into, the last thing that he needed right now was divine disfavor, even if he had never really believed in God, Buddha, or the Kami. For the last two though, he had the excuse of being from America, where both Buddhism and Shinto were rare. Signalling to Sayori that he had finished, Matt stepped over to where Sayori had been standing, and waited for her.

While Sayori was thus distracted, Matt scoured his new memories from this world, looking for hints as to how MC's parents had actually shuffled off this mortal coil. When he found those memories, he honestly felt the sort of sadness that one would upon seeing a known character die tragically on the movie screen. It was as if these both were, and were not, his parents that his memories showed passing away. He was sad that these events happened, and part of him wanted to drop to his knees on the ground in mourning, but the part of him that remained from reality knew that these were not in fact, his parents. Thus, it was not his right to mourn them as if he had actually been their son, right? With this mental war going on in the confines of his head, Matt had to focus and see what had actually happened to the couple.

From what he could recall from MC's memories, he had been a young child when these events had taken place, but he remembered that the family had left their hometown of Maebashi, in Gunma Prefecture, and went on vacation at the beach in the nearby Niigata Prefecture. What no one knew at the time was that one of the fault lines in the Sea of Japan was just about to generate one of those earthquakes for which Japan had become known, and that this would generate a Tsunami, on the very first day of the family's vacation. They had been at the beach itself when the earthquake had struck, and the seawall that they had been next to at the time collapsed, taking a large part of the road, and multiple large, heavily laden semi-trucks down with it. MC's mother had been pinned in the resulting wreckage, and despite the efforts of his father, and his own screams for others to help them, as well as the collective efforts of all those who had rushed over to assist, they could not free his mother from the mangled wreckage and debris that had ensnared most of her body. MC's mother died from her injuries before her body could finally be freed by heavy construction machinery, and what had been such a happy vacation had suddenly turned to ashes, as both father and son found themselves in mourning the same day that they were just having fun on the beach.

This would not be the only tragedy to befall the family that day however, as what happened next was attributed to some as merely a severe case of bad luck, while to others, some sort of curse or devilry must have been at play here. After the two remaining members of the family had been cleared to return to their hotel room, located close to the beaches outside of the city of Nagaoka; a few hours later, the systems that Japan used to detect a Tsunami worked their technological magics, and the alarms sounded. Thinking that everyone would be safe if they huddled together on the roof of the twenty story hotel building, the building staff directed everyone in that direction, unaware that nature, fate, the universe, God, evil, or whatever else that one happened to believe in had different plans for everyone involved in what would become yet another disaster.

As the Tsunami came close to their building, MC could not recall seeing any waves this tall before in his short life. The towering black wall of water kept moving toward them at speed, devouring all that was in its path, just like those monster movies that his parents had discouraged him from watching at his age, but which he had still managed to watch anyway. Huddling close to his father as the gigantic wave approached, he could sense the fear in the assembled crowd, hearing their shrieks of terror before the wall of water struck their building, causing it to rock and sway. Before the building itself shockingly fell over, flinging him toward an abandoned fishing boat, he swore that he could see charcoal-black figures swarming around the building, each one of them wearing masks that represented Oni, Tengu, and other dark monsters of Japanese folklore, their black figures sometimes glowing with strange emerald green lines that seemed to pulsate as they did whatever it was that their strange works entailed. His last sight of these creatures came as he impacted the deck of a fishing boat at speed, the impact of his head against the deck knocking him unconscious as the boat that he had landed on was carried further inland by the waters.

The next gameside memory that Matt had after that detailed his awakening in a hospital, being told as gently as possible that both of his parents had died, and that his longtime friend Sayori's parents would now be taking care of him. While MC had felt great sadness at the news, when asked by a policeman about what had happened to him, he managed to relate everything that he had seen to the officer. The officer had looked very skeptically at him when he had mentioned the black figures, and had chalked it up to a child's imagination. Especially that of a child who had been through more in one day than most people dealt with in several years, and had suffered various injuries from a high speed impact on the deck of a fishing boat, as well. From the policeman's point of view, the kid had been lucky that he hadn't just been splattered dead upon that little boat, and that he had not suffered any brain damage, according to the doctors that had been assigned to his care. No one was sure how he hadn't simply died, as he had fallen onto the deck of the fishing boat from great height, but here he was, alive and with injuries that should fully heal within a few months.

The investigation into what had happened at that hotel continued, and days later, it had been officially determined that the cause for the collapse of the building had been sub-standard construction by a company that used a lot of foreign laborers, especially from Southeast Asia. The Japanese Government went after the company for numerous violations, even forcibly disbanding them via the courts, and sending settlements to those affected from the company's assets. Fortunately for MC (and now for Matt), Sayori's parents had kept that money in a high earning savings account for him that he could touch only when he turned eighteen years of age, and because of this, he already had a large financial nest egg that he could now draw upon, if needed. With careful management of this money, it could even last him beyond college, and give him a leg up on his peers.

Coming back to himself from his memories of the game's past, Matt looked at the clock on his cell phone, and realized that it was getting quite late. Going to an inexpensive restaurant with Sayori, the two shared a meal, while Matt asked Sayori questions about the school that he would be attending, and Sayori did her best to provide him with answers. Though as normal with Sayori, at least some of her answers didn't make any sense. While she was people smart, Sayori could sometimes be a real airhead, though Matt had to wonder how much her depression factored into that. Though if Matt were being honest, he was already seeing flashes of desire in Sayori's eyes, and since that didn't happen in the vanilla DDLC game, it could well be a sign warning that things were not all that they seemed, but then, this world was already far more expansive than the original game had been, so maybe some changes were just inevitable. After all, he'd been to places today that were decidedly not there the first time around, this restaurant being one of those. In order to be the gentleman that Sayori expected him to be, he even walked her back home. That at least was simple enough, given that they lived right next door to each other, now that he was back to living in MC's old house. Of course, given that there were more than two rooms available here, things had indeed changed in this world of limited choices.

Once home, he gathered his school things into his bag, and hung up his new uniform in his closet. Matt plugged in his cell phone to charge it after setting the alarm to wake him at 6:30 in the morning, which should give him time to do his morning routine before reporting to his new school. Sayori was supposed to walk to school with him, both because she was his long time friend, and because she knew the way to the school already, helping to assure him that he would not get lost along the way. This would also give him the opportunity to talk to someone whom he already knew, which suited both of Matt's divided selves very well indeed. Matt knew that he would have to take MC's memories seriously, if he wanted to operate in the game's world without raising too much suspicion, but at the same time; from his perspective, he had just been pulled into this world, and he was still figuring out how things worked differently here than they did in reality.

Once again, the face of a beautiful emerald eyed and coral brown haired young woman flashed before his eyes from MC's memories, and Matt wondered what Monika was doing right now. Did she even know that he was now in her world? How would she react when she found out? Would she be happy? Would she be sad? Or would she see the fifty times that he had tried to save her and the girls as evidence of some sort of torture, and want nothing to do with him? One thing was for sure, however. If the game and the related mods had taught him anything, it was that if Monika was indeed her normal self-aware AI self, then she would instantly be able to tell that he was the Player, effectively wearing the skin, and using the voice of the game's MC. That somewhat gruesome thought aside, Matt decided that the best thing that he could do now was sleep. Changing out of the formal clothes that he had worn since paying respect to MC's parents, Matt changed into a tank top and a pair of shorts before getting underneath the covers and waiting for sleep to come claim him for the night.

This was easier said than done however, as his mind kept working at the speed of light, trying to make sense of the memories that the game had implanted, trying to merge the two memory sets into something coherent. The human brain had not been designed to suddenly have a second lifetime's worth of memories imprinted upon it, and his brain was feverishly doing what it could, as a result. Eventually however, tiredness won out over brain processing, and Matt fell into a deep sleep.