By the time you get home, and reply to the excited text that Rito sent you, your mind is already on the future. With Rito together with Haruna, there is zero chance of him accidentally confessing to Lala when she arrives. All that is left is getting to her first.

Unfortunately, there are only two ways to do that. First is to stick to canon and make sure you're in Rito's bathtub at the right time. Last night, while brainstorming, you remembered the rough time it would happen. At least, the time it happened in the anime, where it was specified down to the minute. You sent a message to the Help Desk asking if the anime was canon. Unfortunately, the answer was "sort of".

They explained that the manga was the core canon, but anything in the anime that didn't contradict the manga was 'potentially canon'. They refused to get into detail, citing that it wasn't their responsibility to give him meta-knowledge, but that was enough for you to feel confident that you could get the timing right.

The only other thing you could do was skip school to try to find her. You don't think her ship will crash in front of the school here. That happened in the anime, but not in the manga. But it will likely come down somewhere in town, and even then Lala will spend some time exploring and running from her bodyguards.

Running into her that early would let you control the situation more. Her appearance in Rito's bathtub is not ideal, even if you are his neighbor. You'd need to convince her to go to your house next door, and get there yourself before her bodyguards catch up. The window for that is pretty tight.

Running into her early should make it easier to get her to your place, or at least make the timing less tight. Though it's also a lot less likely to involve her appearing literally naked and on top of you, which is a shame because it sounds like fun. Still, that's something you can arrange later, once you gain her attention, so it's worth giving it a shot.

But you have five days until she arrives, and you plan on making the most of them. Now that Rito is taken care of it's time to prepare for Lala's arrival. And the best way to do that is to polish up your social skills. You didn't purchase Communication Talent for the hell of it after all. Your talent for dealing with other people is your strongest tool. Not only do you need Lala to actually confess her love to you, but you'll be dealing with people who are major parts of the ruling Empire of the entire galaxy.

Your social skills are good, but not 'trained royalty' good. It's time to change that.

With your ability to read and understand people already pushed to what you feel is a level of mastery most humans struggle to match without years of dedicated training, you decide to see if you can't get some of your other skills to that level just as quickly. Starting with the ability to convince people to see things your way.

Arguing with anonymous posters on an online forum might not be the most traditional way of training, but the results speak for themselves. After just a few hours of taking random stances in debates that had already started and making the other commenters agree with you, you feel like your ability to persuade others has vastly increased. Your success rate isn't 100%, but you never expected that. It's anonymous strangers on the internet- even if they know they're wrong, they won't admit it.

You feel your growth stop there though. Just like observing your classmates could only take you so far, this method of training your skills isn't hard enough to push you anymore. You'll have to find another way.

But that can wait for another day. It's starting to get late, and you still have some homework to do, so you decide to continue your training tomorrow.


You spend your time during class and during lunch doing the homework your teachers assign to you, getting it out of the way before you get home. You still pay half-attention to class, just enough to not be caught off guard if the teacher calls on you, but you don't really absorb what they're teaching. But that's fine. You aren't too concerned about your grades. You'll have time to study later, and honestly, even if you failed it wouldn't matter. You have the multiverse at your fingertips. A high school degree means nothing compared to that.

The next skill you decide to polish up is your ability to lie. And what better way than to learn how to act? Thankfully there's a small local theater that has open classes for acting and drama that you head for after school. It's ¥4,000, but you've got plenty of money. On top of what you've saved up in this life, you have $10,000 a month that you get from the Company, equal to about 1.4 million Yen.

The course is only two hours long, but the teacher leading the small group really knows what they're talking about. He gives all of you a rundown on how to control your body language, what tones to use to convey certain emotions, and most importantly how to get into the right mindset.

"Acting isn't about lying or telling a story," he says at one point. "The best way to act is to become the character. You're not an actor on a stage or in front of a camera, you're the dashing prince or the beautiful woman. If you can convince yourself entirely that you are that character, then acting will come easy. Well, so long as you memorize your lines."

The others laugh at his joke, but you just smile. You understand perfectly how you can use this. Lying and Acting are the same thing, just with different purposes. Rather than convince yourself that you're a character, all you have to do is convince yourself that what you're saying is the truth.

The teacher leads all of you through some practice, and you quickly get the hang of immersing yourself in a fake truth, improving your ability to lie greatly.

But by the end of the course, you can tell you've improved as much as you can from this method. So when the instructor compliments you on your skill at the end of the class and asks you to join their theater as a member, you thank him but politely decline, citing that you're too busy with school, but that you'd reconsider in the future.

After going home and making dinner, you once more retreat to your room. You've done a lot of thinking about what to do next. The only skill of yours that you haven't trained up using Communication Talent is your ability to intimidate people. But intimidation is such a situational thing, and when it comes to dealing with the Devilukians, you lack any political power to back it up.

So you decide instead to come up with a new method of training up one of your other skills, and quickly settle on your ability to understand people. More than anything, information is power, and the better you can read someone, the more power you'll have over them.

You spend the rest of the night watching videos from famous American mentalists, people who use tricks, cold-reading, and social manipulation to make others believe they have psychic powers. They're basically con-men who use their skills for entertainment.

That works, and you absorb the knowledge they share like a sponge. You can tell they're not giving away everything, but by watching multiple videos from different mentalists, you get a pretty good grasp on things.

But by the end of it, your progress is slowing down. You haven't hit a wall again, not yet. But you've already learned what they all have to say. You call it a night and think about ways to maybe apply your new knowledge.


You sigh as you eat dinner with your mother the next day. You have no idea how to train your skill further, at least not without drawing undue attention to yourself. You're seriously starting to consider taking the train to the next town over, where no one knows you, and running some of the tricks you learned in the videos you watched last night.

"What's wrong Aki-kun?" your mother asks. "Hard day at school?" A look of concern passes over her face, though she tries to hide it with a nonchalant smile.

"No, just…" you trail off, abandoning your reflexive excuse as a thought occurs to you. Your mother is a lawyer, a prosecutor even. She might actually be able to help you. "Hey Mom, how do you tell if people are lying to you? I mean, I'm sure a lot of people do when you're questioning them, right?"

"Oh sure, all the time," she replies. "As for how I know…well, experience, I guess?" She shrugs. "People lie all the time in the courtroom. When I first started out, I didn't realize that and I lost some cases because of it. But if you pay close attention, you can tell. Some people get really nervous when they lie, but others get really calm instead. Others play with their hands or hair." She shrugs. "With enough experience, you start to notice the common points." She looks at you with concern. "Are you worried about someone lying to you?"

"No, not me," you explain, using the excuse you came up with earlier. "A friend at school. She's concerned another friend of hers is lying to her about something important. But thanks, I'll try telling her to pay attention and look for stuff like that."

Of course, tells like that are cold-reading 101, and you had learned how to read them before you had come to this world. In fact, that was how you had trained during class the other day. But your mother did make you realize something. If observing teens not paying attention to you wasn't enough to improve your skill, how about recordings of court cases, where adults were actively trying to hide the truth?

After dinner, you go straight back to your computer and start looking for recordings of court cases. Not all are available publically, but many cases are. You spend some time figuring out which ones are the most contentious or drama filled before settling in to watch.


"Uuuuuuuggggghhhhhh," you moan as you collapse into bed. It's Sunday night, and you are giving up. You had spent every waking moment you could spare watching shitty recordings of court cases online, dedicating the entirety of your weekend to it.

And it was working. At least, it had been at first. Criminals and lawyers were tricky bastards, and the effort required to figure out what they were thinking and hiding certainly did improve your ability to read people. It also helped when their lies were revealed and you could go back to when they had lied and look for specific tells.

Hour by hour you felt your comprehension grow…until about 3 hours ago, shortly before midnight, and you hit a wall. Not the kind of wall you are used to either, where it comes after a moment of comprehension. In fact, it's the opposite. You feel like you're on the verge of understanding, but the last step is instead a massive hurdle.

But now it's almost three in the morning with not a speck of progress made, and you're throwing in the towel. You should have stopped earlier if you're being honest, but the feeling of being so close had made it difficult. Still, tomorrow, or today technically, is the day Lala arrives, and you need at least a little rest for that.

So you quickly strip out of your clothes and crawl under the blanket, begrudgingly giving up on your goal for now. You have bigger things to worry about now.

There's a thrill of excitement in the back of your mind, standing out even under the haze of mental exhaustion.

This is it. This is the day Lala arrives. This is the day when you have a shot at your first naturally pink-haired girl, fulfilling a lifelong dream that you've thrown everything away for.

Today is the day your pink-haired harem begins.


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This is the story-only edit of a Quest I run over on Questionable Questing! If you'd like to participate in the Quest and vote on decisions the character makes, head there!