My ear felt cold against my cheek as I pulled up my hood. The noonday sun high in the sky was deceptive as the cloud I breathed out with every exhalation reminded me. Trying to take my mind off the heat struggling to escape from my body, I looked down at my phone and shitposted on my favorite transphobic hate forum.
Suddenly I felt myself sliding on something, and before I could feel anything else-I was facefirst in a pile of slushy, shoveled snow.
"Are you OK?" I heard a voice ask.
I felt something turn me to the light. "Wait, don't open your eyes. There, now you can open them."
A girl with a bandanna was brushing the snow off of my face. In front of me I saw the culprit: a puddle that had frozen over.
"Who are you?"
"The subject of all your teenage fantasies?"
"And who would that be? I had many," I played for time.
"May, you clobberhead!"
"You're...real?"
"I wasn't," she explained, "until some jerk merged real life and fiction and sent me into your little mess-up of a world!"
"Jerk?" I wondered who May could be possibly referring to. I realized she could only have been talking about one person: the Original Lolcow, Christian Weston Chandler. I realized that, like Haruhi, she had played the world like a fiddle. Her mask of incompetence and incontinence had finally slipped, and she would hold the world hostage until the Love Quest was achieved!
"So, are you just going to sit there?"
"What do you want?"
"Oh, you've forgotten all the vows you swore on all the fan forums when you were 12? How I was going to be your 'eternal waifu' and how my 'little flat tits belonged to you forever'? Now it's time to pay the piper!"
"Contracts made by minors don't count, and you didn't agree to these vows, so they're not a binding contract, anyway!"
"But I ended up here when the Merge happened. You were my biggest fan!"
"Were," I emphasized.
"You don't know what it's like! The teens of today have stopped fighting over me and Dawn. It's all Iris, Serena, and maybe even newer girls. I'm getting pushed out of fantasy harems all across the globe!"
"So what? You're not a real human. You don't have real thoughts or feelings. You look like a cardboard cutout!"
"I AM A PERSON!" She roared as she reached into her pocket. By her expression, I knew what had happened.
"Your 'mons didn't come with you in the merge? Too bad, bitch! Enjoy freezing to death with all your exposed skin!"
My slumbering high school track team talents reawakened as they propelled my legs closer and closer to home. I deftly skirted by ice patches as I ran faster and further than I had ever thought possible. Finally, all the adrenaline wore off just as I got back to my building. I felt my ribs trying to squeeze me to death, and I felt a sense of emptiness which meant my body was losing heat at an alarming rate.
As I entered my building I felt something odd. The feeling that something was off only increased as the elevator transported me upstairs, like the prelude to a horror movie. As the doors opened and the mechanical announcer called out my floor, I felt like I was in sixth grade, walking into class with no homework.
My worst fears were confirmed when I saw my door ajar.
I tiptoed in trying my best to control my breathing. I looked around for a weapon. In the bookshelf by the doorway, there was a dictionary, so I grabbed that to use as an improvised weapon that would probably fail to defend myself.
There was commotion in the kitchen.
I tried to lift my dictionary, but I dropped it on my foot as I saw just who was there.
A blue-haired girl in a knitted cap and a small bird-like creature with a round head were helping themselves to all the berries in my fridge.