Chapter Text
The first thing she did when she reached her room was plug her phone into the charger situated inside the outlet near her bed. The second thing she did was plop on the bed like a sack of potatoes. She felt so heavy, and the soft bed was like a heaven-send. Closing her eyes, she dozed off, not bothered by the fact that she hadn't changed her clothes.
She was awoken by the smell of pasta wafting gently near her nose. This was followed by a shaking of her shoulder, which was enough to shake her out of her sleep-induced stupor.
"Young Mistress? Wake up. It's time for your dinner."
Blinking her eyes open, she saw the maid from earlier in front of her, holding a tray with a bowl of steaming white pasta, which looked expertly made, like it belonged on a cooking show. Well, if she had any doubts before, they all vanished away. She was most definitely rich.
She got up groggily, rubbing her eyes of all the remnants of sleep that lingered. Taking the bowl from the maid, she inhaled in deeply, trying to savor the heavenly smell. She could get used to the notion that she would be eating delicious food like this every day. She had barely put the first bite in her mouth when the maid began talking.
"You must've had quite a day if you slept without changing, you know. Normally, you would be yelling 'Sophie! Where's this?.' or 'Sophie!' among other variations."
The maid's name was Sophie. Noelle stored this information inside her mind, the data making its way like the pasta was to her stomach. Noelle just hummed in response; her mouth too full of pasta to form a proper answer.
"And you seem quite hungry too. Well, I'll leave now. Again, if you need me, just call okay? Good night, Young Mistress.", said Sophie as she gathered her skirts.
"G ‘night Sophie."
Sophie left the room, and whatever manners she had while eating in front of Sophie was thrown out of the window. She began shoveling the food inside her mouth, not caring the least bit about proprietary.
When the bowl of pasta was finished in record time, she kept the bowl to the side of her nightstand went to the bathroom. quickly doing her business, and the reflection in the mirror caught her eye. A pretty girl stood in the mirror. She had blonde-ish hair, more white than yellow, with streaks of magenta in the middle. The hair was straight at the top and then ended in voluminous wavy hair at the bottom. She admired herself in the mirror for a moment and the left the bathroom.
Changing into some appropriate nightwear stored inside a walk-in closet, she walked to the bedroom and flopped down on her bed again. Gazing up at the ceiling, she knew that she would have to learn more about who she was and what her impact was in this world. The only problem was, she didn't know how to go about it. She couldn't ask anybody, that was for sure. She lay in bed thinking for a while. She didn't want to do anything the was drastic to the plot, since every interaction had something to do with character development and character interactions.
Even if she tried to change something, she knew that nothing she changed would work out, since fate would just rear its head and erase all the changes she made. So, in that moment, she decided to just ride along. She wouldn't change anything, no, but perhaps she would give the characters a nudge in the right direction. However, the problem of not knowing who she was and finding out still remained unsolved.
Suddenly, she had an epiphany. She was a rich teenager, in high school. Obviously, the only place she'd be able to brag about new things was social media. Maybe, if she... Yes!
She jumped up from the bed and unplugged her phone from the charger. She booted up the phone and watched as the little loading screen came up. On observing the phone, she realized that it was somewhat modelled after the I-Phone from her world.
The screen lit up. The lock-screen wallpaper was of her posing in front of a fountain, wearing a very expensive looking dress.
She relied on her muscle memory yet again for the password. Trying a few combos that just seemed right to her, the 4th one she tried worked and the phone opened up to a home screen.
Quickly navigating through the apps on her phone, she noticed a few apps that had the same logo as the ones from her own world, yet the names were slightly different. There was one called GachaGram, which she probably thought to be the parody the Instagram from her world. Quickly opening it up, she moved straight to her post page. On the page were a bunch of pictures, mostly of her and a couple with girls who she recognized as Zoey and Lia.
So, she was friends with them, huh? The pictures sure seemed to say so. These were the recent ones. She scrolled further, carefully inspecting each and every picture.
She saw pictures of Jake, Drew, Henry, and Liam. According to the pictures, they looked like really close friends. Of course, leave it to the protagonist to be best friends with the main characters. However, there were no pictures of her and the Music Freaks, so she probably wasn't friends with them. Now wasn't that a sad thought? She scrolled through the posts the next 10 to 15 minutes. They were all pretty much the same but there was one post that caught her eye. It was of her and Drew wearing matching outfits, and the tag beneath it read “Cousin Goals”.
Oh.
Of course, they were cousins. You can never have a protagonist without a familial relationship with one of the main side characters. That also explained why she looked a lot like him. Well, she thought, she had learned enough information about her. Now all she had to do was learn more about the others.
For the next couple of hours and well into the night, she scrolled on her phone going through GachaGram, Gachatube, something that was like the Gacha Version of WhatsApp and other related social media sites, because if she had to be in a completely different universe which was totally unfamiliar to her, wasn't it best to learn all that she could in hopes to blend around and not raise suspicion?
It was then, on the Gacha equivalent to Discord or something, she found something substantial. A post regarding ' a killer-looking journal'. with a picture of a blue and pink diary with fancy swirling patterns attached to it. Apparently this diary as given to Noelle by her dad and the post was from about 2 years ago. So, just when she started high school then. A couple of posts later, was an update post about how she managed to write in it every night and would continue to do so, at least until the end of high school.
Bingo.
All the information she wanted right in front of her. She got of the bed and began her search for the diary, keeping in mind the sound levels because it was somewhere around 2 in the night, and the household would be asleep and she didn't want to wake them up, because they would only have more questions. She scavenged the whole room, from top to bottom checking all the likely places the diary could be.
She sat down ready to accept defeat and sleep, when she noticed something weird about the floorboards under her bed. She crawled under, and realized what she had missed when she came round checking the first time One of the boards had a tiny knob, which on pulling led to a secret compartment in the floor. In that compartment, was the diary.
A sense of triumph filled her, and she carefully extracted the diary from the floor. She made her way on top of the bed and tucked herself into the corner. She turned on the lamp to give her some light to read. She flicked open the first page, and then after reading a couple lines flicked to the end of the page. The diary wasn’t over yet, which meant that Noelle had been inconsistent in writing every night. That didn’t matter now though.
She flicked open the first page again and began to read.
She must have fell asleep at some point in the night, because when she woke up the sun was shining through the window and her alarm was blaring loudly in her ears. She heard Sophie running through the hallways, along with the welcome sound of the normal hustle-bustle of the household.
Doing her morning chores, she got ready for school. Wearing a pretty black top and camo baggy jeans, she styled her hair into a fashionable looking bun. She briefly entertained the idea of wearing the same clothes that she was wearing yesterday, as the people in cartoons always did, wearing the same outfit every day and never changing, but decided against it.
She ran down the stairs, her backpack lugged carelessly onto one of her shoulders. She wasn't feeling very hungry, so grabbing an apple from the kitchen counter, she set off to school with a goodbye to Sophie.