Chiaki receives a visitor.

Nearly an hour later, Chiaki had finished preparing for a guest. Really, there hadn't been much to do: Chiaki had cleaned up the most egregious part of the mess in her apartment (that is, wiped up the mess that had come from her and hidden the tool that had helped extract said mess), prepared an invitation that the guest wouldn't miss, and familiarized herself with the new game she'd just tried. Shortstack Imp Attack Party Pack Vol. 0 out, as it turned, had a lot of depth for a game that seemingly had no characters in it but the one she'd just created... because, of course, it wasn't a simple video game at all. She didn't understand all of it yet, but she thought she understood enough to know she wanted to know more. Besides that, the game was full of plenty of recommendations for what she should do next.

A considerately quiet knock came on her door, barely audible. It was, after all, now late in the night. Still, she'd been listening for it, so when she heard the small noise, she jumped up to her feet energetically and bounded over to the door, throwing it open.

As she expected, it was Hajime Hinata. He was holding his bookbag, which meant he'd come over as soon as he'd seen the note she left on his door without even stepping into his apartment. That was what she'd expected. "I'm here..." The young man was clearly exhausted, but he was also as flustered as she'd ever seen him, struggling to keep a cordial smile on his face. "Chiaki... I-it's kind of late for me to commit to a gaming session with work in the morning, but I had to come over and ask about-" He trailed off, his eyes widening and jaw slackening as he got a better look at the woman who had invited him.

Chiaki was smiling at him, a soft smile he'd seen so many times before, but completely transformed by the bright pink lipstick on her face. Hajime couldn't remember every seeing Chiaki with makeup on before... was it just that makeup making her lips look more kis-- !! Hajime stopped himself before finishing that word, convinced he was still misunderstanding. He shook his head to chase it away.

She slinked past him and shut the door behind him. She pressed her back against it and tilted her head curiously, giving Hajime a stare like she didn't understand why he'd frozen up... Since he felt like she must understand, though, it felt more like she was playing with him. "Hajime... what's wrong? We haven't had a game night in a while. I don't think it's weird to ask every now and then, is it?"

"W-well yeah, but... you haven't asked for one at this hour of the night in a long time, and you usually don't, uh... sign it this way," he commented, presenting the message she'd tacked to his door as evidence.

Chiaki looked at the message she'd written, reading the words on the back of an old receipt. "'Hajime, wanna come over and play...?'" She looked at the ink on the white paper, and then at the suggestive stamp of pink lipstick that accented it. She stared at it, then put a hand to her own pink lips, as if considering the connection. Then, she gave him another familiar, easy smile. "Well, you're here. That means you want to... probably. Let's get to it."

"Get to it...?" Hajime repeated after her dumbly, before the young woman wrapped her arms around one of his and dragged him over to the beanbag chairs she'd set up in front of her TV. The contact of her considerable breasts against his bare arm, separated from him only by the large tee shirt she wore, was about to drive him crazy. It wasn't like he'd never thought of them before, but... Weren't they even bigger than he'd imagined?

Before he'd walked in the room, he had been certain that someone was playing a joke on him, or that he was misunderstanding something. Now that he was this close to her, there was no room for doubt. "Chiaki... is trying to seduce me, isn't she? What...? Where is this coming from?!" The tone of all of his previous meetings with Chiaki had been a meeting of friends. This wasn't the first time he'd been over, but while those meetings had been cozy, they'd been nothing like this. If anything, the two of them had been in danger of growing too distant in the past weeks. This seemed like a pretty dramatic overcorrection.

She sat him down on the beanbag chair near her console with a playful shove, then went to pull over one for herself. Hajime set aside his bookbag, which he still hadn't yet found a moment to get off, then watched her, still feeling entranced...

As Chiaki bent over to scoop up a beanbag, Hajime realized something else amazing about Chiaki's appearance, something he couldn't believe he'd missed before. "She's... not wearing pants!!" It was a long tee shirt, so it hadn't stood out to him before, but as she bent over, it went taut against the cheeks of her plump ass, even revealing panty lines that cast aside the doubt there could be any other layer between her skin and outerwear. Also, with even less left to the imagination, Hajime couldn't help but notice... "Her butt and her thighs look... kinda fat...?" Again, Hajime wasn't sure if this was a change or just something he hadn't had a cause to notice before, but Chiaki's hourglass shape looked even more incredible when her peachy bottom was thrust in his direction.

Chiaki looked back at him, holding her position bent at the waist. "Anything wrong?" He couldn't see her mouth to tell her expression, but her heavy-lidded eyes caught his gaze without hesitation.

Hajime went back-straight and put his eyes forward on the TV. "Nothing, nothing! Uh, so, what are we playing..." He answered his own question by reading the name on the screen. He read it under his breath, too embarrassed to say it out loud.

His friend gave him another shock by plopping her chair down directly next to his, planting her shapely butt in it and leaning in against his shoulder. "This is a very interesting game, Hajime. Trust me. It feels like a game made just for me... A game I can see myself playing for a really, really long time."

"H-huh..." Haijme struggled to make conversation with Chiaki in close proximity. If this was, indeed, their first date, he'd always pictured it would probably feature him in cologne and Chiaki in... more clothes. Actually, what was that strange smell she had? His mind wouldn't let him connect the dots on the musky scent coming off of her... He tried to ignore it. "I always figured these party games had short shelf lives-"

"Short?" Chiaki responded defensively, frowning. For once, she looked like the one surprised at what was happening, but she seemed to shake it off quickly. "I mean... This one's different from those games, promise. Hajime, do you like shortstacks?"

"I... What?"

"Shortstacks," Chiaki replied, tilting her head curiously again. "Like, women who are short but curvy... Do you like them? Ah, I'm not trying to judge your preferences," she added, holding up one finger. "It's just that this game is going to have lots of shortstacks in it. I think they're cute, though. Do you?"

Hajime couldn't decide how to answer this question. If Chiaki was trying to flirt with him, this question was probably a trap. If he said he didn't like them, it might imply he wasn't excited about the game she was so into. If he said he did... well, Chiaki was a little short and she was plenty curvy, but he'd never thought of her as a "shortstack" and would be very surprised if she herself did. In other words, he'd be admitting he liked a body type Chiaki herself didn't have. Ultimately, he was still too shy to lean into the path where he started returning Chiaki's sudden flirting, which meant was he put in the odd position of choosing the second option. "Y-yeah, um... Sure. They're cute."

Chiaki's eyes seemed to shine as she leaned even closer to him in excitement. "You like them? That's good, Hajime! I have a good feeling you're really going to love this game, too. Go ahead and start it up. You've gotta make an imp to play. I already got mine set up."

Hajime could see the imp Chiaki was talking about... Even in the low-poly graphics, he couldn't miss the fact that "Chichi," as the character was clearly named, had a hairstyle almost just like Chiaki's, down to the untamed curls of bedhead. Other than that, though, the character was like a funhouse mirror version of his friend, with disproportionately big tits and ass, besides the obvious demonic features. He got a strange feeling and passed Chiaki the controller. "Uh... N-not sure how comfortable I am setting up a character like this. Why don't you make mine?"

Again, Chiaki's eyes seemed to shine at this. She took the controller with a funny smile Hajime thought he'd never seen before. Surprisingly, he quickly hit on why: this was the kind of face he thought Chiaki would make if her opponent had made a silly mistake in a competitive game, but even in the rare cases they were competing instead of cooperating, he didn't think she'd make a face like that. Chiaki almost never made jokes or teased... Hajime had always assumed she didn't know how. "I guess there are sides of Chiaki I didn't know about, huh..."

He continued to watch her as she set up his character for him. A strange thought occurred to him. Actually... was Chiaki really that far from a "shortstack" in her build? Besides the amazing hourglass features Hajime had already noted earlier, he felt he was noticing for the first time how short Chiaki was. Had that been because of her shoes? Did her coat make her look bigger? In just the tee shirt, Chiaki looked like she couldn't be taller than five feet. That was... below average, wasn't it? Depending on how you stretched the definition...

Her voice snapped him out of his thoughts. "That was pretty fast. My own imp took a lot longer, but I've got yours all ready to go. Say hello to Nanahime." She set down the controller in front of them, as if commanding him to appreciate her creation visually before proceeding with the game.

Hajime tried to play along, but the thing in front of him increased his uneasiness dramatically. Chiaki had designed a dark brown imp with a single, small and angled horn the shape of his own hair antennae. She'd given it long, wild hair, which he appreciated: it was one degree of separation that chased off the odd feeling she'd been trying to make it look close to him. On its cute face, it wore a serious expression... It was one he didn't think he normally wore, but one he could picture himself making. Its proportions were still ridiculous: it was a little bustier than Chichi, but not as thick in the lower body. As for wings and tail, they were as typical for an imp as they could be, with bat-like features to the wings and a classic devil point for the tail.

... Hajime had noticed that while the game was making no attempt to hide the questionable anatomy of its completely-naked imps, the low-poly cartoon style omitted some of the naughtiest bits of the anatomy. That was why he had to look closely to make sure he was seeing the most important difference between Nanahime and Chichi correctly. He asked Chiaki to confirm. "My imp... she, uh, seems to have a..."

"Ah, yeah," Chiaki confirmed with a casual nod. "She has a dick. I thought you'd want one."

Hajime, who couldn't even imagine Chiaki saying the word "dick" before today, was at a loss to respond.

Chiaki gave him another curious tilt of the head, this time with a frown. "You don't want one? Or... did you want a bigger one?" That funny smile passed her plump pink lips again. "I can probably get yours nice and big, if you want."

"F-forget it, whatever's fine!"

"Good. I knew you'd like it." Chiaki picked the controller back up and continued maneuvering through menus, back to her usual and relatively vacant expression. "On this screen we enter your imp's power and preferred game type. Since mine was the first, I think they automatically set it to... let's see... 'Tome Mistress.' The game type is 'jack-of-all-trades...' since I enjoy almost all types of games. Do you want to set this part up?"

"I gotta admit, I have no idea what we're doing," Hajime told her, then hurried to correct himself. "I mean, uh, no idea what we're doing in this setup menu. I'll leave it to you again."

"That's fine. Let's think... what is your strength? What kind of game are you good at? I'm gonna say... your power is 'Tenacity.' Your best game type is 'Puzzle-Solving.' There, the set-up is done. I think we should start playing right away." She looked into his eyes with her own strangely bright pink ones and gripped her controller tightly. "We're gonna have so much fun, Hajime!"

... Chiaki seemed totally convinced Hajime was going to enjoy playing this transparently horny, transparently low-quality game with him after he'd finished a full day of work. Even if she was trying to seduce him, this was a crazy way to go about it. More importantly, that little squeal of excitement she'd just given... Hajime was sure he'd never heard her that excited about anything, ever.

Something felt extremely off. Hajime had a feeling that whether he chose to play this game with Chiaki or not would have a huge effect on his life... On something even more important than the increasingly likely and arousing prospect that after a year of dreaming about Chiaki, he might finally have her, tonight, with no more effort than indulging her request for a late night of gaming and out-of-character teasing.