Recharge: A Second Chance at Life in a World Where Boobs Hold Mana
I
Karina closed the dating app and dropped her phone in her lap with a sigh. Why had she thought she’d have better luck with women? She wasn’t sure what a relationship with a woman would even look like, but it wasn’t as if she’d had the best track record with men. Things with Jacey had been going so well; the vibes were vibing; she’d sent laughing emojis at Karina’s jokes; it was her first promising match in months. But everything had gone wrong, like it always did, when Karina sent an up-to-date selfie.
Was it a little misleading that the newest photo Karina put on her profile was five years old? Sure. But was it a crime to want to get her foot in the door? To try to dodge, or at least delay, those reflexive rejections that seemed to define the attention-deficit hellscape that was modern dating? Karina didn’t think so. Most of her profile was candids from college, her cousin’s wedding when she was twenty, and one from the girls’ trip to Cancun she’d taken with her dormmates. Every photo that showed more of Karina than her face and a little tasteful cleavage was at least fifteen kilos and two cup sizes ago. Everyone lied on their profiles, from dating apps to job apps. It wasn’t like she was catfishing anyone; she just wanted a chance.
Once she was vibing with someone, finding out that she was closer to a J-cup than a double-D should’ve been a bonus; it should have made guys want her more. But she’d yet to find a single match who stayed interested after the big reveal. She used to wait until the first date, but after one too many of those ended with no hope of a second, she’d started sending the selfies beforehand. Getting her foot in the door was one thing; sitting through an already awkward first date with a guy who’d clearly lost interest was another.
Some guys made token efforts to soften the blow. Others were brutally honest, like ripping off a Band-Aid. Jacey had done something almost worse, no, definitely worse: she hadn’t commented on the photo at all. As if Karina hadn’t even sent it, she kept up their flirty DMs. Only, they got less flirty. And less frequent. Instead of a steady back-and-forth throughout the day, Jacey’s replies started to take an hour, then an afternoon, then a day or more. It had been over a week since Jacey’s last message. Karina was well and truly ghosted.
Karina pushed herself up from the couch and padded into her kitchenette. She wasn’t sure why Jacey’s rejection hurt so much more than her last dozen aborted matches, but she wasn’t going to let herself sit in a doom spiral. She just needed to switch her brain off for a few hours and re-watch her favorite sitcom until she passed out. Unfortunately, her emergency pint of “emotional support” ice cream was about three tablespoons away from being empty. Worse, the bottle of five-euro rosé from ALDI was half buried in her overflowing recycling bin.
Karina allowed herself a moment to wallow in frustration and rage, resisting the urge to scream. The last thing she needed was a “concerned” chat from her upstairs neighbor, Mrs. McGibbons, the next time they met in the hall. She spent five minutes pacing her small apartment, debating whether or not she could disassociate her way through the rest of the evening raw-dog. With another sigh, she grabbed her jacket off its hook and stepped into a ratty pair of flats. What was the point of living two blocks from a convenience store if she wasn’t going to avail herself of overpriced sleep aids?
Under the buzzing glow of sodium lamps, Karina trudged down the abandoned city sidewalk. With virtually no traffic in sight, she crossed an intersection, ignoring the pedestrian signal. The moment she stepped off the curb, her phone buzzed in her pocket. Maybe Jacey had finally responded to her last DM! Her shoulders slumped as she read the glowing notification: “We found something you might like” from the Amazon app.
Squealing brakes and hard shadows in her peripheral vision made Karina finally look up. The last thing she saw was the telltale glow of the absurdist bar headlight on a Cybertruck.
***
“Seriously? A fucking Cybertruck?”
Karina stood in a featureless room, bluish-white in every direction. It was so bright that she had to squint after the darkened city where she’d stood seconds before.
“Welcome, human.”
Karina spun at the voice, finding herself face-to-face—well, face-to-tits—okay, fine, face to sternum—with a goddess. At least, a goddess as imagined by a particularly lewd comic book artist. Or maybe a mangaka. Definitely a gynophile. The woman towered over Karina, at least two meters tall, with blonde balayage waves straight out of a salon poster. She wore a white toga dress thing and an assortment of gold bangles and chains around her arms, her waist, and ostensibly holding the scraps of fabric together. She was exquisite, all luscious and ripe, with boobs that could only exist in art. The kind of rack that laughed at the very notion of gravity. If you took the best genetics in the world, had a lifetime of expensive treatments and procedures, and bumped it up with a professional, Hollywood-tier makeup artist, you still couldn’t have a face half as perfect.
She was breathtaking. Literally. Karina’s chest clenched, and her heart stopped beating. With an effort, she forced her mouth to speak. It was supposed to be “what?” but came out as a little more than an incoherent gasp.
The goddess seemed to understand her, anyway. “You have been chosen.”
Her voice was ethereal and harmonic, like several voices singing in chorus, each of them more lovely than the most famous and adored singers in human history. Karina didn’t know whether to weep or come.
“You will be given a second chance. Another life, in another world.”
“Really? A fucking isekai?”
The goddess continued, as if Karina hadn’t spoken. “Unlike your previous life, it is a world of heroes and magic. A place where deeds and their rewards are more closely aligned.”
“That sure is a fancy way to say XP…”
“Please choose a class from the following list: Knight, Mage, Hunter, Rogue.”
“Class?”
“This choice will affect your skills and abilities, along with your artifact.”
Definitely an RPG world, then.
Karina thought about the games she’d played over the years. She normally preferred the simplicity and catharsis of a melee class, but the thought of getting “up close and personal” in real life turned her stomach. Similarly, playing some kind of thief was probably way more fun around a table with dice and her dormmates than dealing with real cops—or guards or whatever. She considered the ranged option for half a second before she remembered countless holidays listening to her uncle’s endless, droning stories about deer hunting and “bow season.” Plus, there was a good chance her boobs would get in the way of a bow.
“I guess… Mage.”
For the first time since she started talking, a hint of emotion cracked the goddess’s orgasm-inducing visage. Her eyes roamed Karina’s body lasciviously from head to feet and back, pausing to appreciate her chest. The gaze lasted right up to the moment Karina’s arms twitched with an impulse to cover herself, and the goddess’s eyes snapped to hers with a smirk. “An excellent choice.”
She raised two fingers in a gesture of benediction and said, “Enjoy your new life!” as the white room faded away.
***
Karina’s stomach lurched as if she’d been riding in a car whose driver had unexpectedly slammed on their brakes. She fought down the urge to be sick and looked around. She was clearly no longer on Earth. At least, not the Earth she knew. The sky wasn’t quite the right blue; slightly green, but closer to teal than the pea soup shade of an incoming storm. She’d appeared at the intersection of a wide dirt road and a wider cobblestone one, in an idealized version of a rural countryside: prairie grass, low shrubs, and a smattering of trees. The trees were strange as well—a bit too uniform, as if some artist or designer had tried to recreate the chaotic randomness of real trees, but hadn’t quite managed it. Like the sky, all the colors were a bit off: the browns too brown, and the greens too green. It was like one of those boring, “cozy” video games or anime, or maybe Ireland. At least, the Ireland she’d seen in films and TV.
As the nausea faded, Karina moved her body experimentally. She felt better than she had in years. Strong, healthy, no aches in her shoulders or pain in her lower back. The heaviness she’d lived with since college, weighing on her, slowing her down, was gone. There was a long gray stick in her hand. A staff? Maybe it was the artifact the goddess mentioned.
Looking down at herself—arms, legs, and everything else she could see without a mirror—Karina discovered with dismay that, despite her newfound vitality, her body was the same. She was dressed like a medieval peasant, though cleaner and more fanciful than an actual medieval peasant probably looked. Her shirt was made of some natural fabric, topped with a skirt that fell to her knees, and an embroidered bodice that snatched her waist. The outfit was cute, if nothing she’d ever wear, even the time her dormmate dragged her to a Renn Faire. The shirt fit perfectly, but showed way too much cleavage; she had bathing suits that were less revealing. Karina tugged on the neckline, but it refused to stay any higher.
She’d seen a literal goddess and been sent to an iconic fantasy world. It was bullshit that she still looked the same. Shouldn’t she be more like a video game character, Keira Knightley in those Pirates movies, or even one of those anime FMCs who all looked about eighteen no matter how old they were?
Well, if she’d become a Mage, she should at least be able to do magic. Taking the staff in both hands, she pointed it at a small tree. “Um… Fire bolt!”
Nothing happened.
One of her foster families had made her attend Mass, and Karina tried to remember some of the Latin she’d picked up.
“Ignis!”
A blast of red-orange flame shot from the staff and rocketed toward the sapling. The tree’s small trunk erupted in a spray of splinters as flames licked up its spindly limbs and spread into the surrounding grass.
“Shit, shit!”
Karina dashed toward the fire and stomped on the burning grass with her shoes. They seemed fire-resistant, the soft leather undamaged by her “firefighting” efforts. When the last of the embers faded, she leaned on her staff, feeling far less winded than she expected.
“Lesson learned, I guess,” she said to the air.
With no apparent quests or goals, Karina read the crude wooden signs nailed to a post at the crossroads. An arrow to the right read, “Fields of Fire 328.” To the left, “Frost Peaks 1283.” Behind her, “Sapphire Sea 723.” And straight ahead, “Fernvale, 17.”
Were those meters? Miles? Fernvale sounded like a town. It was the closest destination by far, no matter what the numbers meant. Maybe she’d find a quest there or a place to stay. They might even have a healer. If there was magic in this world, there must be a way to fix her body. At the very least, shrink her ridiculous boobs to be proportional to the rest of her.
Of course, she probably couldn’t get plastic surgery for free, even the magical kind. Was there money in this world? Gold? Her dress had pockets in the skirt, surprisingly, but they were completely empty.
Karina had nothing but questions and no phone to look up the answers. She’d have to find an actual real person to ask, unfortunately. She shouldered her staff and started walking toward Fernvale.