The Witch wore a surprised look on her face when she opened the front door of the cottage in the middle of the woods.

  “You are back earlier than I expected,” she murmured, shining the oil mp in her hand over Estel’s sullen expression. “And looking awfully worse for wear, might I add.”

  “E…” Her lips trembled with the effort to form words. “Everything you said turned out to be true…h-how did you know?”

  “I told you, my phone contains information about the future,” she replied, stepping aside while she held the door open for her. “But I’m more interested in knowing how you managed to find this pce again. There’s supposed to be an illusionary barrier that conceals my house, so unless…”

  Estel took out the flip phone and showed it to her. “Unless you gave me this memento precisely so that I can locate you?”

  “Well, that is indeed true,” the Witch admitted. “But to think that it only took you one day to master it. Have you used something like it before?”

  “I don’t think so…but I guess it’s pretty intuitive once you get the hang of it? I managed to figure most of its functions out once you transted them for me yesterday.”

  “Huh. My bad for underestimating the original viliness, I suppose.”

  Crossing the threshold, Estel was greeted by the familiar smells of old wood and frankincense wafting in the air. From the heavy oak rafters hung a chained chandelier of rusted iron, its dim candlelight casting flickering shadows that danced on the stone floor and rough-hewn walls bestrewn with exotic oddities. A crackling fire burned inside the firepce set against the far wall, fnked by a pair of stuffed armchairs with a table arranged in between them.

  “Have a seat,” the Witch prompted. “The coffee machine is avaible for your use. You look like you need a good shot of espresso, if I may speak my mind.”

  She gratefully sat down on the left armchair and pressed the white button of the contraption. “Where did you pick up your peculiar vocabury, I wonder?”

  “From another world,” the Witch said as she rummaged about the shelves.

  “Oh, that’s fascinating.”

  “…”

  She picked up the cup of steaming hot coffee and blew gently on its surface. “May I have sugar with this?”

  “It’s in the jar beneath the table.” The Witch paused and gave her a puzzled look. “Wait, is that all you have to say? You don’t sound too surprised.”

  “I had an inkling that you aren’t of this world, after all,” she murmured, carefully dropping a cube of sugar into her cup. “Don’t get me wrong, witches are outcasts in general. But even those witches seem…less mysterious when compared to you.”

  After a brief moment of quiet, the Witch let out a sound that seemed to be a cross between a snort and a chuckle.

  “This is why I wanted to keep my distance from the main characters as much as possible,” she muttered. “You people are too uncanny for my taste. Never really liked this particur story anyway, but I digress.”

  She approached her, holding a bell jar which contained a softly-glowing flower in her hands.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “A nightshade bloom,” Estel answered immediately. “It grows bountifully all through the woods, using its mbent glow in the moonlight to guide wanderers home. What’s so special about this pnt?”

  “From where I’m from, we call this ‘bioluminescence’,” the Witch eagerly said. “I studied biotechnology back home—a work simir to what the apothecaries of this world do—and researched ways to harness useful energy from the chemical reactions inside pnts. Although it ultimately failed to deliver results, I tested the same experiment here and discovered that the bioluminescence of this pnt can be converted into electricity—”

  Estel held up her hand to stop her. “Pardon me, but I’m not too sure that I’m following what you’re saying.”

  “S-sorry, I couldn’t help it since I had no one to share my research with.” She coughed pointedly. “All you need to know is that this pnt is what powers both the phone that I gave to you and mine. Give me a moment…”

  She opened a small drawer at the bottom of the jar and took out the ‘battery’—something Estel still couldn’t wrap her mind around, but she somewhat understood that it was the source of the Witch’s power.

  “Yesterday night, this thing died before I could properly read through the earlier chapters of the story, so I was only able to give you a general heads-up about today’s events,” the Witch said in a sheepish voice as she pried open the back of her phone and popped the battery inside. “But there’s no need to worry about that now—I made sure to charge the battery overnight.”

  Estel shot her a curious look. “You’ve been making mentions of a ‘story’ since our first encounter. Would you be so kind as to expin yourself?”

  The Witch pursed her lips. “It’s exactly what you think it is, a story. A fantasy story created on a whim by someone who had too much free time on her hands and wanted to write a fanfiction of her favourite otome game, but decided to throw in a non-canon viliness character to create much unneeded drama between the existing cast, and then ironically ends up inside the world of her own fanfiction as nobody but an extra. Does that answer your question?”

  “Uh, no, not really.”

  “Too bad I don’t know how else I can expin the concept of ‘isekai’ to you, so you have to just accept that as your answer.”

  Turning her gaze to the glowing screen of her phone, the Witch let out a wry sigh through her nose. “As I thought, you are really one hell of a character set up to fail from the very beginning. Some parts have indeed changed here and there, which I guess is good for you…but if you don’t take more drastic measures from now on, you’re going to end up at the gallows.”

  “W-what kind of drastic measures are you suggesting?” Estel anxiously asked.

  “Well…” She fshed a grin at her. “For starters, how about getting rid of your butler ASAP?”