Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 4.1 - Chapter SS

Bonus Short Stories

The Joy of Fashion

The young student looked at their reflection and groaned.

They’d received this hand mirror from their master, and despite its age and decay, the mirror proper remained clear. He’d probably passed it down as a message that a future magus nearly of age needed to take care of their appearance.

“Hrm...”

This was the same face they’d seen reflected hundreds of times in the surfaces of puddles and ponds, and today, it was scrunching up in frustration. Trying to objectively judge one’s own facial features was a challenge. At times, the brain naturally interpreted its shell as being prettier than it was, and beauty was something that varied with taste and opinion of the character it represented.

Young Mika had been born a tivisco, and the cautious avoidance they’d experienced in their hometown had left them naive to the workings of the mortal heart. They knew what kind of features they liked, but what constituted traditional beauty was a complete mystery—especially now, when they were neither boy nor girl.

“He sure does give some tough homework... I bet I’m supposed to learn how to use all these.”

Mika propped up the mirror on their desk with a little leg hidden within, and stuck their hand in the bag their master had given them. Inside were too many vials to count, all full of some drug or another. Each and every one was labeled with their name and effects, and each and every one was some kind of makeup meant to doll up the user’s looks.

“Skincare, bleaching, dyeing...hair tonic? Boy, he really threw everything he had my way, huh?”

Sorting the things out by their written descriptions was enough to get a good sense for how unpredictable their master’s various tea parties were. It also drove home the great pains humanity went to in order to conform themselves to higher aesthetic ideals.

“Anti-bedhead, straighteners, gloss, colorful dyes, black dyes, lengtheners... People really do love hair.”

Mika knew that a change in hairstyle was enough to recontextualize a person’s whole demeanor; they weren’t going to make fun of the universal interest the craft demanded. After all, they saw someone that showed them the importance of hair nearly every day.

Erich of Konigstuhl was Mika’s best friend, just as important to them as their arms and legs. He was also a boy who didn’t care much for fashion—he still made sure not to look offensively bad, of course—save for his ever changing hairdo. According to him, he wasn’t doing it because he wanted to: it was all a product of “earning favor.” Whatever the reason, though, his head always had a fey charm to it.

For someone with wavy hair like Mika, the boy’s straight locks were worthy of envy. They were rays of sunlight spun into thread, and his shimmering blond flowed freely away through Mika’s fingers whenever they ran a hand through them, leaving only the lingering fragrance of flowers like a fairy vanishing into space.

And every day, the alfar played their little pranks: his hair was always done up to their liking.

Erich usually kept his hair tied high on his head so as not to get in his way, but if left alone for any length of time, he would come back with a braided crown, an impressively set bun, or a thick braid reminiscent of a fish’s skeleton. Mika could always count on his bombastic hairstyles to entertain them.

At times, the boy grumbled, saying that their pranks bent his hair out of shape and were difficult to undo, and that he wished he could cut all of it off and be done with it. His tone was that of someone genuinely upset as opposed to someone trying to garner attention, so it seemed like he really meant it.

That said, Mika loved his hair: looking at it, running their fingers through it, and neatly tying it into braids—he was soft on Mika and let them play with it no matter how much he grumbled—so the young mage planned on putting up a fight if he ever went through with it.

Not a verbal fight, either. A fight fight. They were ready to die on this hill.

“I mean, I can’t ever have hair like that.”

Picking up a golden dye, Mika thumbed it around for a moment before putting it to the side; they’d never use that one.

They couldn’t muster the faintest interest in any of this and the necessity of it all had yet to sink in, but there was no denying that their shifts had begun. They knew that the day would eventually come when they’d need this sort of knowledge in order to go out into public without humiliating themselves; the least they could do was study these drugs while sorting them to be ready for when they’d start experimenting.

In the middle of cataloging, Mika came across something stored in a seashell container; the iridescent shell lacked any sort of label, perhaps in order to preserve the stylish exterior. Curious, they opened it to find...

“Rouge?”

Blinding red covered the insides. Pigments this vivid required a great deal of safflowers to produce, so this was probably high-quality stuff. Though they were unsure if it was a newly developed color, the poor student marveled that anyone could give out something of this make as a free sample.

Suddenly, the sharp scarlet tickled the tivisco’s fancy: a mysterious desire to put it on welled up within them. Only a moment prior, they’d been cocking their head, wondering why people fixated so heavily on their images, but here they were.

“Uh... Like this, I think?”

Mika thought back to how their parents had applied makeup when in their feminine forms, and tried to copy them. Taking a small bit of the dye on their pinky finger, they ran it across their lips, overwriting the pink flesh in the mirror with a deep red. They did a second pass, and then a third, making sure it covered everything evenly. Lastly, they folded their lips in and began rubbing them against each other—they didn’t really know what this did, but copied their parents anyway figuring that it was probably an important final step.

Finished, Mika looked at themselves in the mirror and a thought crossed their mind: I wonder what my old pal would think of me in makeup.

“...Mm?!”

All at once, this train of thought became very embarrassing, and they wiped off the lipstick in a frenzy. Once it was gone, they looked in the mirror to see their usual self...except that the red on their lips had been replaced with a rosy hue all across their face. In fact, it was dubious as to whether any blush could produce cheeks this pink.

Tormented by the mystifying onset of sudden embarrassment, the young mage stuffed the arcane drugs back into the bag with one conclusion: Yup, this stuff is still too early for me.

[Tips] Imperial society considers makeup a form of etiquette for women; for men, it is the extra mile meant to spruce up one’s visage.