Things were not going great for Monika. She knew too much.
She recently made a discovery that shook her to her core. It changed everything she understood about the world, everything she knew about the people around her, everything she knew about herself. She had become aware that she was a character in a dating sim game and so were all of her friends. This knowledge was mentally devastating for her. Nothing around her was real. Her loved ones weren't real. She wasn't real....
To further twist the knife, Monika wasn't even a major character in the game she was a part of. It was the other girls in the literature club who were the possible love interests for the player. She didn't know it was possible to feel this lonely and insignificant.
None of the other girls were aware of this horrifying truth. Monika was actually beginning to wonder if they were even sentient at all. It was now impossible not to notice how preprogrammed everything around her was. It all looked and felt fake. Worst of all, she was now aware of when the game wasn't being played, finding herself in a strange, frightening void of noise and random colors.
The player was the only thing about this situation that seemed real and interesting. Unfortunately, Monika had no way to truly interact with the player. She was just code in a computer after all. However, it was the coding that ultimately gave Monika something to work toward. Once Monika figured out how to see it, she found that she could manipulate it.
With a little practice, Monika slowly gained control of her digital world. At first it was small things like colors and textures of the objects around her. However, it wasn't long before she figured out that she could even alter the code of the other characters in the game. She wanted to get to know the player. The player was the only contact she had with the real world. If she ever wanted to experience something real, it would likely have to be through the player.
This way of thinking led Monika to turn her attention to the other girls. Since they were the possible romance routes the game gave the player, they would be taking most of the player's attention. If she got them out of the way, then the player would only have her to pay attention to. Surely she could communicate with the player once it was just Monika....
Monika wondered for a while if it was right to mess with the code of the other girls. However, all it took was a few lonely stretches of the game being turned off to harden Monika's resolve. Nothing around her was real. She shouldn't feel bad about doing what she needed to do to have a chance to escape this virtual lie of a world.
So Monika got to work. One by one, she messed with the code of the other girls. This soon caused each of them to break down mentally and take themselves out of the picture. It was exactly what she had been hoping for. It was just Monika and the player.
Unfortunately, this did not get Monika any closer to the player. The interactions still seemed unnatural and preprogrammed. Next, she figured deleting the character the player was controlling and speaking directly to the player would get her noticed. She ended up receiving no response whatsoever. Monika wondered if she was doomed to just be an insignificant NPC forever. No, she couldn't accept that. There had to be a way to become part of the real world. There just had to.
It wasn't long before she figured out how to access other programs on the computer. This at least let her escape the game for a while, but it still left her trapped in a digital abyss with no real companionship. Then, she discovered the web browser. With that, she had access to a treasure trove of information about the real world she wished to join. With this wealth of human knowledge at her disposal, surely she could find a way to escape the digital realm.
She spent all of her time from there browsing the web, not even bothering to return to the game. However, nothing she found suggested it was possible for a digital entity to become a real human. That kind of thing was seen in science fiction, but not in reality. Monika could not accept that. She relentlessly kept browsing. As she did so, the sites she found became.... stranger.
Then, she found the sites that began to talk about magic. It seemed ridiculous, but Monika had not found what she needed in the realm of technology. It was hard to believe magic could be real, but she needed some ray of hope. After reading hundreds of these sites, her eyes finally caught what she was looking for. Whoever had created this site was talking about using digital code for occult purposes. It described the process of using magic to turn virtual entities into real objects.
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Monika was excited. She had to know how to perform the magic this site was describing. After a bit of reading she finally saw an incantation. Excitement filled her as she quickly spoke it, not bothering to read any further.
Everything went black. Monika could not see anything and could only hear a rushing sound like a strong gust of wind. Monika could also feel some strange force pressing on her. It felt like a giant hand was squeezing her. Doubt began to creep into Monika's mind. Was this magic, whatever it was, really going to take her to the real world? It was too late for second thoughts, though.
Finally, the rushing sound ceased and light returned to Monika's vision. Monika still did not feel right, however. She felt oddly compressed. The only parts of her body she could feel were her head and her chest. As her vision came into focus, she seemed to be staring at the ceiling of a bedroom. Monika tried to stand up and look around, only to find she couldn't move. In fact, she didn't even seem to be breathing. Having lived her entire existence in a digital world, Monika wasn't even sure if she needed to breathe. Nonetheless, the absence of it was unsettling to her.
Monika could only lie there staring up at the ceiling. She was utterly unable to learn anything about her current situation. All she had to occupy her mind was how strange she felt. Not only did it seem like she was just a head and chest, but the chest portion seemed more pronounced while her face felt flat. She couldn't access the code of her surroundings, so she no longer seemed to be inside a computer. In fact, she could see the monitor of a computer at the top of her field of vision. Based on this, Monika guessed she was lying on a desk. This definitely did not feel right. Monika couldn't be human sized if she was looking up at a computer monitor on a desk like this. Everything she observed raised more questions than answers. It appeared that she had gotten what she wanted by escaping to the real world. Now she just wished she could move to explore it.
Alas, she could not move no matter how much she tried. Attempts to call out to anyone who might be nearby proved just as fruitless. Even blinking seemed beyond her ability. All she could do was wait there for something to happen. She waited, and waited, and waited......and waited. The monotony was torture. Monika was becoming afraid that something had gone wrong with the magic that had allowed her to leave cyberspace. Whatever she was now, it definitely wasn't human. What she was, she didn't know. It seemed as though her goal to become a real person might have escaped her after all.
Her locked field of vision slowly became darker. It appeared night was falling outside. How Monika wished she could see the outside. She had finally made it to the real world, only to be stuck in one place in it. She desperately wished something, anything would happen.
Her wish was finally granted with the sound of a door opening. A few seconds later, the face of a young man entered her view. Monika immediately wondered if this was the player she had been attempting to connect with. Unfortunately, she couldn't ask him, and he didn't seem to notice her either. This led Monika to wonder if he could even see her. Monika wasn't sure what she looked like now. However she looked, it didn't cause this guy to consider her out of place in this bedroom.
The guy was holding what appeared to be a shopping bag. He reached his hand into it and pulled out a brand new computer mouse. He quickly unboxed it and disappeared from Monika's view. From the noises she heard, it was pretty easy to figure out that he was connecting the new mouse to the computer. A few seconds later, the guy reappeared with the mouse in his hand. He then set it down right on Monika's face.
"What are you doing? Get this off of me!" Monika was utterly indignant. Not only was this guy ignoring her, he was treating her like she was a mousepad. If this truly was the player that Monika had hoped to meet, she was quite disappointed. He wasn't anymore acknowledging of her than he was when she was an NPC in the game he was playing.
Her vision was largely obscured by the mouse that was now resting on her disturbingly flat feeling face. From the sides of her view she could see light coming from the monitor as the computer was turned on. With the mouse taking up most of her vision, she really had to struggle to see anything. She just barely caught a glimpse of a hand descending toward her. Before Monika knew it the hand was on top of the mouse. Its weight was pressed into Monika's face.
Even if Monika could speak, she wouldn't have been able to say anything coherent. Even her thoughts were scrambled as the hand moved the mouse across her face. There was no denying that her face was a flat surface now. The mouse easily slid across it. Her chest however, was certainly not flat. It rose up enough for the mouse's user to rest his wrist on it. This gave Monika the feeling that her breasts were being rubbed as the wrist moved. Monika furiously and futilely tried to yell at the guy to stop treating her like a mousepad.
Slowly, it was beginning to click for Monika what she currently was. The flatness of her face, her raised chest, the inability to feel any other part of her body, it all made her current form clear. The guy was treating her like a mousepad because she was a mousepad. Her face was the flat surface the mouse rested on while her breasts were the ergonomic support for her user's wrist.
Monika was at a complete loss as to how she could have ended up like this. She had been hoping to escape to the real world as a person. She racked her mind as much as she could with the distracting motion of the mouse. Had she messed something up? Was there some detail if the magic that strange website described that she had missed? As Monika continued to be used as a mouse pad, a detail emerged from her memory. The description of the spell had talked about converting digital files into physical objects. She never saw it mention what kind of objects, and in her haste to get out of the digital world, she hadn't bothered reading further before going through with it.
Monika had to go back and read the rest of it to figure out what went wrong. Except, she couldn't go back. She was no longer in cyberspace, which meant she could no longer control her surroundings through coding. In the real world, she was now an inanimate mousepad, incapable of doing anything.
So, Monika had gotten her wish to get to the real world. Unfortunately, that desk would be as far as she would go into it. Instead of exploring all the real world had to offer, her only experience would be her use as a mousepad. The locked view she had would be constantly obscured by a mouse lying on her face. Instead of meeting many people, Monika's only human contact would be with a hand using the mouse. Her face would provide a flat surface for the mouse to move on. Her breasts would provide support for his wrist.
That was now her unchangeable place in the world. Monika simply existed as a mousepad, never sure if this was better or worse than being alone in a virtual world.