Reverse, Redo, Rebirth

Kotori believed in many things in her life. She believed in shooting stars, that walking underneath ladders were bad luck, and she believed in her daily horoscopes almost a bit too much. One of the few things she didn't believe in, was reincarnation.

She, like a lot of other people, simply believed that her life would end after death. Never in her wildest dreams would she have imagined that it would be possible to be reborn and have a second life.

That was until it happened to her.

Her twenty four years of life came to an abrupt end the day a drunk driver swerved off the road and into sidewalk. She, who had been walking home from work, had been killed instantly. There wasn't even a moment for her to think about any of her regrets, or about the things she wanted to accomplish but still hadn't yet. She died on the spot.

Contrary to all her expectations, she didn't go to heaven, or hell, and she didn't fade away into oblivion either.

Instead, she opened her eyes as a baby once again. She became a strange baby too, for she didn't cry when she was born, she merely gazed at the people around the operating room with a confused expression on her face, as if she was wondering why she was there. The doctors didn't know whether to label her a freak or some kind of genius.

Her parents naturally thought that they had simply given birth to an exemplary baby. In their eyes she was not strange, just incredibly gifted. In fact, on the night that she was born, while the parents were still discussing possible names for her, once her father said 'Kotori', she began clapping happily, as if she were agreeing with him. Ever since she chose her own name, her parents stopped believing that their child would be normal. Luckily, this was something that only made them love her more. Kotori simply thought getting used to a new name would be a pain, so the moment her father had suggested her old one, she jumped at the chance to claim it. It was fortunate that her new father seemed to understand what she wanted to convey.

Thus, the first and only child of the Ueda family, Kotori, was hailed as a genius.

At first, Kotori had no grand plans for her second life. She knew she was blessed to be granted a new start, and one where she came from a rich and loving family as well, but she didn't have any big ambitions. She didn't have any plans to take over her family's company, and she didn't want to be famous or well known. She was fine with just living her life as a regular person (albeit a very rich one), playing when she wanted to play, eating what she wanted to eat, and doing what she wanted to do.

As far as Kotori was aware, nothing was amiss in her new life. Ten years went by happily, and then she was suddenly informed that she was going to be attending a prestigious private school when she turned sixteen.

As soon as her mother said the words "Kouketsu High" and told her how there would be lots of other kids like her attending, Kotori suddenly remembered something from her previous life. In her previous life she had an older sister who was obsessed with otome games. She played them to a worrying degree, and their parents often argued with her about the time and money she was spending on them. At the end of the day though, there was only so much they could do as she was spending her own money and not theirs.

Kotori never really understood her older sister's fascination with otome games, so she didn't pay them much attention even when her sister would be playing them on the tv in the living room. Though she was uninterested, she would often ask her sister about the games she was playing as she usually found the storylines quite intriguing. Many of them were clichéd and predictable, but Kotori got a good kick out of secretly laughing at them in her head. Kotori knew too that her sister loved to talk about the otome games she was playing, and so she usually provided a free ear when her sister looked like she was excited about something and wanted to share it with someone.

It was because she did that that in the end Kotori had retained a lot of knowledge about otome games herself. Though it was never from first hand experience, she'd heard enough from her sister over the years to consider herself fairly knowledgeable about them. It was this exact knowledge that lead Kotori to realise that she hadn't just been reborn, she had actually been reborn into an otome game.

In fact, she seemed to have been reborn into her sister's favourite otome game. It was called 'Doki Doki High School Paradise' and Kotori had caught her sister playing the game at least fifty times. She knew the storyline pretty well. It was one of the few otome games her sister played that didn't take place in a fantasy European setting and instead focused on the life of a seemingly average Japanese high school student. The heroine, the character that everyone played the game through, had the default name of Mari Suzuki. Mari was a girl who grew up in a middle class household. Compared to the other characters in the game, she had quite a humble background. Usually someone of her status couldn't enter the exclusive and prestigious Kouketsu High, but Mari managed to get in with a scholarship. In actuality, Kouketsu High could be applied to through scholarship like any other school, but it was notoriously hard to actually pass the scholarship requirements, and so no one had ever gotten in that way before. Mari, however, as the heroine, naturally had excellent grades, so she was the first scholarship student to ever be let into the school.

The game began at the start of the school year, as Mari was entering Kouketsu High for the first time. After that it followed the typical otome game plot, with events popping up one after another for all the capture targets. Kotori remembered that there were five capture targets. The first one, and the one that Kotori's sister deemed her 'ultimate husband' was Hiroki Ishijima, a second year, and the princely type. The second was Kazuki Ando, a first year, the boy next door, athletic type. The third, Masao Fukunaga, the young school nurse, the popular yet somewhat frivolous type. Fourth, Sota Hayama, first year, a bit of a tsundere type. Then finally, the fifth capture target, Sosuke Hayama, Sota's older brother, a third year and the student council president.

Following that, there was of course, the villainess of the game, Kimiko Ueda. She came from the very wealthy Ueda family and grew up spoiled. Within Kouketsu High, there was no one who didn't know her name. Naturally, she was beautiful and the envy of many of the girls there. Of course, none of them dared to say or do anything against her, as the Ueda family was a family too powerful to go up against. Kimiko was a very typical otome game villainess. She looked down on the heroine and bullied her whenever she got too close to some of the capture targets.

According to Kotori's sister, Kimiko didn't appear in every route, however. She was usually only a big presence in either Hiroki's or Sosuke's route. The Ishijima family was a successful one, and had some close ties to the Uedas, and for years the heads of both families had discussed a possible engagement between Kimiko and Hiroki. It was never made official, but Kimiko was aware of it all the same, and so if the heroine got close to Hiroki she would naturally step in and interfere.

In Sosuke's route, though, that's where the player would find out that Sosuke was the one Kimiko actually had feelings for. She always saw him as the ideal boy, someone perfect and who was well suited to her. Though Kimiko never acted on her feelings as she knew she was likely to be engaged to someone else, she still didn't hesitate to get in the way of other girls if they ever tried to get close to Sosuke. The heroine was, of course, no exception, and Kimiko would unleash her anger and jealousy on her whenever she got anywhere near Sosuke.

If the player got a good end for Sosuke or Hiroki, Kimiko would suffer the consequences for her actions. Her bad deeds would be exposed and she would be expelled from the school as well as the talks of the engagement between her and Hiroki falling through. Though it was not such a dramatic sentence, the game was set in the modern world after all, so the punishments were quite realistic. The Ueda family was still rich and had a lot of influence, there couldn't be much else done other than having Kimiko expelled.

If the player got a bad end for Sosuke or Hiroki, Kimiko would end up stealing the capture targets away from the heroine. In Hiroki's case, he would end up being engaged to Kimiko and the heroine would be unable to do anything to change it. In Sosuke's case, Kimiko would eventually confess to Sosuke, saying that she never really wanted to be engaged to Hiroki in the first place, and the heroine would have to watch as Sosuke accepted Kimiko's confession.

Kotori was sure that she had been reborn into that very game with those characters, and that she herself had been born as one of those characters, but she'd already changed something fundamental. Kimiko Ueda did not exist, and instead, in her place was Kotori Ueda. As for her personality as a villainess, Kotori wasn't sure she was similar to Kimiko in that aspect either.

Being a villainess was out of Kotori's expectations, but she thought to herself, it might be fun to try anyway, right?