Chapter Text
Ochako Uraraka never thought her aversion to disappointing people would lead to an unconscious, naked man on her living room floor.
This was all Neito Monoma’s fault.
Ochako couldn’t help feeling a little smug witnessing him handing out flyers outside of the shopping district when, months prior at graduation, he’d been boasting about being personally scouted for a start-up company that would jump-start his career and eventually make him millions. That was until they made eye contact and he made a beeline towards her.
Naturally, she tuned him out. She managed to catch onto some words like “cutting edge technology” and “high performance” and “flesh-like feeling silicone”. She didn’t really understand that last phrase, but she accepted the neon flyer out of pity and hightailed it out of there before he could finish his sales pitch and ask what she was up to. Which was a whole lot of nothing. Unless sitting around her apartment doom-scrolling in-between job searching for entry-level positions counted as something.
It was during this very activity that Ochako remembered the flyer sitting at the bottom of her purse. Worse comes to worst, maybe Neito’s workplace needed some part-time help? She nearly did a spit-take when she saw “Absolute Boyfriend” printed in big, swirly letters advertising the highest level of quality for artificial dating.
“He’s working for a dating sim company?” All in all, it wasn’t the worst industry to be involved in so she thought, Why the hell not? and looked up the site and entered the special pass-code from the flyer that granted her entry.
There was a ton of custom options to chose from and all of the choices made her head spin from the number of possible combinations. Male, female, non-binary. Tall, short, fat and stocky or lean and trim. Black hair, brown hair, blond hair, and every other shade within the colour spectrum. It reminded her of the dress-up games she played on the old family computer as a child and, before she knew it, Ochako spent an embarrassing amount of time recreating those fond memories. She ended up with a Frankenstein-like concoction of a man with both red and white hair bisected into equal halves, prince-like features, and heterochromatic eyes.
“Cute,” she muttered, satisfied with the final product.
Customizing an idealized, fictional partner was a fun distraction until she was done and the cost for interacting with him was 1) not ideal and 2) all too real. She balked at the total – before taxes! – and a pop-up message appeared, inquiring about her hesitation as the timer on the purchase quickly counted down. She tried to word her explanation as succinctly as possible, erasing and retyping over and over again, until that stupid timer ran out. Settling for “I’m poor!” Ochako submitted her response and promptly exited the site, hoping Neito’s gaming company would crash and burn with exorbitant prices like that.
And that was the last time Ochako Uraraka thought about Absolute Boyfriend.
Until the package arrived a month later.