Otto stared at the scene before him, his brain struggling to process what his eyes were seeing.
A man. With a frying pan on his head. Standing in the middle of his rented room. Next to an RV that had absolutely not been there three seconds ago.
How...
His gaze drifted to the phone still in his hand, the screen displaying the bizarre conversation he'd just been having in a language that shouldn't exist.
Then to the taco on the windowsill.
Then back to the man.
Then back to the taco.
...Oh.
'Oh holy grass!!!?'
It's actually him.
"Crazy Dave?!" Otto blurted out, his voice carrying the unique tone of a transmigrator confronting the sheer absurdity of his new reality.
The man blinked, then grinned—a wide, toothy smile that seemed to take up half his face.
"Wubba wubbo! Blerg squiggly fuzzlewump!"
Translation: "You got my message! Hey, thanks for finding my taco! I've been looking everywhere for it!"
Otto froze.
He understood. Every single gibberish word, every nonsense syllable—it all made perfect sense in his head.
Crazy Person Language Proficiency.
The skill description flashed through his mind with the kind of timing that felt almost sarcastic.
"...Right," Otto said slowly, gesturing vaguely at the windowsill. "Your taco's over there. I didn't eat it, if that helps."
Dave's eyes lit up like twin lanterns.
"Fiddly wobbly doo!!!"
"My baby!!!"
The man crossed the room in three surprisingly swift strides, scooped up the taco, and cradled it like a long-lost child. He held it up to the lantern light, turning it slowly, inspecting it from every angle with the intensity of a jeweler examining a rare gem.
"Squibble wibble... sniff sniff... hmmmmm."
"Let's see here... give it a smell... hmmmmm."
He peeled back the wrapper carefully, revealing the contents within. His eyes narrowed. His lips pursed. He brought the taco close to his face, then pulled it away, then brought it close again.
"Floob noob. Squiggly wibble... GRGLL."
"Lost the sauce. The structural integrity is... ACCEPTABLE."
And then, with the ceremonial gravity of a priest conducting a sacred ritual, Crazy Dave took a bite.
"MMmmmmmmmm… Nom Nom chump"
His eyes closed. His shoulders relaxed. A look of profound contentment spread across his face—the kind of peace that only comes when a wandering soul is finally reunited with something it had lost.
"Wubba."
"Still good."
He took another bite. Then another. By the fourth bite, he was chewing with the enthusiasm of a man who had not, in fact, eaten this particular taco in several days and was making up for lost time.
Otto watched all of this with the expression of disbelief. Probably similar to a natural history documentarian observing an extremely rare species in its native habitat.
"Ahem… .So…," Otto ventured after Dave had polished off half the taco, "you came all the way here... for that taco?"
Dave paused mid-chew, looking genuinely offended.
"BARGLE! Wubba wubba TACO! Squiggly wobbly SAUCE! THREE WEEKS! Grgll grapla blerg!"
"'Just' a taco?! This is MY taco! My special sauce! Three weeks I spent on that sauce! THREE WEEKS, young man!"
He jabbed the remaining half of the taco at Otto for emphasis, bits of filling threatening to fly loose.
"'Sandi webrle. Mud wubba wobly squicgly peppa clog? shiji! shiji webbler! Grlajd blegrs sa
"'THREE. WEEKS. Do you know how many dimensions I crossed to get the right peppers?! SEVENTEEN. SEVENTEEN DIMENSIONS! and then I left it in a table like a fool for a zombie to steal it!!!—'"
Otto raised both hands in surrender. "Okay, okay! Important taco. Life-changing taco. Peak culinary achievement of the multiverse. Got it."
But inwardly he curses…
'How the hell does a zombie steal his taco…!? Don't tell me his taco also contain brains as Dr. Zomboss said in one of the stages in PVZ2?? Ahem… Forget about it. I better not delve deeper into this eerie thought.'
He then saw that Dave nodded approvingly at his praise for the taco and took another massive bite, and chewed with renewed vigor.
Then, unexpectedly, his expression shifted. He swallowed the taco just like a chomper thwn wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and fixed his eyes at Otto with a look that was... different.
The manic energy was still there, but beneath it was something else. Something almost like recognition.
He tilted his head, squinting at Otto in a way that made the young man instinctively want to check if something was stuck to his face.
"Grumble fuzzle..." Dave muttered, more to himself than to Otto. "Blibble blobble. GRGLL."
"Now that I look at you... something's there. Something green."
Hearing this, Otto twitches his forehead.
'Did he just curse me!?!?!'
After all, although it was not him personally, it was his predecessor that was greened (NTR)..
Otto then said while gritting his teeth. "Something... green?"
Dave set down the remaining taco paper wrap that no longer contained anything—a sacrifice that clearly pained him—and walked a slow circle around Otto, like a gardener inspecting a particularly interesting seedling.
"Wubba wubba. Flibble flabble. GRAPPLA GRGLL."
"Don't play dumb. I can smell it on you. That connection. That spark. Plants don't sing for just anyone, you know."
He stopped directly in front of Otto, pointing a stubby finger at his chest.
"GREEN THUMB. Squared. Times infinity. You've got it, kid."
Otto stared at him blankly.
"I... what? Green thumb? I've never gardened a day in my life. The closest I got was planting a beansprout for science experiments during elementary school."
Dave waved the objection away like a pesky fly.
"Flibble! GRGLL! Gardening isn't about experience. It's about the soul. And your soul—" he tapped Otto's chest again for emphasis, "—is GREEN."
'F#^^@ ing green you said?????' Otto thought while twitching his eyes.
If not for him knowing Dave is not Chinese, saying something green does not mean the green hat or NTR, he would have slapped and kicked this crazy dude away.
Dave then grinned, apparently satisfied with this pronouncement, and returned to his taco wrapping, then stunned looking at the empty wrapping.
Dave and Otto stood there, thoroughly confused. Both for a different reason though…
Green thumb? Is the soul green? What is he talking about?
He opened his mouth to ask for clarification, then stopped.
Because somewhere in the depths of his consciousness—where the system had once squatted like an unwelcome tenant—something stirred. A warmth. A green warmth, if that made any sense. It unfurled through his chest like a vine reaching for sunlight, responding to Dave's words as if they had woken it from a light sleep.
Wait.
He closed his eyes, focusing inward.
And there it was.
Three colors bloomed in the darkness behind his lids.
Breezy Yellow. Bright and free, like wind sweeping across an open plain. Familiar, somehow. Like it had been there all along.
Void Black. Deep and cold, like the void between stars. This one felt... newer. Sharper. Born from something he couldn't quite name.
And green.
Natural Green.
Vibrant. Living. Growing. This one was different from the others. It pulsed with its own rhythm, like a second heartbeat tucked somewhere beneath his ribs.
The Natural Green style.
The system had barely mentioned it, but this is actually the settings for this Honkai Resonance game. Of course not from the information system gave him but his predecessor's memory. At the time, he'd barely registered it. He'd been too busy telling a parasitic entity to go eat a bag of shit and get lost.
But now, feeling it, actually feeling it for the first time…
So this is what Dave was talking about.
His eyes snapped open.
For a moment, Otto simply stood there, letting the realization settle.
Right. He should probably explain this for the sake of anyone reading. The world he'd landed in had a whole system around this stuff—classes, styles, elements. The kind of thing that would be in a game's tutorial if this world had any decency.
Just like the genshin elemental system, honkai star rail paths or zzz types?
This game, Honkai Resonance, also has this system.
In this world—Artesia, or whatever the system had called it—every soul had a "style." Think of it like an elemental affinity, but more personal. More tied to who you were at your core. The locals divided these styles into nine categories, each associated with a color:
Fiery Red for fire. Melancholy Blue for water. Poignant Cyan for ice. Breezy Yellow for wind. Natural Green for plants. Grounded Orange for earth. Electrifying Purple for lightning.
Beside those 7 elements mirroring genshin, it has another 2 styles.
Sacred White for light which probably linked to the Imaginary energy. And Void Black for darkness and linked to Quantum energy.
Most people only ever awakened one style. It was just how souls worked—you got what you got, and you made the most of it.
Then there were the exceptions. The people who carried two styles, or even three. They were rare. Talented, sure, but also cursed with a kind of built-in inefficiency, because each style leveled up separately. A dual-style user who split their training time might end up weaker than a single-style user who focused everything on one path.
And then there was the protagonist.
The system had mentioned it—Maestro, the male player character of this whole mess. That guy could probably, just like the previous game installment, switch between all nine styles after enough story progression. Because of course he could. Protagonists didn't play by the same rules as everyone else. That was kind of the point.
As for me...
Otto's thoughts turned inward again, to those three colors waiting in the dark.
Yellow had been there before the transmigration. The original Otto—the failed art student, the disgraced noble, the guy who'd lost everything to the child of luck protagonist of the game—had awakened Breezy Yellow as his natural style. Wind. Fitting, maybe. Something about being swept along by forces beyond your control.
Or maybe because hair color here is tight to your style, and Otto having yellow hair (eventhough he keeps getting NTR) is a canon which is probably the most useless yellow haired guy to ever exist.
Black had come after the duel. After Kallen left. After everything fell apart. The original Otto had apparently awakened Void Black in his despair—a Quantum style, born from loss and darkness. The kind of thing that usually preceded a villain arc in any half-decent story.
Of course we readers prefer to call it blackening…
When a charcter is blackened, he becomes way stronger… Cough!
Though it seems Otto's own talent for Void black style seems to be higher than his Breezy yellow counterpart.
And green...
Green was new. Green was him.
'Fu#*$!!!'
What he meant was that his own soul color style was green which added to the roster of 3 colors not because Otto was greened.
So the new style Natural green that he has is not from Otto Hitler, but himself the transmigrator.
The transmigration had done something. Natural Green. Plants. Growth. The kind of style that didn't come from tragedy or talent, but from... what? Being a guy from another world who'd just wanted to pull Cyrene before getting hit by a train?
He almost laughed at the absurdity.
Three styles. That put him in some pretty exclusive company, at least numerically. Not as many as the protagonist's eventual nine, but still... three.
Not that numbers mean much, he reminded himself. Three styles didn't make him strong. It just meant he had three different paths to train, three different sets of skills to level up, three different ways to be mediocre if he didn't focus.
The original Otto had been level twenty in his wind style. Level three in his black style since he unlocked it gradually as Maestro kept on getting close to his beloved Kallen. and from whatever brief darkness he'd experienced before... well, before he the transmigrator had taken over.
And now there was green. Level one. Maybe even level zero. A seed that hadn't even sprouted yet.
And that's what Dave picked up on.
The man had called it a "green thumb." A gardener's touch. But what he'd really sensed was the Natural Green style—a soul-color Dave probably didn't even have a name for, because how could he? He was just a traveler passing through, here for his taco, not a scholar of this world's magic systems.
But somehow, across dimensions and realities, Crazy Dave had looked at him and seen it.
It's like...
Otto's thoughts trailed off, snagging on a memory.
Grayzhu. The character from Honkai Impact 3rd—one of the games that existed in his world, not this one. She had a special ability: she could see the colors of people's souls. Their true natures, laid bare in shades only she could perceive.
This is just like that.
The Natural Green style. The color of his soul, as far as this world was concerned. And Crazy Dave—a man who communicated in gibberish and wore a frying pan as a hat—had picked up on it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Otto let out a slow breath.
"...Huh."