Rewritten Past

Maybe it was the adaptability of a five year old's body while having an adult mind and memories?

Either that, or I was always a murderer who was about one bad day away from crashing out and just seeing how high of a kill count I could rack up.

...Mm, actually, let's not answer that question.

I, uh. Kind of know the answer.

ANYWAY.

That situation was resolved. I'd definitely changed the future for April and Mama Yue. Miss Serena too.

From this point, I just had to live normally and things would be fine. The root cause of their lives getting screwed up was resolved.

April would have a loving mother to support her, along with Mama Yue now. And me.

Woe betide the fools who dared make April cry or threatened to hurt her.

Like I said.

This was the 90s.

Cameras were easy to dodge. Compared to the crazy surveillance state of the 2020s, this was EASY mode.

Not to mention the complete and utter lack of fast communication other than phone lines.

If I REALLY wanted to ruin someone's life, I could.

Easily.

Cut the power, cut the cable lines, fuck them up, then disappear.

No one would know.

And no one would believe them.

I wasn't a professional 'fixer' in my past life. But just from the raw information gap, I was in this era.

Especially since I was a child right now.

Things might get iffy around high school... but by that point I'd be WELL established with fuck you money.

Anyway.

Speaking of money...

Can confirm. While I wasn't really putting much attention to it, I WAS getting quite a bit of passive income from various sources due to my online blogs and adsense.

It wasn't crazy amounts. Only 100 dollars so far this week. But I was also getting various Asian currencies too since I translated it to Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean.

The benefits of being an ultraweeb in the future are paying off tenfold~

Ah.

Come to think of it, I could probably make a lot of money as a translator too...

Note to self: Do that.

And also keep an eye out for opportunities to localize games.

Let's see if I could catch the timing to establish a video game company to localize visual novels... Choose Your Own Adventure novels were already pretty popular. If I marketed it right, it should work...

Anyway, that was going well.

What other things did I need to deal with?

Ah, right. My parents.

I felt a bit guilty still about basically betraying my real mom for Mama Yue.

I absolutely did NOT feel guilty about leaving my dad behind.

Nothing against him as a person. Everything against him as a father.

He was NOT a good father. A good man, yes. But not a good father.

He had always been pinning his expectations on me, trying to live vicariously through me and pushing me onto paths that I could do, but made me cut against my core.

I was a creative person, first and foremost. I NEEDED to be constantly making things or improving skills.

He had shoved me into the soul crushing 9-5 lifestyle of an engineer at first, and then into the even MORE soul crushing life of being an attorney.

I crashed out, cut ties, and then started being a content creator instead. Didn't make NEARLY as much money, but was MUCH happier.

Of course then this whole shebang happened...

10/10 would do it again though. Loving this new game plus deal.

Also, Mama Yue was awesome, adorable, and I would trade her for the world. April too. Like a baby sister I never knew I had.

...Even though April was technically older than me by a year if we were going by physical ages. She was born on April 1st in 1993.

I, for the record, was born August 29th 1994.

Where was I going with this?

Oh, right.

There was probably a confrontation due with my parents. I'm guessing it'll be around Christmas. Mom's the sort who would insist we visit, and Dad's the sort who'd expect me there.

Mm... it'll work out.

It's not like they could force me back home anyway.

Mama Yue wasn't letting me go without a fight. And it would get ugly, but the facts were on her side.

Legally, my parents were neglectful in the past. The neighbors could attest to it.

Meanwhile, Mama Yue was a model parent, raising me despite being a young single woman and even having me excel.

Then there was the fact that my parents basically admitted to not being good guardians by giving her temporary guardian powers as well as making her my emergency contact AND having me live with her...

Yeah.

CPS would not be siding with my parents here.

Which reminded me that I used to have some fantasies about calling CPS on my parents because I hated the situation that much.

Hm.

Strange thought. I don't remember the context, but now that I was thinking about CPS, I distinctly remember having the intention of calling them at one point.

Well. All the more reason to stick with Mama Yue.

The soft thud of the wooden dummy echoed in the condo, along with the soft sipping of coffee and rustling paper.

Mama Yue was rehearsing her lines and sipping on coffee, of course. She was always working to better herself like that.

It's why we got along so well.

Honestly, it's enough to where it really made me feel like she was my real mom. Our personalities just matched so much, you know?

But anyway...

Things were on the up and up. I was living the reality that I once dreamed of, and I was accumulating things for a stellar life up ahead.

Now, to finish up my training for now before April woke up and clung onto me all day...

===

A hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The Marriot, from the look of things.

After an hour long commute, we'd arrived to the suite that we'd be living in for the next week or so while Mama Yue filmed her parts as the pink power ranger.

...I still didn't know where we lived. Apparently, it was a small town in SoCal, but I didn't recognize it at all and no one was namedropping it. Not to mention Google was ASS at this era...

Honestly.

Maybe I should just knuckledown and code my own tech. C++ existed. That was more than sufficient for my surfaces. We had object oriented programming already and classes too...

Wait.

...Huh.

Come to think of it.

I can make games.

Like, actual video games.

I understood how to code shaders since I took a stint studying artificial intelligence as a Master's at Urbana-Champaign when it was still ranked number one for that.

About two years before the AI boom, sadly. Missed that by juuust a bit.

Anyway.

Note to self: pursue that at some point.

"Wooow..." April looked around the hotel lobby with wide eyes. "This is a hotel? It's so pretty!"

I looked at her, amused. "Is it?"

To my eyes, it was super rustic. Nothing compared to the sleek decor I remembered of the future.

It was nostalgic, sure. But I didn't prefer it.

...Mostly because I still had the phantom itch to pull out my smartphone. Something that didn't exist and maybe would NEVER exist depending on how the future unfolded.

Hm...

That might be a net gain actually.

Food for thought.