It is Wednesday. Progressive rock wakes you up. In your drowsy state, you take a second to identify that it’s the theme of the Doom Dragon from the Golden Sun soundtrack. You enjoy the contrast between the slow harmonic part and the shredding 16th notes following immediately thereafter. “Alarm clocks are a strange thing,” you think to yourself. Despite our human bodies being perfectly capable of waking up on our own, we still rely on these man-made device to mimic a fraction of Kronii’s power.
As you idly ponder the nature of the alarm clock, you wonder if your roommate is streaming already. You have a strange relationship with your roommate; you aren’t quite lovers – not even friends with benefits – yet you feel so much more close in every trivial interaction with her than you’ve ever felt climaxing inside your exes. Your dog hasn’t bothered you yet; officially, he’s nameless, but your roommate Kronii has taken to calling him Doggerino. Normally, he comes to play every morning; this is as much of a bother as a guilty pleasure to you. He’s probably just sleeping. Your roommate’s cool, soft voice coming from the dedicated streaming room soothes your ears. The thin walls in your apartment have caused some discord in the past – God knows that being too loud on a call with a client would spell doom on her career – but you always found pleasure in listening to her as she streamed, so you ended up never reinforcing the wall with noise protection.
Briskly getting your morning routine over with, you sit down at your computer to do your freelance programming job. Your current client uses a web framework called CakePHP. Jokingly, your roommate often refers to you as the baker in the house for that reason. This in turn caused you to pick up bakery as an actual hobby. You dunk the piece of bread from yesterday, by now slightly hardened, into your aromatic black coffee and bite into it, swallowing the rich taste along with your dislike for working in today’s society. Your roommate is doing her best and so must you.
While you’re waiting for your corporate VPN to connect, you get an odd sense that something is off. The jingle of Outlook flooding with a dozen of e-mails interrupts you. You snap back to reality. Even though you ended yesterday on a sour note with a bug you couldn’t fix, there’s now a higher priority item. As you curse the powers that be for focusing on new features rather than prioritizing bug fixes, your roommate enunciates some words that catch your attention. “My dog died, let’s gooooo!” You’re no stranger to memes and neither is she; this could be a meme superchat she’s reading out loud as much as it could be a dead Minecraft dog, after all.
Nonetheless, the nagging feeling won’t go away. You get up not long after you just sat down. With careful but deliberate steps, you walk across the hallway to check up on Doggerino. He’s lying on the ground, motionless, lifeless. You rush to check for any sign of life, but he feels so incredibly cold to the touch. What she’d said before suddenly feels very much real.
“It is Wednesday, my dudes,” Kronii gleefully memes into her microphone.

To you, it is the day your dog died. But for her, it was Wednesday. She was used to being hurt by the passage of time, after all, you think.

Your hands begin shaking and they do not stop. A flurry of emotions wells up inside you: How can she take this so nonchalantly? She’s literally making light of this situation on stream right now. A river of tears abandons the shelter of your eyelids as they are squished out by the increasingly painful pressure inside your eyes. You never wanted to get a dog, she just showed up with Doggerino. You knew it would end like this. An uncontrollable barrage of sniffles tries to keep you from getting snot everywhere while a cacophony of noises that escape any classification escape your throat.
Your roommate enters and you look at her with utter contempt as you’d completely forgotten who you chose to live with. “You should see your face right now,” she says almost deadpan. You barely manage to calm yourself before you yell something you might regret.
Kronii points at the dog. As an ethereal clock appears above him, he regains his energy and looks almost as if he’d been reborn. “Pretty good prank, huh?” she boasts. Dumbfounded, you just utter “never do that again.” You should’ve known better, this isn’t the first time her tone-deaf antics have go—you lie flat on your back in excruciating pain.
“No one tells me what to do.”

To you, it is the day you died. But for her, it was Wednesday.