While visiting home during a short school break, Lance manages to buy a Switch after saving up for several months, plus an RPG game he’s been itching to play for forever. His twin Rachel, who loves playing dating sims, pesters him to let her borrow the console so she can play a game she’s been wanting to play as well, but of course Lance plans to fully enjoy playing his game on the console he bought, although he has to wait until he’s back at the Garrison since the McClain household is a very busy household (plus he has to make sure he hides his new Switch from Rachel).
Once he gets back to the Garrison, he excitedly brings out his Switch and his still unopened game, but once he opens the latter’s package, he finds out that the cartridge inside wasn’t the one he thought he’d bought. Instead, it was one labeled “Tokimeki Marmora” (heh). The title isn’t familiar to him, but once he boots it up on the console, he discovers it seems to be a dating sim (he’s had several years of watching Rachel play tons of them to be able to tell).
Lance is of course annoyed and thinks it’s Rachel’s doing, but when he calls her up to ask her where she’d put the actual cartridge for the game he’d bought, she insists she has no idea what he’s talking about. And so, Lance is stuck with a game he didn’t want to play and having to save up again to buy another.
But after one exhausting and frustrating school day (probably crashing the simulator and getting told off by Iverson again), Lance decides to half-heartedly boot up the game to pass the time. Rachel was so addicted to dating sims, so there must be something good about them right? he thinks.
The game’s prologue tells him about a secret alien society in space called the Blade of Marmora, which was involved in fighting against an alien empire, and although Lance doesn’t want to admit it, soon he finds himself very interested in the game’s story. Unlike Rachel’s games that he was used to, his game doesn’t tell him much about the premise of the “heroine”—only telling him that he holds the secret that the Marmora have been searching for and want to use as the key to defeating their enemy.
Somewhere in the story (Lance refusing to admit he’s gotten hooked on a dating sim enough to play it in the middle of one stormy night), Lance meets a masked Marmora member and is made to choose whether to go with him during an escape sequence. Lance chooses yes and the Marmoran leads him (or at least, his character) to some sort of chamber with a pillar of bright light that would supposedly take them to safety. But right at the moment the Marmoran—Keith, Lance learns—takes his (character’s) hand to lead him to the light, a bright flash of lightning appears outside with a loud clap of thunder, making Lance slip off his bed in shock right as the lights in his room go out.
It takes a couple of seconds for him to gather his wits, and he groans as he realizes he lost his grip on his Switch in his surprise. He gropes around in the darkness for it, wishing hard that it he didn’t throw it too hard and damaged it when it was still new, when his fingers brush against…an arm?
Lightning flashes outside his window again, enough to give his room a moment’s worth of light, and Lance stares into the glowing marks of the mask worn by what moments ago was just a character inside the game he was playing.
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