“Oh! I see! Yes, a surprise!”
She had just been talking about Christmas with Ashiya, but Suzuno knew the best way to convince Acieth to do something was to make it seem fun for her. If she thought Alas Ramus would like it more, this should make it easy to keep her from yapping about the holiday until the day actually came.
“All right! Then I will do the talking with Maou about that, too. He seems stressed since he handles all the new things right now, so I need to wait until he is the serene again…”
Acieth looked deadly serious. The upper half of her face did anyway, with the bottom busily devouring two corn dogs at once in an astonishing feat of flexibility. In a short time, all she had left were the sticks.
“Anyway! We will surprise big sis! I hear you the loud and clear! So, Suzuno, what are you thinking?”
“Huh?! Um, we—we were still planning matters, but Emeralda is quite enthused about it all…”
She was too flustered by the sudden question not to mention Emeralda. It wasn’t a lie, but if Acieth came to know that other people were also planning for Christmas, it could prove even trickier to make her butt out. But there was no taking it back. Acieth’s eyes began to burn with raging flame, raising a corn dog stick high in the air like a Hero’s sword.
“Hngh! I am the more excited than ever! And now I am the hungry!”
“Wha—?!”
“Bell! Damn you! I will make you pay for this!”
“Ashiya! Maou will be the home soon! What’s for dinner?!”
Once Ashiya began griping at them from the kitchen window, Acieth hurriedly stormed inside Room 201.
“Such a fearsome storm this is…”
The storm subsiding from Suzuno’s sight was now bearing down upon Room 201 itself.
“…So be it. I do owe Alciel for this. If the Devil King is returning soon, I could at least offer a few things for the dinner table.”
Whether it was thanks to Acieth or the fault of Acieth, Suzuno was finally able to switch mental gears. She hurried back to Room 202 before she had to endure the screams of Ashiya that would no doubt be coming along shortly.
Several hours had passed since Acieth’s sudden attack on the Devil’s Castle dinner plans. It was late at night, Alas Ramus sleeping peacefully on the bed in Emi’s apartment in Eifukucho.
Meanwhile, Emi was curled up on the floor nearby with her head in her hands, Emeralda kneeling down and trying to offer comfort.
“Now, now, there is no need to feel so down about thiiis…”
“How could I not be down about it?”
“There’s no way around it. You’re going through a great deeeal, Emi, and this isn’t a custom that one sees in Ente Isla…”
“That isn’t the problem.” Emi groaned, keeping her head down. “No matter how hard it is or isn’t for me, that doesn’t mean I’m safe to avoid thinking about Alas Ramus… She’s had it as hard as I have.”
She put her head up, flattening out the shift schedule she had all but pulverized in her fist a moment ago.
“Ohhh, what have I done?”
How shallow she must have been a month ago! Both she and Maou were on duty for December 24 and December 25.
“Ugghh…”
She balled herself up again.
“Maaaybe I shouldn’t have saaaid anything?” Emeralda said, a little unnerved at this dramatic reaction.
Emi had returned to her apartment after picking up Alas Ramus from Devil’s Castle, and Emeralda had waited for Emi to put her to sleep before asking if she could give her a gift. It was a simple question—nothing meant behind it—but it made Emi freeze in place.
“Christ…mas?”
“Er, yes! Ummm, I heard it celebrates the birrrth of a holy figure here on Earrrth?”
“Christ…mas?”
“E-Emilia?”
“When is Christmas?!”
Then she let out a scream that, barring a miracle, absolutely had to have woken up Alas Ramus. She had run off to her calendar, checked her shift schedule—and it had been like this ever since.
“It… It didn’t matter at all to me last year, so…!”
“E-Emiliaaa? You can’t torrrture yourself like this…”
“How did I not notice until today…? I could have picked up on it in a million different ways before now! When I made my shift requests, when she printed out the schedules, when Sariel started freaking out about Sentucky starting their Christmas reservations…”
“Yesss, perhaps you should have noooticed at one point or the other…”
Even Emeralda had to chuckle a little at Sariel’s name coming up.
“I mean, this is supposed to be a religious holiday, right? I didn’t realize it’d be this huge party for everybody. I thought it was kind of weird last year, like…I bought a little cake and stuff, at the nearby convenience store since they had a deal going, but it didn’t feel like anything special…so…”
“Well, you’ve been buuusy! Lately, you’ve just been cycling between your house, that aparrrtment building, and work, haven’t you? Maybe you didn’t see too many of the decoraaations in town.”
“And everybody on crew has to wear Santa hats starting tomorrow… Ugh, geez!”
Emi had not wholly forgotten about Christmas. It was just that last year’s experience had given her such a skewed idea of the holiday that she didn’t realize it was for celebrating and having fun with people. The main thing she remembered about it was how surprised she was that all the public décor switched from Christmas to New Year’s by the morning of December 26.
“It’s all riiight! We could always hold the festivities on another daaay, can’t we? It’s not like we are involved with the religious aaaspect of it…”
“We aren’t. No, you’re right. But… I wanted to tell Alas Ramus about all this fun stuff coming up for her, and right at the start, I’m screwing it up… Uggh…”
“Ummm…”
Emeralda looked a little surprised by this. “So you wanted to teach her about Chriiistmas?”
“Yeah.”
“Which meeeans that you intend to celebrate it again next yeeear?”
“…Yeah.”
“…………Which meeeeeeeeeans—”
“There’s no deeper meaning to it.” With a sigh, Emi finally sat back up. “I have no idea where Alas Ramus and I are going to be by the time it’s December twenty-fifth again on Earth. Remember, this time last year, I was intent on slaying the Devil King and going back to Ente Isla. The year before that was bloody warfare. By this time next year, I know I’ll look back on agonizing about my Christmas shift schedule and just laugh about it.”
“…But you’ll be together with her this time next yeeear, won’t you?”
“…Yeah.”
“And anybody eeelse?”
“Everyone.”
“Eeeveryone?”
“Everyone. Everyone I hold dear to me at that time.”
Emi stood up, fished her smartphone out of her bag, and placed a call.
“Hello? Hey. You got a moment? I hear crying in the background… Oh, Acieth is there for dinner? Well, you have my condolences.”
If Acieth’s name came up, Emeralda assumed she was talking to somebody living in Villa Rosa Sasazuka.
“So I wanted to talk to you about Christmas… No, we got just barely enough people, so I can’t request a shift change now. Eme told me… Oh, you heard, too? Okay… Yeah, I feel the same way. But anyway, it all got started because Eme wanted to give a Christmas present to Alas Ramus… Right. Yeah. So we can’t do the day of, but if we could do it on the twenty-third or twenty-sixth, then at least one of us could be on hand for it, so I thought, like, maybe we could do something?”
This astonished Emeralda a little. Emi was talking to Maou. The “us” in “at least one of us” had to include him. She watched as Emi listened silently for a bit.
“Yeah. Yeah… Huh?! Uh, wait a minute, I didn’t say anything to Chiho. Huh? Why? …I mean, anything’s fine!
We can work out things with her later but not right this minute! I can bring it up with her first, so please don’t say anything when you see her tomorrow, all right?”
Maou must’ve suggested that they discuss matters with Chiho, a proposal that immediately set off alarm bells with Emi for reasons Emeralda couldn’t guess from her perspective.
“Eme? Yeah, it’s sounding like she’s not leaving after all. I dunno why, but she says everything is all right, so… Okay. Right, I’ll talk to you later.”
The several-minutes-long conversation came to a close, with neither side raising their voices.
“Was that the Devil King?”
“Yeah. He was kinda pissed since he was about to go to sleep.”
Emeralda wondered why there’d be crying in the background while Maou was trying to sleep, but Emi didn’t explain why. Instead she turned toward Alas Ramus, sleeping in her bed with her arms outstretched.
“I think he understood what I was getting at. But he’s a demon, you know? The thought of celebrating Christmas with Alas Ramus never even occurred to him, so he got kind of whiny about that.”
“Whiiiny?”
“Well, you know, whenever Alas Ramus is involved…” Emi connected her phone to its charger, placed it on the table, and heaved a dejected sigh. “The Devil King’s busy right now, so even though he saw Christmas on the calendar, I guess he didn’t realize how close it really was. He only really thought of it as a day when people ate lots of cake and cookies—that was his attempt at an excuse.”
“I thought MgRonald only made cakes for birrrthdays.”
“He wasn’t on shift that day last year, so apparently he and Alciel picked up a one-day job selling Christmas cakes at some convenience store.” Emi looked back at her wadded-up shift schedule. “Chiho is off on the twenty-fourth…but unlike our last birthday party, the Devil King doesn’t really know where his training is yet. It might not necessarily be at his home location.”
“But if you and the Devil King are together with Alas Ramus and she calls you Mommy, that will cause quite the paaanic in the ressstaurant, no?”
“Yeah. And some of the more senior crewmembers are on that day’s shift, so we can’t really pull the gray-area stuff we did with the birthday party. What should we do…?”
Emi’s eyes turned toward a photo frame propped on top of her clothes dresser, one of the gifts she received during her and Chiho’s tandem birthday party in October. It held a photo of everyone at the party, except Maou, centered around the two birthday girls. Maou steadfastly refused to join the shot, so he took the picture instead. Ashiya offered to do it for him, but Maou had shot him down—he was on the clock and in uniform, so if the wrong person saw the photo, he could get in trouble.
Emeralda followed Emi’s eyes toward the photo and to the smiling Chiho posed next to her in it.
“So why can’t you discuss matters with Ms. Sasaaaki? I think it’d be better to ask herrr for advice, rather than flounder around with what little Christmas knowledge we haaave…”
“Ahh………well…”
Emi opened her mouth but had trouble piecing the words together. She was even starting to blush.
“Um… Well, maybe I’m overthinking it, or being too self-conscious, or something like that…”
“Oh?”
“It’s like, lately things haven’t been going quite right between me and Chiho a little.”
“Reeeally?! Did—did you and Ms. Sasaki have an arrrgument?!”
This was honestly a shock to Emeralda. She didn’t know Chiho that well, but even then, it was impossible to imagine anything that would make them butt heads with each other.
“No, not like that. We still talk all the time; there haven’t been any fights or anything. But, like, when the subject turns to Alas Ramus, she can’t talk about anything unless the Devil King’s involved. So asking Chiho from the very start about what we should do is, to me…you know…”
“Ohhh? I’m not sure I know at all, no.”
“Mmm, how should I put it? Ugh, and now I’m breaking out into this weird sweat.”
“Emiliaaa? You’re acting weeeird.”
“I know I’m acting weird. Like, more than you’d ever know! I just mean…”
She was sweating despite the cold, fanning herself with one hand and using the other to grab the AC remote and look at the temperature.
“…Back with all that stuff on the Eastern Island, you know, the Devil King helped out a ton, right?”
“Truuue.”
“So now I’m one of the new crewmembers at MgRonald, and he’s the one training me. He’s shift supervisor, so that’s pretty much a given.”
“Uh-huhhh…”
“So then Laila shows up, and then I’ve been doing all this irresponsible stuff, right?”
“I cannot denyyy that, no.”
“Right? So… Ugghhh…” Emi groaned—out of regret, or out of fatigue, or maybe to round up her disorganized feelings. “The Devil King’s been…so damn nice to me the whole time.”
“………………………………Hmm?” Emeralda’s eyes shot open.
“So… You know… Chiho’s gotten kind of…kind of jealous.”
“Hmmmm?”
“Before we went to Laila’s place, me and the Devil King… Some, um, stuff happened…”
“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm??”
Whether she understood what this meant or not, Emeralda was now half off her seat, with Emi holding her head and trying her hardest to dodge her intent glare.
“Emilia?” She brought herself toward Emi’s ear, her voice low. “What do you want to hear from me?”
“…Um.”
Emi clammed up for a good half minute. Then in a barely audible whisper:
“…I don’t know.”
“Then can I give you my honest feelings?”
“…Okay.”
“Depending on the circumstances, I may need to leave right now and go slay the Demon King.”
Emeralda’s voice indicated how serious she was.
“The way you’re acting right now is like nothing I’ve seen from you before, Emilia. Depending on what’s causing it, I believe I will need to contact several related parties.”
“……Er.”
“I am feeling very emotional right now. Beyond whatever we’ve discussed before, I need to know what happened. This…‘stuff’ between you and him.”
“W-wait! Not—not that! Nothing weird or anything…!”
The veiled accusation made Emi flash back to that night, the infamous evening her head kept spitting out system errors. It made her blush a shade redder than before, and Emeralda wasn’t blind to it.
“There was some stuff, you say, involved, which made Chiho jealous enough that even you picked up on it. That alone is enough to summon a mighty tempest in my heart. I find it hard to remain calm.”
“I-I’m serious! Nothing happened! It was a huge pile of nothing!”
“Then please tell me. You can talk about it if it was nothing, can’t you? What did that crude and disgusting demon do to my beloved Emilia?”
“I—I told you, nothing!”
“You’re going to wake up Alas Ramus. Please be quiet.”
“I—I can’t because you’re putting the screws on me, all right? I’ll tell you! Please step back a little!”
Emeralda heeded the half-screamed order, kneeling on the ground just a short distance away and looking straight at Emi.
“Now, listen, I swear to you nothing happened…”
It was with an unsteady voice that Emi began to explain all the events of that night. Those eyes of hers were just too scary to deal with. But by the end of it:
“Haaaaaaa… This is sooo ridiiiculous…”
Emeralda was far looser now, the accusatory light in her eyes replaced with exasperation. By the end of it, she was lying on the ground and enjoying some crackers as she listened.
“Did you knowww, Emilia? On Earth, they call that Sto
ckholm syndrooome.”
Meanwhile, Emi felt like her rising temperature mixed with the cold sweat was going to turn her into a puddle of goo.
“And you knowww, no matter how casually friendly I’ve come to be with the Devil Kiiing, if something happened between you twooo, not that I really thought sooo, but if it diiid—and wow, as grown-up as Ms. Sasaki seems, she’s still just a kiiid, too, huh?”
It was a funny thing to hear, given how much older Emeralda looked than even Chiho.
“But I could perhaps understaaand that, given the Devil King’s personaaality, right? It’s all thiiings that would be good for Alas Ramus more than youuu, so what’s the big deeeal? Except for that paaart where you had to huuug him and stuuuff…”
“Nnnnnnngh.”
Emi wanted more than anything to melt, evaporate, and vanish for good from the world right now.
“I don’t see aaanything for Ms. Sasaki to be jealous about, thooough.”
“B-but that’s what Laila and the Devil King said.”
“Well, you and the Devil King were pretty diiistant before now, so even if you act norrrmally with each other, it could looook like things have changed quite a biiit.”
“Ugh… Well, maybe so…”
“So ridiiiculous… Ridiiiculous…”
“Can you stop calling it ridiculous over and over?! This is freaking me out, too!”
“Ahh, I see Ente Isla committed a great criiime in stealing away your youuuth. You were out journeying so long, and the only maaale accompaniment was a burly giant and this ooold guy…”
Now Emi could see it. Emeralda was exasperated with her in just the same way Laila was. But in her eyes, being told that over and over again wasn’t going to achieve much for her at this point.
“But if thaaat’s how it is, I can see how it’d be difficult to sit down and taaalk over matters with Ms. Sasaki. You can’t just go up to her and say I’m busy with worrrk, so can you hold a Christmas party with the daaaughter of the guy you got the hots for, caaan you?”
“Eme!!”
Emeralda’s frankness led Emilia to shout the word in a mixture of anger and surprise.
“Nmmghm…”
“Ah…!”
But Alas Ramus grimaced in her sleep and turned on her side, so Emi quickly shut her mouth.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 15 Page 9