I guess that was the wrong choice of words; both Petralkas glared angrily at me.
“I couldn’t tell which was which, you know? So I said something that would get a rise out of you so that I could tell which was the real Petralka by the slight delay in the reaction. Sorry.”
“Hrm...”
This seemed to placate Petralka, because she didn’t complain any further.
“They really do look identical, don’t they?” Minori-san said in admiration. “From a bit of a distance, you literally can’t tell them apart.”
She was right: it was natural that the doll’s facial features and whatever else would look just like Petralka’s, because that was how it had been made. But even so, if it had just been standing there, or lying on the ground, it would still have felt like a doll. It wouldn’t have had this... vitality, this liveliness.
But as Petralka and Lauron had demonstrated moments earlier, when the doll and the human struck the same pose and had the same expression, that doll-ishness all but vanished. I suppose if you were to get your nose right up next to it, you would probably notice some subtle differences. But that was chiefly because the real Petralka was standing right there for comparison. At a glance, from a distance? You’d never be able to tell. And when they started moving, you had to pay attention or you would quickly lose track of which was which. Even we ourselves could hardly say, and we already knew about the doll. People who didn’t know about it would never imagine that it was a fake. When Lauron really got Petralka’s tics and habits down, I could easily picture the day when I came into the audience chamber and wasn’t sure which of them I was dealing with.
“What do you think, Myusel?” I asked the maid standing beside me.
She had seen the doll under construction a few times, but she had never seen it right next to Petralka, let alone moving and expressing itself.
“It’s incredible,” she breathed. “It really looks like there are two of Her Majesty.”
From her tone, I could tell that this wasn’t just politeness. The two of them really looked the same to her. Perfect.
“All right, shall we go ahead and get started, then?” I said, and everyone nodded. “Lauron, would you make the doll imitate Petralka?”
“Yes, sir.” Lauron nodded.
“Romilda, Myusel, if you notice anything off, speak up. Loek, get your voice-changing magic ready. And Petralka, I want you to just say and do whatever, for Lauron to copy.”
With that, everyone but Petralka lined up along the far wall by Lauron, the better to see the doll.
There was a moment of silence. Petralka, with the eyes of everyone in the room focused on her, took a deep breath. She opened her mouth as if to speak. But...
“Hrrn...”
No words came out from between those pink lips. Just a sort of grunt, accompanied by a panicked expression.
“What’s wrong?”
“It turns out this is rather difficult to do on command...” Petralka muttered, crossing her arms. An instant later, the doll crossed its arms.
And then its lips moved. “It turrrns out this is razzer diffyicult to do-on-com-mand.”
Hmm. I should have guessed it would also be hard to change someone’s voice with wind magic. The words sounded a little awkward. Loek, though, had claimed to me that with a little practice, the speech would become completely natural.
“Just talk like normal,” I advised her.
“Hrm...”
“Hrbb...”
“Like, try laughing,” I suggested. “Oh ho ho ho!”
I thought I was helping, but Petralka didn’t look very appreciative. One eyebrow stood up in annoyance.
“We do not laugh like that!”
“Huh? You think?”
“Wee do not laugh like thad!”
“I think if you take it a little slower on the voice, it’ll sound more regal,” Hikaru-san said.
“...Yes, sir,” Lauron answered. Actually changing the voice was Loek’s job, but Lauron was providing what amounted to the raw material.
“Myusel, Romilda,” I said, “how’s it sound to you?”
This was actually one of the reasons I’d brought Myusel along today: that magic ring. We were able to communicate telepathically using these magical items, but it was a sort of mind-to-mind translation of what was being said. It didn’t work with recordings on machines, or with written letters.
The voice we were hearing was really Lauron’s voice, modified by Loek’s magic. With this magical intermediary, we could hear the sound of the voice, but it wouldn’t carry over into the translation. Of course, Minori-san and I both had at least a working knowledge of spoken Eldant, but things like tone and inflection escaped us. Hence why we needed the opinion of a native speaker of the language.
“I’m sorry,” Romilda said, “but it just sounds like Lauron talking to me.”
“That’s nonsense! Are you saying my magic isn’t getting the job done?!”
“I didn’t say that! I just said what it sounded like to me!” Loek was furious, and Romilda was thoroughly annoyed. “Yes, it sounds a little different, but I talk with Lauron a lot, and I know her quirks. She might sound funny, but she still sounds like Lauron.”
“...I agree,” Myusel said apologetically. “I’ve had the honor of hearing Her Majesty speak several times now... But if I had to compare this to those occasions...”
“No dice, huh?” I sighed.
Lauron’s performance looked like our bottleneck now. Once Loek had the magic worked out—once he understood the basics of how to change the voice—we wouldn’t need to make further modifications based on the situation. We could just stuff it into a magical item.
But the doll, acting as Petralka’s body double, would need to be able to answer basic questions. The overall quality of the voice was one thing, but the nuances were something we couldn’t augment with magic.
“It’s starting to look like the talking is going to be the hardest part,” I said.
“It’s possible we could get someone else specifically to do the voice,” Hikaru-san said.
Then, to our collective surprise, there was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” Petralka said, implicitly pausing our practice.
“It is I, Your Majesty.”
“Garius. Enter.”
“Majesty.” The door opened even as he spoke, and the silver-haired knight came in.
“What is wrong?”
“An urgent matter requires your attention.”
“We are over here.”
“...How rude of me.” Garius, who had been addressing the doll, gave a discreet cough and turned to the real Petralka. “We implore you to return with us,” he said softly.
“Hmm?” Petralka pursed her lips. Incidentally, so did the puppet standing next to her.
“Majesty...” Garius said pleadingly.
“There appears no choice,” Petralka said with a sigh. “We must excuse ourselves for the time being. The rest of you, do not forbear to practice in our absence.”
Then she and Garius left the room.
Okay, understandable. I could have seen this coming. Petralka was the empress. No matter how carefully she arranged her schedule, there was always going to be a mountain of business to attend to. Frankly, I expected plenty more interruptions like this in the future.
“All right, well, Lauron, how about you just start imitating Petralka doing whatever?”
I looked at Lauron... but she didn’t move. She didn’t seem to be using magic; the Petralka figure was just standing there motionless.
“What’s wrong?” Hikaru-san asked the frozen dwarf.
“Um...” Lauron blinked and looked at Hikaru-san, sounding lost. Then she looked at me. She wore her usual detached expression—but was it my imagination, or did she look upset?
“When you say... doing whatever... what exactly do you mean...?”
“Huh...? Oh, right.” I realized my instructions had been a little too vague. Fair enough. She
had only just started training—maybe suddenly saying “just make it like Petralka” was a bit much to ask. Even Petralka had had trouble when I’d told her to just act like herself.
“Hmm, uh, okay, could you walk from the chair to the wall and back, then sit down again?”
“Understood.” Lauron nodded, then raised her arms and pointed her palms at the Petralka figure. She spent a second intoning a spell, and then Petralka’s feet began to move. She walked to the wall, turned around, and swinging her arms like a marching soldier, she went back to the chair and sat again.
“Was that... to your satisfaction?”
“Hrm...”
For a second, I wasn’t sure what to say. Sure, she’d done exactly what I asked. To the wall, come back, sit down. On target as far as it went, but... But...
“It just didn’t feel like Petralka...”
The problem was bigger than that, in fact. Not only did it not feel like Petralka, it didn’t feel human: the movements had looked just like a puppet’s. Like a machine that looked human. You could practically hear the gears clanking.
So I stood there, not sure how to answer—not sure how to explain.
I was saved when Hikaru-san, who had been watching from the wall, took a step forward. “You’re imitating the empress, so I think when she walks, she should puff out her chest and look a little more important.” He strutted to demonstrate. Fists clenched, chest out, marching in place.
Lauron watched silently, then gave a small nod and started moving the doll. Just the way Hikaru-san had shown her—exactly. Now it looked plenty human. In fact, it was like having another Hikaru-san standing right...
Huh?
I was starting to get an unpleasant feeling. Could this be...?
“I think she sort of crosses her legs when she sits. You could try that,” Hikaru-san said, back in his place by the wall.
“Switch your legs back and forth a few times,” Minori-san added.
“Understood,” Lauron said, nodding again, and again the puppet started moving. Petralka’s look-alike seated herself in the chair once more—awkwardly and mechanically—and crossed her legs. But something was obviously wrong. It was like her energy was in the wrong places.
“Switch... several times...” Lauron murmured. As she did so, the puppet crossed its legs. A few seconds later, it recrossed them. Then a few seconds later, it did it again. And a few seconds after that...
“Okay, whoa, stop, stop!” I called, waving my arms. “Just crossing and uncrossing your legs forever is super weird, right?!”
She looked set to keep shifting positions at precise intervals pretty much all day. And wasn’t that practically the definition of mechanical? And there was something off about the way the doll looked with its legs crossed. Like, normally when you cross your legs, the upper leg sort of rests on the lower one, with the lower leg supporting the weight of the upper one. But that wasn’t what the doll was doing. It had the basic action down, but its strength seemed to be distributed evenly throughout its body. It was almost like it was forcing itself to hold a pose.
“What? But... you said to cross and uncross the legs...”
“Okay, yes, we did! But there’s a limit to these things!”
Lauron furrowed her brow, seemingly deep in thought.
I should have guessed.
The exact reason for that unpleasant feeling I’d had was becoming clear to me.
Earlier, Lauron had been able to imitate Petralka’s movements when she’d been physically there as a model. But she hadn’t absorbed those movements and taken them into herself; she hadn’t needed to. She just needed to copy what was in front of her.
But what about when you took the model away?
In other words, when you’re not copying, but reproducing...
Like, say there was a math problem. The teacher solves it, the student sees them do it and learns the answer, so the next time the same problem comes up, they can give the right response. But they don’t really understand the problem; they’ve just learned by rote what the teacher showed them. So when it comes to a different problem, when they have to apply the idea, they’re lost.
Or pretend someone likes the work of a certain illustrator, and all they do is copy that person’s pictures. After making hundreds or thousands of copies, they can reproduce that illustrator’s work at a level that’s indistinguishable from the original—but they still don’t necessarily understand character anatomy, or how to put flesh on a design; they’ve just specialized in copying 2D points and lines. So that person still wouldn’t be able to produce an original work in the illustrator’s style. They could only imitate what had already been created.
“You’ve seen Her Majesty up close a number of times now, right?” Hikaru-san said to Lauron. “Did you never notice at all how she walks or sits?”
“I did...”
“Sure you did. So just imitate what you saw, right? What’s so hard about that?”
“H-Hikaru-san...” I said. He didn’t sound especially critical, but you could never tell how a person was going to take something. “Maybe you could be just a little more... gentle...”
“Gentle? What?” he said, blinking in confusion.
Hikaru-san is so smooth in so many ways that I think he may not fully grasp the feelings of people who aren’t as socially adept as he is. To say this should be obvious, so why aren’t you doing it? might just be an innocent question in his eyes, but the socially maladroit might feel like they’re being made fun of or even attacked.
I had grown up with a light novel author for a dad and a game artist for a mother—in other words, with a couple of creative types—so I was well aware of the gulf between people who “could do” and people who couldn’t.
What Hikaru-san was saying wasn’t wrong—but it wasn’t going to help solve the problem, either.
“Okay, okay,” Minori-san broke in with a wry smile, as if to say, Let’s all calm down. Hikaru-san didn’t look thrilled, but he backed off, and then we all looked again at Lauron.
And I boggled.
“Wha—”
Lauron was standing there with her eyes full of tears, her whole body shaking.
“...oh...” A tiny sound escaped her. It was almost like she was trying to stifle a cough—but instead, it turned out to be the signal for a total breakdown. Huge tears rolled down her cheeks, and she let out one wracking sob after another.
“I don’t... understand... I don’t understand... Why...”
“Whoa, whoa, uhh!”
Why? That’s what I wanted to ask! But I was afraid that would sound too critical, so instead I just took a few steps closer to her.
“Y-You don’t have to get it right away. It’s your first time and all!” I said, but Lauron just rubbed at her eyes and continued to cry.
Ahhhh. What to do, what to do? I hate when girls cry...!
I was just about at the end of my rope.
“Uhh, uhhh, uhhh, I’ve got it! This is Hikaru-san’s fault!”
When in doubt, start with the classic: blame someone else.
“What?! How is this my fault?!” Hikaru-san exclaimed, sounding uncharacteristically unsettled. I’m sure he hadn’t expected Lauron to burst out sobbing, either. She had always seemed so stoic, and she was good at magic and very serious. Maybe that had given us the mistaken impression that she was just an unflappable hard worker. We had never imagined that she might also be so vulnerable.
Ohh, for— What am I gonna do?
“Uh, umm... Okay, let’s all take a break! Take five! Im’a use the bathroom—see ya!”
Maybe it was the tense situation that inspired my sudden need to answer nature’s call. Whatever the case, it was the perfect excuse to flee the room.
There’s a relatively well-known story about the Palace of Versailles: that at first, it didn’t have any separate bathrooms.
Maybe that seems obvious enough. Before the development of sewage pipes and bathrooms with running water, the pit latrine was the most c
ommon method of collecting waste, which would then be used as fertilizer.
In Middle-Ages Europe, I’ve heard, human waste was typically thrown away in courtyards or in the street.
And remember what I said about the Eldant Empire being a lot like Middle-Ages Europe?
The “toilets” in our mansion were... yep. Pit latrines.
That was manageable when you were in a one-story building, or when there were toilets on just one floor... But when it came to a massive, complex structure like Eldant Castle, things got a lot more complicated.
For a serviceable pit latrine, you need some height. You can’t just flush the waste away like with a flushing toilet. Build a bunch of toilets above each other on each floor, and it would just come straight down on the head of the guy beneath, which would not only be stinky and unsanitary but downright psychologically damaging. In light of how many people needed to use the toilet in a building this big, the sheer amount of waste was no laughing matter, either.
So how did the toilets work in this castle? They were... surprisingly cutting edge, actually.
The toilets were mostly located around the outside edge of the castle, in order to make it easier to bring in air from outside (or so I was told). Believe it or not, they had toilet-specialist mages whose whole job was to periodically gust magical wind through the bathrooms. The wind would go down into the areas where waste was collected along the outer wall, helping to both keep down the smell and disperse the humidity, as well as dry out the contents of the waste collection vessels and tamp down the material. It virtually eliminated the smell.
People charged with waste collection would then take this stuff and use it for fertilizer. The whole process had apparently been systematized.
I have to admit, I was pretty impressed when I first heard about all this. Not that doing your business at Eldant Castle was exactly fun. As I’ve written, the toilets were mostly towards the outer wall, and the passageways running around the castle were plenty complicated... So if you had a real emergency but didn’t know your way around, you could waste a lot of time rushing around the hallways.
And thus I found myself...
“Sigh...” I sighed as I walked down the hall.
Outbreak Company: Volume 8 (Premium) Page 10