The Power of Moe

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to change.”

  “Yes, sir...?”

  She looked at me, evidently confused. Normally, this was the part where she would leave the room...

  “I’m going to change my clothes. What are you going to do?”

  “Help you change your clothes...?”

  “No, you’re not!” I said, suddenly shouting. My lower body was only covered by a single pair of pants. Not to mention, my morning glory hadn’t yet faded. If I took off my pajama bottoms now—well, it would be very, very embarrassing.

  “I—I’m sorry, sir!” Myusel was quivering with shock. Apparently thrown completely off by this turn of events, she fell right over. “Eeyipe!”

  “Are you okay?” I hurried over and offered her my hand, helping her up.

  “I’m fine, and—I—I’m sorry.” She pulled her hand back, looking mortified.

  Erk. That hurt a little—the way she jerked her hand away, like she had touched something dirty.

  “I really am very sorry, I just forgot myself and—for a creature like me to touch your body, Master...”

  “Guh...?” I was caught off guard by her completely unexpected reaction. What in the world was she talking about? “Hey, I don’t mind if you touch me—I mean, the way our fingers brushed just kind of set my heart racing. It could be a flag for something more... I mean, wait a second.”

  Suddenly I realized. Basically, Myusel thought I had shouted at her because she was about to touch me—she thought I didn’t want to be touched by her. So when I helped her up, she thought she’d upset me by making physical contact.

  This was awful. I was already an unfamiliar foreigner to Myusel. She had no idea what Japan’s values were; how could she know what position I occupied in my native society? So she wanted to help me change clothes, but when I refused, she must have thought I was such an august person that even touching me wasn’t allowed.

  It was ridiculous. And so, with a sigh, I set out to clear up this misunderstanding.

  “Erm, Myusel...”

  “Yes, Master?” She was looking at the ground and seemed to be summoning her strength. Maybe she expected me to yell at her.

  “I don’t know what’s normal in your country. But in mine, nobody would get angry at anybody else just for touching them, no matter who they were.”

  Well, granted, there were some girls who would be pretty upset if an otaku like me got into their personal bubble in any way. But bringing that up would only confuse the issue, so I kept to myself. The point was, I said, that even if we were maid and master, there wasn’t such a great difference between us that I would be angry to be touched.

  “Is... Is that really true...?”

  “It is. So don’t sweat it, okay?”

  “But...”

  “Listen,” I said with a frown. “The reason I told you not to help me change—it’s just, where I come from, I don’t normally have a woman help me with that sort of thing. I was just embarrassed.”

  “Oh...” Myusel’s eyes were wide. It didn’t look like she followed me exactly, but...

  “All right. Just out of curiosity, if I said I would help you change, what would you think?”

  “Y-You would d-demean yourself like that—?!” Myusel shook her head furiously.

  “No, no. I mean, if I were in the same position and social status as you. If a man offered to help you change, you wouldn’t be embarrassed? Even if he saw you in your underwear?”

  “I guess...” She nodded, not quite looking at me, her cheeks flushing. Ahhhh, why did every single thing she did have to be so cute?!

  “It’s the same thing. Anyway, I can change on my own, so why don’t you go ahead and go to the dining room?”

  “Yes, sir. I understand.” Relieved, she was finally smiling again. She nodded and left the room.

  “...This could be tougher than I expected.” I thought about all the miscommunications and misunderstandings that were no doubt waiting in my future and let out a long sigh.

  Done changing, I walked through the halls of the mansion, heading for the dining room. I may have been in another world, but the people living here were basically human like me, so the construction of their houses was similar. From a utility perspective, it made good sense. It was like parallel evolution—if the starting conditions were the same, then the outcome was likely to be similar.

  The hallway looked pretty much like you’d think the hallway of a Western-style mansion would, or like you might imagine from seeing the outside of the house. It was so wide that two adults could walk side by side with their arms outstretched. Windows were placed at even intervals, and the floor was covered in wooden tiles that made complicated geometrical patterns.

  Incidentally, I was dressed in what was allegedly traditional Eldant attire. Perhaps in another display of parallel evolution, it was just a shirt and a pair of pants. Nice and familiar. But maybe because I was being treated as a noble, the sleeves and collar of my shirt were covered in fancy embroidery.

  “Man is she cute, though.”

  I was talking about Myusel, of course.

  For better or for worse, I was a man of well-rounded tastes. I could dig anything from loli characters to big-breasted, bespectacled older-sister types like Minori-san (obviously). Shrine maidens? Sure. Nurses? Totally. The only thing I wasn’t into was little-sister types. Otherwise, I could get moe for just about anything.

  But despite all that—or maybe exactly because of it, because I had no blind spots—ultimately, I was especially weak to well-balanced types, maids like Myusel. The purity and sweetness just grabbed me by the heart and wouldn’t let go.

  She was a maid and an elf and clumsy to boot. And she was throwing herself into taking care of me. What can I say? I was so thrilled I thought I might never come down from the high.

  Lost in rapture, I soon found myself lost in the house, too. I’d wandered into some strange place. It looked like a store room; the whole place was dim even though it was morning. Near the ceiling, there were a few windows meant for ventilation, but there was nowhere else for sunlight to get in. It’s normal in food storage to try to keep sunlight out, so that products aren’t affected by ultraviolet rays or changes in temperature, but even so, it was like it was still night in there. It was a little creepy.

  I thought I felt something cold on my back, and turned around. But at just that moment, I stopped: I was sure I’d heard something wriggling in the storeroom. Then came an intermittent sound like a wet slap. Like something was sticking to the ground and then being removed again. It was this close to sounding like someone walking on bare feet—but then, what was that scraping sound, like claws dragging along the floor?

  I remembered a horror game from years ago where there was this evil that was resident in this house—this sounded a lot like what you heard just before zombie dogs attacked. Scrrtch. Scrrtch. You’d hear the sound getting closer, growing louder—it was the most terrifying thing in the world.

  To think sound alone could be so evocative. All the more so when it was dim and hard to see.

  “Where am I...?”

  And when you were in another world. A world where dragons and elves just wandered around like it was no big deal. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find out there were zombies, too. I was just starting to tremble at the thought when—

  “Oh!”

  A strangely shaped face emerged from the shadows. Long and sort of rough. A jagged curve of a mouth large enough to eat a small child in a single gulp. The body, covered in scales, didn’t seem to emit any heat, and the pupils, straight as if they’d been carved with a knife, turned to look at me almost mechanically.

  “Eeeeyyaaaaahhhhh!!”

  In a fit of terror, I screamed and waved my arms. One of my clenched fists landed on the side of the creature’s face—its cheek, I guess—with a dull impact. A couple of seconds later, the fist that had struck the scaly visage began to grow hot and then burn with pain. Hang on a second.
What’s wrong with me, taking on a monster like this with my bare hands?!

  I’d read on the internet somewhere about a haunted house where a visitor got so surprised that he reflexively punched out one of the employees. But I had never imagined I might have it in me to instinctively hit someone. I guess you never know what a human will do when he feels cornered.

  They say your instincts choose between fight and flight, and I obviously hadn’t chosen flight. It was too late to regret it now. If I turned my back on my opponent, it looked like he might just take a big bite out of me. There was no running. In an RPG, when you choose the “Run” command, sometimes you get a message like “You started to run away but were blocked in front.” It was just like that.

  That meant I had no choice left but to fight.

  “Yaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!”

  Pretty much just confused and panicked at this point, I launched another haymaker at my opponent’s face.

  It hurt. It really hurt. I don’t exactly have beefy hands, and on top of that my opponent was covered in rough scales like a reptile, so of course I would hurt myself by hitting him. If I could startle him enough, though, maybe I could make an opening for myself to flee............... Wait.

  Reptile?

  Just as I was letting my enthusiasm carry me into a third punch, it registered. I wasn’t exactly the quickest guy on the draw, yet I had thrown three punches... and my opponent hadn’t moved. Hadn’t counterattacked, hadn’t run away. He was just standing there.

  “...Huh?” I cocked my head, confused.

  In response, the strange creature cocked its own head and said with a concerned look, “Are you all right?”

  “...Huh??”

  “If you wish to strike me, this may be better.”

  He handed me a stick-like object (his hands were, of course, also covered in scales). It was a lot like the “wooden club” that you get at the start of so many RPGs. There was cloth wrapped around the handle.

  “I used this end t’ dig a hole for some flower bulbs in the garden earlier, so you might dirty your honorable hands if you hold it there. Take this end.”

  “Oh, thanks. I mean—wait a minute!” No sooner had I taken the club that was so politely offered to me than I shook my head. The other person wasn’t an evil beast—he wasn’t even a monster. He was the mansion’s manservant. The lizardman, Brooke. I’d been introduced to him the day before, but in the dark he really spooked me and I made a bit of a rash mistake.

  “S-Sorry about that!” I apologized quickly. “You scared the heck out of me, so I popped you one—you’re not hurt, are you?!”

  “I’m quite well. As you can see, I’m covered in scales.” He sounded completely nonchalant. At the very least, he didn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere, and nothing was swollen. I guess I couldn’t tell from here whether there might have been internal injuries, but...

  “More importantly, Master, your hand...”

  “Huh? Whoa!” His words caused me to look at my own hand—where I found a bunch of small cuts welling up with blood.

  I didn’t have any fighting experience; I had just struck him as hard as I could, and as a result, I had done more harm to myself than to him. The cuts must have come from his scales. Come to think of it, I had read that if you didn’t close your fist the right way when you punched someone, you could break your own fingers. I figured I should be glad that my injuries weren’t any worse.

  Brooke’s reaction, however, made no sense to me. What was going through his head? Sure, I was his employer, but to just stand there and let me hit him? Even offer me something “better” to do it with? It defied all logic.

  “Master?!” I spun around at the shout. Myusel stood there with her hands over her mouth, her face pale.

  She was looking at my hand. I scrunched up my face. I knew I was still standing in front of Brooke and holding the club, as if to say Look at my blunt weapon! I beaned him with this! What must this have seemed like to her?

  “Th-This isn’t what it looks like!” I threw the wooden club aside as quickly as I could. “Myusel... This is just a misunderstanding!”

  Misunderstanding or no, it was true that I’d hit him. But it was self-defense, right? The heat of the moment. At least there hadn’t been any malice in it. Whatever excuses I might offer, ten out of ten people seeing what Myusel was seeing right at that minute would have concluded that I had struck Brooke.

  “Master! Your hand is bleeding!”

  “...Huh?”

  Myusel came rushing up to me and touched my hand gingerly. She took a white handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and began bandaging my wound. She was completely flustered, looking left and right as if for help. Finally she said, “I need the first-aid kit—no, get the doctor from the clinic!”

  “Er, I don’t think you need to do all that...” She seemed so upset that I was starting to feel sorry for her. “Wait a second, calm down, Myusel. It’s not that serious a wound.”

  “B-But...”

  “Anyway, are both of you crazy?!” I took a step back so I could see both Brooke and Myusel.

  “Crazy?” Brooke looked at me quizzically. “How so?”

  “I—I’m very sorry! I d-don’t really know why, but I am!” Myusel was once again terrified to think she had angered me.

  “No—listen. I’m the one who just up and punched you. I know you say it didn’t hurt, but how can you just stand there and take it? And Myusel, shouldn’t you be more worried about Brooke than me?”

  No matter how you sliced it, I was the one who deserved to be chewed out here. And yet both of them were staring at me with blank looks on their faces, as if they had no idea what I was talking about. What was with these two?

  “I mean... Brooke didn’t do anything to deserve it, right? And I still hit him! You should be mad at me! If I got a little hurt, it’s my own fault.”

  “But Master,” Brooke said with a dubious expression—actually, him being a reptile and all, I guess I had no idea what his expressions meant—“It’s quite normal for a noble to beat his demi-human servants.”

  “...Come again?”

  Now I was the one with the blank look on my face. True, Matoba-san had told me I was like a guest of state in the Eldant Empire, and that I would be treated like nobility. But still...

  “Normal? Even for no reason?”

  “Their nobility is reason enough,” Brooke said.

  I wasn’t completely sure I followed. But basically, it sounded like class differences were absolute in the Eldant Empire, so nobles held the power of life and death over their servants. They were slaves—hell, practically livestock.

  That was why a noble might beat a demi-human servant for no reason as a matter of course. And the servant would no more be upset about it than any person would be angry at a typhoon, or an earthquake, or a flood, or any other force of nature.

  ...Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!

  “So you’re not angry...?”

  “Angry?” Brooke asked.

  “I mean... You’re not going to hit me back or something?” I said hesitantly. I was worried he might say, Oh! Yeah! and clock me.

  It was Myusel who answered, “Demi-humans can never go against full-blooded humans...”

  I furrowed my eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

  She was quiet for a moment, thinking about something, and then she said, “I don’t know how it was in the country you came from, Master, but here, there’s contempt for demi-humans.”

  “What do you mean, contempt?” I asked dumbly.

  The story I got out of Myusel and Brooke after that was a bit shocking to me. Apparently, there was a sort of pyramid structure in this world, with humans at the top and demi-humans below them. On an individual level, humans didn’t have much to distinguish them—no unique physical capabilities, no magic, no nothing.

  But the elves, although strong in magic, didn’t reproduce very quickly. The lizardmen had powerful bodies but next to no magic, and because they were basically reptil
es, they were at the mercy of the ambient temperature.

  There were other kinds of demi-humans in this world, too, yet the most numerous race was humans, who might not have had any special abilities but also didn’t have any specific weaknesses. It was humans who had developed technology and culture, formed large-scale groups and nation-states. There were so many of them that they didn’t have to adapt themselves to the environment; they could change the environment to fit them.

  With the advent of agriculture, the humans’ income grew. With more resources, the number of people society could support increased. That encouraged development across all fields, not just farming. Professional soldiers and scholars, among others, emerged. That led to even more advances in farming and the discovery of animal husbandry and construction, while the humans’ military power to protect themselves from outside threats also expanded. The greater the shared wealth, the more abundant each individual person’s life became, and more resources meant more of everything to go around.

  In contrast, the demi-humans, who had a strong tendency to simply live in accordance with nature, had only ever formed small groups; they were at risk from disasters and famine and were easy targets for more powerful enemies.

  “That’s just how exalted humans are,” Myusel concluded.

  “No... Wait...” I could see the logic. And yet... This slap in the face by reality left me lost for words. Obviously, discrimination against demi-humans was a common plot point in games and manga. But to be confronted with a real society in which the victims of discrimination had completely assimilated that same bias... It left me with a cold feeling.

  I thought of Brooke, who had let me hit him without saying anything. Of Myusel, who was less worried about her beaten colleague than about her “master’s” hand. Their behavior wasn’t at all their fault, yet I couldn’t shake an inexplicably strange feeling. I sighed.

  “What are you doing?” an annoyed voice asked. We all turned to see Minori-san. “I was looking for you. I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

  “Oh. Um...”

  I couldn’t even begin to explain, but Minori-san said, “Eat your breakfast and then let’s get to work. Matoba-san is waiting at the castle.”