“Yeah. If you really want to, you can watch TV on your phone, besides. It kind of kills the battery, so I usually don’t, but…” Chiba’s flip phone, meanwhile, had a screen you could flip around so the main screen was facing outside instead of in when folded.
Emi sighed. “We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries lately about batteries, actually. It depends on how you use your phone, of course, but…yeah, I wish they lasted longer, too. If you’re using a smartphone, I tell people they pretty much gotta have a portable charger with ’em at all times.”
Emi worked full-time as a customer service agent for cell phone giant Dokodemo’s main call center. Since her bosses began introducing thinner and more lightweight smartphones, there was a clear uptick in complaints about batteries and why the hell they didn’t last so long.
In practice more a portable computer than telephone, these devices’ battery lives varied wildly depending on how much users took advantage of their data packages and fancier features. But compared to Suzuno’s and Chiho’s older models, they almost always went dead more quickly.
Maou glumly interrupted the three women’s cell phone confab.
“Uh, girls, you think I’m living so high on the hog here that I can afford a phone to watch TV on?”
“Wait’ll you get a load of this… The King of All Demons has a phone with an extendible antenna.”
“Huh?!”
“Wha?”
“Pardon?”
Urushihara’s poetic turn of phrase made Chiho gasp, Emi gape, and Suzuno tilt her head in confusion.
“Yeah, well, I only have to recharge it every other day.”
“Whaa?!”
“Every other day?!”
“Is that long? Short? What are you trying to say?”
That was enough to even surprise Emi. Suzuno remained confused.
“Right after I showed up here, I just asked for whatever cost the least money, and I got this.”
Maou removed his phone from his pocket as he spoke.
It sported a few scratches, but looked fairly well taken care of. But even compared to Chiho’s and Suzuno’s models, it was clearly from another era.
“Ooh. My dad used to have one of those.”
For someone like Chiho, growing up in the digital age, a cell phone was a device whose constant presence around her was a given. Even she could tell with a single glance that Maou’s device was a modern relic.
“…Who made that?”
The carrier name on the back of the phone was something Emi, who worked for a phone company and had at least a passing knowledge of the competition, had never seen before.
“Your mail address is from AE, right, Maou?”
Maou nodded.
“Yeah, my phone bill comes from AE. But when I bought this, they kept yappin’ at me about base costs and data plans and stuff. I kept telling them that all I cared about was talk and text, and they gave me this.”
“Just talk and text… Wait, is that a Joose’d Mobile phone?!”
Joose’d Mobile had its heyday a while back, selling cheap prepaid plans and no-money-down phones to millennials with flashy in-your-face advertising. The original service died long ago, merging with AE—one of the Big Three in Japan’s carrier scene—a few years back.
“Yeah. The phone was free, it’s easy to use, and I figure I’m not paying more than what I use it for, y’know?”
Maou’s reply was indifferent. But in this era where even the so-called next generation of cellular devices were now old hat in the wake of all-purpose smartphones, sporting a Joose’d phone—one that ran on a network that didn’t even exist any longer—wasn’t exactly common.
The fact that Joose’d devices could even run on a modern carrier infrastructure was a miracle in itself. And as their old TV slogan “All Talk. All Text. No BS” hinted at, there was no web surfing going on with Maou’s handset.
“S-so…like, Maou, how do you know what the weather’s gonna be like, even?!”
“Huh? 177.”
The reply offered little explanation to Chiho’s disbelieving ears.
“’Course, I still wind up calling the voice-time number by accident every fifth time or so…”
“Emilia, what does ‘177’ mean?”
“You call that and a computer voice gives you the weather. You get the time by dialing 117, by the way. I think you need to dial some kinda special prefix if you’re calling from a cell. During training, they just kinda touched on it as something I’d never, ever use, so I forgot about it.”
Emi’s response belied her customer-service experience. Quick and to the point.
“I had no idea anyone used it, though. I mean, a lot of people have the weather on their lock screen these days. …And if you misdial it all the time, why don’t you stick the number in your directory?”
“Yeah, well, that ain’t the first time he’s tried to palm off crappy tech on us.” Urushihara dejectedly shook his head, eyes fixed upon his computer screen.
“Wh-what about the news, then?” By Chiho’s judgment, Maou never seemed too far behind at work when it came to current trends and topics. He seemed to have a working knowledge of politics, the latest scandals, sports standings, that sort of thing.
“Well, we have a PC here ever since Urushihara showed up, so… Plus, they have those video screens at the rail stations with news and stuff, right? I like to hang out at the bookstore magazine rack, too, so keeping up ain’t too hard.”
“……”
Chiho, a child of the information age, couldn’t make head or tail of it.
“Besides, what’s it matter what kinda phone I have? It’s not like I’m missing out on anything, and I’m not planning to upgrade anytime soon, either. But…hmm. We got an HD antenna now, huh?”
Maou gave a thoughtful look to the antenna hookup, then to the outlet occupied by Urushihara’s computer. He scowled.
“Hey, Ashiya.”
“Yes, my liege?”
“Wanna buy a TV?”
It almost sounded like Maou was talking to himself.
“Hahhh?!”
“Why that reaction?” Maou started quizzically at Ashiya, who sounded like someone had run a cheese grater over his throat.
“I simply reasoned from your conversation, Your Demonic Highness, that you didn’t see the need for one… You stated a moment ago that you needed no television to know the ways of the world. We already have a computer! And the Internet!” Ashiya frantically pointed a finger at Urushihara.
“Dude, could you stop pointing at me like my computer’s the only reason I deserve to live?”
“Hmph. I will admit, you are at least capable now of serving food to people. A living, breathing vending machine.”
“Yeah, see? I had dudes lining up for me. Beat that.”
The conversation between the two was not quite Great Demon General material.
“I think Alciel has a point, though. I’ve had a TV in my apartment for a while now, but it’s pretty much always off. I watch a few minutes of the morning news, maybe a drama or samurai show at night, then the weather, and that’s about it. I don’t see any major pressing need of one for you guys, just because your landlord installed an antenna.”
“You aren’t showing Alas Ramus any educational TV or anything?”
Maou turned to face Emi. She glared back. Alas Ramus, who spent the late afternoon napping in Room 202, was currently fused within her.
“Oh, what, you forgot already? The show at Tokyo Big-Egg Town? Shows like Sunflower Street and cartoons pretty much bombard kids with colors all the time. I don’t want her having another episode, so I’m trying to keep her away from TV as much as possible.”
“Huh. Gotcha.”
The live-action ninja-ranger show the three of them watched at Tokyo Big-Egg Town a while back was filled with color-coded warriors of justice bounding around the stage. The experience caused Alas Ramus to have something resembling an epileptic seizure.
She always had a pretty deep re
lationship with colorful things. The ninjas, and the enormous tree they somersaulted around, must have reminded her of the great life-giving tree Sephirot and the multihued Sephirah it bore, each governing over a different color and a different aspect of the world.
As of right now, nobody in the room knew anything about the Sephirot apart from what they heard elsewhere.
None of them could say for sure that the sacred tree had any lasting effect on Alas Ramus. But after that harrowing incident, Emi tried her best to avoid reminding the child of anything resembling Sephirot as much as possible.
“Thing is, though…there’s been one time before when I kinda wished I had a TV in here.” Maou’s voice took on a bitter tone as he thumbed through his memory banks. “It was before Chi joined me at the Mag. You know our Jolly Meals? The ones that come with toys and stuff?”
“Um, yeah, sure.”
“Well, the toys are always either really hot, or really cold, in terms of popularity. This one time, we were doing these Pocket Creatures—y’know, Pokétures—toys, and this kid who couldn’t have been much older than eight or so comes up and orders a Jolly Meal. So I asked him which toy he wanted, and he was like…”
Maou bunched up his eyebrows.
It was a look of anguish, one not even Ashiya had seen in several months.
“Gimme the one that goes ‘croak-a-loak’!”
The sudden scowl, followed by the otherworldly cry, bewildered the rest of the room.
“Yeah! You see? I felt, like, exactly what you must be feeling right now. What the hell’s this kid mean, the one who goes ‘croak-a-loak’? I didn’t even know that every monster in the game had their own unique cry like that, so I was totally clueless. And of course we had, like, ten different toys to choose from, so I couldn’t really spend the time guessing.”
The others, unsure what the point was to this ripping yarn, could do nothing but sit tight and listen. Surprisingly, it was Urushihara who broke the silence.
“I tried searching for it. Turns out it was from one of the movies, Decahelios and the Path to the Sky King. Decahelios is the mythical Pokéture in that one, and his basic chibi form is Dekalo, and that’s who makes it. He’s this little frog guy who lives in a bog somewhere, and eventually he evolves into a dragon.”
“You are speaking in tongues, Lucifer.”
To Suzuno, not very versed in modern Japanese subculture, Urushihara’s speech must have sounded like a runic inscription on the tomb of a long-forgotten ruler.
“But, my liege, if his cry was ‘croak-a-loak,’ that would imply to me that the correct creature would at least look somewhat frog-like…”
“Yeah, Ashiya, but you say that because you’ve been here on Earth for over a year now. Do the chickens say ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ back in the demon realms?”
Every language on Earth had its own unique ways of rendering animal cries and other bits of nonlanguage. The only person who had the right to take someone not native to Japan (or this world) to task for not knowing that croak was shorthand for “frog” was Mayumi Kisaki, Maou’s manager at MgRonald and a woman oblivious to his past.
“So anyway, these Pokétures were mostly movie tie-ins who first got introduced in the plot, so at the time, all you knew about ’em came from the maybe five seconds they showed up in the trailer. The kid didn’t remember the name of that Dekalo guy or what he looked like. So I had no idea, and his mom was like ‘Oh, Shocksqueak is fiiine, son…’”
Shocksqueak was the most well-known of Pokétures, a constant presence across the entire series and its merchandise.
“The problem, though, was that Shocksqueak was the most popular toy and we had already run out of it. So his mom wound up leaving with this freaky toy that looked like a jellyfish with a bunch of magnets stuck to it.”
“Jellyfish with a bunch of magnets stuck to it” provided little in the way of new insight to Maou’s audience of Pokéture neophytes.
“…Okay,” Emi impatiently spoke up. “So what’s the point of this story?”
“The point is, if I had a TV—if I saw some of the preview ads and knew at least a little bit about what we were selling to kids—I could’ve given that li’l guy what he wanted. It’s not my fault we were out of Shocksqueak, but we had all the other ones.”
“…Took you long enough.” Urushihara eloquently summed up what everyone else was thinking.
“But how does that connect with purchasing a TV?” Chiho asked. “Not to take Ashiya’s side, but you could still look that stuff up on the Internet if you wanted to.”
Maou nodded at her.
“Yeah, but I’d never see that kinda stuff unless I actively searched for it. I mean, failure breeds success and all that, but if I’m failing to avoid mistakes I could’ve easily avoided if I cared a little, that’s not a mistake so much as sheer laziness, right?”
“And that, my liege, is precisely why the Internet is there! That is as wide a net as anyone needs to cast. The news is no different between the Net and television, is it?”
Maou grinned bitterly at Ashiya, whose fervent desire not to blow their budget on a TV purchase was oozing out of every pore in his body.
“Lemme put it in a way you’d understand. Let’s say you heard ground beef was cheap at the supermarket, so you go out expecting to make some burgers for dinner, but when you show up, you notice that the sliced salmon is actually a lot cheaper. So you decide to change the menu to buttered salmon and use the extra change to buy some bean sprouts to flesh out dinner a little. You ever have that kind of thing happen?”
“Um? …Well, certainly, yes. If you put it that way.” The sudden topic shift to household errands perplexed Ashiya.
“So instead of buying buns or ketchup for the burgers, you buy some butter for the salmon. And from that point forward, you know how to whip up a meal of buttered salmon and bean sprouts for really cheap. That kinda thing.”
“Yes… Indeed.” Suzuno, who cooked for herself just as often as Ashiya, could empathize.
“But that’s the thing about the Net. You can’t learn stuff like that online. If you search for burgers, you get hits about Worcestershire sauce and barbecue grills and upscale burger chains and Wagyu beef and maybe Hamburg, Germany, too, I dunno. But you aren’t gonna get anything about buttered salmon with bean sprouts. You don’t get that kind of happenstance going on.”
“Happenstance, huh…?”
Urushihara sat up a bit, uncharacteristically attentive.
“Of course, things spread in all kinds of ways, so you can’t say that about everything. But with the Internet, once something loses your interest, you don’t go back again, right? You don’t need to.”
“Yeah. I suppose you wouldn’t. But TV’s the same way, isn’t it? You don’t like it, you turn it off.”
Maou shook his head at Emi, the only extraterrestrial with a television.
“But with TV, there are things you don’t care about now, but might care about later. It’s not just an on-or-off thing. With the Net, meanwhile, all you see are the things you want to see. And you need a guide for that sort of thing, right? For things you don’t actively want right now, but might come in handy later.”
“…Your Demonic Highness, how did you come to know so much about television in the first place?”
“Oh, that was back when we just arrived here. I had this temp job where we all congregated at a soba noodle place for lunch, and they had a TV in there. It was playing the news, and they were advertising this piece about how the temp agency I was working for was under investigation for something or other. So I waited around for the piece, but then another customer changed it to some stupid variety show. Man, that pissed me off.”
“I know now’s a different story but, Maou, you are another world’s Devil King, right?”
“Enough of that topic, Chiho. All it would do is serve to depress me even further,” Suzuno interjected. “The Devil King, going on about noodles and tuna and hamburgers… It disgusts me.”
&nb
sp; In many ways, Maou’s enemies seemed far more concerned for his future than he was.
“Anyway. I just figured it’d be nice to have some play, you know? Some more exposure to unintended discoveries like that. I know the Net’s easier and you can look up anything you want and stuff, but in terms of creating chances to take an interest in something new, I think TV’s still a lot more vital. Then, if I want to examine a topic more in-depth, I can hit up the Net for that.”
“Yeah, true,” Urushihara admitted. “A lot of people brag about never watching TV, but if you look at search term rankings and trends and stuff, TV still affects them a lot.”
Maou, uncharacteristically, nodded his approval at Urushihara’s point. “I don’t need a 3D set or a blue-whatever player or anything fancy like that. I’m just saying, if we can have this media device that plays a major role in human society, I think that’ll help us later on. Help teach us about the human world, and help us once we’re ready to conquer it.”
“Hmmm…” Ashiya grunted as he weighed Maou’s thought in his mind.
“And…” Now Maou turned to Emi. “TV gives you live reports on accidents and disasters and stuff, right? Like, flood warnings and so on.”
“Yeah. So?”
“If something happens, that could help me take action faster.”
Maou used the index and middle fingers of both hands to form makeshift claws in the air.
“…!”
Emi knew what he meant. The Malebranche, the demons they fought over in Choshi.
“That’s kind of a secondary reason, but still, if some kind of major incident happens that makes no sense by human standards, we could at least check it out to see if someone from the other side’s messing with us again.”
That was a concern on everyone’s mind. Downtown Tokyo had been the site of several angel/demon duels by now. They barely fended off a full-scale demon invasion off the Choshi coast a few days ago, too.
They had managed to keep casualties to a minimum so far, if only by the skin of their teeth. But there was no guarantee their luck would continue.
Where they stood in Japan, forced to deal with crises as they reared themselves, having as many information sources as possible—the way Maou framed it—seemed to make sense.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 Page 3