That was the sort of thing that happened when every Dokodemo phone within the twenty-three central boroughs of Tokyo lost all functionality for seventy-five or so minutes in the middle of the evening.
The complaints started streaming in the moment the morning shift began. The customers asking to be refunded for the outage were, if anything, among the kinder, more accommodating ones. Businesses and civic departments calling to demand reparations for the outage, on the other hand, were beyond anything Emi and her coworkers had the power to handle.
The cause of the outage, reported as the lead story of every early-morning TV news show, was undoubtedly the twin sonar blasts Suzuno and Chiho bounced off the Dokodemo Tower antenna during their little skirmish the previous night.
She couldn’t berate the idea, at least—fighting TV signals via a high-energy transmission sent through cell phone bandwidth.
But, due to some miscalculation on Urushihara’s part or Suzuno firing a stronger pulse than she intended—or maybe just the general interference dominating the skies over Tokyo that evening—the blasts took over Dokodemo’s entire mobile spectrum for what seemed like an eternity.
That made it impossible to connect to certain Dokodemo phones, and the resulting cascade of failures led to the quagmire Emi faced today.
Every chair in the room had a call handler sitting on it. From early morning, the team leader had been texting out desperate pleas to unscheduled staff to sign on for an extra shift or two over the next couple of days.
So Emi was back at work the day after. Her conscience wouldn’t allow anything else. This time, at least, there was no shunting the blame over to the demons.
And she needed a distraction anyway. She still hadn’t sifted through everything she’d experienced the night before.
The shocking truth Gabriel revealed to her was more than enough to send mighty waves of stress crashing over her heart.
Her father was alive.
Thinking about what that meant, and what effect it would have, filled Emi with a tormenting fear that made her feet stop in their tracks.
So this was good for her, dealing with irate customers, not given so much as a millisecond to dwell on her own thoughts. As she told herself, she needed to focus on handling customer issues as quickly and efficiently as possible. Her issues could wait.
“Think we’ll get a lunch break today…?”
Rika’s exasperated complaint, voiced between the endless barrage of calls, made the blood drain from Maki’s face.
“Uggghhh… I stayed up late watching TV last night and felt kinda sick this morning, so I haven’t eaten yet today…”
“TV…?”
Emi, remembering something, addressed her coworkers on both sides.
“Hey, guys, um…”
“Mm?”
“Yes?”
“Did you guys see anything weird when watching TV last night? Like…any kind of flashing, like everyone’s talking about?”
Rika nodded. It sounded familiar to her.
“Oh, yeah, it affected more than mobile video this time, didn’t it? I wasn’t really in any shape to watch TV last night so I wouldn’t know, but…”
“Me, I haven’t bought an HDTV yet. I’m still on analog, but I didn’t see anything.”
“Oh…”
Rika and Maki didn’t run into any trouble. It was a relief to Emi.
“What were you doing, though, Ms. Suzuki?” Maki asked Rika. “Wasn’t one of your favorite dramas on last night?”
“Aaaahh!!” Her observation sent Rika into a panic. “I tooootally forgot…”
“…Do you maybe have a guy now or something?”
Straight down the middle.
“Oh, c-come on, Maki! He’s not my ‘guy’ or anything yet…”
“……!”
Emi grabbed her head.
Maki’s face brightened at Rika, who was rapidly digging her own grave right under her own feet.
“Not yet? You said not yet, didn’t you?!”
“Uh, ah, n-no, I, ughhh! Maki! Take a call already! We’re at work!”
“Well, I’m expecting a full report later!” Maki shot back. “Thank you for your patience. This is the…”
Rika turned her exasperated face toward Emi for emotional support.
“Sorry. Can’t help you this time.”
“Aw, that’s mean, Emi!”
Emi returned to her calls. She had a headache of her own to deal with.
Not even the fact that Rika clearly had feelings for Ashiya was enough to make Emi’s mind budge from the subject it was currently obsessing over.
Thinking over why she went through all that effort to demolish the Devil King’s Army… If she trusted what Gabriel said, it could make her doubt everything she lived for, in the end.
But something still tugged at her.
“Can’t turn back time now, I guess…”
Whether she doubted herself or not, as long as she was alive, she had to keep moving forward.
In fact, maybe she should be happy. She finally had a goal in life aside from slaying the Devil King.
“No point beating myself up pondering over it. That’d just be spinning my wheels by now.”
She could start by doing what she could, right this moment, fully gauging what life had in store for her.
Just as she felt her resolve start to firm up, a voice in the back of her mind addressed her.
“Mommy, Chi-sis’s lucky charm going boom-boom?”
She must have woken up.
It was highly questionable how much Emi could focus on her work while trying to keep Alas Ramus entertained. She had to smile at the absurdity of her situation.
Once she escaped work today, she was due to visit Chiho at the hospital, giving her a chance to both listen to her side of the story and teach Alas Ramus how to say Get well soon to people. She began to write a mental list of sweet shops on the way home that she figured Chiho might like. Alas Ramus caught on to it.
“Senbei! Senbei! Wice crackuhs!”
She was always ready to pitch in her two cents.
“Welcome back, Your Demonic Highness. How is Ms. Sasaki faring?”
Suzuno, for some reason, was waiting alongside Ashiya when Maou made his return.
“Ah, you’ve returned? Anything happen to you?”
“Nah, Chi’s just fine. Couldn’t be healthier, in fact. And no, nothing happened to me; what’s that question supposed to mean?”
Even if the threat wasn’t explicitly targeted at Maou and Ashiya this time, Suzuno still hesitated to see Maou venture outside alone. But today presented a vastly different picture from yesterday. Nothing about Tokyo seemed unsafe at all.
Having Suzuno accompany Maou without Ashiya tagging along would create its own raftload of misunderstandings, so Suzuno instead fretted by herself at Villa Rosa Sasazuka, awaiting his return.
“N-nothing, but…”
She stopped. This sounded suspiciously like she was worrying about him. She raised her voice. Enough of that.
“Enough of that, Devil King! The television! We have the television on!”
“Hah, really? Welcome to the fifties, I guess.”
“…Yes. Thank you…”
Something about Maou’s sarcasm embarrassed Suzuno a little.
“Thought you’d be more excited than that, dude. You’re the one who wanted it,” Urushihara added in.
Maou shrugged at his griping.
“Yeah, dealing with those two bastards kinda cooled me to the whole thing, I guess. I’m glad we got another tool to let us know if something’s going haywire, but it’s not like they’re dumb enough to try the same trick on us twice, so…”
By modern standards, the TV screen was miniscule. But within the current Devil’s Castle, it was more than enough.
“Oh. Hey, Ashiya, I got this.”
Maou tossed a wad of paper out from his pocket.
“Hmm? What is it?”
It was a receipt from their bank.
Ashiya carefully unwadded it. Then his eyes expanded into saucers. Deposit: 50,000, it read.
“Y-your Demonic Highness?! What on earth is this deposit?!”
“Well, after we screwed up Ohguro-ya, I’ve been outta work, right?”
Maou opened the refrigerator door and chugged what remained of their barley tea supply straight from the bottle.
“…Pahh. I still got a little bit before MgRonald starts back up, but with Ciriatto back in the demon realm, they might decide to send a Barbariccia squadron or two back over here. We could be in serious danger, for all I know. I figure it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to go off somewhere far away for day-labor crap. We probably better stick together more.”
Suzuno stole a glance at the receipt from the side, her own eyes popping out of their sockets at this highly irregular deposit.
“There were more jewels embedded on the scabbard of Camio’s magic sword than just the Yesod fragment, y’know. So I plucked one of ’em out—nothing too big, you’d never notice it if you didn’t know what to look for—and I pawned it over at the Mugi-hyo in Shinjuku. That way, we can budget the TV for next month and you can actually buy a decent phone with what’s left, okay?”
“My liege…”
Ashiya’s reaction went beyond astonishment and entered the realm of blissful ecstasy.
“Why just one, dude? Might as well just cash ’em all in, no?”
Maou scoffed at Urushihara’s sensible suggestion.
“Oh, yeah, a guy in his early twenties dressed head to toe in closeout UniClo gear carrying a box full of precious jewels with him? You think I’m in that big a hurry to arouse suspicion? That’s more than enough right there. We’d get taxed out the ass if I sold it for too much, besides.”
Maou rinsed out the bottle, refilled it with water, stuck a barley-tea packet inside, and placed it back in the fridge.
“Once work starts back up, I’ll have to deal with Sariel across the street again. If everything goes to hell, I suppose I can try using him to save my own ass…but until then I figure, hey, why not enjoy some time off for the first time in a couple centuries? All work and no play, and all that.”
With that, he picked up the TV remote and instruction manual on the table, referring to one as he tapped away at the other.
Watching him as he crouched over his new toy made Suzuno whisper:
“…So. He is thinking about matters, yes?”
Ashiya didn’t acknowledge it. He was too busy admiring every digit, every contour of the words Deposit: 50,000 in front of him.
Gabriel, sitting in the CyberSafe Net café he was currently using as his main base of operations on Earth, spotted a familiar face.
“Satou! Hey, someone’s lookin’ chipper today, huh? You find some decent work for a change?”
Satou, ever-present glass of oolong tea in hand, waved as he took a sip.
“Hey, Greek! You been hearin’ about all the trouble they’ve been having with TVs and cell phones and whatnot?”
“Oh? Uhm, yeahhhh. Yeah. Sorta.”
Gabriel, the chief cause of said trouble, found it difficult to reply coherently. Satou, beaming, paid it no mind.
“Well, the phone companies are all staging top-to-bottom maintenance inspections of all their equipment! You wouldn’t believe how many traffic guides and security guards they’re hirin’ for the thing! I’m gonna be up to my eyeballs in work for at least the next two weeks!”
“Oh? Oh. Ohhhh. Well, good?”
“My heart goes out to all the phone companies ’n’ all, but I tell you, this is really gonna put me back on track to my dreams, y’know? It’s like God’s rewarding me for all my hard work or somethin’.”
“Oh, you…think?”
The archangel had little to add on that front.
“But, hey, you’re lookin’ pretty happy, too. Find yourself a decent paycheck?”
Satou was fully convinced Gabriel was in the same financial boat he found himself in. There was no need to correct him, but on the other hand, Satou seemed to have a natural-born gift for reading people’s minds at times.
“Mmm, I dunno if it’ll wind up working out or not, really…”
The burly denizen of heaven filled up his own glass of oolong tea and smiled.
“But I think we miiiight just see someone step up to save the world, if you know what I mean.”
“Huh?”
Satou paused a moment to think.
“You working for one of those goofball stunt shows down at the amusement park or somethin’?”
Gabriel’s scarlet eyes, studying Satou closely, sparkled with the shine of a child basking in the glow of his own epic prank.
THE AUTHOR, THE AFTERWORD, AND YOU
Tokyo Skytree, the official new landmark of Japan, surpassed its old man Tokyo Tower’s height of 1,093 feet in late March 2010. The observation deck was completed three months afterward, and a mere year later, in March 2011, it attained its full height of 2,080 feet. Nearly a thousand feet of growth in the space of a year. All hail the glories of Japanese construction firms and hefty budgets. It’s grown up so big and strong!
Alongside that, Japan—with the exception of a few areas—switched over to digital-only TV broadcasts in July 2011.
This book will see its original publication in June 2012, so by the time you read this, it’ll already be nearly a year after the fact and the Skytree should be open for business. Time flies when you’re spending all day writing at home.
I suppose I’ve gone on in assorted places about how The Devil Is a Part-Timer! couldn’t exist without depicting Japan as it really is, as if I’m some kind of literary genius who knows where the story’s going two pages ahead of the one he’s writing. But I’ve made it this far without explicitly stating which year it is in the Japan Maou and Emi live in.
That ends with Volume 5, though. Between the under-construction Skytree and the rest of the events in this volume, if we assume Devil fully complies with time in the real world, the story is officially set in August 2010.
But!
If you look over the whole series, dating back to Volume 1…let’s just say that Maou and friends have had an extremely busy summer of 2010.
Every volume I’ve written tends to be a reflection of the time I live in at the moment I put fingers to keyboard. When I was first writing this story on the Web, under a different title—the story that eventually won me a Dengeki Award and this gig—construction hadn’t even begun on the Skytree yet. Contradictions abound across the story’s world as a result.
These are just novels, of course, so I could just shrug it off and defiantly tell my readers not to sweat the details. But that isn’t the problem. Now that it’s set in a definitive time period, everyone involved with this series has a very specific issue they need to deal with.
In Volume 1, the Hero Emilia’s friend Rika Suzuki discussed her experiences with the Kobe earthquake of 1995, an experience no one in Japan could ever forget.
Nor should they, really. But her memories, too painful for her to talk about with most people, were pretty much taken verbatim from those of a personal friend of mine.
And if the Japan Maou and Emi live in is really going to be the Japan of August 2010, that means there’ll be an event in seven months that will ultimately carve its place in the annals of world history. And when this book is released, it’s doubtful that any of the ensuing memories or effects will have faded from anyone’s minds.
So as someone who used Rika Suzuki’s memories as a central piece of character development, I have an announcement to make to my readers.
In the world depicted within the Devil is a Part-Timer! series, I am not going to weave the Tohoku earthquake of March 2011 in any way, shape, or form into the story.
The Devil is a Part-Timer! is a story, and like any story, it has to end sooner or later.
I can’t say how far past August 2010–ish the story will proceed, or if these guys are going to even bother staying within
the confines of Japan, but either way, the “real Japan” of Devil is a Japan free of the Tohoku quake.
This is not a case of me attempting to weigh the importance of one natural disaster against another.
It’s just that the quake, as I write this, is an event of the now, not of the then. It is too early to treat it as a memory, or as a completed piece of history. In my opinion, it is not a matter that a novel series that saw its original launch in February 2011—one whose primary aim is to entertain—should be blithely tackling.
The Japan of Devil is one where the disturbing memories of the Kobe earthquake continue to reside in people’s minds. It is one where the Skytree has only just begun to outgrow Tokyo Tower, where the government is switching everyone over to digital broadcasting, where smartphones are beginning to take over for flip phones, and where even a Devil King needs to work to keep a roof over his head. Nothing more, and nothing less, than that.
It may resemble the Japan you and I see with our own eyes at least superficially, but it is also a Japan traveling down its own unique path in history.
So, going forward, I will continue to not explicitly mention when this story takes place in the real world. I plan to have the characters age in real time, of course, and given the material I cover, I can’t help but pin a time frame to many aspects of this tale. But this is their own story, their own history, and one I hope you will continue to keep close at hand well into the future.
But regardless of how I feel about it, this volume still tells the story of the Devil King and his cohorts, normally struggling to keep food on the table, engaging in a rare bout of consumerism.
It may be nothing they need, but having it around expands their perspective on things. I’m just another joe on the street, myself. Instead of having the bare essentials around me in perfect shape, I like having a hodgepodge of things around me as I work. If there’s a little dust on it, that only adds to the character.
Though maybe I should at least have them purchase a couple of futons for themselves. I can tell Emi won’t abide by that for much longer.
Regardless, as always, I hope that I see all of you who took this book in hand over in the next volume, and I hope all real-life bums will forgive the fallen Demon General for his misguided diatribe on bumming.
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