Just then...
“Sorry t’ be late,” Brooke said, ambling into the dining area.
With the exception of Elvia, then, we were all there.
“Looks like breakfast is ready,” I said. “Might as well eat.”
Once breakfast was over, I had nothing but time. We all split up to enjoy our day off however we liked.
Of course, there was no such thing as a complete day off for Myusel, Brooke, and Cerise; and Minori-san was technically on duty twenty-four seven as Hikaru-san’s and my bodyguard. But the point is, we got to just lounge around the house in a way we usually didn’t.
I decided to go to my room and get through some of the anime that had been piling up. The stuff that was airing in Japan was being recorded onto a hard drive and then brought over for me to evaluate. Obviously, I didn’t have time to watch every minute of every show, so I would watch a couple or three episodes, and if it didn’t look like something I was going to like, I would just take a quick peek at fast-forward or 3x speeds.
Even with that system, the data on my hard drives was starting to outpace me. I was hoping to really tear through some of it today.
With that in mind, I took a brimming teapot and some of the sweets Myusel had cooked up and settled in for a day of anime.
“Come to think of it, Dad’s light novel got turned into an anime just recently...”
I grabbed the remote. And just then...
“Shinichi-sama?”
There was a knock on the door, and I heard Myusel call my name. I paused my show and went over. “Myusel? What’s up?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you while you’re busy with your anime, but, umm...” She hovered uneasily in the doorway. “Loek-san and Romilda-san are here...”
“Say what?” Those were names I hadn’t expected. School, as I mentioned, wasn’t in session today. I hadn’t thought I would be seeing Loek, or Romilda, or any of the students. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go see what they want.”
I turned off my electronics, and Myusel and I headed for the front door. Sure enough, there were Loek and Romilda.
“Sensei!” They rushed over, smiling, when they saw the two of us. They were both clutching digital cameras—wait, Romilda, too?
“Romilda, where’d you get that?”
It wasn’t a DSLR like Loek had, but it was still a pretty serious piece of equipment.
“I borrowed it from a Jay-Ess-Dee-Eff person!”
“Uh-huh...”
Several of the soldiers besides Satou-san had digital cameras for personal use. The military also had a few that were for official record-keeping of their activities. I assumed one of those cameras was now in Romilda’s hands. I guess Loek’s boasting about his camera had really gotten to her.
“Okay, that’s fine, but what are you two doing here? You need something all the way out here at the mansion?”
“Yes, Sensei. We’d like to charge our cameras...” Loek held up his device.
“Come again?”
The way they explained it, the two of them had been having a long-running contest to see who could shoot the most beautiful photograph. Neither of them, however, had a personal computer, so if they wanted to look at their photos, they had to do it on the cameras’ LCD displays. Looking at the screen outside, though, demanded turning up the brightness to make it visible, and those screens are surprisingly battery hungry.
These kids didn’t know anything about power-saving modes or how to turn off the LCD screen to conserve battery, so as they went around constantly shooting and checking their shots, they ran out of juice.
But having done that, they came up against the fact that there was no power grid here in the Holy Eldant Empire. There were just a few sources of electricity around: the solar generator by the school, a wind power station, and an emergency diesel generator the JSDF kept around. And Loek and Romilda couldn’t ask to use the JSDF one.
That left the school and my house, but school was out today, the building locked up tight, so Loek and Romilda decided my mansion was their best bet. And that brought them to me, cameras in hand, begging for power.
“Please let us charge our cameras!” they chorused, dipping their heads. I smiled a little—for all their fighting, the two of them seemed to be of one mind right now. Almost as in tune as the time they had piloted the Faldra to rescue me in Bahairam.
“I understand. Okay, come on in.”
“Yahoo!” they exclaimed.
I couldn’t quite explain how the sight made me feel. Myusel was adorable in a way that made me totally moe, but watching these two was something else—sort of the warm fuzzies you get seeing a puppy and a kitten playing together.
But anyway...
“Let’s see, where’s the best outlet for you to use...”
“How about the living room?” Myusel suggested.
“Okay, let’s go there,” I said, nodding and walking off.
“Oh, Shinichi-sensei,” Loek said as if he had just thought of something. “Is Minori-sensei around today?”
“She’s in her room, I think.”
“Oh...”
He was visibly disappointed. I guess he had been hoping to bump into Minori-san while his camera was charging. Romilda glared at him.
Hmmm.
“Well, it’s not like she’ll stay in there forever, I guess,” I said.
“S-Sure! Of course not!”
I just wanted to make Loek feel a little better, but his face lit up so much it was almost comical.
Romilda, though, frowned openly. “You aren’t planning to take more pervy photographs of Minori-sensei, are you?”
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about! My f-feelings are completely pure...!”
“Oh really?” Romilda said, eyeing him. Loek was starting to sweat. They just seemed to be settling in for a good staring contest when Romilda sniffed and said, “Don’t forget our promise: if I win, you have to give me your cards.”
Privately I thought, Don’t say that, Romilda! That’s just begging to lose! But...
“You just better hope you aren’t the one who ends up crying over your lost cards.”
Loek eagerly tripped the exact same flag.
Geez, you two are made for each other. I hope you stick together...
The point seemed to be that whoever won their photography competition had to give the other person some trading cards. These kids could sure be harsh in the weirdest ways. I think the classic bet would be “the loser has to do any one thing the winner says.” That gives you a little more room to, you know, use your imagination and have some fun. Oh well.
I didn’t figure the participants in this contest would be very good at objectively judging the merits of their photos. I had to wonder if they had some kind of standard.
All this was running through my mind as Myusel and I showed Loek and Romilda through the house.
Since they had come all the way here, I suggested Loek and Romilda have their photo contest at the mansion. That way they could just recharge their batteries again if they ran down, and more importantly, observing the two of them up close might help me understand how best to teach them photographic manners. I would be running that photography seminar, but I didn’t really have any idea what the Eldant people might do when they got their hands on cameras for the very first time. Watching Loek and Romilda might give me some insight that would prove useful.
The two of them were thrilled, of course. When I thought about it, I realized that they were the first of our students to be allowed to wander freely around the mansion. The mansion that was Amutech’s headquarters. To them, this house represented ground zero for otaku culture, like an anime lover from the sticks who suddenly finds themselves in Akihabara.
And that led to...
“This! And this!”
“Ooh, look at this!”
“Loek, you’re in the way, move it!”
“Well, stop running in front of me when I’m trying to take a picture, then!”
/> And so it went, as they raced around the house taking pictures of my bookshelves, my figures, even the kitchen and the dining area—everything they could find. They couldn’t wait for the batteries to charge completely; they would let them fill up a little, then grab the cameras off the chargers, go running off, and come back again when the batteries were dead. Over and over.
They spent a little more than three hours taking pictures like this. When they had both just about filled up their cameras’ memory cards, they came back to the living room and requested that I be the judge in their photography contest. Apparently I was supposed to decide which of them had taken the most good pictures.
“Boy, you guys really went nuts.”
I was reviewing Romilda’s photos from her digital camera and smiling absently. Myusel was there too, as were Minori-san and Hikaru-san, who had come out of their rooms to join us when they heard that Loek and Romilda were here.
Myusel sat beside me on the sofa, Minori-san and Hikaru-san on the far side of the table. Loek and Romilda were lined up alongside us. I had my laptop open on the table where everyone could see it, running through the photographs.
“Is this... Hikaru-san’s room?”
The picture showed a closet full of Gothic-loli outfits. There was also a desk with a personal computer as well as a ring, some earrings, and other little accessories. Who else’s room could it be?
“Yes, that’s mine,” Hikaru-san said, nodding at the photograph. There were several more pictures after that—more clothes, materials for making clothes, even a sewing machine.
“Your room was a blast, Hikaru-sensei!” Romilda said.
“Hoo hoo, thank you very much,” Hikaru-san replied. He hadn’t been very happy about the students taking his picture, but obviously it really had been just because they hadn’t asked. If anything, he seemed to like the photographs. I guess a cosplayer would have to.
“And here’s a hallway... And this...” Flipping through the photos, I came across a picture of a bookshelf. “...This must belong to Minori-san.”
“Huh? How can you tell?”
“Well, these titles...”
I zoomed in on the books so the spines were clearly visible. There was Super-M Spectacles, followed by a slew of books with portentous names like He’s a Demonic Master and Teacher and I Have a Secret.
“Oh, no, that’s my ‘flesh-tone’ shelf. Beginners should start with something softer and sweeter.”
“I really don’t want to start it at all,” I said, shaking my head at Minori-san, who was reaching over to do something to my computer.
Wait, so there were books for “BL beginners” and “advanced BL-ers”?! Whatever; I didn’t want anything to do with any of those. What was Romilda taking pictures of, anyway?
I may have been a little annoyed, but someone else in the room seemed downright shocked. “R-Romilda! Did you go into Minori-sensei’s room?!” It was Loek. “H-How did I miss that...?”
“Minori-sensei told me I could.”
“Hrgh!” Loek responded, grinding his teeth. I guess he had been showing restraint, sort of, by not going into Minori-san’s room. Maybe that had something to do with my stern talk about “manners” and “knowing what people are okay with”—but when he saw Romilda had gotten those photographs, he couldn’t help wishing he’d done things differently.
“Oh, look, here’s one of Myusel.”
“G-Gosh, I’m a little embarrassed...”
This picture showed Myusel doing the laundry. When I zoomed in, she blushed and looked at the ground.
There were shots of Brooke and Cerise, too, apparently crossing paths with the kids in the hallway. Going through all the pictures at once like this gives you a pretty good idea of the photographer’s interests, their personality.
“You seem to like taking pictures of people, Romilda,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay, let’s see Loek’s next.”
I opened the folder of photos I’d copied from his camera. His pictures seemed to focus more on scenery. The garden as seen from the mansion’s windows, for example, or the house as taken from outside. Huh. His sense for this stuff was surprisingly sharp. There were several shots with a striking feeling for composition you wouldn’t have expected from someone who’d only had a camera for a few days. I guess it’s always possible they were just lucky pictures, helped by the camera’s functionality, but...
“Oh, you can see Myusel in this window. Looks like she’s carrying the laundry.”
A window of the mansion, shot from the garden, reflected Myusel walking along. And in the next picture...
“Is that... Elvia?”
You could see a beast girl just past the window glass. She was facing outside and stretching.
“Elvia-san said she would be in her room drawing all day today,” Myusel said, leaning in to get a good look at the computer screen. That is to say, leaning over close to me.
Oohh... That s-s-skin, so s-s-soft on my a-a-a-arrrrrmmm...
Myusel probably wasn’t even thinking about it, but her exposed shoulder pressed right against my exposed arm, and the softness, the gentle smoothness, the heat of her body—how hard did she want my heart to pound?
“Er—oh, this is that shed Brooke was talking about,” I said. I pressed a button on the computer, focusing very hard so as to keep Myusel from noticing my excitement and getting embarrassed. The picture that came up was of an isolated shed. I assumed it was the one Brooke said he had emptied out for Elvia’s use.
It wasn’t very big. Although it had been doubling as a storage space, it seemed to have been built to accommodate a servant, should one need to live there—there were even windows.
And that was when I noticed: there was a figure floating dimly in one of those windows.
“Is that a gh-gh-gh-ghost?!”
“Huh...? Minori-san said, sounding skeptical.
“H-Here, look!” I said, hovering the cursor over the window of the shed. I selected that part of the photo and zoomed it in.
Then I let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, it’s just Elvia.”
She had said she wanted to use the shed for her pictures and paints and stuff, so of course she might show up in any given photo of the building. The camera had chosen to focus on the window pane, so Elvia herself was fuzzy and indistinct, which had made her look like a ghost to me.
But then...
“Isn’t that a little strange?” Hikaru-san murmured. “There was a picture of Elvia-san just a few shots ago, right?”
“Oh... yeah.”
“And digital cameras play back shots in the order they were taken, so how did Elvia-san get from her room to this shed?”
“Maybe she just, you know, moved around,” I said, going back to the folder of pictures.
There was the photo of Elvia stretched out in her room we’d seen earlier.
And here was the one of her standing in the shed.
No problem, right? But Hikaru-san pointed to the timestamp on the files. “Look. These two photos were taken at almost the exact same time.”
He was right: there was hardly a minute’s difference between them.
Could Elvia, considering her speed, have run from her room to the shed in less than a minute? If she ran as fast as she could, then maybe—and if she jumped through the window of her room, she could get there even quicker. But would she do that?
“And didn’t Elvia say she was going to be in her room all day?” Minori-san asked.
“Y-Yes, she did...” Myusel said hesitantly, nodding.
“But then...”
Just to be sure, I took another look at the pictures. The Elvia in her room and the Elvia in the shed both looked more or less like her. Shed Elvia was kind of fuzzy, but I zoomed in, and it sure looked like her to me.
“Wh-What’s going on...?” I felt Myusel grab my sleeve. Maybe she was a little frightened.
Loek and Romilda finally processed what Hikaru-san was talking about; they both paled. I did
n’t know exactly if this world had any concept of ghosts or doppelgängers, but they certainly seemed to share our discomfort at the weird and seemingly unnatural.
“A-An exorcism!” I exclaimed. “We have to do an exorcism! But do we exorcise Elvia?! Or Loek, who took the picture?!”
“Me?!” Loek said, frozen with his eyes wide open.
I guess they knew something about exorcisms here.
“Calm down, Shinichi-kun,” Minori-san broke in, smiling wryly. “Anyway, if that’s really Elvia, then it would be a living ghost.”
“Huh, that’s true...”
“The real question is, why would Elvia be there, right?” Minori-san said, sounding like she’d had an idea.
I enlarged the photo of the shed again, squinting at the figure of Elvia in the window. It was kind of hazy, sure, but Loek’s digital camera was high-quality enough that a little bit of fiddling with the uncompressed file in a photo retouch program could gain us some extra clarity.
The Elvia we saw was expressionless. It was like she had killed all her emotions—almost unimaginable compared to the bright, cheerful girl we knew. If there was any question which one was the ghost, I thought we had our answer.
There was just one thing.
“Minori-san, does that look like—”
“Yeah. I think so.”
She seemed to have noticed it, too.
We nodded to each other, but Myusel and the others looked just as anxious as ever.
Chapter Two: More than Just a Palette Swap
Midnight... With the lights doused in the hall, a lone, barefoot figure crept through the house.
Looking furtively from side to side, trying to walk as quietly as possible. Attempting to be totally inconspicuous. Silent but swift, like a thief sneaking in for a burglary.
She finally reached the changing room and opened the door.
Perfect timing.
“Yo, Elvia.”
Outbreak Company: Volume 11 Page 6