We watched him shuffle away. I thought he might go over to his wife, but instead he headed for the far side of the mansion, walking right by the pale lizardman like he didn’t even see her. Like she didn’t exist.
“He didn’t seem very excited, did he?”
“He was certainly taking a good look at that ball, though,” Myusel said.
That was true enough. It wasn’t a total lack of interest on his part—more like he had been staring with unusual intensity. His expression might not change, but after months of living together, we could pick up on that much.
It was then that I noticed someone else staring. It wasn’t Brooke or Elvia fixated on the soccer ball I was holding. It was the pale lizardman, the one Brooke had said was his wife. He—or rather, she—was looking straight at the ball.
“What,” I asked, “is going on here?”
Did all beast people worship the moon, or go nuts when they saw round things, or something?
“Elvia?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Do lizardmen have a moon cult, too?”
“Nah, they’re different. Werewolves, weretigers, and werebears, we worship the moon, but I’ve never heard of a lizardman doing it.”
“Huh...”
So what was going on here? If she was Brooke’s wife, then maybe I should say hello to her. But just as I was going over to her, she gave a single bow in my direction and then left at a quick clip. Almost like she was running away.
I didn’t exactly have a good feeling about this.
“This isn’t making any sense,” I said. “I wonder what’s happening.”
“You hear how lizardmen are born from eggs and are cold-blooded and stuff,” Elvia said. “It wouldn’t be surprising if they didn’t think like us.”
“Yeah, I mean, I guess so...”
Something still nagged at me as we all headed inside.
I had eaten and bathed; all that was left in my schedule was to make some short notes about the day’s events on my phone and then go to bed.
But actually, this time belonged to me and Myusel.
“Myusel,” I said, knocking on the door to the kitchen. There was no reason we had to be secretive about this—but I admit that the kind of secret-rendezvous vibe got my heart pounding.
“Master,” Myusel said as she opened the door.
Then we sat on either side of the counter in the tidy room and opened a notebook. Myusel could already read Japanese at a surprisingly high level, but writing was still difficult for her.
Some people might argue that a little bit of telepathy was enough, but I continued to help Myusel study because I so wanted to increase the number of Eldant-language “translators.” In exchange for teaching her Japanese, Myusel helped me with my Eldant, and also taught me the basics of magic.
That bit about magic, by the way, was the one thing that would cause real trouble if the Empire got wind of it. Demi-humans like Myusel weren’t supposed to teach people magic without permission. It might have been less of an issue if she were teaching a noble, but although I was largely treated like nobility here, I didn’t know how far that would extend. And even if I escaped punishment, Myusel would certainly get in trouble for having failed to get permission.
So she taught me magic, and I didn’t tell anyone.
In general, we started off with Myusel’s Japanese and then moved on to my lessons. It wasn’t very formal; we were both at a basic level, so we just sort of traded questions back and forth about things we didn’t understand or that interested us.
I took off my ring and said, “Okay, shall we get started?”
“Yes. Shin-ichi-sama,” Myusel said, removing her ring as well.
When we were in public, or anytime anyone else was around, Myusel generally referred to me as “Master.” She only called me “Shinichi-sama” when it was just the two of us. I asked her once if she wasn’t worried she might accidentally call me the wrong thing in public, but she had blushed, looked at the floor, and replied, “Truthfully, I always call you ‘Shinichi-sama’ in my heart. I just replace it with ‘Master.’ So I’m not worried.”
Yikes. That’s suuuuper moe.
Myusel was so impossibly cute I could just eat her up, but I had to restrain myself.
“Come to think of it, Myusel, are you interested at all in playing in our competition? I’m planning to put Elvia on a mixed team.”
There weren’t too many beast people in the Eldant Empire. And most of the ones there were were lizardmen. The werewolves, weretigers, and werebears—the traditional “furry beast people”—were actually more prevalent in the neighboring country of Bahairam. And practically none of those in the Eldant Empire had the means to send their kids to school. No chance, then, of creating a were-person team.
“I will... food to take... you... in boxes,” Myusel said with a smile.
“We have a word for that,” I said. “O-bentou.”
“O-bentou.” Myusel nodded happily. “O-bentou, o-bentou. I will... make.... your o-bentou, Shinichi-sama.”
“Thanks,” I said with a nod. “So you’ll be a spectator, huh? Kind of part of the cheering section?”
“What is... spec-ta-tor? And cheering sec-tion?”
“Cheering is when you encourage someone to do their best,” I said. “And a spectator is someone who watches a match or game.” I found it surprisingly hard to come up with definitions for such everyday words. “You’re sure you don’t want to participate?”
“I am bad at... winning and... losing,” she said. She went on to explain, in her halting Japanese, that she wasn’t very interested in fighting over things or determining winners and losers. She didn’t really enjoy it.
“Winning, losing,” she said. “They are angry, the losing people. And winning people... too important. They is too cool.”
It was a little tough to follow what she was saying, but the gist seemed to be that the losers would get upset and resent the winners, while the winners would turn arrogant and lord it over the losers. But Myusel didn’t know words like resent or arrogant yet, so she had tried to muddle through with the vocabulary she had.
Judging by Myusel’s personality, I figured the words she had come up with were a serious understatement. As someone with both human and elven blood, she had firsthand experience of persecution. In a contest like the one I was proposing, victory would only make her the object of ridicule, disgust, and anger, while defeat would subject her to further shame and humiliation.
“I guess I can’t blame you,” I said, putting my ring back on to signal a shift in the conversation. “Everyone’s got their own perspective on sports. I don’t especially love them myself.”
“But,” Myusel said, replacing her ring as well, “you’ll be happy if this helps people of different races get along even a little, won’t you, Master?”
“That’s right.” I poured myself some water from a carafe. “And if we can improve interracial relations, the treatment of people with mixed blood should get better, too.”
Half-bloods were considered less worthy than pure-blooded people because of a bedrock assumption that it was okay to look down on them or hate them. But if people could come to feel a genuine respect for other races, to accept other people’s best features, then life might get better.
You can see this in the plots of plenty of half-blood-centric works aimed at otaku. In them, the mixed-blood character usually experiences discrimination or persecution, but then the half-vampire or half-elf or half-demon or half-whatever turns out to be even more capable than the people around them, and readers can see how cool they are. They help otaku audiences, at least, understand that mixed blood can be pretty awesome.
And so—
“Master,” Myusel said, her eyes wide. “You don’t intend...”
“Uh, well... Ha ha ha.” I laughed to hide what I’d really been thinking. Myusel was a sharp one, all right. It looked like she’d seen through me.
Reducing interracial strife was important from th
e perspective of making my classroom a little more peaceful—but it was true that it might also improve the position of mixed-race people like Myusel. That wasn’t my entire goal, but it was a big part of it.
Myusel personally, of course, was good friends with Petralka now, so she wasn’t necessarily in a bad position herself. But that was all predicated on her friendship with the empress—and there were definitely nobles who didn’t approve of Her Majesty’s friendship with a half-blood servant girl. It was entirely thinkable that they would still harass her. In that sense, the best way to make sure people stopped getting hurt was to make discrimination toward or persecution of mixed-race people a social no-no.
“Master... Shinichi-sama.”
Eep. Those eyes... That ‘Shinichi, oh Shinichi!’ Stobbit, it’s sooo mooooe!
Okay, so I didn’t actually give voice to that ridiculous thought, but an otaku like me could hardly pass up at least thinking it.
Myusel stared intently at me for a moment, then said, “But, Shinichi-sama.” Her eyes flitted to the ground. “If that happens... If half-bloods can be born without stigma... wouldn’t you... I mean, wouldn’t you end up married to Elvia-san?”
“Oh, for crying out loud, I told you, that was a misunderstanding!” I exclaimed. “Anyway, we’re, like, completely different species. Can a human and a beast person even have a baby?”
Humans and elves seemed to differ externally only by the length of their ears and some subtle facial constructions, and I didn’t think a difference in magical ability would be important in this sort of context. I thought of it as no more consequential a difference than that between white people, black people, and Asian people on earth.
When it came to beast people, though... They had things humans didn’t have. Like tails and stuff.
No, wait, hang on a second. Don’t they say that human embryos actually do have tails? Isn’t the “Mongolian spot” supposed to mark where it was? I had even heard it said that human fetuses went through a process of “evolution” in their mothers’ wombs—starting out fish-like, then resembling an amphibian, a reptile, and finally a mammal. So before birth they actually did have tails, albeit small ones.
From that perspective, maybe you could actually think of humans as having tails, even if they were practically nonexistent. Why else would we have tail bones?
Wow, man... That’s deep. Straight from “who can bone?” to the mysteries of our bones.
Uh, anyway. Moving on.
“Yes... I think they can have children,” Myusel said hesitantly. Fair enough: she had been born into a world where humans, elves, and dwarves could all be classified as “humanoids.” Myusel herself was literally the living proof that humans and elves, at least, could procreate together.
“Huh. So a human and a beast person could...”
An image floated into my mind, of Elvia holding a baby with my face. I quickly shook my head. Uh-uh. No-fly zone. I’m not quite sure why, but that’s off-limits. A kid before I’m twenty? That’s too heavy.
Now that I stopped and thought about it, it was obvious: being in heat, from a biological perspective, was precisely the time when it was easiest to get pregnant. In other words, if I wasn’t careful and ended up doing it with Elvia while she was on her phase, I really could end up with a child.
Thank God we didn’t go all the way last time...! I let out a very, very long sigh.
“Shinichi-sama?”
“Oh, uh, nothing! Not one thing.”
I gave Myusel my best (slightly panicked) smile, and tried to convince myself that it really was nothing at all.
Chapter Three: Soccer... Soccer?
It had been about a week since I brought up the possibility of a competition in front of the empress, and the Holy Eldant Empire had decided to support the creation of a series of soccer fields. The plan was for six playing areas. One would be right next door to Holy Eldant Castle, so the knights could use it to train. Another would be built for the exhibition game—more of a stadium, with spectator seating, a roof, and even a special viewing box for Her Majesty. It would be built on the outskirts of the capital city, Marinos.
As for the remaining four fields, they would be built in an open space near the school, so that not just the students, but anyone who wanted to, could use them to play. This was both because Amutech was sponsoring the event, and because there were relevant materials in the school library.
The construction would be handled by the JSDF, as well as the Empire’s Dwarf Corps of Engineers, whom I had gotten to know during the building of the school. Both units were very familiar with this kind of work, so they whipped through the construction of the four fields near the school. From leveling the ground to erecting the goalposts and even putting up fences to prevent balls from being lost, the entire job took them just two days. As soon as the fields were ready, we opened them to the public.
And so...
“Right! You won’t beat me!”
“Bring it on!”
“We’re gonna win, or die trying!”
“Show me what you’ve got!”
Classes were over for the day, and the students were once again on the fields. The raucous voices were coming from the human team. The elf squad was practicing on the field next to theirs.
Once classes were done, students could generally decide for themselves what to do—stick around, go home, whatever. But almost all of them had rushed outside for some enthusiastic soccer practice.
“They’re sure into it, aren’t they?” I remarked.
“They sure are,” Minori-san said, looking out over the soccer fields with admiration.
Minori-san and I had passed out soccer rule books earlier, and it looked like the students had taken them to heart. We didn’t see anyone touching the ball with their hands, or trying to kick on a throw-in, or anything like that. I was surprised at how much they had picked up in barely a week—but then again, the basic rules of soccer are pretty simple. And the students were all excited to be playing a game in front of the empress herself. Maybe that was more than enough motivation to memorize a skimpy rule book.
“I guess they really want those PLPs and 3TSes,” Minori-san said.
“Er... Yeah.”
Minori-san and I were looking out from the library, up on the second floor. All four of the soccer fields were in use, and elsewhere in the immediate area we could see students working on their footing and heading.
“You’d think we were giving out a cash prize...”
I glanced back at the library’s lending record, a notebook lying open on a desk. It had notations in both Japanese and Eldant, indicating who had borrowed what over the last several days.
Your Field of Dreams.
Captain Tsukasa.
Inazuma El**n.
Striker on the Verdurous Planet.
Kick-On.
And so on and so forth. It could practically have doubled as a list of all the soccer manga in the library’s collection. None of the entries bore a return date, meaning they were all still out on loan. I figured the students were eating up every bit of soccer-related media we had. It was the same with the anime DVDs. None of the students had video playback devices at home; the most they could do was watch them on the PCs in the self-study room, but still...
“They seem to have found something to study, too,” Minori-san said, pointing to a group gathered in front of one of the computers.
From their size, I guessed they were dwarves. The school was fielding four soccer teams, but since the fields outside were open to the public as well, everyone couldn’t be practicing all the time. The mixed team, the one Elvia had joined, was using one of the fields, so one of the school teams had to take a bye.
It looked like it was the dwarf team’s turn to sit out, and they were using that time to absorb more soccer knowledge and work out a strategy.
“The elves have longer legs, so we won’t win by running.” Overseeing the dwarf team was none other than Romilda. A piece of paper, evidently s
tanding in for a soccer field, sat on the desk, and she was writing things on it for all the dwarf boys and girls to see. “I swear here and now we’ll beat the stuffing out of those spindly-legged tree-lovers!”
“Woo!”
“Especially Loek!” Romilda pumped her fist in the air. “Pick a fight with every little thing I say, will he? He’s worse than a rock in my boot!”
“You really hate Loek, don’t you, Romilda?”
“He makes me physically ill!”
Gosh. Tell us how you really feel, Romilda.
“Seeing that flimsy beanpole he calls a body just makes me—well, it makes me sick!”
She made a sort of screeching sound that I took for anger. The dwarves all laughed merrily.
Okay... I know this sounds crazy, but... Could it be Romilda was actually tsundere for Loek, that she actually really liked him, but she was so embarrassed about it that her only way of showing it was to smack him around?
I mean, when you really, passionately love someone or something, it can suddenly turn into hatred or resentment, right? Sometimes the biggest fans of a series turn around and become its biggest critics.
So why not the other way around? You think someone is hateful or stupid or obnoxious—until you cross an invisible line, and suddenly they seem attractive...
“I swear we’ll force them to crawl on their knees! We’ll force them to slurp down muddy pond water!”
.........Okay, so maybe not.
I sighed. At length, Romilda and the others adjourned their strategy session at the desk in favor of plugging an anime DVD into the big TV on the wall, gathering around in hopes of learning more about soccer.
On-screen, a soccer ball came spinning out of a curtain of flames. Its trail transformed into a sparkling dragon, and then the title appeared with great fanfare.
Prince of Soccer—FLASH
Oh. Season two of the anime.
The words shattered like glass to reveal a young bishounen soccer player spinning around and around (while flying through the air for some reason) before finally landing on a soccer field like an angel from heaven. It looked like one of those things where there would be a big fuss every time he showed up on-screen—a starburst effect or theme song or something.
Outbreak Company: Volume 3 Page 10