And she had managed to keep it all a secret from me. Where in the world had she found the time? It must have demanded so much work...!
“Er... Master?” A cloud of anxiety passed over Myusel’s face. “I’m... I’m very sorry for hiding it from you, sir. But... I just...” She sounded worried, almost panicked. She must have interpreted my shocked silence as anger.
I clenched my fist and exclaimed, “Don’t apologize!”
“Eep!”
“I’m moved beyond words right now!”
“Er... Ah?” She blinked her big, emerald eyes.
I took her hand and exclaimed further, “Myusel—you formed these onigiri with your delicate, graceful fingers, worked your very heart and soul into them! It’s wonderful!”
“Er... Ahem... And that makes you... happy with me, Master?”
“Absolutely!” I insisted. How could I not insist? “You must understand! The heroine’s hand-made o-bentou is a rite of passage in every romantic comedy, a standard trope not to be denied, an event as inevitable as the rising of the sun! And what does she make the hero? A sandwich is okay, but my heroine—! She chose onigiri! Made by hand, yes, by her very own hands! The rice caressed by her fingers, as if they, by proxy, were touching my very tongue! Such care should never be less than completely respected! Banzai, Japanese food!”
“Th-Thank you.” For some reason, Myusel seemed just a touch hesitant, but she smiled.
As for me, I picked up an onigiri and put it in my mouth, soaking in the thousand feelings it evoked. There was an instant where I worried there might be some bizarre twist, like maybe she had used sugar instead of salt, or maybe there was caramel in the middle or something, but it was filled with minced fish, just like it was supposed to be.
Wonderful!
“D-Do you like it?”
“Ah lahb ih,” I said. I was devouring the rice balls like a starving child.
It had been close to a year since I had had rice. Myusel’s cooking didn’t leave much to be desired, but I was still Japanese, and there was nothing more familiar and comforting to me than that soft, white staple.
“We do not quite understand. Is this some foodstuff from Shinichi’s country?” Petralka asked, peeking into the basket. She had disembarked from my knees and was eating a full-course meal prepared by her personal chef, but it looked like my intense emotion had attracted her attention.
“It is,” Myusel answered. I was too busy eating to say anything. “Minori-sama taught me how to make it, and then I prepared it.”
“Mm. If it so pleases Shinichi, we are most eager to taste it as well.”
“Ah, Your Majesty may certainly—”
“Have one? So we shall.” Petralka grabbed an onigiri.
I noticed that these rice balls were a little on the large side. Since this was Myusel’s first time making them, she probably found it easier to get the shape right that way.
“Hrm. And one eats them with one’s bare hands?”
“That’s what Minori-sama told me, yes.”
“Most intriguing...”
Having never tried onigiri before, Petralka seemed a little hesitant. She picked up one of the balls of rice with both hands, as if afraid of dropping it.
“A very strange object indeed,” she said, but she took a little bite, chewing off one corner of the triangular onigiri.
D’awwww...!
A little, silver-haired girl holding an onigiri in both hands...
Taking a sweet, tiny nibble of one corner...
It’s like she has a dang moe checklist, and she’s ticking the boxes one by one! So cute!
Between the emotion evoked by Myusel’s rice balls and the moe-ness of the way Petralka was eating them, I was very busy.
“Ahh. How interesting. This is entirely different from bread, and yet the rich, chewy texture is—nom nom.”
I guess Petralka liked the rice ball, because she ate the rest of it with gusto. Maybe she thought she was supposed to eat it like I was, because she took big, indiscriminate bites, getting rice all over her mouth.
“Oh, Your Majesty. Your honorable face...” Myusel pulled a handkerchief from her pocket. “Just let me—”
“No, don’t!”
My unexpected shout brought a squeak from the maid.
Staring fixedly at the rice on Petralka’s cheek, I said, “Wiping it off with a handkerchief would be completely unacceptable! When a beautiful young woman has a bit of onigiri on her cheek, you say, ‘There’s a few grains on your cheek...’ and pluck it gently away and eat it! This is basic!”
“Beautiful young woman—?” Petralka said, blinking in confusion. “D-Do you refer to us?”
“Yes, Your Majesty, I do! Listen to me! You have to recognize that you are a beautiful young woman, and behave accordingly! You must respect yourself enough not to let anyone do something so crassly wasteful as to wipe rice off your face with a mere handkerchief!”
I had become so agitated that even I wasn’t sure what I was saying anymore, but the sincerity of my emotions came through. I hoped.
“Erm... Yes. We do not fully understand, but very well,” Petralka said. “In—In that case, Shinichi, you shall remove it.”
I snapped back to reality. “What?”
Me? She wanted me to do it? To take the rice off her cheek? And eat it? MAJI DE??
Wait... Was I getting so agitated that I was thinking in Japanese? Heck, that wasn’t even actual Japanese, it was romaji!
But forget the self-flagellation.
“Er... ahem.”
“Is this not how things are done in your country?”
“Uh... I mean, yes, sort of...”
I could see now that the rice on Petralka’s cheek was stuck right next to her pale-pink lips.
Ack! This is suuuper-duper almost a kiss!
“Are you trying to tell us that you cannot eat an object that was stuck to our cheek?”
“Not in the least, Majesty...”
“Then remove it!” Petralka commanded. Then she closed her eyes and stuck out her face. She almost looked like she was getting ready for a kiss, and it was impossibly cute.
Calm down, O my heart! Ahhhhh! But— But—!
Petralka opened one eye. “Will you not do it quickly?” she asked. “Why are you shaking? Your embarrassment—although we don’t know why you should be embarrassed—is nearly contagious!”
“Y-Yes, ma’am!” I exclaimed, unconsciously straightening up. I reached out, pulled the rice off her cheek, and—
Ate it. I actually ate it.
Yaaaaaaahhhhh?!
How do I put this? It tasted just like rice always tastes, but it was also—hmmm. As if I had crossed some culinary Rubicon. This was probably how Adam and Eve felt when they ate the fruit of knowledge.
Father! Mother! Today I take another step on the path to manhood...!
Knowing my parents, they would have just said something like “Good work, that’s one flag down.” But whatever.
“Mm,” Petralka said, opening her eyes and nodding. “Tell us, Shinichi. Is this ritual always performed by men?”
“Er, no. In fact, it’s usually the other way around.”
“Then we shall perform it as well.”
“I’m... I’m sorry?”
“Shinichi. There is rice on your cheek, too.”
I caught my breath.
OMG! Kanou Shinichi—could you ever have been prepared for this?!
I stiffened as Petralka reached for my cheek and plucked off a grain of rice. The brush of her white fingers was almost like a caress... Ahhh.
“Hrm. A most unusual custom,” Petralka said. She popped the rice in her mouth without hesitation. “It makes one rather... bashful.” And then the empress smiled shyly.
No fair! Super no fair!
The whole thing was like throwing gasoline on the moe fire of my heart.
To think that I, who once held that “the third dimension is just for show; the brass doesn’t... (you know the rest)”�
��to think that I should reach such a pulse-pounding point in a relationship with a 3-D girl!
“Shinichi. You still have rice stuck to your cheek.”
Who should approach me as I was thinking all this, take the rice off my cheek, and eat it but... Garius?!
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!
“Hm, I see,” he said with an easy smile. “What a deeply intriguing custom.”
I remained completely stiff.
No! Crud! I should have thought of the possibility that Garius would get in on this! But I got so moe over Petralka’s totally unfair behavior—how was I supposed to think?! (Note: rhetorical question.)
“Err... Um...” I rose from my seat as if I were about to run away. “I, uh, I’ve got to... use the bathroom!”
It was a half-baked excuse for leaving in the middle of a meal, but it got me out of the viewing box.
Danger! Danger, Shinichi!
Garius wasn’t a bad guy by any means, and along with Petralka he was one of my staunchest supporters. But I just didn’t have any interest in same-sex romance. Having another guy touch my cheek, or eat the rice he plucked off it... I just couldn’t get moe about that.
I felt like I had eaten the sweetest candy and then been forced to swallow the hottest pepper—they pretty much canceled each other out.
“Aw...” I sighed as I walked down the hallway. Maybe I really should go use the bathroom. Obviously there were no sewers or indoor plumbing around here, but they did have clay pots full of nice, clean water that you could use to wash your hands. I could rinse my face, cool down a little...
But then, I stopped. “Huh?”
I thought I heard a voice I recognized. They were talking to someone. Indistinct chatter, not very loud, but the conversation sounded strained.
Curious, I went in the direction of the voices, and found I could hear them more clearly.
“Husband, does that time still—?”
There was silence in response.
I peeked around the corner. Brooke and Cerise were standing nearby. The lizardman team’s prep room must be right around here.
“Everyone is hoping to see you out there,” Cerise said.
She sounded pleading, but after a pause Brooke replied only, “Tell them... I’m sorry.” And then he left her there, just like before. Cerise, standing all by herself in the hallway, looked terribly lonely.
“Ah.” Cerise looked up and met my eyes. “Shinichi-sama...”
“Er, uh, sorry, I didn’t mean to, uh—”
Cerise seemed oddly cold toward me. Maybe it was because every time we met, I appeared to be eavesdropping.
But she said, “Not at all. I’m the one who should apologize. You caught us at a most... unflattering moment.”
“You really don’t need to apologize,” I said. “Um...”
Brooke’s repeatedly giving her the cold shoulder was really starting to bother me. This was twice now... In fact, including that very first time I’d seen them, it was three times.
“Are you guys fighting about something?” I asked quietly. “Is Brooke... I mean, is he unhappy working at my place?”
“No, certainly not,” Cerise said, shaking her head. Lizardman expressions were, as ever, hard for me to read, but she seemed to be anxious to dispel any misunderstanding. She repeated certainly not again, and then hung her head.
So... what was going on?
Cerise seemed like a really heartfelt and decent person (even if she did bear a passing resemblance to Godzilla), so I wanted to do anything I could to help her.
“If there’s anything I can do to help, just tell me,” I said.
“I’m sorry?” Cerise asked.
“Er... I don’t mean to butt in, of course,” I said, embarrassed. “It’s just... Brooke does a lot of good work for me, and I’m grateful for that. I want him to be happy.”
She was silent.
“Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like husbands and wives should get along. Maybe lizardmen don’t see it that way, or maybe happiness means something else to you. Maybe I’m being self-indulgent. But the impression I get is that right now, you and Brooke... aren’t very happy.”
It was nice to live with someone else. Living alone—being by yourself when you were supposed to be with someone else—that was sad. I knew that from experience. That was why, if there was any way I could help reconcile Brooke and Cerise, I wanted to do it.
“Shinichi-sama...” Cerise looked at me for a moment. “Truth be told...”
And then she started talking about the past.
Cerise was the daughter of a powerful member of the Tribal Council—effectively, lizardman nobility. When she married Brooke, it was for chiefly political reasons. He was the lizardmen’s greatest hero, after all. The feelings of the husband- and wife-to-be didn’t really matter. Still, Cerise and Brooke had known each other a long time, and she hardly disliked him, so she had no specific objection to the wedding.
Marriage in lizardman society, incidentally, has just one purpose: procreation.
Cerise told me that unlike mammals, lizardmen didn’t have the same clear-cut division of labor when it came to childcare. That is to say, the mother didn’t breast-feed, so it was easier for both husband and wife to look after the kids. The society’s laissez-faire approach to child-rearing helped, too. The adoration humans displayed toward their offspring—hugging them, touching them, Eskimo-kissing them—wasn’t really present with lizardmen.
These limited interactive behaviors were one of the reasons observers from other races called the lizardmen “cold-blooded” or claimed they didn’t have emotions. Personally, I figured it was just a fact of biology, and not something to criticize.
But anyway, Brooke and Cerise got married, and she bore his children—or I guess, laid his eggs. Normally, they would have looked after the eggs together. But at the time, Brooke was still a member of the army of the Holy Eldant Empire. His whole race considered him a hero, and now that his marriage with Cerise had been consummated, he had no excuse for neglecting his military duties. When the call-up came, he couldn’t ignore it. That was how he ended up going off to war, leaving his wife and eggs behind.
While he was away, his home was attacked by the Kingdom of Bahairam.
Since lizardmen were so low on the social ladder to begin with, they were often treated as pawns who could be deployed into occupied territory. In other words, they often lived in the hottest parts of every conflict zone. Cerise and Brooke’s home was one such place.
Now, Cerise might have been female, but she was also a lizardman. She had considerably more toughness and fighting strength than the average human. Under normal circumstances, she might have been able to defend the eggs even without Brooke. But bad luck brought a further twist of the knife: when the attack came, Cerise was sick.
Their eggs were broken in the conflict.
If Brooke had been there, sturdy as he was, there was a good chance he could have defended the eggs in Cerise’s place. But he was on a battlefield far away, unable to protect his wife and “children.”
“It’s pained him ever since,” Cerise said. “He says he has no right to be a father.”
“But it wasn’t his fault,” I said. Anyone could see that.
“And yet he blames himself.” Cerise looked at the ground. “And this... ‘soccer.’ The ball you use in this competition. Its size and pattern look very much like those of our eggs.”
“Is... Is that what’s been going on?” I asked, the realization slowly dawning on me.
Now I understood why Brooke had given the soccer ball such a long, strange look. It reminded him of the eggs he had been unable to protect. It was probably the same reason Cerise had looked at the ball the way she had. And with all that in his past, I had asked him to go out and play soccer?
“I can see why he wouldn’t want to kick a soccer ball,” I said. A game where you kicked a ball that looked just like one of your eggs? No wonder the lizardmen weren’t eager to play.
> But Cerise seemed surprised. “What? No... I don’t think there’s a problem with that.”
“You... You don’t?”
“No. In fact, lizardmen transport their eggs using their feet.”
“............Huh?”
My eyes went wide. Cerise was kind enough to explain.
As one might guess from her remark that her eggs looked like soccer balls, lizardman eggs weren’t quite the shape we associate with eggs. Instead, they were perfectly round. This, apparently, was because they had evolved to be easy for the parents to transport. Unlike human births, a clutch of lizardman eggs usually numbered three at the least, and averaged five to ten. If they needed to go anywhere with them—to keep them safe, say—they’d find that all the eggs wouldn’t fit in their hands, and they could hardly put them in their mouths. The natural thing to do, then, was to roll the eggs along with their feet.
The eggs were apparently tough enough to put up with a little bit of kicking. I guess if kicking a soccer ball were inherently repulsive to the lizardmen, none of the others Brooke brought would have been willing to participate, either.
“Wow. Everyone really does have their own customs, don’t they?” People like me might be shocked to think about kicking an egg with your feet, but if humans were completely biologically different than we are, maybe it would seem natural to us, too. Heck, there are fish that raise their offspring in their mouths—and then there’s the praying mantis. In order to be sure she has enough nutrients to lay her eggs, the female mantis eats the male mantis after they copulate.
People tend to react viscerally to this sort of thing: “That’s weird!” or “How awful!” But that’s just how we see it. A mantis, for example, is a totally different creature.
“Heh... So we’re the same, when it comes down to it.”
“I’m sorry?” Cerise said.
“Oh, no... It’s just, our appearances and our ways of life are so different. I always thought Brooke was a good person, but there was a line in my mind separating me and him. He was a different kind of creature.”
Brooke was Brooke. Not a human. Lizardmen weren’t like us. That caused me to resign myself to certain things from the outset, to assume that there would naturally be little misunderstandings. I had given up on completely understanding him before I’d even tried.
Outbreak Company: Volume 3 Page 15