Outbreak Company: Volume 14

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “Hrm,” Petralka grumbled.

  “Soooo,” Minori-san said, turning to Myusel and grinning. I’d never seen her so happy about anything that wasn’t BL. “I’m thinking you really are the most important to Shinichi-kun, Myusel.”

  “G-Gosh, I wonder...” Myusel turned red and put her hands to her cheeks.

  Wow, what’s with the adorable gesture?! Some kind of special move—is that what this is? Does everyone who sees it die (of moe)?!

  ................................................Er, nope. Never mind.

  “I disagree,” Hikaru-san said. “Shinichi-san was just going in the order we disappeared. After all, he couldn’t be sure Myusel would be in my room, right?”

  “Yes, that is indeed the case!” Petralka exclaimed, clenching her fist. “Behold the face of Shinichi when he enters Myusel’s room and discovers we are not there. His expression at that moment reveals precisely whom he cares for the most!”

  “If ya really believe that, then get a look at his face when he pounds on my door! He’s totally freaked! Way worse than for any of the rest of ya!” Elvia practically squirmed with happiness.

  “I don’t know, I really think he was looking for Myusel first... Ah.” That was when Minori-san turned toward me. Being the accomplished martial artist she was, maybe she could sense that I was there. “...Well, well.” She gave me a lopsided grin.

  That prompted Myusel and the others to look my way, too.

  “Shinichi!” Petralka was the first to speak. Followed by—

  “Amazin’! It’s just like Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama said!” Elvia’s tail wagged.

  “Shinichi-sama...” Myusel was the last to speak, her voice a whisper of wonder. Naturally, all of them—all three girls, plus the amused Minori-san and Hikaru-san—looked in perfectly good health, no sign of illness anywhere. Which meant...

  “You’re awful, all of you!” I shouted, my clenched fists trembling. “You tricked me?!”

  And here I had been so worried about them! All of them! I had been wracked with anxiety about what was going on! And the whole thing, all of it, had been made up!

  “You even killed the power and everything! What did you think you were going to get out of it?!”

  “We just figured that if a push didn’t work, we’d try a pull,” Minori-san said with a shrug. “If you wouldn’t come out for something fun, we thought maybe you’d come out for something scary.”

  “That was crazy! How could you lie to me like that?!”

  “Nobody lied. There is an epidemic near the castle, that much is true. And then we each just stopped playing the game and came out into the yard. Right, Hikaru-kun?”

  “Sure is!” he said. I could practically imagine him giggling like a schoolgirl chatting with her BFF. But they couldn’t get rid of me that easily.

  “That’s just semantics!”

  I mean, strictly speaking, what Minori-san said was true. They hadn’t deliberately lied to me. But the way they had each gone silent and left the game one after another, the way they mentioned the epidemic right when it would most fan the flames of my worry, and then going so far as to cause a power outage—it was obviously all a ploy to scare the crap out of me!

  “And then there was that Itchy. Tasty. chat message from Elvia!”

  “That was just to help set the mood,” Hikaru-san said.

  “You did that, Hikaru-san?!”

  “Yeah, although I admit I was a little worried it’d tip you off that we were just playing with you.”

  “Grrrrrr!”

  “Still not a lie,” Hikaru-san said, pointedly looking away from me. Wow, it was really adorable the way he—no, no!

  “Don’t act all cute with me!” This was bad enough already. I wasn’t so much upset about being tricked; I just wanted to die from embarrassment at the thought that everyone had been watching me the whole time I rushed all over the house in complete terror. I was sure they’d seen me screaming like a little girl when I thought Brooke and Cerise were a monster, too.

  And to record the whole thing!

  I glanced in the direction of the royal guard, but they collectively refused to look at me. Clearly, I was too pitiful for them to even bear to see me.

  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!

  Gah! If there was a hole here, I would have dreaded-spinning-drill-jumped right into it!

  “U-Uh, Shinichi-sama...” Myusel said hesitantly. “I—I really w-wanted to... to apologize to you, Shinichi-sama. So I wished... you would... come out of your room...”

  “Myusel, you are one dedicated girl,” Minori-san said with a laugh.

  “Again...” I whispered, my eyes on the ground.

  “What...?” Myusel looked at me, perplexed; Petralka and Elvia glanced at each other; while Minori-san and Hikaru-san regarded me skeptically. I turned my back on them all... and set off running as fast as a frightened rabbit.

  “I’ll shut myself in agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiinn!”

  “Oh, Shinichi-sama...!”

  I ignored Myusel, making a beeline for my room. I didn’t have it in me to stay in that spot one moment longer.

  A while later. After less than half an hour, the mansion’s power came back on, which meant I had my computer back. My messenger was full of apologies from the others, but I didn’t see them until the next morning. I had pulled the covers over my head and gone to sleep.

  And so we came to the next day. Through the chat Petralka and Garius, back for another visit, gave me the details on this epidemic. Sufferers experienced a high fever and a feeling of lethargy, while some also presented with runny noses, coughs, headaches, nausea or vomiting, diarrhea—the list went on. Eldant had its own endemic diseases, but none of their medicines seemed to work very well on this current outbreak. Garius and the others didn’t know what to do.

  The solution, finally, came from an unexpected source: the JSDF garrison. The base’s doctor evaluated several people who had the illness, and discovered what it really was: influenza.

  The influenza virus, it turned out, hadn’t existed in Eldant. I.e., most people had no immunity, and there were no medicines to combat it. It was as simple as that: the bug had never existed in this world, and we had brought it with us from Japan.

  Here I thought they had tested the hell out of us to make sure we wouldn’t bring any unknown viruses back from the other world, but I guess they hadn’t tested us enough after all. I didn’t know who the carrier had been, but Matoba-san made more back-and-forth journeys than any of us, and there was a good chance it was him.

  It wouldn’t be the first time this sort of thing had happened in history. But things moved quickly after that. The JSDF requisitioned and distributed medicine from Japan, as well as flu vaccines for all of us and anyone else who wanted one. Everyone seemed to think the furor about the epidemic would die down before long.

  And then...

  “Morning...”

  I came into the dining area, scratching my cheek in embarrassment. Everyone else was already there; I was the last to arrive.

  Despite my declaration that I was going to go back to being a shut-in, I had eventually given up on it. I assumed Minori-san and Hikaru-san would continue to try everything they could think of to get me out of my room, and I wouldn’t have put it past them to finally resort to violent force, like my parents had done. Frankly, I was afraid they might invent some even more humiliating plan. And I didn’t think I could endure any more humiliation.

  So, farewell, shut-in life! It was good while it lasted. Lounging around in bed, reading whatever manga I wanted, playing games when I got tired of that, having delicious food brought right to my door.

  But now...

  “Um...” Myusel interrupted serving and rushed over to me—but then her shyness seemed to catch up with her, and she looked at the ground. “G-Good morning, Sh-Shinichi-sama.” She sounded like she could hardly get the words out.

  “Yeah, morning...”

  “Your food..
. It’s ready, so...”

  “Yeah. Let’s eat. Together.”

  “...Yes, sir!”

  The shut-in life was a fun time; I’m not gonna lie. But I have to admit, too, that meals do taste better when you share them with someone. And they taste even better than that when they’re also made by a girl like Myusel.

  And so...

  “Itadakimasu!” I was grateful, but not just for the food on my plate. I looked at Myusel, sitting across from me—I was grateful for her, too.

  Chapter 2: Chirudoren?

  You can talk about “otaku stuff,” but that term covers a wide range. Manga. DVDs. Games. Light novels. You could think of “story” as a huge tree that branches out into things like character goods. There’s a lot of diversity.

  Then you’ve got figures of specific characters, or maybe image songs, body pillows, and on and on. Or there might be products representing tools and gadgets from the story world. When it comes to super popular series, there might even be tie-in food items and sweets, or stationery—you know, really working that synergy. And then sometimes branches of the main series spawn their own manga or DVDs or light novels or games. Read: spinoffs.

  Anyway.

  The field of otaku goods is so vast as to defy total categorization, and the mere thought of collecting everything out there is enough to make a person feel faint. Let alone the thought of having to have it all shipped over to you at regular intervals... Imagine the tower of boxes, the fleet of massive trucks it would demand, the dizzying amount of packing material. It would all take up a lot of room.

  And now imagine the shipments cover three people.

  When I found myself staring down the delivery of cardboard boxes, I honestly got a bit dizzy.

  “Seems even more... staggering than usual today,” I mumbled as I took in the wall of boxes standing just outside our front door. About half were filled with brand-new manga, novels, anime, DVDs, and games, while the other half contained “related merchandise.”

  All of it supplied and paid for by the Japanese government.

  It had made its way to us here in the Eldant Empire through a hyperspace wormhole. Normally it was addressed to the JSDF garrison on the edge of the Eldant capital of Marinos. Trans-hyperspace wormhole delivery wasn’t just used to get anime stuff to needy otaku; supplies for the JSDF and personal items for the members of the garrison came, too. For that reason, we often went by bird-drawn carriage to pick up our deliveries at the garrison, but sometimes soldiers would drop things off at the mansion if they were in the area on other business. Today, that’s what had happened. Not to mention, all this stuff would never have fit in one carriage.

  “Why is there so much stuff?” I asked aloud. I was the one who had placed the order, but this was clearly an unusual amount of deliveries. Or had someone else included a bunch of requests that made the pile this big?

  “Probably because Summer Co**ket just wrapped up.” This calm assessment came from another employee of Amutech—and another of the three people responsible for this order—Ayasaki Hikaru-san.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “And WonFes was just recently, too.”

  “We cut down on the number of genres we wanted them to check out, but there have been so many new groups making goods recently,” Hikaru-san said.

  And so it was: we had ordered doujinshi and the like as well as all the official stuff, but of course it was impossible to order one copy of every doujinshi at “NatsuKomi”—Summer **miket. Instead, we had asked them to canvass only specific genres—but just like Hikaru-san said, there were lots of groups out there, and more every day. Not just making books, either, but shopping bags, body pillows, and more. Books, being all roughly of a similar size and shape, were easy to pack into cardboard boxes, but a lot of merchandise was less intuitive to ship.

  And then there was WonFes (“Wonder Fe**ival”), a huge event all about plastic models and garage kits, held at almost the same time as Comi**t. Most of what came out of that show was statuettes and models, things that ate up a lot of space. But a lot of those figures and gadgets I mentioned could only be found at WonFes, so we had asked for a few of them to be sent over.

  And I guess everything had arrived at once.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t even remember what you ordered,” Hikaru-san said.

  “I do! Vaguely. But it’s not like I ordered it all at once. Some of it was probably a while ago...”

  C*mik*t and WonFes weren’t held quite simultaneously, after all, and it would take time to go to them and check everything out. The only way to be sure what the different groups had there was to get on the internet and look up the details, but because there was no network connection between Japan and Eldant, I even had that sort of thing shipped to me periodically on a hard disk. It meant a lengthy time lag before I got caught up on anything.

  Then of course, there were times when release dates slipped (and not just for doujinshi; it could happen to anything), which of course meant it got to us even later. Say it had been six months since I requested something; of course I wasn’t going to remember what it was.

  “Anyway, we’ve got to get this stuff inside.” I turned to the maid beside me. “Myusel, sorry to trouble you, but...”

  This maid was a half-elf. The pointy ears were the proof. She handled whatever domestic tasks needed to be done in the household, and she had come out here to help with the cargo, but... honestly, I wasn’t sure about making this frail-looking young woman carry around these bulging boxes. Maybe if we stumbled across one with figures in it, it would at least be a little lighter than a box full of books.

  “It’s fine.” Myusel smiled, looking completely at ease. Ahh, what a fine girl. A fine young woman y’ are, Myusel...

  As my thoughts suddenly and inexplicably took on the twang of an old Osakan dude, I realized that the muscliest Japanese person among us wasn’t here.

  “Hey, where’s Minori-san?” That was, Koganuma Minori-san, officer of the JSDF. She might have been a woman, but to be perfectly honest, she was way stronger and more physically capable than I was. “I’m sure a lot of this stuff is her BL.”

  “Oh, Minori-san said she was going to go get Brooke and Cerise-san to come help. She thought there might be a lot of cargo today.”

  “Ah...”

  Well, there was. Even with Myusel to help, it would take an awfully long time to move it all inside. Minori-san had obviously come to the same conclusion when she had seen “the wall.”

  “Elvia said she’d be by later, too... Oh, speak of the devil.” Hikaru-san pointed toward the house.

  I looked back and saw Minori-san emerging from the open door, along with our lizardman gardener Brooke Darwin.

  “Is it all here?” Minori-san asked, jogging up to us. She had a huge smile on her face. Without waiting for an answer, she tore open one of the boxes tagged on the side with a marker pen and started inspecting the contents. I thought she might burst into a happy “runtatta~ ♪” at any moment. She was practically floating.

  “Minori-san, hang on...”

  I guess she was really looking forward to something in one of these boxes. I acted a little chagrined, but the truth is, I understood how she felt. Any otaku, regardless of interests or preferences, wants to see their stuff when it arrives. If you aren’t eager to see it, are you even really an otaku?

  But some of the stuff I had ordered was stuff I would rather the girls not see—which is to say, stuff I would be embarrassed for them to see—which is to say, stuff I might very well be torn limb from limb for if they saw. So I didn’t necessarily want to just pop open all the boxes right in front of everybody. I had to think Minori-san was in the same situation—I assumed it was some BL doujinshi she was looking for—but she didn’t seem to have my qualms. Then again, I was a lot less worried about the BL books themselves than about the unquenchable fire of Minori-san’s passion for them.

  “These’ns belong to you, Master?” Brooke asked, shuffling toward the wall of boxes.

&nb
sp; “Er, yeah, thank you,” I said. “From here to here. They’ve all got my mark on the side. Could you bring them to my room?”

  “Yessir,” Brooke nodded.

  “My mark,” by the way, was an icon Hikaru-san had designed, something to help the Japanese residents of the mansion keep each other’s possessions separate. It was nice and simple, sort of like the face of some SD character. It was so easy that even I, with my minimal artistic talent, could draw it, and above all, it was cute.

  Myusel could actually read a pretty good number of kanji, and even Elvia and Brooke had picked up a fair amount just by being around, but Cerise, who was the last of the mansion’s occupants to have taken up residence here, didn’t know a word of Japanese, and even Brooke and Elvia had to study a kanji for a moment before they could figure it out. So we had created icons that were immediately distinguishable.

  “Hey, is it just you, Brooke?” I asked. The lizardman was hefting a box from beside the grinning Minori-san. Hadn’t Hikaru-san said Minori-san was going to get Brooke and Cerise?

  “This’s physical labor,” Brooke said around the box. “I’ll do enough for the both of us.”

  Huh! Very manly. Lizard... manly.

  As I’ve mentioned, Brooke and his wife Cerise were lizardmen, a reptile-like race. Brooke was our gardener, and Cerise worked as a maid in the mansion. They didn’t act all lovey-dovey in public, but moments like this showed exactly how much they cared for each other. Honestly, it was kind of heartwarming.

  “Okay, cool. Myusel, could I ask you to take... let’s see. How about this little box?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s still pretty heavy, be careful.”

  With some of the portering successfully delegated, I grabbed another box with some of my stuff in it—

  “AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!”

  —and then practically dropped it when Minori-san uttered a piercing, shattering cry of joy. I scrambled to catch my box, then looked over to discover her madly unpacking some exceptionally carefully packaged item. She unfurled a puffy sheet of bubble wrap to reveal... a boxed soccer ball.