“What’s that, Minori-san?”
“It’s a ball signed by one of the voice actors from Prince of Soccer! I’ve been waiting for this forever!”
Prince of Soccer—wasn’t that, you know, that anime about those boys who played soccer? I’d heard it was wildly popular with girls these days. Allegedly these guys could warp time and space with their kicks, cause entire stadiums to crack in half when they scored a goal, and float through the air on top of a soccer ball. For the life of me, I couldn’t picture it.
But in any event, Minori-san looked overjoyed, clutching the ball to her chest.
“Is that, like, a limited edition or something?”
“It’s a prize! Only three people in the entire world have one! I can’t believe I’m one of them!” She looked like a kid with a new number-one possession, her eyes sparkling behind her glasses. I guess she was really happy about winning this autographed soccer ball. You know, I seemed to remember her being thrilled about another limited-edition ball from Prince of Soccer. A gold one. Or... at least gold-colored. I also seemed to remember Elvia being even crazier about it than Minori-san.
“This time I’m gonna hide this thing so well Elvia will never find it!” Minori-san said to herself.
“Elvia? What about her?” Hikaru-san said, looking perplexed. Come to think of it, I guess he hadn’t been here for that little episode.
“The last time I got a limited-edition ball from Prince of Soccer, Elvia decided it was her new favorite toy.”
Elvia had a special weakness for round objects—maybe it was a werewolf thing. And if it was yellow or gold, so much the better. So when she’d seen that soccer ball, she’d pounced on it like a dog with a toy.
“Ahh, I get it...” Hikaru-san smiled. His face showed a mixture of emotions, but he seemed to completely believe that sort of thing could have happened.
On the one hand, it was easy to picture how cute Elvia must have been playing happily with that ball—but as an otaku, he understood how it must hurt to watch your precious new limited-edition ball rolling through the dirt. I had heard of some especially dedicated people who even put on gloves when touching their limited-edition items. It was as if they were precious art exhibits or antiques. And for the people who owned them, maybe they were just that valuable.
“Man, that takes me back,” I said, closing my eyes. “That whole soccer tournament! Although I guess it did get pretty crazy in the end.”
We’d had teams with elves, dwarves, human knights, lizardmen, and even the JSDF, all participating in a soccer tournament together. This was not long after we had arrived in Eldant, which is to say immediately after the little incident between me and the Japanese government. We needed a nice event to smooth everything over.
I don’t know why I had expected soccer here to be anything like it was in Japan, though. In the end, magic came into play, along with all the varying physical abilities of the different groups, until the whole thing was as crazy as anything on Prince of Soccer. It was enough to make you wonder if it was really soccer anymore, but one thing it unquestionably was was fun, and the Eldant people all seemed to enjoy it, too. The only thing as extensive as the enjoyment had been the property damage, though, so we hadn’t held another tournament since then.
“That was when Cerise and Brooke got back together,” I said fondly.
“Back together?” Hikaru-san echoed. “Wait... They were apart?”
The soccer tournament would have been described in the papers Hikaru-san had read before coming here, but the reports probably wouldn’t have included a description of the rapprochement between two lizardmen. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you put in a white paper.
“Some... things happened,” I explained, “and their egg, it got broken. That’s what they told me.”
“Egg? They had an egg?”
“But the whole thing wasn’t, like, anybody’s fault. There was nothing Brooke could have done about it, but it really got to him. I guess he felt like a man who can’t protect his egg isn’t fit to be a husband... so he left Cerise. But then they made up, and now they’re a couple again.”
“Gosh...” Hikaru-san blinked, but he was smiling. He could be a slippery customer, but I guess even he was a sucker for a happy ending.
“I’m pretty sure they said something about a soccer ball looking a lot like a lizardman egg, right, Minori-san?” I said, looking to her for confirmation. But she was completely absorbed in examining the autograph on her ball from every possible angle, and didn’t seem to hear me.
“You’ve never seen one for yourself?” Hikaru-san asked.
“No,” I said. Now that he mentioned it, I realized I only had Brooke and Cerise’s word to go on as far as what a lizardman egg looked like. Apparently they carried it around by rolling it with their feet, so it probably wasn’t the shape of a chicken egg, but closer to a spherical ball. Come to think of it, weren’t sea turtle eggs supposed to be almost perfectly round? (I’d seen some videos of them laying eggs somewhere.) I guess there was nothing that said all reptile eggs had to be the same shape.
“Now that you bring it up, I’ve never even seen a lizardman child,” I said.
I wondered what they looked like. I tried to picture one, but the best I could do with my minimal imagination was a sort of SD version of Brooke. You had the scales, the inscrutable expression, the kind of glinting eyes... Hmm, not very baby-like.
“I’m having some trouble with the mental picture here,” I said, tilting my head.
That was when I saw a figure emerge from the mansion, whose door had been hanging open.
“Oh,” I said.
A beast girl came pattering up to me. Elvia Harneiman...
She wagged her tail eagerly back and forth and said, “Shinichi-sama! Hikaru-sama! Minori-sama! Sorry to keep you waiti—”
But then she stopped short. Her big, round eyes were staring directly at... the autographed soccer ball Minori-san was holding. She hadn’t yet taken it out of the box (and probably never planned to), but it was one of those packages with one side cut away so you could easily see what was in it through a sheet of transparent material. Elvia could see that ball clear as day.
Minori-san started; she seemed to sense something untoward, and turned around. At which point—
“Rrrrf!”
Elvia made a sound exactly like a puppy excited by a toy and came charging in. Straight at Minori-san, or rather, at the ball she was holding.
Minori-san was pretty strong for a human woman, and super athletic too, but even she was going to find it hard to avoid a crazed werewolf. Elvia was an order of magnitude stronger than her, and Minori-san had to not only get out of the way, but protect her goods while she did it. I was sure this was going to end in a loud scream as Elvia stole another autographed ball.
“Hah!”
But at that moment, Minori-san pulled something out of a bag and flung it on the ground. There was a bright flash and a cacophonous explosion.
“A stun grenade?!”
A nonlethal flash-bang. The sort of thing the special forces would use when rescuing hostages or something. It didn’t shatter and cause injury like a normal fragmentation grenade, but the extremely bright light and extremely loud noise disoriented your opponents and sent them reeling. The blast just now wasn’t bright enough or loud enough to completely overwhelm our senses—in fact, I didn’t think it was even a real stun grenade. A little home cooking of Minori-san’s, I guessed.
What there was, though, was a whole lot of smoke.
“Yarf?!” Elvia exclaimed as she stumbled, suddenly unable to see.
“Mwahahahaha! I knew this would happen, so I got this little surprise ready!”
“If you knew this was going to happen, why didn’t you just take your precious ball to your room right away, instead of standing there staring at it?!” I quipped. It was like she had become a different character altogether—not a JSDF soldier, but a ninja.
“See ya in hell!” she exclai
med (like a certain slayer of ninjas), before turning and running away through the smoke. What was with her?
Hikaru-san went over to help Elvia up; meanwhile...
“Umm... Shinichi-sama...?”
“Master. What shall we do...?”
Myusel and Brooke stood there holding cardboard boxes, but lost in the fog. We couldn’t see three steps in front of ourselves. It would probably be almost dangerous to walk around carrying a box. Especially for someone who was already kind of clumsy, like Myusel.
“Uhh... Just hang tight. I’m sure the smoke will clear in a few minutes,” I said, and sighed.
One thing we obviously had to do with all the new stuff was find a place for it. Manga and novels went on the bookshelves. DVDs had their own special shelf, too. There were only so many places to display figures and posters and the like, so we kept them on another dedicated shelf and changed them out regularly. Besides, it was just common sense that anything—be it a book, a poster, or figure—displayed too long would end up sunbleached. Rotating them was practically a necessity.
It was also another big job. It would be hard enough if this was all purely my own personal stuff. But all the otaku goods in the house were purchased with public money, ostensibly to help foster exchange with this alternate world. Ideally, we wanted to avoid depreciation as much as possible.
That’s right: from the outside it may have looked as if I was living on Otaku Easy Street, but it wasn’t as if I was just throwing my hands in the air and crying, “Yahoo! Otaku buying spree on the government’s yen!” No, I absolutely was not! Totally not! I hadn’t the barest thought of such base personal benefit!!
..........................................Please believe me (weak voice).
Uh, anyway.
It obviously wasn’t the work of a moment to unpack everything, especially not when just flipping through a manga, trying to make sure it was what I expected, occasionally led to me sitting down and getting lost in reading it. I had a surprisingly small amount of time to really forget everything else and get completely absorbed in a book. Anyway, when I was doing this work, I made sure to split it up into lots of little pieces, taking breaks in between.
“Phew...” I left my room, stretching my arms in the air. I wasn’t going anywhere special. I just wanted a change of air. Often, my “breaks” consisted of doing a lap around the mansion and then getting back to work. Right now, my throat was feeling a little dry, so I went to the kitchen in search of some water.
“Oh.” I spotted Myusel coming down the hallway. “Hey, Myusel.”
She looked up when I called out—and her face immediately lit up. It seemed like she was really happy just to see me. We had been living in the same house for quite a while now, but still she always reacted like that. As an otaku with zero experience of dating an actual woman, I found it very, uh, heart-pounding.
“Is something the matter?” Myusel asked as she came up to me at a delicate jog.
“No, nothing. I’m just taking a little walk around the house to get a break from organizing stuff. Thought maybe I’d get myself a drink of water.”
“Let me make you tea!” she said and started back the way she had come.
“No, really, don’t worry about it. Are you cleaning right now, Myusel?” It was an educated guess: she was carrying a broom, a dustpan, and a big cloth bag.
“Yes, sir. I was going to pick up the leaves around the house and yard. And then there’s the laundry to do.” She gestured with her broom for emphasis. And that caused me to look at her hand.
“Myusel, what happened to your finger?”
One finger of the hand holding the broom was wrapped in a small white cloth. It didn’t look like some kind of fashion statement. In fact, something red was seeping through the cloth.
“What? Oh, when I was doing the dishes earlier, I broke a plate, I’m afraid...” She shrugged a little, but then added, “Um, I’m very sorry...”
“No, don’t worry about it.” I shook my head with a half-smile. “We’ve got plenty of dishes. But what about you? Did you hurt yourself?”
“I-I’m all right, sir. It’s just a shallow cut.”
“That’s good,” I said with relief.
Myusel could be very serious, or at least very hard on herself. So sometimes she kept pushing herself even when she was really tired, or tried to continue working despite an injury. If I didn’t check up on her to make sure she was doing all right, she certainly wouldn’t come to me herself to say she was in pain or something.
A little cut, though, was probably all right. Again, for better or for worse, she was very serious, and I didn’t think she would lie about something like how bad her injury was. But there was one thing I wanted to ask...
“Myusel, aren’t you being a bit of a workaholic?”
She’d already lugged all those boxes inside, and now she was launching right into housework without so much as a break. First she had carried around all those heavy boxes, then washed all our dishes, now she was cleaning, and then she was going to do the laundry. I know, I know, it was her job to do the housework, but even so, it seemed like a lot to ask.
And this was after her individual workload had decreased when Cerise had joined us.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen much of Cerise working around the house recently. Was something going on? She always showed up at mealtimes, so I hadn’t thought much about it. She, like Myusel, was pretty straitlaced, so I didn’t suspect her of slacking off, but I was worried that maybe she wasn’t feeling well. I wasn’t an expert on lizardman health—you couldn’t exactly take their temperatures or check their complexion—but she had Brooke with her in the evenings, and I thought he would have mentioned to me if anything was wrong.
“If you don’t mind, Myusel, I’d be happy to clean up the yard.”
It was just a passing thought.
“What...?” Myusel’s eyes went wide, and for a moment it was like she didn’t understand what I was saying. But the moment it registered, she shook her head, hard. “N-No, I could never! I couldn’t make you do something like that, Shinichi-sama!”
“Aw, I was the one who suddenly added carting boxes around to your list of chores earlier. And we don’t have school today, anyway; I’ve got time to kill. I’d love to do something other than organize merchandise.”
Then I plucked the broom out of Myusel’s grip.
Her bandaged finger brushed my hand.
“I’m worried about that injury, too,” I added. “If you have to move your fingers too much, the wound won’t stay closed.”
“B-But...”
“I really appreciate all the work you do around here, Myusel. Think of this as just a little token of my thanks. Okay?” As I talked, I relieved Myusel of the other items she was holding. (I didn’t have to pry too hard.) She looked at me, confused, for a moment. As her master, whatever I said was effectively an order. I tried not to take advantage of that, but it was still the case that she couldn’t object.
“Listen, uh,” I went on, scratching my cheek. This was sort of—well, embarrassing. “This is an order from your master. Don’t do any more housework. Go back to your room and rest for a bit. Got that?”
I smiled at her as I spoke, and Myusel—whether because she finally accepted what I said, or because she was just resigned to it—nodded hesitantly. “Thank you, sir.” She looked at the ground, blushing just a little.
Arrgh, what is with this girl’s killer cuteness?!
“Shinichi-sama, you sound just like Brooke-san.”
“Huh? Brooke?” There was a name I hadn’t expected to hear just now. “Did he say something to you?”
“Oh, no, not to me. To Cerise-san.” Myusel continued to stare at the ground. “I heard him tell her, ‘You don’t need to do the housework.’ He said he would take care of it for her, and that she should go to her room and rest.”
“Oh, I see.” I did remember him saying he would do Cerise’s share of the box-carrying. So maybe she was feelin
g a little under the weather?
“I thought, the way he cares for her like it’s the most natural thing in the world, it’s just... very husbandly. They’re such a sweet couple. And to hear you say the same thing to me, Shinichi-sama...” Then she suddenly seemed to realize where she seemed to be going with this, and quickly looked up. “Oh, no, I don’t mean—I didn’t mean to imply—”
Uh, I think there was only one thing you could have been implying, talking like that. And I think she knew it, too, considering her ears were even redder than before.
Husbandly... A sweet couple... Huh.
For me personally, those words evoked first and foremost a mental picture of my mom and dad.
I was struck by an image: Myusel, wearing an apron like a loving young housewife. It quickly turned into an image of Myusel wearing nothing but an apron, and I chased the wayward thought out of my head as quickly as I could.
“Well, uh, I’m gonna get cleaning,” I said.
“Th-Thank you again, sir,” Myusel replied, still sounding awkward. And there we parted. I started down the hallway towards the yard, but then I glanced back, and found Myusel still standing where she had been behind me, her head respectfully bowed.
“Cleaning the yard” sounds like a lot of work, but I didn’t actually have to handle a very large area. It was normally Brooke, the groundskeeper, who would deal with the yard—pruning the trees, watering flowers, and getting any moss out the fountain, of course, but also taking care of any weeding. So although I had a look around, all that really needed to be done was to sweep up any fallen leaves around the building and gather them into my bag.
Thinking about whether we should toss them right on the fire—maybe make some baked potatoes with them—I started gathering up any leaves I saw.
Taking a survey like this made me realize just how large our yard really was. Like I said, the “yard” was everything the mansion wasn’t actually standing on. Out front, we had flower beds and the fountain and stuff, but in the back, there was even more uninterrupted land. Yes, there was a place to dry laundry, storehouses, and the little building Brooke and Cerise lived in, along with a smattering of other small structures. Even the workshop where Petralka’s body-double doll had been made was still there, on the assumption that we might want it for something else someday. But even if you added all of that together, “unoccupied yard” still won out over “places with buildings.”
Outbreak Company: Volume 14 Page 7