As I struggled with feelings I myself didn’t completely understand, Elvia let go of me, came around front, and started scrubbing again. I looked away from her, but forced a dry smile onto my face.
“So you’re not like, This is so weird! or You make me sick! or something?”
“Not especially?” Elvia said, unconcerned. “Here, I’m gonna rinse you.” Then, before I could rephrase my question, she dumped a bucket of water over my head, rinsing away all the soap bubbles.
“But why...?” Had I dressed as a girl so long that she just didn’t feel funny around me now? Or could it be...
“Aren’t ya just yourself, Hikaru-sama?”
“Wha...?”
“If what’s inside you really hasn’t changed even though you’re in a girl’s body, then you’re Hikaru-sama, right? You don’t make me sick.”
She sounded as if all this were perfectly obvious to her. Me, I could sort of see it, but... I wasn’t quite so sure.
At that moment, though, a series of memories flashed through my mind. I’d never had a very distinct sense of myself. People had often said I wasn’t a very needy child, but I think that was a misunderstanding. My desires were just very outwardly directed: I wanted to make people happy, I wanted them to recognize me, to praise me. I wanted them to see me.
I’d always had soft, girlish features, and my parents went through a phase where they’d dress me in girls’ clothing, and then coo about how cute I was. I just couldn’t get that time of my life out of my head, and started to think maybe that was what people really wanted from me. And if that was what everyone around me wanted, I had to rise to that expectation. It became my whole reason for being, or so I started to think.
The next thing I knew, I discovered I was someone constantly aware of the gaze of others, without a real self to call my own. I was, in a word, empty. I didn’t have anything I could really argue passionately about, the way Shinichi-san defended a given anime or proudly got moe over a certain character. I didn’t have an interest so all-consuming that it influenced the way I talked and acted, like Minori-san and her BL. Yeah, I was a bit of an otaku; I knew plenty about anime and manga and whatever else, but that was mostly to support my cosplay, or so I could drop relevant details in conversations with my otaku friends. It was totally superficial. Ayasaki Hikaru was like a balloon, floating along with nothing inside him.
That’s why what Elvia said... I can’t quite describe it, but it almost felt to me like some sort of forgiveness. Permission. You are you. You’re Ayasaki Hikaru, before you’re anything else. And that’s okay. That’s good. That was what it sounded like she was saying to me.
“And when I was fightin’ with Myusel and Her Majesty, you took my side, Hikaru-sama.”
“Well, I mean...”
Someone had to. Elvia had obviously been late to the battle for Shinichi-san’s affections. Frankly it kind of ticked me off—it made me feel a little bad for her—that she was the one who most obviously had real romantic feelings for Shinichi-san, was the most aware of him as a member of the opposite sex, and yet he hardly seemed to notice her.
In some ways, Elvia and I were polar opposites. She was all innocence, with no secrets—everything she thought came right out her mouth. She could be a little bit of a klutz at times, but she threw herself into everything she did. She knew exactly who she was. Or at least, she looked like it to me. I could almost be jealous.
“Maybe it ain’t a werewolf’s place to say this, but...” Elvia smiled, almost shyly. “You’re a real important friend to me, Hikaru-sama.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“There, all clean,” she said, rinsing the last of the bubbles from my body.
“Thank you, Elvia,” I said. And then I thought, if I were still in my male body, we would never have had the chance to talk like this. So, hey. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing, this turning into a girl. I smiled at myself, a bit.
I glanced down, toward my chest. The little red light there was flickering, as if keeping time with my pounding heart.
“So what you’re saying is... that stuff got out of the ‘coffin’ and turned into this body?”
Not long after I emerged from my bath, I was surprised to find Shinichi-san and the others already arriving home from school. Rather than heading for their own rooms like they usually did, though, they called everyone to the living room and presented their hypothesis. Specifically, that this female body of mine was created by that amorphous stuff from the coffin. If nothing else, it had the advantage of solving several mysteries at once, including where the goo had gone and why I was suddenly a girl.
“We don’t have any real proof, but Petralka’s at the castle now investigating the possibility,” Shinichi-san said.
“Huh, all right,” I answered, and nodded. Shinichi-san sort of blinked at me. “What?”
“You... don’t seem very surprised.”
“Oh,” I said with a bit of a smile. True, the idea might have been surprising, but I had already seen that light in my chest. It sure looked an awful lot like the red glow that had been floating in that gelatin. In fact, I had been thinking along lines not too different from Shinichi-san’s hypothesis myself.
“I’m kind of impressed, though,” Minori-san said. “Seeing that slime take on a form like this. If I didn’t know better, I might think it was a real human body.”
“It has the right body temperature, and the skin feels very human. Want to touch it?” I said, holding out a hand to Minori-san. She stopped for a second, startled—but then took my hand.
“Wow,” she said, “it does feel real.”
“How about you, Shinichi-san? Want to cop a feel? My chest is right here.”
“What?!”
I got his eyes to just about bug out of his head when I reached for the collar of my shirt. He knew, theoretically, that I was still a guy at heart, but he reacted to me just as if I was a girl, and the incongruity made me laugh.
“Quit it, I’m serious,” Shinichi-san said with a long sigh. He tended to have the edge on me in our daily life, so it would be a shame not to take advantage of a chance to tweak him a little. “Anyway, Hikaru-san, as far as why that Slime thing turned into you, I have to think it has something to do with that choker Romilda gave you.”
“Can’t really think of anything else,” I said. That was about the only thing that had changed recently.
Shinichi-san’s theory was that the gelatinous stuff had always gone along with the choker; that it was a way of, for example, making a body double for someone. The goo copied the physical form of whoever put on the choker, then could be controlled remotely by the person in question, like an avatar in an online game. And because one person’s consciousness obviously couldn’t control two bodies at once, the original body remained asleep.
“So I’m thinking that if you take the choker off, maybe your consciousness will go back to your real body.”
That would be the natural conclusion, sure enough. I could go back to my own body. That should make me happy.
So why didn’t it?
“That’s...” I just couldn’t lose myself with joy.
“Hikaru-san?” Shinichi-san sort of half stood up from the sofa, looking at me, puzzled. I guess he had been on his way to go to the room—my room—where my male body was sleeping to take off the choker. But my show of hesitation stopped him. Minori-san, Myusel, and Elvia all looked at me in surprise. I could see why they would think it was strange. Wouldn’t a person normally be eager to get back to their own body? But...
If I go back to my male body...
Would I still be able to share the same closeness with Elvia, like we’d had in the bath today? Different gender. Same gender. That one thing made all the difference in how people reacted to you. It sort of had to. Actually, to be fair, I didn’t think Elvia would attach that much significance to it. But I had no confidence that I could still interact with her the same way. We’d had that conversation in the bath exactly becaus
e I had been in a girl’s body.
“I grant your guess is probably right, but... could we wait a bit before we take the choker off?” I said. “It’s a good theory, but it’s still just a theory. Maybe the choker doesn’t have anything to do with it after all. Or if it does, what if there’s some order we’re supposed to follow to take it off, one that could be dangerous to mess up? What if my consciousness never comes back? What if it vanishes from this body, and the other one doesn’t wake up? I sure wouldn’t want that.”
“Well...” Shinichi-san started, but there wasn’t much else he could say. I thought my reasons were pretty convincing, if I did say so myself. And they weren’t completely outside the realm of possibility. The whole choker-body double connection was just a theory.
“True enough,” Minori-san said. “All fair points.” She and Shinichi-san nodded at each other.
“Right now, there’s nothing really problematic about this body other than being an unfamiliar gender,” I said. “I’d like to wait and see how things go for a bit. Maybe Her Majesty can discover something more certain.”
And with that, the day’s discussion of the “Ayasaki Hikaru Gender Swap Incident” concluded.
My consciousness gradually floated up from the depths of sleep. I opened my eyes, and was aware of waking up.
“..............................Mn.”
The sunlight coming in through the window seemed so bright. I reflexively closed the eyes I’d just opened, and waited for them to adjust to the light. I blinked a few times, and when it no longer hurt, I finally opened my eyes all the way and took in what was around me.
The first thing I saw was myself, sleeping peacefully beside me. After my decision the night before to stay in my female body a while longer, I’d chosen to sleep beside my original body. I admit it was a slightly unsettling experience, but I wanted to be right there if anything happened. Notwithstanding how surreal it was to fall asleep looking at your own face.
“Mn... Mnnn......”
I gave a lazy stretch and sat up. My whole body felt strangely lethargic, like my joints and muscles were too loose, too easy to move. I couldn’t remember having that sensation yesterday, but maybe I’d been unconsciously storing up anxiety since turning into a woman. Anyway, this was no time to be enjoying a doze. It would take me half an hour to do my makeup, and another half an hour to do my hair. That was an hour just getting ready for the day. That much hadn’t changed since I’d become a woman; if anything, I had to pay even more attention than before. And I had to be careful in case anything was subtly different, which could be a headache.
At this house, we all ate breakfast together. It wouldn’t do for me to make everyone wait because I was running late.
I got out of bed. Feet on the floor. And that was when I noticed something... off.
No—that wasn’t quite the right word for it. It was something deeper than “off.”
“No...” I mumbled, unbelieving.
I quickly ran a hand over my body. Even with clothes on, I could tell that two things that had been there yesterday weren’t anymore. And down below, something that hadn’t been there yesterday, was. All of which meant...
I touched a hand to my neck. The choker was there.
“I’m... back to normal...?” I whispered. I looked back at the “me” sleeping on the bed. There she was, still dressed in the pajamas I’d put on last night. Shinichi-san and I had both guessed that that body could have been created by the gelatinous slime from the coffin, but the other Ayasaki Hikaru was still very much there, with no sign of being about to collapse into shapeless goo.
Was it possible the thing couldn’t go back to its original form after taking on someone’s body?
“Ah... That would explain the coffin shape.” I nodded to myself. If all you needed was something to store some gelatin in, there was no call to shape it like a coffin. A ball, or maybe a cylinder, might have made more sense.
“Geez...”
I sighed, not quite sure what I felt. I was sort of relieved—and sort of disappointed. Whatever the stuff was, evidently your consciousness just automatically returned to its original body with enough time. The weird sensation I’d felt in my joints and tissues was probably just from not moving them for an entire day. Kind of like how when you oversleep, your body can actually feel slower and heavier than normal.
In any event, I guess my adventures as a girl had had a time limit on them. I took off the choker and placed it on my desk. I marched in place, swung my arms, and otherwise made sure to move my body a bit. I still felt some of that fatigue, but I’d lived in this body for close to twenty years, and it was comfortably familiar. In fact, this being morning, there was a certain part of me that had really woken up...
“Sigh...” I looked back and forth between the male body I was in now and the female one lying on the bed. I guess I should have been happy to be back to my old self. But I couldn’t help feeling a certain loneliness, too. It was funny, not to really understand what I myself was feeling.
“Eh... Oh well.” I let out another breath and set about doing my makeup. This body had gone without for a whole day, and it looked like this could take a while. I turned to the mirror and got to work.
The next day, we took the female me and the choker to Eldant Castle. The mages were desperate to get their hands on them, I gathered. It was a little disturbing to see something with my face carted away like a corpse, but I was sure it was better for everyone if they had a chance to take a good look and figure out what it was. Besides, if we kept it around without knowing exactly what it could do, who knew what might happen? (I was thinking here about the “forbidden armor” that had bedeviled Shinichi-san not too long ago.)
“So I guess, uh, that means it’s all over, huh?” Shinichi-san said. He and the others were all thrilled that I’d gotten my own body back.
Thrilled... That would be the normal way to feel.
Even Elvia was in on it: “Good for you!” she said, smiling as brightly as ever. Her attitude toward me... hadn’t changed, really. I guess she’d meant what she’d said in the bath, about me being her friend regardless of whether I was a man or woman. Maybe the fact that I couldn’t quite feel happy about all this only showed how twisted I was.
In any event, we went back to our normal lives. Nothing changed. It was all the same familiar routine, as if the whole me-turning-into-a-girl thing had never happened. And that was great, as far as it went. Life was easier for me in my accustomed body, in any number of ways.
“Okay...” Back home from school, I shut the door to my room, passing the time until dinner with some miscellaneous work. That, too, was just as usual. But then...
“Hikaru-sama!”
With no warning, the door to my room burst open. I looked over, startled, to find Elvia standing there with a big grin on her face.
“Elvia...”
“Borrowed the key from Myusel!”
“Not what I was really worried about. You remember our conversation the other day about knocking?”
“Hee hee. Sorry ’bout that.” She stuck out her tongue playfully; she clearly didn’t mean any harm. I thought about scolding her a little more, but I suddenly felt tired, and instead I sighed.
“All right. What do you want?”
“Ahem!” Elvia smiled even wider as if to say I’m glad you asked. “Here, I drew this.” She walked over to where I was sitting in my chair and produced something from behind her back. It was a sheet of paper about the size of a B4 page—a picture. “You can have it, Hikaru-sama. I mean, if y’ like.”
“This is...”
Me. The picture was me. It was a portrait from the neck up—by the specific design of the Gothic-Lolita dress and the fact that I wasn’t wearing the choker, I could tell this was a drawing of the girl I’d been shortly before.
I took the page, feeling a little dazed. I looked at Elvia, asking Why? with my eyes, and she scratched her nose with her pointer finger, a bit embarrassed. “Aw, I just though
t y’ looked so pretty Hikaru-sama, I couldn’t help wantin’ to draw you.”
“So the way I was...” I was right; it was a picture of my female body. But what could I say? After a moment, I asked, “...Was I really that pretty?”
“The prettiest!” Elvia said, clenching her fist emphatically. “’Course, you’re always pretty, Hikaru-sama! But it’s just, like, uhh...”
I could see what she wanted to say: she wanted to praise my girl body, without implying that my usual male body wasn’t good enough, and she just didn’t know the words. Something like that.
Watching Elvia squirm as she tried to figure out what to say, I couldn’t suppress a smile. “I get it, I do. Thank you, Elvia.” I looked at her picture and half-closed my eyes. Just because I was back to my normal body, it didn’t mean the events of a few days before hadn’t happened. Yes, Elvia still treated me like she always did. It didn’t matter whether I was a woman or man, or whether I was a man who’d become a woman and then went back to being a man. She was just like she always was—not the sharpest sometimes, but certainly the most open and sure of herself. Enough that I could almost be jealous.
So...
“It makes me really happy,” I said. And, being careful not to wrinkle or fold the page, I hugged the picture to my chest.
（づづく）
To be continued...
Afterword
Hullo, light novelist Sakaki here, bringing you Volume 14 of Outbreak Company: The Power of Moe.
I finally made good on my promise and actually did another short story collection, just like I said I would in Volume 13. I meant to get around to this a little sooner, but each time I tried to write one of my short stories, it turned out to be a long story (Volume 12, for example), so it’s been a long and winding road, but hey, here we are, know what I mean?
If you’re curious, the earliest idea I had for any of the stories in this book was the one about Brooke and Cerise’s children. I actually considered doing this all the way back in Volume 7, but I just couldn’t shake the side-character vibe the lizardman couple had, so I put it off.
Outbreak Company: Volume 14 Page 17