Outbreak Company: Volume 13

by Ichiro Sakaki

“Trying to gain someone’s love through such underhanded methods is wrong.”

  “U-Underhanded...!” Petralka said. But she couldn’t quite muster as much indignity as she wanted—she knew she had broken the rules of engagement.

  Hikaru-san, looking to twist the knife, said, “Can you even be sure it’s love, if you get it through force like that?”

  Petralka almost choked.

  “No! And again I say, no!” He made a sideways chopping motion as if he were trying to drop someone with a knife hand. The gesture made his meaning inescapably clear.

  ...Ahh. You know, I think I remember some guy in Germany a few decades ago who used to do that. The one with the little mustache?

  “You must put yourself as a woman before yourself as the empress, and fight your battles fair and square!”

  “Th-This is a battle?” I burst out.

  “Girl talk, no boys allowed,” Hikaru-san said.

  Uh, pretty sure you should excuse yourself, then, Hikaru-san.

  “I can go further!” Hikaru-san exclaimed. “To obtain love by underhanded means has nothing to do with a woman’s attractiveness! In fact, it’s a veritable declaration of defeat, an admission that you can’t win on your own merits!”

  “Hrm...!” Petralka grunted, somewhere between angry and mortified. She seemed to be completely taken in by Hikaru-san’s force of argument. Myusel and Elvia both stood by, looking slightly dazed.

  I guess I was glad the three of them had stopped fighting, as far as it went, but seeing as it was Hikaru-san who had intervened for me, I didn’t exactly feel safe. Who knew where this might lead? I had the uneasy sense that this was all part of a plan to tweak me in a big way.

  “Not to mention, trying to use power to get love like that is the very script for a character destined for defeat.”

  “S-Say what?” Petralka said.

  “The script. It’s a cliché! Something is bound to happen at the last minute to turn the tables on her and leave her, as we say in English, a loser.”

  Since when do you speak English?!

  “A... A cliché, you say...”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s the way things are. A law of the universe.”

  Petralka put a hand to her cheek and considered. “H-Hrm. Well, if it is the universe’s own law, then there is nothing to be done...”

  “You believe him?!” I exclaimed. But Petralka already appeared to be all but deaf to me. I felt like she was probably putting the cart before the horse in a number of ways, but she was pointing to Myusel and Elvia with a series of small nods.

  “Very well. We are not the empress at this moment! We are but a woman! You shall treat us as such!”

  “Y... Yes, ma’am...”

  “Yes’m...!”

  Myusel and Elvia both unconsciously straightened up in the face of Petralka’s imperial-sounding instructions. But as proof that they weren’t completely overwhelmed, Myusel’s fists were clenched at her sides, and Elvia’s tail stood as straight as if it had an iron rod in it.

  Huh? This hasn’t resolved anything, has it!

  I was starting to get very uncomfortable with the three of them staring each other down. Suddenly, Petralka tilted her head and remarked, “But what constitutes a fair fight?”

  Pause from Myusel. Pause from Elvia. The two of them looked at each other.

  “Umm... How do we do that?”

  “Yeah, I dunno...”

  Okay, hold on, you three...

  Had they really been battling each other with no idea of what they were actually doing?

  But I was afraid that if I made some careless quip like that, the result would be “Then let us have another bento competition,” or “The one who jumps Shinichi first is the winner,” so I decided to keep my peace.

  Maybe I wasn’t the only one learning that war was hell.

  “Well... uh, how ’bout soccer, then?”

  “That would hardly be a contest!” Petralka stamped her foot.

  Well, she wasn’t wrong.

  “Cooking, then?”

  This time it was Elvia who objected: “Y’d win that hands down, Myusel!”

  True. Considering how her beast-person palate differed from mine, Elvia would be at a disadvantage in a cooking contest. Plus, Myusel cooked every day; she was practically a pro. Elvia, at least, would have no hope against her.

  It was almost too obvious to mention, but the three of them were different people with different talents. Those different capabilities, combined with varying levels of experience, made anything that might be influenced by those abilities inherently unfair.

  “It’s really very simple,” said... surprisingly, not Hikaru-san.

  This voice...

  “Hoo hoo hoo! Trouble with love? Trust a very experienced grown woman!” It was Minori-san, sounding full of confidence. I guess she must have heard the commotion. That was all well and good, but didn’t she seem a little... different somehow? For that matter, hadn’t Minori-san said herself that she was a very single woman whose years without a boyfriend were exactly equal to her lifespan? Again, I was too afraid of the possible consequences to actually voice any of this.

  “You each want to shoot an arrow through Shinichi-kun’s heart, right?”

  “Yes, of course...” Petralka said. I wasn’t sure she realized she had effectively just confessed to me.

  “Then all you need to know is which of you Shinichi-kun is most moe for.”

  “Hang on, Minori-san, I don’t know about that—”

  Should we really be treating “character moe” and love as if they were the same thing? I mean, it was true, you could feel a sort of faux love toward a character, but...

  “So, Shinichi-kun. Who are you most moe for?” Minori-san asked, and Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia all looked directly at me. Faced with three highly expectant gazes, I nearly crumbled.

  “If... If I knew that, I wouldn’t be so worried, would I?!”

  “A man needs to be clear about his feelings!”

  “The whole problem is that I can’t choose!” I wailed, and Minori-san and Hikaru-san both sighed.

  “If you really don’t know,” Hikaru-san said, “then until you do, we’ll need a judge—a completely impartial one.”

  “Huh...?” What was he talking about?

  It looked like I wasn’t the only one who didn’t get it; everyone else was looking at Hikaru-san’s beaming face, too. He held up a single finger and said: “We have to make the moe visible.”

  My vision was dark. I mean, of course it was—I had a black cloth tied over my eyes.

  “Ummm......”

  I certainly couldn’t take it off: my hands were tied to the arms of the chair with belts or something. My feet were likewise strapped to the chair’s legs. Maybe I could try to stand up, but I figured the chair wouldn’t be happy about it. Blinded and unable to move, about the only way I had of figuring out what was going on around me was to listen very carefully.

  What was going to happen to me? I had no idea. To be honest, I was extremely concerned.

  Suddenly, I heard Myusel’s voice, right nearby: “Um... What’s this?”

  “Hoo hoo. Let me show you how to use it,” came Hikaru-san’s voice. And then—

  “Heek?!” I yelped a little as somebody blew into my ear.

  “There... See?”

  No, no I don’t see!

  As I sat there flummoxed, the blindfold was suddenly pulled off, and my world went white.

  “Wh-What the heck’s wrong with you?!” My eyes, accustomed to the darkness, burned in the light of the room. I squinted, and a second later my vision went back to normal. I saw a circle of girls (and one guy dressed like a girl) surrounding me. Myusel, Petralka, Elvia, Minori-san, and Hikaru-san.

  I looked past them at the room we were in. Furniture and decorations were at a minimum. The desk, though, looked like a tornado had come through: a sewing machine, scraps of fabric, beads... I realized immediately whose room we were in. Hikaru-san’s. They had brou
ght me to Hikaru-san’s room.

  After his incomprehensible proclamation about “visualizing moe,” Hikaru-san had blindfolded me and pulled me by the hand before sitting me in this chair and strapping me down.

  “What the heck?!”

  I knew he had strapped me down, yes, but now I saw that those weren’t just belts holding me to the chair. They had cords coming out of them, which ran to a laptop computer on the nearby desk.

  “It’s a lie detector,” Hikaru-san said with a bright smile.

  Excuse me?!

  Hikaru-san spun the laptop around on the desk so I could see the screen. There was a graph with jagged lines, like an EKG, constantly updating itself, while beside it a bar graph moved sporadically up and down. They were obviously measuring in real time.

  But what were they measuring? It was probably my pulse, or my blood pressure, or my body temperature, or the amount of sweat I was currently soaked with. As you probably know, a lie detector isn’t an automatic ticket to reading another person’s mind. It works on the tiny variations, the physical tics, that occur when a person knowingly tells a lie and feels guilty about it. The tells show up as changes in pulse, blood pressure, and the other things I just mentioned. A lie detector simply, well, detects them.

  “But why?!”

  “Just to make sure you’re being honest,” Hikaru-san said with no trace of malice. “I have some truth serum, too, but it might cripple you, so...”

  “That’s not truth serum, then! Why the heck do you even have something like that?!”

  “The lie detector I borrowed from the JSDF garrison’s medical division. It was made for medical examinations, but with the right software, it makes a perfectly serviceable lie detector.”

  Okay, yes, a medical exam also involved measuring your pulse and blood pressure and all that other stuff! But making a lie detector machine out of it? That wasn’t, like, just a convenient life hack. It wasn’t like saying, “Oh, we had leftovers from dinner, so I made a nice lunch for you.” Was it?!

  “Was the blindfold really necessary?! And the bindings?” Were those for some kind of fetish Hikaru-san had? Tell me they weren’t for a fetish!

  “If I told you I was going to hook you up to a lie detector, would you have gone along with it?”

  “Like hell!”

  “Well, there you go. I just did what I had to do.” Hikaru-san shrugged. “And since you’re so wishy-washy, I had to make them good and tight so you couldn’t run away when the time came to make a choice.” He seemed extremely amused by all this.

  Are we sure this isn’t a fetish of his?!

  “So Ja-pan even has such things as these...” Petralka studied everything from my bindings to the cords to the laptop. Just behind her, Myusel and Elvia were looking from me to Hikaru-san and back uneasily.

  “You saw the reaction when I blew into Shinichi-san’s ear a moment ago, right?” Hikaru-san asked, turning to them. “When a person is agitated, it shows up in their breathing and heart rate, or sometimes perspiration, even if you can’t see it on their face. And when you’re trying to lie while you’re under interrogation, it’s very easy to get agitated—meaning we get nice, big reactions.”

  “Hrm...?” Petralka grunted. She didn’t seem to quite understand how the lie detector worked.

  “Okay, example. Shinichi-san?” Hikaru-san turned to me with a grin. “You like to look at Minori-san’s boobs, don’t you?”

  “...Huh?”

  “You adore big boobs, right? And you’ll steal a glance at Minori-san’s chest anytime you get a chance, won’t you? If she’d let you, you would love to bury your face in that deep valley, wouldn’t you?”

  “I—I wouldn’t—”

  “See?” Hikaru-san pointed at the screen. Several of the readouts were going nuts—clear evidence that I was, as he put it, agitated. The words LIE DETECTED conveniently flashed on the screen.

  What the heck kind of software was this?! Had Hikaru-san written it himself?

  “He’s lying.”

  “Hold on just a—!”

  Behind Hikaru-san, who was smiling innocently, Minori-san was fixing me with a death glare. She had her arms crossed—a little high, as if to protect her ample bosom from my view.

  “Wh-What guy doesn’t look sometimes?!”

  “Unrepentant!” Minori-san snapped. “’Course, it’s not like your harassing ways are anything new...”

  “Th-That’s awful...! Besides, you can’t measure what’s in a person’s heart with a machine!” I protested, like the protagonist of some anime.

  Lie detectors weren’t infallible. People to whom lying came as naturally as breathing didn’t experience perspiration or increased heart rate when they said something untrue.

  “We aren’t trying to read your heart,” Hikaru-san replied flatly. “We’re just trying to read your body’s reactions.”

  “Hrk...?”

  “The mouth can say what it likes, but the body never lies.”

  “Hrrrrk...” There wasn’t much I could say to that.

  “So we’re gonna interrogate Shinichi-kun while he’s hooked up to this thing?” Minori-san asked.

  “Yep. This is what I meant by visualizing moe.”

  “Makes sense!” She nodded, impressed.

  I looked at Myusel in hopes that she would catch my subliminal cry for someone to help me—but she was looking at the laptop screen hopefully. This was no good. No one was going to stop him.

  “All right, let’s get started.” Hikaru-san cleared his throat and turned to me. “Shinichi-san, who do you like best?”

  I didn’t speak.

  “Myusel?”

  Didn’t say anything.

  “Her Majesty—or should I say, Petralka?”

  Not a word.

  “Or is it Elvia?”

  Uh-uh, not biting.

  Hikaru-san’s questions were relentless. But the whole problem was that even with him pelting me with names, I really couldn’t pick one. As I stayed silent, Hikaru-san and Minori-san looked at the computer screen, but—

  “His reaction is the same to all of them,” Minori-san observed.

  “But they all say LIE DETECTED,” Myusel said fretfully.

  “Oh, that just shows that Shinichi-san is agitated. But this is a problem. I thought for sure saying the names one by one and observing his reactions would show who he was the most moe for...”

  “I’m actually sort of amazed by how completely identical his reactions were,” Minori-san said.

  “That’s just another way of saying I’m completely fair and evenhanded, right?!” I almost wailed, feeling Myusel and the others looking hard at me.

  “We’re going to need a stronger stimulus.”

  Hikaru-san was starting to sound like a mad scientist.

  “Stimulus...?”

  “Whatcha gonna do to him?” Elvia asked.

  “If you’ve got some kind of skinship test in mind, I think Elvia has an unfair advantage,” Minori-san observed. She was mature enough to politely refrain from putting it the opposite way: that Petralka was at a disadvantage.

  “I agree, that would be unfair... Okay, no physical contact. Visual and auditory stimulation only, then. Right. Maybe we put everyone in outfits Shinichi-san would appreciate, and see who he has the strongest reaction to. How about that?”

  “Not a bad idea,” Minori-san said. She nodded, but then tilted her head thoughtfully. “But what kind of outfit does Shinichi-kun like? The strike zone for an otaku as serious as him is a bit too big. And his personal collection of manga and doujinshi is too varied to really give us a hint...”

  “Hey, hey! When did you ever see my personal collection, Minori-san?!”

  “All our luggage came over together. I had to check the manifest to make sure we weren’t missing anything.”

  “B-But you didn’t have to look so close!”

  I was an otaku and everyone knew it, but when it came to my doujinshi—well, I had some that weren’t in the best of tast
e, and I was a bit embarrassed to think a girl had seen them.

  “Oh! Come to think of it...” Myusel blinked as if something had just occurred to her.

  “What is it, Myusel?”

  “Nothing... I just remembered something...”

  “If you’ve got any ideas, by all means, share them,” Minori-san said.

  Encouraged, Myusel nodded. “Shinichi-sama told me once that a girl instantly becomes more attractive when she puts on a maid uniform...”

  “Shinichi-san said that, Myusel? To you?” Hikaru-san was positively gleeful.

  Why did he look so triumphant?!

  “Wh-What’s wrong with that?! Maid moe is my calling! As a general rule, I—”

  “But to say it to a girl actually wearing a maid uniform? I don’t know...”

  “You know, I seem to remember Shinichi-kun couldn’t take his eyes off me when I had to wear a maid outfit once,” Minori-san mused.

  “Don’t look at me like that! Don’t look at me like thaaaat!!” I wanted to grab my head, but my hands were still lashed to the chair, and all I could do was writhe uncomfortably in my seat. “Yeah, okay, I like maid uniforms, but so what! Maid-sans are great!” I was on the brink of despair.

  “Shinichi-sama...” Myusel looked heartened.

  Petralka, for her part, had clearly put the pieces together. “What you are saying is that we and Elvia need only dress like Myusel, is that it?!”

  “B-But who wouldn’t want to hug a petite girl in a dress and a tiara?! And a tube top that shows a girl’s midriff? It’s a perfect blend of outgoing and sexy, right?!” I was speaking from the bottom of my heart, but I was met with a long silence and everyone sharing a collective look.

  “You mean you like Myusel’s outfit, and Her Majesty’s outfit, and Elvia’s outfit,” Minori-san finally said, exasperated, and I nodded vehemently.

  “How could I not?!”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Hikaru-san said, sounding equally annoyed, as he looked at the laptop screen. “Or more accurately, his numbers are through the roof, and it’s impossible to tell one girl from another.”

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “Maybe if we had them all swap outfits?”

  Myusel and the others all nodded: no objections. Then, in a no-time-like-the-present move, they all made to take off their clothes.