Outbreak Company: Volume 13

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “The three bags? Aw, man, haven’t heard that one in a while,” Minori-san said with a dry smile.

  “Yeah, people don’t talk about that much anymore. But the old folks always throw it in their wedding toasts,” Hikaru-san said.

  In Japanese, we could describe a lot of things as fukuro, bags. Like, say, the i-bukuro, the “tummy-bag,” or stomach.

  “I’m trying to remember what the three bags are,” I said. “I think it was... A man’s stomach, his mother—o-fukuro—and, uhh... what was the other one?”

  “Isn’t it Ikebukuro?” Minori-san volunteered.

  “I thought that was just a place in Tokyo.”

  “It’s a sacred place in Tokyo. Man, I wish I could go back there!” Minori-san looked longingly into the distance.

  “Come on, I know it has ‘fukuro’ in it, but that’s just a coincidence!”

  Stupid, rotten fujoshi brain...! Then again, considering the love triangle she’d devised between a knife, a fork, and a spoon a bit back, maybe it would be better to let her go to Ikebukuro or wherever sometimes, just to blow off some steam.

  “Ah! This is the Ike-bukuro of the Otome Road, is it not? We, too, wish to see it on our next trip to Ja-pan!” Petralka said, her face glowing.

  “No!” I exclaimed. “No, you don’t!”

  Please, Petralka, I’m begging you! Don’t go that way!

  But anyway...

  “One thing’s for certain,” Hikaru-san broke in quietly. “Past or present, what’s true is true. Catching a man by the stomach is a time-honored strategy in love.”

  “Fair enough, I guess.” That would explain why the o-bento was considered such a love potion. I had to admit it was true that a girl who could cook was attractive by default. But... “But the downside is then you eat too much and get fat.”

  When I said that, time seemed to stop.

  Or to be more precise, the munching sounds coming from Petralka, Elvia, Minori-san, and the maids stopped. For some reason, they were all looking vacantly at the utensils in their hands.

  N-Now I’m scared...!

  “Shinichi-san,” Hikaru-san said brightly, a smile on his face. “Which do you like better—thin girls or fat girls?”

  “Huh? I—I mean, I guess if I had to choose... maybe... thin girls...?” Even I thought I sounded timid.

  “Huh. Interesting. Preference for slender girls, noted.”

  “Hey, look, they don’t have to be anorexically thin or whatever—I like, you know, a well-balanced body. Thin, but... rounded.”

  Someone who was skin and bones? Not really the girl for me. I wanted a girl’s body to be soft. I wanted to be able to drown in the softness. That’s a man’s romantic dream. And you needed a little bit of meat on the bones for that. Gosh, this was complicated.

  “Okay. Next question: What’s your girl’s ideal weight?”

  “W-Weight?” I reached back in my memory and tried to recall a number I’d seen on some video game character’s stats once—you know, the sort of thing where they give you the heroine’s sizes. I didn’t actually pay a lot of attention to the numbers, so I wasn’t really sure exactly what I should say. “Uhh, I guess about 40 kilograms?”

  Come to think of it, I didn’t even know how much my own little sister weighed.

  “Forty... keelo-grams...”

  “I—I think I saw a conversion chart somewhere before...”

  I noticed Petralka, Myusel, and Elvia holding a whispered conference. Ahh. They wouldn’t know how much forty kilograms was off the tops of their heads. They probably only even knew it was a unit of weight thanks to manga or anime or whatever. They were trying to get a feel for what it would be in some local measure.

  “..............................Shinichi-kun,” Minori-san said, that dry smile still on her face. “I take it you don’t know the average weight of an actual woman.”

  “Sorry...?”

  “Forty kilos is what a girl might weigh in, ohhh, middle school. Heck, probably even grade school.”

  “Huh? But I feel like it’s pretty normal for a video game or anime character...”

  “Because they only have to carry two dimensions.” Minori-san’s shoulders sagged. “So Myusel, Elvia, you can just ignore him.”

  I glanced over at the girls and found them shifting uncomfortably, as if they were embarrassed. Were they suddenly feeling self-conscious? I mean, because they weighed more than forty kilos?

  “And of course,” Minori-san went on consolingly, “weight varies with height, too—”

  “‘A woman’s fiftieth kilo is mere self-indulgence!’” Petralka suddenly exclaimed. Something was scrawled in what appeared to be sauce on the table in front of her. Ah—she must have been trying to convert forty kilos into the local measuring system based on Myusel’s hazy recollection of the conversions. “A woman’s fiftieth kilo is mere self-indulgence! A woman’s fiftieth kilo is mere self-indulgence! It is so important, we said it twice!”

  I wanted to object that she had actually said it three times, but I resisted. Petralka looked downright gleeful. We were talking about a girl so small you could mistake her for a grade-schooler. And she was slim to boot. She and she alone probably cleared that forty-kilo line. But I had a bigger concern...

  “Where did you learn that expression?!”

  “Hmm, where was it?” she said, tilting her head and considering.

  I was sure it had to be some manga or anime or something, but anyway.

  “Now! We are having a competition to be the thinnest!” Petralka proclaimed, getting to her feet.

  “Just a second—you’re trying to give yourself an advantage!” I said.

  At almost the same time, Elvia exclaimed, “Ain’t that unfair to the rest of us?!” She almost jumped out of her chair, causing her ears to flap and her chest to heave...

  Ahh... That looks heavy... Huh? Come to think of it, hadn’t I read in some manga somewhere that by the time you reach an E cup, the two of them together weigh about a kilogram...?

  Well, that aside, in a contest of slenderness—or at least body weight—Elvia would clearly be at a disadvantage. She was the tallest of the three girls, and almost certainly the most muscular.

  “Bwa ha ha ha ha! There is no padding on our body!” Petralka declared, puffing her chest out and laughing like a bad villain.

  P-Padding...!

  I mean, I guess if you considered a large chest to be padding, then Petralka definitely had a minimum of it. By the way, they say big boobs float in water—something about the ratio of the fat content. (Something else I read somewhere.) And when fat goes to the stomach, we call it a beer belly—definitely padding.

  But still, that word, padding...!

  There was an audible silence. I looked over to see Myusel putting her hands to her chest and looking thoughtful.

  “Is this... padding...?” she asked.

  “No, definitely not!” I exclaimed before I knew what I was doing. “Anyway, you can’t have a ‘slender’ competition! You’re all different heights!” If they were going to compete, it would be unfair if they weren’t all about the same size. Unless they were planning to compare body mass indexes or something. “And besides, if boobs are considered padding, then Hikaru-san would win hands down!”

  “Hmm?” That seemed to amuse Hikaru-san. “Can I be a part of the battle for your affections too, Shinichi-san?”

  “Huh? Wait, what? BL? Are you talking BL?! Has he finally opened his eyes?!” Minori-san demanded.

  “No! I haven’t opened anything! Hikaru-san just chooses the weirdest way to put everything!”

  “You’re the one who said I would win that contest.”

  And so it went. You get the idea.

  “Oh, for...!”

  “A woman’s fiftieth kilo is mere self-indulgence! A woman’s fiftieth kilo is mere self-indulgence!”

  “Padding...”

  “I’m gonna shrink myself...!”

  And so ended that day’s raucous, but entirely inc
onclusive, dinner.

  Myusel and Cerise were cleaning up after the meal. Brooke had headed outside to take care of some things in the garden. Elvia had gone running off, muttering something about body weight and shrinking. Maybe she was going to go run a marathon or something. Her boobs were pretty much the only part of her with any fat to begin with, so I wasn’t sure it would help much.

  Petralka, for her part, got into her carriage with her maids, in high spirits, and went back to the castle. Maybe she thought she had “won” the slenderness contest she had unilaterally proposed at dinner. And maybe she had... by default. It seemed to have completely slipped her mind, though, that she had left the castle on her own, and that if Garius found her, she would be in for it. I knew from the time she had sneaked away to Japan that Garius knew how to get good and mad. I grinned to myself as I pictured Petralka hanging her head during Garius’s endless lecture.

  I watched the carriage leave from our front door, standing there until it vanished into the distance, then I turned to go back inside.

  “Well, Shinichi-kun, look who’s Mr. Popular.” Minori-san, who had been seeing Petralka off with me, leered at me. “It’s your moment! Your moteki! Aren’t you thrilled?”

  “Are you seriously asking that?” I stopped and sighed.

  “Aww, does this mean you’re not thrilled?”

  I took a breath. “Of course I’m happy about it. How could I not be? It’s just turning out to be an awful lot of work...”

  Without Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia right there in front of me, I felt a wave of fatigue. I hadn’t noticed it when I was busy feeling anxious, but now that I had a moment to catch my breath, it hit me.

  “Well, I enjoyed myself.” Hikaru-san was smirking behind his hand.

  “You sure did!” I exclaimed, practically on the verge of tears. Hikaru-san was almost certainly the person who had gotten the most out of that afternoon.

  “And now you’ve got a nifty little square going on, how nice for you,” Hikaru-san said innocently. “Imagine how much worse it would have been if Minori-san had decided she wanted in.”

  “I’m rooting for Myusel, but I’m basically a neutral spectator,” Minori-san said, brushing Hikaru-san’s suggestion aside. I knew she was a real adult—she could let that sort of thing just roll off her back. Of course, that partly spoke to how totally disinterested she was, but still. And it was just as well. If Minori-san had taken that moment to blush and whisper, “Well, actually...”, I don’t know what I would have done.

  “I do think you should try to make a decision soon, though,” she said.

  “Believe me, I know,” I said. I knew so well it hurt.

  “I get that it’s a tough call, but wouldn’t you feel bad, making them wait too long? This isn’t modern Japan—people get married younger here.”

  “That’s... I mean... Yes.” I nodded along, because she was right, but hearing the words get married was bound to give me pause. I mean, I was an otaku who had never so much as gone on a date with a girl. To suddenly think about marriage, or—God help me—kids, was almost too much to bear. “Anyway, think about... I mean, hypothetically, if I married someone over here, how would that even work, legally? Would that be considered an international marriage?”

  “Good question. I don’t think Japan recognizes Eldant as a country. Heck, publicly, they don’t recognize it exists. Maybe it could be considered a common-law marriage?”

  “It would be, wouldn’t iiiiiitttt...” And then, inexorably, I found myself remembering that nightmare. That had been a de facto union, hadn’t it? But while I was busy freezing my own blood with the image of Petralka and Myusel both stabbing me at the same time—

  “I think there’s a lot of ways to choose,” Hikaru-san said, as if it had just occurred to him. “Looks, personality, or maybe some combination of the two. But if you try too hard to use logic to figure this out, I think you’re going to miss what’s most important. Love has a big emotional component. Say the first one to make your heart skip a beat is the winner...”

  “Not sure I follow,” I said, a little bit lost by Hikaru-san’s idea.

  “For example, maybe you discover that your assumptions about someone were all wrong, and at that moment, you fall in love with them. Like when you suddenly see a side of a girl or guy that you never knew was there.”

  “Hmmm...”

  “Okay, like, say...” Hikaru-san tilted his head and thought about it for a moment. “You’re pretty confident I’m not involved in the battle for your heart, right, Shinichi-san?”

  Then he gave me a coquettish look, widening his dark eyes.

  Wai—what the heck is this?! And... And just a second! Why is my heart suddenly pounding?!

  “I’ve had about enough of that joke! I’m not interested in any guys, okay?!” I shouted, trying desperately to ignore the thumping in my chest. I had to remember. Had to remind myself. No matter how gorgeous he might be, no matter how well he wore that Gothic-Loli dress, Ayasaki Hikaru was well and truly a man. I had personally seen what was between his legs, so he couldn’t pull any “Actually, I’ve been a girl all along!” stuff on me!

  “BL?! Is that BL I smell?! I knew I smelled BL!” Minori-san was just about ecstatic.

  Ugh, I could hardly stand this anymore! What did she mean, she knew it?!

  “I am so not even about BL!” I exclaimed.

  “You know, there’s something I never mentioned,” Hikaru-san said, out of the blue. “I have an identical twin. But she’s a girl.”

  “Wha...?”

  Wh-What was this about an identical twin? A matching guy and girl pair? That was the stupidest, most chuunibyou thing I’d ever—but it would be just like Hikaru-san to have a—whaaaaaa?!

  “We trade places sometimes. You’ve never even noticed, have you, Shinichi-san?” Then Hikaru-san smiled teasingly.

  It was true: the way he (??) tilted his head like that looked awfully girlish, seriously sweet, downright devilish. The luxurious black hair, the pale, delicate neck. I had to admit it was all sort of starting to turn me on...!

  Okay, wait... So the Hikaru-san I was looking at right now, right here in front of me... Could it be...

  “Are you r-r-really...?”

  “Oh, no, I made it all up.”

  “You what?!”

  I mean, I was relieved to hear that, but—!

  “Identical twins are identical. They’re usually the same gender.”

  “Oh... Now that you mention it.” I guess he was right.

  “But I’ll bet you felt your heart pound, didn’t you?” Hikaru-san’s lips twisted into a nasty little smile. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  All right, okay. I got it now. I got it much better than I had ever wanted to.

  “I see what you mean,” Minori-san said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “It’s like when you find out that punk you thought was way scary is actually a total softy, and you’re so shocked by the difference that you fall in love with him. Right?”

  “Yeah, more or less.” Hikaru-san nodded.

  “But, look... You can tell me how it’s not logical, but that just makes it even harder to know what to do.”

  “It’s not logical. You have to feel.”

  “Gee, you sound like a regular guru, but it’s not helping.”

  I was seriously, completely lost. I could only heave a long, long sigh as I turned to go back inside.

  I knocked twice, then waited. I didn’t have to wait long. There was surprise on the face that greeted me. Or at least, I thought there was. I was hesitant to be too sure, because their expressions could still be difficult for me to read. Unfamiliar emotions especially could present in unexpected ways, making deciphering them difficult.

  “Somethin’ the matter, Master?” Brooke’s head tilted the slightest bit.

  I’d gone back in the house with Minori-san and Hikaru-san, but only for a moment. I’d had a brainstorm, and headed out to visit the little cabin on the grounds�
��Brooke and Cerise’s home. It was actually the first time I had been there. Hence why Brooke looked so surprised. Or at least, I thought he did.

  “Sorry to just show up like this. I wanted to get your advice about something...”

  “Advice? Mine, sir?” Brooke’s tongue flicked in and out of his mouth quicker than usual. Ah. That I recognized. Not so much surprise as reluctance.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Certainly, er...” Brooke stepped aside and I walked into the house with a polite greeting.

  I’d had a certain idea of what Brooke and Cerise’s room must look like from the way they dressed and acted, and I wasn’t far off—it was a pretty simple place. There were a few wicker chests of different sizes, probably with clothes in them, and a rush mat laid right on the floor, probably their bed. There was no furniture to speak of, but in the middle of the room was a sort of brazier, presumably for warmth.

  “Afraid ’tis probably not too comfortable by human standards,” Brooke said.

  When two species have completely different physiologies, it only makes sense that they would live in different ways. To me, the room looked plain and simple, but for Brooke and Cerise maybe this was best. Maybe it even seemed luxurious to them.

  “Gosh, please, don’t worry about it. I’m sorry for barging in.” I smiled apologetically and shook my head. I was the one who should be careful to be courteous. This could be Brooke and Cerise’s, you know... lizardman “love nest.” If I just showed up uninvited, who knew if I might walk in at a compromising moment?

  Speaking of Cerise, I didn’t see her around. Maybe she was still helping Myusel back at the mansion. Well, it was best for me right now if there weren’t any women around. Even lizardman women.

  “Please, have a seat. Though... I’m afraid we ’aven’t any chairs.”

  “Thanks.”

  Brooke gestured at the rush mat (so was it a seat?), and I sat down facing him.

  “Now, Master, y’ said you were hoping to get my advice...?”

  “Er, yeah. Let’s see here...” I was definitely feeling a little embarrassed. Not sure where to start. Slowly, I began to tell him about what was going on: me. Myusel. Petralka. Elvia. The fact that three different girls had feelings for me. And the fact that Minori-san, Matoba-san, and Hikaru-san all seemed to back a different one. How even so, I couldn’t choose any of them, and I wasn’t even sure how to start picking. I told Brooke everything.