Chapter 3: Toransusekusharu?

Chapter 3: Toransusekusharu?

The Guld Workshop: I doubt there’s an inhabitant of the Holy Eldant Empire who doesn’t know that name. Adults would be familiar with them, obviously, but even young children have probably been playing with toys bearing the brand of the Guld Workshop since before they could remember. There are a few other workshops in the capital, Marinos, but none as big as Guld. There are probably none bigger in the whole Empire—maybe not even in the surrounding countries.

“Workshop” may sound like a simple enough word, but this place got its start among the ore mines of northern Marinos, connecting the various dig sites with pathways until they formed a vast underground space. It’s not just a mine or a fabrication project, either; the place includes everything its workers (most of whom are dwarves) might need in their day-to-day lives. Intensely aware—and intensely proud—of all the work that went into creating this place, we dwarves quietly refer to it as “Under-Marinos.” More than five thousand people staff the Guld Workshop. The majority of the twenty thousand dwarves who live in the imperial city are either employees of the workshop, or at least friends or family members.

All of this, obviously, gives the Guld Workshop production capacity of a different magnitude from other facilities. Toys; eating utensils and other daily necessities; artwork; swords, shields, and even more advanced weaponry: if it’s fashioned with clay, hammered from metal, shaped from wood, or created with anything else that springs from the earth, Guld can make it. We grudgingly recognize the superiority of other craftsmen in just one respect: elves are more nimble workers of wood than we are. But even they use chisels and hammers produced by us.

And then there’s the man who oversees the Guld Workshop and all that goes on within it, the one ultimately responsible for everything that happens there: me, Rydell Guld.

The Guld family were major movers behind the construction of the royal castle, and so we’re accorded noble treatment despite being demi-humans. The workshop has been able to reach the extent it has thanks to the myriad rights and privileges granted to it by the Empire. It’s worth knowing, though, that despite being treated like nobles, we have never been given a grant of land over which to rule by the imperial family, as a human noble would be—because no matter how well they may be treated, no demi-human family, even the Gulds, can possess a demesne.

Nonetheless, the Guld family has, in effect, been given complete control over the Guld Workshop—that is to say, virtually the entire northern stretch of the capital city and much of the nearby outskirts. An underground domain to do with as we see fit. Sometimes our continual expansion of the tunnels and pathways leads us to discover underground waterways or hot springs, giving the family a nice secondary source of income. Hence, the expansion of the underground reaches is another of our important responsibilities, quite apart from the everyday running of the workshop. Wider, deeper: we are always working to expand our holdings.

And thus:

“Boss!”

I turned, frowning at the figure who came jogging down the tunnel. “I told you to stop calling me that.”

“Right! Very sorry, boss.” My subordinate was sincerely contrite, but the old form of address was too thoroughly ingrained, and wouldn’t seem to go away. In my mind, “boss” had become outmoded; in imitation of the Amutech company, I had instructed that I was to be called “Manager.” But it wasn’t going very smoothly yet.

In any event. “Eh, forget it. What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

I thought I recognized the man as part of the tunneling team. If he had left the dig to seek me out, it meant they had come up against something the on-site team felt they couldn’t handle on their own. Had there been a cave-in or something?

We dwarves mostly used specialized magic in our tunneling projects, but even magic had its limitations, and it wasn’t uncommon to have to proceed by hand. Large-scale projects involving mountains and stone were one thing, but if you simply shoved softer earth aside with magic, then the moment the spell ran out, it would come crashing back down. It could even cause subsidence in the land above, and nobody wanted that.

All of which was to say that although tunneling work might be our bread and butter, it was more dangerous than it looked.

“We dug up something strange during the excavation,” my subordinate told me. He looked less panicked than he did simply perplexed. Apparently the situation wasn’t urgent.

“Did you, now?” I raised an eyebrow. A new vein of ore wouldn’t be described as being “dug up.” You would simply say you “found” it. And you certainly wouldn’t look so confused about it. I looked at the man, silently encouraging him to continue, but although his lips twitched under his mustache, he didn’t say another word. Perhaps whatever they had found was beyond the power of words to describe.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll come have a look.” I gave my subordinate a slap on the back and started down the tunnel.

Although parts of the dig site were reinforced with wire netting and steel supports, most of it was just exposed earth and rock, the floor and ceiling rough and unrefined. It wasn’t a proper passageway yet; still more of a hole. That meant both poor footing and poor air quality. The tunnel got narrower as I went along, until it would have been challenging for two or three to walk abreast. Weaving around mini-golems that were busy carrying soil and detritus away from the dig, I worked my way ever deeper into the tunnel. At last I arrived at a dead end, a wall of earth in front of which stood two members of the tunneling team. “I hear you’ve come up with something strange,” I said.

They turned to me. “Boss...”

“I told you not to call me that!”

“Sorry, boss—er, I mean... what was it again?”

“Ahh... Forget it,” I groaned, instead turning my attention to the object indicated by the two team members. It was in the shape of a box, seemingly made of metal. “What have we here?” I went over and looked at the thing where it sat on the ground.

It was long and narrow and stuck out towards us. If I had to describe it, I might say it was similar in shape to a coffin. And not one for a dwarf—more like for a human or an elf. But humans and elves usually made their coffins of wood, not metal. And then there were the perfect hexagons, each about the size of a grown-up’s palm, spaced at even intervals around the surface. Such a regular pattern rarely occurred naturally: this thing had been built.

“We just stumbled on it while we were digging,” one of the tunneling team members explained.

“Hmm?” As the other two looked on, I slowly, carefully rapped the surface with my fist. It was hard. And the sound—barely an echo. Whatever was in there, it was packed tight. There were streaks of dust caked on the surface, evidence of how long this thing had been buried here. Months, maybe, years. Still, the metal showed no sign of rusting. What could it be? I was starting to understand why my subordinate had found himself at a loss to describe it.

“Is this the only thing you found?” I asked.

“The only one here, sir. But next door, in tunnel Red 45, they came up with something else.”

“Next door...?” I frowned.

These tunnels, Red 37 and Red 45, were technically next to each other, but if one thought of them as city streets they would be two or three blocks apart. And yes, sometimes we found things from old ruins underground, including precious objects and even coffins. But to find them simultaneously at such a remove—was it coincidence, or was there some sort of connection? I didn’t have enough information to say.

“What should we do, sir?” The question came from the first subordinate who had come to get me.

“If these are relics of some kind, then we’ll have to inform Minister Cordobal.”

In principle, everything that could be found in the empire was the property of the empress. Even a noble’s domain was, formally speaking, “on loan” from Her Majesty. But at the same time, anything discovered in the process of digging these tunnels belonged, for practical purposes, to the Guld Workshop. That included finds like this.

Anything that was readily identifiable, like ancient eating utensils or some commoner’s ornaments, we were customarily free to do with as we pleased, to use it or sell it. The bureaucratic headache would just be too much otherwise, a fact the empire’s administrators tacitly acknowledged when they chose to look the other way in these matters. But if this was a coffin, or something like it, it would feel wrong to simply try to profit from it.

“Get a golem and haul this thing out of here. And bring me some of the workers from the other passage.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

“And don’t call me—ahh, forget it, just hurry!”

Eldant Castle. This building, which shared its name with the country as a whole, was the center of politics, economics, and culture in the Eldant Empire, not to mention a veritable symbol of the state itself. Created from a hollowed-out mountain, it redefined the word massive, and was in fact just about the biggest building we knew of here in this alternate world.

This being an empire, the castle was the home of the empress. A thriving castle town sprawled around it, and notwithstanding the nearly five thousand people who worked at the castle, as long as there wasn’t some very special reason—like an enemy attack on the one hand, or a big festival on the other—commoners were very rarely permitted inside.

Needless to say, the first time I showed up for a visit, I was pretty nervous. The place was crawling with soldiers and knights, all carrying swords that I knew were perfectly real. And I knew they had a license to cut down any commoner who ticked them off. This was the first alternate world I’d ever visited, and I had no idea how to speak the language or even what was polite or impolite—in short, I had no clue how to comport myself. Maybe I would unconsciously scratch my cheek in embarrassment and discover I had accidentally challenged some enraged other-worlder to a duel to the death.

With enough visits, though, my anxiety started to get better. It helped that I was learning what was considered common sense around here, including how to behave politely. As I got more comfortable, I started to be able to enjoy just walking around this humongous castle, which was like something out of a history book or a fantasy story. It was elegant and ornate, but this was no mock-up or movie set—this was the real thing. It wouldn’t disappear just because nobody was looking at it.

There were the huge, prominent portrait paintings. The suits of armor that lined the hallways. Stone everything: stairs and walls and floors and ceilings. The lamps that burned here and there for light. And on and on. All of it real. A real, functioning castle. And I was in it!

I chewed over that fact as the knight of the royal guard led me down the hallway, just as usual. I wasn’t alone, of course. I was with the other employees of our alternate-world general-entertainment company, Amutech. Kanou Shinichi-san, our general manager. And Koganuma Minori-san, military officer and bodyguard to me and Shinichi-san. The three of us were headed for an audience chamber.

“Amutech General Manager Kanou Shinichi-sama, accompanied by Ayasaki Hikaru-sama and Koganuma Minori-sama, has arrived,” announced the knight standing guard by the doorway. Again, standard procedure.

We were in the smallest of the available audience chambers. This wasn’t for official, public audiences with ministers and VIPs in attendance; it was for quiet, comparatively private—or even secret—conversations with Her Majesty the empress, when we didn’t want too much of a, well, audience.

“So you are here.” We all looked toward the source of the voice: the adorable, silver-haired Petralka an Eldant III (a.k.a. the empress) and her handsome, similarly silver-haired knight-attendant, Minister Garius en Cordobal. So far, everything was exactly the way it always was when we came to deliver our regular reports. We met with these two almost daily as representatives of Amutech, to let the empress know what the firm was up to. Although, to be honest, a lot of times we ended up just shooting the breeze.

But today was different.

“Romilda? Guld-san?” I heard Shinichi-san mumble.

Waiting for us in the audience chamber along with the two royals were a pair of dwarves, a father and daughter. Rydell and Romilda Guld. Rydell was head of the biggest workshop in Marinos—named after his family—and Romilda was his daughter. She also attended the school Amutech ran. They both bowed to us and smiled.

“What’s going on?” Shinichi-san asked. We didn’t normally see Romilda and her father here in the smaller audience chamber—in fact, this was the first time. I’m sure Shinichi-san assumed there was some reason for it.

“Just listen to this, Shinichi-sensei!” Romilda exclaimed. “And you, Hikaru-sensei!” She was practically glowing. As a dwarf, she was what you might call vertically challenged, and it made her look much younger than she was. Her cherubic face and effusive behavior added to the impression of youth. “Our workshop found this weird thing and—”

“Romilda, we are in the royal presence. Be silent,” Rydell-san admonished her. He was a dwarf, too, but as a man, he had a stupendous beard and seemed as craggy as a cliffside. He might have been smaller than us, but his entire body rippled with muscles, making him an intimidating presence nonetheless.

“Oh, right...” Romilda, remembering herself, went quiet and glanced uneasily at the throne.

In actuality, this was hardly her first time meeting the empress by way of Amutech. She’d been involved with a movie we’d made and a backyard barbecue we’d had. Maybe it had all made her a little too cavalier about how she behaved in front of Her Majesty. For her part, though, the empress didn’t seem bothered; she showed no sign of anger, and even Minister Cordobal had a wry grin on his face. Romilda was evidently going to get away with her little faux pas.

“We suppose formal introductions are not necessary. More importantly, Shinichi, there is something which we wish you to see,” Her Majesty said. She pointed at something on a stand in the middle of the room: Romilda’s “weird thing.”

It was a metal box, about two meters long. The other two dimensions were, I guessed, about sixty centimeters each. It was just about big enough for a person to fit inside—in fact, it looked distinctly like a coffin. But it was covered in a pattern of hexagons; the whole thing looked almost... mechanical.

“Is it a coffin?” Shinichi-san asked, evidently thinking the same thing I was.

“I’m afraid to say we’re not entirely sure,” Minister Cordobal replied.

“As Romilda said, we know only that it was excavated by the Guld Workshop,” Her Majesty added. “And while it certainly has the dimensions of a coffin, we have never seen nor heard of a coffin with such a pattern on it before. And only this single one was found, all by itself.”

Excavated. So it had been underground, apparently. It had, we were told, been discovered during tunnel excavations carried out by the workshop. Their first thought was that they had accidentally struck on a tomb of some sort, but there was no sign of any mausoleum, burial chamber, or grave goods anywhere to be found. It was always possible, of course, that the march of time had eroded the tomb and turned the grave goods to dust, or perhaps that everything had already been found and moved somewhere else. Whatever the story, it didn’t change the fact that they had this one “coffin,” and nothing else.

“And the contents are stranger still.”

“Huh? Petralka, you guys opened it?” Shinichi-san said. He looked shocked. If this really was a coffin, then true enough, you might open it and be confronted with a mummy. Maybe it would just be ugly, but there was always the possibility of harmful dust or particles, or some unknown pathogen that had been locked away with the corpse and would sicken anyone who opened the coffin. Remember Tutankhamun’s curse? The people who opened the tomb of the former Egyptian ruler died one by one, and it’s been proposed that ancient bacteria or viruses were the reason. Of course, some people claimed the whole thing was a hoax, that the series of deaths hadn’t really occurred at all.

But getting back on topic...

“What was in there? Was it an arm? It was an arm, wasn’t it?”

“Why would it be just an arm?”

“Perhaps you had best open it and see for yourself,” Her Majesty said, gesturing at the box with her chin.

“Wha...?” Shinichi-san looked at me and Minori-san with trepidation. I think he was afraid there really was a body in there, and that it was going to burst out with a “Woo!” or a “Blargh!” or a “Together we travel the path of meifumado!” and attack him.

“Fine, I’ll open it,” Minori-san said with a half-smile, and walked over to the box. I had a certain sympathy with Shinichi-san’s reluctance, but the empress herself had told us to open the box, so we could hardly refuse. Among the hexagons, Minori-san located a small depression that looked like it was built to accommodate a person’s hand. She grabbed hold of it with her fingers and slowly opened the box. Inside was...

“The heck is this?” Shinichi-san said, leaning over from next to Minori-san. I guess there was no dried-out corpse in there after all. But then, Shinichi-san had been wrong, too: there was more than just an arm in it.

The box was filled with something semitransparent. For a second, I thought it was a liquid, but when Minori-san gently tapped the side of the “coffin,” it didn’t ripple. So was it something more viscous? A gel or a jelly or something? Then I took a good look, and saw something red, like a dried plum, floating in the center. The hazy quality of the gel or whatever it was made it hard to see any details of the thing, but it was a distinct shape within the amorphous gelatin, strangely dominating the scene.

“Guess it’s not just your average coffin,” I said.

“Mm,” Her Majesty concurred.

So what was it? I had to confess, I had no idea. This was a fantasy world; could it be a Slime’s coffin or something? To be fair, probably not.

“It does indeed seem like a coffin at first glance, but no one has proven remotely able to identify what is actually in it. Not even the dwarves in the Guld Workshop,” the empress said. Then she looked at Shinichi-san. “We wished to ask for your collective opinion.”

I guess Rydell-san and Romilda were there as representatives of the Guld Workshop.

“We have never seen its like here in our world, but we thought perhaps in your Ja-pan, you might have encountered it before,” Her Majesty said. “Or at least something like it.”

“Can’t say I have... I don’t think,” Shinichi-san said, cocking his head. He looked at us in turn. But we were just as perplexed as he was. Even the container itself was starting to look less like a coffin the more I looked at it. “I guess I’ve seen toys and food that sort of look a little like this goop, or that thing in there,” Shinichi-san said.

Heck, so had I—“slime” toys on the one hand, and dried plums on the other. But I highly doubted that was an actual dried plum in there. And the other stuff? It vaguely reminded me of something you might find in industrial manufacturing, but that was way over the head of a nonspecialist like me.

“Can you take this stuff out of here?” Shinichi-san wondered aloud.

“Remember what’s happened the last several times you touched something without knowing what it was?” I said, and he quickly pulled his hand back. We had no idea what that stuff might be, so I didn’t think we should be going around grabbing it. This might have been an alternate world, but our common sense should still have been functioning. Even if Shinichi-san’s seemed a bit numb.

“Mm, so none of you know anything about it, either...” Her Majesty pursed her lips. The adorable empress seemed to regard Shinichi-san uncommonly highly, but he was no scholar; he wasn’t even a fortune-teller or something. He could hardly be expected to guess what this goop was.

“Sorry we couldn’t help,” he said.

“No, we were simply curious. Do not let it bother you,” Her Majesty said, shaking her head. “The palace mages are prepared to conduct an investigation, and the Guld Workshop has offered to send researchers over to help. We were simply seeking any possible clue that might be had before we began.”

“All right, that’s a relief,” Shinichi-san said with a little shrug.

As for me, I took a fresh look at the stuff in the “coffin.” I stared at it as hard as I could, but it didn’t so much as move. Not the gelatin, not the little red ball suspended in it. They were just... there. As if time were somehow stopped inside that container. And yet...

I shivered. Somehow, to me, the stuff looked alive.

Class was over, and Romilda had invited us to come to the Guld Workshop. Mostly because Shinichi-san had hit on this idea that maybe if we saw the place where the “coffin” had been discovered, we might get some clue about what it was.

Normally, we might take what we referred to as a “bird-drawn carriage”—a carriage literally pulled by an ostrich-like avian—but with Romilda being what amounted to a dwarf princess, her favored mode of conveyance was a little different. Instead of a large bird, clay golems pulled the carriage along. In spirit, I guess it was similar to a rickshaw. Unlike a rickshaw, it had two rows of seats for up to six people, and the pullers were a pair of rough-hewn clay dolls, so the whole thing looked a little strange. Although no stranger, I guess, than an automobile from our world would’ve looked to the locals here, without anything at all to pull it along. Conversely, if you thought of the golems as like an engine, maybe it turned out this wasn’t so different after all.

“Boy. What is that thing, anyway?” Shinichi-san mused. The benches in the passenger compartment faced each other, and I was sitting beside Romilda, with Shinichi-san and Minori-san across from me.

“I guess it can’t be some kind of toy,” Minori-san replied. “I’ll bet it’s magical, though.”

“My father tells me it was the only one they found,” Romilda said.

“Huh? Weren’t you with them, Romilda?”

“No, not me. I’m not allowed where the tunneling team works—too dangerous, I’m told.” She started digging through a bag slung over her shoulder. “But sometimes they find the coolest stuff,” she grinned.

“Like what?”

“Like this,” she said and put a small, wooden box on her knees. She opened the lid, and when I looked inside, I was surprised to find an assortment of rings and necklaces.

“What?” Shinichi-san said. “They found this while they were tunneling?”

“Yeah. Every once in a while, something like this will come up,” Romilda replied.

“Does, uh, does Petralka know about this? Isn’t this, like, treasure?”

“It looks pretty, but there’s a lot of fakes buried down there,” Romilda said.

The objects in the box were, it seemed, all imitations. What looked like jewels were simply glass beads, and what seemed like precious metals were only normal metals that had been specially treated. Overall, none of it was very valuable. For a while, it seems, a flood of objects like this had been found, and to save the empire the trouble of having to inspect each and every one of them, the dwarves were given special dispensation to dispose of anything that was obviously a fake.

“Although we do check them for magical properties,” Romilda added.

That made sense. Some items could have dangerous enchantments on them, not unlike the “forbidden armor” we had encountered, so the dwarves at least looked to make sure there was no magic on anything they found. And for better or for worse, nothing in this box had been enchanted.

“A lot of times these things just get thrown away, so if I see one I like, I ask to keep it,” Romilda said, trawling through the box with her fingers. “Ah, here we go.” She took something and held it out to me. “When I saw this, I thought it would be perfect for you, Hikaru-sensei.”

“Huh? For me...?”

I was a little taken aback. I was under the impression that Shinichi-san was the most popular teacher with the students, including Romilda. Not that I thought anyone hated me or anything, but I would have expected any gifts from the students to be directed at Shinichi-san. And yet here we were.

“What’s this—a choker?” I said. When I looked at it, I could see where she was coming from. It was a small strip of black material, like leather, with a metal clasp and a single turquoise stone carved with a geometric pattern. It was too small to be a belt; it had to be a bracelet or a choker of some kind. I had never known Shinichi-san to wear any kind of jewelry other than his interpreter ring, and black was definitely more my color—it would go perfectly with a Gothic-Lolita outfit. I guess that was why Romilda had wanted to give it to me.

“Can I really have it?”

“Of course!” she said, nodding eagerly. Maybe there was a touch of flattery in it, but knowing she thought it would look good on me personally felt pretty nice. I took the choker from Romilda and fit it around my neck.

It had a surprising heft in my hand—that stone was heavier than it looked—but when I put it on, I was struck by how little I noticed the weight. The clasp must have had magnetic stones in it, because the ends came together with an audible click, and it sat comfortably in place when I let go of it.

“It looks great!” Romilda said, clearly pleased to see her judgment vindicated.

“Wow, it really does,” Shinichi-san said.

“You wear that well,” Minori-san nodded. I actually found myself a little embarrassed to be on the receiving end of this shower of praise from my two colleagues.

“Thank you, Romilda,” I said, smiling at her. I brushed the choker with my finger.

“Young Miss, we’ve arrived.” Just at that moment, the bird-drawn—er, or rather, golem-drawn carriage—came to a stop, and the dwarf directing the golems from the driver’s seat alerted us in a low, rumbling voice that we had reached our destination.

We didn’t find any especially compelling clues at the Guld Workshop. The place was big enough that you could truthfully call it an underground city, but the spot where they found the “coffin” just looked like a dig site, rocks and dirt everywhere and not much else. We took some photos and videos and then decided to leave.

“Okay, see you later,” I said as we entered the house. No sooner had we gotten inside than we all went our separate ways, mostly to our rooms. As the head of Amutech’s school, I had to reorganize the teaching materials we’d used that day, record everything that needed to be recorded, and do other fiddly paperwork. By the time I was done with all that, Myusel would probably be calling us for dinner.

I pulled out my phone, checking some notes as I walked down the hall.

“Huh?” I could see something walking in the other direction, toward me. It was a basket so big you could barely get your arms around it, packed to overflowing with laundry. Talk about a bad center of gravity: the basket wobbled to the right, then to the left, looking like it might tumble over at any moment.

Obviously, I don’t mean a laundry basket had sprouted legs and started walking around. There was somebody holding it, somebody coming this way. They must have just been to get the laundry. There were only a couple of people who handled the laundry around here—and from the pale, white legs I could see peeking out below the basket, I knew which of our maids it had to be.

“Myusel,” I said, coming to a halt, and the towering basket of laundry stopped, too.

“Shinichi-sama...” The person who peeked out from behind the basket was exactly the one I had imagined. She had flaxen hair tied in twintails, a headdress on her head, and she was overall completely beautiful. Her ears were pointed like an elf’s, but she was actually a half-elf, with one elven and one human parent. She was also our mansion’s maid, Myusel Fourant. “W-Welcome back—welcome back?!”

She sounded a little bit panicked. Normally she would have met us at the front door, but I hadn’t seen her today. The trip to Guld Workshop had meant getting home a little later than usual, so I had assumed she was busy with some job. Apparently she had been collecting the laundry out behind the house, and hadn’t realized we’d gotten home.

“I’m so sorry, sir, I should have been there to greet youuaaahhh!”

“Oh—!”

I don’t know if she tripped on something, or if she just lost her balance from that awkward position, but Myusel went falling on her bottom with a shout. The basket slipped out of her grasp, depositing its contents all over the hallway. Oh well... It happens. Around here, it happens more than you might think.

“Are you okay?” I asked, collecting some clothes as I worked my way over to Myusel.

“I’m sorry! I’m very sorry! I’ll clean this up right away!”

“Calm down, it’s all right,” I said with a grin as Myusel started grabbing clothing in a tizzy.

By and large, Myusel was a perfectly capable maid and a hard worker, but once in a while she would try to push herself just a little too far. In case you’re keeping track, this means that not only was she a half-elf and a maid-san, she was also an adorable klutz. If checking too many boxes on the moe list was an arrestable offense, Myusel would have been in jail a long time ago. Er, not that I know exactly who polices those sorts of things.

Anyway...

“I’ll help you,” I said.

“Thank you, sir...”

It was a familiar sort of conversation. I started collecting whatever was nearby, draping the clothes over my arm as I went. A towel, aprons that looked like they belonged to Myusel and Cerise-san, my T-shirts. I was going along, innocently grabbing whatever was within arm’s reach, when—

“Hrk—!”

Something came falling out from where it had been hiding under a towel, and I froze.

It was a piece of cloth, elegantly embroidered and covered in frills. It almost looked like some kind of 3D model: there was nothing inside the cloth, yet it ballooned out like a bowl, suggesting the shape it assumed when it was worn. A second piece of cloth just like it was attached to the first, with a cute little bow of red ribbon in the middle. The other side from the ribbon boasted a cloth belt and U-shaped clasps, matched by little hooks on the other side. It was completed by straps, if you will, that could rest over the wearer’s shoulders.

...........................

Uhh, I guess this wasn’t the moment for detailed description.

It was—it was—it was—Ahhhhh, it was—!

“Bravooooo!”

No, wait, that wasn’t the word—brassiere...! That was it! I started to quake as I stood there holding the brassiere.

Okay, so, obviously, it wasn’t like I had never seen a bra before. Even the dollar stores and supermarkets sell ladies’ underwear in Japan, and I had seen mannequins wearing them plenty of times. And I had seen my mom’s and sister’s clothes drying on the wash line before. But those were all completely different from the article of underwear that was in my hand at this very moment. It didn’t belong to my family, and it wasn’t a never-worn display piece at the store. It had, in fact, been in contact with the body of a girl I knew very well. In other words, me holding this bra was like—well, not an “indirect kiss,” but you get the ideaaaaaaghhh!!

Wait, hang on, I thought, coming back to my senses. Who does this belong to?

It was too small to be Elvia’s, and she tended to wear tube tops anyway, so the shoulder straps wouldn’t make any sense for her. And to be honest, I thought, neither would the little red ribbon.

This thing was clearly made in Japan. It had Japanese washing instructions on the tag. But it couldn’t belong to Minori-san, could it? Could she possibly squeeze that giant rack into something this size?

Then—Myusel? The size was about right, but I couldn’t quite imagine her with Japanese underwear. Of course, she could have asked Minori-san or someone to get it for her...

“...Oh.”

“Shinichi-sama...” Myusel’s voice snapped me back to reality. She had finished gathering up the rest of the laundry and was looking at me. Or more specifically, at the white brassiere that I was clutching.

“Oh! U-Uh, it’s not what it looks like, Myusel! You’ve got it all wrong!” I exclaimed. “I just happened to pick this up! I d-definitely wasn’t standing here thinking, Gee, I wonder whose this is? Could it be Myusel’s? Could this bit of cloth have once been gently cupping Myusel’s chest? Woohoo!, or any perverted stuff like that!” As excuses go, it was a rather revealing one. “I—I’m sorry! Don’t look at me like that! I just... I...!”

I seemed to keep digging myself in deeper. I mean, it wasn’t like I was planning to just stick it in my pocket and walk away. Really. I swear! It’s true! Please believe me!

“P-Please, Shinichi-sama, calm down.”

“But I’m desperate for you to believe me! I swear to God I didn’t have the slightest perverse motivation for picking this thing up!” I was a little crazed.

“No—listen—Shinichi-sama?”

“And I even more never thought of smelling it, or trying it on myself, or anything like that...! I’m not one of those freaks that gets all pant-pant over girls’ underwear, I mean, for starters, I think what’s inside it is so much better—no! That’s not what I mean at all!”

I was completely failing to talk my way out of this. Flubs left, right, and center. Arrrgh, stupid, stupid Shinichi!

“Erm... Shinichi-sama?”

“I—I —!”

“That belongs to... Hikaru-sama...”

“You’re right! I’m sure if Hikaru-san were here, he would be looking at me with utter contempt, total disdain, complete—what?” I blinked and took another look at the bra in my hand. “It belongs to... Hikaru-san?”

“Yes, sir,” Myusel said, nodding. She set the laundry basket on the floor, came over, and took the clothes I’d collected, along with the article of ladies’ underwear. She calmly went back and returned them all to the basket. I watched her, sort of vacantly.

“So even his underwear is girls’ clothing...” I mumbled.

There was a very long pause as I pictured Hikaru-san in my mind. I was aware he was very beautiful, so much so that if nobody told you, it would be easy to take him for a girl. From his long, black hair to his impeccable Gothic-Loli outfit, there was no flaw in his look: all of it suited him perfectly. But it hadn’t even occurred to me that a predilection for wearing women’s clothes would extend to his underwear. I did recall him and me hiding out in the backyard once in our underwear—or really, in some swimsuits—but that had been because Minori-san had gone mad from BL withdrawal. It wasn’t anything from Hikaru-san’s personal wardrobe. In fact, they had actually been men’s competition swimsuits.

But this... Man, this was some commitment. Women’s underwear. Typically, when you were cross-dressing or cosplaying, nobody saw your underwear. Unless you had some reason to assume somebody was going to see your delicates, why go out of your way to cross-dress that stuff, too? What if somebody put on women’s underwear not because he expected anyone to see it, but just because he himself enjoyed dressing up as a woman? That would be understandable.

Hmm?

“Come to think of it, I never actually asked Hikaru-san,” I mused. “Does he see himself as a man who enjoys wearing women’s clothes? Or does he actually want to be a woman?”

“I believe he said once that he began doing it to make his parents happy, and simply continued,” Myusel said thoughtfully.

“Oh yeah, I guess he did. But wearing women’s underwear seems like a bit much if you’re just doing it for appearances. Maybe it, like, started that way, but now it’s something different.”

“I wonder...”

“There’s a lot of things I can’t quite figure out about that guy,” I said.

“What’s up?” someone asked. It was Minori-san, who had appeared in the hallway. I guess if I had seen two people standing next to a huge basket of laundry and whispering with each other, I would have been curious, too. “Anything wrong?”

“No, not really wrong,” I said with a half-smile. “I was just... wondering why Hikaru-san dresses as a girl.”

“What, Hikaru-kun?”

“Uh-huh. Like, does he see himself as a guy who enjoys cross-dressing—almost like a sort of performance—or is it maybe something more? Like, you know... uhh...” I looked for the most delicate way to put it.

Minori-san, though, after blinking behind her glasses for a second, beat me to it, asking bluntly: “Is it gender dysphoria, you mean?”

“I guess. I mean, I’m not looking to diagnose him or something.” Hikaru-san could feel like or be whatever gender he wanted inside; it wouldn’t change anything. “I was just sort of curious about why.”

“Mmm,” Minori-san said, crossing her arms. I guess she hadn’t given it much thought, either. It just seemed that natural, or that typical, maybe, for Hikaru-san to wear girls’ clothes. We never even questioned it. “If it were just cross-dressing, I guess gender dysphoria might be a strong possibility. But he likes to cosplay as anime characters, too, right? Remember how he did Suiren?”

“Now that you mention it, yeah, I do.”

Back when he had first met Petralka, he had gone out of his way to cosplay as a character from Rose Princess, a show the empress had been obsessed with at the time.

“People cross-dress for cosplay all the time without having gender dysphoria,” Minori-san said. “I dress in guys’ clothes, myself.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. Minori-san, I was given to understand, had gravitated toward cosplaying male characters because of a sense her father would have accepted her more readily if she’d been a boy. But that wasn’t the same as wishing she could be a guy, and that wasn’t the vibe I got from her.

“Cosplay contests are a trip,” Minori-san told me. “You’re in the changing room with some cute young woman, and before your eyes she turns into a lady-killer of a guy. Or you glance in the men’s room as you go by, and everyone lined up along the wall looks like a woman.”

The idea of a men’s room full of women (even if they were just guys in costume) was so surreal it made me a little dizzy. So there were people in frilly dresses lined up at the urinals or something? It seemed like it would be chaos.

“Of course, they might be in character, but it doesn’t mean they want to be someone of the opposite sex necessarily,” Minori-san added.

“And I know there are some people who obviously do it for laughs,” I said. Overseas, I’d even heard of middle-aged men who dressed up like pretty-girl characters and paraded around. They were all smiles when they appeared in photographs. So did guys like that feel, inside, that they were actually women? Probably not, for the most part. More likely, they were just amused by the total disconnect between the adorable costume and how they looked as men. The whole point was to dress in something that looked a little ridiculous.

“If you’re really dedicated to getting the character, though, there are lots of things you can do. The perfectionists go to incredible lengths. I mean details you can’t even see.”

“Could that include underwear?”

“I guess for some people, maybe?” Minori-san said matter-of-factly. “There’s plenty of places online where you can get women’s underwear for men.”

“So they do sell that kind of thing?”

“Sure they do. You can get padded bras to give yourself a decent bust, and even stuff for the lower half that, you know, hides what’s down there. Ahh, I see what this is about.” Minori-san seemed to have figured out why Myusel and I had been talking about Hikaru-san’s cross-dressing. “He seems like the type who would be a stickler for details like that, doesn’t he?”

“Okay then...”

“Only way to be sure would be to ask him, though.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“That’s an awfully nice bra for someone who’s just having fun with it, though,” Minori-san remarked.

“Isn’t it, though? I’m almost a little jealous,” Myusel said, smiling shyly. I guess Hikaru-san made a pretty girl even from the perspective of an actual girl like Myusel.

............Um. Hold on.

“I just had a thought,” I said, looking at Minori-san. “If Hikaru-san is really just doing it because he enjoys looking like someone of the opposite sex, or putting on cute clothes or something, then what do you think would happen if he wound up in one of those plots like they’re always doing in anime and manga and stuff? You know, ‘I woke up one day and I was the opposite sex!’ That sort of thing. You think he’d panic?”

“Hm?” Minori-san said, putting a thoughtful finger to her mouth.

Whoa, it’s so cute the way she does that! I think it’s against the rules to look that good doing that when you’re over twenty already! I was starting to think Minori-san’s insides didn’t match her outside—but anyway, back to business.

“I don’t know. I think Hikaru-kun is uncommonly easygoing.”

“Yeah, fair point.”

“Gotta say, though, Shinichi-kun, that’s some imagination you’ve got.”

“Nah, I was just reading something earlier with one of those stories in it.”

This trope can take a couple of different forms: a guy can wake up one day having turned into a girl, or a guy and a girl can swap bodies. To be fair, there might be a certain value in it: boys are interested in girls’ bodies, and vice versa. But either experience would probably be a secret you’d carry with you to your grave.

“Um, I’m afraid I have to start making dinner,” Myusel said, and excused herself from the conversation.

It wasn’t like I had ever thought that hard about any of this, anyway. Minori-san and I parted ways, and I trotted after Myusel in case she needed help carrying the laundry. The talk turned to dinner, and five minutes later I had forgotten I was ever curious about Hikaru-san’s cross-dressing.

It had truly been a passing thought, meaningless, going nowhere.

Certainly nothing that would have tipped me off to what was about to happen.

Nothing that would have made me imagine that the very next day, my hypothetical question would come true.

For a moment, my consciousness felt sort of... floaty.

My eyes drifted open.

“Mn...” A thin but welcoming shaft of sunlight came into my room through a crack between the curtains. I could hear a faint twittering of birds. The message was clear: morning was here.

“Mnnn...”

I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, then gave a big stretch. I hardly remembered falling asleep. I recalled staying up late going over a list of stuff to be imported to Eldant in the near future.

Finally I opened my eyes, and was greeted by the sight of my familiar Gothic-Lolita dress. That’s right—I’d been planning to catch a bath once I got to a good stopping point in my work. But first I had lain down on my bed to catch a quick wink—and everything after that was a blank. I must have fallen right to sleep. There were a few aspects of my Lolita outfits that bordered on feeling like bondage gear, like the exceptionally tight chest. It could be such a relief to take it off that sometimes I would just get very sleepy all of a sudden.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t even removed the choker Romilda had given me the day before. But anyway, bath first. I would have to ask Brooke to heat the water. A wry smile came over my face as I looked at myself slumbering on the bed, not even under the covers, still in my dress.

“Huh...?” I felt myself tense with confusion.

There was Ayasaki Hikaru, sleeping peacefully on the bed in his Gothic-Lolita dress.

And here I was, lying next to him, buck naked.

...........................................................................

“Hrgh?!” I jolted upright. I, Ayasaki Hikaru, was definitely asleep. Thanks to my cosplaying, I spent plenty of time looking at myself in mirrors and taking selfies and stuff. A lot of people probably weren’t nearly as familiar with their own faces as I was, and maybe the reason it took me a second to register this bizarre turn of events was because I was so accustomed to seeing myself.

What turn of events was this? Was I dreaming? Having an out-of-body experience? These days, I lived in an alternate world full of elves and dwarves and lizardmen, where magic was an everyday thing. Maybe astral travel was totally normal, too. Maybe you could do it with magic or something.

I realized I was so confused I could hardly think straight. Almost unconsciously, I brushed my long hair out of my face, and the sensation alerted me that this was neither a dream nor a disembodied journey. Physical sensation was present and accounted for. Or was even that part of the illusion?

I looked down to take an inventory of my body.

“............”

I felt my mind go blank. I was completely naked. And hey, that was fine. In a person’s own room, they can wear whatever they want—or don’t want, as the case may be. I seemed to remember some Greek myth about some guy who fell in love with himself when he saw his own face in a pool of water, but at least I didn’t have that problem.

Not normally, anyway. But...

“I... I can’t believe this...”

I was particular about my appearance, always making sure to attend to my hair and complexion. So it wasn’t the pale, healthy glow of my skin that surprised me. No, I was wondering why my chest seemed so... round.

I put a hand to my chest, discovering a slight but distinct weight. It was unmistakable. This was no illusion. Being seriously obese could produce that effect, of course, but it so happened that no other part of my body seemed so swollen. In fact, I looked exceptionally taut all over. Which all suggested one thing.

I sat and thought about it for a moment. I had a bad feeling about this. I know I dress in women’s clothes pretty much every day, but I am a man. I don’t wear women’s clothes out of some desire to deny that. I’m not interested in any sex-change surgery, and I still get perfectly excited if I see a naked woman. (At least if she’s my type.)

But anyway... After a long moment, I gathered my nerves and looked down. My gaze moved over the breasts... past my navel...

“Eeeeeeeek!”

A scream wrenched its way out of my lips. What should have been there... wasn’t!

A wave of confusion swept over me as I sat there, confronted with this fact. I was sure it had been there as recently as yesterday. I mean, it was attached to me! And now there was no trace of it! In its place was a woman’s—

“B-But why?!”

I was in a girl’s body, all right. I just didn’t have the faintest idea how I’d gotten there. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t an illusion. As hard as it was to accept, this was real.

“Hikaru-san, what’s wrong?!” Someone was knocking urgently on my door, trying to ascertain what was happening to me. It was Shinichi-san. And I was sure he wasn’t alone. I could hear someone else on the other side of the door, too. Myusel, probably. They must have heard my scream and wondered what was wrong.

Crap. That was my first thought. I hardly even knew what I was thinking it about.

“H-Hey... It’s... n-n-n—”

I was in such a panic I could hardly talk.

I’m fine. That’s all I had to say, but all I could manage were trembling syllables that could only make Shinichi-san and Myusel think something was really wrong. And Myusel had a spare key to every room. It seemed like only a matter of time until they came in to check on me. It should have been easy: I should have just exclaimed, “I’m fine!” or “Don’t come in!” But all I could manage was inarticulate gibbering as they pushed open the door.

Not just pushed it open, either; the door flew inward, and in bounded Shinichi-san and Myusel, just as I’d expected. “Hikaru-san, what’s... wrong............”

Behind them, Minori-san and Elvia were there, too.

There was a short, heavy silence, and then Shinichi-san let out a single befuddled syllable.

“...............What?”

Myusel, Minori-san, and even Elvia were just standing there, saucer-eyed. Everyone was understandably shocked at my... nakedness.

“Hikaru......san?”

“I think so,” I said, not feeling entirely sure myself. For the time being, I did the only thing I could do—arrange my hands to try to preserve my modesty.

The mansion was normally bright and full of life, but now it felt oddly... stifling. Anxious. Confused. Shaken. Maybe even a little panicked. Along with any other synonyms for “disturbed” you might come up with. Nobody knew exactly what was going on, but we were all very concerned about it. Including, of course, the person at the center of it all, namely me. But everyone else was so freaked out that I looked positively calm by comparison.

Sitting on the living room sofas were me, Shinichi-san, and Minori-san. Behind Shinichi-san and Minori-san stood Myusel, Brooke, and Cerise, collectively facing me. In other words, all eyes were on me. I found myself feeling a little uncomfortable. I tried to glance away from them, down to my knees, but then I couldn’t help noticing the bulge of my chest in my peripheral vision, and that made it all the more difficult to keep my composure. Outwardly, it didn’t look so different from when I was wearing padding, but wearing a brassiere that was actually touching my skin—it was, well, different. My intense awareness of the fact made it hard to ignore the swell. I had sure never expected that the women’s underwear I had might come in handy in this particular way.

While I had turned into a woman, on a positive note, I hadn’t gotten any taller, shorter, thinner, or fatter, so all my clothes still fit. That was a major relief. I mean, one way or another, I couldn’t go around naked all day.

Incidentally, on my left hand was an interpreter ring, swiped from my sleeping “self.” I felt a little bad stealing from him, but without it, I couldn’t hope to communicate with Myusel and the other Eldant people.

“Um, so. Hikaru-san, is that... really you?” Shinichi-san said, just to be sure.

“Yes, it’s me,” I nodded, at which Shinichi-san and Minori-san traded confused looks.

I understood—believe me, I did. For starters, the man they knew perfectly well as Ayasaki Hikaru was currently asleep on the bed in my—his?—room. From their perspective, he might be the real Hikaru, and I might be some kind of imposter, or maybe a joke in really bad taste.

And was I really Ayasaki Hikaru? Or was I someone else who was simply convinced they were Hikaru?

“I was like this when I woke up,” I insisted. It was all I could say.

“All right, well... mind if I ask you a few questions?” Shinichi-san said.

“Shoot,” I replied. I was just as eager as he was to know exactly who or what I was at this point. If it turned out I wasn’t Hikaru, then at least that would be something to go on. Better than having no idea at all.

“Umm...”

“Describe Kanou Shinichi in one word.”

“Loser.”

While Shinichi-san dithered about what to ask first, Minori-san shot out ahead with an off-the-cuff request that I responded to completely on instinct.

“Sounds like the real Hikaru-kun to me.”

“What kind of question was that?!” Shinichi-san nearly exploded. But Minori-san just grinned, not a shadow of remorse on her face. “Shall I ask for more details?”

“.......................................No. That’s okay.” Shinichi-san wilted. He walked over to a corner of the room and faced the wall, from where we could hear him muttering, “What can you do?” and “I mean, me too, I...” Well, we could leave him to it.

After that, Minori-san peppered me with questions about various anime and manga, and I was able to answer them all fluently. When she asked me, finally, “What were you wearing the day you first met Her Majesty?” I immediately replied, “A Suiren costume.”

Minori-san nodded, satisfied that I was who I claimed to be.

“The other Hikaru-sama ain’t wakin’ up, though,” Elvia said, coming into the room.

Elvia Harneiman was our resident werewolf girl. The bushy tail and floppy ears proved it. When she wagged that tail like a happy puppy, you could practically feel your mood improving. But anyway...

“I tried shakin’ him, I tried ticklin’ him, but nothing works.”

Elvia had remained in my room to keep an eye on the sleeping “Hikaru,” just in case anything changed. Apparently she’d also tried to wake him up, to no avail. He was still breathing, though, so at least we knew he wasn’t dead.

This was making less sense by the moment.

“Does Eldant have some kind of magic that can turn a man into a woman overnight?” Shinichi-san asked.

“Not that I’ve ever heard of,” Myusel replied.

“Figures,” Shinichi-san said, and shrugged. I guess he was just asking to be sure. He didn’t think magic like that actually existed. Personally, I agreed. Anyway, I guess in this particular case, it would be “magic that can create an exact but opposite-gendered double of someone overnight.”

“How about an illness that might do this?” he ventured.

“No, I’ve never heard of that, either,” Myusel said, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“So far we don’t even know if this just happened, or if it was somehow artificially induced,” Minori-san said, crossing her arms.

“It seems like a natural phenomenon to me,” Shinichi-san said.

“I agree,” Minori-san replied, “but if it isn’t natural, then that means someone did it deliberately, right? Someone with a reason to want to turn Hikaru-kun into a woman.”

“It—It wasn’t me!” Shinichi-san said, maybe a bit too emphatically.

“And it certainly wasn’t me,” Minori-san said, much cooler.

“I mean, I admit Hikaru-san seems sort of wasted on the male gender.”

“Dummy. It’s perfect because he’s a guy!”

“That’s just your twisted view of things, Minori-san.”

“Hmmm...”

“What’s even weirder about this whole thing is that the guy Hikaru-san is still here, but now we have a girl Hikaru-san, too. Maybe someone does want to turn him into a girl for some reason, but why make a second one of him to do it?”

“That’s a good point...”

The two of them both made concerned noises. Gender-change storylines aren’t that uncommon in manga, anime, and games. It was a time-honored trope, in fact. But most of them also focused on the action: “suddenly, a guy becomes a girl!” Or vice versa. Most swept questions of why or how under the rug.

Whatever. The point was, we still had no idea why my consciousness had found itself in a woman’s body.

“Oh...” Myusel said, looking at us.

“What is it, Myusel?”

“We have visitors... I’ll go answer the door.” She left the room. With her elf senses, she had much better hearing than any of us humans. I hadn’t even noticed anything, but she had picked up on someone coming to the house—maybe she’d heard the carriage pulling up outside or something. But who could it be so early in the morning?

I was considering the possibilities when I noticed Elvia intently studying my face.

“What, have I got something in my teeth?” I asked, looking her in the eye, and she quickly shook her head, a bit chagrined.

“Uh, no, uh...” She couldn’t quite seem to find the word at first, until finally she came out with: “I was just thinkin’, boy or girl, you’re awful pretty either way, Hikaru-sama.”

I found myself at a loss for how to respond to that. I’d been hearing things like “He’s so cute for a boy” or “He’s too pretty to be a boy” ever since I could remember, so you wouldn’t think this would have surprised me so much. But for some reason, Elvia’s words really left an impression.

I blinked. Then I sighed. “Is this really the time for that?”

“Uh, oh, right. Sorry ’bout that.” Elvia smiled, a little embarrassed, and scratched her head. She really didn’t have much of a filter. I guess you could say she wore her heart on her sleeve in a big way.

“I’ll grant, if one of us had to get turned into a girl, better me then Shinichi-san,” I said, glancing at him. “He would probably be falling apart by now.” Then there were the clothes to consider—and the underwear. At least I was ready to go with appropriate attire. “Or maybe he would do like those MCs in manga who get sex-swapped and check himself out in the mirror. Get all hot and bothered over his own naked body.”

“I would not! Never! No way! ...Probably.”

I wasn’t sure about that last bit. Neither was Minori-san, who laughed; even I couldn’t resist a bit of a smile.

At that moment, Myusel came back.

“Um, Shinichi-sama?”

“Yeah? Who was it, Myusel?”

“Um, yes, well... Her Majesty is here.”

“What?!” Shinichi-san did a double take. Minori-san and I were as surprised as he was. It was true, the empress sometimes dodged her official duties long enough to come hang around with us, but she had never shown up so early in the morning. In fact, we usually went to see her before school. Was there some kind of emergency? I was still trying to figure it out when Her Majesty marched in, accompanied by her knight-bodyguards.

“Excuse us for arriving so early and so suddenly,” she said, glancing around at us. “But something most serious has happened, and we wished to ensure you were all immediately informed.”

“Something serious?” I asked on behalf of the group, as Myusel ushered the empress to a spot on the sofa.

“You remember the object you saw yesterday?”

“The coffin thing with the slime in it?”

“Indeed. When we inspected it this morning, the contents were missing.”

“What?!” we exclaimed, and looked at each other. So that mysterious gel that had been in the “coffin” was gone? That meant somebody must have taken it, or else...

“We simply do not understand it,” the empress said with a frown, her confusion evident on her face. Minister Cordobal wasn’t with her this morning; I assumed he was busy investigating what had happened. If the thief had kept the goo somewhere in the castle, it would already be the crime of the century, but if they were out running around somewhere with it, then things would be even more complicated.

“I’m sorry to hear it, but why did you think we needed to know first thing?” I asked. This was clearly a big deal, of course, but surely we didn’t need to be among the first to be told. Heck, she could have just informed us when we showed up to make our report before school.

But Her Majesty replied, “Close inspection revealed damp tracks, as if the gel had crawled out of the container.”

“Crawled out?”

“It could perhaps have simply left a mark when it was removed by some thief, we supposed.”

True enough: some damp tracks weren’t enough to warrant the assumption that the gelatinous stuff was moving around under its own power. But Her Majesty told us that, while there hadn’t been anything to suggest anyone had entered the room where the coffin was being kept, more “tracks” were found in the crack between the door and the floor, as if the gel had slithered through.

“So maybe it really was a Slime?” Shinichi-san ventured.

“It is too early to come to that conclusion,” Her Majesty replied. “But it remains that traces of its movement were discovered. When we followed them, they appeared to lead in the direction of this mansion. There are a few other houses in this area. Provided the thing has not become lost in the woods, we fear it may have come to your residence, Shinichi.”

“Huh...” Shinichi-san nodded. “But we haven’t really seen anything unusual... I don’t think...” He looked around at us. No, we hadn’t seen any mysterious, autonomous gelatinous substances. It could be hiding somewhere, of course—it could probably expand and contract at will, the better to hide under a floor or behind a door. But if it was here, it hadn’t done us any harm yet.

“Very well, then,” Her Majesty said, obviously relieved. Then an edge entered her voice. “That being the case, Shinichi, we will proceed directly to Guld Workshop. You will come with us.”

“What? Why?”

“Because we have no other clues to that thing’s true identity.”

We had already been to the workshop the day before looking for clues, but Her Majesty thought we might have missed something, and wanted to look again. She also planned to talk to dwarves who had actually excavated the coffin.

“Uh, but we haven’t even had breakfast...”

“You will not die for lack of breakfast.” Her Majesty got up off the sofa and took Shinichi-san’s arm too firmly to be ignored. He definitely had a soft spot for the adorable tyrant, because he let himself be dragged out of the living room. Minori-san stood up, too.

“I’ll go, too. And Hikaru-kun, I think you’d better stay home from school today.”

“Yeah, I think that’s a plan.” I didn’t think I would make it through anything like a normal day in this body.

“Hey, y’ think we should’ve mentioned the deal with Hikaru-sama to Her Majesty?” Elvia asked. The empress didn’t seem to have gotten the slightest inkling that I had turned into a girl. Maybe that was a measure of how convincing my daily appearance was. Would it be wrong of me to feel slightly pleased with myself?

“There’s no need to give her more to worry about,” Minori-san said, picking up her suitcase—the one with the 9mm machine gun in it. “Myusel, could you go to school today to fill in for Hikaru-kun?”

“Y-Yes, ma’am. Oh, um, I’ll pack breakfast into bento boxes for you.” She hurried out of the room. She was sweet enough to envision everyone eating in the carriage on the way. She had used some breakfast ingredients in dinner the previous night, so she could slap them together with some bread to make a few meals in a pinch.

“Sorry. And thanks,” I said, bowing my head. Minori-san left, heading after Shinichi-san and Her Majesty. Elvia and I followed her out to the hallway and watched her go.

Breakfast involved those of us left in the house—me, Elvia, Brooke, and Cerise—eating what Myusel had prepared. Afterwards, it was business as usual. Brooke went to do the gardening, Cerise went to do some housework, and Elvia went back to her room. As for me, I found myself with some time on my hands, and eventually I just went back to my room, too.

I heaved a sigh as I settled into my space. Without Shinichi-san, Minori-san, or Myusel here, the mansion seemed awfully quiet. Brooke spent most of his time outside, and Cerise was doing some outdoor cleaning, so it was really just me and Elvia in the house at the moment. And with her cooped up in her room drawing most of the time, it was only natural for the place to seem kind of empty.

I finally picked up a novel I was in the middle of, but somehow it didn’t feel quite right, and before long I closed it again. I couldn’t seem to settle down. If it turned out I couldn’t go to school at all as long as I was in this body, then Myusel would have to fill in for me teaching. There were a few things I could do at home in my capacity as an Amutech employee, but to the extent Myusel was taking over my teaching duties, maybe I would have to take over her housework, at least some of it.

I let my eyes wander around as I thought, when suddenly I spotted the mirror on the wall, a full-length thing I’d brought from Japan. I never left my room without checking myself in it. Any cosplay costume, not just a woman’s outfit, is delicate: the illusion can be ruined by the smallest things. I wanted to make sure my hair looked right, obviously, but I also checked for any accessories out of place, the slightest trace of mustache, the quality of my skin, and anything else that could conceivably make people feel something was off. If anyone questioned what they were seeing, I had failed.

Therefore, any time I was going to go out in public, anywhere people might see me, I would always look at myself from a third-party perspective. It had been a habit of mine even back in Japan.

Now I looked at the mirror, and saw myself: Ayasaki Hikaru. At a quick glance, I was all I saw; I looked just like I always did when I was wearing women’s clothing. But hiding beneath the outfit was an actual woman’s body. When I stripped down to my underwear, that was readily apparent. Not just the bulge of my chest or the lack of a bulge between my legs, but more subtle things, too. Even the exact shape of my bones seemed ever so slightly different. When I looked back at my other self, the male body still sleeping on the bed, it brought home to me even more powerfully that I was in fact a woman now.

I don’t mind saying that I was always confident in my ability to cross-dress convincingly. I worked hard to make my language gender-neutral, so I could seem more girlish, and I had always paid close attention to the curves of my body. You had to be more than just slim to be a believable girl; you had to be careful no one part of you got more muscled than it should. I was diligent about my makeup, of course, and I shaved my mustache fastidiously so the pores wouldn’t open and show black.

And yet, for all that effort, when I was confronted with a real woman’s body, it became glaringly obvious that I wasn’t one. Take those curves, for example. Now that I had a woman’s body, there was more plumpness—not fat, but everything, the chest naturally, but also my butt and thighs, my arms, and even my fingers, were more fleshy, without the hardness of muscle. I guess this is what it really meant to have soft skin. Honestly, as I ran my fingers along my arms, they felt nice even to me.

I stood there for a moment, massaging my arms. It probably would have looked pretty weird if there’d been anyone to see. But there wasn’t; I was the only one there. Maybe this would be the perfect opportunity to get to know a woman’s body, to learn something about them for future reference. It would make my costumes even better when I got back to my male body.

There was my swelling chest, the ultimate symbol of womanhood. There was the way the curve of my body puckered in slightly from just below my side down to my navel. And then, between my legs, there was...

“........................”

It would be a lie, of course, to say I had never seen one before. Anyone who could do an internet search had a vast wealth of such things at their fingertips. You could even check out the videos on overseas websites, places where they didn’t censor them like they do in Japan. I had seen my fair share, partly as research when I was trying to get my “look” right, and partly out of a more unabashedly animalistic interest. I was, as I think I’ve made clear, a man, with a man’s desires.

So even though I knew I was looking at my own body, I couldn’t keep my heart from picking up the pace when I saw all the gentle curves of my naked form.

Argh. I guess this means I can never laugh at Shinichi-san again. I reflexively looked at the floor, away from my mirror. But I could still see my own chest in my peripheral vision. I told myself not to pay any attention to it, but that was never going to happen.

“Huh...?”

It was in trying to look away from myself that I noticed it: situated in the cleft between my breasts, the smallest of red lights was shimmering. But it wasn’t coming from my skin. In fact, it seemed like it was emanating out from somewhere deep in my chest. As if something buried there were shining.

I took a step closer to the mirror, staring hard at the light in my chest. Whatever it was must have been shining pretty brightly to be visible through my skin; it looked like a sphere about the size of a golf ball. In fact, it looked oddly familiar.

“It’s from that coffin...”

Yes, that was it. The gelatin in that coffin-like container had had a similar small object floating in it. Obviously, I couldn’t see the pattern or color well enough to be sure it was exactly the same thing.

“What in the world...?”

What was going on here? I put a hand on the mirror, leaning my face as close as I could to the thing. Just then—

“Hikaru-sama!”

“Eeek?!” I shrieked as the door came flying open. “Wha—Wha—Wha—?”

I turned to find Elvia standing there. The easygoing beast girl wore the same innocent smile she always did. Leave it to her to come bursting into a person’s room without knocking and never realize she’d made a faux pas.

“Wh-What are you doing in here?”

“Huh? Oh, I just thought, hey, Hikaru-sama got turned into a girl. Wonder if he’s all right?” she answered brightly. She sounded completely sincere.

“No! I mean, what about the lock...?!”

When we closed our doors, a magical lock was activated that was supposed to make it impossible to open the door from the outside. At the very least, Elvia shouldn’t have been able to just come waltzing in.

“How did you get past the lock?” I exclaimed, meanwhile almost subconsciously moving my hands to cover myself. Elvia, seemingly oblivious, stared directly at me. Assaulted by a sudden wave of embarrassment, I twisted, trying to hide from her, attempting to make myself as small as possible.

“Oh, I borrowed the key from Myusel,” Elvia said, scratching her head shyly.

Ah, yes: Myusel had backup copies of all our keys, so we didn’t have to go walking around with them. That helped reduce the risk of dropping them somewhere outside the mansion. It was all very logical.

Meanwhile, Minori-san, the Amutech bodyguard, was with Shinichi-san. Which meant at this moment, I had no one to keep me safe if the need arose—no one except Elvia. I guess Myusel had given her the key in part because she knew Elvia was my best ally under the circumstances.

“Okay, fine, but you shouldn’t just come bursting into a person’s room! Y-You could at least knock first!”

“Sorry ’bout that.” Elvia bowed her head, but she still didn’t seem to feel particularly guilty. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as I reached desperately over to my bed, grabbing my clothes and holding them in front of me to cover myself.

I know, I know. Elvia didn’t mean any harm. In fact, as she herself said, she’d had my best interest at heart. But it was just tremendously embarrassing for anyone to know I’d been examining myself naked in the mirror. I couldn’t look at her. Did she think I was some kind of sex-crazed pervert now? Not to mention, I wasn’t wearing a thread of clothing, and I just didn’t want her to see me that way.

“A-Anyway, I’m gonna get dressed...” I said, trying to indicate that Elvia should step out of the room, when suddenly something occurred to me. I was a woman now. And so was Elvia. So actually, it was pretty strange to be acting all embarrassed. For that matter, if this body was just a construct—just something my soul had somehow been transferred into—then the real me was sleeping on that bed, which meant she wasn’t really seeing me naked at all. So why was I so embarrassed?

The entire thing was making my head spin.

“Er... Hikaru-sama?” Elvia was looking at my feet for some reason. “Have y’ been outside?”

“Huh? Outside?” Did she mean, since I got up this morning? “I don’t think so... why?”

“Your legs, they’re kinda dirty.”

At that, I looked down at my legs, and lo and behold, they were a little bit dirty. It looked like I had been running around in bare feet. I hadn’t left the house since I got up this morning. And I never went out of my way to go out without putting shoes on. So how had this happened?

“I guess I did go to bed without my bath last night...” I said, but that had been in the male body that was currently asleep on the bed. I was sure I hadn’t been in this woman’s form before I drifted off last night.

“Hikaru-sama?”

I was getting confused by the sheer number of unanswered questions. Elvia looked at me blankly. Then she looked at my feet again, smiled with almost blinding brightness, and said, “Let’s hit the bath.”

“Uhhh...” I hadn’t expected that. She shuffled over to me where I stood, still frozen, and grabbed my hand. “E-Elvia?!”

“Nobody likes to go around dirty, right?”

“Well, I mean—yeep!” She hardly waited for me to respond before she started off, dragging me behind her. I had been in Elvia’s arms once, as we jumped from a runaway carriage, and it had given me an appreciation for just how strong and powerful she was. With my weight, I don’t think she knew I was there. If she really wanted to, she could probably tuck me under one arm and run away. All of which was to say, resistance was futile.

Still, I tried. “H-Hold on, Elvia! At least let me dress...!”

“We’re goin’ to the bath. You’d just have to undress again.”

“Not the point...”

She smiled, but ignored me, as she half-dragged, half-carried me down the hallway.

As I expected, the Guld Workshop didn’t yield much. We were able to talk personally with the dwarves who had dug up the “coffin,” but it was the same story: they found it in a tunnel they’d been digging. In other words, they’d just been working on expansions when they happened to stumble across it, and they didn’t know anything more than that.

They could tell us, though, that diggers in a neighboring tunnel had come up with several other objects at about the same time. They seemed to assume this was just coincidence, but I wondered if there might be a connection.

“Hmm...”

After our investigation at the workshop, we headed to school, but it wasn’t for our normal classes. Well, for Myusel and Minori-san, it was, but Petralka and I had another goal in mind: we were going to see Romilda. She had already set off for school by the time we arrived at the workshop that morning, and we hadn’t been able to talk to her. She hadn’t been at the site when the coffin was discovered, but she had come with her father when he brought it to the castle. We wanted to know if she had noticed anything unusual at the time.

“Oh, there she is.” It turned out it didn’t take much searching to find her. She was chattering happily with her classmates, including some of the humans and elves. It hadn’t been long ago that dwarves would only talk with other dwarves, elves would only talk with other elves, and humans stuck with humans. But recently, those kinds of racial divisions had started to ease, and everyone was learning to get along. That made me really happy, and I was reluctant to interrupt the conversation, but unfortunately, today, I had little choice.

“Hey, Romilda, can I borrow you for a second?” I said, and led her out of the classroom to another, smaller room nearby, normally used for individual consultations with students or their families.

“What’s the matter, Shinichi-sensei?” Romilda asked, although she didn’t seem particularly ill at ease. Nonetheless, she stiffened when she saw Petralka—along with two armed bodyguards—waiting in the room. “Er, ahem—what’s going on, if I may ask...?”

“Petralka, I found her,” I said.

“Mm,” Petralka responded with a nod.

This was hardly the first time Romilda had met Petralka in person, of course, and although they could hardly be called close friends, Petralka would at least remember Romilda’s name and face. Still, Romilda had never sat down one-on-one with the empress before—there’d always been a sort of social cushion between them. Like me, or her father Rydell-san, or someone else to help mediate. Romilda was often sort of along for the ride.

“Shinichi-sensei... Your Majesty...?” She looked uneasily from me to Petralka and back. For better or for worse, Petralka looked very serious; she obviously wasn’t here for chitchat. It was clear to Romilda that she had been asked for by name, and she had to be worrying that the empress was mad at her or something.

“No need to look so stiff,” Petralka said. “We simply wish to ask you a few questions.”

“Yes’m...” Romilda nodded, not quite convinced, and I gave her the rundown. The missing stuff from inside the coffin. The tracks that led from the castle in the direction of my mansion. I told her we were just curious if she knew anything at all about the incident.

“That stuff was gone...?” Romilda said, blinking, her eyes as big as saucers. “You mean it... moved?”

“There is always the possibility that it was stolen. But from the evidence available, the material seems to have moved under its own power.”

“Did you notice anything unusual, Romilda? Anything at all?”

“I’m sorry, I really didn’t...” She shook her head.

“Okay, I see. Thanks,” I said, managing a smile.

The reality was that neither Petralka nor I had really expected to get anything enlightening out of Romilda. We were both grasping at every last possibility. But that being the case, we were left with nothing to go on. No clues. Why had the goo vanished? Where had it gone? Petralka and I were just sharing a look and a sigh when Romilda said hesitantly, “Oh... Um, Shinichi-sensei...” It sounded like she had just had a thought.

“What’s up?” I said. Maybe she’d remembered something. I looked at her with hopeful eyes, but she said, “Where’s Hikaru-sensei today...?” So this wasn’t about the coffin goo at all.

“Er, uh, H-Hikaru-san? Him?” My voice almost betrayed me as I remembered the morning’s events—in particular, Hikaru-san’s complete nakedness, which I had definitely not intended or wanted to see.

“Hrm...?” Petralka watched me squirm for a second.

I cleared my throat, got my voice under control, and managed a reluctant smile as I said, “He’s not quite feeling himself today, so he decided to stay home...”

I could hardly tell them he wasn’t here because he’d woken up to discover he was a girl. Nope, no way I could say that. Even if it had been a total accident. I was just about to tell Romilda I would happily take any message she had for him, when she said, “Not quite himself...?” The blood drained from her face with alarming suddenness. Romilda was usually a pretty happy-go-lucky person (even if by the standards of, say, Elvia, she seemed downright subdued), and I’d never seen her look so concerned before.

“Um, yeah. Something the matter?”

“I... I’m afraid it might be my fault...!”

“Huh?” I frowned. That seemed to come out of left field. Romilda, though, looked like she might burst into tears. She said might, but it looked like in her mind there was hardly any doubt. “Why would it be your fault?” I asked.

“You know—because I gave Hikaru-sensei that choker yesterday!” she wailed. “It wasn’t found in the same place... But it was found on the same day...”

“You mean the same day as—”

“That coffin!”

Ahh. Yes, I remembered her saying that the choker was another item that had been dug up. I was pretty sure Hikaru-san—the male one, lying asleep on the bed—was still wearing it.

“But it was found in a different place, right? So it probably doesn’t have anything to do with—” Then I stopped. “Wait, hold on...” I was starting to sense a possibility. I was no geologist or anything, but... “What if there was a flood or something that knocked over a building, and scattered the contents all over?”

It wouldn’t all end up in the same place. It was possible that even things that had been stored in the same location could be washed dozens or hundreds of meters apart from each other, then later buried by mud and silt. The two tunnels in question seemed like completely different places, but they had been going the same direction, at the same depth. Which meant maybe the layers of earth around them had been deposited at about the same time.

So what if that “coffin” and Hikaru-san’s choker had once been in the same place? Heck, what if they belonged together? It was a dizzying idea. But when two strange things happened at the same time, it was probably more logical to assume they were connected than that they weren’t. For example...

“You mean, like, maybe by putting on that choker, Hikaru-san awakened whatever was in that coffin...? And maybe he turned into a girl as a side effect? No, or maybe...”

“What? What are you talking about?” Petralka asked, furrowing her finely shaped eyebrows at me.

“I just thought of something,” I said, but Romilda didn’t look any less worried or Petralka any less perplexed.

...How had this happened? I tried to suppress a shiver as I watched the steam rise into the air. I struggled to grasp what was happening to me. Well, it should have been obvious; it was simple enough. I just couldn’t rationally accept it.

“Whassa matter, Hikaru-sama?” A cute face appeared right in front of me, sending ripples along the surface of the water I was currently submerged in. The short hair, the floppy ears, and the innocent smile made for the perfect image of a dog-like beast girl. The faint ridiculousness of what she did and said made her seem just like a big, sweet dog that had been aggressively anthropomorphized.

Everything below the neck looked properly like a wild animal, muscular limbs and taut body—except for the bust and behind, which had the perfect amount of swell. It was obviously a woman’s body. A woman’s naked body. And a well-endowed one at that.

“N-N-Nothing...!” I answered quickly. I looked away from her and tried to make some space between us.

“Hikaru-sama?” Elvia looked puzzled by my reaction. Geez, this girl was... too open. Or she had no shame or something. Yes, my body, or at least my legs, had been dirty, and she wasn’t wrong that I needed a bath. But there was no need for her to get in with me. After Elvia had dragged me, naked, relentlessly through the hallway, we’d arrived at the changing room, where she’d unhesitatingly torn off her own clothes and then pulled me straight into the bath. And so we found ourselves here.

I let out a long breath, trying to do anything I could to stave off the rising heat in my body—not to mention my ever-increasing blood pressure as my heart got more and more out of control. For the time being, at least I could pretend my face was red because of the hot bath. Not that Elvia seemed to notice anyway.

“It’s nothing,” I repeated, and then sank down until I was submerged almost up to my nose.

My guess was that Elvia wasn’t even thinking of me as a man. She was never exactly shy about sex—maybe it had something to do with going into heat on a regular basis, the way beast people did—but she also had a deep-seated respect, almost reverence, for Shinichi-san. Her behavior towards him notwithstanding, I didn’t think she was so cavalier that she would go showing off her naked body to just any guy. That seemed evident enough just from watching her.

I paused. There was a sort of distant ache in my chest, almost a pain. Like if I didn’t take care to breathe deeply, I would run out of oxygen. My heart kept pounding away, and I started to feel like my face and body were even hotter than the water.

This body was really getting to be a lot of trouble. I couldn’t control it through sheer willpower anymore.

“Had a nice soak, Hikaru-sama?” Elvia asked, splashing in the water like a child.

“Er, yeah, I guess...”

“Great! Time to help you wash up, then!”

“Huh? No, you don’t have to—”

Washing, of course, was why we were in the bath in the first place. Actually, you were supposed to wash before you got in. But, reluctant to sit there naked in front of Elvia, I’d lunged for the tub as soon as we arrived.

“It’s like—I mean, it’s not that it isn’t a good idea, but—”

“They asked me to take care of you, Hikaru-sama,” Elvia said proudly.

“No, listen, I’m pretty sure they meant, like, as my bodyguard—”

“We’ll wash over there.” Then she dove underwater, leaving behind only a little bubble.

I was just thinking Huh? when I felt her grab hold of me, reservations and all.

“Hey—hold on—” I was so shaken that I could hardly get out more than a word or two. Aw, man. It turned out I was no better than Shinichi-san. Pathetic. The feeling of Elvia’s soft chest pressing against my midriff threw my entire mental system completely out of whack.

Elvia, seeming completely oblivious to my discombobulation, held me tight with both arms and lifted me easily out of the water. The closest thing I could do to fighting back was to kick helplessly at the air. But of course, it didn’t make any difference against the sheer physical power of a werewolf.

“Okay, just sit right here.” Elvia plopped me happily onto a stool.

“F-Forget about it, okay, Elvia? I’ll do it myself!”

“Ya don’t have to worry so much! I’ll get you nice and clean!”

Whoever had trusted Elvia with me—Minori-san, Myusel, or Shinichi-san—she was obviously stoked about it. She had a huge grin on her face. I tried to stand up, and she easily pushed me back down with one hand, then grabbed a bar of soap and began lathering it between her palms.

“Elvia...?”

“Don’t fret, just stay right there,” she instructed, and then she set to scrubbing me—forgoing any kind of towel, using only her soap-bubble-covered hands. Maybe that’s just how she always used soap, but still...

“Hey...!” I said. I didn’t care what she had been told; this was too much. “Stop...”

“Don’t move,” she said. “Ya wouldn’t want to slip, would you?” Meanwhile, she kept sweeping her hands all over my body. I was basically getting a massage from a beautiful woman...

“Ahh... Oh...” I couldn’t prevent a moan from coming out my lips.

“Feels good, huh?”

“That’s not—”

Look, I know. I know Elvia didn’t mean anything by the question. That it was hardly different from a hairdresser who says “Let me know if the water’s too hot” when she’s washing your hair. So it would have been fine for me to just say, “Yeah, it feels nice.” But then... Then there were Elvia’s hands, running over my body among the suds. There was the way she braced herself against me so I wouldn’t fall off the stool, reaching around to soap me.

“You’re, uh, used to this, huh?”

“Yeah, I used to help Big Sis Ama and Big Sis Jiji get clean all the time when we were kids!”

“Oh, uh... Oh.”

That’s right—Elvia had two sisters, didn’t she?

In the end, I just let Elvia have her way with me, her hands going here, there, and everywhere, while I focused on trying not to make any embarrassing sounds. As for her, she was in such a good mood she was even humming a little tune. I didn’t recognize the melody—maybe it was from Bahairam. As far as she was concerned, the current situation wasn’t any stranger than being in the bath with one of her sisters.

And yet... And yet... Yes, I looked like a woman on the outside; at the moment, I lacked the organ that would have stood up and made my presence here inexcusable in a man’s body. But deep inside, I was painfully aware of Elvia’s nakedness, very much as a man. Elvia supposedly understood that awareness was there, yet she didn’t show the slightest hesitation in getting in the bath together.

I’d heard about how Elvia had dragged Shinichi-san to the bath before, but that was supposedly because of something or other that happened to her on account of the moon or something. And she was crazy for Shinichi-san anyway. With me, it was different. I wondered what she really thought about all this.

“I’m surprised you decided to jump in the bath with me, Elvia,” I mumbled.

“Huh?” She stopped scrubbing. “Somethin’ the matter?”

“Well, I mean, it’s just—I know I look like a woman and all, but... what’s inside hasn’t changed, you understand?”

I was a little reluctant to say it. After all, if she burst out, “Oh yeah, that’s right!” and got upset, it would suck. But at the same time, I couldn’t just let all this happen without at least trying to make sure we were on the same page. I needed to know what Elvia thought was going on when she hopped in the bath with female me.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I guess you’re right.” Completely matter-of-fact.

That put me on the back foot. I blinked. I was briefly tempted to look back and see what kind of expression was on her face, but I resisted the impulse. So I guess she really hadn’t been thinking of me as a man. That made sense, I guess, but that recognition was mingled with a certain disappointment at her density—and in fact, for some reason, a certain disappointment in general. I wondered why.

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 because 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 thought 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...