Chapter Three: The Party’s Over

Today was to be the last day of shooting.

We were gathered on our usual hilltop—but we were all looking at each other with troubled expressions.

We couldn’t start filming.

The reason? Our lead actress was missing.

“Is Petralka not here yet?” I asked.

“Usually, she’s earlier than any of us,” Minori-san said from beside me, equally perplexed.

She was right: every other day, Petralka had been here long before I arrived after the end of classes; she would be standing there with her back turned to her bodyguards and the JSDF people who were helping with the shoot, chiding, “You are late, Shinichi.”

But now even her personal escort of knights didn’t know where she was.

“Do you suppose something’s happened?” Myusel said worriedly from my other side. I was silent. I certainly couldn’t deny the possibility.

After all, at bottom, she was Her Majesty the Empress. She was one of the most important people in the Eldant Empire, and such a likely target of assassins that she even had anti-magic patterns on her body.

We hadn’t specifically announced that we were filming in this location, but we hadn’t been treating the information as absolutely top secret, either. I mean, even Elvia was on set here. As much as I thought it unlikely, it was impossible to rule out a kidnapping or even an assassination—attacks that would give us far more to worry about than just finishing our movie.

I couldn’t stop the unpleasant thoughts from swirling in my head.

“Uh, Minori-san, I’m going to go over to the castle...”

“What, now?”

“We can’t start filming without Petralka anyway, right?”

She was the star, after all. There were some scenes we could do that didn’t include her, but the atmosphere on the set was just different with her around. Minori-san and I might have been officially running the place, but Petralka was without question the beating heart of our film effort.

“Hmm...” Minori-san looked concerned for a moment, but then, to my relief, nodded. “Okay. I’ll come, too. Myusel, can you handle things here?”

“Y-Yes, I can.” Myusel nodded.

I looked around, then pointed at the sky over our collective heads. “I don’t like these clouds!” I bellowed. “So everybody hunker down until we get some better ones!”

The response from the students was simple: “Huh?”

Fair enough, I guess.

“Look who’s a big, important director,” Minori-san said.

“I’m surprised you recognize it.”

“My dad was nuts for Kurosawa movies.”

“I always wanted to say that once. Er, we’ll be leaving the set for a while, so everybody, do whatever you can in the meantime! And if you can’t do anything, just hang tight!”

“Yessir!” came the enthusiastic response.

The students set about their work, and Minori-san and I made for the JSDF LAV parked beside the hill.

Despite the abruptness of our visit, Minori-san and I were admitted into the castle. Inside, things were pretty calm; it sure didn’t look like they thought anything had happened to Petralka. After all, we already knew how that looked, and nobody would have had time for us then.

That was a relief to me, but it left us with the question of why Petralka hadn’t shown up at the set.

Minori-san and I stood whispering outside the audience chamber as we waited for the empress.

“Maybe she just forgot we were filming today?” I said.

“Yeah, but then I wouldn’t expect to wait so long to see her,” Minori-san replied.

Typically, Petralka was waiting in the audience chamber to receive us, but today it was sort of the opposite. Of course, that was understandable, given how suddenly we had requested to see her, but it was still slightly unusual.

Finally, the door opened, and Petralka could be seen on the other side. Standing beside her was the knight Garius. Prime Minister Zahar was nowhere to be seen, but still, it was a perfectly normal sight.

And yet Petralka, who didn’t say a word, was obviously unhappy. She sat on the throne with a sullen look on her face, resting her chin on her hands. Garius looked more or less impassive, as always, but I thought it was possible to detect a hint of irritation in his expression.

You could cut the tension with a knife. Had something happened? Minori-san and I looked at each other.

But then Garius said, “We know why you’re here. I am sorry, but Her Highness will no longer be participating in your fyl-ming.”

“Huh...?” I said, dumbfounded.

Petralka, however, exclaimed, “Garius, we will speak for ourself!”

The minister seemed to ignore her; his focus remained on me. “Your fyl-ming has caused Her Highness’s public duties to languish. We can turn a blind eye to the occasional laxity... But this cannot go any further.”

“W-Wait, but... P-Petralka, didn’t you say it was all right?”

She didn’t answer me. Around here, absence of refusal was tantamount to confirmation. But...

“It was just two or three hours after classes each day,” I protested. Back when I had first come to the Eldant Empire, Petralka had spent nearly that much time at my house on an almost daily basis. I couldn’t see how this was so different.

“But the influence of those hours cannot be confined to them,” Garius said. He explained that while Petralka was attending to her duties at the castle, she seemed constantly distracted—if he took his eyes off her for one second, she was suddenly reading a script, or fiddling with one of her costumes. Further, he said, she was obviously exhausted—once she had even fallen asleep in the audience chamber in the middle of a discussion with her advisors.

“So you’re saying...”

I glanced at Minori-san, who nodded. She seemed to have come to the same conclusion. In a word, Petralka had simply become too wrapped up in the filmmaking.

It’s a common enough story, and not just in the world of movies. Sometimes a person gets too into some hobby, going so far as to change the way they live to accommodate it. It can go so far that the hobby becomes the most important thing to them. They quit their job or stop coming to school, cut off relations with their friends, and even grow distant from their family, becoming completely engrossed in whatever it is that has their attention.

Now, of course, sometimes people manage to parlay these hobbies into paying work. My parents were a classic case.

But the reality is that far, far more often, these things end in failure—a person gives everything they have to their interest, only to end up burned-out and empty. If the person recognizes what’s going on, sometimes that’s enough. The problems start when all this stuff begins to have an effect on the people around the person with the obsession.

Think of a grown man with a wife and kids, for example. Or, say, Petralka right here and now.

“It so happens that there has been a particularly large number of pressing concerns of late,” Garius said.

Apparently, the kingdom of Bahairam, a neighboring country with whom the Eldant Empire was at war, had been behaving provocatively, and Garius and others were wracking their brains about what to do about it. He claimed that a small number of Bahairamanian special-ops units had been making lightning-quick incursions across the border. It wasn’t enough to change the tide of the war or anything, but if they weren’t careful, one of those units might get dangerously close to the Eldant capital.

On top of that, there had been eyewitness sightings of a dragon in the vicinity of the capital.

It hadn’t done any damage yet, but we were talking about something bigger than a wyvern—an aggressive, violent carnivore. Very dangerous, Garius said. If there really was a dragon in the area, they would have to organize a hunting party posthaste. But given the pressure from Bahairam, no one could agree how much manpower the royal forces could spare to deal with the wayward drake.

And so on and so forth.

As I listened, I had to agree that all of these situations sounded awfully dire, and that whoever might have to handle the details, the broad contours of the problems definitely had to be addressed by the empress. So far, none of these issues had resulted in any harm to the empire, but they could easily develop into something where people’s lives hung in the balance.

“Whatever the case, this isn’t good,” I said.

“That’s for sure,” Minori-san said.

Much as I hated to admit it, there were a lot of people among the ranks of the otaku who had “gone too far” like I described above. Cosplayers went to enough events that I was sure Minori-san knew more than a few people like that herself.

“Well... It’s not like we were ever planning to film an entire movie, anyway.”

In fact, Minori-san had already given Matoba-san several clips to use as “secondary leaks.” To convince people that this was really a stealth marketing campaign for a new movie, we had to release a certain amount of material—enough that people would start to lose interest.

From that perspective, the more stuff we could film, the better, but there was no bright line dividing “not enough material” from “too much.” We would work out the kinks in post.

“Okay,” I said to Garius. “Minori-san and I will figure out some way to—”

“You will not!” Petralka shouted.

I looked at her, more than a little rattled, to find she had jumped up from her throne.

“We shall not abide any such thing!”

“B-But—”

“We are not to be argued with!” Petralka said, stamping her foot on the floor. She was the very picture of a tantruming child: she shook her head back and forth to emphasize her point, her long silver hair, tied off into tails, flowing through the air.

Come to think of it...

When did Petralka start wearing her hair like that all the time?

Her hair wasn’t simply down, as it usually was; it was in the twintail style, similar to Myusel’s, that she wore on set. The ’do looked good on her, but it was also a distinctive feature of her role as “the magical girl.” If she wasn’t changing her hair back, maybe it was a sign that she was losing her grip on the distinction between on-set and off.

This was bad.

I had dragged Petralka into this hoping it would help her feel a little better, but I hadn’t expected it to be as “effective” as this.

“No! No! No! No! NO!”

“Your Majesty—”

“It isn’t done yet!” Petralka shrieked, as if to crush Garius’s words with her exclamation.

“Petralka, it’s all right. I’m sure Minori-san and I can figure out a way to—”

“We disavow any filming done in our absence!”

I had nothing to say to that.

Instead, Garius spoke up, trying to sound reasonable. “Your Majesty, there are a great many matters you must attend to.” His voice was soft, but firm. “As Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire, this is your—”

“Nuh-uh! We won’t!” Her voice was like a slap.

“Your Majesty...”

“We are sick and tired of being—”

“Majesty!”

Garius’s voice was no longer gentle; it was sharp as a sword. He was not going to let her finish that sentence. The thought of what she was about to say angered him, and you could hear it.

Petralka fell quiet, brought up short by the rebuke. A painful silence descended upon the audience chamber.

What should I do...?

I was, frankly, panicking inside. No matter how you cut it, this was my fault, and it was up to me to do something about it. But at the moment, Petralka seemed likely to rebuff anything I said out of sheer spite.

“Your Majesty... If I may be so bold?”

It was an unexpected voice that broke the silence.

“Minori-san?” I asked. I wasn’t the only one who was taken aback: Petralka and Garius were both looking at her as if they didn’t quite understand what was going on. To this point, although Minori-san frequently accompanied me into the audience chamber as my bodyguard, she had never once spoken directly to Petralka.

“Your words at this moment, Your Majesty, are impossibly irresponsible.” Petralka’s eyes went as wide as dinner plates, but Minori-san forged ahead. “I understand how much you want to keep enjoying the filming. Believe me, I do. I’ve had more than a little fun with it, myself. But it’s so engaging precisely because it’s just a way of passing an all-too-short moment.”

“What is it you’re saying...?”

“Please think, Your Majesty. Compare that ‘magical girl’ to the Empress of the Holy Eldant Empire. One is real, and the other... well, isn’t.”

“W-Well...”

“It’s exactly your obvious difference from your predecessors that allows all of us to appreciate your constant kindness. If you forget about what’s real, how will we ever get you back? If you insist on turning your back on the reality in front of you—if you lose yourself in fantasy—how will it profit you as Empress?”

Minori-san’s expression was clear and calm as she spoke.

“Will you abandon who you are, and take on a fake identity instead?”

She didn’t shout her question—but in the noiseless room, her voice seemed louder than even Petralka and Garius’s yelling.

The empress and her advisor were both absolutely quiet. Even I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.

Finally, Petralka let out a kind of half-choke and slumped back onto her throne. Her hands gripped her knees as if to keep her planted there, and she wouldn’t look up. Her hair hid her face, so it was impossible to say exactly what her expression was at that moment...

“Er, u-um!” I spoke up, desperate to escape the overwhelming tension in the room. “Let’s devote today to business, okay?”

Petralka said nothing.

“We’ll call off the shoot for now. I’m sure everyone’s tired from working so many days in a row.”

Still she didn’t speak.

“O-Okay, then! Let’s call it here for today,” I said, bowing my head and hoping this would serve as a neat conclusion.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Minori-san had her head bowed, as well. “Excuse us, Your Majesty!” she said. Then both of us turned smartly on our heels and exited the audience chamber.

I glanced back just as the door was closing. Petralka was still sitting on her throne, still looking at the ground, not so much as glancing after us. I figured she might be feeling a bit betrayed right then.

I understood what she was experiencing.

Not, obviously, the pressure of being an empress; that, I had to leave to my imagination. But the simple happiness that came from working on our “movie.”

But... I’m sure Minori-san’s right, I thought.

There was a definite difference between getting away for a while and trying to escape reality.

A former home security guard like me ought to know that better than anyone.

The moon was noticeably bright that evening. I was staring vaguely out the window into the cloudless night sky.

A sigh escaped me.

“Sigh...”

Filming for the day had been hastily canceled. I didn’t really mind that much; it wasn’t going to do us any harm. In fact, with everything going so smoothly, we were on track to finish sooner than expected. Taking a day or two off might actually help keep everything harmonious.

“But what am I gonna do?”

The problems would come after that.

We could finish the filming, but would Petralka accept what we had done? It would be possible to hurry and finish the shoot without her, but that would probably just encourage her to nurse a grudge that had no outlet. It’s human nature to want to see through something you’ve started.

But we couldn’t let Petralka just get completely wrapped up in moviemaking, either. You hardly had to look at the annals of history to know that a ruler who let personal interests override concerns of state was demonstrating a classic case of bad leadership. When prosperous empires waned and fell, it was often under the influence of just such a ruler throwing domestic politics and economics into disarray.

Not that I thought Petralka was that far gone, but if she went on like this, it wouldn’t surprise me if some group coalesced seeking to remove her from the throne. Her own parents’ deaths had been on account of a struggle for the succession. It was very likely that there were still elements within the Eldant Empire set on resisting her rule.

“It may be ‘just a hobby,’ but it’s still a hobby,” I said to myself. As an otaku, I had heard my own interests derided with the expression “just a hobby” plenty of times, and I hated it. But at the same time, letting a personal pastime take over to the point where it posed a danger to your life was highly questionable. In that sense, Minori-san’s distinction between the real and the fake, fantasy and reality, hit home.

A breath of fresh air helps because you only take one. Sweets are tasty because you only have a little between meals. Wait... Is that right? No, yeah. I’m sure it is. I think.

“Ahh...” I let out another long breath.

Just at that moment, someone knocked on the door of my room.

“Yes? Come in,” I said, turning.

I had a pretty good idea who it was—and just as I expected, Myusel poked her head in hesitantly from the hallway.

“What’s up?”

It was already pretty late.

“I saw that the lights were still on in your room, so...” Myusel entered as she spoke. “If you’re having trouble sleeping, I thought... If you like...”

She was carrying a tray with a mug of some kind of steaming liquid on it. At first I thought it might be tea, but it didn’t smell like it.

“Thank you,” I said. “But... what’s this?”

“Warm milk,” she said, placing the mug on my desk. “Minori-san told me it’s good to drink before you go to sleep.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve heard the same thing.”

Milk, just slightly warmed, was easy on the stomach and helped alleviate any sense of hunger. Plus, the amino acids it contained prompted the brain to release sleep hormones. That was the story, anyway.

It was like some kind of super-drink.

“Thanks, Myusel. Sorry for always putting you to all this trouble.”

“Not at all.” Her expression, which had been slightly concerned, softened like a blossoming flower. I suppose she had been worried that she had overstepped herself—that’s just the kind of person my maid was.

But how could I consider this to be any kind of imposition? To have such a beautiful young woman go out of her way to make this drink for me—the thought alone was enough to set my heart dancing with happiness. She could have made me vegetable juice, or tea made from fish wort—let alone hot milk—and I would have gulped it down with a smile on my face!

I drank the milk in a single swallow, and nodded.

“Delicious.”

It was warm, and faintly sweet. She had probably added a little sugar. I could definitely see where this would quiet a growling stomach and help you sleep.

“That was good. But maybe you could make a little more of it next time.”

“Oh... Was there not enough?”

“Not quite. And you’ll need to bring another cup, too.”

“Another—?”

“I want you to share it with me. Since you’ve gone to the trouble.”

“Oh...! But I—I mean, is that all right?” Myusel asked, blushing.

Gosh, she really does hesitate in everything she does, doesn’t she? What a modest young woman.

“It tastes really good. Or did you already try some before you brought it to me?” I said teasingly.

To my surprise, Myusel gave a ginger nod. “I always try what I make, to make sure it tastes all right, and to check for poison.”

“Poison?!” I said, a little shocked.

Myusel explained that this was standard procedure for maids working in a noble household (or any household on that level). I had to admit, the most frequent tool I heard about in stories of power struggles was definitely poison. Some claimed that poison had killed more people throughout human history than any other weapon.

Come to think of it, hadn’t Petralka’s parents died by poison? That just went to show what a common danger it was for nobles and rich people here.

It wasn’t so different in our world: I heard once that silver was popular for dining utensils in the Middle Ages because it would change color if exposed to poison, thereby alerting the diner to the danger. That’s also supposedly what gave rise to the popular notion that silver could kill monsters.

But anyway...

“Wait... So every time, with all our food, you—”

“Yes, of course,” Myusel said.

Even though she made the food herself, there was always the possibility that the serving utensils she had been brought could have poison on them, or that some bottle of spices might have been changed out for something much more dangerous. So as a rule, Myusel would taste the food, wait half an hour or so, and if she still felt okay, then she would start cooking for the rest of us.

What a lot of work!

“But, Master... What’s the matter?” Myusel fixed me with a probing look.

“Huh?”

“Oh, I mean... What’s keeping you awake so late?”

“Oh, that... Sorry to worry you.”

“No, not at all.” Myusel shook her head.

“Maybe I could trouble you to talk with me for a few minutes?”

“Of course—it would make me, er, very happy if I could serve as your conversation partner.” Myusel looked down shyly.

We often bottle up our worries, keeping them to ourselves and trying to act as if nothing’s wrong. Frankly, that’s exactly why they’re worrisome. When you share those sorts of concerns with someone else, you can find solutions coming from unexpected places.

And so I told Myusel all of it: how I had invited Petralka to be part of the filming in hopes that it would make her feel better. How she had gotten so into it that she ended up neglecting her work. How I wanted to honor her feelings, but had the distinct sense that things couldn’t go on like this.

I’m sure my explanation was awkward. Maybe it didn’t even make complete sense. But Myusel listened quietly to me the entire time.

Finally...

“You’re really... very kind, aren’t you, Shinichi-sama?”

She said it as if it were so simple, so obvious.

“Huh? I don’t—I don’t really think so, no...”

I knew Myusel often said that sort of thing about me, but it really wasn’t true. I was just doing what I enjoyed, what seemed good to me.

“It is true. You think about the people around you, so much that it starts to upset you. I think... I don’t quite know how to put this into words, but I think that’s amazing.”

She may have stumbled slightly over her words, but Myusel’s eyes were fixed firmly on me.

I looked away, starting to get embarrassed.

“But... I also understand how Her Majesty feels,” Myusel said, her face clouding slightly.

The difference in their social status was so great that it was impossible to say that Myusel and Petralka were friends, exactly—but what with this and that, they had a good relationship. In her own way, Myusel was probably worried about Petralka, too.

“I’ve enjoyed pretending to be someone else, myself...”

“You too, huh?”

“Yes.”

I doubt there’s anyone anywhere who’s completely satisfied with everything about themselves. To a greater or lesser extent, we all have some kind of inferiority complex.

That’s why we go head over heels for something different, or discover a work we enjoy, and project ourselves into it. It’s certainly not a bad thing. In fact, it can give us an ideal to work towards, which helps give us hope.

“Knowing where to draw the line can be tough, huh?” I said.

“Yes,” Myusel agreed, nodding.

I still didn’t have any firm idea of what I was going to do, but as I felt the warmth from the milk spread through me, I looked back out the window, up into the night sky.

An hour or so later.

Myusel had gone back to her room; she was probably already asleep.

“I can’t sleep, though...”

I sat up in bed with a sigh.

I groped my way along the edge of the bed until I found the chest sitting to one side. I reached out and flicked the bellflower-shaped antique with my finger. The magical object immediately began to emit a soft glow, providing the room with dim illumination.

“Sorry,” I said, apologizing to the sprites inside for startling them. Then I slowly got down from my bed. I had already done quite a bit of fruitless tossing and turning; I might as well try taking a walk around the mansion to clear my head.

I left my room, trying to be as quiet as possible.

“Hm...”

The hallway wasn’t completely dark, but had lights on the wall at regular intervals. They were oil lamps that were left burning all night—essentially a cousin of the lantern. Naturally, they didn’t give off the bright, bold light of an electric lamp, but only just enough of a glow that you could sort of see where you were going.

I instinctively leaned forward a little, trying to be careful of what was underfoot. I walked like that, slightly hunched over, through the dim mansion. With many a sigh, I rounded a corner and—

“Yikes!”

—ran into something soft.

Hm? I recognize this feeling...

“Shinichi-kun?”

“M-Minori-san?!”

Despite my surprise, I put the pieces together.

I get it. It’s Minori-san’s boobs. No wonder it seemed familiar!

I scrambled backwards even as these one-step-away-from-being-sued-for-sexual-harassment thoughts ran through my mind. Apparently, Minori-san had just happened to be coming around the corner from the other direction at that exact moment.

“What’s up? It’s awfully late.”

“Oh, I just couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d take a little walk and—wait, what about you?”

As the question left my mouth, I noticed something: Minori-san wasn’t in her usual military uniform, but in battle gear. In fact, her entire body was covered in a thin sweat.

“Same here,” she said and shrugged.

“Uh... in full combat gear, though?”

“Oh... It’s just easy to move in. I always dress like this at night.”

“You mean they’re your pajamas?”

“No! It’s kind of... instead of a gi.”

She looked almost shy as she spoke. Wooh! How refreshing is it to see that kind of expression from Minori-san?

“A gi?”

“Sure. You know, a martial arts uniform.”

“A-ha...”

Given that Minori-san was a member of the JSDF, it made good sense that she might wear a martial arts gi. The incident with the “assembly of patriots” had already alerted me to her considerable fighting abilities.

“Right after I wake up and right before I go to bed, I always do a little light training. Just a set of basic kata. It’s what I’ve done ever since I was a kid, so it’s like... If I don’t do it, I actually have trouble sleeping.”

“Since you were a kid?”

Meaning these fighting skills were something she had acquired before joining the military.

Minori-san gave me an ambiguous smile, but didn’t say anything else. Maybe it was her way of telling me not to press the subject.

She put her back to the wall, her smile growing a little bit pained.

“Stupid me. Maybe I went too far today.”

“Huh? What are we talking about?” I said, thrown by the sudden change of subject.

“I actually lectured Her Majesty.”

“Oh, that...”

She meant today’s (or was it yesterday’s by now?) audience.

“Think she’ll have my head cut off tomorrow?”

“No way. Petralka’s not the type.”

“Shinichi-kun, you’re always so confident,” she said with a chuckle. “It’s almost like no one could know Petralka better than you.”

“I don’t— That’s not—”

“I was just kidding.”

“Sure... Sure.”

I leaned against the wall next to her. The lights in the hall shone on her face in profile. I looked vacantly into the middle distance, just like she was doing, and asked, “What do you think we ought to do?”

“You mean about the empress?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you ask her to be a part of this anyway, Shinichi-kun?”

“I was just hoping I could make her feel better. Even a little bit...”

I had thought of her crying in her sleep, hidden where no one would see her, and I had wanted to lift just a small part of that burden. It had never occurred to me that Petralka might become obsessed with the very thing I was hoping would help her. With pretending to be someone else. Living a different life.

Yes, that could feel good, but—

“I agree, cosplaying is a lot of fun,” Minori-san said. “It’s a quick way to feel like you’re somebody other than you are. To be honest, I enjoy that aspect of it. That’s part of why I do it.”

“I got that feeling somehow,” I answered.

I didn’t have any cosplay experience, but I had played online games, role-playing things where you took on the identity of a particular character. I thought the attraction was something similar. I enjoyed it even when the character was on a computer screen and the communicating was all done via in-game chat. How much more engaging would it be to put on a costume?

“Yes, it’s fun,” Minori-san went on. “But I don’t think we should use it as a way to escape.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Cosplay, anything designed to entertain us... In the end, it’s all just fiction. A temporary way to forget about reality. Not a way to spend our lives running.”

“To spend our lives running...”

“Yeah. If you’re not careful, you can find your whole life consumed by it.” There was something like conviction in her voice. “I can sure imagine how being an empress wouldn’t be easy. But the fact is, she is an empress, and nothing else. Just like you can’t really be anything but Kanou Shinichi, ultimately, nobody can be anyone but who they are.”

I stood there, taking it all in.

“Suppose, just suppose, that she abdicated as empress. Would that let her keep pretending to be that magical girl forever?”

“No... Of course not.”

If Petralka gave up her position, even the policies favoring otaku culture—and everything that had come from them—could well disappear. Even this mansion we were living in was really on loan to us from the empress.

“You’re really... grown-up, Minori-san,” I said.

There was something persuasive about the way she spoke. I felt like even if I had said the same words, they wouldn’t have sounded the same way. Maybe it was because Minori-san seemed like she was backed up by life experience. This wasn’t empty philosophy or an idea she’d gotten from someone else. She was talking about something she had lived through.

“I really don’t think so,” she said, her face falling. “I just... don’t want Her Majesty to become like me.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Hmm,” Minori-san said. “Do you really want to know?” She glanced at me.

“I—I mean, I don’t want to pry or anything...” I shook my head.

By this point, even I had a vague sense of what was going on. I had noticed Minori-san forcefully changing the subject sometimes, and I could tell that whatever she was talking about now was somehow connected.

And yes, I wondered about it, but I wasn’t going to interrogate her just to satisfy my curiosity.

But then Minori-san went “Hmm” again, a pained smile coming over her face. Was it just me, or was there a hint of self-deprecation there?

“Sorry,” she said, “that was a loaded question. I want to tell you. Will you listen?”

“S-Sure.” When she put it that way, I had no reason to refuse.

Minori-san’s eyes half-closed, and she appeared to be looking at something far in the distance as she started talking. “I was— Well, I’m the child my parents finally managed to have after years and years of trying. But my mom died right after she gave birth to me. There’s some danger associated with having kids later in life, you know? So my family was just my dad and me. I didn’t have any siblings, obviously. In fact, I barely had any relatives at all. It was just me and Dad.”

Her smile grew a little deeper then. And, I thought, a little sadder.

“But my dad didn’t appreciate me much.”

It was such an offhanded way of saying it, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “What? But... why?”

Her mother had given her life to produce this child, the child they had longed and hoped for for so many years. And aren’t fathers supposed to adore daughters? I knew my dad, for one, was a total softie when it came to my younger sister, Shizuki.

“Because I was a girl.” Minori-san shrugged.

“What...?”

“My dad... He wanted an heir.”

An heir? What was this, a samurai drama?

“Sounds old-fashioned, huh? But my dad was the head of a famous dojo, and he desperately wanted a son to be his successor. Don’t get me wrong, he was perfectly willing to raise me and everything, but it was... out of duty. Nothing more than that. Forget summer family vacations. He didn’t even come to school visit days.”

It would have been easy to say, “That’s awful!” But I didn’t actually know Minori-san’s dad, so I wasn’t really in a position to criticize him. And I didn’t get the feeling that Minori-san had told me about this hoping that I would badmouth him.

“He didn’t show his soft side very often. And he hardly ever drank. But when he was drunk, once in a while, I’d hear him muttering, ‘If only you’d been a boy...’ I don’t think he ever remembered saying it, but when you’re the person who has to hear it... Believe me, it’s not something you forget.”

“Yeah... I could see that.”

“So I started training in hopes of impressing my father. I might never have a boy’s body, but I thought I could become a man inside. Pretty dumb, huh?”

I was silent.

“It wasn’t possible, of course. In fact, the irony was, as I went through middle school and high school, I started... growing up.” She patted her chest with a distressingly dismissive motion. “Still, I refused to believe that all my work had been for nothing. I decided to go somewhere I could put my fighting skills to good use. Somewhere I could show that I was the equal of any man. And so I joined the Japan Self-Defense Force.”

“That’s...” I was lost for words. I felt like I should say something, but I didn’t have the slightest idea what.

“But my dad died before I could earn his approval,” Minori-san said flatly. There was no hint of tragedy in her voice, but that very lack of sadness made her words sound impossibly somber to me.

“It was like I had been possessed, and all of a sudden... I wasn’t. I started to wonder what I was doing. I had always forced myself to avoid cute clothes and accessories and plush toys, all those girly things. I had refused to admit that I actually enjoyed them.”

As if being interested in them was a bad thing.

“And all of a sudden... All that was meaningless. But it was way too late to just go back and be a ‘normal’ girl. I had been lying to myself for so long that I couldn’t take it back.”

We weren’t talking about just a year or two here. Minori-san had probably been working on herself for a decade or more, ever since she could think for herself. “I should be more like a man.” “I shouldn’t be girlish.” All that time she had been repeating those things, like the words of a curse. They had sunk in, become a part of her, and after that there was no getting them out.

The fact that she only cosplayed as guys must have been related to her desire to become a man. Maybe it accounted for the way she kept her hair in a bun, too: she wanted to let it grow, like a girl, but she had spent so long suppressing that sort of desire that she couldn’t just let it hang down.

“In a way, the only girlish things about me are these boobs and the whole fujoshi thing...”

“That isn’t true!” I suddenly found myself shouting. Then, remembering that it was the middle of the night, I quickly brought my voice down. “That’s not true at all. If you aren’t girlish, Minori-san, then who in the world is?”

“Shinichi-kun?”

“I mean, I know I have a bad habit of looking at your chest—sorry about that. But that doesn’t mean other parts of you aren’t perfectly womanly. Absolutely not at all! Take that maid outfit from the other day—it looked great on you!”

“Hmmm...” Minori-san smiled, looking like she wasn’t quite sure about that.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what she was trying to say. To her, the maid thing was itself basically cosplay. She might argue that because I was used to how she normally looked, the difference made her look more womanly than she would have otherwise. “Gap moe,” if you will. Again, I understood the logic.

But still...

“I’m the older child in my family,” I said. “And I’ve always, always wanted an older sister.”

“Say what...?” The sudden change of topic left Minori-san scratching her head.

But I pushed ahead. “With a little sister around, it’s always, ‘You’re her big brother. You have to set a good example.’ That sort of thing. Since the little sister was born after you, everything is harder with her, and you’re kind of... pushed to the side.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So I always wanted, you know, an older sister who would look out for me and be nice to me and everything.”

“I don’t think that’s physically possible.”

“Obviously, but... Little kids don’t understand how these things work, right? So I went to my parents and begged them for an older sister. But they didn’t quite understand.”

I mean, what kind of parents say to a kid, “Ahh. So you’re moe for older sisters, huh?” But mine did.

“...................You’ve had kind of a weird life yourself, it sounds like.”

Well, considering their occupations...

“But anyway, that appreciation for older sisters has always been there inside me. So I’ve always had a certain reaction to the term ‘older-sister moe.’”

To be fair, I was moe for older sisters, or least, I ended up that way.

“The point I’m making is, Minori-san, you rank awfully high in the annals of older-sister-ish characters!”

“Sigh... Wait, who’s a character?”

“There’s a lot of variation in older-sister-type characters these days, but the primary characteristic is definitely motherliness. This capacity they have for healing by virtue of being older. Yeah, there are violent older sister-types and cool ones and whatever, but there’s no intrinsic connection between those qualities and being an older sister-type. From that perspective Minori-san, I think you’re perfect!” I clenched my fist, which always makes an argument more convincing. “And on top of that, you actually turn out to be really strong in a fight?! The type who can protect a person when the moment comes?! The type who jumps out in front with a ‘You won’t die—I’m here to protect you, after all!’?!”

“Er, I mean, I am your bodyguard...”

“The point is, you’re great! You’re fine! I know older sister characters—you can trust me!”

“But you like all sorts of characters.”

“Of course I do. I’m pretty much game for anything but little-sister moe and cross-dressers. But so what?”

Minori-san didn’t answer; there was an instant of silence.

The next second, both of us started laughing—and then, once again remembering the time, quickly shut ourselves up.

“Hah! Now I get it. Now I see why Myusel and Elvia and Her Highness are all so into you.”

“Sorry? What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? You’re a total lady-killer, Shinichi-kun!”

Seriously, I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Ahem. Not to brag,” I said, “but you’re talking to the home security guard who got shot down by his very own girl-next-door when he confessed his feelings for her.”

“That’s really not to brag.”

“Otakuism 101: self-flagellation.”

“Hehe.........” Minori-san smiled gently. Then she said, “Thanks, Shinichi-kun. I feel better.”

The next morning.

Before I went to school, I went to Eldant Castle. I had Minori-san and Myusel wait outside. Normally they would come into the audience chamber with me, but I had my reasons for wanting to go in alone today.

I had to persuade Petralka.

Rather than having a bunch of people around who might all jump in, I thought it might be easier for her to accept what I had to say if she only had to talk to me.

“Well then, Shinichi—what did you want?” Petralka asked from her usual spot on the throne.

In fact, everything was as it usually was. She was leaning on the armrests, her chin on her hand. She used the same important tone she always did. (To be fair, she was important.) But today, she lacked a certain... energy. There was no strength in her expression. She almost seemed downright tired.

“I’ve come today with a request for Your Majesty and Minister Cordobal,” I said. My carefully polite diction caused Petralka and Garius both to raise an eyebrow at me. No doubt they realized I was trying to sound especially respectful as I told them my wish.

“And what is that?”

“To continue shooting.” Petralka’s face tightened a little at that. I had expected that, so I ignored her and went on: “I ask your permission to resume filming.”

“Meaning... without us?” Petralka asked in a strained voice.

I shook my head. “Not at all. I respectfully request Your Majesty’s participation.”

Petralka didn’t say anything, but her expression brightened immediately. Garius, predictably, looked much less pleased.

“Shinichi. I’m sure you recall our conversation yesterday,” he said. “That would be most difficult for us.”

“About that,” I said, turning toward him. “I’m concerned that if we quit filming now, we’re going to be left with a sense of dissatisfaction. Me, Her Majesty—all of us. When I think about the shoot, I really want to be sure we can look back on it without regret.”

“But didn’t you say you could finish the work without Her Majesty?”

“The making-of material, yes,” I said. “But I’m not talking about that now. I’m thinking about finishing the complete movie. I want to go all the way to the end with this effort, please. And for that, we absolutely need our lead actress—we need Petralka.”

“Mere self-indulgence,” Garius sniffed. “There are already enough problems on account of this activity. Extending beyond the original schedule is out of the question.”

Er, well, technically, he’s absolutely right. But...

“It’s true, I want to extend. But I’ve got some ground rules in mind.”

“Hm?” Garius gave me a dubious look.

“Obviously, for Her Majesty to neglect her duties as Empress isn’t good for her or for us. Even I know that. So what I’d like to do is limit the amount of shooting we do at any one time, but slightly extend the overall schedule.”

It wasn’t exactly “one hour of video games per day!” But it should make the filming less likely to have an adverse impact on Petralka’s political duties.

That was my solution—a sort of compromise.

“However,” I said, taking a deep breath, “when this movie is done, it’ll be over for real.”

“What do you mean, over?” Petralka asked with a vacant expression.

“When we’re done filming this, we won’t do any more. Ever.”

At the moment, we were the only film concern going in the entire Eldant Empire. If we stopped, and decided not to do more, then by definition there would never be another movie.

“Shinichi!” Petralka shouted, jumping up from her throne. “You rat...!”

She probably felt I had betrayed her.

Heck, there was no probably about it.

She was about to take a run at me, but Garius grabbed her shoulder.

“Why?!” she said. “Why would you—”

“Every work has to end sometime, Petralka,” I said. “Otherwise, it can never be complete.”

“B-But... Well, then, what about— you know! A ‘sequel’? A continuation?”

I shook my head. “Remember, movies are fiction. You can’t just keep doing them forever because you enjoy it. Then they wouldn’t be entertainment anymore. Just a vehicle for the creators to indulge themselves, or to escape reality. And maybe that’d be okay, if you could really throw yourself into them... But Petralka, do you really want to abdicate as Empress and just make movies forever? Do you really think that would make you happy?”

Petralka was lost for words.

She was a smart kid, so I suspected she understood. What I was saying wasn’t that different from what Minori-san had said the day before. I couldn’t imagine Petralka hadn’t spent some time thinking about it.

“It’s exactly because there’s a real you that becoming a fictional you is so much fun, Petralka,” I added.

“B-But...”

“Forgive my bluntness,” Garius said with a frown, “but even if Her Majesty agrees, what makes you think that I will?”

“I’ve got an offer that might make it easier for you,” I said. “A trade, if you will.”

“Oh?”

“That dragon you mentioned. How about you let the JSDF take care of it?”

“...............I’m sorry?”

Even Garius was surprised by this.

“The JSDF is in no way part of the Eldant army, and won’t have any effect on its organization or operations. I know dragon-slaying is considered a matter of public security, but it wouldn’t upset anything that much, would it?”

Garius paused in thought.

That’s right: this very morning, I had asked Minori-san to get in touch with Matoba-san, and forced him to tell me posthaste whether or not such a thing would be possible.

Matoba-san and the whole Japanese government had been gunning to essentially become the Eldant empire’s “police force” since the beginning. If they could do that, they might effectively be able to turn the Eldant Empire into their colony.

The Eldant government, however, was nobody’s fool, and had turned down the Japanese offer to handle local security.

So what if this were to be considered “natural-disaster relief”? That sort of thing was the JSDF’s bread and butter, and getting rid of giant monsters was basically tradition (?) for them. A one-off dragon-slaying mission would be limited in scope and duration. But because it might also provide a precedent for being involved in the Eldant Empire’s domestic affairs, and might indeed create a feeling of indebtedness on their part, it was diplomatically attractive to the Japanese government.

And anyway, the whole film-shoot thing had begun as a way of covering for a screwup on the part of the Japanese and the JSDF.

“I admit it’s an intriguing offer,” Garius said. “But can your Jay-Ess-Dee-Eff really handle a dragon?”

“They should be okay, I think,” I said.

I had spoken to Myusel about it, and she said that the real reason dragons were so much more feared than things like wyverns wasn’t just because they were bigger or more violent.

It was because, apparently, magic had almost no effect on them.

Dragons were already what you might call quasi-divine, or at least quasi-mythical, creatures, and they could basically shrug off direct magical attacks.

Consider it from the perspective of biology as we know it: anything that was that big, and could fly in the sky, and even breathe fire—we had to assume it operated on different principles from the average life-form. It seemed to metabolize something magical or spiritual or whatever in order to keep that huge body together. Dragons (I hope you’re sitting down for this) had the innate ability to absorb any magic that was thrown at them.

When you got close to a dragon, therefore, magical effects stopped working. Short version: if you wanted to bring one of them down, you had to do it without spells. You would have to whittle down your opponent’s health with swords and spears and bows or whatever else. Because a dragon was a moving target, catapults would obviously be useless, and a light bow could hardly shoot one scale off a creature like that. You would need a crossbow or something to have any hope of injuring it—but then your rate of fire would be abysmal.

The upshot was that knights with swords and spears had to get in close to fight the creature, which meant an endless stream of casualties.

But what about the JSDF?

The military’s modern weapons had nothing to do with magic, so they should work like normal even on a dragon. And a small-caliber machine gun could shoot quickly and with more stopping power than a bow—remember, it was the ability of firearms to punch through plate mail that put an end to Middle Ages-style armor—so they might be able to keep working the dragon’s health down while keeping their distance. If they could bring anti-tank missiles to bear, that might be even better.

“Obviously, there are some things we won’t know until we actually try them, but that’s true of anything,” I said.

Garius mulled over my suggestion for a long moment. Finally, he nodded and said, “Very well. If you can take care of even one of the problems we’re having, so much the better for us. We can’t give final approval until Prime Minister Zahar and the other ministers have agreed, but I suspect this can be done.”

“Thank you very much.”

“I will, of course, hold you to your word regarding your fil-ming.”

“Of course.”

He meant my promise to film in short bursts, and then to stop when we were done with the movie.

Finally—

“Petralka.” I looked at the adorable empress. She was biting her lip and looking at the floor. She didn’t so much as twitch, even when I said her name.

Maybe she hated me now.

But then...

“Tomorrow...” Petralka said in a whisper. “We will be there... at the usual time. Make sure you’re ready for us.”

“I will. Thanks.”

It still wasn’t completely clear whether she would go along with this, but at least she would work on the shoot with us. I let out a sigh of relief.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have to get to school now.”

I gave a bow, then turned away from the two of them.

I thought at least one of them might have some parting shot for me, but neither Petralka nor Garius said anything as I left the room, heading outside to where the two women were waiting for me.