Chapter One: A Royal Replica?

I ran for my life through a murky abyss.

I pumped my legs, dashing as hard as I could. Running was everything.

I had no idea where I was, or what direction I was heading in. Running was absolutely all I knew. Maybe it would have been better just to stand still. But I was terrified by the thought of doing nothing at all.

“Huff... Puff...”

I couldn’t keep this up forever, though. It wasn’t long before I reached my limit. The fatigue was like a weight on my legs, threatening to make me stumble and fall—but I managed to plant my hands against an earthen wall and at least stay upright. I finally decided to stop for a moment. The instant I did so, I broke out in sweat all over.

“Pant... Pant... Uh... RX-78! RX-78 NT-1! RX-79, RX-79 Ez-8, RX-78GP01, RX-78GP02A, RX-78GP03S, RX-178Mk II, MSZ-006, MSZ-010, RX-93v, RX-0, F91...!”

To calm my ragged breathing, I recited the identification numbers of mechs from an anime set in a certain Universal Century. Finally, I had a chance to take in where I was.

I was in a cave... No, more of a tunnel. I was closed in by an overwhelming amount of earth and rock on every side. Obviously I couldn’t see the sky, and there were no windows. Thanks to the lights lining the wall at regular intervals, I wasn’t trapped in total darkness, but they were barely bigger than Christmas tree lights, so it was all relative. The tunnel in front of and behind me faded quickly into darkness, and I could hardly see anything at all.

Where had I come running from? How had I gotten here? I’d already lost track. I did remember, though, several forks in the road on the way.

Yes: this tunnel was practically a maze. And I was in a lot of trouble...

“Maybe this is what it would be like being trapped in an anthill,” I mused by way of escapism. But that quickly led me to imagine giant bugs careering out of the darkness, and I shivered. A massive monster chasing the protagonist through a tunnel is the most stereotyped of stereotypical scenes.

Stop it. You’re jumpy enough just being alone, don’t make it worse on yourself.

You’ve got to calm down, Kanou Shinichi!

I had to chase the frightening thoughts out of my overeager imagination.

I’ve got it. I’ll think about something fun.

Yes! Fantasy. That’s what you need at a time like this.

If I’m going to be chased, maybe it could be by, say, a beautiful girl. “Wait for me, Shinichi-kun!” she’d say as she came tearing after me.

I was pretty impressed with the image in my head. Not to brag, but I’ve been training my imagination for a pretty long time now, and it was capable of some serious feats.

The girl chasing me exclaims, “You’ll never get away again! ♪” and grabs at me. Clutch. Mm, it’s a good feeling. It’s just adorable the way she looks shyly at the ground. The only downside is that then I can’t see the cute little expression on her face.

I bend down, try to get a look.

That’s when she takes the carving knife she was holding behind her back and jams it into my chest, smiling as she looks up and says, “Now we’ll be together forever! ♪”

“Hey, that’s not how it’s supposed to go!” I exclaimed, reining in my rampaging imagination. What was I going to get out of going down the yandere path?

“Eh... I guess it’s not going to do me any good, standing here and playing pretend.”

I heaved a sigh and looked once more into the inky blackness in front of me.

As I said, when you’re lost, it’s usually best just to sit tight and wait for someone to come find you... but I wished I could have waited somewhere a bit less claustrophobic. I decided to keep walking until I found something that wasn’t a constricting tunnel.

I worked my way forward, taking turns pretty much at random. I had nothing but my intuition to guide me—but eventually, the darkness ahead seemed to lift ever so slightly.

It was a light. And not one of the minimal lights along the wall, but something large enough to fill an open space and then leak into the tunnel.

“Yes! An exit!” I exclaimed.

To be fair, I didn’t know whether it was really an exit—whether it led to the surface. But if it at least got me out of this tunnel, that would be a load off my mind.

I burst into the light, grinning with relief and joy.

“Urk...”

The light was stronger than I’d realized; with my eyes used to the darkness, I was almost blinded. I put a hand up to shield my eyes and waited a few seconds for them to adjust.

“Huh...?” I said stupidly.

In front of me was a monster.

It was giant, bizarre. It seemed to be covered in layers of folded steel, like dark-gray armor. It was the size of a small truck and looked awfully heavy. Its back legs were gigantic, and on its front legs grew short but sharp claws.

And were those wings folded on its back?

It had a long neck that culminated in a head covered, like its body, in hard skin. Prominently displayed on the head was a big, serrated mouth, like a crocodile’s.

It was plenty scary, let me tell you. It was just sitting there, like a boulder, but that was more than enough to terrify this onlooker.

“Oh... sh—”

As I stared at it and gibbered inarticulately, it started to move.

It gave one great shake, then its neck stretched out like a snake.

And then—

“There you are!”

“Hagh?!” I screamed when I heard a voice from behind me. A voice that sounded far more cheerful than any voice should have sounded down here.

“We were looking all over for you, Sensei!”

I spun around and saw a diminutive young woman coming up from behind me. Just for a second, I thought she was a child.

But then I recognized her. I ought to—I saw her every day.

She was one of my students.

“Sensei!” she said, looking up at me. “I thought I told you not to go wandering around on your own.” She puffed out her cheeks at me, making her look younger—and cuter—than ever.

She kept her hair cut short (sort of reminding me of a kappa), and the hair ornaments she wore above each ear definitely did look good on her. That is to say, she made a pretty elegant impression—until you noticed the work gloves and boots she was wearing, which looked awfully rough, covered in leather. The overall look said barbarian warrior. I’d seen her holding a halberd before, and while seeing a small person with a big weapon is perfectly common in manga and anime, it was still kind of surreal to witness it in real life.

“Ah... Mistress,” the terrifying monster said.

No... wait.

On closer inspection, this thing was man-made. It only looked like a monster. It was like a big, mobile statue.

It was the False Dragon. The Faldra, for short. A pretend dragon animated with magic.

You could almost call it a robot—something the ever-industrious dwarves had whipped up. I had seen it before, but—huh? The details looked different somehow. I stood there, staring at the thing and mentally comparing it to the way I remembered it.

“Don’t call me that,” the girl said with a slight frown.

The girl’s name was Romilda—Romilda Guld.

You might have guessed that she was my student by the fact that she called me Sensei. She was a dwarf girl, one of the so-called “demi-humans” who live in this world. Her family, the Gulds, are apparently a big name among dwarves, so despite how she might look, she was indeed the kind of person who might normally be called “mistress.”

Also, for some reason she was holding a birdcage in her left hand. Inside, a small, white bird sat placidly on a tree branch.

“Right, v’ry sorry,” a dwarf man said, sticking his head out from behind the Faldra.

All dwarves are short, but unlike the women, who tend to look childish, male dwarves grow beards at a young age, causing all of them to look permanently like grandfathers. That can make it awfully hard to tell how old a dwarf is. Was this guy Romilda’s age? In midlife? I had no idea.

“Anyway, listen, Sensei,” Romilda said, putting her hands on her hips. “We looked all over for you. Our underground workshop is awfully big. Even dwarves sometimes get lost when they first come here.”

“...Right. I’m sorry.” All I could do was offer a lame apology. And I thought I was supposed to be the authority figure here. Pitiful.

Still, finding someone I recognized in this underground labyrinth of a facility was a huge relief.

My name is Kanou Shinichi.

Now, this is going to sound crazy, but just hear me out.

This alternate world is being targeted—by the Japanese government!

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

Sorry. I’ll try to start at the beginning.

The beginning beginning is that a strange “hole” was discovered in Mt. Fuji’s “Sea of Trees,” the famous suicide forest. It turned out to be what scientists called a hyperspace wormhole, and believe it or not, it led to another world.

Not just any other world, either, but the exact sort of place you would find in a fantasy light novel.

We’re talking about a Middle Ages Europe-style nation, complete with an empress who wields absolute authority. Great, as far as it goes, but there’s also dragons, and instead of science they have magic, along with all kinds of other stuff that’s hard to wrap your head around if you grew up in our world.

This is definitely the biggest discovery of the century—no, probably in of all human history.

But the Japanese government never told the rest of the world about it. They stamped it Top Secret and launched their own investigation of the place. They didn’t want anyone else to know that Japan was connected to a new world.

I mean it is, after all, a totally new place. It’s full of life-forms we’ve never experienced, cultures and resources we know nothing about. If Japan could keep this all to itself—more to the point, if it could hoodwink the inhabitants of this place into giving Japan control of all this—then the country stood to make a lot of money. So Japan’s VIPs set out to initiate exchange with the country on the far side of the wormhole—the Holy Eldant Empire—with yen signs in their eyes.

Here’s the upshot: they were able to make overtures, but they never really became friends with this place.

The wormhole, allegedly, isn’t very stable, and it’s small to boot, so bringing through a large amount of anything all at once isn’t feasible. Not to mention that any major movement of resources would catch the attention of other Earthly countries. Hence Japan found itself limited to small items and a constrained number of personnel. That led to the decision to try to gain the Eldant Empire’s trust based on cultural exchange.

And cultural exchange, in Japan, means traditional culture. So they tried pottery, they tried textiles, they tried whatever was refined and elegant and uniquely Japanese, but the people of this new world just weren’t biting. Who knows—maybe it was just the climate? Whatever it was, the Eldant people weren’t very interested in anything Japan had to offer.

The Japanese government, getting desperate, started casting around for anything that might get the new country’s attention, traditional or not. In the end, the thing that got the best reaction, if you can believe it, was otaku-esque entertainments—manga, anime, games, that sort of thing.

The government immediately made that stuff the core of its exchange.

The only problem was—they didn’t have anyone who knew quite what they were doing when it came to this stuff. From time immemorial, the mix of bureaucrats and popular entertainment has virtually always meant a lot of wasted money and almost no visible effect. These programs are all too often the very epitome of wasteful government spending.

And to their credit, maybe they knew it, because the suits looked for someone other than themselves to run the show.

That’s right: they decided to get a citizen who knew something about otaku culture to come over and coordinate things. Considering how secret this all was, they felt it would be best if this citizen were someone who could disappear off the face of the earth without causing much of a stir.

On those criteria, they picked... me.

In the beginning, I swallowed the “cultural exchange” talk hook, line, and sinker. I was eager to use my otaku knowledge to build bridges between Japan and the Eldant Empire, to bring the people of this other world entertaining books and shows. “Otaku evangelism”? I was all over it.

But it turned out they were just using a naïve, stupid kid for their own ends.

What the Japanese government actually wanted was to invade this other world using culture.

It was something like what had frequently happened with religion in Earth’s past: you didn’t have to have tons of resources or armies of people; there was a quiet, economical way to approach the issue—invading people’s hearts. The idea was to soften them up using Japanese entertainment products so that they would then listen to what we wanted. The most subtle invasion of all.

When I learned all this, I rebelled against the Japanese government. They responded by sending a special ops squad to eliminate me, then sending someone to replace me, and... Well, let’s just say a lot has happened. But with the support of the people I’ve grown close to in this other world, I’ve managed to survive all the infighting to reach this point.

I won’t say I never miss my life in Japan. I do, sometimes. But still, I’ve somehow managed to get to where I am, no longer an invader, but a true evangelist, still preaching the good word of otaku culture in this strange new world.

Romilda ushered me into another room. We were still in an underground workshop, so there was still earth and rock on every side, but the room itself was so big you could have held an impromptu soccer game in it. It was filled with diminutive figures—dwarves bustling this way and that. I could hardly believe how isolated I’d felt just a few minutes earlier; this place felt packed.

“Shinichi-kun!” Someone in the room, seeing us come in, rushed over to me. “I was so worried.”

A bespectacled young woman put her hands on her hips as she stopped in front of me.

Koganuma Minori-san.

I’ve never specifically asked how old she is, but I’d have to guess early twenties. Maybe I’m not one to talk, only being in my teens myself, but she had a baby face that still had a youthful roundness and softness in places; add to that her large-ish, round glasses, and the overall effect was cute—very cute. She kept her long black hair swept up in a bun that wouldn’t interfere with her work, but that had a kawaii-ness all its own.

Then again, her uniform-clad bust made itself inescapably evident... Now that’s a gap you could get seriously moe over.

Minori-san was our resident WAC, a member of the JSDF—and my bodyguard.

“I turn around and you’re gone? You scared me to death.” She sounded half relieved and half scolding.

“I’m very sorry,” I said, deciding that excuses wouldn’t be worth much right now.

“You just got so excited at the whole idea of a giant underground facility,” someone else said instead, “that you started taking pictures of all the neat stuff with your cell phone, and before you knew it everyone was gone. Am I right?”

This teasing assessment came from someone with long hair and a Gothic Lolita outfit, a striking beauty. It seemed like they’d deduced what had happened just by glancing at me.

This person’s name was Ayasaki Hikaru-san.

Things always seemed... how do I put this? Different around Hikaru-san.

The Japanese government had originally sent Hikaru-san as my replacement—versed in otaku culture, of course, but also a serious cosplayer, with the special air of someone who spends their time making it look like characters have jumped right out of the pages or screens of manga, anime, or games. Hikaru-san specialized in gorgeous young female characters; this was the sort of person you looked at and thought, I’ll bet they don’t even go to the bathroom. Totally pure.

There was just one eensy-weensy little catch to Hikaru-san’s hobby, which was that despite all the great girl characters Hikaru-san portrayed, he was a guy. A cross-dresser, if you will.

“...Very sorry.”

He was also exactly right about what had happened, and all I could do was apologize again.

“Well, at least we found you again,” Minori-san said, “thanks to Romilda and her friends. Thank you all so much.” The dwarves bowed.

“Not at all,” Romilda said with a slightly frantic wave of her hand. “It’s no big deal. As complicated as this place is, everyone gets lost sometimes. Even dwarves, when they’re new here.”

It was nice of her to cover for me like that.

What a sweet girl... Sensei is very happy.

Meanwhile, the bird Romilda was holding began to protest the waving with little chirps.

“Hey,” I said, “I’ve been wondering—why have you been carrying that the whole time we’ve been down here?”

Romilda looked confused at first. “Carrying what? Oh, you mean this?” She held up the birdcage.

She certainly didn’t show up to school with a birdcage every day. That meant she had brought it along specifically for our trip to this underground facility.

“You have to bring one of these when you come down here,” she said. “It lets you know if you get too close to anything dangerous.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” Minori-san said with a nod.

“It does?” I asked.

“Shinichi-kun, you’ve never heard of this?” Minori-san smirked a little. “Miners always used to take canaries into the coal mines with them. I mean in Japan, not Eldant. Down into the tunnels. Dangerous gases would affect the bird before they hurt humans, so if anything happened to the canary, it was a sign there was trouble. A living gas detector, sort of.”

“Ahh...” Come to think of it, I had heard something like that before, somewhere.

“This workshop has been around for more than a generation, so there shouldn’t be anything too dangerous around here,” Romilda volunteered. “But there’s still expansion work taking place in some of the far reaches, so we’re supposed to keep birds with us. You remember the little hut at the entrance? That’s where they live.”

“Oh, I see...”

“Us dwarves are all used to being in underground workshops like this, but you can never assume it’s safe. Mining and manufacturing use large-scale magic that can cause accidents. We have lots of stuff ready to go in case of an emergency.” Romilda smiled. “Like magical bombs.”

“Bombs?!”

That sounded a lot more likely to cause an emergency than solve one, in my opinion. I could see using something like that to open a new tunnel, for example, but once you were underground, setting off a magical bomb seemed like an invitation to be buried alive.

“You have to fight rampaging sprites with other sprites,” Romilda explained.

“Like bombing out a fire, I guess...” I said.

Even back on Earth, there were things you couldn’t fight just by throwing water or fire retardant on them, like grease fires. Sometimes you literally used a bomb to put out the flames. The wind created by the explosion would douse the fire while also blowing away fuel the inferno might use to continue to grow.

“To be fair, we’ve never had a serious enough accident here to have to use the magical bombs,” Romilda said with a shrug.

“Best to be ready, though. Forewarned is forearmed. Or... fore-prepared, or... something.”

“Right.”

“This place is seriously huge, though,” I said, trying to picture the scale of the underground area based on the tunnels I’d gotten lost in. They called this place a workshop, but it seemed big enough to be a city. Romilda said it’d been operating for more than a generation, and they were still building it out...

“We’re the biggest workshop in Marinos,” she told us proudly. The owner of the facility—the “boss” who oversaw all the dwarves working down here—was her father. That was why she could talk about we. “We make everything from weapons and armor to candlestick holders and eating utensils.”

“Huh, wow...”

Marinos was the capital of the Eldant Empire, and the way Romilda talked made it sound like there were other, smaller workshops around here as well. I knew Eldant Castle had been built by hollowing out a mountain; the rock was probably plenty thick around here. But still, this was incredible.

“Anyway,” Romilda said, turning aside, “this is what I wanted you to see, Sensei.”

I was down here in the first place because Romilda had invited me to see something in this underground workshop. And there it was, lined up along the wall on the far end of this big room.

A whole collection of strangely shaped things. Ten of them, at least.

They were just like the thing I’d seen earlier—big bodies covered in tough-looking, dark-gray plates. Four extremities, a head, wings, a tail... They were obviously modeled on a living thing, but they had none of the softness of a real living creature.

“The Faldras...” Romilda said.

Faldras—short for false dragons. As you might guess from the name, these things were designed by the dwarves to look like dragons. Just as big as the real thing. Romilda’s dad made the first one, at our request, for a movie we were producing at the time. Originally, it only had to look like a dragon—but then Romilda and her elf buddy Loek, perhaps inspired by all the otaku stuff they were seeing from Japan, went ahead and used magic to make the Faldra move. It even transformed, like some sort of mecha.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Are these all...?”

I thought of how the Faldra I’d encountered in the other room had moved.

“Yep!” Romilda said.

Apparently, all the Faldras here were mechs.

“Geez, look at ’em all.”

One Faldra by itself was imposing enough; ten of them lined up together was I’ll-do-whatever-you-want territory. It felt like I had wandered into a nest of monsters I knew nothing about.

It was perfectly natural that the details should look different. The other one I had seen was a prototype, while these were the mass-production models.

“We’d like to make some improvements, and we want our teachers’ opinions.”

“Why ours?” They already looked finished to me. What kind of opinion could I possibly offer? “I mean, I’m happy to share my thoughts, but...”

“What exactly are you planning to do with all these?” Minori-san asked, sounding a bit wary herself.

“Dad thought maybe we could make a bunch of them and, you know, have the army use them.”

“The army... You mean they’re weapons.” My eyes were wide.

“We did use one once.”

“We did? Oh, you mean when I was kidnapped by Bahairam.”

When I had been kidnapped by the Kingdom of Bahairam, Romilda and several of my friends had come to the rescue aboard the Faldra—which had then gone toe-to-toe with a Puppet Wyrm, Bahairam’s brand-new “living weapon.” Although to be fair, our mech ended up running out of magic before the end of the fight. It was Minori-san who finished the job, using an RPG she’d carted along.

Still and all, though, the Faldra had certainly proved its ability as a fighting machine.

And hey, they didn’t have to use it for fighting. It could lift heavy objects or dig trenches, transport materials—there were all sorts of uses for something like that. I mean, back on Earth, we were all about building robots because of all the things you can do with them, right?

“But that was really something you and Loek achieved together, right?”

Dwarves are superb users of magic dealing with ores and minerals. That’s why they could use magic to move the Faldra, which was essentially a big lump of metal. But when it came to the wings, getting it airborne and everything, that was beyond them. That was when they needed the help of wind magic, which is the specialty of the elves.

“Well, uh...” Romilda didn’t quite look at me. She puffed out her cheeks a bit, annoyed. “I guess that disgusting, pervy elf did help me out a little. I can’t deny that.”

“Worried about the past, Romilda?” I smiled. “There’s no real reason for the elves and dwarves not to get along now, is there?”

If fantasy stories the world over have taught us anything, it’s that elves and dwarves don’t like each other very much—and that seemed to hold true in Eldant as well. In the classroom of the otaku training center—er, school—that I ran, this was exemplified by the “young mistress” Romilda and the “young master” Loek, leaders among the dwarves and the elves in my class, respectively.

They fought, and fought often. But it didn’t seem like they hated each other from the bottoms of their hearts—they proved that when they worked together to come rescue me. And recently, I thought I’d been seeing them with each other quite a bit.

The origin of this animosity between elves and dwarves existed only in legend now—more to the point, it stretched back before humans had put themselves at the top of a centralized, authoritarian nation-state. In other words, elves and dwarves, especially younger ones like Loek and Romilda, had no real reason to go out of their way to get into arguments with each other.

“How about we stop worrying about how I feel about elves and think about how that stupid idiot—” Then Romilda stopped and let out a sigh. “Well, Sensei, you’re not wrong that the whole fighting-with-elves thing is more like heritage now than anything. Even my dad is hoping that working with elves on this Faldra project might raise people’s opinions of demi-humans all around.”

Humans were capable of using wind and earth magic, yes, but only to a pretty limited extent. When it came to the sort of complicated, precise magic required to control a Faldra, you couldn’t beat elves and dwarves working together.

As things stood, though, elves and dwarves were both just grouped under the catch-all term “demi-humans,” and were considered a rung below humans on the social ladder of the Holy Eldant Empire.

The difference in status wasn’t absolute, and such people had several ways of rising in the world.

The simplest was to join the military—do something noteworthy, and you might even be respected as much as a human.

“Hence the weaponry, huh...”

Okay, so the word weaponry did sound a bit like trouble waiting to happen. But I thought it was a good thing the dwarves were specifically trying to move themselves up in the world. And if it happened to help bring the elves and dwarves closer, so much the better.

“Anyway,” I said, “I can definitely see how you could get some use out of a Faldra, especially for defense.”

“Yeah, right?” Minori-san said with a sly grin. Who would know more about using weaponry for defense then a member of the JSDF?

“So, Sensei,” Romilda said. “You have any thoughts or comments or anything?”

“Thoughts, huh...” I crossed my arms and looked up at the Faldras. “When it comes to robots, to mobile weapons platforms, armored is the word.”

“Are-mored?”

“You know, reinforced this and strengthened that. If you’re gonna have a second cour, you need to make some changes! Keep things from lagging midseason, right?”

“Uh...”

Apparently I was talking over Romilda’s head. She had seen some robot anime, but she probably hadn’t really watched it from the perspective of what you do in a second season, or how new robots show up because sponsors want to sell toys, that sort of thing. Most of the anime and tokusatsu stuff we had at the school was on DVD; it didn’t have commercial breaks. These kids might not even have known what a sponsor was.

“Or, you know, Mk II.”

“Mark Too?”

“A new version, the original concept polished to a sharp point! Like, now it can fly or something. Stick on a bunch of Vernier thrusters or apogee kick motors or whatever! More tech means more eyeballs!”

“Er, Sensei, the Faldra can already fly...”

“Oh, that’s right.”

“Shinichi-kun,” Minori-san said with a sigh, “can we at least try to be serious, for her sake?”

“...Yes, ma’am.”

Sorry. My fault.

I kind of forgot we weren’t selling viewers plastic models of the hero robot.

“But we have been talking about adding transformation capabilities,” Romilda said. “So it can fight in humanoid form like before!”

“Ooh, me like!” Every man dreams of a humanoid robot. Mm-hmm. “Plus its combat power’ll go up!”

That’s how transforming mechas work, right? The flying form is for mobility, and the humanoid form is for making the most of its fighting prowess.

But then Minori-san said coolly, “I’m not so sure about that. The first time you do it, it’ll probably surprise the opponent enough that they might not attack until you’re done transforming. But after that, they’ll probably hit you in the middle of the transition.”

“As if!” I exclaimed. “It’s against the rules to hit a robot while it’s transforming!”

“Whose rules?” Minori-san said with a grim smile. “An opponent who deliberately puts themselves in a completely defenseless position like that is just begging to be destroyed.”

“I see. No good, huh?” Romilda’s shoulders slumped.

“Well, it depends on how you’re transporting them,” Minori-san said. “Think of them like tanks. As long as they don’t rush to the battlefield in flight form and then try to transform right in front of the enemy, it’d be okay.”

“Oh, yeah, I see.”

Even tanks didn’t get to the battlefield under their own power; they were often loaded on trailers to move them around. Really, tank treads were designed to grip uneven surfaces. A normal wheeled vehicle would generally be more effective on a proper road.

But then, of course, when you brought tanks to a combat zone by trailer, you didn’t sit there and unload them right in front of the enemy. You had to decide how to handle things based on the situation.

“I think there’s a more pertinent question,” Minori-san said, “of whether humanoid weapons are even really practical.”

“Gosh, Minori-san, you go right for the jugular...”

“Weapons systems don’t have jugulars.”

“In the image of humanity, in the image of God—if you wish to know what drives these impulses, seek within the human heart.”

This oddly chuunibyou-esque line came from Hikaru-san, who had simply been looking at the Faldra and listening to our conversation up to that point. As usual, his declarations were hard to parse, at best. But he came at things from a perspective I didn’t usually take, so I tried not to hold it against him.

“What are you talking about?”

“I think of humanoid robots in anime and manga as essentially an extension of sculpture or carvings. Making gods who look like men, humans’ throbbing desire to leave images of themselves behind—all of it goes back to human psychology.” Hikaru-san spread his arms wide in a theatrical gesture. It was overdone, for sure, but it fit so well with his personality that I found it hard to be snarky about it.

“Think about the golem in Hebrew mythology, among others—whenever these things are used as weapons, it’s about more than just simple destructive power, or even efficiency of labor. It harkens back to an instinctual fear people have of things that look like themselves but are much bigger.”

“Oh, I get it,” Minori-san said. “The best way to deter an attack is through intimidation.”

“I’m glad you know what he’s talking about, because I’m not sure I do,” I said.

Hikaru-san sighed and explained, “If the people of this world were suddenly confronted with a tank or something, they probably wouldn’t be as frightened as you or I would. We know how much firepower a machine like that has, so we know to be afraid of it. But think about what people in this world know. They know how big a person is supposed to be. So when they see something that looks human, but is vastly bigger than they expect, they’ll instinctively be afraid of it. Long before they have any idea how powerful it is in battle, see?”

“Ahh...”

Come to think of it, I felt like I had heard a similar explanation in some old robot anime I’d seen a long time ago. Something about how the effect of humanoid weaponry had as much to do with its psychological impact on people who saw it as its actual combat power.

“You’re saying that instead of using it as an actual weapon, you have it act sort of like police equipment.”

If the Faldra could be effective just by standing there, without actually having to injure or kill anybody, I thought that would be the best of all worlds.

“But if that’s how you’re going to use it, wouldn’t it be better to have it look as human as possible?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Hikaru-san said.

“Sort of like it was about to attack,” I said, thinking of a manga that shall remain nameless.

Just picturing some titanic creature having a little peek at your house from across the street was beyond scary. It was more like... reality being pulled out from underneath you. Actually, maybe that was why they made Ult**man kind of featureless and symbolic.

“I think all that would be less scary than sort of... sickening,” Hikaru-san said. “I don’t know much about the magic around here yet, but trying to get an expression to work—to move the eyes and lips and everything—seems like it would be a lot of trouble. But then if you tried and didn’t get it right, I think it would make the thing look more artificial and less scary.”

“This is tough,” I said.

As we talked, I took a few steps forward to get a better look at the mass-production Faldras.

They were lined up side by side, and I guess they weren’t finished yet, because two or three dwarves were working away on each of them. It’s not easy to guess the age of a dwarf guy, but it seemed like the workers ran the gamut between the young and the old. Grizzled laborers made up the bulk of the ranks, obviously, but once in a while it was possible to spot someone who clearly looked like a young woman.

Then I stopped, puzzled, my attention drawn by one particular dwarf.

Or rather, not the dwarf so much as the work they were doing.

I could see short, neat gray hair peeking out from under the black hat covering the worker’s head. At first it looked like a guy, but the structure of the facial features led me to think it was probably a woman.

Like Romilda, her outfit was relatively revealing—short tank top and hot pants, midriff completely exposed—but her skin tone was darker, and her toned, muscled limbs kept the effect from being too erotic.

One of the Faldras sat placidly before her, and I could see clay figurines working both inside and outside it.

These were magical puppets the dwarves could create. The two outside were on the large side, while in between the slats of the armor I could see one within. They were all moving at once, all working. The one inside must have been fiddling with the Faldra’s internal equipment. The girl was the only person near this Faldra. Meaning...

Is she controlling all three of those dolls at once?

All three of them different sizes, and all doing different tasks—simultaneously.

I wasn’t sure, but that seemed awfully difficult.

“What are you looking at?” Hikaru-san had noticed me staring.

“Oh, just...” I pointed out the girl and the figures she was controlling.

“Ahh,” Hikaru-san said, looking over himself. “You saw a cute loli girl, so you were sexing her up with your eyes.”

“Hey, don’t say that where people could hear you!”

Though I don’t deny she was cute!

I mean, her face, sure, but the way the area around her belly—no! No no no no! Different subject!

“You see how she’s controlling three of those clay dolls at once?” I said.

“Huh, yeah, she’s good.” Hikaru-san at least had the good grace to be genuinely impressed.

My understanding was that controlling even one clay doll wasn’t an easy task. It wasn’t like you just created the creature, and then it did work for you on its own. You had to pay attention to and dictate its every move. That meant that controlling two clay dolls at once would be like trying to write totally different letters with your right and left hands. It was borderline impossible for most people, even for dwarves.

And she had three of them going at once. I couldn’t imagine how she was controlling them.

“What’s going on?” Minori-san and Romilda glanced over at us.

“Hey, Romilda,” I said. “Controlling three clay dolls at once—that would be pretty hard, right?”

Romilda looked like she thought this question came out of the blue. “Er... Yeah.” Then she saw who I was looking at and nodded. “It’s not normally possible. I certainly can’t do it. That girl—Lauron Selioz is her name—she’s an exception. You might even say she’s a genius, at least when it comes to controlling clay dolls.”

Romilda sounded as pleased as if she were talking about herself.

“Even experienced clay-doll users can almost never control three at once—and she’s only my age. Most of us, even if we can make that many dolls, we don’t have anything like Lauron’s precision. Plus she’s a hard worker.”

“Wow...”

And that was coming from the daughter of the guy who ran this workshop. I guess this Lauron girl really was something else.

My admiring ruminations were interrupted by a voice shouting Lauron’s name.

“Hey, Lauron!”

I saw a male dwarf bounding toward her. Lauron, though, didn’t seem to react.

“Lauron!” he shouted right in her ear, and then finally, as if waking from a dream, she blinked and looked over at him.

“Yes...?”

“I told you to leave that for later and do that one, over there!”

“Er... But... the schedule for today says this one...”

“Don’t you remember? I said this morning: Radol’s been out sick since yesterday, and we’re running behind on the exterior of prototype number 3! Go help Garaham!”

“But...”

“No buts! Don’t I keep telling you to be more flexible?!”

Lauron was pretty much fixated on the work in front of her throughout the conversation, and the other dwarf didn’t seem happy about it. She muttered a few more things that seemed like excuses, but finally she dragged herself over to the other Faldra and got to work.

Our group watched the exchange silently.

“Uhh... Look,” Romilda said with a strained smile. “Sh-She’s normally really awesome, I swear. Today someone got a little angry at her, that’s all. It’s just...”

“No, uh, I get it,” I said, nodding. “She does look really sharp.”

Long story short, apparently she was a master among dwarves when it came to controlling clay dolls, but maybe not when it came to compromising. Well, it was hardly unusual for geniuses to be very specialized.

“So, about your thoughts or ideas...”

“Oh, right.”

Prompted by Romilda, we put aside any concerns about the girl called Lauron and resumed our walk through the workshop, discussing the mass-production Faldras and the best ways to improve them.

The Holy Eldant Empire.

That’s the complete, official name of the place where I’m living now. It’s connected to Japan via a hyperspace tunnel known as the “hole.” (Because I was in a drug-induced sleep when they dragged me over here, I don’t know where in Eldant the hole is.)

I’m living in the country’s capital, Marinos, as general manager of an other-world-first entertainment company. The area around Marinos is rich with natural beauty; the plains are peppered with forests and little hills. And sitting right in the middle of it all—right in the middle of the Eldant Empire, really—is a castle town.

It all looks pretty Middle-Ages European. There are big houses and small ones all packed in together, and the main roads are lined with flagstone; for a kid who never so much as went on an overseas vacation, this place feels extraordinary enough to last me a lifetime.

And the most extraordinary thing of all has to be Holy Eldant Castle.

It’s big. I mean huge. That’s the first thing you notice. It looks less like a building than a geographical feature, like a mountain. It was a mountain, in fact, originally: they hollowed it out to make the castle. It’s bigger than any building I’ve ever been in; you feel impossibly small just standing near it.

Then you go through the front gate (big enough to make you think maybe it’s for giant robots), and... well, I’ve been there a lot, but it makes me nervous every time.

“And that’s all I have to report.”

We were in one of the audience chambers deep inside that very castle; in other words, in one of the rooms reserved for meeting with Her Majesty the Empress, the owner of the building. We were in the smallest of the audience chambers, but it still would have been big enough for ten or twenty people to comfortably hold a meeting.

The three of us stood in a single row.

A little bit in front of and just above us, the empress sat on her throne.

A silver-haired, lovely little g—I mean, young woman. The color of her hair and eyes, and even the cast of her facial features, clearly communicated that she was swimming in a different gene pool from the Japanese. To put it bluntly, she was absolutely beautiful, the very picture of a fantasy princess. She looked like the work of a master dollmaker, and her miraculous cuteness made men and women alike want to give her a big hug.

Of course, if you tried to do that to her, heads would roll... literally.

This was Her Majesty the Empress, Petralka an Eldant III.

She practically looked like a preteen—heck, she wouldn’t have seemed out of place wearing an elementary-schooler’s backpack—but she was, I was told, sixteen years old. She was also very touchy about how young she looked, and you could get in major trouble by pointing it out.

“Mm. Fine work.”

Petralka nodded graciously when I finished my report about the activities of our company, Amutech, and the associated school.

Up to this point, though, I’d been giving a more or less formal report. After that, we usually slipped into a more relaxed chat.

“Let’s see, what else was there... Oh, I know. I went to one of the dwarves’ underground workshops the other day. Romilda’s place. Guld Foundry, I guess.”

“Oh...?” Petralka nodded, interested. “That’s the largest workshop in Marinos. We are sure it’s quite impressive. But why so suddenly?”

“Romilda said she wanted to show me something. You know the Faldra? I guess the dwarves have been working on an upgrade.”

“Hmm...?”

“They’re prototyping a mass-production model now. They think that if the things get into military use, it’ll be a new way for the dwarves and the elves to help the empire.”

“I see...” The affirmation and the nod came, not from Petralka, but from the young man standing beside her throne. He had long, silver hair, just like her, and his attractive features showed a certain resemblance, too. It was enough to make you think they were related by blood—perhaps even that they were brother and sister.

This young man was the beautiful knight, Minister Garius en Cordobal. He was a relative of Petralka’s, and he held an important position as an imperial advisor as well. His designation as knight referred to his actual job, and was separate from the title of nobility—he was the commander-in-chief of the entire military. And from what I had heard, he was as accomplished with the pen as with the sword.

He looked like he had jumped right out of some otome game, an over-spec’d hunk of a perfect man who would get any girl excited... The only thing being, he didn’t seem very interested in that sort of thing. I think he preferred boys over flowers, if you know what I mean.

I sometimes caught him shooting weird little looks in my direction: I couldn’t let my guard down. Not that he seemed like a bad person, but that didn’t mean I wanted rose petals flying around us or whatever. Minori-san, who had a BL fixation and did want to see us like that, made a mountain out of every molehill she could find, and I wished she would leave us alone.

Anyway...

“This could be interesting,” Garius said, tapping a finger against his chin. “The military considers it a matter of utmost importance to secure combat power matching that demonstrated by Bahairam’s puppet drake. Your Faldra has at least proven itself in that regard.”

Garius was talking about the same thing that had come up in my talk with Romilda the day before—the way the Faldra had fought with the puppet drake in Bahairam when Romilda and the others came to rescue me.

“Yeah, but it stopped moving halfway through.”

Dragons, apparently, were part sprite themselves—in other words, they metabolized magic. Use magic near a dragon, and the critter would just absorb it, and your spell would fizzle out. It also meant that the magic-powered Faldra ran out of juice in a hurry when it was at close quarters with a real dragon. And we happened to learn this right in the middle of an actual battle, which wasn’t fun.

“It would be useful even as a deterrent,” Garius said. “The fact that a Faldra once defeated a puppet drake would carry considerable weight.”

Ahh. I knew this guy was smart.

He wasn’t necessarily thinking about winning a toe-to-toe contest. All they needed was something that put Bahairam on notice: Hey, guys! We’re not afraid of that fancy new weapon of yours—because we’ve got this! That might be enough to make them think twice about taking any military action, and that would justify the Faldras all by itself.

It didn’t seem like Eldant had traditionally used these kinds of tactics—what you might almost call psychological warfare. But Garius, in his own way, seemed to be figuring them out as he worked with us.

“Those dwarves are quite clever, aren’t they?”

The note of agreement was sounded by another man, standing on Petralka’s other side—an older man with white hair and a white beard. Prime Minister Zahar.

Look, I know what you’re thinking. The moment you hear the words “Prime Minister,” you picture a scheming fox who wants to take over the kingdom, or some intimidating final-boss type, or a clever plotter who prefers to run things from the shadows... Not a good impression.

I understand. But it’s just a product of too many games and anime and manga—a bias, if you will. As a matter of fact, Prime Minister Zahar came across like a hard-working middle manager. He had single-handedly shattered my preconceptions about men of his station.

He was Petralka’s advisor on political and economic matters, and also helped educate the still-young ruler. He was sort of like a grandfather to her.

When the Japanese made first contact, it was Zahar who chose to engage them in dialogue rather than immediately trying to fight. So as much as he might look like a frail old man, he was actually intelligent and rational.

“It would work on more than just Bahairam,” he said. “It might help cow rebels within our own country.”

As we’ve discussed, the Faldra looked like a dragon, even if it was a fake one. It even had a specially crafted “skin” of cloth that made it, from a distance, look exactly like the real thing. And in this world, everyone knew that nothing was higher on the food chain than a True Dragon. If someone who didn’t know better was confronted with a Faldra, they would run away in terror, or otherwise just fall to the ground, praying to get out of it alive.

“Hmm. Was the Faldra not able to take the form of a giant? Then perhaps it could serve for domestic security—or perhaps the castle specifically...?” Garius murmured, deep in thought. “So many unpleasant things have been happening lately...”

“Like the Assembly of Patriots...?” I whispered.

“Correct.” Petralka and her advisors smiled bitterly.

The Assembly of Patriots was a group who didn’t look kindly on the otaku culture Japan was bringing in. They were, in their own way, worried about the future of their country—making them patriots of a sort, I guess—but the problem with them was that they quickly turned to violence to get what they wanted.

“The Patriots are not the only rebellious faction in this country,” Petralka said. “We must carefully consider how to improve public safety so such an incident never happens again.” She sighed. “But we’re afraid that...”

“It’s not going to be easy, huh?”

You’ve heard of having a viper in your midst? A Judas at your table? One of the dangers of domestic anti-government factions was that they could so easily blend in with innocent civilians. An enemy army was one thing: you just pointed your own army in the right direction and set them loose. But the enemy within your own borders—first you had to find him, figure out who was the foe and who was just another citizen.

“Magical items are especially dicey,” Petralka said, leaning on the armrest of her throne. “Citizens who are less than content, but not angry enough to openly rebel—when the army suddenly drops a huge, threatening magical weapon right in front of them, anger may quickly turn to defiance.”

Ahh. In other words, people might not fight a battle they don’t think they can win, but show them a weapon with enough power to make them think they can win, and you can end up fanning the flames.

“Fire-based magical weapons are especially... easy to understand.”

“You mean like Imarufe Bisurupeguze, the Consuming Flame?”

This was a magical weapon the Assembly of Patriots had used to threaten the empire when they took over the school. When activated, the fire sprites inside would come rushing out all at once, causing an explosion—in basic terms, it was a big old bomb.

“No special aptitude is required to use them,” Petralka said.

“Yeah, I think I remember all you need is a card and an incantation to set it off, right?”

“Correct. The user need not even be a spellcaster. One simply inserts the card and recites, ‘In the name of justice, I invoke this great power!’ and then—”

“Your Majesty!” Prime Minister Zahar tried to interrupt Petralka, sounding panicked. “Don’t speak those words so lightly...”

“We very much doubt our voice will carry to the underground storage chamber. And even if it should, the card is not inserted, is it? Nothing’s going to explode.” She sounded perfectly confident.

“You keep one of those in the castle?” I asked.

“Considering this is the most well-protected place in the nation, yes. But to all things there is a limit.”

“Whatever the case,” Garius said, bringing us back to the subject, “there’s no end of domestic difficulties. In light of Her Majesty’s kidnapping by the Assembly of Patriots, there’s been a flood of overeager would-be imitators.”

“Yikes...”

In other words, that one incident let everyone know that Her Majesty the Empress wasn’t an inviolable deity, that she was just a girl who could be kidnapped or even killed. And that thought was enough to fire up every anti-government rebel in the country.

“We’ve been trying to devise the best way to safeguard the Empress’s person, but so far...”

“There have, however, been several suggestions,” Zahar said with a glance at Garius.

“What kind of suggestions?” I asked.

“The most convincing thus far is to make a body double for Her Majesty.”

A body double? Like the kagemusha, the official imposters feudal daimyos used to have?

Of course, that word brings to mind an old movie about a kagemusha who served the Sengoku-era general, Takeda Shingen, but body doubles are hardly limited to Japan’s warring states. Having a stand-in at a crucial moment happens all the time in novels and movies. I mean, there’s even that legend that it wasn’t Jesus Christ crucified on the hill of Golgotha, but his younger brother Isukiri, with the Lord himself escaping to Aomori.

“You mean she hasn’t had a royal double in the past?” Hikaru-san asked, puzzled.

Now that he mentioned it, it was strange. Wouldn’t an absolute monarch normally have some kind of stand-in?

“The subject has come up before, but we could never find someone who fit the part,” Garius replied.

There’s a saying that holds that somewhere in the world, there are three people who look like you—I guess the trick is finding them. I mean, Petralka was strikingly beautiful; it wouldn’t be so simple to find someone who could pass as her.

“In addition... You recall the moo-vee we made?”

“The movie? What about it...?”

“On account of that production, Her Majesty’s face became widely known among the populace. A double who didn’t closely resemble her would quickly be discovered.”

“Ahhh...”

So that was it. At a Middle-Ages level of technology where information didn’t spread quickly, or was badly distorted when it did, a body double or kagemusha didn’t have to look absolutely identical to the person they were replacing. Even when it came to someone important, like a king or a general, there wouldn’t be that many people who had met them in person. And even if they had seen their faces, it probably would have been just one time, at a distance.

Because of the technology we’d brought in, though—because of the movie we made—whole crowds of people had seen Petralka in glorious close-up on a gigantic screen.

Well, darn.

Had I inadvertently made finding a royal double way more difficult than it should have been?

“Come to think of it... There were those leaflets with Petralka on them in Bahairam, too. I mean, they were basically just pictures, but...”

“What...?” Garius said, furrowing his eyebrows.

Oops. Should I not have said anything?

“I see...” The knight nodded, but his face was... dark. “So it’s spread all the way to Bahairam. Hrm. I suppose I should have anticipated that.”

The pictures had been made in Eldant by someone who respected Petralka, but as they got more and more popular, they naturally found their way into foreign countries—including hostile ones. This whole experience was new to everyone involved, and even Garius and Zahar hadn’t considered this possibility.

“And to think—recently we’ve even seen some scoundrels impersonating Her Majesty.”

“Seriously? Like, Petralka cosplay?” I glanced at Hikaru-san.

“What?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing.”

The word cosplay just made me think of him, that was all. I didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, I couldn’t imagine even Hikaru-san would dress up like Petralka and then go parade around. Besides, he was too tall, and his face didn’t look anything like hers.

“Coss-play?” Garius asked.

Ah. The people of Eldant weren’t really familiar with the pastime we called cosplay. They had theaters, but outside of the context of a play, I got the impression that dressing up like someone just for fun wasn’t culturally something they did. That meant our magic rings couldn’t translate the idea. These very useful magic items stop helping so much when a concept comes up that isn’t shared by both sides.

“It’s—how do I put this? You dress up to look like someone else. That’s the fun of it. Like, say you’re a normal citizen, but you think knights are awesome. You want to be a little more like them, even if it’s just by putting on some armor.”

“Ahh. This is indeed such... coss-play.” Garius nodded. “For the time being, no real harm has come of it. However...” He sighed.

People were doing this out of love for Petralka, so it was hard to charge them with lèse-majesté. But at the same time, having a bunch of people running around who looked like her—right down to the hair and clothes—made things awfully complicated.

“...I guess this is my fault, huh?”

I was the one who created and released the movie, after all. I was starting to get the cold sweats, but Petralka said, “We would not go quite that far. It might have been possible to predict this outcome during the filming of the moo-vee—but not very likely. We do not seek omniscience from you, Shinichi. But.” She leaned forward slightly. “This situation is well beyond our experience. We must hope for your help.”

“My help...?”

“Do you have any clever ideas how to deal with this?” she asked, but my mind stayed blank. I was glad she thought she could turn to me, but...

“Uhhh...” I said.

“It need not be this moment,” Petralka said with a bit of a smile. “But if any inspiration should strike you, inform us immediately. You have in the past frequently come up with schemes beyond our wildest imaginings.”

“Is that... a compliment, Your Majesty?”

“Did it sound to you like a rebuke? You are as prone to misinterpretation as ever, Shinichi.” Petralka seemed to be blushing a little.

Gosh, but this empress is cute!

I was keen to think of something—partly to justify her faith in me, but mostly because I really did want her to be safe.

“I understand. I’ll give it some thought.” I bowed my head.

“We’re counting on you.” Petralka, along with Garius and Prime Minister Zahar, nodded back.

Break time in the classroom was lively and loud. Everyone had their own way of passing the time—some students chatted, others read books, while still others diligently started getting ready for the next lesson.

As for me, I didn’t go back to the teachers’ room, but just sat in a chair by the lectern, looking vacantly out at them.

“Do any of them look like Petralka...?” I scanned the classroom, picturing the loli empress in my mind. That long, silver hair and those triumphant emerald eyes. Soft cheeks and cherry-red lips. Features befitting a princess, someone who could wear a bejeweled tiara and make it look like it belonged on her.

“Turns out it’s not so easy to find someone who fits all those criteria,” I murmured, letting out a breath.

“Master?” came a voice from beside me. I looked up to see my maid.

The first thing that struck you about her was her flaxen hair, tied up high on each side of her head. The next thing was her big violet eyes.

She was beautiful, too, in a different way from Petralka. To use an animal metaphor, Petralka was like a feisty house cat with pedigree papers, while this girl... She was more of a frightened fawn. Her half-elf heritage meant she’d experienced a lot of discrimination in her life, and she gave an overall retiring impression, often acting like she didn’t have a lot of self-confidence.

Myusel Fourant was her name. She was the very first person I had met in this other world, and also someone who took extensive care of me—up to and including saving my life on more than one occasion. Suffice to say I owed her a lot. If I told her as much, though, she would look at the ground and laugh uncomfortably and say it was just her job.

“Is anything the matter?” she asked, pouring me water from a carafe.

By the way, although she normally wore a maid outfit around the house, here at school she wore a dress that she used for going out.

“Not really... I was just wondering if anyone here happened to look exactly like Petralka.”

“Her Majesty?” Myusel blinked, surprised. Her huge eyes and long eyelashes gave even that simple act the innocence of a small bird, making her look supremely cute—but anyway, never mind.

“Can you think of anyone, Myusel?”

“Not really...”

“Hmm.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of help...” She looked at the ground and her shoulders slumped.

I melted completely at the sight of Myusel looking depressed. “Oh, no, don’t worry about it! Why should you know anyone who fits that description? If it were that easy to find somebody like that, we wouldn’t be looking!”

“Anyway,” Hikaru-san piped up from nearby, sounding a bit frustrated, “most of the kids here at school are the children of nobility, influencers, important merchants, right? If any of them looked exactly like the empress, don’t you think Her Majesty or Prime Minister Zahar would have noticed already?”

Yes. Yes, I do. You are so right.

My ultimate objective with this school was to make a decent education available to everyone, regardless of social class, but we were still in the testing phases—a lot of what was happening here was experimental, and almost by definition the student population favored the noble and the rich. In other words, people who were already likely to be close to the empress. If there were any dead ringers for Petralka in that crowd, it wasn’t likely Elder Zahar or Garius would have missed them.

“Anyway, Shinichi-san?” Hikaru-san said, narrowing his eyes at me. “Supposing, just by chance, they did happen to overlook some identical twin of Her Majesty’s among the students. What would you do—recommend that student? Send your own pupil to be the empress’s body double—to get captured or killed in her place?”

“That’s another consideration,” I said with a sigh.

He was right—again. Being a body double didn’t just mean filling in when your employer had better things to do. It meant taking risks in their place—like the risk of being assassinated. Even if someone in my class fit the bill, could I ask them to do that?

“Could you die in place of Her Majesty?”

Hmmm.

I know I’m not the world’s greatest teacher or anything, but even I would balk at putting one of my students in that sort of danger. But then again, I really did want to come up with a way to keep Petralka safe.

Hikaru-san put a finger to his chin and said reflectively, “Instead of trying to find someone who looks exactly like her in every way, why not just find someone who’s about the right height and change their appearance using magic?”

The whole thoughtful-pose thing—it really looked right for him. Like, if you didn’t know he was a man, you could get genuinely moe for him. It was dangerous, I’ll just say that. But anyway.

“That’s how cosplay works,” he went on. “You can use shoes to add height, and then the rest of it is makeup and wigs... If you nail the most obvious features, it’s surprising how little the details actually matter.”

“Wow, really?”

“There’s a more basic problem, though,” Hikaru-san said, looking at Myusel. “Changing someone’s appearance with magic—is that possible? Could you do it while they were acting as someone’s body double?”

“Well...” Myusel gave it a moment’s thought, but quickly shook her head. “Magic can change the way a person looks. But getting it absolutely natural from every angle would be awfully hard.”

So it would be possible to cloak someone in an illusion. But the fundamental problem of getting that illusion to look exactly right would be multiplied by having to keep it up while the person moved and spoke. And that sounded frighteningly difficult. I guess it’s sort of like how a computer can display a 2D cartoon and have processing power to spare, but if you want a 3D image rendered photo-realistically in real time, then you’re going to gobble up resources. Anyway, that’s how I was thinking of it.

“What you’re saying is, this might be a fantasy world, but that doesn’t mean we can just solve any and every problem with magic, huh? I guess that makes sense.”

Magic really was one of this world’s outstanding technologies, but there was still a line between what could and couldn’t be done with it.

“Maybe a combination of magic and makeup would fool people...? No, that would never work.” Hikaru-san shook his head.

Covering up the imperfections in the magical disguise using conventional makeup might be possible—but where would those imperfections show up? When, and from what angles? Figuring all that out, and making someone up to cover for it, probably wasn’t practical.

“Hrmmm...”

Dead end, huh?

But I had to figure out something to help with Petralka’s problem, just had to.

Sometimes when you think you’re stuck, you just haven’t noticed that the way out is in an unexpected place... Anyway, that’s what I remembered my light-novel-author dad saying to me. He said sometimes you shelve a problem, go do something completely different, and then all of a sudden the answer comes to you.

Could I somehow “flip” what I was imagining?

That’s what was running through my head as I returned to gazing dumbly around the classroom.

And then...

Hmmm...

There, in the back of the room. An elf boy and a dwarf boy were standing on opposite sides of a desk, facing each other. In between them, on the desk, were two figures. Not the sculpture-type ones cast in a single pose; they were the jointed, action-figure type—basically fig*a, if you’ll indulge me.

They were something I’d brought in as another form of otaku culture. We kept them in the library, and students were welcome to request to take them out on loan. One of them was Kita-ikki, the heroine of the anime Mike-mike Osuwari. The other was Serris, leading lady of the video game Faerie Field.

So much, my otaku eye discerned immediately.

But then I suddenly found myself doubting that very eye: both of the figures appeared to be standing on the desk. As in, neither the elf nor the dwarf was touching them. But a second later, they moved; each of the figures grabbed firmly onto the other.

Not only that, but then Kita-ikki flung Serris—but Serris righted herself in midair, landed, a bit unsteadily, and resumed a fighting pose. Kita-ikki attacked again. Again, the movement was somewhat odd looking, but her right leg came up high and launched a devastating roundhouse kick at Serris. She caught it on the rifle she was holding and—

Wait. Hold on. Uh-uh. No way.

What the heck was this? In front of my dumbfounded eyes, two action figures were dancing around on a desk, hitting and being hit and kicking and being kicked, straddling and being straddled. The movements were quick, but none of them ever looked quite right, either. Almost like they weren’t acting of their own volition, but were being controlled, like puppets on strings...

“Magic?!” I exclaimed as I realized what was powering this bizarre sight.

It was just like with the Faldra. The dwarf’s magical affinity with metal—or at least ore—and the elf’s with wind magic was what was making the two characters move. The figures weren’t doing it by themselves; they were being moved by an invisible hand (or hands).

“That’s really incredible,” I murmured. The characters’ movements looked a bit halting, sure, but it was interesting to watch. They seemed to be treating the whole thing like some sort of fighting anime, with the desk as the arena and the figures as the combatants.

“Hang on...” I said as an idea began to flower in my mind.

That was it! We didn’t have to go scrounging around for some identical twin.

“Master?”

“Shinichi-san?”

Myusel and Hikaru-san looked questioningly at each other, and then at me.

“I’ve got it!” I said. “How about this?”

And then, grinning like a fool, I explained to them the brilliant idea I’d just had.

Come the next day, Minori-san, Hikaru-san, and I were in the audience chamber at Eldant Castle. We’d sent a messenger the night before requesting to meet with Petralka. “Idea re: body double,” we’d added. Myusel and Hikaru-san both reacted favorably to the idea I’d had in the classroom, as did Minori-san when I explained it to her later. That got me thinking it might actually work, and I decided to report to Petralka as soon as I could.

And so we found ourselves in the usual audience chamber, in front of the usual throne, on which the usual empress sat blinking. “Fig-yoors...?”

“That’s right. Figures,” I said, nodding. “Your kagemusha—your body double—I thought maybe we should make a full-scale figure that looked like you. A doll, if you will.”

“A doll?” Garius asked with a frown. “That might work well enough at a distance, if it were merely standing still, but it wouldn’t take long for people to realize it never moved.”

“Of course it would move,” I said proudly, smiling.

“What?”

“It would be an action figure, a doll with movable joints, so it could adopt any number of poses.”

Sculpture was familiar to the people of Eldant, but freely poseable dolls weren’t. They didn’t tend to think along those lines: pictures didn’t move, and neither did statues. That was considered to be common sense, which was part of why anime had been so shocking to them.

“We move the character with magic. Like a Faldra,” I said.

Now Garius and Zahar looked at each other in amazement.

“If it were full-size,” I added, “we could probably fit some little gadgets inside it, too. Make the eyes move, or the mouth, give it basic expressions. I think the dwarves would be capable of making it for us.”

“Now... that does make some sense,” Petralka murmured, thinking it over.

She and her advisors had been stuck on the idea that the body double had to be another human, so it hadn’t occurred to them to use a doll as a substitute. In our world—or actually, the world of manga and anime—this sort of thing happened pretty frequently, like in a certain such-and-such savior legend, or the epic of a certain Meiji-era swordsman. Come to think of it, it was heroines who were saved in both those cases.

Anyway, forget about that.

“Then anything else... I mean, anything that still looks too doll-ish, we can fix with some makeup, maybe. I think Hikaru-san should be able to pull it off. Right?”

“I’d have to try it to know for sure, but probably,” Hikaru-san said from beside me, nodding. “If the dwarves could build us something detailed to work from, then we could work on it to make it look as much like Your Majesty as possible. Even on people, some color in the cheeks, or under the eyes, can completely change a person’s look...”

“I guess dwarven magic is mostly good for minerals,” I said. “We could include some metal in the joints and other parts of the doll.”

Incidentally, the fig*as in the classroom had been made of resin, with small needles stuck in the joints and limbs, and that had been enough for the dwarf boy to make it move.

“Indeed...” Petralka put her chin in her hand and thought for a long moment. Finally, sounding genuinely impressed, she said, “We knew we could count on you, Shinichi. Hardly a day has passed, and you’ve brought us an excellent idea already.”

“Your praise honors me, Your Majesty.”

I was actually a little embarrassed by it, and that made me talk a little more formally.

“This will be a more reliable method than trying to find someone who looks like you, Majesty,” Garius agreed. “If we have several such dolls prepared, we could use them whenever and wherever they’re needed.”

Several... So he wanted to mass-produce Petralka dolls? In my head, I pictured an army of identical Petralkas marching forward, transforming into flight form, firing missiles from heavily armored parts of themselves, and so on... I privately trembled, but never mind.

“What do you think—is it possible?” I asked.

“Possible... It may be,” Petralka said. “At least it should be quicker than producing Faldras.”

Naturally, the gigantic Faldras might be simpler from a pure production standpoint, but then, the Petralka dolls didn’t have to fly through the air or have superhuman strength or whatever.

“However,” Petralka said, furrowing her brow. “Will it not be difficult to make the movements natural enough to deceive people?”

“You think so?”

“We are not terribly conversant with dwarf magic,” Petralka said, looking like she was trying to remember something. “But their puppets, the clay dolls, were originally created for purposes of manual labor—digging tunnels, carrying equipment, and so forth. Their movements are very broad and exaggerated. We have been told delicate work is much more readily dealt with by living hands.”

“Ah ha...”

For sure, the fig*as the students had been playing with had looked a bit hesitant and unnatural.

“We would not say this is impossible, but it would require finding an exceptionally skilled and precise user of clay-doll magic. This may pose a greater hurdle than the actual creation of the doll.”

“Oh, uh, on that subject.” The note of pride crept back into my voice. Kanou Shinichi, ready for anything! (Okay, maybe not anything.) “I know someone who might fit that bill.”

“You do?” Petralka and her advisors looked shocked. I gave them a big grin and a thumbs-up.

There was still time until dinner. After getting back to the mansion, I dropped my stuff off at my room, then headed for the living area. I didn’t really have enough time to start anything, so I went hoping I would find someone to help me pass the time.

I peeked into the living room, and saw a couple of girls in there.

Er, more precisely, I saw one girl and one guy who looked like a girl.

The guy was Hikaru-san. The girl was Elvia Harneiman, another resident of our mansion.

She had golden-brown skin, four gangly limbs, and a real joie de vivre. She was a pretty natural girl—okay, almost entirely a natural girl—but I thought that suited her best. You know how makeup would look weird on a dog or a cat? This was sort of the same thing: she was great the way nature made her.

By Eldant standards, however, Elvia was not a “human.”

She was a demi-human—a werewolf, one of the wolf-like beast people.

Although if you ask me, Elvia was less of a wolf and more like a domestic dog—a puppy, at that. Her fuzzy ears and fluffy tail, and the way she kind of bounced everywhere she went, gave an impression of barely controlled eagerness. It made you want to just pet her and nuzzle her to your heart’s content. Which would be fine with an actual dog, I guess, but Elvia was a person, a girl, so I had to fight to control myself.

Elvia was sitting in a chair, running a pencil along a piece of paper secured to an easel in front of her. Periodically, she would look up at Hikaru-san, then go back to the paper, her pencil working quickly.

Elvia called herself a wandering artist. The fact was, she was really a spy from Bahairam, but she did have some real artistic ability. She also seemed to like drawing a lot better than spying, and the rest of us didn’t worry too much about her supposed “real” job.

Across from Elvia, Hikaru-san was sitting completely still. He seemed frozen—not moving a muscle, like a doll. He wasn’t in any special pose; his hands were folded neatly in his lap and he was sitting naturally, but he was so still, it was almost like he wasn’t breathing. I had never seen anyone stay so motionless.

Elvia seemed to be using her—er, him—as a model for a drawing.

Hikaru-san was expressionless. Elvia was the picture of seriousness. There was an electricity in the air, and I discovered I couldn’t quite bring myself to step into the room.

But then Hikaru-san noticed me standing there. “Heavens,” he said. “Is something the matter?” Only his eyes and mouth moved.

“Oh, no, I don’t need anything special... Just wondering if I can come in...”

“You’re fine.”

“Oh, okay. Thanks...”

I came in hesitantly and sat in a chair next to Hikaru-san. Elvia’s eyes stayed fixed on her canvas; she didn’t so much as glance at me. She just kept drawing away in absolute concentration. I knew how focused she could be, but it never failed to impress me. When she was deep in a drawing, sometimes Elvia wouldn’t even hear you if you talked to her.

Just incidentally, the pencil she was using was one I’d gotten for her from Japan. She always used to work in charcoal, but once I became interested in her artistic abilities, I started to wonder what she would do with more specialized supplies—and it turned out she learned them very quickly, and her drawing abilities immediately improved. She wasn’t exactly using a pen tablet or CG rendering programs yet, but hey.

“I think we’ll be done soon,” Hikaru-san said, smiling.

“Right...” I could only give a noncommittal nod.

Soon the only sounds in the living room were our respective breathing, and Elvia’s pencil scratching along the paper.

“All done!” Elvia announced suddenly, looking up. She had a gigantic grin on her face, genuinely thrilled, the kind of smile that makes you happy just to see it. She really did love art. Moments like these were when Elvia looked the most adorable of all.

But, uh, anyway...

“Shinichi-sama?!”

Her eyes went wide—she had finally noticed me. I told you she knew how to concentrate. Someone could have a sword at her throat, or a fight could break out, or a natural disaster could bring the house tumbling down around her, and she might not even notice. There was a certain danger in that, but I had to admit, I was a little jealous, too.

“Wh-When did you get here?!”

“Just a few minutes ago.” I smiled. “So you were drawing Hikaru-san?”

“Uh-huh. I like to do faces from time to time, y’know?”

“And I happened to be passing through,” Hikaru-san added, “so she called me over.”

We had established that doing art was Elvia’s way of attenuating her beast-person hunting instinct. It involved careful focus, feeling out the object of your attention, and taking it within you—all things shared with stalking prey. That would explain why she wanted to draw still lifes and people as much as sketching from her imagination.

“Thanks a lot, Hikaru-sama.”

“Can I see the picture?” Hikaru-san held out his hands.

“Sure!” Smiling, she handed him the finished product.

I took a peek, too.

“Ooh,” I breathed in admiration.

On the paper was a black-and-white Hikaru-san. This was more than a sketch—it almost looked like a photograph. Elvia had always had a gift for realism, and once she got hold of pencils, with their capacity for precision, I felt like the details of her pictures had only improved.

“This is incredible, Elvia,” I said.

“Y-Y’ think so? Heh heh...” She blushed. She scratched the end of her nose, maybe a gesture of embarrassment. In any event, she looked awfully cute doing it.

“You’ve got him to a T,” I said, looking closely at the “Hikaru-san” on the paper.

“I guess it has that in common with making figures,” Hikaru-san said quietly, looking at the picture with me.

“Huh?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you emphasize things, make them more than they are. If the subject’s eyes droop a little, you draw them drooping a little more. If they’re a bit rotund, you make them a little rounder. A touch of exaggeration actually makes the impression more accurate.” Hikaru-san pointed to the picture. “The drawing seems photo-real, but you can see that the details are just a little bit off—a little bit overemphasized. I don’t know if Elvia’s doing that consciously or not, but...”

Hikaru-san pulled out his phone and pulled up a picture. It was him—wearing different clothes, but looking substantially like Elvia’s drawing. (That’s a cosplayer; of course he would have pictures of himself on his phone.)

“I get it...”

I had understood intellectually the technique of emphasizing certain details, but as someone who didn’t do any drawing, I didn’t really have a good personal grasp of it. But with the photo and the drawing side-by-side, I could pick up the differences.

Things like the angle and the light can make a person look like a total stranger in a photograph, and there was no question that between the two of them, Elvia’s drawing felt closer to Hikaru-san as I pictured him in my head.

“Again, I don’t think Elvia is doing it deliberately.”

I guess that’s talent for you.

“Doin’ what?” she asked, looking a little perplexed.

“That’s what makes me think that when it comes to the puppet double for Her Majesty, there are some things about the clothes and appearance that we should change,” Hikaru-san said, putting a finger to his chin. “We could just put it in normal clothes, to make it look like her, but because we also want to hide the joints and stuff, I thought maybe custom-made clothing might be in order... Then again, it depends a little on how it’s made. We should probably hide ball joints, but otherwise, it might actually look unnatural trying to cover them up.”

“Clothes aren’t exactly my specialty,” I said, “so maybe I can leave that to you?”

“Fine by me. I’m sure Minori-san will have some ideas, too.”

They both loved cosplay, anyway. I figured it would be a lot more efficient to just let them handle everything, rather than trying to offer my amateur opinions.

“That just leaves the makeup... or I guess you’d say the paint,” Hikaru-san said. “Mostly we can let the dwarves handle that. Her Majesty looks pretty young, so the main thing will be to emphasize that. Maybe make the stand-in look a little rounder, be sure to get some blush in the cheeks...”

“I agree with everything you just said,” I told him, “but take my advice and never let Petralka hear you say it.”

Petralka was somewhat less than happy about her girlish appearance. If anyone described her as young or childish, regardless of whether they meant anything by it, she would get steaming mad. I happened to have received a royal punch to the face at our first meeting—although that was partly my fault for exclaiming “IS THAT REALLY AN ARCHETYPICAL LITTLE GIRL CHARACTER?!” the moment I saw her.

“Anyway, there are some things we’ll need to ask Minori-san and Matoba-san about,” I said. I was hoping we could get the doll’s external covering—its skin—from Japan, along with the clothing materials and makeup. After all, putting clothes and paint right onto a wooden (or metal) surface didn’t seem likely to fool anybody.

But that would mean working with Matoba Jinzaburou-san—the middleman between my company, Amutech, and the Japanese government; a classic bureaucrat. And that thought made my skin crawl.

“So you can’t just make them look identical,” Elvia mused, looking at her drawing and the photo of Hikaru-san. “Who knew this was so hard?”

“Yeah, sometimes overemphasizing things makes them look more realistic.”

“Izzat right...”

“I think we talked about this before.”

“We did?” She chuckled with embarrassment. Geez, she was one adorable beast girl.

“You mean you don’t think about that stuff when you’re drawing?” Hikaru-san asked.

Elvia shook her head. “Uh-uh. Not a bit.”

I knew it: she wasn’t going by logic but by a sort of intuition, a je ne sais quoi. I had to marvel afresh; that itself indicated serious talent.

“Oh, here you are,” said a voice as clear and sweet as the ringing of a bell. We turned, and there was Myusel, once more dressed in her maid outfit, in the doorway. “Dinner is ready, but I couldn’t find any of you in your rooms...”

“Thanks. We’ll be right there.” I got up from my chair, and Hikaru-san and Elvia did the same.

I had a lot to think about, but priority one was getting some food in me. Who could think on an empty stomach?

And so I followed Myusel into the kitchen.

Okay, so anyway, the next day came.

And I stood wondering how I had gotten myself into this.

I stood smack in the middle of a large room, desperately concerned about my current situation.

In front of me was a girl with her back to me. She was wearing very light clothes—probably the best way I could describe what she was wearing was as a camisole and shorts; anyway, obviously very thin clothing that left the lines of her body easily visible. Her bare shoulders and pale legs just about blinded me. It was enough to make me worry that a careless touch might despoil her.

It was the honored and alluring body of Petralka an Eldant III.

But...

Is that... the spell she was talking about before?

There on her back—her lower back, just above her behind—a complicated pattern was tattooed into her skin. The ink was almost the color of her flesh, so it didn’t stand out much, but I bet you could see it better, say, after she had been in the bath, when the skin was flushed.

A member of the imperial family was always in danger from assassins and killers. While her royal knights might be able to deflect swords or arrows, powerful and/or long-range magic wasn’t something you could stop with a shield or armor. Hence, her body was covered in spells designed to reflect offensive magic.

I had seen it work once, but I had never seen the inscription itself with my own eyes.

Man... It brings home to you just how important an empress is...

I know it was a little late to be having that epiphany. Sorry.

“Won’t you hurry and do it, Shinichi?” Petralka urged me.

“Oh, but, uh...”

“Yes, what?” She glared back at me over her shoulder. “What makes you hesitate?”

“No matter how careful I am, I’m still... gonna touch you.”

“We believe we instructed you not to worry about such niceties. Or what? Do you find the notion of touching our person unpleasant?”

“N-No, not at all.”

I had exactly the opposite problem, actually. I was afraid that one stray touch would lead to another, and pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from huffing and panting and getting my hands all over her. All of which, I was fairly confident, would lead to the prompt separation of my head from my body.

“Not at all?” Petralka pursed her lips in displeasure, turning even more towards me.

Urgh. That’s a very dangerous angle, Your Majesty.

I found my brain overwhelmed by the almost-but-not-quite perspective, the small space between the camisole(-ish thing) and her skin through which I could very nearly, maybe-but-maybe-not catch a glimpse of that small chest. It might have been a modest endowment, but it was a girl’s chest just the same. As slight as it was, it pushed up the camisole, hence why there was the tiniest gap between her skin and the fabric, and to see it was like looking into a secret place where I mustn’t look but which was now revealed before meeeeeeeghhhhhh.

Without really thinking about it, I found myself clapping a hand over my nose and looking away.

I forced myself to take my eyes off Petralka—and instead looked at Minori-san, who was standing with an exasperated expression on her face. “Shinichi-kun, I get it, okay? But Her Highness was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule for us, so...”

“...Yeth, ma’am. I underthand.”

I nodded, then gently took my hand off my nose.

Safe. No nosebleed. So far.

Then I took a deep breath.

That’s right. Calm down, Kanou Shinichi.

I wasn’t alone in here. Minori-san was with me, and so was Hikaru-san, while several female knights—Petralka’s royal guard—stood along the walls. Maybe the reason I felt so jumpy had to do with the collective suspicion they were leveling at me.

Right. It’s okay.

Even on the off chance I totally lost it and committed a crime for the ages, or looked like I was about to commit a crime, someone would stop me. I hoped.

All too aware that I was maybe relying too much on the kindness of those around me, I reached out for Petralka again.

“Okay,” I said, taking her delicate arm in my hand. “P-Pardon me...”

I could hear my own heart pounding in my chest. This was hardly the first time I had touched Petralka—she even used to sit on my lap while we read books together, and I’d been unable to avoid touching her exposed shoulders then. But even so, confronted with the empress in what amounted to her underwear, I couldn’t help the feeling I was doing something absolutely taboo.

Carefully, oh so carefully, I pressed it to Petralka’s body.

“It” being the measuring tape I’d borrowed from Hikaru-san.

“Let’s see...” I ran the measuring tape around her, reading off the number for her waist.

Minori-san’s job was to take notes, though apparently we were also audio-recording this. Hikaru-san was just an observer; he stood slightly apart, watching me.

So, what were we doing? In a word, we were taking Petralka’s measurements. In a few more words, we needed detailed numbers for different parts of her body. This was all so that we could build her body double—her stand-in doll.

Making a detailed replica naturally required taking detailed measurements. Personally, I felt that job could have been handled by anybody, but someone had the bright thought that as the guy who had come up with the idea, I should handle the measurements as well.

I guess as sort of the foreman, it made a certain kind of sense—but I made sure to have Minori-san and Hikaru-san with me, the people who would handle making the actual clothes. They knew a lot more about this sort of thing than I did.

But then came the moment when we were actually ushered into the audience chamber. Petralka had turned to her guards for help removing her clothing, and then standing there in her undergarments had turned back to me and said, “Now, measure. You need not hesitate.”

“Uh, Petralka...”

“What is it?”

“I don’t mean to quibble, but... are you sure it wouldn’t be better for Minori-san or one of your guards to do this...?”

I know, I know. Taking some measurements shouldn’t really be guilt-inducing stuff. But even so, I was a guy and Petralka was a girl, and with virtually nothing but a thin piece of cloth between me and her, I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed.

Come to think of it, back when we were making the movie, I’d accidentally stumbled into the girls’ changing area, but Petralka hadn’t seemed very bothered then, either. She’d had her guards help her out of her clothes earlier—I guess important people rarely change clothes all by themselves, so maybe she’d numbed any sense of embarrassment.

Me, though, I couldn’t take this so calmly. Not to mention, I wasn’t just measuring her height or something. We needed the length of her arms, her legs, the size of her hips and chest, and more. I thought girls usually didn’t want guys knowing that sort of thing about them—especially their bust size.

Or did Petralka just not think of me as a guy? That would have been something of a tragedy in its own right, but...

“And yet a quibbler you are,” Petralka said, glancing over her shoulder again. “Are you indeed so averse to touching our person?”

“I told you, that’s not the problem.”

“Then carry on.” She fixed her gaze forward again. Somehow she looked almost... amused. Maybe she enjoyed watching me squirm?

“Ah, yes. Shinichi.”

“Yes...?” I responded. Meanwhile I resumed taking her measurements, trying to pretend I was a machine with no feelings.

“When the time comes that the spellcaster is found who will operate the double, I leave their education in your hands as well. Is that acceptable?”

“Their education?”

“We assume some practice will be necessary to make the doll move and act like us. We are instructing you to provide the spellcaster that guidance.”

“Me...?” I shot a glance at Minori-san and Hikaru-san. They looked almost as surprised as I felt.

“Your Majesty,” Hikaru-san said, “please forgive my presumption, but wouldn’t it be better to entrust that task to someone personally closer to you?”

I agreed one hundred percent. Garius and Zahar, for example, had both known her way longer than I had; they must have had a better sense of Petralka’s smallest tics.

But Petralka shook her head. “No...” The long silver hair fluttered in front of me.

Wow. Her hair brushed my nose, and it tickled, but it also smelled good. My Kurobe Dam was already about to burst.

“We found your direction during the production of the moo-vee to be quite appropriate. One who is too close may be prone to missing certain details—so Garius tells us. In any event, we are not out to deceive friends and family. As far as catching the ‘gist’ of us—Shinichi. We believe you understand it well.”

“The movie?” Hikaru-san said, putting a finger to his chin and looking puzzled. “I know what you mean. That’s one of the projects you did before I got here, right? Didn’t it feature Her Majesty as a magical girl who—”

“Silence!” Petralka exclaimed suddenly. “We shall not permit further discussion of that thing!”

“Oh... Of course.” Hikaru-san nodded, cowed by the sudden outburst. Petralka, for her part, was red up to her ears.

“Petralka... Calm down,” I said with a grin. Apparently that movie was still a raw nerve for her. Personally, I thought that was too bad—she’d been adorable in it. Even her somewhat awkward performance was sweet in its own way.

“..................Anyway,” Petralka said with a single, pointed cough, bringing us back to the original subject. “We wish to entrust the matter to you.”

“Well, if you insist...” I could hardly refuse.

“We request that you focus on things here. You may reduce your workload at school or delegate that business to others for a while. A room will be prepared here for you.”

“Is it really that urgent?” I asked in surprise.

“Not precisely,” Petralka replied, “but still...” She spared another glance back at me. “Shinichi, it has been some time since you visited the castle for any reason other than to make your regular reports, has it not?”

“Er... I guess so. I didn’t think a castle was the sort of place you just dropped by to hang out, you know?”

Being a castle and all.

It was Petralka’s home, but it was also the seat of the government of the Holy Eldant Empire, like the Japanese Prime Minister’s residence and all the cabinet offices all rolled into one. I didn’t think you just popped in for a visit the way you might at a friend’s house.

Petralka, though, looked forward again, almost seeming to pout as she said, “Come even when you have no specific business.”

“That would be totally out of line...”

“We are unable to go to you, therefore you must come to us, must you not?”

“............Ah.”

You might recall that the terrorist incident with the Assembly of Patriots was one of the background causes for this whole discussion of a body double. Petralka had been an actual hostage—the Patriots could have killed her anytime they wanted. The whole thing came as a shock to the empress’s advisors, and for reasons of safety, Petralka’s excursions had been severely limited since then.

“Come here sometimes. Even if you do not have... ahem... any specific business.” Petralka seemed almost hesitant; after a moment’s silence she added, “It—It gets lonely, does it not?”

“Petralka...”

I looked at her, she looked at the ground, and I felt an almost painful squeezing in my heart. How could an absolute monarch be so dang cute?! I was gonna die! Die of moe! Or if not from moe, then because I just couldn’t hold myself back from giving her a big hug and getting my head chopped off! Danger! Stay calm, my arms!

I fought valiantly to push back the rising tide of chuunibyou-ishness within me.

But, uh, anyway, she was right. I had school. Petralka had an empire to run. That didn’t leave us with a lot of opportunities to see each other, and because of our respective positions, we rarely got the chance to just talk as friends.

Could it be... Had she asked me to handle these measurements for the same reason?

Wait... Was she... Could she be inventing excuses to see me?

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

Ahhhhhhhhhh!! The bittersweetness! Why is this bittersweetness filling my—nay, overflowing from my heart?! What’s going on here?!

This feeling—is this feeling moe?!

Okay, so I was maybe putting all these pieces together a little late.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Petralka’s back. “I get it. I’ll be sure to stop by sometimes, even if I don’t need anything.”

“Th-That will be well.”

I couldn’t see her face, but I could see her beet-red ears, and it made me break out in a smile.