Chapter Three: Hullo, Akiba!
Chapter Three: Hullo, Akiba!
We emerged from under the green overhead rail to find ourselves in a country of dreams.
I drank in the avenue, a vast street running onward and onward. I spread my arms wide and said, “Akihabara! I have returned! Not that I’m going to shoot a nuclear bazooka at you or anything!”
The view of the holy land from the famous Mansei Bridge, so near and dear to my heart, looked just the way I remembered it. Okay, so some of the stores I knew were gone and others had replaced them, but so what? The view hadn’t changed much.
For better or for worse, it was still the hodgepodge it had always been. Roadways streaked this way and that, seemingly leading nowhere; people walked wherever they wanted, and it was impossible to ignore the signs for anime and games and manga. Even the Niku no Man*** building was there—the sort of thing that really lets you know you’re alive—as we headed onto the area’s main street.
“Ooh!” Petralka exclaimed, running ahead of me. “So this it is!”
She was dressed completely differently than normal. She was wearing a pinkish jacket with a polka-dot miniskirt, loose socks, and sneakers—and to top it all off she was wearing a ribbon, along with earmuffs and even a little bag. The whole enchilada.
It definitely made her pretty conspicuous, but Petralka had always been noticeably pretty anyway, and the outgoing, assertive outfit really suited her. Okay, it didn’t all exactly match, but at first glance she looked like a perfectly ordinary girl—even if she and her clothes came from Eldant.
That’s right: Petralka had brought this outfit with her from her home country. Apparently she had put it together based on careful observation of manga and anime. And you know what? It did have a certain “cosplay” vibe.
Now her eyes sparkled and she nearly launched herself down the street—except that Myusel and I each grabbed one of her hands.
“What is this, Shinichi? Myusel?” she said, frowning.
We had discovered something else interesting: when we were physically touching each other, our magic rings worked even here in Japan. I guess the rings, which functioned using the modicum of magical energy produced by our bodies, normally used the magic in the air around us as a medium to transmit our thoughts to other people, much like how sound waves travel through air. That was why they didn’t work when there was no magic in the surrounding area but could still function when we were in physical contact with each other.
You know how in Gun**m they’ll be in the vacuum of space, but people can still communicate by touching each other so that the sound waves travel directly from body to body? It’s sort of like that.
I never really thought about it too hard, but I’m starting to wonder what exactly magical energy is.
It wasn’t the first time on that trip the thought had occurred to me. Apparently the human body gave off a very small amount of whatever it was...
Okay, bracket that for now.
“Don’t run around, it’s dangerous. This is a pretty busy street.”
“Hrm. These auto-mo-beels of yours. They do indeed seem profuse.” Petralka nodded.
She had seen the LAV back in Eldant, of course, and on arriving here had gotten some firsthand experience of a small van, so she and the others had some sense of what a car was. Nonetheless, getting here and seeing so many of them must have been something to behold.
“Very well, then. Walking like this allows us to use the rings, anyway. You may take us by the hand, Shinichi.” Petralka gave my hand a squeeze.
“Huh? Oh...” It was only then that it really sank in with me that I was holding hands with Petralka, her small, delicate fingers interlaced with mine. “Er, um, Petralka?”
“Yes, what?”
“H-Holding, I mean, hands like this... Don’t you think it could be bad in... various ways?”
It was one thing to grab her hand to stop her from running into the street, but just to hang out, walking hand-in-hand? It seemed—How should I put this, Your Majesty?
“Was it not you yourself who took our hand in the first place? Come on, hurry and show us around!” Petralka started off, all but dragging me along. “We see that it is a vast space indeed! We must hurry, or there won’t be time to see it all!”
“Er, right.”
Okay, fine.
Touring Akiba hand-in-hand with a beautiful young woman? Honestly, I had never even dreamed it. But if it would make Petralka happy, I would go along with her. As for the bashfulness, I would survive.
Or anyway, so I thought.
That was when someone else took my other hand. Squeeze.
“Um, Shinichi-sa—I mean, Master.”
It was Myusel.
I looked over to see her with her eyes cast toward the ground, her left hand at her chest, her right stretched out to take my hand. For reference, she wasn’t in her usual maid outfit just then—she was wearing a beige cardigan and a red-checked miniskirt, along with legwarmers and sneakers. She still had the fluffy cap on her head, and a similarly fuzzy scrunchie holding her hair back. Those were pretty distinctive, but overall she looked more or less like an average high-school girl.
Then again, Myusel’s whole “exotic beauty” thing made her stand out to begin with.
“Myusel...?”
“M-Master, it’s my duty t-to protect you and Her Majesty, so I thought... I th-thought, we should make sure we could communicate at any time...”
I guess there’s some logic to that...
“What is the matter? Shinichi, Myusel, let us go!”
“Yeah, sure, Your Majesty, don’t pull!”
“Call me Petralka!”
“Sorry...”
That was the quality of the conversation as Petralka, me, and then Myusel went walking hand-in-hand down the main avenue of Akihabara. I knew Minori-san and Elvia were following just behind...
“Ah, a young man in his prime.”
“Ia dorou osura ekiru oto etapishitorappu.”
“Well, his hands are both taken, but maybe you could jump on his back?”
“Ti eodo osu!”
I could hear Eldant and Japanese flowing freely; maybe the two of them were touching, too. And then a second later—
“Shinichi-sama!”
I could practically hear the thump as Elvia glommed on to my back.
Okay, wait, what is the deal here?
Myusel holding my left hand. Petralka holding my right. And Elvia riding piggyback.
It was complete: Full-Armor Shinichi’s Beautiful Girl Shield!
Okay, no.
“Ooh, this must be a ‘gei-sen’ such as I’ve heard so much about!” Petralka said, dragging me off in a new direction. That meant I pulled on Myusel, and Elvia came along for the ride...
“Girls, we have to— This is not the way to stay hidden!”
Petralka, though, was too hyped up to listen to a word I said; Myusel just kept saying “I—I have to, it’s my job”; and Elvia had her face buried in my back and was making comments like, “Mmm. It smells like you, Shinichi-sama.”
As I’ve explained before, all of these girls were exceptionally pretty. They looked like foreigners (which, I guess, they were), and here in Akihabara they really stood out.
I could see people looking in our direction and talking, though they were too far away for me to catch what they were saying. Worse, some people had their cell phones out and appeared to be taking pictures...
“Minori-san...!” I looked to my WAC for help, but she just shrugged and grinned.
“You’re really something, Shinichi-kun. You get more popular every day.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Ah, if only Minister Garius were here. I’ll bet that would spice things up even more.”
There’s no hope. I can’t count on her.
Defeated, I let Petralka drag me into the game center.
Let’s turn back the clock about an hour.
“Dad, please give me some money!”
“Hrmph, absolutely not!”
My dad and I were squaring off in the living room. Mom and Shizuki were out.
“Grr. You didn’t even think about it.”
“Hmph. I didn’t have to think about it,” he said. “Anyway, where do you get off demanding money when you spent more than a year as a useless home security guard?”
“I’m always hurt when adults use such brutally honest words...”
“Hrm. An appeal to my empathy? I warn you, it won’t work!”
My dad seemed inordinately proud of that fact.
“Whatever. Listen, I just need some cash!”
“What for? Are you completely obsessed with social-game ga*has?”
“No! I’m not you, Dad! Petralka says she wants to go to Akiba, okay?”
Yep: since we had come all the way to Japan, Petralka insisted that she wanted to see that otaku Mecca, that broadcasting station of otaku culture, Akihabara.
To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but thinking that maybe I should just count myself lucky she hadn’t asked to go to Comiket, I decided to grant her wish if I could.
“And you can’t not spend money in Akiba! You’re surrounded by manga and DVDs and games and figures and character merchandise of all kinds! And Ichiban **ji and claw games aren’t free, you know! You can never have enough money there! Money, money, money—an army needs funds...!”
“Ohh!! Hrgh, are you trying to make me weep tears of blood with that Ta**** Hiroshi-esque touch?!”
“Please!”
“Never!”
Bam! I brought my hands together in a gesture of supplication so hard you could hear it, but my dad put his hands above his head like an attacking black bear—a classic “mad dad” pose.
“If you won’t take no for an answer, then you’ll have to destroy me in combat!”
“So it’s to be the path of destruction...” I said, clenching my fist.
My dad, though, smirked triumphantly. “Hahaha. You take me too lightly, if you think you can beat your father. I attended a correspondence karate course for three months!”
“Dad...” I said. I looked at him for just a moment, then said, “Elvia?”
“Rawr!”
My dad cried uncle five seconds later.
“Th-That was dirty, Shinichi...” My dad sat twitching on our blood-streaked sofa after Elvia worked him over.
Okay, so the blood came from my dad’s nose after Elvia, holding him in a choke, pressed his head against her chest. He was pushing fifty, but I guess in some ways a man is always young.
Heck, maybe that’s why he was able to write light novels.
“Dirty? Don’t you have any better words? You’re an author, for crying out loud. Say, like, dishonorable or unscrupulous or something.”
“Hrm... One question, Shinichi.” My dad hefted himself up, looking puzzled. “Haven’t you been getting paid?”
“Huh...?” I said stupidly, and then I realized. “Oh yeah, my salary from being Amutech’s general manager...”
I hardly used money as such when I was in the Eldant Empire, so I had almost completely forgotten about it.
“Here’s your bank book, which you left here, by the way. There’s a pretty good chunk of change in there. We realized when the bank called asking if you didn’t want to open a CD.”
“That much?”
So the help-wanted ad on the internet may have been a total trap, but apparently they were actually respecting the salary as it had been posted. The Japanese government was honest about the strangest things. Maybe that was what you got for having such a hierarchical government, where each person just did what they were supposed to do without worrying about what anyone else was up to.
“But I lost fair and square—so take this and go,” my dad said, producing an envelope from the folds of the couch. “Leave the salary in your account and just let it grow. You never know when you might need it.”
I took the envelope and peeked inside: there were ten whole ten-thousand-yen bills in there. That was great and all, but the blood from my dad’s nose had gotten on the envelope, so now it looked like I had killed somebody for it. You sure about this, “Papa”?
“Huh? You had this here all along?”
“Eh, y’know.” My dad grabbed a wet wipe and started dabbing at the sofa. “My son brought home a girl for the first time. Several girls, in fact, all beautiful foreigners. What dad wouldn’t want to help him look good?”
“Then why...............?” I asked, actually a little bit touched.
My dad nodded. “Form is beautiful.”
“Uh-huh...”
That was my dad: passionately committed to the absurd.
Maybe that was why he was able to write light novels.
And that brings us back to the present moment, in Akihabara.
Petralka, Myusel, and Elvia were constantly shocked by what I guess you could call the culture gap.
“We have been wondering for some time,” Petralka said, pointing at the buildings all around us. “What actually is this Akihabara of yours? Is it some kind of castle?”
“Huh? A castle?” I said.
“Is it not surrounded by walls in the far distance?”
“Oh...”
In a word, Petralka was seeing the skyscrapers. They were so far away that the skyline looked like a single solid wall. Considering how differently things were done in Eldant, it was an understandable mistake.
“We know that you must be seeking to protect your holy land—”
“That’s not what we’re seeking.”
“—but as large as your walls are, there are vast gaps between them. Does this mean what we think it means? Are there giants, giants who assault this place? Do you get eaten? Are you attacked by these titans?”
“No, no, and no.”
“Ahh, truly a holy place...”
Fine, let Petralka admire whatever she wanted about Akihabara, even if it was off-the-wall.
Then there was the person on the other side of me. Myusel was bowing to somebody.
“Ah, thank you for your hard work,” she was saying.
“Myusel?” I asked.
“Oh, Master. I was just greeting these other maids here.”
She was talking about some girls dressed up as maids, who were trying to get customers for one of the maid cafés that seemed to be springing up all over Akiba these days.
“Myusel, Myusel, those are ’layers working a part-time job.”
“Par-time? Ley-er?” She cocked her head in confusion.
Ahh! That gesture, like a songbird—it was heart-stoppingly cute, but forget about that.
“Er, what I’m saying is, they’re not real maids.”
“Oh my goodness...!”
She seemed maybe a little more surprised than necessary.
And then there was—
“Shinichi-sama, Shinichi-sama! The mural! The mural on the wall is moving!”
Elvia was shouting from her place on my back, or by this point, practically on my shoulders. She was pointing to the Diamond Vision screen on the side of one of the buildings.
Geez. Here I had one girl on each arm and one on my back, each of them looking in a different direction and excited about a different thing. If they had been kids instead, I wouldn’t have looked out of place as a teacher at some kindergarten somewhere. I finally felt some real sympathy for what a tough job they must have.
And it didn’t stop there.
“Tell us, Shinichi, why would these places have lanterns burning in the middle of the day?”
“Huh? Oh, those are display windows, and... uh...”
I found myself struggling to explain. The Eldant Empire had outdoor shops, but no concept of the display window, so it was hard to explain that the lighting was there to make the merchandise look more attractive. To Petralka and the others, “lanterns” were for indoor use, helping to light up dim interiors, and not something that went outside most of the time.
“Master, there are such colorful clothes here!” Myusel said, her eyes wide. She was pointing at a cosplay specialty shop. In the front window were several outfits inspired by various anime and games. They were colorful, all right, but they looked even wilder here in the real world than they did in animation. Then again, for someone like Myusel who had no sense of what was “normal” attire in Japan, who knew how they looked?
“And so many maid uniforms...”
“Eh, there’s lots of different types.”
“It’s incredible...” Myusel said, her eyes shining as she looked at the outfits.
“Hey, wanna buy one?”
“Wha?” Myusel looked at me in surprise.
The expression was just so cute—I couldn’t help showing off a little. “Don’t worry, this army has funds. We can afford a cosplay outfit if we want,” I said, glancing at the prices on the display as I spoke.
It seemed like these outfits had gotten more affordable lately, to the point where with a lot of them, you would get change for a ten-thousand-yen bill. We would need to make sure we had money for food, but even then, we should be able to spare ten or twenty thousand yen each for fun.
“Which one do you like, Myusel? Is there anything here that strikes your fancy?”
“Oh, but...”
“Seriously, don’t worry about it. Let’s get one. That’s, uh, an order. Pick something out,” I said.
When I used that word, order, Myusel couldn’t put me off any longer. Okay, I felt a little bad forcing her, but it didn’t look like she was going to let me buy her something any other way.
“Okay, then.........” She looked over several of the outfits, at a bit of a loss, but then said... “Something characteristic of your country, Master.” With a hint of embarrassment, she pointed at something.
“Huh?”
I realized, to my surprise, that Myusel had picked out a kimono.
She had read plenty of manga herself back at our mansion, so she understood that this was a “period” outfit, something traditionally Japanese.
Also, though, there was no way a cosplay shop in Akihabara would have a normal kimono. Instead, everything would be from period-drama anime like Sengoku BASA*A, Gin****, and Ru**uni Kenshin. They were all made to be easy to wear, too, for those of us who weren’t versed in putting on traditional clothing. Still, for someone like Myusel, they would look plenty Japanese.
Hmm. But when it comes to kimono in anime, it’s always lady ninjas or lady martial artists or lady swordspeople who wear them. Huh, but I guess there is the apron-like kappougi; that’s Japanese, too. Since Myusel already wore her maid uniform all the time, though, I didn’t want to get her something that would be like just another work outfit. I wanted something she could wear out if she felt like it.
This was tough! I had to think hard about what I was getting, or I might end up having to buy a bunch of accessories, too.
But as I was trying to work all this out...
“What is it you are dawdling over?” Petralka demanded, pulling me by the hand. I almost stumbled as I took a step toward her.
“Sorry, Petralka. What did you need?”
“You are paying attention exclusively to Myusel!”
Her Majesty was in a royally bad mood.
...Sorry, I slipped.
In any event, Her Royal Majesty was awfully cute puffing out her cheeks in annoyance. She had stopped arguing with Myusel in quite the way they had at first, but she still definitely wanted to be number one, and I guess I couldn’t blame her. What with being an empress and all.
“Look, I didn’t mean to—sorry, Myusel, we’ll pick something out later.”
“Yes, Master,” Myusel said with a half smile and a nod.
“Sorry, Petralka. Is there an outfit or anything you’d like to buy?”
No matter how you cut it, nothing here was likely to cost more than a fraction of anything Petralka wore on a regular basis—and when it came to the faux accessories, it would be just a fraction of a fraction.
Petralka, though, pointed down the street and said, “Shinichi, what about those people vending fabulous crafts right out in the open? Do they not fear attack by thieves?”
She was pointing to some people selling cheap accessories from a table on the sidewalk covered with a velvet cloth. In Japan, with its advanced machining and metal-refining technologies, trinkets like those were unremarkable, but for a princess—er, empress—from another world with Middle-Ages technology, they must have seemed like rare treasures.
“And look, Shinichi! Look at all these tiny statues!”
Now she was fawning over a gacha**n machine. A case next to it displayed the figurines so you could see what you might get.
“Why so shocked?” I asked. “The dwarves make stuff like that all the time, don’t they?”
“True, yes, but—hrk! Is that not the foreman from Gaishi?!”
Her eyes went from huge to huger.
“Oh... I get it.”
Theme counted for a lot. There were plenty of manga series for which you could only get figures—including those of minor characters—from gacha**n.
“We want this, Shinichi, we want it! Hrm? How does one purchase these things? The lid of this container refuses to open.”
“Here, look,” I said, taking out some small change and putting it in the machine. I turned the handle and click-klunk! Out came a capsule.
“Ooooh!” That was Petralka, suitably impressed by everything she saw. It was awfully cute.
But...
“Grr. What is this? It’s wrong, this is not the foreman!”
“Yeah, it’s kind of a lottery. You’re not guaranteed to get the one you want. That’s part of the f—”
“Arrgh! The foreman! Produce the foreman!”
To all appearances completely ignoring me, Petralka grabbed onto the gacha**n machine in a way that made her vaguely resemble a koala and started shaking it.
What are you doing, Your Majesty? I wanted to ask—but we had bigger problems, like how conspicuous this made us, or for that matter the fact that we might get the police called on us! The squad from the Mansei Bridge police box would rush over, and we would be sent up a river that Tokyo didn’t even have!
People were definitely starting to notice what was going on, and naturally, a few of them were even pulling out their phones... I couldn’t have Petralka ending up on some internet list: “12 Foreign Girls Hanging from Gacha**n Machines—You Won’t Believe No. 8!!”
Actually, I was probably already too late.
“Okay, we’ll get your foreman, just calm down!” I all but shouted as I desperately searched for more change.
So you see how it was going.
.........
“There! There! Argh, what are you doing?!”
“Hey, this is harder than it l—”
“Step aside, we shall do it ourselves! ......Ahh?!”
“See? Not so easy, huh?”
“Bah, we shall try again!”
The two of us must have sounded pretty hopeless. The claw game we were trying promptly consumed three thousand of our yen.
.........
“And so, this is where we’re going to have lunch!”
“Really, Shinichi-kun? We have a national leader in tow, and we’re taking her to Go! **! Curry?”
“When in Rome, right?”
“We could at least go to Niku ** Mansei or something.”
“But we just had meat yesterday.”
“Let’s at least do Fuji ****, then.”
“And you think that’s a better place to take a VIP?”
Notwithstanding my ongoing discussion with Minori-san, we walked into Go! **! Curry.
“Hm. This aroma of spices we detect does indeed provoke the appetite.”
“Right? You’re about to sample a quintessential part of Japan’s culinary culture, Your Majesty,” I said. Minori-san might or might not have shot back “Is curry really Japanese food culture?” but I ignored her. Indian curry was a quantifiably different thing; surely I was within my rights to call Japanese curry part of the local culinary scene.
“Come on, give it a try, Petralka.”
“Mm. M... Mrrgh... grff...?!”
“P-Petralka, what’s wrong?”
“Wagh—wagha—wugherr!”
“Water! Right, water...!”
“Phew! What is this thing, Shinichi?! Poison?!”
“You take that back! It’s just a little spicy!”
“A little spicy?” Petralka’s eyes were watering.
I realized Myusel and Elvia had had the same reaction. I guess for the non-curry-experienced among us, the food had come out the gate swinging. The spice was pretty average as curry went—I might even have gone so far as to say it wasn’t very spicy at all—but I guess if you had never tried it before, it might catch you off guard.
“Do you eat such punishing food often, Shinichi?”
“Punishing? It’s good!”
One silent girl.
Two silent girls.
“Shinichi.”
“Yeah...?”
“W-We might see fit to, ahem, t-try ourselves against one more mouthful.”
“Ooh, gonna go for it, Your Majesty? That’s what makes you the empress!”
“We find ourself feeling, Shinichi, that we are the strange one not to like what you so clearly enjoy. Give to us from that plate of yours. We presume it is not spicy?”
“No, they’re the same. I already ate from this plate, that okay?”
“We do not care; give it to us.”
“Okay, okay.”
Silence.
“Petralka?”
“Hrmph, you are the most oblivious! Here! Ahh!”
“Ah... Ahhh...”
And so, there in the Go! **! Curry restaurant, I found myself forced into some very embarrassing “role-playing.”
.........
“Shinichisama!!”
“Wait, Elvia, watch out for—”
Tmp! Tmptmp! Elvia bounced on the dance-game platform with light, nimble footsteps. With her superhuman physical abilities, a capacity to see motion befitting a predator, and her incredible reflexes, she had been shattering one record after another. Elvia had always loved art, but it looked like maybe she had a talent for music, too.
I found it all amusing—at first.
As the music got faster and faster, though, Elvia’s movements got more violent, too.
“Hang on, what’s happening over there?”
“Trippin’! Get a load of that girl!”
“Naw, man, there, by her skirt—”
“A tail?”
“Some kinda cosplay?”
“But it’s moving...”
The peanut gallery was getting a little too interested, so Minori-san and I jumped up on the dance platform, dragged Elvia down, and beat feet.
.........
“This tower—is this tower the fabled Library?!”
“It’s a bookstore, Petralka. A bookstore. They sell books.”
“The entire interior of this tower is full of books?! And for sale?”
“It is quite something...” Myusel agreed.
They were gazing up at that famous Akiba landmark, the Shosen Boo* Tower.
They were plenty impressed by the escalators running up and down the building, but as I expected, the thing they loved most was the shelves upon shelves of books.
“Oo?! Eresu era inamu uen sunoitasshirubappu!” Ohh?! All these brand-new releases!
“Shi, itosejamu, shi, itosejamu, esu anime noisure gaishi...” Your Majesty, Your Majesty, it’s a gazette of the Gaishi anime...
“Oo, Myuseru ti netofoo dido!” Oh, well done, Myusel!
“Shinichi-sama, Shinichi-sama, sisu kuubu fo sugunitoniabu ia tonau shisu kuubu fo sugunitoniabu ekunisu ti sukurou iruguniradone esaerubu ibu ti ekunisu gunisuina si dirakku touo esaerubu ibu ti!” I want this art collection, this one! I’ll work extra hard, just please get it for me! I’ll do anything!
“Ooh, they have the latest issue of Super-M Spectacles! ♪”
Everyone, even Minori-san, was really into it.
“You know,” Myusel said, taking my hand once more as she came back to me, “think how happy Eduardo-san would be in a place like this...”
“Oh, yeah. They’ve got more light novel series than you could read in a lifetime.”
This wasn’t even a light-novel specialty place, and the shelves were still packed with them.
Speaking of Eduardo, he had asked for copies of my dad’s books. I would have to grab a set before I went home. We should have plenty of comp copies lying around the house.
...Wait.
“Master?” Myusel looked at me, puzzled. “Is something the matter?”
“Hmm... Well, nothing serious. But I just thought of going back to Eldant as ‘going home.’”
“I’m sorry?” Myusel said, blinking at me.
I guess it made sense that it didn’t make sense to her.
Maybe was a little late for me to be realizing that the Eldant Empire had gotten so close to my heart that I thought of it as home. I actually felt more comfortable with the idea of going home to Eldant than I had at coming “home” to Japan. Maybe that was just a kind of escapism? Then again, maybe not.
If I did feel unexpectedly at ease in Eldant, though, it was probably because there were so many people there who accepted me. Myusel and Petralka, for instance; Elvia, Garius, Zahar, Loek and Romilda, all the students at school—so many people.
“Good Lord, Shinichi,” Petralka said. She had come up and taken my right hand while I was lost in thought. “This place is bulging with BL, too.”
Minori-san was buying an armload of BL stuff, screeching and hurrah-ing. I hardly recognized her.
“Perhaps it would have been good to bring Garius along,” Petralka said slyly.
“I can’t imagine a better description of Hell,” I said.
“No?”
“...Well, maybe we should get Garius-san some souvenirs. I can’t imagine Lauron and the doll are going to go undiscovered the entire time we’re gone. I bet he’ll be wishing for some relief by the time we get back...”
“Mm, an excellent idea. We shall also bring something for Zahar, as well as our attendants and the royal guard.” Petralka, sounding pleased, let go of my hand and went over to join Minori-san. Apparently she just meant to pick out some random BL books.
“And that might not be a good idea,” I said with a wry smile. Even so, I wasn’t feeling half bad as, hand-in-hand with Myusel, I watched the girls enjoy the bookstore.
It was Minori-san who noticed the disturbance first.
Maybe that only made sense. After all, Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia didn’t know what was normal in Akihabara—or anywhere in Japan, for that matter. The usual, the typical, the standard meant nothing to them here. And because to the Japanese people around us they were so obviously foreigners, nobody paid them much mind, either.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
We had just come out of the Shosen Book **wer, and I noticed that Minori-san didn’t look pleased.
“Hmm... Nothing much. Something feels off,” she whispered to me.
Her face was set, extremely serious. The laid-back air that usually hung around her had vanished. I knew this was how she got in her “JSDF mode”—when she was busy being a soldier charged with the protection of her country.
Granted, maybe she would have looked a little cooler if she hadn’t been carrying a bag overflowing with BL books, but never mind.
“I guess they’re not that unusual, this being Akiba.”
“What’s not that unusual?”
“I know Myusel and the others must look like them, too.”
“Seriously, fill me in—look like what?”
“Like foreigners.”
Minori-san had her hand at the small of her back and was working it around. It looked a little like she was giving herself a massage, but I knew that underneath her oversized top, she had hidden her 9mm in exactly that spot.
I kind of thought a shoulder holster was the more traditional place to conceal a weapon, but according to Minori-san, with some body types that could make the shoulder bulge too much, giving you away at a glance. The hip made better sense for those people. “And it’s easy to draw,” she’d said. “Although it makes driving a pain.”
Anyhow...
“Maybe I’m just imagining it. Hmm...”
“Well, Akiba’s pretty famous even overseas. Everyone knows all the otaku come here.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” She let out a breath and nodded.
But an instant later—
Thump!
Minori-san dropped her books to the ground and set off running so fast she practically left a dust cloud behind her. She covered several meters in a matter of seconds, heading towards a narrow alleyway where a lens was pointed in our direction...
“A lens...?” I muttered, but Minori-san already had her target in hand, dragging them out of the alley with their arm bent.
“H-Hey, whaddaya doin’?”
“Don’t try anything funny. Let’s start with your name and national affiliation.”
“Whahuh?!” The guy half-screamed, partly because of Minori-san’s deadly tone, but mostly because she had his arm in a lock.
I took him to be roughly thirty. He was kind of pudgy, and his hair was messy. He was wearing a checked shirt and washed jeans, carrying a backpack—but in his hands was a bulky single-lens reflex camera.
If there was anyone who screamed “otaku” louder than this guy, I hadn’t met him.
“F-Forget my name! And what do you mean, national affiliation? I’m Japanese, for crying out loud!” Mr. Otaku sounded pretty well terrified.
I looked at him and Minori-san. “Uh, Minori-san, you think maybe he’s just an otaku or a, y’know, camera punk...?”
Okay, so maybe he was a little old to call a punk.
Minori-san took a long, hard look at the poor guy she had in an arm lock. Finally she said, “You think?”
“Whatever you think, just let me go! Ow, you’re—you’re hurting me!”
“Uh, sorry,” Minori-san said, and set him free.
“Geez, what even the heck?” The camera punk (?) shot Minori-san a dirty look, but almost immediately, he turned to the rest of us, his face shining.
Well, not all of the rest of us. More specifically, Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia.
“If you’ve got a bodyguard like her, then you’ve all got to be the real thing, right?!”
“Uh... What?” I said. Minori-san was equally perplexed at the punk (?)’s behavior.
He looked positively elated. In fact, he started coming toward us, still smiling, brandishing his camera. It looked like it was probably a digital camera, but a big, expensive one, the sort of thing that would look more at home in the hands of a war photographer or something.
“‘The real thing’...?”
“Have you ladies come to Japan for a promotional tour? Can I take your picture?”
“Promotional tour?” I said, still confused. “Hang on just a second, what are you talking ab—”
The camera punk (?) pulled out his phone to show me something. “This, obviously!”
With a few quick swipes, he had taken us to YouTube.
A video-sharing site?
“Wait, this...”
“Ahh! This video is on my favorites list, and I’ve watched it so many times! I knew it was you the minute I saw you!”
The phone might have had a small screen, but there was no mistaking it: there was Petralka in full magical girl regalia, frills and everything, waving her “magic wand” around.
“Shinichi?” Petralka said, clearly about to demand to know what we were doing. But as she was coming over to us, she spotted the phone’s screen and froze.
“Th... That’s...”
“And I’ve got clips of your other actresses, too,” the camera punk (?) enthused, pulling up videos of Myusel and Elvia. It was footage from our soccer tournament—even Minori-san was visible if you looked hard enough.
“I heard that movie was in production hell because no one would pay for it, but if you’re here in Japan to promote it, then it must be coming out!”
Camera Punk (?) sounded genuinely really thrilled about this.
Minori-san groaned, “That’s—”
“—the leaked footage,” I concluded.
Yep: you might remember the time we held a soccer tournament and some of the JSDF’s video of the event leaked onto the internet. Now this guy was proudly displaying not only that clip, but the fake making-of documentary for a nonexistent movie we’d constructed in hopes of throwing people off the scent.
Shoot, shoot, shoot. I’d completely forgotten.
I know: I was the one who suggested creating the fake footage and deliberately putting it onto the net. I of all people knew how many views those clips had gotten. But I hadn’t counted on somebody so eagle-eyed, so dedicated, so obsessed, that they would not only remember what the actors looked like, but would immediately recognize Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia in their disguises.
“I knew we should have tried to blend in...”
By standing out, we had drastically increased the chances that someone would notice us. But it was too late now to cry over spilled milk.
Minori-san and I glanced at each other, trying to decide what to do.
Petralka made it a moot point.
“You far-get thaaaat!!” she howled, grabbing Camera Punk (?) by the collar—or really, dangling from it—in a red-faced rage.
We ended up explaining to Camera Punk (?) that we weren’t promoting, but taking a little trip on the sly, and begged him not to photograph us.
He seemed like a decent guy: disappointed, sure, but he didn’t press the point or give us any trouble. He just wished Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia a fun time in Japan, shook their hands, and left.
“Geez. That was a close call, but I guess we’re in the clear,” Minori-san said with a little sigh. “How about we take a breather somewhere?” And so we ended up at a nearby shop.
You know what kind of shop I mean.
“Hel-lo, Master-sama! And young lady-samas!”
A young woman in a maid uniform gave us a polite little bow. I nodded and replied with a magnanimous wave of my hand, and in we went.
Minori-san was giving me a look, and it wasn’t an especially happy one. Personally, I thought this was a good idea; the shop was up on the second floor of its building, which would get us away from Akihabara’s foot traffic and prying eyes for a while.
“‘Young lady-samas’?!” Myusel and Elvia exclaimed. Still not helping them blend in.
If you hadn’t guessed by now, we were in a maid café. I’d gone out of my way to pick a place I was familiar with.
“...I guess I should count us lucky you didn’t just pick a random McDo**ld’s or a Matsu** or something.”
“Hm, yeah, maybe one of those would have been better.”
“How could they possibly be better?” Minori-san shot me a glare.
“This way, sir,” a maid said to me, showing us inside. “What will you have to-day, Master?” She made a show of cocking her head.
...Huh? I kept detecting a little catch in her pronunciation. Was it possible this maid... wasn’t Japanese? I was so used to the weirdness of Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia’s Japanese by now that I hardly noticed it, not to mention how rarely you heard words like Master in real life. But now that I thought about it...
Hmm. It wasn’t quite the same thing Minori-san had been talking about earlier, but Akihabara had apparently acquired quite an international flavor. This girl did look kind of Japanese at first glance, so maybe she was Chinese or Korean... From somewhere in Asia, anyway.
I looked around and realized we were the only customers in the café. Dang. I had been hoping there would be more people here.
“What do you recommend?” I asked, even though I already knew what she would say. Half the point of going to a maid café is to chat with the maids, and a real pro knows how to get a little conversation out of them.
“Re-com-mend...” She cocked her head for a second, puzzled, but then she nodded. “I recommend this omurice!”
“Oh? What do you recommend about it?”
There was a long moment as the maid seemed to wrestle with something, then she finally said, “It is delic-ious.”
“Uh... oh,” I said, feeling a little let down. “Well, uh, okay then I’ll take—let’s see, I already had lunch, so—one of those. And then...”
“Black tea for all of us,” Minori-san said before I could finish.
“Yes, ma’am,” the maid said, then vanished into the back with a nod.
I watched her g—
“Hey, stop, Myusel.” I grabbed her hand as she went to follow the maid into the kitchen as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, well if they’re going to serve you tea, Master, I thought I should help.”
“No, look, you don’t have to.”
I guess you can take the maid out of the service, but you can’t take the... service out of the maid, or something. It looked like it made Myusel uncomfortable when there was work to be done and she wasn’t helping.
“Are you sure...?”
“Totally. You’re a customer here, Myusel, not an employee, so you can relax.”
“O-Okay.” She sat back down hesitantly.
“Hmm,” I mumbled. “I wonder if this place is under new ownership. Or maybe they just stopped doing that.”
“Doing what?” Minori-san asked.
“Oh, it’s just, when I came here before, the Master Maid Artist Yuumi-chan would put a picture of your favorite character on the omurice. I don’t recognize that girl serving us, either.”
“...You were a real regular here, huh?”
“I don’t know if I’d say that. I was a shut-in, remember. I think I only came here a couple of times before I stopped leaving my room. The rest I learned by looking at the website. Maybe you could call me an ir-regular.”
“Ir-regular?”
Elvia, though, had latched on to a completely different facet of our conversation. “She will make picture?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said, linking my hand with hers as if she were some stranded extraterrestrial. (That’s how we got the magic rings to work, after all.) “She uses an ingredient called ketchup instead of paint. She’ll draw any character you like on your meal. Or she used to. It looks like they don’t do that anymore. Too bad...”
“Don’t worry, Shinichi-sama, just leave it t’ me! I’ll do it! Even if I don’t know what kechappu and omu-raisu are!”
“Er, sure, thanks,” I said. In my mind, this was in the same category as latté art—it was a very different set of skills from regular painting, and I wasn’t sure Elvia would find it so easy. “Look, don’t worry about it. We’re going to have to—”
“Congratulations!!” someone shouted. There was the pop! of a noisemaker.
Minori-san’s hand went straight to her back, while Myusel and Elvia both tensed up, ready for a fight.
The maid from earlier appeared, smiling. “Sir, you’re our one hundred thousandth customer!”
“Huh?”
How else was I supposed to react to that announcement? One hundred thousand people? Was this place really that popular?!
For that matter, why was she bringing this up now? Wasn’t that usually the sort of thing you announced when the customer walked in the door?
The maid, though, kept me from asking questions with a show of sheer enthusiasm. She was pushing a cart with four parfaits piled high with ice cream, which she placed on the table.
“Ooh!”
“Amazingh!”
“It looks very good...”
Response from the Eldant contingent was swift and positive. Even Minori-san looked surprised.
“This is our number-one recommendation, the Jumbo Ice Cream Parfait!”
“Yeah, I can see that, but I didn’t ask for—”
“It’s a free gift for our one hundred thousandth honored customer!” the maid broke in, like she thought the conversation was some kind of competition. Then, still smiling, she grabbed me by the arm and started to pull, hard. “Also, for our honored male customer, there is a special free service! A cosplay photo session with a maid! This way, please!”
“What? Er, gee, uh, really?”
Had they ditched the omurice art and started doing this instead?
The maid nodded with a big smile. “Yes, sir! Very really!”
“Uhh... Okay, well, I guess I’ll be right back,” I said.
“Mm!” Petralka nodded, already entirely fixated on her ice-cream treat, and I let the maid drag me toward the back of the store. Specifically, through a door out of the room where Myusel and the others were sitting...
“...Now, then.” The maid closed the door with a clack, then locked it.
Huh? Locked?
“Your special service, honored customer—I mean, Master.” As I stood there confused, she grinned a bit nastily and licked her lips. She was extremely alluring.
“This ‘special service’...”
“It’s very special.”
As she spoke, the maid slipped off her apron, then quickly stripped off her dress, too—wait, what? What was going on here?!
“No, hold on, I—”
“Don’t be so difficult, Master.”
I didn’t have time to stop her. The maid was already in her underwear, advancing on me as I backed away.
Two steps. Three. Then I felt the wall behind me. There was nowhere to go.
I could only stand there panicking as the maid took me with both hands and licked her lips again.
What was going on? What was going on? What the heck was going on?!
Her hands found their way to my collar, slipping inside my clothes. Why did she seem so used to this?! Even as I was trying to figure things out, though, her pale fingers were brushing my skin, my skin my skiiiiiinnnn.
“Ah, ahhhh, when it comes to—to maid-sans, I guess I’m used to M-M-Myusel, I thought, but, somehow such a proactive maid is really fresh and new!”
“Do you like maids, sir?”
“They’re my favorite thing!”
“That’s good to hear. Please enjoy me, then.”
The maid was wearing a beguiling smile—and nothing else.
No! I mustn’t! I mean, I don’t know exactly why, but I mustn’t, mustn’t let myself get swept along, mustn’t, but ahhhhhh!
I went weak at the knees and slid right down the wall. The maid crouched over me and smirked again.
“Heh heh heh...”
Then she took off the frilly headband she was wearing. It unleashed her luxurious black hair, which cascaded down her—
“Hhhggh!!”
When I saw that, something inside me snapped.
“What’s wrong?”
“Yaaaah!” I cried and shoved the maid with all my strength.
I must have caught her by surprise, because she went stumbling backward and ended up on the floor just like me. I didn’t waste a moment: I jumped to my feet and pointed at her with a gesture so emphatic I could almost see the fwah!
“Bad! Bad! Not good! Wrong, wrong, wrong!”
“...Huh?”
“Your headband! Your frilly headband! It’s the symbol of maid-dom! The one great thing that distinguishes maids from everyone else! And you deliberately took it off!”
“...Huh? Oh.” The maid felt at her own head, surprised.
Well, she wasn’t actually a maid, of course. She was just a naked woman.
“A maid who removes her headband is no maid at all! She’s just a woman!” I exclaimed, but inside I was thinking, That was close!
Honestly, her taking off that headband had broken the spell, and for that I was grateful. Otherwise, the whole situation might have just swallowed me up, and who knows what I would have ended up doing?
I mean... if it were really a “special service,” then maybe it would have been okay? But not with Myusel and Petralka and Elvia and Minori-san all right in the next room!
“...Grr,” the naked woman said, grimacing. There followed a stream of words I couldn’t understand.
Huh? What was that?
I didn’t know what language she was speaking, but from the sound, I might have guessed Chinese.
Another woman emerged from the shadows of the room, but this one was wearing a normal pantsuit. She said something, too. She was holding a camera, albeit one that didn’t hold a candle to the one Camera Punk (?) had been wielding earlier.
What was this? A badger game?
Wait... Chinese?
Did that mean...
“Shinichi-sama!!”
The door burst open, the last breeze from a serious blast of wind magic blowing into the room.
Something else came flying in, too: Minori-san, holding her 9mm at the ready. “Shinichi-kun, are you okay?!”
I guess all the commotion—my shouting, the sound of the woman going flying—had given my friends the sense that something was wrong. Behind Minori-san were Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia, all rushing into the room and—
“...Hang on. What are you doing in here?” Minori-san said, eyeballing me.
“Huh?” I said. “I—”
There was me, standing there. There was a buck-naked woman (the former maid) flat on her bottom beside me. There was only one thing to say at a moment like this.
“It’s not what it looks like!”
“Shinichi-sama...”
N-No, Myusel, please don’t look at me with that surprise and disappointment!
But just as I was trying to figure out how to explain myself...
There was a burst of foreign language, the naked woman and the camera woman having a short, sharp conversation. Then they both retreated toward the back of the room, kicking open some kind of back door.
“Hey, wait—!” Minori-san made to go after them, but a little lump of something came rolling across the ground.
It looked like a small can with a lever attached. In fact, it looked a lot like a—
“Grenade?!”
“Get down!” Minori-san shoved me aside and flung herself on top of it.
At the edge of my vision I could see Elvia, grasping the situation, shove Myusel and Petralka down the same way, covering them.
And then...
“.........Huh?”
The explosion, the shockwave, the flash of light, the fire—none of it ever came.
After a long moment, Minori-san sat up, staring intently at the hand grenade. Finally, she decided to pick it up off the floor.
“We’ve been had! This is a dummy.”
“...Oh.”
In other words, they’d had what amounted to a toy grenade on hand to buy some time when they needed to get out of Dodge.
Myusel and the others, realizing there was no danger, sat up, too.
And then...
“...Oh.”
I thought I heard a clattering from a locker on one side of the room—and then it suddenly fell over, the impact knocking the door open. Something rolled out from inside—a naked woman, bound and gagged.
“Don’t tell me...” Minori-san said. She started opening the other lockers, the ones that hadn’t fallen over, and found a person inside each and every one of them. Three young women in maid outfits, and four men. Evidently, Thelma and Louise had tied them up and stuffed them in there. They constituted the café’s employees and customers.
Minori-san’s expression was grim. “This is...”
“Shinichi,” Petralka said, blinking and looking from us to the hog-tied crowd. “Is this what you call ‘role-play’?”
“That is so wrong!” I practically shouted.
What the heck had been going on there?
We had a few theories—but not enough evidence to prove any of them. And the question of why always remained. We just didn’t have the information.
Anyway...
Apparently, the parfaits the fake maid had served us had been laced with sedatives. Elvia had stopped Petralka from trying the food.
In the other world, whether in the Eldant Empire or the Kingdom of Bahairam, most drugs were of the herbal variety, the kind you had to mash up and mix in with other ingredients. If nothing else, they certainly didn’t have lab-spliced stuff made with complicated chemistry. So when one of those weird engineered drugs came up, it smelled really strange to Elvia with her sharp nose. That’s what saved Myusel and the others from dropping off to dreamland under the influence of powerful sedatives.
That was why the fake maid had been so aggressive with me—she’d assumed my friends were out cold.
“Seriously though, what was going on there?” I said as we went down the stairs.
“I didn’t hear much, but that was definitely Chinese,” Minori-san said.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “It might have been Korean, or some other language. The pronunciation did sound a lot like Chinese, but I don’t know enough Chinese to have any idea what they were talking about. Besides, then there’s all those regional differences like Mandarin versus Cantonese and everything.”
“Yeah, I don’t know much about it either. I only know it smells fishy.” Minori-san frowned. “Maybe that’s why the Black Suit Brigade tried to force themselves on us.”
“You mean those guys with the van?”
“Yeah. There’s always the possibility that something’s leaked out to a foreign country. And that that other country might think maybe they could catch a VIP—you, say—off guard and kidnap you, or blackmail you with a honey trap or something.”
After a moment I asked, “Should we really have just left everyone like that?”
“The police will be there soon. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
We had freed the customers and employees the fake maid and her friend had tied up and stuffed in those lockers. Once the gags were out of their mouths, the one thing everyone wanted to know was what in the world was going on, but that was something even we weren’t really sure about. So instead, we put that café behind us like we were the ones on the lam.
“Anyway, now we know for sure: we can’t keep doing things on our own. We have to get in touch with the Ministry of Defense in Ichigaya and—”
Minori-san was about to step onto the street outside the maid café building when she stopped.
“What’s up?” I asked. I came up alongside her and looked out at the street—and then I froze, too.
Outside was a crowd of dozens—no, maybe hundreds. And as soon as they noticed us at the door, every single one of them pulled out a smartphone or a digital camera and started taking pictures, movies, anything they could get. It was the middle of the day, so you didn’t have the stereotypical sea of camera flashes, but even so, I felt like a beloved baseball player coming back from abroad—or maybe a famous actor caught in adultery or something. Not that it was the actual mass media out there taking pictures...
“Wh-What the heck?!”
“What’s going on?”
“What is this?”
Me, Myusel, and Petralka—both just behind me, holding my hands—were all very surprised.
Our reaction only seemed to make the chatter and the sound of clicking shutters get louder.
This had to be a case of mistaken identity. I mean, these people had been waiting out there to get our pictures. But why?
“Do they all have the same fixation as—”
Camera Punk (?)?
But how in the world did they figure out we were in this maid café?
“Taking mad pix!” One of the people who had taken up a position closest to us and was snapping away with his smartphone—he must have been just past twenty years old—suddenly started swiping and tapping on his screen. I zipped over to catch a glance of what he was doing.
“Oh...”
“Huh? What?” He looked at me innocently. On the screen of his phone I could see the Twitter app running.
“Minori-san, they’re tweeting about us! I think we’ve got a wildfire on our hands here!”
Now the pieces were falling into place. Someone—whether it was the alley-skulking Camera Punk (?) or someone else like him—had snapped some pictures of us and uploaded them to the web. Specifically, pictures of Myusel, Petralka, and Elvia having fun in Akihabara. And now it looked like half the internet had seen them.
They’d been identified as the girls from the movie teaser that had leaked on YouTube. The mysterious fantasy film had been a big deal on the net for a while, but then it was reported that the movie had been shelved due to lack of funding, a rumor that drew plenty of outcry. And now the actresses—including the star!—were here in Akihabara. When word got out, everyone decided to come see for themselves...
We had been in Akihabara all day, making no real attempt to fly under the radar, and this was what we got. We had been careless—but it was too late for regrets now.
First things first: we had to get out of there.
“Minori-san!”
“We have to get to the car!” Minori-san said. Still holding Petralka and Myusel by the hands, I dove into the crowd. Most of them were just onlookers and didn’t try to get in our way. I pushed through, using my own body to part the crowd. Going straight through meant plenty of people got our pictures, but we couldn’t worry about that.
“Minori-san,” I called, “take care of Elvia!” But when I glanced back to make sure she heard me, I found that Minori-san had been swallowed up in a wave of bodies. I couldn’t even see her.
Elvia, however, was there, still hanging onto my back.
“Minori-san? Minori-san!” I shouted, but there was no answer.
Minori-san, where did you go?!
Just as I was starting to really panic—
“Hey, hey, you’re the girls from that movie, right?”
“You know, the video on YouTube?”
“Mind if I snap a few pics?”
“Hey, wait up, let me get another shot!”
“Three famous actors are fleeing right now! You won’t believe number—”
It was one thing after another as people pressed in around us. At first they had been giving us a respectful distance, but as it became obvious that we were trying to get away, people started shoving, bent on getting a photo or saying hello. To be fair, if I’d been in their shoes, I would have done the same thing.
“Ugh...”
“What is it, Shinichi? What are they all saying?”
“Master...”
“Shinichi-sama, what d’you wanna do? Should I punch us a way out?”
The girls were all at least as confused as I was. These people weren’t “enemies” exactly; they didn’t want to hurt us, and it wouldn’t have been right to harm anyone trying to force our way past. But...
“Seriously, what are we supposed to do—Minori-san?!” I cried, completely at a loss.
Then I heard shouting.
“Yikes!”
“Watch out!”
The yelling was almost drowned out by a screeching siren. A moment later, people scattered as two cars pulled up through the crowd.
Both were imposing black vehicles, both a foreign make.
Chevrolet—that was an American manufacturer, right?
And then...
“Kanou Shinichi!”
The window of one of the cars opened, and a man with golden hair and blue eyes—an American straight out of central casting—leaned out and shouted my name.
What? Why? I don’t think I know any Americans!
“Mi-noh-ri is oh-kay! Get in!”
He knew Minori-san’s name. So... was he a friend? Come to think of it, I thought I had heard something about the JSDF conducting joint training exercises with the American military in Japan on a pretty regular basis...
While I was hesitating, one burly white guy and one burly black guy hopped out of the car, shoved the onlookers out of the way, and pointed to the back seat.
“You won’t get anywhere out here!” one of them said.
“Argh...!” I knew he was right. We couldn’t stick around—especially not with the police still on their way to investigate the fake-maid incident.
“Myusel, take care of Petralka,” I said.
“Yes, sir!” she said.
Then I told her to get in the first car. Elvia and I would go for the second one. Why had I picked this arrangement? I just figured Petralka would be happier with someone from her own nation than being looked after by a former Bahairamanian spy.
“Petralka, get in that car! We’re getting out of here!” I said—and then I made a run for the back seat of the second car.