Outbreak Company: Volume 8 (Premium)

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “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 p
ut 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.”