The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 4

by Satoshi Wagahara

  “Huh. Never know what’s gonna help you in life, huh?” Urushihara chuckled to himself, in rare agreement.

  “Yeah. And since you don’t know what kind of help you’re gonna be in life yet, I’m gonna have a few jobs for you, too.”

  “Nothing that’s a pain in the ass, thanks.”

  He didn’t shoot it into Amane’s ear or anything, but it was still one step too far for Maou’s tastes.

  Pulling Urushihara out from his cubbyhole, he pointed him toward the customer seating.

  “See the padding on those chairs? Pull it off for me.”

  “Huh?”

  “You can use scissors or whatever else you want. Just rip it all off, down to the wooden surface. Got it?”

  “Rip it all off…? Well, sure, but, like, what for?”

  “Customers from the beach sit on those chairs with their wet bathing suits.”

  Maou pointed out a particularly water-stained piece of padding.

  “Nobody wants to park their ass on something like that, right? These seats used to have vinyl-leather covers that made them waterproof, but now that they’re like this, they’ll just sop up water like a sponge.”

  “Huh? But, dude, if you rip all that foam off, you’re just gonna be sitting on bare wood.”

  “That’s fine. The important thing is that customers have someplace to sit right off the beach that isn’t all soggy and gross, okay? That, and there’s no point making them more comfortable than necessary. That’ll just torpedo our turnover rate, and I’m not expecting a ton of customers at first anyway. With the amount of time we have to work with, I wanna focus more on getting people in and out of here instead of the individual customer experience. So once you get that foam off, you’ll take the sandpaper Emi’s getting for us…”

  “Oooh, I get it. Sand down the edges of the wood so it’s all smooth, right?”

  Amane peered in from the side. The sheaf of papers in her hand must have been the part-time work contracts Chiho mentioned.

  “You sure are coming up with a lotta ideas, huh? You ever run a shop before?”

  “Oh, not really. I mean…I can explain why I’m doing everything I’m doing here, but as for what inspired me to try it, it’s mostly just guesswork.”

  There was nothing Maou instructed his work crew to do that was purely his own idea. He were merely building what he thought were the “best practices” the place needed—anything from his past experience, and what he had learned at MgRonald, that could connect to customers wanting to purchase that little bit more from them.

  “I’m sorry, though. It probably looks like I’m busting everything up in here.”

  “Oh, it’s fine, it’s fine! The place needs it anyway. Besides, after that little speech of yours, you’ve sure convinced me. Most of the beach houses nearby have a bunch of patio chairs lined up, but we didn’t really have the money to invest in that stuff, so… If we can patch up this place without breakin’ the bank along the way, then bring it on, I’d say.”

  It was hard to tell whether Amane was being serious or just trying to keep Maou at ease, but either way, she ended her appraisal with a hearty laugh and a slap on his shoulder.

  “All right, Urushihara. We got our boss’s permission. Skin that chair down to the wood. And clean up, too. I don’t want to see any foam or leather bits on the floor afterward.”

  “…I knew this was gonna be a pain in the ass,” Urushihara whined, though he was at least kind enough to keep it to a low murmur in front of Amane as he went to work.

  “I’m gonna go check in with Suzuno for a sec, so if you have any order forms for the local liquor store or farmer’s market or whatnot, I’d love to see them.”

  “Sure thing. I printed out some contracts, too, so take a look once your wife comes back, ’kay?”

  “She’s not my wife, Ms. Ohguro…”

  Maou frowned and jogged outside, not waiting for her response.

  A bit in front of the shoreline, Suzuno was building a sand castle with Alas Ramus.

  Or, to be more exact, Suzuno was tending to the job by herself.

  “Daddy! Suzu-Sis is awesome!!”

  Alas Ramus had reason to be excited. Suzuno, sand stuck against the hemline of her kimono, had completed a castle. A real one. “Sand castle” didn’t do this work of fine architecture justice.

  It wasn’t a Western-style medieval castle, but a full Japanese-style donjon, golden whales adorning both sides of the sloped main roof.

  She attended to every detail in an amazingly short amount of time, right down to the seawater-filled moat surrounding the edifice.

  Most very young children, when greeted with this sight, would immediately go all movie-monster on it with their hands and feet. Not Alas Ramus. Her budding sense of appreciation for the arts must have been stimulated to overload by Suzuno’s masterpiece.

  “…I had no idea you could do that.”

  “Mmh. Devil King. The child was begging me to carry on, and I became a little…wrapped up in the work.”

  The smile on her face belied her obvious pride. It really was an impressive effort, one you wanted to take a picture of and label it “Greetings from Himeji Castle, Japan” just to see how many people you could fool with it.

  “It is nothing that impressive. Some of the ascetic monks of our faith devote a lifetime to the study of church architecture or religious sculpture. Working with sand is far simpler by comparison. One can always start over if things turn out poorly. Though, sadly, the wind is already causing the structure to deteriorate.”

  A Church cleric versed in architecture and religious sculpture, making a model of Japan’s world-famous Himeji Castle out of sand, was news to Maou. But, given that he was expecting little more from her than an hour or two’s worth of distracting Alas Ramus with seashells or whatever, the sight made him rethink matters a little.

  “Listen, Suzuno, I gotta ask you a favor. Could you, like, build that next to the beach house later on? ’Cause Amane’ll probably pay you for it.”

  “This? The sand castle? Very well…but what would be the purpose of that?”

  “You seriously don’t know? ’Cause if you don’t, that’s just scary.”

  Maou scrutinized the miniature Himeji Castle intently.

  Emi and Chiho were working with a restricted schedule. But Suzuno, by and large, was a free woman.

  If he procured lodging for her, produced a daily salary, and begged her on hands and knees long enough, he could convince Suzuno to build sand sculptures for him on a daily basis. There couldn’t possibly be a better way to attract customers.

  “…But anyway. Thanks for taking care of Alas Ramus for the time being.”

  “By all means. What would you like to build next, Alas Ramus?”

  “Ummmm… Mommy!”

  “Emilia, then? Very well. Off we go!”

  Given her Himeji Castle masterpiece, human sculpture was no doubt a piece of cake for her. Suzuno might even build a sand golem to attack Maou if he wasn’t careful. Leaving them behind, he walked back to the store.

  “Here’s all of our main supplies. And here’s the menu list we had for most of last year.”

  Amane had spread a litany of documents out on the counter, next to where Urushihara beavered away at the seats.

  “All right. We should probably keep the menu small the first day. It probably won’t be until tomorrow morning when we get all the ingredients in here, and we’ll run out of time if we try doing up everything right then. We’ll just have to do what we can on the griddle at first, and… Hey, uh, what kind of work do you do anyway, Amane?”

  When it came to Emi, Chiho, and Suzuno, Maou couldn’t count on much work from them beyond today. Which meant that starting tomorrow, he and Ashiya would have to cover as much as possible for Amane, who had let the house fall into de facto ruin, and Urushihara, who could barely even finish a sentence when talking to a stranger.

  Still, if Amane had any experience working with customers or cooking, maybe, h
e might be able to count on her for food prep or something, to some extent…

  “Me? Um…soldier of fortune, kind of?”

  “Sol…what?” Maou replied, before he had the words fully parsed.

  “Welllll, as far as food goes, anyway, I’m pretty much a home-ec dropout. I can’t even cut up lettuce or anything.”

  And she was running a shop and snack bar? This was starting to make Maou anxious.

  “Otherwise…yeah. I guess you could call it job security work.”

  Not the kind of “home security work” Urushihara provided by shutting himself inside Devil’s Castle 24/7, hopefully. She mentioned over the phone that this used to be her parents’ business. A mental picture was forming in Maou’s mind of a lazy, shiftless father foisting his dingy, underperforming beach shop on a daughter who couldn’t care less about making an honest living.

  He couldn’t take a gamble on letting Amane run the kitchen.

  But she understood what “petty cash” was, at least. She knew the basics of business operation. Maou felt safe enough leaving all the store’s financial needs in her hands.

  As a matter of course, then, it’d have to be Ashiya manning the griddle.

  “For drinks… I guess we’ll focus on mineral water and 5-Honest Energy, plus Kola-Cola, orange soda, sports drinks, tea… Maybe too much?”

  They only had a single four-tier cooler to work with. Unless they limited the number of brands, running out of a single item would make the rest of the cooler look like slim pickings.

  “Why 5-Honest Energy? Doesn’t that come in those little tiny bottles?”

  Maou nodded.

  “Yeah, so we can stick a boatload in the cooler, sell ’em cheap, and make money out of the volume. If everything in the cooler’s a hundred and twenty yen except for one item that’s a hundred, whether you buy it or not, you notice it, right? Plus, I don’t think people are carrying around a bunch of bills if they’re going in the water. The lockers and showers are a hundred yen a pop in here, so once they ask us for change, our customers are gonna have a bunch more coins in their pocket. Having something they can buy real quick with what they’ve got on them helps boost the average sale per customer.”

  That was something he learned from MgRonald’s “100-Yen Mag” value menu.

  “Also, I’d like to get some of this.”

  Maou pointed at an entry on the order sheet touting “5-Honest Energy Campaign Pack – Buy 2 Cases for 1 Set of Movie-Size Promotional Posters!” As long as they ordered two cases, the advertising came free with it.

  “Oh? You looking for one of those bikini-girl posters, Maou?”

  Amane grinned as she spotted the smoking-hot young girl—no doubt blissfully refreshed after being dosed with as much caffeine as the leading cup of premium coffee—in the poster illustration. Maou stoically shook his head.

  “Retro-style posters like that can help cover up some of the stains on the walls. And if we put the pin-up-girl posters near the cooler to attract people’s attention, I figure that’ll keep them from noticing how beat-up the cooler is. That, and cute girls never hurt, I suppose.”

  “Aww, you’re no fun. Or… What, you got other tastes, know what I mean?”

  This wasn’t the kind of feedback Maou was hoping for.

  “That’s why I’m having Chi…er, Ms. Sasaki polish up those taps, too. If those are all sparkly inside of here, that’ll draw people’s eyes to it. And when someone’s ordering a soft drink, if we can get some kind of beer poster in addition to the energy drink one, that can lure people into checking out both the beer and the other menu items. It’ll be perfect.”

  “Huh… Neat.”

  “Same deal with the inner tubes, too. If we take the spanking-new one Emi’s buying and put it up front, the older ones we have in stock will look less ‘old’ and more like funky variations. The point is that, as long as we’re providing the bare minimum as a beachfront bar and rental place, we win. Then we can really go on the offensive after that.”

  “Yeahhh…”

  As Amane looked on in admiration, Maou suddenly received a phone call.

  “Hey. What’s up? I guess the world’s gonna end tomorrow if you’re actually calling me, huh?”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  By the tone of her voice, that wasn’t all Emi wanted to do.

  “I’m at this supermarket right near Choshi station, but what kind of inner tube should I be looking for? With all the other stuff I gotta get, I doubt I could buy more than one for five thousand yen.”

  “Maybe a child-sized one. Something gender-neutral. Are there any Pokétures ones?”

  Pokétures, short for “Pocket Creatures,” was a game and merchandising franchise now large enough that it spawned a new anime film like clockwork every year.

  A lot of the toys MgRonald sold as part of their “Happiness Set” kid-oriented menu were based on Pokétures, too.

  “Sorry. I think they’re out. It’s all Pretty & Pure or superhero stuff… Oooh, here’s a Relax-a-Bear one…”

  “You’re not shopping for yourself, all right? Chill.”

  “It’s fine! I mean, boys would be okay with Relax-a-Bear, right? Barely?”

  “No.”

  The denial was flat and low-pitched.

  “Oh, come on! I mean, you’d pretty much have to be a demonic monster not to think this is cute… Oh, Pokétures! Oh—wait. Never mind. That’s a kiddie pool…”

  Listening to Emi fumble her way around the summer-goods section struck Maou with a sudden revelation.

  “Emi! How big is that pool?!”

  “Um? Not that big. Maybe six or seven feet in diameter. It’s a kiddie pool, so it’s not too deep, either…”

  “Six or seven feet… Perfect! Buy that for me, now!”

  “Huhh?! Buy this? It’s gonna put you way over budget…”

  “I’ll pay you back, okay? And go ahead and take that Relax-a-Bear inner tube, too!”

  “…All riiiiiight. Fine. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  Maou hung up before allowing Emi any more time to complain.

  Then he flung himself to the cash register and hurriedly thumbed through the phone book.

  “Choshi’s a harbor town… There’s gotta be something to keep the…fish fresh and stuff… Here we go!”

  Seemingly spotting an ad on a random page, he immediately whipped out his phone.

  Amane stared on in wonder as, after finishing the call, Maou threw a fist into the air in a classic “yes!!” pose.

  “Who’d you call?”

  “The icehouse. It’s called Nanchou Ice Manufacturing.”

  “Icehouse?”

  “I figured in a port town like this, there had to be a company out there providing ice to the local fisheries. So I called ’em up, and they said they could give me a deal on a pretty small order if I wanted. I’m sorry to bother you, Amane, but would you mind picking it up in your van tomorrow? I reserved some edible ice to make shaved-ice treats out of, and some colder pure ice for freezing purposes.”

  “Freezing?”

  Maou turned around, facing the store space, and gestured at it with his hand.

  “We can’t move the cooler very far. There’s no place else to plug it into. So I figured we’d fill the kiddie pool Emi’s buying with ice water and toss in cans of soda and stuff for sale. That’ll help attract customers, and even if they don’t want to go inside, they’ll have something to buy from us. Then we can devote the cooler space to things that people who wanna sit down and enjoy a meal would prefer. That way, we can offer more variety.”

  “Hohhh… Boy, you’re just full of ideas, aren’t you? But…were you plannin’ to use that thing to make the shaved ice?”

  Amane looked at the hand-cranked shaved-ice machine Maou had plucked out of storage earlier.

  “I mean, it looks easy, but you’re gonna need some real muscle to crank that thing. You think we’ll have the time for it tomorrow?”

  “Sure. We can have U
rushihara handle the drinks and shaved ice.”

  “Wh-Whoa! Dude! You’re crazy!”

  Urushihara, still pecking away at the seat-cushion foam, bugged his eyes at Maou.

  “Um, I really… I don’t think Urushihara might be up to it…”

  “I agree, Maou. There’s no way at all.”

  “Uh, dudes, I already said I can’t. You don’t have to rub in like that, do you?”

  Urushihara puffed up his cheeks as Ashiya and Chiho, both still busy with their own work, chimed in with their own appraisals.

  But Maou stood tall, brimming with confidence.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m gonna be inside here taking care of whatever comes up, so if it gets too hairy, I can come over to help out. Otherwise, Urushihara can totally run this by himself. He’s guaranteed not to screw it up. And even if that machine doesn’t work too well, the customers are never gonna complain about it. It’s the ideal system.”

  “Huhh?”

  “Wh-What are you talking about?!”

  “Urushihara can…do that by himself?”

  Maou had a satisfied look on his face as he surveyed his disbelieving crowd. What was this wonder system that would make a shut-in fallen angel handle several work posts at once? He began to explain.

  And when he was finished:

  “Huh. Now I get it. …You’d need a place like Ohguro-ya to pull that off, for sure. It definitely wouldn’t fly in MgRonald.”

  Chiho barely croaked it out, such was her surprise.

  “Indeed… As long as he can open and close a refrigerator door and read prices, it is certainly possible. Absolutely cunning. You’ve thought of everything!”

  “It’s nothing that amazing, Ashiya. You’re really starting to make me pity you, you know.”

  Urushihara, for his part, looked supremely relieved.

  “I dunno, but…I think I can do that, you know?”

  It was rare to see him exude such positive vibes.