The Power of Moe

by Ichiro Sakaki

  As I was thinking all this, Myusel was looking at my hand in befuddlement.

  “Master... What’s that?”

  “Huh? Oh, this? It’s my... Well, it’s a magic item from my country.” I smiled and showed her the memo pad screen I’d been writing on earlier.

  “Are those... letters?”

  “Yep. My country’s language.”

  Myusel stared at my smartphone, eyes wide. She looked so earnest...

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, no, forgive me.” She quickly bowed her head. “I was just amazed that you use such complicated letters, Master...!”

  “Huh? Oh, uh, I guess.”

  She had been looking at the Japanese sentences. In other words, lines with complicated kanji characters in them. Having been born and raised with this system of writing, I’d never thought too much about it, but cultures that used this many types of letters at once were pretty unusual on Earth. The English alphabet only has twenty-six letters. Japanese is said to have “fifty sounds,” but there are twice that many characters in kana syllables alone. Add in kanji and you have many, many times that number of characters.

  How many? Suddenly curious, I checked my phone’s dictionary. It said the basic number of kanji for literacy was around three thousand. But the most accomplished readers might know in excess of ten thousand characters. As far as I could tell, only the “kanji countries” used this many characters to write. And it seemed like only Japan and Korea made things even more complicated by adding syllabic characters.

  ...I could see why foreigners might think we were crazy.

  “I guess you guys don’t use too many letters around here?”

  “Oh... I’m sorry.” Myusel looked down. “I can’t... read or write...”

  “...Oh.”

  Come to think of it, another distinctive quality of Japan is its unusually high literacy rate. Visiting foreigners are sometimes surprised to see homeless people reading the newspaper. Or anyway, that’s what I heard on the net someplace.

  Now I got it. From the perspective of someone who can’t read or write at all, a guy reading and writing using complicated combinations of characters might look a lot smarter than he was. Maybe the way someone who spoke five different languages would look to me.

  “Hmm, paper, paper...”

  I went back to my desk and opened the drawer. There were several sheets of somewhat rough paper inside. Maybe paper production technology wasn’t as advanced here, either, because it looked pretty crude compared to what I was used to. But of course I could still write on it.

  I took out a ballpoint pen, which, like my smartphone, I’d had on me when I got here, and began to write at the top of the paper.

  A-i-u-e-o. Ka-ki-ku-ke-ko. Sa-shi-su-se-so. Ta-chi-tsu-te-to. Basically, the hiragana syllabary. I wrote the characters as neatly as I could at the top of the page, then handed it to Myusel.

  “Here.”

  “...Eh?”

  “Call it a symbol of our friendship. Er... Maybe it’s a little cheap for that, but...”

  “Wha? Y-You’re... giving it to me...?!” Her eyes were wide.

  “It’s a chart of ‘hiragana.’ It’s the most basic way of writing in my country; it’s simple, but everything starts here. I’ll teach you the sounds they make later.”

  Then I had a thought. I grabbed the paper back and wrote Myusel on it in hiragana.

  “This is how you write your name in my language. You can find the characters on the chart later.”

  “...Master...!” she whispered, sounding overwhelmed. She held my hiragana chart as if it were some kind of priceless award, the first one she’d ever won in her life.

  At first I thought it was a little silly, but I soon thought better of that. If printing technology wasn’t very developed, then books and the like must largely have been hand-copied manuscripts. So, naturally, they would be valuable artifacts that only nobles and some rich people were able to get a hold of. And a chart of characters from an entirely different world? All the more so.

  It might just be a sheet of paper, but Myusel must have felt she’d received something wonderful.

  For a while, she simply stared at the chart—but gradually, a happy smile began to spread across her face. Her happiness seemed to come less from the fact that she’d been given something valuable, and more from the simple fact that she’d been given a gift. She held the paper to her chest as if clasping a treasure. And then she said, in a voice so quiet it was barely audible:

  “Th-Thank you very much.”

  Her cheeks were rose-red, perhaps from the excitement, and her smile was shy.

  Whoa. Hold on now, I could get seriously moe for this. I never thought I would feel so moe for a three-dimensional girl. She’s so dang cute, I think I feel a tightness in my chest...!

  As I stood there, getting swept up in a rising tide of moe-ness, Myusel said, “Oh!” as though something had just occurred to her.

  “It looks like Brooke-san is home.”

  “It does?”

  Apparently, those large ears weren’t just for show. I hadn’t heard anything at all, but she had picked up the sound of someone getting back.

  “I’ll bring Brooke-san in.”

  “Oh, uh, sure, please do.” I nodded. Myusel went scurrying out of the room and—

  “Oh.”

  Fell flat on her face.

  “Yikes!” She had taken a serious tumble, but before I could so much as ask if she was okay, she had jumped up, given me a panicked bow, and set off again.

  Hmm. She was awfully clumsy. And it wasn’t calculated; it was completely natural. She was the maid who was going to be looking after me, which meant that at least as long as I lived in this house, we were going to be seeing a lot of each other. Plus, I was her “master,” which meant that unlike my classmates or my old friend, at least she wouldn’t mock me as an otaku, look down on me, or respond to my heartfelt confession of love with a flat “No way.”

  “Heh heh heh heh heh!”

  I knew it wasn’t exactly right, yet a happy grin spread over my face. This meant...

  “Master?” A knock came at the door. “I’ve brought Brooke-san.”

  “Sure, please come in,” I said, trying to sound as easygoing as I could.

  I wondered what kind of person Brooke would turn out to be. Another elf? Was the Holy Eldant Empire a country of elves?

  Wait, hang on. This was a different world. I couldn’t assume that what seemed obvious to me would be obvious to the people here. Meaning “Brooke” might be a beautiful woman! After all, it sort of sounded like a man’s name, but this was another world, and maybe they named their gorgeous women Brooke here. And if it turned out “Brooke” was a last name, then who knew? All these thoughts were running through my head as the door opened.

  “’Scuse me,” a voice said. “I’m Brooke Darwin, your manservant. I’m a gardener, for the most part, but you can count on me for any sort of manual labor.” This deferential self-introduction came from a huge humanoid figure. Wait... Humanoid?

  I felt the blood leave my face, the way it would have if I’d gotten too close to a wolf or tiger at the zoo. I thought all the cartoons and illustrations had desensitized me, so this shouldn’t have frightened me, but seeing the real thing up close—how huge it actually was, the way everything about it screamed carnivore...

  Standing beside Myusel was a creature at least two meters tall. He wore a tunic, dirty and torn in places, and pants that were in no better condition.

  That would have been enough to freeze me in place. The real issue was that although this creature was humanoid, he wasn’t human. His face, neck, arms, and all the skin that I could see, right down to the feet poking out of his trousers, was covered in blue scales, and he had a missile-shaped head. In other words, just like a snake.

  In front of me, so close he could practically breathe on me, was a creature of the type popularly known as a lizardman.

  You didn’t have to look to “giant mo
nsters” like Godzilla or Gamera: a two-meter-tall snake-thing was more than big enough to look like he could pick me up and eat me. Frankly, I was surprised my pants were still dry. I’m not ashamed to admit I wanted to run away as fast as I could, but the lizardman was standing between me and the only exit.

  “Master?”

  Myusel was looking at me strangely. She didn’t seem at all unsettled by the thing standing next to her.

  “...I forgot.” This was another world. Things that were obvious to them might not be obvious to me, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, no matter what happened. A lizardman gardener? Not surprising. Totally normal. Maybe?

  “My greetings t’ you, Master.” The lizardman—Brooke—bent down to look me in the eye. A forked red tongue darted in and out of his mouth, another little detail to give me the willies.

  Yes, he was scary, but...

  “P-Pleased to meet you,” I said, somehow managing a smile.

  Chapter Two: The Royal Punch

  I finished reading the manga and shoved it back into the blue backpack at my feet. The name tag on the backpack read, in an awkward hand:

  Kanou Shinichi Yr 2 Rm 3

  The sky was dazzlingly clear. I was in one corner of a nature park. A very large one. For a tiny grade-schooler, it might as well have gone on forever. The green stretched as far as I could see.

  In one corner of the park, in the shade of a huge tree with spreading leaves, was a cement bench that looked as if it had been hewn out of a piece of actual rock. That’s where I was sitting. None of my classmates were around. They were all off playing baseball or dodgeball or whatever, but I—I alone kept my distance and read comic books I’d brought from home.

  Okay, so maybe I looked a bit aloof to other people. But even early in my grade school career, I was already an otaku.

  “Hey, Kanou!”

  I looked up at the voice. In front of me, a woman in a white tracksuit was looking at me in exasperation. She was our teacher. She must have been a stunner earlier in her life, but now she was in her late forties and bags had formed under her eyes. She was more mannish than most men; if she saw you running down the hallway at school, she’d give you a piece of her mind—she was famous for her fearsomeness.

  Now I’m in for it, I thought. I quickly tried to hide the manga behind my back, but of course I was too late.

  The teacher sort of sighed and said, “...I thought I’d lost you. You’ve just been here, reading a book?”

  I hung my head, a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t know exactly what she would say next, but I knew what the gist would be: “We come all the way out here and you read comic books?” or, “This is why the other kids make fun of you,” or, “Go play with your friends.” I’d already heard it from every other teacher. Why should this one be any different?

  I bit my lip and stayed quiet. With a touch of frustration, the teacher said, “If you’re too far away, we’ll be late going home. If you’re going to read, do it closer to the meet-up point.”

  “Huh?” I blinked and looked at her. “You aren’t... going to take it away or something?”

  The teacher raised an eyebrow (surprisingly bushy for a woman) and gave a sort-of smile. “Maybe if this were math or Japanese class. But we’ve come all this way for a little free time.”

  I was silent.

  “Kanou. Why do you think we take field trips like this?”

  “So we can all learn to work together and develop our ability to cooperate,” I responded immediately. That was what they’d beaten into us on previous outings.

  But the teacher said, “Yes, that’s part of it. It’s a way to learn things you can’t learn in the classroom.”

  “What do you mean...?”

  “Addition and multiplication, how to read kanji... All that isn’t enough to make your life rich.”

  I found this hard to follow and cocked my head in confusion. I hadn’t even been alive for ten years yet—for a kid who barely understood the workings of society, the richness of life was a tough thing to grasp. On some level, I figured that living comfortably under your parents’ wings was a rich life, and to be honest, I couldn’t imagine what else might qualify.

  “Hmm.” The teacher thought for a moment, then asked, “What do you like about manga, Kanou?”

  “Um... How the hero faces the bad guys and wins.”

  “Do you think it’s easy for them?”

  I shook my head. Sometimes heroes had to struggle to learn a powerful finishing move to defeat the villain, or they had to keep fighting even though they’d been beaten to a pulp and didn’t seem to have any hope of victory.

  “I think you’re right,” the teacher nodded. “Manga are books, too. If you read them carefully, you can learn from them.”

  “Manga are books, too...”

  Come to think of it, mom and dad had said the same thing. Their bookshelves were crammed with comics and light novels, many of which I had taken out and read. My parents claimed that they needed all those books “for work,” so I came to think of them as things adults used for their jobs, not things a kid might learn from.

  “This...” I breathed, looking at the cover of my manga and seeing it in an entirely new light. “This is like my... textbook?”

  “It can be,” the teacher said. “That depends on you.”

  The smile she gave me then, I remember to this day.

  I felt consciousness slowly returning. I gave an owlish blink and found slats of bright light pouring over everything. I could hear birds singing somewhere—my whole room pretty much screamed, It’s morning! Fade in, change scene, it’s a whole new day.

  I made an inarticulate noise and blinked a couple more times. That helped chase the sleepiness from my eyes, so I sat up.

  It felt surprisingly good to wake up. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it was like, back when I had been a home security guard, I didn’t exactly keep a normal schedule. Even the border between waking and sleeping was kind of fuzzy; I would get out of bed, but I wasn’t always quite all there. But this morning—maybe because I’d been tired out by all the surprises yesterday—I found I had actually slept really soundly. A good, deep sleep.

  As these thoughts were running through my mind, a voice like a tinkling bell came from the other side of the door. “Good morning, Master. May I come in?”

  “Oh—hang on a second.” I quickly patted my hair to make sure I didn’t have bed head or anything. Looked like I was doing all right. I had my pajamas on, too. As for the biological phenomenon men often experience in the morning—well, I could keep my bedsheets where it wouldn’t be obvious.

  “Okay, come in.”

  “Pardon me,” Myusel said, and came through the door.

  An elf-eared maid girl. One with a clumsy streak, no less. Plus, she was so beautiful that I wanted to ask how she had gotten every great character trait at once. I had seen plenty of characters like her in games, fantasized about them again and again, but to see one up close, in the flesh, left me breathless from her elegance.

  You know what? Even ignoring all those endearing clichés, she was just plain adorable. Her flaxen hair was parted down the middle. Skin smooth and white as porcelain, irises a translucent indigo that made her eyes look like jewels. Her full lips were a pale pink. She was perfect.

  The balance of her features was just right, not ostentatious. Yet just looking at that modest, innocent face seemed like it would be enough to heal the wounds in one’s heart. And then—well, I hadn’t really noticed it in all the excitement yesterday, but while the body clad in that maid uniform was willowy, it was also curvy in all the right places and slim in all the right places, too. Even with her clothes on, you could tell. It wasn’t like she was irresistibly erotic—more like you just kind of found yourself wanting her.

  Gaaah! SO CUTE!!

  I was so moe for Myusel that I just wanted to hug my pillow and squeal for joy. Whether she realized what I was thinking or not—I mean, she probably had no idea
—Myusel said with a gentle smile, “Breakfast is ready, sir.”

  Ahh! “Breakfast is ready, sir”! A maid said Breakfast is ready, sir—to me! I very nearly let out a whoop of happiness. This was the most standard of standard lines for maid characters. All my life I’d been jealous of characters in this situation—yet now that I found myself in the midst of it, I felt surprisingly shy.

  “Thanks for always being such a help,” I said, feeling a little panicked.

  Of course, there was no chance that Myusel, being from another world as she was, would go on to reply, “Aw, Da~ddy, don’t say that!” Instead she just looked at me in puzzlement.

  “Always?”

  “Er, well, it’s... just a formality.”

  “What do you mean...?”

  “It’s... I’m not talking to myself, exactly, it’s just sort of something we say to each other in my country.” I tried to explain it in a way that would make sense, but it wasn’t easy.

  Apparently, Myusel still didn’t follow me. As she opened the curtains to let the light in, she glanced back at me and asked, “Will you eat here? Or in the dining room?”

  “What, here? You mean as in, right here?”

  “I can bring breakfast to you here, if you want...”

  “Hmm... Nah. I’ll go to the dining room.”

  I was done being a home security guard, and I felt that meant I ought to be done eating meals in bed, too. Or maybe I just wanted to eat breakfast with Myusel. Obviously, I couldn’t invite her to just eat in my bedroom.

  I climbed out of bed and began undoing the buttons on my pajamas...

  ...and froze.

  Myusel had come up beside me with a shirt in one hand, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “Ahem...”

  “Yes?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Huh...?” She blinked her big eyes at me and cocked her head. “What am I...? H-Have I done something to offend you?” Suddenly, she looked fearful.

  “No, you haven’t. I’m just going to change now.”