The Power of Moe

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Matoba-san said. He further offered that although the project was somewhat risky, it was also top secret, so none of my countrymen would be upset if I failed. That at least (he speculated) should help put my mind at ease.

  “You needn’t think too hard about it. Import what you like, what you find interesting.”

  “Hmmm...”

  Even at that, where was I supposed to start? Then I thought of something.

  “About this ring,” I said, pulling mine out of my pocket. “Wearing one doesn’t let you read Japanese, does it?”

  “It doesn’t seem so,” Matoba-san said. “It actually works via a kind of telepathy.”

  “Ah ha. I see.”

  So the rings didn’t actually make you able to understand another language. Matoba-san and Minori-san and I were speaking Japanese, and Myusel and the others were speaking their own language, and we were able to communicate because we could intuit each other’s thoughts before they actually became words.

  “But that means games and anime and whatever are hopeless, right?”

  Telepathy was all well and good, but machines didn’t have thoughts to read. The DVD player you used to show someone an anime DVD wasn’t thinking anything. People like Myusel would never be able to understand what was being said.

  “I see. Yes, that is a problem.”

  “But wait. Didn’t you say they liked that stuff?” According to what he’d said earlier, out of all the Japanese cultural artifacts the government had tried, it was otaku stuff that had gotten the best response.

  “Indeed they did. But you don’t really have to speak Japanese to enjoy anime, do you?”

  “It’s not all kids’ stuff, you know. What about, like, war dramas where the characters are constantly flinging Zen-like dilemmas at each other?”

  Y’know. G**dam and whatever.

  “Well, in any event, it is the case that out of the various things we showed them, anime was the best received.”

  Come to think of it, they probably didn’t have motion pictures in this world. Something where images appeared to move would naturally draw interest. And it was true that there were plenty of anime where even if you couldn’t follow the story, you could enjoy the beauty of the art or the adorableness of the characters.

  “We’re not going to do any better with manga or novels, either. It doesn’t look like the literacy rate is very high around here. And we’re going to ask them to read something from a foreign country? Are we able to translate anything for them?”

  “That’s rather difficult,” Matoba-san said, shaking his head sadly. “Since we had these rings to enable communication, translation and interpretation went on the back burner. And can you imagine how much trouble it would be to bring a famous linguist over here?”

  I didn’t speak for a moment. Sure! Abducting a famous linguist wasn’t like disappearing some loser former home security guard, was it?!

  “But... Look, I really think any effort here is going to have to start with procuring a competent translator.”

  “Hmmm...” Matoba-san answered me with a noncommittal noise. It seemed to say, We’re really at the end of our budgetary and personnel ropes.

  I couldn’t see how any of this was going to work, and it left me very, very uncomfortable.

  I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. The room was full of an inky darkness; the sun had set long before. I just couldn’t sleep. The audience that afternoon had been pretty agitating—just thinking back on it gave me cold sweats, and I couldn’t calm down.

  “Maybe I’ll go have a drink of water.”

  I reached out for the chest beside my ridiculously large bed, looking for a certain small object atop it. It was a copper antique shaped like a bellflower. I took hold of it and gently flicked the top. At once, there was a pleasant sound and the darkness receded from a pale light.

  This was a magical item that generated light for a brief period when a small physical shock was administered to it. Apparently, it was the standard light source in the Eldant Empire. They said it was full of “light sprites” or something. I guess it wasn’t that different from what we do on Earth when we put “sea fireflies” in a jar. You give it a gentle shake to startle them, and they light up. The only real difference is whether you’re using magical spirits or plankton.

  “Sorry,” I said to the sprites in my lamp, then dangled my legs over the edge of the bed, put on my shoes and, with the light shining on the ground in front of me, left the room.

  I went out into the hallway, down the stairs, then through the dining hall. I was aiming for the kitchen, which was just past the dining area. This world didn’t have water purification technology or even sewer systems, and Minori-san had taught me that just to drink a glass of water, you had to boil it to make sure there were no dangerous bacteria. But she also mentioned that water starts to go bad if you leave it sitting for a couple or three days...

  Suddenly I stopped, surprised. The door was ajar, light leaking out into the dining hall. I wondered who could be up at this hour. Well, staring at the door wouldn’t answer my question, so I took the metal doorknob and pushed it open.

  The kitchen area was made almost entirely of brick. It was a narrow, long room, the floor covered in ceramic tiles. The wall at the far end boasted a counter to work on. Obviously, they didn’t have gas heating here; there was a hearth with a big kettle hanging in it.

  There was a wood table in the middle of the room. Knives and cutting boards were lined up alongside it; it must have been used for chopping things. But there was also...

  “Master?!”

  ...Myusel sitting there.

  “It’s so late,” she said. “Is anything wrong?”

  “Nah, I just wanted a drink of water.”

  “You could have called me, sir, and I would have brought it to you. Let me get some ready for you.”

  “Oh, no—” I raised a hand to stop her as she clambered up from her chair. “I’m not dying of thirst or anything. And anyway, I thought you’d already be asleep. What are you doing up?”

  I thought maybe she’d been getting ready for the next day’s breakfast, but when I looked at the table, all the cooking implements were neatly put away. Instead, she had a pen and a familiar piece of paper.

  It was the hiragana chart I had given her.

  “Wait. Are you... studying?”

  I seemed to have guessed right. Myusel went a little red, as if I’d caught her at something embarrassing.

  “Since you did go to all the trouble of giving me this page, Master...”

  Everything about the way she acted was so innocent—my heart was pounding! But never mind that. I looked at the paper beside her to find it full of hiragana characters. Way more than you would expect. This girl had literally been burning the midnight oil trying to learn hiragana.

  “You know, it’s bad for you to stay up too late. Why not do this tomorrow?”

  “Most of my time during the day is devoted to my work,” she said. “And also... It’s something you went out of your way to give to me, Master, so I wanted to learn it.”

  Yikes! The way she looked sweetly up at me when she said that... It was so moe I could die.

  When I stopped to think about it, I realized that whenever I was awake, Myusel was pretty much always right nearby, taking care of this and that. Cooking and cleaning and doing the washing and other chores. I hadn’t thought too much about it—I mean, what else are maids supposed to do, right?—but on reflection, I realized that taking care of an entire mansion was a pretty major job for one person. Sure, we had Brooke, but it seemed like he mostly worked outside.

  Myusel obviously didn’t have a lot of time to herself, and here she was spending those precious moments studying. I thought I felt a tug on my heartstrings.

  “Well, let me keep you company, then.” I pulled out a chair next to Myusel and sat down.

  Myusel shook her head emphatically. “S-Sir, you mustn’t! With all due respe
ct, you can’t deprive yourself of sleep just to indulge my studying...”

  I, however, tapped the chair she’d been in a moment before, urging her to sit back down.

  “I’m wide awake anyway. C’mon, sit.”

  “It—It’s really all right, sir! Perhaps sometime when you happen to have a free moment...”

  “Aw, if I let you hold out on me now, I’ll be really disappointed,” I said, giving her my brightest smile. Myusel blinked several times, not appearing to understand what was going on. Was what I had said really that strange?

  “Master...” A smile spread slowly across Myusel’s pale face. I know that to say a smile is “like a flower blooming” is a badly overused cliché, but for once I saw what it was really supposed to mean. The hesitant, uncertain Myusel I’d known up till now was charming in her own way, but she was a mere sprout; she didn’t represent everything there was to this girl.

  Gaaaaaaah thisgirlissocute!!

  “...You’re a little strange, aren’t you?”

  She said it! She really said it!

  This would be a flag in any and every game! What’s that? I’m just this close to the “good ending” with this girl? But my choices! Where are my other choices?!

  “Y-You think so?”

  “Yes. Eccentric.”

  Aaarrrgh, I just love those words! Myusel sat down next to me, her smile a bit shy.

  “If it’s all right, perhaps I’ll take you up on your offer.”

  “If you don’t mind having me for a teacher,” I said. Yeah, it was a bit theatrical. But then, so was the moment.

  Wait—damn! Was I playing it a little too cool? I wasn’t used to these things. Anxious, I glanced at Myusel. But the half-elf girl was looking down intently at the hiragana chart, an expression of happiness on her face.

  Chapter Three: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

  My name is Kanou Shinichi, and I’m the general manager of Amutech, the first general entertainment company in this alternate world.

  Yeah, that sounds cool, I guess, but it didn’t change the reality. The fact is, I was thrown headfirst into a situation where even the bureaucrats immediately admitted they had no idea what would sell here, and now I was supposed to sell things here.

  Anyway, never mind the details. Basically, my job was to bring things in that I thought might possibly be interesting to the people of this other world, or at least the Holy Eldant Empire. I didn’t expect to hit it out of the park the first time. I was just trying to lay the groundwork to have a hit later.

  And that required research.

  “Might as well start with what’s right here.”

  I looked around my first-floor office. “Library” might have been a better word. I had made a long list of “otaku goods” for Matoba-san; now the shelves were overflowing with manga, anime DVDs and Blu-rays, game discs, and more. Of course, manga and novels weren’t the only paper goods I’d requested; there were also plenty of design books and posters.

  The result was that my office looked like some otaku-centric bookstore or DVD shop in Akiba. All this stuff wasn’t going to be gold, but just seeing it there was impressive.

  “It’s sort of a dream come true,” I murmured, slightly overwhelmed.

  Each thing I’d gotten was a necessary expense. Forget sales tax; the Bureau was footing the entire bill. Matoba-san had obviously gotten a bit of sticker shock, but getting everything over here was actually a bigger problem than money.

  Just as a note, there seemed to be some weird magnetism or something in the hyperspace tunnel, because wireless communication devices wouldn’t work through it at all, and even wired lines were subject to large amounts of noise. So unfortunately, internet connection had to be scratched off my wish list.

  That being the case, I created a separate list of sites that needed regular checking. People on the other side would have a look periodically, download any important articles, and put them on physical media that could be brought to me. We would lose the immediacy, but I was just going to have to roll with it.

  “Is this y’r ‘otaku culture,’ Master?” The lizardman Brooke was standing beside me, looking around the room in amazement. At least, I thought it was amazement. His scaly face made his expression difficult to read as always, but his tone and gestures gave me just about enough to go on.

  At the moment, Brooke was helping me bring box after box of merchandise from the containers outside into this room. Now that things had quieted down a little, he had a chance to see what was in all those boxes he had been carrying.

  Myusel and I had carried out the work of taking the books and DVDs and such out of the boxes and lining them up on the shelves. We had started early and spent the entire day on it, yet we were still only about sixty percent done.

  “Yeah, this is it. But hey, just staring at it won’t get us anywhere. Brooke, if you see anything that looks interesting to you, feel free to grab it.”

  “May I really? A servant like me, touch your honored possessions?”

  “It’s fine,” I said with a smile. “I don’t care if you’re a servant or a king, the point is to get as many people reading this stuff as possible. But I need feedback, so if you check any of this stuff out, let me know what you think.”

  Brooke looked at me. His eyes never blinked; they looked like glass. I think he was a little surprised...

  “Still not sure? What if I said... Pick anything you like. That’s an order.”

  “Hmmm...”

  Brooke hunched his shoulders and scratched what I assumed was the back of his head, then walked over to the shelf. As a matter of fact, Myusel, with whom I had had virtually the same conversation earlier, had already taken an armful of manga with great interest.

  It was ten days or so since I’d given her the hiragana chart. She had already memorized all the hiragana, and could read katakana, too. Because I was helping her study every night, she could even recognize a couple hundred everyday Japanese words. It turned out she was actually a pretty smart cookie. Not to mention she was apparently thrilled to be learning to read and write, even if it was in the language of a completely different world, and she was picking up Japanese awfully fast.

  Maybe part of it was that she was living with me. Like I said before, the magic rings we wore acted almost like simultaneous interpreters; Myusel could still hear the actual words I was saying. And sort of like watching a subtitled movie, when she heard the same words over and over again, she started to learn some Japanese in spite of herself.

  Naturally, she couldn’t yet read kanji to speak of, but a lot of manga include pronunciations in hiragana next to the kanji, and the pictures themselves are a form of communication in graphic novels, so she could actually work out what was going on in some relatively simple series.

  I had ordered Brooke to pick up a book for much the same reason. He and Myusel would be valuable research subjects.

  Just as I was thinking about all this, I heard an indistinct voice. It sounded like somebody was fighting, maybe out in the hallway, but I couldn’t quite make out what was being said. Although, if they were speaking Eldant, I wouldn’t be able to understand them anyway. The ring’s powers weren’t absolute. If you couldn’t see the other person or if you were too far away, it wouldn’t always work. But then, suddenly—

  “KANOU SHINICHI!!”

  The door burst open. When I saw who had come storming into my office, my jaw dropped.

  “Empress Eldant?!”

  “Indeed!” her Not-Actually-an-Archetypal-Little-Girl-Character Majesty replied. “So this is where you’ve been hiding, Kanou Shinichi. We’ve come to observe your evangelism firsthand and as soon as possible!” Petralka harrumphed, seeming to think I should be grateful for this.

  Apparently, she had gotten word that large amounts of otaku merchandise had been brought in and had come to see for herself. I knew we were in the castle town, but was it really safe for the empress to come out without so much as a bodyguard? Wait... Just how fast could she travel
, anyway?

  I was busy keeping these interjections bottled up when:

  “Y-Your M-Majesty...!” Several steps behind her came a frail old man, his shoulders heaving painfully—Zahar, the prime minister. “Y-Your Majesty... an empress must not run... down a hallway,” he wheezed. “A-And slamming a door is most unfitting...!”

  In games, manga, anime, and light novels, prime ministers always seem to fall into one of a few categories. You’ve got the pathetic guys who are just puffing themselves up in the ruler’s reflected glory, the evil guys who are controlling the ruler like a puppet, and the last-boss types who pretend to be faithful subjects but are secretly plotting rebellion. But this old guy just seemed to really want to bring the empress up right, even if he was a little indulgent. A genuinely good servant.

  Petralka, however, didn’t quite seem to be picking up on his particular expression of loyalty.

  “Quit your blabbering, old man. We did not run, we merely walked quickly.”

  “Ohh, Your Majesty, not more of your royal pedantry...” Zahar let out a groan and put his hands to his face. Evidently this wasn’t the first time they’d been through something like this. I felt bad for him. Surely, he had prime ministerial duties to attend to.

  “Hmm!” Petralka looked around my office, which, on its own small scale, had been Akiba-fied, and made an impressed noise. “Most arresting! Is this the ‘otaku culture’ of which you spoke to us?” Her eyes sparkled with anticipation.

  Mm-hmm. That’s the perfect expression for a loli girl.

  Wait... Myusel was sixteen too, right? I might have been conservative, but I prided myself on having a wide range of expertise when it came to moe characters. And Petralka was moe in a slightly different way than Myusel.

  “How very different these are from your extravagantly colored wall hangings!”

  Unlike Brooke, Petralka hadn’t even thought of asking permission; she’d dragged Zahar over to the bookshelves with her and was now paging through one manga after another with exclamations of “Ooh!” or “Hmm!” As far as I knew, she couldn’t read a word of Japanese—but that didn’t seem to stop her from enjoying the books.