“Yes?”
“Could we... save that for some other time?”
“Save wha—aaaahhh!” I realized my hand had ended up clamped on Elvia’s boob. I let go as fast as I could and got off her back. “S-S-S-Sorry about that!”
“Nah, it’s okay. I don’t really mind.” She laughed a little. “Actually, I’m kind of proud...” She scratched her cheek.
Oops. She left some crayon streaks—wait.
“Huh? How’s that again?”
Did she mean she was proud of being sexually harassed? What was going on in that furry brain?
“Well, I am a werewolf and all...”
“I know that.” Her ears and tail were right out there for all to see. She was pretty much wearing nothing but underwear; they were hard to miss.
“But you’re a human, right, Shinichi-sama?”
“Uh... Yeah...”
“And they... don’t bother you?”
“What don’t?”
“My... ears and tail.” She pointed to each of them in turn.
“Bother me? No, not at all. Heck, I think they’re the most moe things about you.”
I had almost immediately ceased to pay them any mind. I mean, for an otaku, animal ears and a tail were par for the course, important moe stuff. Definitely not a negative in any way.
“Wait,” I said. “Are you saying... In this world, in the Eldant Empire or the Kingdom of Bahairam or whatever... ears and a tail are considered off-putting?”
“Well, yeah,” Elvia said with a sad smile. “Not among werewolves, obviously. Think about it—Bahairam and Eldant and most of the other countries around here, they’re controlled by humans, right? So the human form is considered the most beautiful. Some werewolves even cut off their own ears and tails so they can fit in.”
“Wow...”
Now it was starting to click for me. Human perceptions of beauty have always varied by time and place. You’ve got your otaku, who can get off on two-dimensional images, and then you’ve got the mainstream, where people just don’t understand what’s attractive about “those huge eyes.” Actually, you can check out shunga, erotic woodblock prints from the Edo era. Those were basically the equivalent of manga back then, but otaku today don’t get moe at all for them.
As for werewolves, it would make sense for them to consider the werewolf body the most beautiful, but long ages of living under human domination had made it so even beast people had come to accept human standards of beauty.
“So to have a human guy act hot and bothered over me,” Elvia concluded, “makes me a little bit proud.”
“No, uh, I’m sorry. That wasn’t why I was grabbing you.”
I mean, yes, I was hot and bothered, but that was a different story. Calm down, little guy! This isn’t the time!
“Oh, really? Too bad.” Elvia smiled without a hint of resentment.
Ahh. You know, she’s... she’s not bad.
She didn’t have that refined cuteness, the gorgeousness of Myusel or Petralka, but she did have a plain attractiveness. Even her easygoing demeanor was part of an unadorned sexiness. Then take all that and multiply it by werewolf.
“Plus, I owe my life to you,” she said. “I don’t think I’d mind if you were to get all over me.” She smiled brightly. I was almost a little disappointed not to sense anything impure in her.
“Er... Thanks?” It was all I could think to say. “Elvia, can I ask you something? You were really concentrating there. How long have you been drawing?”
“Huh. Good question.” She eyed the stack of dishes against the wall. “One, two, three... Hm. About five days, I guess.”
“That long?!”
That was definitely too many days to be doing anything nonstop. I was pretty sure I had heard news reports of somebody who dropped dead after playing an online game for three or four days straight.
“Well, how about you take a little break?” I suggested, but Elvia shook her head firmly.
“It’s all good. I want to work just a little more.” She reached into the bag next to her and pulled out a new piece of charcoal.
So she was just going to keep drawing? I guess that’s dedication. Or... craziness.
“How and why can you concentrate for that long?” I asked, the formless anxiety welling up within me again.
“Good question, too.” She looked at me like it hadn’t really occurred to her, and made a thoughtful sound. “I guess it’s... you know.”
“I really don’t.”
“It just kind of helps me feel better. Wait, that’s not quite it. How do I put it?” She shrugged her shoulders. “Werewolves are natural hunters and fighters, right? But now that we’re associated with settled societies, we can’t just do whatever we want. If we accidentally let our instincts run away with us, we can end up in serious trouble. Punished way worse than a human.”
“Huh...”
In a world of class differences, it was possible—maybe even, to them, natural—that someone of high status would get off lightly for a crime that would bring major punishment for someone of a lower class.
“Yep. And most of us... Well, we’re taught how to channel those impulses. For me, it was art. I learned to look closely at something, study it, then draw it. In some ways, it’s not that different from hunting, right?”
“Sublimation, huh?” I muttered. I supposed that would work as a substitute for hunting, where she would use her no-doubt powerful senses to their utmost in order to catch her prey. She was just “catching” it on paper.
I get it...
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. She wasn’t specifically aiming for a realistic style for its own sake; she was trying to re-create even the smell and body heat of her subject. After all, this was a replacement activity for hunting, which uses all five senses. That was why it was so easy for her to switch over to a style of art where she got to add her own interpretation.
But still...
“That’s... kind of rough.”
“How’s that?” Elvia looked at me blankly.
“Isn’t that, like... distorting who you are, who you were meant to be, for the convenience of humans?”
“Oh. Well, I guess so, kind of. Actually, I do know werewolves who got so tired of it that they went to live in the wilderness instead.” She gave a bit of a smile, scratching her cheek. “But me, I can live with this. Drawing is fun, and I don’t think I’d last long in a survival-of-the-fittest world.”
“I see...”
To live “as nature intended” would literally mean prioritizing animal-ness. Werewolves must once have lived by the code of the strong eating the weak, but that meant that anyone who didn’t have the sharpest instincts, or anyone weakened by age, wouldn’t get to live out their natural lifespan...
Did that mean that having to bow to the needs of the humans wasn’t such a bad thing after all?
“Okay! Time for another!”
As I stood there agonizing over all this, Elvia gave herself a little pep talk. Then she grabbed her charcoal and she was at it again.
Things at the school were actually going smoothly. A little too smoothly, in fact.
My “otaku training center” was wildly popular with the people of the Holy Eldant Empire. You would never have guessed there had been a terrorist incident there. We could only take so many actual students, obviously, but we had more and more children of local nobles showing up to “audit.” Even some adults were begging to get in. I was starting to wonder how I would deal with it all.
With Minori-san as my assistant, I was introducing the students to Japanese entertainment and otaku products by the armload. And the students, like Myusel and even like me in my youth, seemed to be on the fast track to serious otakudom. Was it the simultaneous interpreting? Was it just because they were young? Or did they have some innate talent? I didn’t know, but they were progressing far more rapidly than I had planned on.
“Good morning, everyone!” I said as I came into the classroom. Just like I
always did. But today, the way the students reacted was different from usual. Maybe there had been signs that I had simply missed.
It’s true: change doesn’t always proceed in neat stages. Eventually you reach a tipping point, and everything explodes, like an allergic reaction.
“Senseiiiiiiiii!”
For a second, I thought someone was yelling at me. The voice was just that loud and passionate; it hit me like a slap in the face. I took an unconscious step back.
Immediately after the voice, a student came rushing at me.
“Yikes! Wh-What the—?!”
No sooner had I entered the classroom than I was being pushed out of it. I somehow managed to stop the backward momentum before I went stumbling out the door.
There were fifty students in the room, and they were all peppering me with questions.
“When is volume 13 of Pop Dragon going to get here?!”
“...Huh?” I said stupidly.
They ignored my befuddled response; if anything, the questions came even harder and faster. I thought they might tear me to pieces... Words like rioters, nerd tsunami, and the infamous East Hall on the last day of Comiket went through my mind.
“No, wait! What about our bishoujo games?! I want the new Hell Angel Lumière!”
“Sensei! Is it true that there’s a lost twelfth episode to the anime version of O-samurai Seven?!”
“Shut up! The real issue is, in the afterword to the latest volume of Asobi ni kita YO!, the author says he did a spinoff where the vice-captain is the heroine! Do you have it on your bookshelf already?!”
...And so on and so forth. They looked like news reporters trying to get a scoop, lobbing questions at me one after another. They were all shouting over each other, but the questions all came down to the same thing: “When is the new volume/issue/episode coming out?”
“Okay, hang on. Everybody just... calm down!” I said, fending them off with both hands. I guess everyone was starved for more manga and anime and games. “Just be quiet!” I said.
The room went silent, as if someone had flipped a switch. It was such a uniform reaction that I wondered if they had had some kind of training in it—this was a fearsomely repressed society, after all.
No, no. The more fearsome thing right now was...
“Um,” I said slowly, looking around at everyone. “I understand how you guys feel, believe me. But right now... No. I don’t have them.”
I didn’t just mean I couldn’t get them. I meant there was no new whatever. They didn’t exist. Some series were being serialized and the latest collected volume hadn’t come out yet. Some games were still in development and hadn’t been released. Before we could bring them to Eldant, they had to come out in Japan.
“Awwwww!” The students began to howl as if I had sentenced them to death. “O great evangelist! Please, have mercy—grant unto us more moe!”
Were they praying to me?!
It wasn’t just one student kneeling with tears in their eyes, begging piteously. A second, then a third followed. Some of them were elves and dwarves no less, and both men and women were among the supplicants. It was the strangest sight I had ever seen.
“Grant me illustrations of comely maidens!”
“Graciously throw in some bishounen, too!”
“Confer upon us a new prophecy, a new revelation!”
Okay, you guys, stop. I think you’re leaning just a little too hard into the pity thing. My classroom had transformed into a chapel for those contaminated by otaku culture, and I was apparently the great ancestor they were praying to! This was no joke!
“Wait a mi—”
“Oooohhhhhh!”
“Sensei! Senseiiiiii!”
“Oh! Oooohhhhh!!”
This was... Well, it wasn’t like any class I had ever seen.
The students were reaching out to me like zombies. I backed up, my cheeks twitching. Then someone grabbed me by the collar...
“Okay! Today is a free-study day!” That was Minori-san, slamming the door shut.
On the other side I could still hear the students moaning. They sounded like the damned in hell, but I ignored them as hard as I could and set off running.
I was panting by the time I stopped, not sure where I had run to. I was at some far part of the hallway when difficulty breathing finally slowed me down. I bent over, trying to collect myself, then leaned against the wall as the fatigue overcame me.
“Shinichi-kun.” Minori-san, who was standing next to me, sounded annoyed. I guess that’s a WAC for you: I had run myself ragged, but she had followed along like we were going for a walk. She wasn’t even breathing hard. “Not that I don’t understand how you feel...”
“What the heck?! What the heck was going on back there?!” But even as I asked, I thought I had a pretty good idea.
They’ve accelerated.
Things like learning Japanese or becoming acquainted with otaku culture don’t happen at a constant speed. Instead, after certain point, things increase exponentially—both the rate of learning and the rate at which consumable media is, well, consumed. My supply of product was no longer able to keep up with their evolution as otaku. On top of that...
“Um...”
Someone called out to us from nearby. Minori-san and I turned and saw a woman of ambiguous age standing there.
“Are you Kanou Shinichi-sama?”
“Er... Yes, I am.”
The woman had golden hair tied up in a ponytail and was wearing a restrained brown dress. It was obvious she was a member of the nobility long before you noticed the gigantic jewel on her finger.
“Pardon me,” I said, “but you are...?”
“I’m Rauletta, wife of Bardaressa Teodoro Pertini, who was granted noble rank by the empress. Actually, I’ve come to talk to you about my son, who goes to your school...” She looked troubled.
“You... You have?”
“Yes, I simply must. Please—” Rauletta-san’s voice broke before she could go any further. She looked completely beleaguered. Honestly, I wasn’t sure this was the time to be stopping to lend an ear to other people’s troubles, but faced with this despairing noblewoman, we could hardly rush off with a “Sorry! Busy!” We ushered Rauletta-san down the hallway.
“Perhaps you remember my son, Eduardo?” she asked as we went.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “He’s pretty sharp—he learned to write in a hurry, anyway.”
Eduardo Teodoro Pertini. He was the boy I had seen earlier, translating the light novel in the library. He was only about fifteen years old, and his most conspicuous trait was his curly golden hair. He had picked up kana right away, as well as most of the kanji necessary for basic literacy. Extremely quick to memorize things, he drank in the information. I had him pegged as a scholar—he was very focused and very particular.
In other words, he was ideal otaku material. I would have certainly counted him among the top students at our otaku training center. But his mother...
“I’m very proud of my son,” Rauletta-san said, but she had a pained expression on her face. “Or, I was. But that seems so long ago now.” She had stopped in her tracks, and Minori-san and I stopped with her.
Rauletta-san pointed at a certain room. The door was ajar. A sign reading “Library” hung on the wall.
For a moment, I looked in puzzlement at Rauletta-san, who showed no sign of moving. Then I looked into the library.
We taught the kids to be quiet in the library, so it was never too noisy in there, and since it was class time now, it was practically dead. The students should have been in the classroom.
“Huh...”
And yet, I could hear a pen scratching busily inside. Deep within, I could see a young man sitting alone at a desk.
It looked a lot like what I had observed earlier. The difference was the sheer volume. Piles of dictionaries and novels towered on either side of him, and he was writing on his lambskin paper as quick as a copy machine. Yep: it was Eduardo.
There were lit
tle bags under his eyes, his face the picture of seriousness. He reminded me of a manga artist trying to make deadline. I had to admit, he didn’t exactly make one think of a promising young noble.
“He talks about nothing but those books. It’s as if he’s possessed,” his mother said, nearly weeping. “I just can’t bear to see it anymore. But if I take his books, he runs away from home, and we always find him here. We’ve tried to get him tutors for etiquette and ballroom dancing, but he insists that his translations are the only thing that’s important and won’t be moved!”
She went on to tell me that she couldn’t even badmouth otaku culture in front of her son. Especially seeing as how it was favored by the Empress...
I stood dumbfounded. I had students who seemed to be going through withdrawal when they couldn’t get their otaku goods, and now Eduardo, who had abandoned everything else for light novel translation. I knew what was happening. I had seen this before.
“I...”
I had only wanted to share the excitement and joy of my beloved manga and anime and games and light novels. That was all I had ever been after. And because that was all I had wanted, I had missed the most crucial thing.
The Eldant Empire—no, this whole world—would find the entertainments of my world overstimulating. I admit, I had never expected it to spread so fast, and that meant it could potentially spread too fast and be dangerous.
I hadn’t even considered this possibility. I had believed that anime and manga and games and light novels—really, stories of every kind—were good. Not only could they allow you to experience things that couldn’t happen in reality using the power of the imagination, not only did they help relieve fatigue and stress, but they were also a chance to gain new insight and viewpoints. They could help give life flavor, make it richer. My belief in that particular truth was unshaken.
But at the same time, there was a time and a place for everything—to say nothing of an amount. The way I brought everything in without thinking about any of that, it was almost as if I had imported powerful drugs.
There’s a limit to everything. Maybe I don’t seem qualified to say that, having spent a year as a home security guard—but then, in a way, I’m in a position to talk exactly because I’ve lived through it. And there might be other people who can talk about it in Japan, but here in the Eldant Empire, I was the only one who could or would say anything at all.
Outbreak Company: Volume 2 Page 9
