Outbreak Company: Volume 11

by Ichiro Sakaki

  Yes, we had known that Elvia was keeping the other two women here. The question was why.

  “...Elder Sister,” Clara said, looking questioningly at Amatena.

  Amatena give the smallest of nods, then met Minori-san’s eyes. “A massive purge has started in Bahairam. We were among those under suspicion.”

  “Purge...” Gosh, that sounded dangerous. “But... suspicion?”

  “We escaped by the skin of our teeth, so we don’t have any details, either. But corruption in the military has been an issue for some time. Embezzlement, misappropriation of supplies. I think our superiors finally decided to bring down the hammer, and it looks like they took me for part of the problem.”

  “But why would they—”

  “You can’t imagine why?” Amatena said, looking at me with a hint of annoyance. “We’ve been smuggling in ‘otaku goods’ that you sent us.”

  “Well, yeah... but...”

  It was true, I had been using Elvia and Amatena to supply Bahairam with otaku products—principally manga with translations written in next to the word balloons—but just as an experiment. Just to see how people would react, what might happen. Amatena wasn’t getting any kind of personal benefit from it.

  “Corruption and abuse of power... That could apply to just about everyone, right?”

  “That’s not the point. If top brass ever found out that we had been engaged in unauthorized trade with citizens of an enemy nation, they could charge us with sedition against the Honored Father-Ruler, and we would have no defense. If I were in the MPs’ place, I wouldn’t listen to my excuses, either.”

  So, she told us, they’d had no choice but to flee. And for good luck or ill, the day they decided to run was the very day they were supposed to meet Elvia to pick up another shipment of goods.

  “And then I told ’em,” Elvia said. “I said Shinichi-sama, he would help hide them.”

  “Oh... So that’s what you were trying to bring up...”

  That day, back when she had come home from Bahairam, Elvia had been trying to say something to me. She must have been hoping to talk to me about Amatena and Clara. She must have thought I would be able to give them refuge somehow. But before she could bring it up, Minori-san and Hikaru-san and I had started talking about the fraught situation between Eldant and Bahairam, and had even emphasized that any Bahairamanian military forces found in the area might be executed.

  It was probably Elvia’s first inkling of how precarious Amatena and Clara’s situation was. Bahairam wanted them as criminals. Eldant would treat them as enemy combatants. But it was too late to flee to yet another country...

  “I knew you would help, Shinichi-sama, but then I thought ’bout what would happen if Her Majesty found out and... and I knew I just had to do it myself...” Elvia hung her head. “I’m real sorry.”

  It was a pretty reasonable thing to think. Elvia had just been trying to protect Amatena and Clara in her own way. Granted, it was her own personality, totally unsuited to deception as she was, that had given them all away. But still...

  “Huh?” Suddenly, something odd occurred to me. “Why would Bahairam be attacking Eldant if they’re busy conducting show trials?”

  A moment when your internal politics are at a boil is hardly the time to go attacking other countries.

  Amatena, though, shook her head. “I’m speculating somewhat, but... those border skirmishes may actually be intended as a smokescreen to distract your country from our domestic strife. A period of unrest offers a perfect opportunity for another nation to attack, so Bahairam may be putting on an aggressive front as a means of defense.”

  “That makes sense...”

  I thought back on Garius’s comment about small squads getting in small battles. It turned out Bahairam was actually in no position to engage in larger-scale conflict. A series of small incursions would look like probing in advance of a major attack—but it was all a sham.

  “All right. I understand what brought you here, but...”

  I knew now why Amatena had come to Eldant, and what was behind the border disputes. But the biggest problem of all was what to do next. Amatena and Clara were not my enemies at this moment. They were just refugees, chased out of their country on false allegations, running to be with Amatena’s sister. But they were also criminals who had once kidnapped me. If the Eldant Empire found out these two were here... would Petralka or Garius be willing to overlook that fact?

  I really doubted it.

  This wasn’t like the case with Elvia, who hadn’t done any actual harm. The fact that these two had infiltrated Eldant territory and led a squad to within a stone’s throw of the capital, Marinos, was impossible to overlook. Not to mention that they had then proceeded to capture a national VIP (that is, me). The Empire’s reputation might take a hit if it decided to just ignore that.

  One thing was clear: we couldn’t hand Amatena and Clara over to the Eldant authorities. They hadn’t kidnapped me out of malice, but simply because they were ordered to; they hadn’t had anything to gain. They weren’t bad people. And more than anything else, Amatena was Elvia’s older sister. I couldn’t tell Elvia to just abandon her.

  For a long moment, Minori-san stood there, silent, frowning. She seemed to be thinking about the same things I was. Elvia looked anxiously from one of us to the other and back. Even Myusel did the same, though she technically didn’t have a stake in this situation. Hikaru-san had a hand to his chin, mulling it over.

  What should we do? What was best? What was right?

  I wracked my brain, desperate to find an answer that would relieve the tension in the room.

  We were back at school after the break, and cameras continued to be the hot thing in the classroom. Most kids were still shooting with their 3TSes, but a few of them could be seen with specialty digital cameras like the ones Loek and Romilda had, though no one knew how they had gotten them.

  Professional equipment, though, took a lot of effort to learn to use right—it was tricky to take pictures that everyone could and would recognize as good work. In that sense, Loek and Romilda, who had gotten their cameras earlier and gone nuts with them, had a leg up on everyone else. Now the other students surrounded them as they proudly showed off the photos they had taken at the mansion the day before.

  It was break now, and I was watching the students a bit distractedly. My head was full of what to do about Amatena and Clara, and to be honest, though I might have been looking at the kids, I wasn’t really registering what they were doing.

  “Shinichi-sensei!”

  So before I knew it, I found a crowd of them around me. It was pretty diverse: boys and girls both, of different races. But every single one of them had either a 3TS or a digital camera in their hands.

  “Wh-What’s up?” I said, coming back to the moment.

  One of the students stepped forward to speak on behalf of the group. “At the next break, let us photograph your house too, Sensei!”

  “...Huh?” I said dumbly. Other students added their voices in a chorus:

  “It’s no fair only Loek and Romilda get to do it!”

  “I wanna see Hikaru-sensei’s closet, toooo!”

  “I want to check out your otaku goods, Sensei!”

  Every student seemed to have something they wanted to see.

  Ahh... After Loek and Romilda showed off their photos, the others naturally wanted to shoot the mansion, too. It probably didn’t hurt that at my place, like at school, they wouldn’t have to worry about their batteries.

  “It’s okay, isn’t it, Sensei?”

  The students pressing around me looked at me with expectant eyes. Some of them had clasped their hands together and were bowing to me. What was with these displays of absolute and total passion? Was this how far cameras had come?!

  “Er, uh, well, okay. Sure.” I nodded, overpowered by the collective student gaze. I had let Loek and Romilda in. I could hardly turn down the other pupils.

  “Woo-hoo!” The students cheered, pu
nched the air, and high-fived each other.

  Hmm. All right, so I had essentially capitulated to group pressure, but when I saw how happy they were, I couldn’t help feeling good myself. “Is it that great? There’s nothing really special there.”

  “That’s so not true!” the kids responded. “This is you we’re talking about, Sensei—your room must be full of posters and body pillows and stuff, right?”

  “I’ll bet you’ve got it set up so you can reach your computer without ever leaving your bed, don’t you?!”

  “I heard you have a special portable bathroom called a PET bottle!”

  “What was it you said you do when you need food? Knock on the wall?”

  “Dummy. That’s the floor! It’s a ‘floor-knock’!”

  I keep thinking I’m used to this place, but then I’ll hear an elf using a word like ‘floor-knock,’ and it’ll all turn surreal again. I can practically hear the sound of my beautiful illusions shattering. But anyway...

  “Where did you even learn a word like that?!” I exclaimed. “And for that matter, don’t you think it’s kind of mean to apply it to me?!”

  They weren’t wrong: during my shut-in days, I had made sure my manga, drinks, and other stuff were all within arm’s reach so I didn’t have to leave my bed. But still!

  “Awesome! We’ll see you at the next break, then, Sensei!”

  “I can’t wait!”

  The kids weren’t listening to me at all; they were too busy cheering and congratulating each other. They looked so earnest, so sincerely thrilled, that even I couldn’t suppress a smile.

  In Japan we have an expression, “Clothes make the man.”

  “Welcome home, Shinichi-sama, Minori-sama, Hikaru-sama.”

  When we got back to the mansion, we were surprised by the adorable maids who came out to greet us.

  “Nice to be back, Myusel.”

  One of them, needless to say, was Myusel. She was in her maid uniform as always, her sweet smile an oasis for my heart. Her very existence was like a balm to me. She was the person from this world I’d known longest of all, and even though she was my maid, it still felt fresh and new every time I saw her.

  “Welcome home.”

  Standing beside Myusel was an expressionless beast girl.

  It was Clara, showing no obvious discomfort at being dressed in a maid uniform. The design was the same as Myusel’s—kind of French-y, kind of maid-y, with her thin shoulders peeking out just a bit. From one perspective, you could call it a little inflammatory: there was enough skin showing to be a bit provocative, but in Clara’s case the effect was almost comical, like a girl who had gotten into mommy’s closet.

  Anyway, there was also the little fact that the clothes Clara had been wearing when I first met her had been far more revealing.

  “That looks good on you, Clara,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said with a little bow. The green hair bobbed on her head, but I couldn’t see the catlike ears that were a distinctive feature of weretigers; they were hidden by a frilly headdress. What we could see instead was a pair of pointy elf ears.

  They were fake, of course. To be precise, we were using the headdress to hold her real ears down, while she wore these fake elvish ones instead. We were going with the story that Clara was a relative of Myusel’s.

  This was, clearly, a move born of desperation. If we ourselves had discovered Amatena and Clara in barely three days’ time, well, it didn’t seem like we were going to get away with just hiding them. We didn’t have any setup for that, for one thing, and our house had a lot of visitors. Eventually, someone was bound to notice them—as Loek’s picture of Amatena proved.

  Just as clearly, though, we couldn’t ask them to live in a storage room forever, either. So why not set them free in the mansion? It was the most obvious non-obvious thing to do.

  Amatena was one thing; she looked exactly like Elvia. But with Clara, it wasn’t clear at a glance where she came from. So if we dressed her in a frilly apron and said she was our new maid, she might be able to fly under the radar.

  There was just one little problem with this plan.

  The mansion where we lived was not, technically, our property. Strictly speaking, the Japanese government was borrowing it from the Eldant Empire. We couldn’t just add boarders or servants willy-nilly. We had to let the owners know—which meant telling Petralka. We would certainly be expected to provide some kind of proof of who exactly Clara was.

  The Holy Eldant Empire, though, wasn’t looking for the same kind of proof as an organization in modern Japan would be. A good word or an introduction should be enough. Thus, Clara became a young elf girl looking for help from her “distant relation” who was working in a mansion on the outskirts of the capital—namely, Myusel. For the time being, we were employing her on probation, sort of like Myusel’s apprentice.

  Clara was wearing one of Myusel’s maid uniforms, as modified by Hikaru-san. We hid her tail inside the skirt. Her ears, as I mentioned, we tucked under the headdress, replaced with a set of elf ears imported directly from Japan.

  Er, by which I mean Hikaru-san had brought them with him in case of cosplay.

  “Man, these things look so real,” Hikaru-san had said with a big grin as he pulled them out of their box. They looked a little too real, if you asked me. Less like a cosplay prop than something out of a horror movie. The skin was like... I mean, at a glance, you seriously couldn’t tell whether they were real or not.

  “Japanese cosplay technology, hoo boy,” Minori-san said with a wry grin. “They’ve got to be approaching Hollywood levels.”

  “Well, the Japanese would put all their skill and resourcefulness into something like that,” I said. I couldn’t imagine another country that would even think to try to make, say, cat ears that moved in response to your brain waves.

  Still... with her ears and tail hidden, and augmented with elf ears and a maid uniform, Clara looked every bit the adorable elvish maid. But...

  “Yes?” Clara asked, tilting her head.

  “Huh? Oh, no,” I said.

  There was just something... off. Yes, she looked like a maid, but she didn’t feel like one. I thought it had to do with her expression. Clara rarely showed emotion, kept her hands smack at her sides, and always stood ramrod straight. It screamed soldier, and it didn’t look very friendly. If Myusel were just standing there, she would have her hands folded in front of her, radiating a sense of composure. And if her eyes met mine, she would smile sweetly. These thoughtful little gestures were what made a maid a maid. Then again, Myusel had served in the military, too, so maybe it was just a matter of getting used to it.

  Whatever the case, a quick comparison between the two of them made it clear that it took more than clothes to make a maid.

  “Clara-san.” Myusel seemed to have sensed the same thing herself. “As a maid, you ought to be mindful of the language you use when speaking to your master,” she advised in a bit of a chiding tone. “Also, when your master comes home after a long, hard day of work, you have to be sure to greet him properly. Your hands should be in front of you, not at your sides—place them one over the other just below your navel.”

  Rather than biting back, Clara obediently followed Myusel’s directions, placing her hands in front of her. She looked a little awkward doing it, but that was understandable.

  “I’ll go get dinner ready, then,” Myusel said, looking back at the rest of us with a smile. Then she gave a little bow, turned neatly, and walked into the house. Clara—she was an apprentice maid, remember—followed her “mentor” a second later. The rest of us watched them go.

  “I feel like I’m seeing a new side of Myusel,” I found myself musing. Someone who hadn’t known her very long might not have noticed, but there was a hint of strength, even severity to her that day. Watching her tell Clara how to act, she didn’t sound like the retiring young woman I was used to.

  Was it like in the proverb? “It takes a student to make a teacher”?

/>   “You don’t suppose it’s her pride as a maid?” Hikaru-san said. “The girl’s wearing a maid uniform and is supposed to be a maid. Myusel wouldn’t want her besmirching the good name of her profession by not living up to standards.”

  That made sense. Those two factors—professional pride and mentorship—combined to put an edge on her. This little act wasn’t just for fun, it was about keeping Clara safe, which was all the more reason to take it seriously. From that perspective, the behavior was actually very in-character for Myusel.

  “A bit of whip-cracking will be perfect. Clara is supposed to be here to learn how to be a maid, after all,” Minori-san said, and I nodded.

  “You’re right about that.”

  The moment we arrived in the kitchen, Clara-san looked me right in the eye and asked, “What should I do first?”

  “Oh—take care of this, please,” I said, pointing to a basket full of potatoes. “I’d like you to wash and peel them.”

  “Understood.” She nodded and took the basket to the sink, sort of pattering as she went. It was a fairly large basket and must have been rather heavy, but she carried it as if it weighed next to nothing. I suppose it goes to show how much power is packed into the body of even a small beast person.

  Clara-san didn’t talk much, and wanted something in attitude, but she seemed quite skilled at cooking and cleaning... Honestly, from a practical perspective, I felt there was very little I had to teach her. In fact, I was finding her to be quite a help at my chores.

  It was just...

  I was chopping vegetables, too; as I did so, I kept glancing at Clara-san.

  “Yes...?”

  I guess she noticed. She cocked her head at me even as she shook the basket to wash the potatoes.

  “Oh, no, it’s nothing...” Yes, she was supposed to be my “apprentice,” but I realized too late that even so, stealing those little peeks at her was probably rude. So I gave a quick shake of my head, then changed the subject in an effort to dispel the tension in the air. “Er, so what was life like for Shinichi-sama while he was in Bahairam?”