Outbreak Company: Volume 3

by Ichiro Sakaki

  It was only natural that guys and girls would get moe for different things. The elf and the dwarf were supposedly talking about the same series, but since each of them was coming at it from the direction of what they liked best, they ended up talking past each other—as was all too obvious from listening to them.

  Under normal circumstances, such differences in preference generally weren’t inflicted on each other. Take Comiket, for example. Genre distinctions are made both spatially and temporally, and usually people with opposing interests never see each other. Booths selling doujinshi aimed at women and those selling doujinshi aimed at men don’t share the same space, even if their books are based on the same anime.

  That’s what’s typical, mind you. Very few people deliberately seek out those with different preferences and try to argue. Otaku usually prefer to just ignore people who can’t understand them. For better or for worse, otaku know how to handle other otaku. The culture emerged organically.

  That kind of “common sense,” however, couldn’t be counted on at this school. The Holy Eldant Empire had never had much in the way of “entertainment culture,” and the liberal infusion of manga and anime and games and light novels we had brought over produced a sort of overreaction, like a medicine that was too effective. They didn’t know how to distance themselves from people whose interests diverged from theirs.

  And on top of that...

  “Elves! Hmph! Who needs ’em?”

  “Dwarves! What boors!”

  Elves and dwarves had never been the best of friends; add a disagreement about media to the mix and you had a recipe for some truly stupendous arguments. They were often looking for an excuse to fight anyway, and belittling each other’s interests proved an excellent way to bait their opponents.

  “Hey! If you think I’m going to let that pass, you’ve got another thing coming!”

  “I don’t think you think at all!”

  “Try me, you acorn-shaped—!”

  “All that time in the trees must have set moss growing in those giant ears!”

  “All that underground sulfur must have rotted your brain!”

  And considering that the otaku work in question was nothing more than the spark, these arguments inevitably devolved into a series of mean remarks about the other race’s appearance, abilities, or history. Anyone of the same race who was present was obviously not going to let those kinds of barbs slide. Pretty soon, what began as a personal dispute between an elf boy and a dwarf girl had turned into an entire classroom of people squaring off, elves versus dwarves.

  “Heh! It’s hardly worth talking to you!” the elf crowed.

  “Oh, that’s right,” the dwarf shot back. “Run away! You’re the worst.”

  “Excuse me? As if you don’t just prattle on without even hearing what I’m saying!”

  I knew from personal experience that these sorts of arguments never really end. Usually someone just says something like “You’re wrong!” or “You’re so dumb it’s not even worth talking to you,” ignoring any kind of rational argument, to say nothing of the other person’s viewpoint. That’s how it works online, for sure. But since differences of interpretation and preference for any given otaku work were just an excuse to start fighting, it ends up not really being a question of who’s right and who’s wrong.

  When it comes to stuff like anime, you’d think you could just enjoy it however you liked. But people start talking about how it “should be,” and then things go off the rails—because with a million ways to enjoy any given work, no one conclusion is going to please everyone.

  And that was why—

  “Unforgivable!”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth!”

  The elf and dwarf both took up fighting stances and began to chant magic.

  “Emarufe Ekansu! Flaming Serpent!”

  “Erifutoshigeru Tosegunotosu! Fire with fire!”

  The coil of flame that the elf shot out wrapped itself around the dwarf like a snake, just as the name suggested. But the dwarf, being a dwarf, had cast a spell of resistance to fire, and the conflagration stopped a hair’s breadth from her skin, doing no damage.

  Incidentally, elves tended to be more skilled at offensive magic, while dwarves often specialized in defensive spells. I just learned that myself.

  “Gunoru Edirutosu! Thousand-foot Lunge!”

  “Tifu Murottsu! Storm Fist!”

  There was a tremendous bang as the dwarf girl dropped into a shoulder tackle and the elf boy jumped back and fired off a spell in return. Before the dwarf could connect with her target, a whirlwind spun up and slowed her down.

  Maybe the two of them weren’t all that powerful, or maybe they had both held back at the last instant so there wouldn’t be any casualties, because neither of them appeared to be injured, but the power of their magic had thrown little sparks at every corner of the classroom.

  “Yikes, that’s hot! Watch what you’re doing, you long-eared loon!”

  “Yowch! What’s wrong with you demi-humans?!”

  The shouting came from people who had been hurt when the dwarf, still wrapped in the coil of flame, came flying toward them.

  The room erupted. Yelling and shouting and arguing spread all over. Racial discrimination is bad enough on its own, but when it’s inspired by a dispute about 801 (that is, yaoi) and moe, that just adds an extra savor of the pathetic. And Professor Tolkien would spin in his grave to see a moe-obsessed elf and a 801-mad dwarf.

  The shouting and the stomping and the smashing all ran together. Fire and electric shocks and impacts and pieces of things flew everywhere. The classroom suddenly seemed to have turned into a literal battlefield.

  “Ahem.” Minori-san, standing beside me at the lectern, was giving me the eye. “Aren’t you going to do something about this?”

  “Do I look like I have a death wish?”

  I wanted to have a proper lesson as much as anybody. Besides, it’s not like I enjoyed watching people fight or seeing my classroom supplies get annihilated. Seeing figures destroyed, even if they were mass-produced ones, hurt my heart, and my spirit ached at the waste of manga and novels torn to shreds.

  If I just jumped in, though, I could only get hurt, as I had already learned from painful experience. I could try shouting, but who was going to listen to me? Everyone was too worked up about the “enemy” in front of them. The classroom was utterly out of my control, and I didn’t feel like there was anything I could do about it.

  “I guess we’ve got no choice, then,” Minori-san said with a sigh.

  What came next happened in a flash.

  Or rather, a bang.

  In an enclosed space, even a 9mm is plenty deafening. Elves, dwarves, and humans all froze in place, then turned toward us. They weren’t looking at me. They were looking at Minori-san, who was holding her JSDF-issue 9mm handgun above her head. Without really thinking about it, I glanced up at the ceiling, but I didn’t see any sign of a bullet. Maybe she had loaded it with blanks.

  She still got what she wanted, though.

  “Listen up, you stupid students!” Minori-san put both her hands on the teacher’s desk. When someone who was normally as laid-back as she was started shouting like this, it definitely got people’s attention. She glared at everyone from behind her glasses. “There is no racial bigotry here!” If this had been a comic book, her words would have been accompanied by some sound effect like don! (bam!)

  Wow. That’s a WAC for you. She sure knew how to lay down the law when it counted. So cool!

  “I don’t look down on any of you pigs, whether you’re elf-pigs, dwarf-pigs, or human-pigs!”

  I take back my “So cool.”

  Um... Minori-san? What’s with this “pig” talk?

  “Here you are all equally worthless!”

  “Just a—”

  “My orders! Are to weed out all non-hackers! Who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps! Do you maggots understand that?”

  Y’all remembe
r yer in the Ground force and not the Marines, right?

  Wait, was I so startled that I had started speaking with a drawl?

  No! What I meant was, where’d this Sergeant Hartman act come from?!

  “Stop! Walk it back, Minori-san, walk it back!” I waved frantically at her, terrified that she would start blurting out “I didn’t know they stacked s@&! that high” or “slimy communist c&#ks*@!ers” and other truly unprintable things.

  “Aww, but I was just getting into it.” She looked genuinely disappointed.

  What is wrong with her?

  “You’re gonna get yourself killed by Gomer Pyle.”

  “There are no M14s around, so I’m not worried.”

  “Yeah, well I do want a teenage queen.”

  And on and on we went, in a conversation that would probably have made zero sense to anyone who hadn’t seen F*** Metal Jacket.

  Finally, I glanced at the students. “Er, uh, anyway, no fighting in the classroom, okay?”

  “Sir yes sir!” they shouted in unison. Funny. They sounded just like a group of spooked recruits.

  These people had all been raised in a very authoritarian society, so sometimes Minori-san’s top-down style of leadership (by which I mean shouting things at them) seemed to click better for them.

  Having said that, if you think that, having laid down the law once, we never had another problem with fighting... Well, you’d be wrong. We could shout ourselves hoarse, but the effect was only ever temporary. We were talking about rivalries that had been going on for centuries here; that hostility wasn’t going to vanish overnight.

  Faced with a classroom atmosphere just as strained as ever, I muttered, “What are we gonna do...?”

  Okay, flashback over.

  The point is, the classroom constantly seemed to be on the verge of exploding. The spark that set it off could be anything. I happened to pick an example that started with a disagreement about how to interpret certain anime characters, but that was sort of the best you could hope for. Sometimes arguments started over whether it was better for the heroine to have big boobs or to be really young, and once an elf and a dwarf came to blows over whether this actress or that one should have played such-and-such a role in an anime adaptation of a certain manga. Naturally, what started as an innocent dispute about media somehow escalated into a series of “Yo’ momma so fat”-type insults.

  “Getting everyone to settle down is a massive pain,” I griped.

  But Petralka replied, “Well, we suppose there’s nothing to be done.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “The enmity between elves and dwarves is long-standing.”

  “I guess you’re right about that,” I sighed.

  I know the differences between races can be pretty noticeable, I thought, picturing Brooke or the way Elvia had acted that morning. Even if you didn’t set out to be discriminatory, when another person’s bodily construction and biology were so distinct, it was all too easy to start thinking of them as though they were a different form of life. The divergence in worldview that sometimes came from those differences could cause friction, and it was almost impossible to eliminate these fundamental differences. I didn’t understand Brooke’s experience as a lizardman, and he probably didn’t understand mine as a human.

  Even two people from the same race might fail to understand each other if their perspectives were too different. So maybe some strife between humans and demi-humans, or between different races of demi-humans, was only natural.

  “I’ve got to admit, I hoped we might be able to let lizardman children into the school at some point,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.

  “Lizardman children?” The dubious inquiry came not from Petralka, but from the handsome knight standing at her shoulder.

  We sometimes talk about “knights in shining armor,” but this guy almost seemed to literally embody the expression. Much of the simple armor he wore, as well as the outfit underneath it, was a pure white. He had shimmering silver hair, just like Petralka, and he let it grow long. He was pretty much a stereotypical anime- or manga-style pretty-boy.

  This was the noble Garius en Cordobal. He was a knight of the Holy Eldant Empire, as well as a minister, and on top of that he was a relative of Petralka’s. In other words, he was second in importance only to Petralka herself.

  “What exactly would be the purpose of admitting lizardmen to the school, Shinichi?” he asked, sounding almost annoyed.

  “The purpose? I... I just thought they would be happy to get the chance at an education like everyone else. Lizardmen face even more discrimination than elves and dwarves, right?”

  Petralka cocked her head. “Dis-crim-i-na-tion?”

  Oops. It happened again.

  Sometimes, words that seemed simple enough to me didn’t quite get across. It might be that my Eldant audience didn’t have the right concept, or that they took slightly the wrong nuance from it. Our oh-so-convenient rings readily got across the meaning of most of our words, but when the other person lacked any concept equivalent to what you were saying, the word would be communicated to them as pure sound, with no equivalent meaning.

  “Oh, uh, in other words, something that’s not equal, or, like, when someone is persecuted or treated as less important by others. I thought it might be nice if we could eliminate some of that, even if only at school—”

  “Ridiculous.” Garius’s response startled me. “I want you to understand something, Shinichi. Those things may walk like people do and talk like people do, but deep down they are beasts. No—perhaps not even that.”

  “Gosh, you... you really don’t like lizardmen, do you?” I frowned.

  “I feel I should say that this is not simply my personal opinion,” Garius replied. “Lizardmen as a species are cold-blooded, and their humors are less intense than those of humans.”

  “Is... Is that right?” I asked. And truth be told, I could almost see where Garius was coming from. As I had noticed that morning, Brooke sometimes seemed less prone to strong emotion than a human. Like how when he got hit, he didn’t seem to get angry—in fact, he didn’t even seem to think of it as sad or disappointing or particularly unpleasant. He felt pain less acutely than we did, so maybe the emotions associated with pain or unpleasantness were absent or less emphatic.

  “Trying to treat them the same way as humans could simply create new problems. It could easily lead to the very ‘discrimination’ you’re worried about,” Garius said.

  I thought I understood what he meant. If we treated lizardmen the same way we did other humanoid races, it might actually invite scorn from those peoples. I guess even in contemporary Japan people sometimes argue that if you give too many breaks to those who have been discriminated against, you end up actually treating them better than the people who weren’t discriminated against, creating a new kind of inequality.

  “Okay,” I said, “but if we can turn the lizardmen into customers, we could start selling otaku stuff to them. It would be, whaddaya call it, a new market.”

  Granted the differences in perception and worldview that I mentioned, I wasn’t actually sure whether lizardmen would be receptive to works of otaku culture or not. Brooke, at least, sometimes watched anime or read manga, although that was partly because I encouraged him to. Myusel said that every once in a while he would ask her about the meaning of a word he found in a manga. So that meant he was at least interested, right?

  “I had another thought,” I added. “Lizardmen are effectively the lowest class in this country, right? If we want to raise the nation’s overall cultural level, pulling it up from the top is one way to do it, but raising the bottom seems more efficient.”

  If we taught the lizardmen, who were considered the bottom of the heap around here, to read and write, if they were able to become bearers of culture, then the higher classes would be embarrassed if they themselves were illiterate. That was my thought, anyway. Then people would actively take it upon themselves to study and learn,
and achieving the necessary educational level for the spread of culture would be easier.

  “Hmm...” Garius didn’t look quite convinced. He seemed to be considering what I had said.

  As nonchalantly as this guy could make racist pronouncements, he wasn’t actually malicious, nor—most striking of all—was he inextricably attached to these viewpoints. What I mean is, if he saw that it was of real benefit not to discriminate, he had the flexibility and vision to change his view.

  I had real respect for Garius that way. (Let me be clear: definitely not of the “You’re so amazing! Take me now!” variety.) It was a pretty impressive thing to be able to do, all the more so for someone in a position of power.

  “It is true that from small argument comes great bloodshed,” Petralka commented. “Strife between the races is something we can’t afford to ignore. We are told that such discord has even caused civil wars in the past. And racial tension fuels a good deal of the issues that currently occupy the royal guard.”

  “All true,” Garius said with a nod.

  “If such problems could be decreased even slightly, would that not reduce the burden on the knights?”

  The Eldant Empire didn’t have what we would call a police force. All matters that required any kind of armed force, whether domestic or external, were the business of the knights. So if a war broke out, or intensified, the knights got busier, and sometimes public safety suffered as a result.

  I was given to understand that the Japanese government, in addition to its scheme to import otaku culture, had also been thinking about taking over policing of the Eldant Empire, but I assumed those plans were on hold. Neither Petralka nor Garius trusted Japan nearly enough for that now.

  “Given that all peoples of this empire, regardless of race, are equally our subjects, reducing the amount of fighting would surely strengthen the nation. That in itself is no bad thing.” Petralka frowned and went on, “But the other side of that coin is the emergence of groups like Bedouna.”