Banning unwelcome religious practices, though, was hardly enough to get rid of them. There were plenty of “hidden Christians” during the Edo period, for example. And the more basic the object of worship, the harder it would be to uproot that faith. All the more so if it were connected directly to a biological phenomenon, as it was with Elvia.
“So, when I see something that looks just like the big, round Moon-sama...”
She shivered just thinking about it. Not from fear or cold, naturally, but more like excitement. She looked like she was practically in a trance already.
“Touching something round like that... It gives me a sense of fulfillment...” She made a gesture with her hands as if caressing an invisible ball. “Especially when it’s soft and just the right size, like those balls of yours, Shinichi-sama. Like they would just be so pleasant to fondle...”
Wait... Which balls were we talking about, again? This conversation was taking a dangerously filthy turn.
Hearing the normally adorable Elvia suddenly start talking dirty-ish like that made things hard on me, too. Specifically, the lower half of me, as my mind wandered back to the sensation of her on top of me the other day.
“I’m sure there are plenty of other round objects around, right?”
When I thought about it, though, it actually wasn’t that common in daily life to encounter something the exact size and bounciness of a soccer ball. If you could hold it in the palm of your hand, it would be too small. Any bigger than that though, and anything made of stone or metal would be too hard to really play with—while on the other end of the spectrum, anything made of softer materials like paper or cloth would never survive Elvia when her “phase” was on her.
“We don’t want resentment to build up, huh,” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Petralka. Constantly trying to repress the effects of the phase of the moon would bring its own kind of problems. Next month it might prove impossible to hold the horny Elvia back...
“Right, I’ve got it,” I said. Grinning, I pulled one of the soccer balls from its box. “Elvia, I’ll lend this to you as your personal ball.”
“Wha?” she said, her eyes going wide. “Can... Can I really have it? Isn’t it too valuable for that?”
In light of the dressing-down Minori-san had given her after the incident at the training grounds, it was understandable if Elvia thought soccer balls were rare and valuable items.
“Well, I’m not saying I can give it to you. I can only let you borrow it.”
“Y-You can?!” Her eyes were shining, and there was practically drool dribbling from her mouth. It was cute, but also... a little scary.
“Play with it to your heart’s content. But Elvia—”
“Yesh?”
She sounded a little out of it; she was already staring at the ball in my hand with a laser-like focus. She was only barely retaining control of her sanity. Is a ball really that big a deal to her?
“Do you think you can manipulate it with your feet and not your hands? Like you were doing with the JSDF guys the other day?”
“Oh. Yeah, I think I can.”
“Well, that’s soccer. You play by kicking the ball with your feet.” I made a kicking motion. For just a second, Elvia stood blinking, taking in me and the ball.
Then she said, “I’ll give it a shot.”
She took the ball and kicked it. It bounced lightly along the ground; she chased after it, corralled it with her feet, and then kicked it again. It bounced, and she stopped it once more with a foot. Hey, she was pretty good. Not for the first time, I wondered if werewolves had special athletic talents.
The whole time I was thinking about this, Elvia was single-mindedly dribbling (such as it was) the ball.
Bounce. Stop.
Bounce. Stop.
Bounce. Stop.
Bounce. Stop.
Bounce—
“Hey, Elvia?”
“Um, should we stop her?” Myusel said hesitantly. Intent on her dribbling, Elvia was getting farther and farther away. The school was built on top of a gentle hill—which made sense given that the building was originally a windmill—so there was nothing especially dangerous in the immediate area. The space was large enough that if you wanted to, you could just keep walking. Or dribbling.
“Elvia! Hello, Elvia?”
There was no response. She couldn’t hear me.
It was no good. I couldn’t see her face from here, but I was pretty sure she had those crazy eyes again. I had thought if the soccer ball wasn’t golden—if it looked just a little bit less like the moon—she might be able to restrain herself a little bit, but apparently I’d been wrong.
“Let’s go get her back.” Myusel and I jogged off after Elvia, each of us grabbing one of her arms.
“Elvia! Elvia!”
“Gwah?” she blinked, breathing audibly. The phase must have been nearing its end, because she came back to herself much more easily than at the training ground. “Oh, um... Did I do it again?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes.”
Myusel and I nodded in unison.
“Kicking the ball is all well and good,” I said, “but there’s kind of... no point. I mean, it’s not the most fun thing, right?” I pointed to two trees growing side-by-side near the school. “To play soccer, you kick the ball through a goal. Try kicking it over that way.”
Elvia gave me a long, blank look.
“What?” I asked.
“So I can’t... just kick it?”
“I mean, you can, but...” Did she really enjoy it that much?
“Working the ball with my feet is actually a lot of fun.”
I guess she did.
“Okay, well, fair enough, but you need to score goals to win at soccer.”
Elvia didn’t look very sure about that. What? What was it, had I said something wrong?
“But... If I kick it through that goal, the game is over, right?”
“Pretty much.”
Soccer was a game contested between two teams, so naturally there was a winner and a loser. And whether you won or lost, the game would be over.
“Um...” Elvia looked up at me. Yikes. The puppy-dog eyes were bad enough from Petralka or Myusel, but coming from an actual wolf girl, I was like putty in her hands. Beast-girl eyes! It was like I was discovering a whole new horizon of moe!
Okay, easy now.
“Do I really have to kick it through the goal and end the game?” she asked slowly. She sounded like a child being told to stop her favorite game and go home. She looked so... sad. Her usual carefree demeanor gave this change of mood a special poignance.
“I guess... I guess you do, yeah.” Faced with that expression, I found I couldn’t muster much conviction. I sort of wanted to tell her we didn’t have to decide a winner and a loser.
“Master?” Myusel said, watching us dubiously.
“It’s just...” I found it hard to talk. “I feel like I’m confronting the deep issues of life... Like, ‘What are winning and losing?’ or ‘Is it really that important to win?’ or ‘It hurts, the way adults are always separating us into winners and losers.’”
“Of... Of course,” Myusel said, looking thoroughly confused.
Even as we spoke, Elvia returned to dribbling the ball, and was swiftly disappearing into the distance.
What with this and that, it was twilight by the time we came back to the mansion. The sky was a deep red, and everything seemed especially poignant. Back in Japan, this was the time of day when the shops would all be playing Auld Lang Syne as they closed up. Just the thing to make your heart a little heavy, to urge you back to your home.
The feeling, if not the ambient music, was the same here in the Eldant Empire.
“It’s like... sort of lonely, you know? Like something is ending,” I murmured as I looked out the window of the passenger compartment of our carriage.
“You mean like that lullaby? Let’s go home, let’s go home, everybody, let’s go home?”
“Yeah, like that. You just want to be back in your house.”
“What’s this? Suddenly want to go back to Japan?” Minori-san, sitting across from me, smiled softly.
At the same moment, Myusel, who was beside me, said, “Master?” She was looking at me uneasily. It wasn’t so long ago that I had confessed to her that I thought it might be better if I weren’t here in the Eldant Empire, and it seemed to have left her with a persistent anxiety that one day I would just disappear back to my home country.
“I admit I wouldn’t mind a visit,” I said.
That was the truth. Although I had taken them for granted when we were all living together, after months away from them I was surprised to discover how much I missed my parents and even my smart-mouthed little sister. This despite how, when I had been a home security guard, we had gone months without really seeing each other, and I hadn’t cared.
There was just one thing...
“These days when I say ‘go home,’ I really mean to our mansion,” I said. I pointed out the window at the house, which had come into view. The house where I lived with Myusel and Minori-san and Elvia and Brooke. That was the first thing I pictured now when I heard the word “home.”
On reflection, I saw that during my time as a shut-in, I had essentially been living on my own, even though I was under the same roof as my parents and sister. And as much as I enjoyed the freedom of the “single” life, sharing a home with other people was just... nicer.
“I guess dropping in on Japan wouldn’t be a bad thing,” I said. “Given the way otaku culture changes every six months or so.”
“We still don’t really have a net connection here, do we?” Minori-san said.
Several attempts had been made to run an internet line to our alternate world, but by all accounts they hadn’t been very successful. A simple analog connection to carry voice was something we could manage, even if there was some interference, but with a high-volume digital line the signal-to-noise ratio was simply too poor, and communication slowed to a crawl.
That was how it was with current broadband standards, anyway. Microchips were supposedly highly vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses during operation; that was why (so I’d heard) weapons designed for nuclear war used vacuum tubes (which are highly EMP-resistant) instead. Point being, maybe there was too much electromagnetic interference in the hyperspace tunnel or something.
“Looking at the anime zines they send over, I feel like a bit of an Urashima Tarou.”
“I guess so.”
As we talked, Minori-san, Myusel, and I disembarked from the carriage—to find Elvia standing in front of us and panting. She had run all the way home from school.
It wasn’t some nasty hazing ritual, or a sign we weren’t friends anymore. It was just that she wanted more than anything to kick that ball, so she had decided to jog alongside the carriage, dribbling all the way.
“Wow, Elvia, you really made it,” I said.
“Hee hee!” she responded, sounding a little embarrassed. Even then, her feet continued to swat unconsciously at the soccer ball. I would have figured it was pretty challenging to keep up with a carriage, but other than a little hard breathing, Elvia seemed to be in perfect shape. I wasn’t even sure if the harshness of her breath was really from running, or because she was excited about the ball. She really seemed to love that thing. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she slept with it by her side.
I was quiet for a moment. That image of Elvia, clasping the ball in her bed, pressing it to her cheek like a lover. Her face would be flushed, her breath coming hard as she ran her tongue along its surface...
Yikes! Just picturing it is suuuper hot...
Well, if that was what it took to take the edge off the “phase of the moon” and keep her from tackling me again, so much the better. Not that I was against a little naughtiness, being a healthy teenager as I was. In fact, I considered being attacked by a beast girl to be a reward of immense value. But what with Myusel and Minori-san in the same house with us, I couldn’t help but hesitate.
“Maybe you could give that ball back eventually,” I said. “It’d be dangerous to have it rolling around the halls. And you’ve got your art to do, too.”
We had saved Elvia from being executed as a spy on the condition that she would draw for us. For her to go several days without doing any illustrating would look bad on a number of levels.
“Yeah... I know.” Elvia handed the ball back to me. If she had been a dog, I had the feeling she would have let out one of those sad little moans. Gosh, do you really like it that much? Is it, like, your friend, or... more than that?
I felt a little guilty, but I had to at least try to keep things under control here.
Just as I was having that thought, I saw something unfamiliar move at the edge of my vision.
“Huh?”
More precisely, I saw one familiar thing and one unfamiliar thing...
“Oh, Brooke-san,” Myusel said.
I focused in his direction, and it started to make sense. There was Brooke. With him was a lizardman I didn’t recognize. Given the profound physical differences between lizardmen and other humanoids, I had some doubts whether I could really differentiate one lizardman from another, but at least I knew which of them was Brooke. They were roughly the same height, but his companion’s skin color was lighter. Almost a whitish-blue.
“That must be Brooke’s visitor,” Minori-san said. Come to think of it, Myusel had said something about Brooke “meeting somebody.” He and the newcomer were a certain distance from where we stood in the entryway of the mansion. They were talking about something, but I couldn’t hear them.
I watched them questioningly. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I saw the pale lizardman touch Brooke several times, as if asking for something. Brooke, however seemed to pay the gesture no mind. He wouldn’t even look at the lizardman next to him.
Brooke might look scary, but he was actually the picture of openness and honesty. I had never seen him act so cold toward someone.
“I wonder what’s going on with him,” Myusel said anxiously. So maybe I wasn’t imagining it.
As we stood there talking, Brooke noticed us, and leaving the visitor behind, he came over at a lope.
“Welcome back, Master.”
“Oh, uh, thanks. Is it... Is it all right?”
“All right, sir...?”
“I mean, leaving your friend like that,” I said, indicating the pale lizardman.
For once, Brooke seemed lost for words, but then he said, “Ahem, it’s quite fine.” He almost sounded like he was covering. I knew there was something odd going on here. Brooke didn’t seem to be himself. The difference was subtle, and again, it could have been my imagination, but...
“Now that you’ve said hello,” I said to him, “go back to your guest.”
“No need. She was just leaving.”
“She?” I did a double-take.
Now that he mentioned it, this lizardman did seem to have an almost feminine air. She was a little bit smaller than Brooke. I just hadn’t noticed, because I had never seen a female lizardman before. Their faces looked very similar, and her body wasn’t... well, built the way you might expect of a woman.
Come to think of it, lizardmen were born from eggs and were basically reptilian, so mothers probably didn’t breast-feed their offspring. That meant there was no need for enlarged chests like human women had. In fact, I had heard that reptiles could retract their reproductive organs and that some of them had duplicate organs. That might be part of what made it so hard to tell males and females apart.
I was suddenly moved to ask, “Brooke... is she your girlfriend?”
“Ahem...” For a second, Brooke seemed lost for how to respond. “She’s my... wife.”
“Your wife?!” I practically screamed. “Brooke, you’re married?”
“Yessir.” Brooke nodded. “Though I allow it’s rather different from human marriage.”
“Oh yeah?”
“We’ve no ceremony for it, for one thing,” he said slowly. He had never been the talkative type, but now he seemed more tongue-tied than ever, as if he didn’t want to linger too long on this subject. His facial expression, though, remained as inscrutable as ever.
“Master?” he asked after a long moment. “Is that—?”
“Hm?”
He was looking down at my hand, where I was still holding the ball Elvia had returned to me.
“Oh, right. This is a soccer ball,” I said, holding it up. “And I need you for something, so your timing is perfect.”
“Me, Master?”
“This ball? You use it to play a game called soccer. And Amutech is planning to sponsor a friendly soccer competition in front of the empress herself. We’ve got teams of humans, elves, and dwarves. You know, all the different races. I was hoping you would be part of a lizardman team. You must know a lot of lizardmen, right?”
“Ahem. Well.”
There he went with those ambiguous answers again. I didn’t understand it. Something was definitely different from usual. For some reason, Brooke was staring fixedly at the soccer ball in my hand.
“Are you... ordering me to take part in this game?” he asked hesitantly.
“Huh? Uh... kind of. I mean, it’s more of a request than an order.”
I was actually a little at a loss here. I had been under the impression that Brooke would agree pretty readily. Was there some reason he didn’t want to do this?
If there was some personal reason, I didn’t want to be too nosy. Since I was his “master,” Brooke would probably answer any questions I asked whether he really wanted to or not.
“If this is your command, sir, then I accept,” Brooke said. “I will bring it to the attention of the Tribal Council.”
Come to think of it...
I had heard him talk before about the Tribal Council or the Elders or whoever. I wasn’t an expert on lizardman society, so I could only take an educated guess, but was it possible that Brooke had a certain amount of prestige among his people?
“I must excuse m’self, then,” he said. “I’ve work to do.”
“Oh... Sure.”
Outbreak Company: Volume 3 Page 9
