“There, see!” the dwarf girl said triumphantly. The elf looked less than thrilled.

  But then Hikaru-san went on. “But isn’t it a little hasty to assume that simply because a story is told from a certain character’s perspective that that character is the protagonist?”

  She smiled at the girls, almost indulgently.

  “Do the both of you know that Order of the Dark Knights: Zero’s Revenge was originally planned with Seiryuu as the protagonist?”

  The girls goggled.

  “R-Really?”

  “Yes. But in Japan right now, stories featuring antiheroes—characters with a bit of a dark side to them, like Zero—just happen to be popular. So they changed the story to be told from Zero’s perspective so that people who like those sorts of shows could enjoy it. Or so I’ve heard.”

  The students both looked thoroughly perplexed. And why shouldn’t they? Hikaru-san was talking about behind-the-scenes stuff, the concerns of the production committee. You might argue that, to the extent the information was never divulged to the viewing public, it wasn’t really relevant to the enjoyment of the work, but at the same time it was indispensable.

  The girls had been talking about Dark Knights purely in terms of its content, and they had just been hit with a completely separate dimension of the show. Anyway, the more you liked a show, the more you wanted to know every little thing about it—and we otaku definitely ate up behind-the-scenes secrets like that.

  “Furthermore,” Hikaru-san said, looking at the elf, “as a matter of fact, there was a manga written primarily from Seiryuu’s point of view.”

  “Huh? Th-There was?!”

  “It must mean more than a few fans felt the way you do.”

  The elf girl’s face brightened immediately.

  “If I may go on, there was also a manga that focused on Zero’s little sister, as well as a novelization that took yet another perspective. If point of view determines who the main character is, then Seiryuu is the main character, but so is the little sister.”

  “We get it now...!” The girls nodded enthusiastically.

  ............Wait a second.

  Had Hikaru-san really said anything that different from what I had?

  For some reason, it hadn’t really sunk in with the girls when I said it. Did this just go to show how much the mode of explanation mattered? Or was it something more than that?

  “In the end, it doesn’t matter who the protagonist is,” Hikaru-san said suddenly. “The fact that you’re arguing about it merely proves you’re still young and inexperienced.”

  “B-But—”

  “For if they are both main characters,” Hikaru-san proclaimed, linking hands with the elf and the dwarf, “does that not mean you can ship them both?”

  Ooh! Very powerf—wait, what?

  “When it comes to top and bottom, it matters not who the main character is,” Hikaru-san declared, holding the DVD case aloft as if it were some kind of holy book. “Because the two are also one!”

  “Ahh!” The elf and dwarf, who had been fighting a moment ago, now raised their voices in unison. Around us, other students who had been tensely watching this exchange swallowed in relief. A general murmur of appreciation broke out—especially among the girls.

  “You’re a fujoshi, too?!” I exclaimed. I didn’t think I could take another “rotten woman” around me. It was bad enough with Minori-san constantly trying to get me and Garius to “be friends.” I already couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  “Zero/Seiryuu would be great!”

  “I think you mean Seiryuu/Zero!”

  “Excuse me? Mob slash Zero slash Seiryuu!”

  “N-No one’s ever done that before!”

  The girls had summarily ignored my concerns and turned quickly to the question of the best BL pairings.

  ......Before I knew what was happening, I found Minori-san in there with them. And so an argument about who the main character was had transformed into a bubbly conference about who would be most moe with whom, involving most of the girls in the school.

  Do you really like BL that much? Are you all addicts?

  “......Errr...... So, uh, glad that worked out.”

  I wasn’t about to let myself get sucked into a discussion about boys’ love shippings. I tried to put some space between myself and the animated discussions in which Minori-san and Hikaru-san were featuring.

  Now a safe distance away, I watched them for a moment, and finally I understood.

  Hikaru-san wasn’t just blending in. Almost from the moment she arrived, she had become the center of conversation. There are a lot of otaku, myself included, who can’t tell what other people are thinking to save their lives, or who otherwise have some kind of difficulty communicating. Hikaru-san, however, was completely different.

  “Assistant, huh?”

  I had a thought. Between her background and the fact that Matoba-san had brought her here, it made sense to think that Ayasaki Hikaru was another of Japan’s chosen “otaku missionaries,” like me.

  “But maybe...”

  If it had been Hikaru-san, and not me, who had come here first and been the general manager of Amutech, I wonder how things would have turned out.

  Not that there was any benefit in getting lost in counterfactuals. It just sort of nagged at me.

  After that, class went well enough that day, with no special problems. Hikaru-san’s introduction to the classroom could be considered a qualified success. The whole thing with the Order of the Dark Knights seemed to have led the students to accept Hikaru-san as the same sort of person as me. During class, she mostly sat in a corner of the classroom and observed what Minori-san and I did, but during break, I saw her chatting amiably with the students.

  And so day turned to evening.

  A bird-drawn carriage collected me, Minori-san, and Hikaru-san, and we came back to the mansion.

  “Welcome home,” Myusel said, greeting us in the foyer. Incidentally, she also sometimes acted as a Japanese language teacher at the school, but having her there every day would have interfered with her maid work. So she often stayed at the mansion, as she had today. “I’m sure you’ve all worked hard today.”

  “Thanks. Everything good here at home?”

  “Yes, sir. Oh, that’s right—those nayal berries you like so much arrived from the market today. I’ll be pairing them with duck in a paté for dinner tonight.”

  “Ooh, those are tasty. I mean, your cooking is always great, but I especially like that paté. Maybe it’s the nayal berries.”

  “It’s weird,” Minori-san said. “They taste like avocado, even though they’re a completely different color.”

  “Avocados are something of a strange food to begin with,” Hikaru-san replied. “I’ve heard they’re sometimes called the ‘butter of the forest.’”

  Thus Myusel, Minori-san, and I went about with our usual easy conversation, now with Hikaru-san joining in, as we walked down the halls of the mansion.

  “Brooke-san, Cerise-san,” Myusel suddenly whispered. And indeed, I could see Brooke and Cerise walking together down the hallway. They seemed to have noticed us, because both of them stopped, looked in our direction, and bowed their heads.

  “Welcome back, Master.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  As we exchanged these routine greetings, I noticed: Brooke was carrying some sort of bag. At first I thought maybe it was the trash, but then I realized that both Brooke, who was our gardener, and Cerise, who was a maid, had identical bags.

  “What have you got there?”

  “This? Er, it’s...” Cerise trailed off, sounding hesitant.

  Brooke answered instead, scratching his cheek with one rough, clawed finger. “These are our scales.”

  “Scales...?”

  “Yessir. New ones are coming in.” He gave the bag a gentle shake. It made a rustling sound, like a bag of potato chips. “Left to their own devices, they’d just drop everywhere. So instead we pull out the loose ones and throw them away.”

  “Ahh,” I said, nodding. “It’s like when you brush out an animal’s summer or winter coat.”

  As I recalled, when a house was home to an animal that changed coats between seasons, you didn’t just wait for the for it to fall out; you went ahead and brushed the animal to get out loose fur. That kept the hair from getting all over the house.

  Come to think of it, Elvia had mentioned that her fur got thicker during her “phase” or whatever. I wondered what she did. The thing was, questions about someone’s body could so easily be taken the wrong way, so it wasn’t something you could just ask about.

  “Don’t you also shed your entire skin at once? Is this different?”

  “Yes, it is...” Cerise said. A certain shyness kept her from speaking. It seemed that among lizardmen, the coming in of new scales wasn’t considered a decent topic of conversation.

  “Shedding involves the entire skin at once, so there’s nothing to scatter everywhere.”

  Boy, lizardmen really were different from the rest of us, biologically as well as culturally. Then again, as strange as they might look to us, Brooke and his friends probably thought that humans were the weird ones.

  “If you’ll pardon us, we’ll just go and get rid of these.”

  Brooke and Cerise were about to walk off again when a voice said, “Um...”

  It was Hikaru-san.

  “Could I perhaps... see them?”

  “Ahem? See what?”

  “Your scales.”

  “You wish to... see them?”

  Brooke and Cerise looked at each other. I was no expert at reading lizardman expressions, but I had to figure they looked shocked right about then. They shared a moment of reluctance, but then...

  “Yes... Very well.”

  They couldn’t really refuse Hikaru-san’s request. As a visitor from Japan, Hikaru-san was in the same sort of position as I was, treated like a noble here in Eldant. From Brooke and Cerise’s perspective, a little embarrassment was no reason to refuse her what she wanted.

  “Here you are,” they said after a moment, and each of them opened the bags and held them out.

  Inside, there really were dozens and dozens of scales about the size of the fingernail on my pinky. I wasn’t usually too conscious of Brooke and Cerise as having scales as such, but when I took a close look, I could make out the fine pattern of the covering on their bodies.

  Thinking about the whole process as being akin to an animal shedding its fur had left me with a less than great impression, but up close, I found the scales partially transparent and surprisingly beautiful.

  Hikaru-san must have had the same reaction, because she said, “Are you really going to throw these away?”

  “Er, yes.”

  “If you’re just going to get rid of them anyway, would you consider giving them to me?”

  “I—I’m sorry?!” Brooke’s voice seemed to have uncharacteristically gone up an octave. “B-But that’s—”

  “Is it a bad thing?” Hikaru-san asked, tilting her head.

  “N-No, not exactly, but they’re... they’re scales,” Cerise answered, equally confounded.

  I had rarely seen the lizardman couple so taken aback. They hardly changed their behavior when slightly surprised—so the way they were acting now must have represented absolute and utter shock.

  “But—” Hikaru-san plunged a hand into Cerise’s bag without hesitation, coming up with a scale that twinkled in the light of an oil lamp. “These look like they would make excellent earrings, or necklaces or something.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Minori-san said, nodding.

  Now I remembered: she was a “layer,” too. Cosplayers made clothing, sure, but people who were really into it often made their own accessories, too. The fictional costumes they were recreating, though, frequently included stuff like jewels or dragon claws—things that either didn’t exist in modern Japan or, if they did, were prohibitively expensive. So plastic figured heavily, as did recycled parts from whatever the cosplayers thought might fit. Serious hobbyists were always on the lookout for anything that might work for their costumes.

  Minori-san was dedicated to playing male characters, so I guessed she wouldn’t be that keen on earrings or necklaces or other feminine accessories.

  “But they, er... don’t disgust you?” Brooke asked hesitantly.

  “Why would they?” Hikaru-san asked.

  “You don’t feel they’re... dirty?”

  “I can wash and polish them.”

  “You honored humans would normally feel sick at the thought of wearing lizardman scales, I should think.”

  “Ahh. Is that how things are here? What a waste,” Hikaru-san said assertively. “It doesn’t make me feel at all sick to think of wearing your scales. Perhaps some people have an instinctive aversion to wearing something that came from someone else’s body—but consider wigs, which were once made of real human hair.”

  “Uh...”

  “What’s beautiful is beautiful. That’s all I’m interested in.”

  “You... think they’re beautiful?”

  “Yes. Very.” She reached into Brooke’s bag this time, took out another scale, and placed it in her palm alongside the one from Cerise. “Each of you has slightly different color scales, don’t you? Pairing them like this brings out the contrast, and I think it’s wonderful. If I polished them, I’ll bet they’d be even prettier. If I’m careful about which ones I use, I think I could make something truly amazing.”

  Brooke and Cerise were dead silent. They had to be completely shocked.

  “Shinichi-san, Minori-san, don’t you agree?” Hikaru-san said, looking in our direction.

  “Yeah. You’re right. I think you’re on to something.” I nodded.

  Just like Hikaru-san had said, wigs used to straight up use human hair. In fact, I had heard about a short story from another country called “The Gift of the Magi,” in which a woman cuts off and sells her luxurious hair in order to buy a watch fob for her husband. Come to think of it, even today, some people have the ashes of deceased loved ones turned into diamonds that they then use to make accessories. And that’s just human bodies. Think about leather—that used to be part of a living thing. Or silk, which comes from silkworms.

  Sensibilities about this sort of thing probably weren’t so different between Japan and the Eldant Empire. That being the case, the perception here that lizardman scales were dirty or sickening probably sprang from the racism that was already present. And unfortunately, everyone in this world took those attitudes as given.

  So it was that an idea like this could only have come from someone from a completely different world—someone like one of us. And given how important it was to me to minimize status differences, I couldn’t help but agree.

  “You see? If you’re only going to throw them away anyway, I’d like you to give them to me.”

  Brooke and Cerise still appeared dubious, but at length they looked in my direction—and when I nodded, they slowly and uncertainly closed the bags and held them out to Hikaru-san.

  “You’re quite sure about this...?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” Hikaru-san said, smiling.

  “Thank you very much.” The words came not from Hikaru-san, but from Cerise, who bowed her head as if to emphasize the point.

  “Why should you thank me, Cerise-san?” Hikaru-san said, still smiling.

  “This is the first time any human has called our scales beautiful.”

  “That isn’t anything deserving of thanks. I simply said what I thought.” Holding the bags and looking quite pleased, Hikaru-san tilted her head again. “Don’t you think the two colors together, along with some lace or beads, would make a lovely bracelet?” She was asking Minori-san.

  “Yeah, I think you could pull that off.”

  “I’m going to try it right away. Tonight.”

  “Tonight? Did you bring lace with you?”

  “Yes. I have a few store-bought accessories too, but I so like handmade. I brought plenty of clothes as well.”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” said Myusel, who had been quiet until that moment. “I’m very sorry that I forgot to tell you. A great deal of luggage was delivered from Japan to Hikaru-sama’s room. The Jay-Ess-Dee-Eff person who delivered it told me I could open and organize it. I only took out the things I recognized and hung the clothes so they wouldn’t wrinkle... Er, I hope that was all right.”

  “Of course it was. Thank you very much,” Hikaru-san said.

  “Er, ahh...”

  Myusel wriggled slightly and waved her hand in front of her face. It meant there was something she wanted to say or ask, but couldn’t quite bring herself to do so.

  “What’s up, Myusel?” Minori-san said.

  “Um... About Hikaru-sama’s luggage... There were a lot of adorable Western-style outfits.”

  “You think so? Thank you.”

  “Do they... all belong to you?”

  “I made more than half of them myself.”

  “That’s amazing. I was so surprised when I saw Minori-sama making the costumes for our moo-vee. But Hikaru-sama, your dresses are so detailed, like something the nobility might wear...”

  Gothic-Loli, with all its frills and lace, was definitely not a kind of costume we had created for the movie, and it was a very labor-intensive style. I could understand how Myusel might see it as some kind of elevated fashion for important people.

  “It’s manageable, as long as you have a sewing machine and some other helpful tools.” Hikaru-san paused, then clapped her hands as if she had just thought of something. “Say, Myusel-san.”

  “Y-Yes?” The maid blinked at suddenly being addressed like this.

  “Would you like to try on my clothes?”

  “Huh?!”

  “I had a similar conversation with the students at school. I think the size would be just about right for you. I’m sure it would look great. What do you think?”

  “I... I don’t know what to say... Wh-Why should I ever presume to...”

  Myusel couldn’t hide her astonishment at the sudden proposition; she shook her head vigorously. Hikaru-san, however, seemed to have gotten the idea into her head and was not planning to let it go. Instead, she turned to me and Minori-san for support.

 

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