Outbreak Company: Volume 6 (Premium), page 9
part #6 of Outbreak Company Series
But still... a dude.
I heaved a mental sigh. Even looking at him right now, all I saw was a girl. To be honest, as long as I couldn’t see... you know, what was between his legs... it seemed almost impossible for me not to think of him that way.
“Something on my face?” Hikaru-san asked with a wry smile.
“Huh? Er, no,” I said quickly.
Hikaru-san was a type of person I’d never had around me before. Even though I was an otaku, I didn’t have much experience with cosplay, and even less with crossplay. Nor did I know anyone or have any friends who were into those kinds of things. So I didn’t have a good grasp of what would move a guy to dress like a cute young girl. I just knew that everyone had their own way of thinking about things... and that there were some preferences strangers didn’t have a lot of sympathy for, and that if you weren’t careful in how you approached people, you could end up causing pain.
After all, I knew what it was like to be hurt by someone’s unexamined assumptions about me.
So yes, I could have said something like, “That Goth-Loli stuff looks great on you, you don’t even look like a guy!” but maybe that would turn out to be stepping on the tiger’s tail.
To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t entirely sure how to interact with this “new employee” of mine. It made every time we talked a little harder than it had to be.
But then:
“Maybe you’re thinking, ah, but he’s a guy,” Hikaru-san said teasingly.
“Huh? No, I wasn’t—” I had definitely not expected Hikaru-san to be the one to broach the subject, and it caught me off guard. “I mean, uh, when I found out you were a man, yes, I was honestly a little surprised.”
“That’s only natural. Everyone is,” Hikaru-san said with a nod—and then set off walking with his armfuls of clothes.
The conversation obviously wasn’t finished—I couldn’t just watch him go. So I fell into step behind him.
“To be honest,” Hikaru-san said, “I don’t, like, want to become a girl or anything. I’m not one of those people who feels like they have a woman’s heart in a man’s body.”
“Oh. Okay.”
But then... Why?
“My parents... It seems like my parents wanted a girl.”
“Huh?”
“Both of my parents are otaku. They met at Comiket! When they had a kid, they just wanted to dress it up, so I’ve been wearing girl-character outfits from a pretty young age. By the time I could think for myself, these kinds of frilly dresses already seemed normal to me, or... I couldn’t fight back against them.”
“Uh-huh...”
That’s what you call being dyed in the wool.
“I don’t dislike looking cute, and it seemed to make everyone around me so happy...”
“And so you just got used to looking like a girl?”
“Yeah, more or less,” Hikaru-san said with a dry smile. “And I like to dress people up in cute outfits myself, so I can sympathize with my parents.”
“Oh, like you did with Myusel and Elvia...” Hikaru-san really did seem to have fun with that.
There was no denying that the two girls had looked incredible in that cosplay, or that the disconnect with how they normally looked had produced an equal and moe reaction. So much so, in fact, that I might have found myself compelled to wheedle a few of Minori-san’s copious photos out of her.
“Minori-san isn’t a big fan of Gothic-Loli, though,” Hikaru-san said.
“Ah...” That was true. Minori-san was Hikaru-san’s opposite number, a specialist in male costumes.
“I told her it would be easy enough to alter the chest, but...”
“Ahh...”
I gave a wry grin of my own. I knew Minori-san didn’t object to Gothic-Loli on grounds of body type. Just like Hikaru-san, she was the child of someone who had wanted offspring of the opposite gender, and that was why she wasn’t so into women’s clothing.
Now that I thought about it, she and Hikaru-san actually had a lot in common. Minori-san was a “layer,” too, who frequently cosplayed as characters of the opposite gender. But then...
She definitely doesn’t act like a man.
She had a bright and cheerful personality, for sure, but she also had a womanly gentleness to her.
So I thought: maybe Hikaru-san didn’t crossplay because he was uncomfortable with his biological gender, or out of any desire to express an “inner gender,” but purely because he enjoyed wearing those clothes, like a kind of roleplay or game.
“Say, Shinichi-san, your parents are otaku too, right?” Hikaru-san asked. “I heard from Matoba-san. Something about how you and I are both ‘thoroughbred otaku.’ He didn’t give me the details, though.”
“Oh, uh, yeah, I guess so. ‘Thoroughbred’ might be taking it a bit far.” I nodded. “My dad is a light novel author, and my mom used to work on ero games.”
“Wow, that’s cool!” Hikaru-san looked impressed.
“Is it, though?”
I shook my head, picturing my parents in my mind’s eye. Neither of them struck me as exactly being an ideal parental unit. At the very least, I figured no normal parent would slice through their shut-in son’s door with a chainsaw. Strictly compared to the average parent, I suppose they could be considered colossal failures.
“My parents, neither of them ever made it pro.”
“Huh...? Oh—oh yeah?”
Hikaru-san had mentioned that his parents met each other at Comiket. And while cosplayers were definitely respected there, the big draw at Comiket was the doujinshi. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that both of Hikaru-san’s parents were there as creators, whether of fan spin-offs or original work.
“I gather they tried to make it big, but it just didn’t work out. They found that the quick ways to make money were copying whatever was popular, or making X-rated doujinshi.” There was that half-smile again.
“Ahh...”
I definitely knew those stories. If you could pump out one popular work after another, it would make you plenty of money to live on—sometimes hundreds of thousands of yen. Of course, it also required the artistic agility to keep your style up to date, and a fine sense of what was going to be the next big thing.
“Well, I guess being a pro doesn’t inherently make a creator a great person,” I said, thinking of my father and mother. “My parents always told me that sometimes it’s best not to do what you really love for your job, that it can take away your ability to watch those works for enjoyment.”
When you go pro, my mom and dad often told me, you lose the ability to make work just for the love of it. What professionals produce is to sell—the customer comes first, and rather than doing what you want to do the way you want to do it, your primary responsibility is to produce something that will sell.
They also warned me that you can lose the ability to simply enjoy the creations of others. Whatever you look at, you can’t help thinking how you would do it another way, or how you could fit a given part of it into your own work, and so on and so forth.
“Plus, all-nighters were par for the course before a draft was due or when a game development deadline came up, so at times like that they could be pretty irritable or... well, just not a lot of fun to be around.”
“Oh, really?”
“I mean, I can only speak for my own parents, but...” I shrugged.
They would have an energy drink in one hand and a coffee in the other, no time to even take a bath, let alone get any sleep, just locked up in their room working... It wasn’t a recipe for a pleasant disposition.
The upshot is, I never really thought about becoming a creator. In fact, it made me think that anyone who could endure a life like that and not just quit must really be doing it because they loved it. Because they couldn’t imagine doing anything else. At least, that was my suspicion.
“It sounds like both of us suffered a bit on account of our parents,” Hikaru-san said with a laugh.
“Guess so.”
Granted, given the time I had spent as a parasitic home security guard, I didn’t exactly have the right to criticize my family too harshly.
Finally we arrived at Hikaru-san’s room.
“I’ll see you, then,” I said.
“Yeah. Sleep well.”
I left Hikaru-san there and headed back down the hallway.
“It’s starting to make sense...”
As I walked back to my room, I reviewed my chat with Hikaru-san. His mercenary streak—the way he looked not just at the content of a given work, but at the best way to sell it as well—might just show the influence of parents who made doujinshi while also keeping a finger on the pulse of what was popular. It reflected the idea that you could pick genres based on what was big rather than what you personally liked, a surprisingly businesslike approach to the often passion-infused work of making fan comics.
I had no idea whether doing it that way was any fun. But it opened my eyes to the idea that you could create something that way, that you could have that sort of relationship with creative works. It was a notion I found just a little bit surprising.
Roughly once a week, a delivery would be made from Japan to the training ground located in a far corner of the downtown area.
Unlike the official cargo brought in as part of Amutech’s business ventures, these loads were full of personal items for the JSDF members stationed here. In other words, not technically anything to do with me.
For the most part, if there was anything I wanted, like an anime, manga, light novel, or other otaku merchandise, I could just officially requisition it and have it brought over as trade goods. Not only would it arrive quicker, it would even be delivered directly to the mansion. I didn’t want to go to nuts mixing business and private shipments, but I had to admit it was convenient.
When it came to personal-interest items that had absolutely nothing to do with Amutech, though, I would ask Minori-san, and she would get them included in the regular JSDF shipment. Like when I got cravings for junk food that wasn’t available in the Eldant Empire, such as potato chips or cola. Myusel made wonderful meals and I couldn’t complain about my diet, but this was something else.
As it happened, today was the day of that regular delivery.
I was there to receive an order, as was Minori-san, and Brooke was with us to help lug things around. Our presence had become pretty standard, but today Myusel and Hikaru-san were with us, too. Myusel would periodically ask Minori-san to help her obtain Japanese ingredients so that she could make dishes with rice or soy sauce. She was here today to see that her order had arrived safely.
“Ooh, here it comes!”
We kept one eye on the kids—they were bound for the military when they grew up, and were currently training nearby—as we headed for where the shipping containers were piled on top of each other.
“Ahh, the day has finally come!” Minori-san walked beside me, chuckling to herself in a way I found more than a little disturbing. “Takai-sensei’s new stuff, Misagi-sensei’s new stuff, the fan disc of Gakuen Rakuen...”
“Minori-san, your face.”
Her expression had practically melted, until it seemed like it could put ice on a century-old love affair. Yikes. How yikes? Well, Myusel was walking on the other side of me, and it was enough to make her draw a face and fall back a step.
It’s not like I didn’t understand how Minori-san felt. It’s always exciting when something you’ve been waiting for finally shows up.
“C’mon, slowpokes!”
Unable to wait any longer, Minori-san went rushing ahead.
“Oh, I’ll help!” Myusel said, hurrying after her.
Hikaru-san, Brooke, and I followed behind.
“Sorry I’m always dragging you away from your gardening, Brooke,” I said.
“Think nothing of it, sir.” He shook his head. “Does it seem there’s more cargo than usual?”
“Hmm. I wouldn’t say that, but it might be heavy. We ordered a lot of rice and miso and such. Elvia really wolfs that stuff down.”
Maybe the flavors of Japanese food really agreed with Elvia, because she easily ate three times as much of it as I did. Yet she never seemed to put on any weight. It was enough to make me think that her basic metabolism was different, or maybe it was the result of being so well-muscled.
“It would’ve been nice if we could have gotten her to help us, too,” I said. Elvia had a werewolf’s strength, which made carting around cargo a pretty simple task.
“There wasn’t much we could do,” Hikaru-san said. “She got so into the card idea that she hasn’t come out of her room since.”
“True enough.”
As Hikaru-san said, Elvia had become a shut-in herself.
She was currently doing the art for the trading card packaging. This would actually be the second one. The first one had already been piloted—which is to say, the sale of trading cards had already started, primarily at the school. Hikaru-san had said he would handle the legwork, so I left him to take care of most card-related matters. It sounded like the new product was doing pretty well.
That was exactly why we had decided to bring in another bunch from Japan, the packaging for which Elvia was at that very moment feverishly designing. The sight of her pictures being printed and distributed en masse had a distinctly positive effect on her, and she had thrown herself into the new design. Hence why we had given up on coaxing her into coming along today.
In any event, it looked like introducing trading cards to the Eldant Empire had been a good call.
“Oooh hoo hoo hoo hoo!”
Minori-san, the endless grin still on her face, was taking a cardboard box out of a shipping container with Myusel’s help. When I got to the containers, I joined the JSDF soldiers in extracting the contents and making sure everything was there.
When I was most of the way through, I looked up.
“Okay, so...”
All around me, people had finished getting their orders and had settled to chatting with each other. I let out a small sigh of relief to see things apparently safely wrapped up.
“Huh?”
That was when I noticed two cardboard boxes piled on top of each other in a corner.
Whose could those be? None of the soldiers seemed to be paying any attention to them, and Minori-san was already pawing happily through her delivery, so they probably didn’t belong to any of them.
I went over to the mystery boxes.
“Huh...?”
I furrowed my brow. The boxes had been torn, whether in transit or while being taken out of the shipping container, I didn’t know. So I could just see inside...
“Those are personal items. Could you kindly not peek?”
“Ah...”
I turned and saw Hikaru-san walking toward me; as he went by, he swooped the boxes up in his arms. Whatever was in there, it wasn’t very heavy.
“This is your stuff?”
“Yes. My name is on them, as you can see.” He indicated the sides of the boxes.
“Er... What’s in them?”
Hikaru-san didn’t answer immediately, but gave me a mischievous grin. Then he tapped a finger to his lips before whispering, “Never ask a girl her secrets.”
Er, ahem. With you, it’s impossible to tell when you’re joking around. Please be careful...
“Are you that interested in what a girl might be hiding, Shinichi-san?”
“N-No, I—”
I didn’t know what to say. If I said I wasn’t interested at all, it might sound like I was saying I didn’t care about him as a person, but if I nodded eagerly, I suspected it would only cause a misunderstanding.
“Hey,” I said, deciding to go with the easy out of a one-liner, “whooza girl here, anyway?”
“Why the drawl?”
“I thought that was supposed to make any one-liner funnier.”
“Hehehe. Well, there are a few things in here I might be embarrassed for anyone to see, so I have to ask for your discretion.” Hikaru-san turned, putting himself between me and the cardboard boxes. Brooke happened to be passing by at just that moment. “Brooke-san,” Hikaru-san said, holding the boxes out, “would you be so kind as to take care of these?”
“O’ course. Put ’em right here, please.” He indicated the three boxes he was already holding. Hikaru-san placed his two, smaller boxes on top.
“I’ll put ’em in the carriage,” Brooks said, and shuffled away. I gazed vacantly after him.
“Shinichi-san? Is something the matter?” Hikaru-san asked me.
“N-Nothing! Nothing at all,” I said with a hint of panic.
“Is that all the cargo?” Minori-san asked as she came up with her arms full of boxes. It looked like she was more or less sane again, having confirmed that all the stuff she wanted was present and accounted for. Beside her was Myusel with another box.
“I guess so,” I said, checking over my own box once again and nodding.
“Let’s get going, then,” Minori-san said, and the three of us headed for the bird-drawn carriage.
I couldn’t help thinking, though, about what I thought I had seen in Hikaru-san’s box. It looked like it was stuffed with memory cards—all of the same type, at that.
What was he planning to use all those for?
Hikaru-san had brought his own laptop computer over here, and I was sure they must go with that—but did he need so many of just one type? Wouldn’t a portable hard drive have been a more efficient form of storage? Even if he was planning to use them with a digital camera or something, it wasn’t realistic to think he would switch them out so often.
I was left with a questioning look on my face. Oh, well. I didn’t know if they were a girl’s secrets, exactly, but since he had said they were private, I couldn’t very well press the matter. Maybe he just... liked to collect memory cards. Okay, so it wasn’t very likely. But it wasn’t impossible.
