Outbreak Company: Volume 8 (Premium) Read online

  I was touched by everyone’s concern. I suddenly felt like maybe I could understand those breadwinners who tragically died of overwork. It was like, the more concerned everyone was for you, the more you wanted to repay that thoughtfulness by working hard. I guess that wasn’t a good thing in the long run.

  “Look, if you’re really that tired, you should go to bed early,” Minori-san said, like a solicitous older sister.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll at least make sure I don’t fall asleep at school.”

  “Speaking of school,” Hikaru-san said, “have you heard?” Until then, he had just been listening to the conversation with a small smile on his face, but now he spoke up.

  “Heard what? Something about the school?” I asked.

  “The students were saying—” and here he cocked his head, maybe trying to remember exactly what he’d heard—“that recently when they use magic, something kind of strange happens.”

  “What’s that about?” It was the first I’d heard of it. Or maybe I’d heard of it, and then forgotten while I was asleep.

  “Apparently the effect varies from place to place.”

  “You mean like... magical rampage?”

  “It sounds less like overpowering and more like they can’t quite use the magic.”

  “Hmm?”

  They couldn’t use magic? What was going on here?

  I knew that if you happened to be right up close to a dragon, which was part sprite, any magical power you released would be absorbed—basically, eaten—by the dragon, and your spell wouldn’t work. Surely there wasn’t some huge True Drake hanging out near Marinos, was there?

  If there was a dragon anywhere near school, we would have known about it sooner—the whole area would have been in an uproar long before we were reduced to speculating on rumors about what had happened to all the magic.

  “Does this sort of thing happen often?” I asked, turning to Myusel.

  She looked surprised to suddenly be drawn into the conversation, but after a moment she shook her head hesitantly and said, “I’ve never heard of it. It would seem to suggest that the sprites in that place, the magical power released by nature, have decreased for some reason, but...”

  “But you don’t think that’s really possible?”

  “I doubt it. Oh, but then again, a dragon or other large, part-sprite creature in the area could cause an effect like that. But only if you were right near them...”

  “And people would notice if there was a dragon traipsing through the capital.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then what, I wonder.” I cocked my head—which happened to bring Lauron into view.

  She was fidgeting with her place settings, moving the cups and plates so they were next to others of the same type. She wasn’t just piling things together so they were easy to clean up. It was more like she was... rearranging them.

  “Something wrong, Lauron?”

  Was she... looking for something?

  She didn’t look up at me as she shook her head. “No... It’s just that these dishes...”

  As she murmured, she finished fiddling with the settings and nodded in satisfaction. The cups and plates were now all the exact same distance apart from each other.

  “Oh... I’m sorry, I’ll clean those up right away, so please, just leave them!” Myusel insisted when she saw what Lauron had done.

  Maybe she thought Lauron was implicitly criticizing her for having put off the cleanup to talk with us. Myusel rushed off to the kitchen, coming back with a cart onto which she quickly loaded the empty dinnerware.

  My maid—always such a hard worker. It made me feel warm and fuzzy inside to watch her.

  I could still see Lauron out of the corner of my eye, though, and she still looked a bit put out about something. She was usually so expressionless—like her face had the potential to assume an infinite variety of looks—that a small change like this was noticeable.

  “Lauron?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Starting by piling up the biggest plates, and finishing by cleaning up the glasses, would be the most efficient thing.”

  “Oh, uh, is—is that right?” I was a bit taken aback by her serious attempt at an explanation. True, Myusel had gotten a bit flustered and was picking up table settings sort of willy-nilly, but still. “It looks like she’s getting everything just fine to me...”

  At that, Lauron blinked, as if surprised. “I... I see... I’m sorry...” She cast her eyes down again; she sounded apologetic. Her voice suddenly took on that slightly lost quality, her words sort of trailing off.

  What was the story here?

  I was a little worried about what was going on with Lauron, but I hesitated to press her, and ultimately I didn’t say anything else about it that day.

  Most fantasy stories depict dwarves as sprite-people who are exceptionally good at working with metal. The world I was in seemed to be no exception to the rule. As amazing as it had been to see Brooke put up the workshop in three days flat, the dwarves now working in it were even more incredible.

  Just three days after they started working, and they’d already had a functioning prototype.

  They weren’t just making a statue, remember. An action figure has a bunch of moving parts; it’s almost a type of machine. And because it was going to be Petralka’s body double, it would need to be capable of things like opening its mouth and blinking. Any one part out of place could have sent the whole thing haywire, yet the dwarves had assembled it almost by feel.

  Of course, it was still a prototype. There were some issues that meant it couldn’t be offered up for actual use; I took a look at it and consulted with the dwarves about what to change. But frequently, it would be less than three days before a new prototype was ready, reflecting my suggestions.

  All told, it took less than two weeks after starting on the doll. Half a month to safely complete Petralka’s kagemusha.

  We immediately contacted Eldant Castle, applying for an audience to show the finished product to Petralka and the others. “We,” incidentally, being me, Minori-san, and Hikaru-san, along with Romilda and the dwarves who had created the double.

  The dwarves wore identical expressions of concern as a knight led us through the halls of the castle. Despite a handful of dwarves who were treated as nobility, most of them were simply seen as demi-humans, and therefore socially inferior to humans. Most of them had never been in the castle. A handful of the dwarves involved in this body-double project had been part of the moviemaking effort earlier, but even they had only come as far as the courtyard—everyone was naturally anxious about an imperial audience.

  The audience chamber we were shown to wasn’t the small room I was used to giving my reports in. It was much, much bigger. Several times bigger, I would guess, and vastly more opulent.

  I was starting to sympathize with the nervous dwarves.

  “Wait, is this...”

  I was almost certain it was the room I’d been led to the very first time I had come to Eldant Castle. That took me back.

  Minori-san, Hikaru-san, and I stood in a row, with the dwarves lined up behind us. I heard something behind me and looked back to find that the dwarves had collectively fallen to their knees and bowed their heads. Oh, right. I’d been told to greet Petralka the same way that first day. I had almost completely forgotten about it, since Petralka insisted I not be formal with her.

  “Shinichi-kun,” Minori-san said, tugging on my arm. I realized she was bowing just like the dwarves. So was Hikaru-san. I let her pull me down so I was on my knees like everyone else. “We’re not alone today,” she reminded me.

  Oh, right. As chummy as we normally were, I was still dealing with the empress. And today, we had to stand on ceremony for the dwarves’ sake. At least, that’s what I figured was going on.

  Petralka’s voice reached us: “We appreciate your work on our behalf.” My head was down, so I couldn’t actually see her, but I could easily imagine her sitting on her throne with her legs
crossed. “Raise your heads.”

  Slowly, we all looked up in accordance with the royal command.

  There she was, just like I’d pictured her, arms and legs crossed at the exact angles I’d imagined as she sat on her throne. Beside her stood Garius and Prime Minister Zahar, also as I’d imagined.

  “We are told the doll is complete.”

  “Yes, Majesty,” Minori-san replied. “Just last night.”

  “Mm!” Petralka nodded, unable to hide the curiosity on her face. At the same time, some knights came forward carrying a largish, plain wood box just about big enough for a person—to put it bluntly, it looked a bit like a coffin—and set it in front of the throne.

  “Open it.”

  “Ma’am!” One of the knights stepped back and removed the lid.

  Inside, we could see... a girl. A girl with long, beautiful silver hair, lying inside the box. Her lovely, delicate hands were folded at the neckline of her indigo dress. Her eyes were closed, the lashes long, like a sleeping princess in a fairytale. She looked identical to the young woman who sat on the throne.

  “Ho...!” Petralka’s eyes went wide to see how perfect it was. Garius and Prime Minister Zahar looked from the box to the empress several times, the figure apparently far more convincing than they had expected.

  Good, all good. I smiled in satisfaction.

  Truth be told, I had been pretty shocked myself when I’d seen the finished product for the first time the night before. Yes, I had been head of production and had seen the doll go through both a very un-Petralka-like prototype phase and then increasingly convincing renditions—but even so. I thought if you put Petralka in the same dress and a similar box, and lined the two boxes up, even the people who knew her best wouldn’t be able to pick out the real empress.

  “Ho...!” Petralka repeated, her eyes shining as she stood up from her throne.

  “Magnificent!” she declared.

  “It’s an honor, Your Majesty,” one dwarf said humbly, bowing again. The speaker was Rydel Guld—Romilda’s father.

  “It almost seems to have Your Majesty’s own air of wisdom,” Zahar said.

  “I’m not confident I could tell them apart if they were standing side by side,” Garius added. Their comments could hardly have been higher praise. Frankly, I had wondered if they would complain that it looked too much like a dead body and was unsettling, so this was a happy surprise.

  “It is more than we expected,” Petralka said. “However...” Her eyebrows furrowed. “Could you not perhaps have made the bust just a little larger?”

  “Huh? I kind of thought we had,” I said without thinking—and Petralka fixed me with a look that could kill.

  Ugh. When am I going to learn to keep my mouth shut?

  I thought I was about to receive another royal right hook, but, maybe restrained by the presence of the dwarves and her various attendants, Petralka merely coughed and changed the subject.

  “Well, then—is it safe to take it out of the box?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “Excellent! Then unpack it and stand it before us!” Petralka ordered the knights. They extracted the life-size doll from the crate with the utmost care, as if they were handling something very fragile. I guess considering—as I’ve mentioned repeatedly—the fact that the doll looked exactly like Petralka, they probably hesitated to treat it as just a thing. In fact, they looked downright reverent as they stood the replica before the empress. Unfortunately for them, it looked like it was going to fall over the moment they let go of it.

  “Oh, here, this goes like this...” I walked over, widening the doll’s stance a little, changing the angle of the hips. Hrmm. Have I mentioned how lifelike this doll was? I was touching its leg, and it sort of felt like I was touching the real Petralka’s leg—in other words, like I was basically committing a crime. That made me a little reluctant, myself.

  “Maybe this will do the trick?” I muttered, and the knights let go.

  And it stood! Petralka stayed standing!

  I privately felt like a girl yodeling in the Alps.

  But then...

  “Huh?”

  My elation only lasted for a second. I guess I hadn’t done the job as well as I thought, because the Petralka doll slowly tipped forward—and then fell square on top of me.

  “Grrgh?!” I exclaimed as Petralka—or rather, her doppelgänger—squished me. “It’s... It’s so heavy...” I grunted. It was crushing my chest.

  As small and light as the doll looked, the metal bones and complicated mechanicals actually made it pretty heavy. We hadn’t taken any official measurements, but I would say it weighed... well, plenty.

  “What do you mean, heavy!” Petralka bellowed. “Are you calling us fat?!”

  “I—I’m not talking about you, Petralka, I mean the doll...”

  The dwarves, who did know how heavy the thing was, must have decided that I was going to suffocate if they didn’t do something, because two of them came forward and lifted the doll off me.

  This time, they stood it up. Leave it to the people who made it to know how to get the balance right. Now two Petralkas stood before us, neither of them listing dangerously.

  When the doll was standing properly, it was even harder to tell the two of them apart. I really was seriously impressed with the craftsmanship.

  “Uh, anyway,” I ventured, “do you like it?”

  “Mm. It is indeed fine work, there is no question.” Petralka nodded.

  “I sure think so. Dwarf construction is something else, huh? Granted, we got the covering from Japan, but they managed to cram enough joints in there that it can move almost exactly like a human being...”

  “Plus, it can transform, too.”

  “Yeah, and it can transform, too, so— Wait a second!” I wheeled on Romilda, who had whispered the addendum to me. “Since when can it transform?!”

  I had been at the worksite virtually every day, but I didn’t know anything about that! How could they have added a huge chunk of functionality without me, the overseer, having any idea?!

  Jeez! Dwarves weren’t just demi-human—they were superhuman.

  Okay, hold on, maybe this wasn’t the time to be getting lost in admiration.

  “Huh? But—” Romilda looked surprised. “It’s what you taught us, Sensei. Robots transform.”

  “That’s only giant robots!”

  “Whaaat?!” Romilda took a trembling step back, her eyes wide.

  “What’s wrong, Romilda?” her father, Rydel, whispered to her.

  “Dad, it sounds like it didn’t need to transform after all...”

  “What’s that?!” Mr. Guld sounded every bit as shocked as his daughter. “But Romilda, you insisted—”

  I guess the whole thing had been at Romilda’s instigation. Whatever weird ideas she had suggested to her father, they had made their way through him into the project. The other dwarves were looking at each other, realizing too late that they had gone above and beyond in the most ridiculous way possible.

  Ahh. It was starting to make sense to me.

  These dwarves were professional craftsmen. And craftsmen like to test themselves, like to pour their hearts and souls into their work. Plus, they already understood the basics of how to make a machine transform from working on the Faldra, so...

  “What would people think if the empress transformed right in front of them?!”

  “Oh, uh... I thought maybe they would think it was really cool.”

  It was dawning on me that Romilda was maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

  “Then everyone would know for sure she wasn’t the real empress!”

  “Not true,” Hikaru-san (so uninvolved in this matter) whispered to me. “They might worship her as some new kind of god.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever—!”

  Look, I think Romilda made an innocent mistake, but Hikaru-san—you’re doing this on purpose!

  What exactly did this doll even transform int
o? Could it fly? Was any kind of cannon involved? Or did it have a beast mode? Whatever, that would explain why it was so darn heavy!

  “Er, anyway, if you don’t have it transform, it’ll just look like this!” I said and chuckled, trying to make the best of things as Petralka and her attendants looked at me with sincere doubt. Sometimes all you can do is laugh, right?

  Ugh. Just give it up, Shinichi.

  A while later, after everyone had had plenty of time to admire the product, I walked up to the doll and gave it a pat on the back, just to emphasize how great it was.

  “Hrm...?” Petralka and the others watched me with surprise, apparently not understanding what I was doing.

  Unfortunately, the pat on the back caused the Petralka doll to lose its balance again, and it—

  “Eep?!”

  —didn’t fall over.

  As everyone looked on in shock, it opened its eyes and thrust a leg forward to catch itself.

  “Goodness!”

  In fact, it kept moving after that. With its hands at its sides, it turned its hips and bowed its head. And then, as smooth as anything, it started to dance.

  Just as we had planned, when the Prepure ending theme started playing through my phone, Minori-san, Hikaru-san, and the dwarves all stepped back.

  The room was filled with music, and the doll danced along.

  “Oh ho...!” Petralka, and even Prime Minister Zahar and Garius, leaned forward to get a closer look. In fact, the members of the royal guard even seemed totally absorbed as they watched the Petralka look-alike do the adorable, vigorous dance from the TV show.

  Turn! Turn! Arms wide, and—jump!

  The song, just ninety seconds or so long, seemed to be over in a flash, and ended with the doll striking the final pose, leaving her audience to stare in total silence.

  It was Garius who broke the quiet at last. “Truly spectacular.”

  Petralka looked around the audience chamber. “Who has done this?” She seemed to apprehend immediately that the doll had been controlled with magic, and she must have been looking for the magic-user.

  Good. All the effort had been worth an effect like this.

  I smiled, and nodded at Guld-san. “Would you do the introductions?”