The Power of Moe Page 9

  I saw a young man, a knight, standing there. He somehow seemed different from the other knights in the room. Partly because he was wearing unique clothes, but what got me more than anything was that he was standing on the same level as the throne. That must have meant he had the status of a royal...

  “Garius en Cordobal. A noble who’s both a knight of the realm and a distant relation of Empress Petralka. He’s an important counselor, with almost complete control over diplomatic relations. It’s thanks to him that we were issued our magic rings.”

  In other words, he was one big fish, and someone we were closely connected to. I stole another peek at Garius Whoever-Whoever. He was as handsome as a picture. Probably in his late twenties. He had silver hair that went all the way down to his waist. Thin lips. His narrow eyes hinted at a great depth of knowledge; they gave ample evidence that he was more than just a brute-strength fighter.

  His outfit was awfully impressive, too: his slim frame, which didn’t seem to have an ounce of unnecessary weight on it, was clad chiefly in white, along with gauntlets fringed in gold and a pair of greaves. It was probably more about appearance than practical defense.

  He had two belts wrapped around his waist and a sword with a design worked on the hilt, currently latched into its scabbard. A cape hung from his shoulders all the way down to the floor. Unlike the other royal guards, he wore no armor, but just the way he held himself was enough to make him seem like he’d stepped out of some heroic saga.

  “Um, Minori-san...”

  “Hush.”

  “That Garius guy? I swear he’s looking at me. Like, really looking.”

  His gaze was as piercing as a spear, and he had fixed it not on Matoba-san or Minori-san, but on me. I could feel it prickling my skin—it was a little intimidating. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me; I was the one who had ticked off the empress the minute I’d gotten within earshot of her.

  “Never mind that. Just be quiet. You screw up again, he might just bum-rush you himself.”

  “Got it,” I squeaked.

  “Now, then,” said a still somewhat disgruntled-sounding voice from above us. “When they told us an evangelist was coming, we wondered who might appear before us—and now we find ourselves presented with a child!”

  You took the words right out of my mouth, I thought, but even I had enough presence of mind to force that back down before it got out. Partly this was because I was dealing with an empress, and a careless word could cost me my life. But it was also simply because I didn’t want to say something that would hurt someone. Her Majesty appeared to be sensitive about the fact that she looked younger than her age. I certainly knew from experience what it felt like when someone said something thoughtless and hurtful.

  “As you can see,” Matoba-san was saying, “his actions may be somewhat uncouth. But he has a deep familiarity with the ‘otaku culture’ in which Your Majesty has shown such interest. I goggled at his knowledge myself. I’m confident that what he brings will soothe Your Majesty’s ennui.”

  “Will it, now?” Petralka said from her throne. She sounded pretty intrigued.

  “There are many rather unusual people among those who are accomplished in scholarship and the arts,” Prime Minister Zahar said, as if to back Matoba-san up. “In this, I think our countries are the same.”

  Presentation is everything: this was an extremely generous interpretation. Maybe the old guy was keen to get an exchange going with his Japanese visitors. I was as grateful to him as I was to Matoba-san for keeping a nice flow going.

  “I wonder about that.” The young knight Garius, who had kept his peace until that moment, spoke up in a stern tone. “Elder Zahar seems to be taking quite a favorable view of the situation, but I don’t yet trust you. I have yet to understand what this ‘otaku culture’ of yours is, but if it has as much power over young people as you claim, then I’m not convinced it will be a good thing for Eldant in the long term.”

  He sounded awfully prickly. It was clear he didn’t think much of the Japanese delegation.

  A tone of warning entered his voice as he went on. “If we accept this thing carelessly, only to find that it poisons us... By the time we realize our mistake, it may be too late.”

  He had the same blue eyes as Petralka, and at the moment they were looking straight at me. I felt myself sweating all over.

  “A poison,” I muttered almost reflexively. “A poison, right.”

  This was bad, and I knew it was bad, but I couldn’t stop. Garius wasn’t wrong. He was right! We were Greeks bearing gifts, and he didn’t know whether it was going to be good for his country or not. And this “otaku culture” everyone kept talking about—there were plenty of people in our own world who thought it was poisonous. The gainfully employed, university professors and politicians, cultural critics, human rights groups, and on and on.

  “Even medicine can be poisonous if you take too much of it,” I said. I could tell Minori-san was staring at me slack-jawed, but once I’d opened my mouth, I couldn’t stop. “And some poisons can have medicinal effects, if you only take a little. There isn’t some bright line, like, ‘This much is okay, but this much is poisonous.’ Someone who takes responsibility for their own decisions in cases like that is an adult. No matter how old they are or what they look like.”

  I recognized that I was young and foolish. But when I heard someone talk about my beloved manga and anime and video games and light novels like they were poisonous, or evil, or reprobate, without even knowing what was in them, I flew off the handle a little bit. This may have been another world, and I may have been talking to somebody with a lot of power, but I was 100% an otaku, and for me, this was a line in the sand.

  Garius raised a surprised eyebrow, and tension immediately filled the room. A heavy feeling flooded the audience chamber.

  I could tell Matoba-san was looking at me, equally surprised. If I had to guess, I would say Garius was even more powerful around here than I’d suspected. So powerful that no one ever dared to contradict him. The only reason I had been able to talk back like this was probably because I was blissfully ignorant of the entire situation. If I had understood the powers at play, I would probably have been way too scared to voice so much as a quibble.

  But it was a little late for all that now.

  “Heh...” What broke the icy silence was the laugh of a young girl. “Bwa ha... bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Her Majesty Petralka roared with laughter as though she could no longer hold it in, her hilarity echoing around the chamber.

  “Wonderful! We find this ‘Shinichi’ most amusing!”

  “...Huh?” I certainly hadn’t expected Petralka to say that, so I just stared at her blankly. She was slapping her knees as if this was all too much for her. With a helpless smile on her face, she said, “To think he would go against Garius!”

  “Your Majesty...” Prime Minister Zahar and Counselor Garius sounded troubled, but Petralka ignored them.

  “Very well,” she said. “We, Petralka an Eldant III, hereby and forthwith permit your ‘Amutech’ or whatever it is to carry out any and all activities it sees fit. Do as you please!”

  “Ah...” I looked up at the child empress stupidly for second. Then it sank in that I’d pulled off a coup, and I gave a theatrical bow. “Our most humble thanks,” I said with more than a bit of self-satisfaction.

  If I had to sum up my current condition in one word, it would be: tired. The meeting with Petralka, leader of the Holy Eldant Empire, and her group—which, admittedly, had been just a simple meet-and-greet—was over, and Minori-san, Matoba-san, and I were heading back to my residence the same way we’d come, in a winged carriage.

  In other words, we were going back to where Myusel and the others were waiting.

  “You gave me a shock,” Minori-san said from beside me, a grin on her face. “The way you talked back to Sir Cordobal like that.”

  “Please, don’t remind me. I really regret it, believe me,” I said, feeling exhausted.

>   I had said what I’d said in the heat of the moment, but he could easily have had me executed then and there. Given that Petralka was a child, it was obviously Garius and Zahar, the adults around her, who really ran the Empire. But exactly what they could get away with because of that power, I didn’t yet know. Yes, I was a respected emissary from another country, but so long as I was in the Eldant Empire, they could come up with any number of reasons to have me killed if they really wanted. At the thought, an unpleasant sweat began trickling down my back again.

  “And he never took his eyes off me again after that,” I groaned.

  Garius had stared straight at me until the very moment we left the audience chamber. He didn’t have any particular expression on his face, but his look was so piercing I felt lucky to have survived.

  “True,” Minori-san said. “But I think he likes you.”

  “Huh?” I said. “What makes you think that? I figured he hated me, or, you know, wanted to kill me or something.”

  “Yeah, but... You don’t think there was a certain warmth there?”

  “Kind of...” I figured it had come from the flames of his rage.

  “I bet he doesn’t have anyone like you around him,” Minori-san said. “He probably found you refreshing.”

  “Oh, is that it?” So what? I wanted to ask, but then I realized. Even though I did not in the least want to realize this. “Oh, no...”

  In manga and anime and games and light novels, saying someone “doesn’t have a type like that around” is a flag for romance—a simple pretext for there to be a spark between two characters. I mean, true, a new person is inherently interesting, so it didn’t have to mean there was love in the air, but still...

  “Minori-san...” I looked at her suspiciously. Under the circumstances, I wanted to keep her around—she was really the only person I could count on for anything. But all of a sudden, I’d begun to have doubts. “Minori-san... Is it possible you’re a fuj—”

  “I’m sorry, what do you mean...?”

  I cut myself off, leaving the WAC confused. It was no good. She was rotten. It was too early...

  Er, or rather, as I’d expected, Minori-san was showing every sign of being a fujoshi through and through.

  Works whose plot lines center around two beautiful guys in a homoerotic romance are broadly known as yaoi, and the women who love those stories are called “rotten girls,” or fujoshi. (It’s a dumb pun on the word for “housewife.”)

  Everything I had heard suggested fujoshi had formidable powers of imagination. Their fantasies weren’t limited to human men; they would personify countries or buildings or trains and argue about which one was the top (the guy) and which one the bottom (the girl), debates that got them all hot and bothered in a hurry. From the perspective of one of these women, an attractive young knight staring at a guy like me out of intense hatred could, in the mind’s eye, quickly become intense physical love.

  “Please don’t include me in your perverted fantasies.”

  “I wasn’t fantasizing,” she said defensively. “Rumor has it that Garius started serving at Her Majesty’s side partly because he was... that way.”

  “Huh? Wait a second...”

  A young lady and the man who attends her... When people are close in both their public and private lives, it’s only natural for a spark to develop. But when one or both of them are in positions of power, it can turn into risky business pretty quick. Plenty of examples of that in Earth’s own history.

  That’s why Petralka was attended by Zahar, who was obviously done sowing his wild oats, and Garius, who allegedly had no interest in women. It made perfect sense.

  “Anyway, homosexual love has been pretty much normal throughout world history,” Minori-san said. Behind her glasses I could see a strange, eager sparkle in her eyes, and I smelled trouble.

  “I’m aware of that,” I said, “but just for your information, I don’t swing that way!”

  Honestly, I was a pretty conservative otaku: even cross-dressing guys didn’t really do anything for me.

  Just for a second, I allowed myself to imagine myself and Garius in that kind of relationship, rose petals blowing by dramatically in the foreground. Then I let out a sigh. I think a bit of bile came with it.

  “So...” I decided the subject needed to be changed, forcefully. “I guess we’ve had our audience now. What exactly is it that you guys want me to do?”

  Spread otaku culture in another world? What a vague directive. What were the goals? What was I aiming for?

  “Hmm...” The thoughtful sound came not from me or Minori-san, but from Matoba-san, who was sitting with his back to us in the driver’s seat. He had been waiting for us at Eldant Castle when we arrived, apparently as a way of helping to ensure that I would be allowed at the audience. Where he actually lived, however, was in Amutech’s company dorm-cum-company headquarters—in other words, the same mansion as the rest of us. So we were all going home together.

  “Koganuma-kun.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  Matoba-san and Minori-san looked at each other. Both removed their magic rings, making sure I could see them do so. Then they both looked at me expectantly. I guessed they wanted me to take my ring off, too.

  The three of us didn’t need those rings to communicate anyway, so there was no problem with taking it off. In fact, if I didn’t, I suppose there could have been trouble...

  Ah. The driver.

  Whichever servant of the Empire was driving the carriage right now, they didn’t want him to hear what they had to say. The thought made everything seem a little more tense than usual. But fretting about that right now wouldn’t solve anything. I took off the ring and put it in my pocket.

  “Thank you,” Matoba-san said. “We certainly don’t, you see, wish for the Eldant side to hear what we are about to say. The Japanese side has no cards in its hand.”

  Wait. Hold on a second. I think he just said something very, very hard to ignore.

  “Quite frankly,” he went on, “we don’t know what we’re doing here ourselves.”

  “Y-You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

  They dragged me here when they “didn’t know what they’re doing”?!

  Matoba-san frowned apologetically and said, “The desired end goal is clear. It’s simply that there is no established methodology for how to get there. This is all rather unprecedented, you understand.”

  And there it was. The civil servant’s predilection for manuals and instructions.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t sympathize. But since he’d decided to throw me into the middle of all this, now it was my problem, too.

  “As I said before,” Matoba-san continued. “We prefer to begin with the outward form—you know, make sure there are laws and rules, set up organizations. Then we procure some land and a budget, and then we form a committee about what we should actually do. That’s the ‘building bureaucracy’ for you.”

  “Why does it kind of sound like you’re bragging...?”

  “Far from it. I’m being self-deprecating. In any event, because we knew how these things so often go, we decided not to overdetermine the parameters of our initial concept. It turned out the Eldant Empire wasn’t much for traditional Japanese arts, anyway.” He shrugged.

  Afterward, according to what he told me, the government sort of lost interest in trying to crack the “other world” nut and instead created the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau and stuck him with it.

  It wasn’t hard to believe. I mean, if this were a serious national project, there was no way they would ever have hired someone like me.

  Conducting relations with another world? This was something Japan had never had to do before. For that matter, it was something no one in human history had ever had to do before. Maybe we should have announced it and worked with an international coalition to make first contact. But it looked like the Japanese government wanted to corner the market on interdimensional trade.

  If these trade relations went
well, the Japanese national debt that had been piling up for so long might even be able to get back to the black in one fell swoop. After all, commerce has always been an ace in the hole for countries looking to enrich themselves. Take Dubai, for example, a place justly famous for its rapid economic expansion. Apparently, they owe it to a man-made harbor they created specifically for trade.

  If the government were to let news about this new world slip, every country on Earth would probably be trying to horn in on their racket. Japan would get only a fraction, a tenth, a hundredth, of what it might have made otherwise. Whatever the case, the decision had been made that money like that would not be left on the table, and that if at all possible, Japan would establish itself here without letting other countries know what it was up to.

  On top of all that, up until last year, the administration had been run by a certain opposition party. It was the first time they had ever had control of the government, and they didn’t seem quite sure what to do with it. Bureaucracy followed bureaucracy with ridiculous systemic reforms and budget reallocations. It was chaos. And then you throw another world into the mix? They simply didn’t have the wherewithal to cope.

  Ultimately, the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau was charged with finding a way to conduct trade with the Eldant Empire despite limited authority, a scant budget, and basically one employee. It wasn’t a pretty story.

  “Your job, in a word, is to promote cultural exchange in this world while running a general entertainment business. Having said that, I’ll be handling menial matters for you—red tape and accounting, negotiations with the Eldant Empire and the like. What we want from you is to find works of entertainment that the people of this world—the Eldant Empire, and other countries if possible—will be passionate about. Then, we will sell them here.”

  I understood all that already. But it was just too broad a mandate. It left me with no real idea of what to do.

  “Look,” I said, “sure, I’m an otaku, but I’m a consumer. A connoisseur. I’m not from the selling side or even the production side.”