“Soooo,” Minori-san said, turning to Myusel and grinning. I’d never seen her so happy about anything that wasn’t BL. “I’m thinking you really are the most important to Shinichi-kun, Myusel.”
“G-Gosh, I wonder...” Myusel turned red and put her hands to her cheeks.
Wow, what’s with the adorable gesture?! Some kind of special move—is that what this is? Does everyone who sees it die (of moe)?!
................................................Er, nope. Never mind.
“I disagree,” Hikaru-san said. “Shinichi-san was just going in the order we disappeared. After all, he couldn’t be sure Myusel would be in my room, right?”
“Yes, that is indeed the case!” Petralka exclaimed, clenching her fist. “Behold the face of Shinichi when he enters Myusel’s room and discovers we are not there. His expression at that moment reveals precisely whom he cares for the most!”
“If ya really believe that, then get a look at his face when he pounds on my door! He’s totally freaked! Way worse than for any of the rest of ya!” Elvia practically squirmed with happiness.
“I don’t know, I really think he was looking for Myusel first... Ah.” That was when Minori-san turned toward me. Being the accomplished martial artist she was, maybe she could sense that I was there. “...Well, well.” She gave me a lopsided grin.
That prompted Myusel and the others to look my way, too.
“Shinichi!” Petralka was the first to speak. Followed by—
“Amazin’! It’s just like Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama said!” Elvia’s tail wagged.
“Shinichi-sama...” Myusel was the last to speak, her voice a whisper of wonder. Naturally, all of them—all three girls, plus the amused Minori-san and Hikaru-san—looked in perfectly good health, no sign of illness anywhere. Which meant...
“You’re awful, all of you!” I shouted, my clenched fists trembling. “You tricked me?!”
And here I had been so worried about them! All of them! I had been wracked with anxiety about what was going on! And the whole thing, all of it, had been made up!
“You even killed the power and everything! What did you think you were going to get out of it?!”
“We just figured that if a push didn’t work, we’d try a pull,” Minori-san said with a shrug. “If you wouldn’t come out for something fun, we thought maybe you’d come out for something scary.”
“That was crazy! How could you lie to me like that?!”
“Nobody lied. There is an epidemic near the castle, that much is true. And then we each just stopped playing the game and came out into the yard. Right, Hikaru-kun?”
“Sure is!” he said. I could practically imagine him giggling like a schoolgirl chatting with her BFF. But they couldn’t get rid of me that easily.
“That’s just semantics!”
I mean, strictly speaking, what Minori-san said was true. They hadn’t deliberately lied to me. But the way they had each gone silent and left the game one after another, the way they mentioned the epidemic right when it would most fan the flames of my worry, and then going so far as to cause a power outage—it was obviously all a ploy to scare the crap out of me!
“And then there was that Itchy. Tasty. chat message from Elvia!”
“That was just to help set the mood,” Hikaru-san said.
“You did that, Hikaru-san?!”
“Yeah, although I admit I was a little worried it’d tip you off that we were just playing with you.”
“Grrrrrr!”
“Still not a lie,” Hikaru-san said, pointedly looking away from me. Wow, it was really adorable the way he—no, no!
“Don’t act all cute with me!” This was bad enough already. I wasn’t so much upset about being tricked; I just wanted to die from embarrassment at the thought that everyone had been watching me the whole time I rushed all over the house in complete terror. I was sure they’d seen me screaming like a little girl when I thought Brooke and Cerise were a monster, too.
And to record the whole thing!
I glanced in the direction of the royal guard, but they collectively refused to look at me. Clearly, I was too pitiful for them to even bear to see me.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!
Gah! If there was a hole here, I would have dreaded-spinning-drill-jumped right into it!
“U-Uh, Shinichi-sama...” Myusel said hesitantly. “I—I really w-wanted to... to apologize to you, Shinichi-sama. So I wished... you would... come out of your room...”
“Myusel, you are one dedicated girl,” Minori-san said with a laugh.
“Again...” I whispered, my eyes on the ground.
“What...?” Myusel looked at me, perplexed; Petralka and Elvia glanced at each other; while Minori-san and Hikaru-san regarded me skeptically. I turned my back on them all... and set off running as fast as a frightened rabbit.
“I’ll shut myself in agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiinn!”
“Oh, Shinichi-sama...!”
I ignored Myusel, making a beeline for my room. I didn’t have it in me to stay in that spot one moment longer.
A while later. After less than half an hour, the mansion’s power came back on, which meant I had my computer back. My messenger was full of apologies from the others, but I didn’t see them until the next morning. I had pulled the covers over my head and gone to sleep.
And so we came to the next day. Through the chat Petralka and Garius, back for another visit, gave me the details on this epidemic. Sufferers experienced a high fever and a feeling of lethargy, while some also presented with runny noses, coughs, headaches, nausea or vomiting, diarrhea—the list went on. Eldant had its own endemic diseases, but none of their medicines seemed to work very well on this current outbreak. Garius and the others didn’t know what to do.
The solution, finally, came from an unexpected source: the JSDF garrison. The base’s doctor evaluated several people who had the illness, and discovered what it really was: influenza.
The influenza virus, it turned out, hadn’t existed in Eldant. I.e., most people had no immunity, and there were no medicines to combat it. It was as simple as that: the bug had never existed in this world, and we had brought it with us from Japan.
Here I thought they had tested the hell out of us to make
