And I guess everything had arrived at once.
“Don’t tell me you don’t even remember what you ordered,” Hikaru-san said.
“I do! Vaguely. But it’s not like I ordered it all at once. Some of it was probably a while ago...”
C*mik*t and WonFes weren’t held quite simultaneously, after all, and it would take time to go to them and check everything out. The only way to be sure what the different groups had there was to get on the internet and look up the details, but because there was no network connection between Japan and Eldant, I even had that sort of thing shipped to me periodically on a hard disk. It meant a lengthy time lag before I got caught up on anything.
Then of course, there were times when release dates slipped (and not just for doujinshi; it could happen to anything), which of course meant it got to us even later. Say it had been six months since I requested something; of course I wasn’t going to remember what it was.
“Anyway, we’ve got to get this stuff inside.” I turned to the maid beside me. “Myusel, sorry to trouble you, but...”
This maid was a half-elf. The pointy ears were the proof. She handled whatever domestic tasks needed to be done in the household, and she had come out here to help with the cargo, but... honestly, I wasn’t sure about making this frail-looking young woman carry around these bulging boxes. Maybe if we stumbled across one with figures in it, it would at least be a little lighter than a box full of books.
“It’s fine.” Myusel smiled, looking completely at ease. Ahh, what a fine girl. A fine young woman y’ are, Myusel...
As my thoughts suddenly and inexplicably took on the twang of an old Osakan dude, I realized that the muscliest Japanese person among us wasn’t here.
“Hey, where’s Minori-san?” That was, Koganuma Minori-san, officer of the JSDF. She might have been a woman, but to be perfectly honest, she was way stronger and more physically capable than I was. “I’m sure a lot of this stuff is her BL.”
“Oh, Minori-san said she was going to go get Brooke and Cerise-san to come help. She thought there might be a lot of cargo today.”
“Ah...”
Well, there was. Even with Myusel to help, it would take an awfully long time to move it all inside. Minori-san had obviously come to the same conclusion when she had seen “the wall.”
“Elvia said she’d be by later, too... Oh, speak of the devil.” Hikaru-san pointed toward the house.
I looked back and saw Minori-san emerging from the open door, along with our lizardman gardener Brooke Darwin.
“Is it all here?” Minori-san asked, jogging up to us. She had a huge smile on her face. Without waiting for an answer, she tore open one of the boxes tagged on the side with a marker pen and started inspecting the contents. I thought she might burst into a happy “runtatta~ ♪” at any moment. She was practically floating.
“Minori-san, hang on...”
I guess she was really looking forward to something in one of these boxes. I acted a little chagrined, but the truth is, I understood how she felt. Any otaku, regardless of interests or preferences, wants to see their stuff when it arrives. If you aren’t eager to see it, are you even really an otaku?
But some of the stuff I had ordered was stuff I would rather the girls not see—which is to say, stuff I would be embarrassed for them to see—which is to say, stuff I might very well be torn limb from limb for if they saw. So I didn’t necessarily want to just pop open all the boxes right in front of everybody. I had to think Minori-san was in the same situation—I assumed it was some BL doujinshi she was looking for—but she didn’t seem to have my qualms. Then again, I was a lot less worried about the BL books themselves than about the unquenchable fire of Minori-san’s passion for them.
“These’ns belong to you, Master?” Brooke asked, shuffling toward the wall of boxes.
“Er, yeah, thank you,” I said. “From here to here. They’ve all got my mark on the side. Could you bring them to my room?”
“Yessir,” Brooke nodded.
“My mark,” by the way, was an icon Hikaru-san had designed, something to help the Japanese residents of the mansion keep each other’s possessions separate. It was nice and simple, sort of like the face of some SD character. It was so easy that even I, with my minimal artistic talent, could draw it, and above all, it was cute.
Myusel could actually read a pretty good number of kanji, and even Elvia and Brooke had picked up a fair amount just by being around, but Cerise, who was the last of the mansion’s occupants to have taken up residence here, didn’t know a word of Japanese, and even Brooke and Elvia had to study a kanji for a moment before they could figure it out. So we had created icons that were immediately distinguishable.
“Hey, is it just you, Brooke?” I asked. The lizardman was hefting a box from beside the grinning Minori-san. Hadn’t Hikaru-san said Minori-san was going to get Brooke and Cerise?
“This’s physical labor,” Brooke said around the box. “I’ll do enough for the both of us.”
Huh! Very manly. Lizard... manly.
As I’ve mentioned, Brooke and his wife Cerise were lizardmen, a reptile-like race. Brooke was our gardener, and Cerise worked as a maid in the mansion. They didn’t act all lovey-dovey in public, but moments like this showed exactly how much they cared for each other. Honestly, it was kind of heartwarming.
“Okay, cool. Myusel, could I ask you to take... let’s see. How about this little box?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s still pretty heavy, be careful.”
With some of the portering successfully delegated, I grabbed another box with some of my stuff in it—
“AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!”
—and then practically dropped it when Minori-san uttered a piercing, shattering cry of joy. I scrambled to catch
