“Is it a coffin?” Shinichi-san asked, evidently thinking the same thing I was.
“I’m afraid to say we’re not entirely sure,” Minister Cordobal replied.
“As Romilda said, we know only that it was excavated by the Guld Workshop,” Her Majesty added. “And while it certainly has the dimensions of a coffin, we have never seen nor heard of a coffin with such a pattern on it before. And only this single one was found, all by itself.”
Excavated. So it had been underground, apparently. It had, we were told, been discovered during tunnel excavations carried out by the workshop. Their first thought was that they had accidentally struck on a tomb of some sort, but there was no sign of any mausoleum, burial chamber, or grave goods anywhere to be found. It was always possible, of course, that the march of time had eroded the tomb and turned the grave goods to dust, or perhaps that everything had already been found and moved somewhere else. Whatever the story, it didn’t change the fact that they had this one “coffin,” and nothing else.
“And the contents are stranger still.”
“Huh? Petralka, you guys opened it?” Shinichi-san said. He looked shocked. If this really was a coffin, then true enough, you might open it and be confronted with a mummy. Maybe it would just be ugly, but there was always the possibility of harmful dust or particles, or some unknown pathogen that had been locked away with the corpse and would sicken anyone who opened the coffin. Remember Tutankhamun’s curse? The people who opened the tomb of the former Egyptian ruler died one by one, and it’s been proposed that ancient bacteria or viruses were the reason. Of course, some people claimed the whole thing was a hoax, that the series of deaths hadn’t really occurred at all.
But getting back on topic...
“What was in there? Was it an arm? It was an arm, wasn’t it?”
“Why would it be just an arm?”
“Perhaps you had best open it and see for yourself,” Her Majesty said, gesturing at the box with her chin.
“Wha...?” Shinichi-san looked at me and Minori-san with trepidation. I think he was afraid there really was a body in there, and that it was going to burst out with a “Woo!” or a “Blargh!” or a “Together we travel the path of meifumado!” and attack him.
“Fine, I’ll open it,” Minori-san said with a half-smile, and walked over to the box. I had a certain sympathy with Shinichi-san’s reluctance, but the empress herself had told us to open the box, so we could hardly refuse. Among the hexagons, Minori-san located a small depression that looked like it was built to accommodate a person’s hand. She grabbed hold of it with her fingers and slowly opened the box. Inside was...
“The heck is this?” Shinichi-san said, leaning over from next to Minori-san. I guess there was no dried-out corpse in there after all. But then, Shinichi-san had been wrong, too: there was more than just an arm in it.
The box was filled with something semitransparent. For a second, I thought it was a liquid, but when Minori-san gently tapped the side of the “coffin,” it didn’t ripple. So was it something more viscous? A gel or a jelly or something? Then I took a good look, and saw something red, like a dried plum, floating in the center. The hazy quality of the gel or whatever it was made it hard to see any details of the thing, but it was a distinct shape within the amorphous gelatin, strangely dominating the scene.
“Guess it’s not just your average coffin,” I said.
“Mm,” Her Majesty concurred.
So what was it? I had to confess, I had no idea. This was a fantasy world; could it be a Slime’s coffin or something? To be fair, probably not.
“It does indeed seem like a coffin at first glance, but no one has proven remotely able to identify what is actually in it. Not even the dwarves in the Guld Workshop,” the empress said. Then she looked at Shinichi-san. “We wished to ask for your collective opinion.”
I guess Rydell-san and Romilda were there as representatives of the Guld Workshop.
“We have never seen its like here in our world, but we thought perhaps in your Ja-pan, you might have encountered it before,” Her Majesty said. “Or at least something like it.”
“Can’t say I have... I don’t think,” Shinichi-san said, cocking his head. He looked at us in turn. But we were just as perplexed as he was. Even the container itself was starting to look less like a coffin the more I looked at it. “I guess I’ve seen toys and food that sort of look a little like this goop, or that thing in there,” Shinichi-san said.
Heck, so had I—“slime” toys on the one hand, and dried plums on the other. But I highly doubted that was an actual dried plum in there. And the other stuff? It vaguely reminded me of something you might find in industrial manufacturing, but that was way over the head of a nonspecialist like me.
“Can you take this stuff out of here?” Shinichi-san wondered aloud.
“Remember what’s happened the last several times you touched something without knowing what it was?” I said, and he quickly pulled his hand back. We had no idea what that stuff might be, so I didn’t think we should be going around grabbing it. This might have been an alternate world, but our common sense should still have been functioning. Even if Shinichi-san’s seemed a bit numb.
“Mm, so none of you know anything about it, either...” Her Majesty pursed her lips. The adorable empress seemed to regard Shinichi-san uncommonly highly, but he was no scholar; he wasn’t even a fortune-teller or something. He could
