While I had turned into a woman, on a positive note, I hadn’t gotten any taller, shorter, thinner, or fatter, so all my clothes still fit. That was a major relief. I mean, one way or another, I couldn’t go around naked all day.
Incidentally, on my left hand was an interpreter ring, swiped from my sleeping “self.” I felt a little bad stealing from him, but without it, I couldn’t hope to communicate with Myusel and the other Eldant people.
“Um, so. Hikaru-san, is that... really you?” Shinichi-san said, just to be sure.
“Yes, it’s me,” I nodded, at which Shinichi-san and Minori-san traded confused looks.
I understood—believe me, I did. For starters, the man they knew perfectly well as Ayasaki Hikaru was currently asleep on the bed in my—his?—room. From their perspective, he might be the real Hikaru, and I might be some kind of imposter, or maybe a joke in really bad taste.
And was I really Ayasaki Hikaru? Or was I someone else who was simply convinced they were Hikaru?
“I was like this when I woke up,” I insisted. It was all I could say.
“All right, well... mind if I ask you a few questions?” Shinichi-san said.
“Shoot,” I replied. I was just as eager as he was to know exactly who or what I was at this point. If it turned out I wasn’t Hikaru, then at least that would be something to go on. Better than having no idea at all.
“Umm...”
“Describe Kanou Shinichi in one word.”
“Loser.”
While Shinichi-san dithered about what to ask first, Minori-san shot out ahead with an off-the-cuff request that I responded to completely on instinct.
“Sounds like the real Hikaru-kun to me.”
“What kind of question was that?!” Shinichi-san nearly exploded. But Minori-san just grinned, not a shadow of remorse on her face. “Shall I ask for more details?”
“.......................................No. That’s okay.” Shinichi-san wilted. He walked over to a corner of the room and faced the wall, from where we could hear him muttering, “What can you do?” and “I mean, me too, I...” Well, we could leave him to it.
After that, Minori-san peppered me with questions about various anime and manga, and I was able to answer them all fluently. When she asked me, finally, “What were you wearing the day you first met Her Majesty?” I immediately replied, “A Suiren costume.”
Minori-san nodded, satisfied that I was who I claimed to be.
“The other Hikaru-sama ain’t wakin’ up, though,” Elvia said, coming into the room.
Elvia Harneiman was our resident werewolf girl. The bushy tail and floppy ears proved it. When she wagged that tail like a happy puppy, you could practically feel your mood improving. But anyway...
“I tried shakin’ him, I tried ticklin’ him, but nothing works.”
Elvia had remained in my room to keep an eye on the sleeping “Hikaru,” just in case anything changed. Apparently she’d also tried to wake him up, to no avail. He was still breathing, though, so at least we knew he wasn’t dead.
This was making less sense by the moment.
“Does Eldant have some kind of magic that can turn a man into a woman overnight?” Shinichi-san asked.
“Not that I’ve ever heard of,” Myusel replied.
“Figures,” Shinichi-san said, and shrugged. I guess he was just asking to be sure. He didn’t think magic like that actually existed. Personally, I agreed. Anyway, I guess in this particular case, it would be “magic that can create an exact but opposite-gendered double of someone overnight.”
“How about an illness that might do this?” he ventured.
“No, I’ve never heard of that, either,” Myusel said, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“So far we don’t even know if this just happened, or if it was somehow artificially induced,” Minori-san said, crossing her arms.
“It seems like a natural phenomenon to me,” Shinichi-san said.
“I agree,” Minori-san replied, “but if it isn’t natural, then that means someone did it deliberately, right? Someone with a reason to want to turn Hikaru-kun into a woman.”
“It—It wasn’t me!” Shinichi-san said, maybe a bit too emphatically.
“And it certainly wasn’t me,” Minori-san said, much cooler.
“I mean, I admit Hikaru-san seems sort of wasted on the male gender.”
“Dummy. It’s perfect because he’s a guy!”
“That’s just your twisted view of things, Minori-san.”
“Hmmm...”
“What’s even weirder about this whole thing is that the guy Hikaru-san is still here, but now we have a girl Hikaru-san, too. Maybe someone does want to turn him into a girl for some reason, but why make a second one of him to do it?”
“That’s a good point...”
The two of them both made concerned noises. Gender-change storylines aren’t that uncommon in manga, anime, and games. It was a time-honored trope, in fact. But most of them also focused on the action: “suddenly, a guy becomes a girl!” Or vice versa. Most swept questions of why or how under the rug.
Whatever. The point was, we still had no idea why my consciousness had found itself in a woman’s body.
“Oh...” Myusel said, looking at us.
“What is it, Myusel?”
“We have visitors... I’ll go answer the door.” She left the room. With her elf senses, she had much better hearing than any of us humans. I hadn’t even noticed anything, but she had picked up on someone coming to the house—maybe she’d heard the carriage pulling up outside or something. But who could it be so early in the morning?
I was considering the possibilities when I noticed Elvia intently studying my face.
“What, have I got something in my teeth?” I asked, looking her in the eye, and she quickly shook her head, a bit chagrined.
“Uh, no, uh...” She couldn’t quite seem to find the word at first, until finally she came out with: “I was just thinkin’, boy or girl, you’re awful pretty either way, Hikaru-sama.”
I found myself at a loss for how to respond to that. I’d been hearing things like “He’s so cute for a boy” or “He’s too pretty to be a boy” ever since I could remember, so you wouldn’t think this
