Editing MaruMA:Volume06:Chapter 6

===Chapter 6===

How horrible!  In order to use the bathroom, we have to walk through a bunch of murderers to the other side of the room.

I like redecorating and renovations so I suddenly want to pray for a carpenter to come along and do something about this.

“… You think you can hold it?”

“Even if I can hold it now, I won’t be able to for long… hey, what are you making a woman say!?”

“Travelling makes people kind.  We’ve even become close enough to talk about our biological functions.”

We three travelling buddies are talking together in a huddle.    

“Why don’t we escort you this time, Ms. Flynn.  If you’re too embarrassed to go alone, we’ll go with you!” I offer.

“Ah, that’s a good idea!  It’ll feel good.”

“No!  No way!”

I understand why she’s refusing.

For guys, it’s perfectly normal to do that, but it’s probably humiliating for girls.  But between shame and putting your life in danger, it’s obvious which is the better choice.

“If I can’t use the powder room, I’d rather die!  Make a path for me somehow.  You know, using that ‘Tokyo Comic Show’ technique or whatever.”

The two of us are completely floored.  Not just because she guessed the correct name, but because we suddenly had to negotiate with a hundred prisoners<ref>This is an extension of the loooooong (and awesome) joke that Murata was doing when he was being ‘Tokyo Magic Robinson’ in chapter 3.  The Tokyo Comic Show was a comedy/magic act.  Here’s a vid on Youtube.  It’s not subbed, but I think it kind of makes the Magic Robinson scene funnier if you know what the dude looks like. OH, and this is the background music that Murata was providing himself with.   The German version neglected to mention that he was doing that right before he fell on his face.  Chalalalalaa- uwah! BAM! XD  … Ahem, the show came out a year before Murata and Yuuri were born (this is the reason why Yuuri kept on wondering how old Murata was in that scene).  ANYWAY, the only things that they’ve said so far are ‘Tokyo Magic Robinson’ and ‘Tokyo Comic Romantica’ (which was another joke and Flynn wasn’t even around when they said that) so yeah, they’ve got every reason to be completely floored that Flynn said ‘Tokyo Comic Show,’ especially since all of these words are in English XD</ref>.

“That’s impossible, totally impossible.  I might have been able to do something if they were petty criminals but these are murderers, you know?  And together they’ve killed over a thousand people.  If this was America, they’d be going to jail for 300 years.  What am I supposed to do against-”

“A~nd what are you going on about little lamb?”

The prisoners in pink laughed vulgarly.  Calling someone a little lamb is rude.  Flynn would get mad at being called that even if she hadn’t been ruling a small country for the past three years (in place of someone else, though).

“Nmo?”

T-Zou walked forward.  Ah, I get it.  That’s the little lamb.

“If ya wanna use the bathroom just go and use it, hahaha.”

“If we’re in the way, just jump over us, hahaha.”

“… Nmo!”

On my left side, the sheep started breathing roughly through her nose.  Her back is shaking slightly.

“Wh-what’s wrong, T-Zou?”

I didn’t have time to pull on her leash and stop her.  As soon as I noticed she had fluffed up her fur in a threatening way, she had already dashed into the room.  The size of a moped or a large bike, the sheep is wielding her hooves as a deadly weapon and is kicking around the men.

The murderers of a thousand people scream and run around the room.  However, because they’re chained to iron balls, they can’t move very quickly and there are some who got their feet crushed by the iron balls of other prisoners and are squatting down and crying.  The boat started swaying so strangely that even the helmsman got worried and came to see what was going on.

“Wh-why is T-Zou..?”

“Wow, that was surprising.  She’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Murata, you… I don’t even feel like commenting on your antics anymore.  The helmsman who came to see what was going on is laughing at the scary faced, brawny prisoners jumping around.

“They say if you laugh in front of sheep they’ll mutiny, but if only one sheep does this then a bunch of sheep would be really scary.”

It’s a proverb from a foreign culture.

After wreaking complete havoc, T-Zou comes back content.  Even her breathing is calm.  Flynn, who used the opportunity to go to the bathroom, also comes back with a content look on her face.  They both look like they can say ‘That’s enough for today.’

Since there’s no point in spending more time in the room full of men, we return to the rapidly cooling deck.  Even though we’re feeling a bit more confident concerning them, there’s no way that we’d be able to sleep in that room all packed together.  Even if we managed to grab a corner, there’s only enough space to sit holding your knees.  If so, we should just deal with the cold weather, lie down in some sleeping bags and sing ‘Winter Constellations’ or something<ref>He’s talking about this song.  The original song is Molly Darling.</ref>.

“Halt!”

Called out to in a period drama style, the three of us stop in surprise.  Slowly and carefully turning around, we see that a clear path has been made all the way to the back where a mafia-boss looking guy is camped out.  He’s sitting so I can’t know for sure, but he’s such a large man that it looks like he can easily jump two-meters.  The prison food may have been really good because his chest and shoulder width are both extreme.  If I gave him a nickname, it would be straight and simple: Human Mountain Range.

There’s an X-shaped scar on his newly shaved head.

“The Commander has a message.  Come closer.”

While the three of us were hesitating, T-Zou began walking forward with a menacing expression.  Even though she’s biologically a girl, she’s a manly animal.

Commander Mountain Range is sitting cross-legged with burly legs and is holding a round object in his lap.  He’s continuously stroking the well-polished, shiny, amber ball with his palm.  Hm?  There’s a hollow in the middle.  It’s placed just around where a primate’s eye socket would…..

“A skull!?  Is that human bone?”

“This is Ms. Terrine,” answered a wise looking old man with a goatee. “The Commander brought along the remains of one of the people he killed with him.  However, to be honest… they were already bleached so it’s very likely he killed them a long time ago.”

The last bit was in a secretive whisper.  Then from Ms. Terrine’s viewpoint, wouldn’t she have a grudge?  She’s completely bones though.
Commander Mountain Range was glaring at us with ocher eyes that could have frozen blood, but he immediately dropped his gaze to Ms. Skull.  Then, he called out in a threatening voice…

“You’ve got something to say to these guys, wight Mishy Terrine?”

… to the skull.

“… Mishy Terrine?”

And ‘wight?’  Saying stuff like that with such a powerful voice is just as creepy as Akiko Wada singing an Aya Matsuura song.   But, that’s my own individual preference so I won’t go criticizing that<ref>Okay, I have to admit, this is the first celebrity related joke in this series that made me laugh. Akiko Wada and Aya Matsuura are both singers.  I made their names links to songs they sing.  Fun fact:  That Aya Matsuura song was released a few months after this book.  I was on exchange in high school at the time and I heard that damn song so many times I wanted to gouge my ears out.  Could not go ANYWHERE without hearing it!  That yellow/orange poofy dress thing brought back bad memories XD</ref>.

“Expecially to this woman.  You feel like you’ve met this person, wight Mishy Terrine?  So you really wanna know who and where she’s from, wight?”

“Me?  I don’t have any acquaintances who speak with skulls.”

“Don’t mock the Commander!”

“The Commander and Terry-berry are important to us!”

“Don’t look at him with pity!”

“Don’t say he’s creepy!”

She didn’t say that.  And anyway, what’s ‘Terry-berry?’  Terry-berry?

Perhaps because we had a (wolf wearing the clothes of a) sheep, Flynn used a very lady-like phrase.  Her chin is thrust forward and her face is set.

“If you’re going to ask someone’s name, you should introduce yourself fi-”

“Ah, good evenin’!  I’m Robinson.  This here’s Captain Crusoe.”

“Evenin’.”

“Hey, he was talking to me.  Me!”

Flynn panicking after being lightly-pon ignored was funny.  That pose she had while pointing at herself and looking back and forth between Murata and me was cute, too.  Well, calling a woman five years older than you ‘cute’ is rude<ref>Why yes, Yuuri did just use Luis Biron’s ‘-pon’ from novel 4.</ref>.

“My name is Flynn.  Flynn… I won’t say my last name.”

Commander Mountain Range’s ghastly face suddenly brightens.

“I knew it!  It’s the Mistress, Mishy Terrine!  She’s got that platinum blonde hair and that strong willed personality and her name is ‘Flynn.’  She’s Mistress Flynn from the Plainsmen!”

“Oh!  The Mistress!”

“The Mistress!  The Mistress!”

“Whaaaat?”

Now it was our turn to be the odd men out.  Commander Mountain Range’s group is chanting ‘Mistress’ over and over again.

There’s ‘How I’ve missed the young Mistress’s smile’ and ‘Without the Mistress, I’d never have been able to graduate from the Plainsmen’ and ‘I still treasure the handkerchief the Mistress wrapped around my broken arm’ and ‘It didn’t really do much, though’ and ‘The mud soup the Mistress made me drink after I was exhausted from training and the completely out of this world diarrhea I had the next day… I couldn’t forget that even if I tried!’

“Can you make it clear as to whether you like me or hate me?”

They all continue to list the good and bad of the young Flynn.  I waited for a good moment and then turned to the old man with the goatee.

“Are all the prisoners graduates from the Plainsmen training?”

“That’s right.  I am too, of course.”

“So that means all of them are former soldiers, right?  Why did they become murderers?  Even preschoolers know that killing someone is the worst crime!”

“What are you saying?  We haven’t harmed a single person outside of a battle or a bar.”

“Then why are you in a prisoner transport and chained up?”

“Because we lost,” said Commander Mountain Range gravely as he petted Terrine with a circular motion.  And then he immediately went back to being the weird guy who talks to skulls.  The X scar on his head looks sad.  His subordinates were still recounting their memories of Flynn and the Plainsmen and were getting themselves excited.

T-Zou began to growl lowly.  The group she’d identified as enemies was getting energetic.  In order to make herself seem as large as possible, her fur was standing on end.  With her fighting spirit so out in the open, the day she sheds her clothing as a sheep probably isn’t very far off.
But from my point of view, the noisier they get, the more it just sounds like bravado.

They don’t really have any fighting spirit left, but since they’re all in a group, they can just barely make themselves seem energetic… I can’t help but think that.

“We all lost to Shimaron.  We fought with all our might, but in the end we couldn’t beat their numbers.  Then we spent eight painful years on Nema Via Island in an internment camp and we’re finally being transferred to the northern cape of the continent.”

Goatee stretches and the joints in his shoulders, back and neck pop.

“I’ve heard the cape is good for older people.  They say it’s not as cold in the north and the labor isn’t as harsh.  The land near the mouth of the Longalbalu river is fertile so they can grow crops at their leisure.  For soldiers who have lost and are no longer able to fight, it just might be heaven.”

“Missy Terrine wants to live in the cape too, wight?  Of course, Commander does too~.”

“… So when you say that you all killed two thousand people, they all died in war?”

These people wearing pink clothes have all been in the middle of a real battlefield.  And it’s not some battlefield from my grandfather’s time, it was just a few years ago.  They fought because they were ordered to and they didn’t want to die and lives were lost one after another right before their eyes.  How many of them were friends?  How many of them were enemy soldiers?  And exactly how old were the people whose lives they had to take, no, they had to kill?  The lives of their fellow humans.

I’m starting to feel ill just thinking about it and I chase the images out of my mind.  I’m not going to watch some cruel documentary.  If I didn’t know about this, I wouldn’t have had to imagine it.

“… Shibuya.”

“Ah, what?”

“You look like you’re about to puke.  Let’s go outside and get some air.”

“Yeah… but wait, Flynn!  What do we do about Flynn!?  Even though she’s a widow she’s still young and we can’t leave her alone here with these men.”

Thinking about Flynn Gilbit, the discomfort in my stomach is eased a bit.  I wonder why?  She’s dragged us into horrible situations and is going to use us as bait to make a deal with Big Shimaron.

“Hey Flynn, you’re done with the bathroom right?  I’m sure you have lots to talk about, but that can wait until tomorrow.  It’s cold, but we’ll pass the time in our sleeping bags somehow.”

That might have been on her mind as well because she gave a short and generic farewell and started towards the exit.

“No, the Mistress can’t spend the night in the cold!”

“That’s right!  Please stay in the room, Mistress.”

“Stay with us, please.”

“Uh…”

Flynn Gilbit fell silent and, quite unlike her, let her gaze wander about.  She’s not an indecisive woman, but maybe she’s reluctant to leave the warm room and is letting her hesitation show.

“You guys…” I grab her arm and drag her to the exit.  I’m facing the open door so even I don’t know who I’m addressing.  “You guys being ex-classmates with the Mistress is kinda cool and seems like something that would pop up in a book.  But even so, now she’s someone’s wife and you’re prisoners.  It’s not going to be like Beauty and the Beast in here!  I can’t just say ‘Okay, goodbye’ and leave a young woman in this room filled with a bunch of guys.”

“What does a stranger like you know?”

“The Mistress is our lover in our hearts.  We don’t want some brat butting in!”

“You know what?”

The sheep with the manly spirit bared her front teeth in place of fangs.  Even a wimp can have courage and even an unpopular guy can man up.  Blood rushed through my veins and my face suddenly heated up.

“Saying she’s your lover in your hearts is just going to bother her.  If that’s in a motherly way, then I’d be able to let it pass.  How are you all going to prove that you can keep your heart’s love to a certain level!?”

Silence fell for a few moments.

“… The fuck?  You trying to say that we’re gonna lay our hands on the Mistress!?”

“And just what are you to the Mistress!?”

“I’m…”

Norman Gilbit’s shiny mask is in the back pocket of my workpants.  I should raise that up in place of a medicine case and declare that I’m her acting husband. It’s an excuse that everyone would understand.  Maybe even Flynn Gilbit herself<ref>This is yet another Mito Koumon joke.  At the end of just about every episode, he’d raise up his medicine case and declare who he was, after some huge fight, of course.  Kind of like Sailor Moon’s “I’ll punish you” speech….  I can’t believe I just compared Mito Koumon and Sailor Moon XD</ref>.

I rest my fingers on my trump card for a moment, but then I quickly give up.

The one who’s grasping this thin wrist isn’t the man in the silver mask.

“… her travelling companion.”

“Oh my,”  Murata murmured, twisting up his lips.  “This is really turning into a fantasy story.”

“And you know what, Ms. Flynn, you’re at fault here too!  Even if you were their Mistress in ancient times, at this age you’re letting them spoil you too much!  You had this face that looked like if I handed you a mic, smoke would spew out from the floor around you and you’d start singing!”

“What do you mean ‘at this age?’ How rude.”

The former Plainsmen are grabbing on to her other arm.  They might be fairly pure-hearted guys.

“Well, with things like this, we can settle this fairly.  Those who love her will pull on her arms and she’ll be the mother of whoever wins!  Or something like that.”

Murata, I feel like you’ve gone through that before.  Probably on a rerun at 4pm.

“I’ll rest outside with these two,” Flynn declares as she shakes off the prisoner’s hands and moves with us to the exit.  I can hear dejected voices going ‘aww’ behind us.  Sorry, but we don’t have a choice.

“Is that alright?  Bringing you out here like this?”

“You know, Captain, I can’t afford to lose you.  In order for the deal with Big Shimaron to go through, I can’t have you escaping.  If I let the two of you sleep unattended and the next day there was no trace of you… Ahh, it’d be so horrible I wouldn’t even be able to kill myself!”

Maybe just thinking about it was causing her distress because her shoulders started shaking.  We find a spot behind some wooden boxes sheltered from the wind and start sorting through our belongings.  The sky is already pretty dark and the stars are shining above our heads.

I consult my digital analog G-shock, my real travelling companion, and see that it’s currently 7 o’clock.   The 'free plan' boat trip doesn’t have a set time for dinner, so I silently bite into the handy snack I bought beforehand at a shop.

T-Zou is politely chewing on some dry feed without any apparent dissatisfaction.

Flynn quickly falls asleep wrapped up in her sleeping bag that’s packed with at least five sheep’s worth of wool so Murata and I, having nothing better to do, absentmindedly take in the night scenery.

The lights of the ship reflected on the surface of the water are distorted with the swaying.

“Murata.”

“Hm?”

Only his head is sticking out of the dirty yellow sleeping bag.

“… Why are we the only ones with a sleeping bag for two?”

“Who knows?  Maybe they thought it was better for us to have a slumber party, ehe~.”

“This is a little different than having a slumber party… Hey don’t go to sleep.  I’ll get lonely.  Hey Murata.  Muraken.  Tokyo Magic Robinson!”
Even calling that name, all he did was start humming ‘El Bimbo’ for me while half asleep<ref>This is the song from the first footnote~  El Bimbo, or ‘Oriibu no Kubikazari’ in Japanese, is the song Murata was singing in chapter 3 when he was being Tokyo Magic Robinson.</ref>.

“Why did you have a smoke bomb on you anyway?  Were you the kind of kid who always had a spy kit?”

“I got it from someone.”

“From who, where and when?  Don’t tell me you got it from the Amazon Seatbelts.”

“No.  I got it at Flynn’s house.  The first night.  It was dark and there were rats.  I got it along with a candle.  From a tall and cool guy.  He said he knew you.”

“A tall and cool guy who knows me!?”

Conrad!

I reflexively sit up.

A spark ran through my brain and something indescribable ran up my spine.  The weight on my chest lifts and suddenly it’s easier to breathe.  I feel like I can suck in all the fresh air in the world.

Lord Conrart Weller.

He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s really alive!  Thank god, he’s really alive.  There’s no way he’d leave me behind and die.

My eyes and nose start to burn and the sensation crept all the way to my chin.  I grab the shoulder of my slumbering friend and shake it with all my might.

“Speak to me, Murata!  Tell me everything!  Hey, he was a guy that looked like an awesome fencer, right?  He was a guy that’s ridiculously charming and the girls would all love and, you know, is like a handsome supporting actor in a romance film that you can really relate to, right?  Hey, that’s right isn’t it!?  Who did he look like?  What famous guy did he look like?”

“Hm, I didn’t really get a good look.  The candlelight was dim and I’m afraid of rats and I was nervous and shaky since it was my first night… maybe Bergkamp?”<ref>Dennis Bergkamp.  Soccer player from Amsterdam.  Here’s his Wikipedia page.</ref>

I forget to even comment on that.

“Tell me a baseball player, please.”

“… Uhhhh…  I gueeeeess then… Kakefu?”

Murata, are you Kunihiro Matsumura?<ref>Combined footnote!  Masayuki Kakefu is a former baseball player for the Hanshin Tigers and is now a commentator.  His commentating style has a lot of drawn out syllables.  Kunihiro Matsumura is a comedian famous for his impressions and his impression of Kakefu is one of his better known ones.  So, since Murata was drawing out his speech, it sounded like he was doing an impression of Kakefu.</ref>

But Conrad…

Gazing at the stars above me, I listen to Ken Murata drowsily prattle on with his soccer lingo as he drifts off to sleep.

If that’s true, then why aren’t you here?



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