My Maid is a Formless Entity:Volume 1 Chapter 1

The sounds of the giant birds pursued the two through the passage. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" they cried. "Tekeli-li!"

H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

Chapter I. The Formless Maid Cometh Ia! Ia! Ia!

I knew not if I was facing a good direction or evil direction. In any case, in exactly three minutes my life was about take a dramatic turn.

"You... you are our Master, are you not?"

The voice echoed like a flute from my bath, which I had thought was unoccupied. Before I could react, my neck was being gently, yet forcefully gripped by two long arms coming out of the bathtub.

"How we've waited to meet you, Master! You are our first Master in 1,550,000 years!"

Suddenly, the face of a cute girl emerged, coming so close to my own that our noses were nearly touching. Her glimmering eyes peered intently at my face. Her eyes were an emerald green that would have gotten me quite interested in any other situation.

"You have come! From countless eternities beneath the frozen soil, we have awaited your arrival! Let us stay together indefinitely!"

The girl, on the verge of tears, with all the earnesty of a dog encountering its long-lost owner, snuggled her cheeks against mine over and over. I struggled beneath the weight of this unusually powerful girl's arms, and was unable to move. The phrase "there was nothing I could have done" floated involuntarily through my head.

My name is Tooru Araizawa. Every day, I leave my home in Tokyo's Nanigawa Ward and go to Misukawa Private School, where I am a 10th grader. Living alone at this age has given me a bad habit of excess reading. Other than those non-standard features, I'm a pretty ordinary student. I plan to become a civil servant after graudating and preserve my ordinary lifestyle.

How many things can you do in three minutes?

1/20th of an hour, 120 seconds. The second hand goes around three times. For example, most of the instant ramen sold at supermarkets and convenience stores takes three minutes to go from raw to cooked.

Light travels 300,000 kilometers per second. In 3 minutes, therefore, light can travel 54 million killometers. It's hard to plop an image of that into your head, but the distance from Earth to Mars, for comparison, is about 54 million kilometers.

Only three minutes. But at the same time, three minutes.

From today to tomorrow, tomorrow to the next day, things don't change from day to day, but in three minutes everything can change dramatically. For example, what occurred in my body on this day.

"Oi oi oi, calm down, fraülein!"

Why fraülein?, I asked myself, surprised. I must have panicked.

"Okay, okay, I understand your feelings. You've been waiting a hundred million years or whatever, but I understand so please let go of me!"

With a reluctant air, the girl released her hands from my throat.

Emerald green. That was my first impression of her. It wasn't just the color of her eyes-- her hair, the touch of which confirmed through physical contact the mess I had come into, was also a vibrant, glossy green. And above all, the one-piece she was dressed in was the color of her eyes, like a forest floor.

And one more thing. Her lace-rimmed hat, the pure which French cuffs on her sleeves, and the frilled apron covering her chest, made her occupation as clear as any story. That's right -- it was unmistakable. This uniform was the working uniform of a servant in a 19th century upper class Victorian British home, that is, a maid uniform!

I'd seen it on TV and in manga, but this was my first time seeing it in person.

"Are you a... maid?"

That was my first time meeting Tekeli-chan.

⁂

Let's wind the clock back about thirty minutes.

It was the first day of Japan's only vacation week, in early May. My sole objective for Golden Week was to get through the unread books I had verheffend [Dutch: "piled up"]. Embracing the rush of exhaustion after an all-night spree spent reading the Norwegian private eye Sigerson's travelogue of the Himalayas, I coveted a respite in my warm futon. I would have been pleased to drift into dreamland without further interruption, but the untimely sound of the doorbell forbid such luxury.

Arising bleary-eyed, I could not say I was in the best of humor. But when I opened the door to the sight of a deliveryman panting while shifting the weight of a large crate against his chest, I was unable to maintain my sullen expression.

"Sign here... great, thanks." The deliveryman lowered the heavy-looking crate to the ground and walked away, revealing on his back a logo not often seen in my neighborhood. During Golden Week, only a truly reckless person would request that the shipping company deliver a package in the early morning. But when I saw that it was an international package, there was no need to confirm the sender.

"...dammit, Dad, you woke me up on purpose, didn't you."

Just in case, I examined the origin address, and saw the name "Fremantle". An Australian town, where packages from Japan's Antarctic base passed through.

"Let's see..." I examined the box. It was the size of a large airplane carry-on and covered in "Keep Cold" stickers. I undid the tie and cut open the packaging with an Exacto knife.

As the package fell open, I felt a blast of cool air. On top of an enormous ice pack, the words "To My Son" were scribbled in a disagreeable hand on an envelope, which I swiftly enshrined in a plastic bag. If I'm going to be encountering something that dredges up ill feelings from the cockles of my heart, preparation like this is essential. I let out a deep sigh. I'd been burdened with packages like this before, and generally, when I didn't deal with them quickly, something bad was bound to happen.

For example... no, let's not go there.

Removing the letter from the plastic bag -- which was written not on any sort of stationery, but on something that looked like a field notebook -- I opened up, and read a short, simple message. Or, rather, a command.

Dear son, here is a present from your father. Place the contents in hot water for three minutes. Your father is always watching you.

I wanted to dispose of the letter after the "Dear Son" but that was impossible. The "your father is always watching" line meant that if I didn't do as ordered, I wouldn't be able to count on my weekly allowance. This I knew from long experience.

No more allowance means a lot to a minor, who is unable to seek part-time employment to cover his daily living expenses. In fact, it's the worst kind of threat I could receive.

My future plan is simple. I couldn't care less about Dad's reputation as a world-famous archaeologist, but I aim to escape economic servitude to his inept personality, and achieve a peaceful life employed as a civil servant.

To achieve that goal, there is only one option available to me at this moment. I must follow my father's incomprehensible orders. Ages ago, I figured out what the consequences were for asking, "what?" or "why?"

The sink is too small. I'll have to carry it to the tub. Heaving a big sigh, I violently stuffed my father's letter into my pocket, and put my strength into lifting the crate.

"...This thing is heavy!!"

It was about as heavy as a person, and I couldn't lift the whole thing myself. Four sacks of rice -- roughly 40 kilos [that's 90 pounds in Amurrican].

Somehow I carried the crate into the tub. Time to see what exactly these precious contents were.

I removed the ice pack from the crate, and encountered... what appeared at first glance to be... a large rice cake.

Before my eyes was an enormous agglomeration of "something", an ovaloid about 80 centimeters [2.5 feet] in diameter.

I lightly touched the face covered in frost, and it responded to my fingers with stiff but gummy wobbling. Below the frost was a mixture of green and black, with spots of red and yellow mixed in. Where the light hit it, I could see various bright colors -- to be poetic, iridescence. To be somewhat less poetic, it gave me the impression of a film of gasoline on stagnant water.

Deciding I was as ready as I'd ever be, I turned on the hot water over this Mysterious Substance X. I turned the taps to the heat of the human body.

The covering of frost which had given the object its white appearance melted away under the hot water, and the iridescent sparkling increased. A nasty chill went down my spine.

Feeling somehow grossed out, I turned off the tap and put the cover over the bathtub as soon as the hot water reached the rim. Now, I had to wait three minutes. Whatever is going to come out of this, I thought, it's certainly nothing decent. This was the extent of my thoughts.

Thud!!

A loud crack interrupted my contemplation. It was like a hammer hitting wood or something, and it was right near me.

Thud! Kkrrrk -- krrk -- krrrdrdd --!!

The sound went from cracking to scratching. Now it had transformed into a dull sound like wood getting dented. The source, obviously, was inside my bathtub.

Dddddddddd!!

Place the contents in hot water for three minutes.

And so exactly three minutes went by. At that instant, the din up vanished, and the room became so silent to make me doubt my memory. The bathroom area was blanketed in silence.

Gulp. The sound of me swallowing echoed in my ears.

Nothing was flying out of the tub, and I didn't hear anything inside it.

Well, I couldn't just sit there like an idiot. Whether standing before an unknown door, or faced with a fruit of unknown taste at the supermarket, the human thing to do is to what I did next.

Knock on it.

"Knock-knock, who's there?"

Taking care not to make a big sound, I lightly struck the bathtub cover.

"Hello, welcome to Japan. Anyone in there?"

I carried on the joke pointlessly, but there was no reply. One thing left to do.

"Guess I've got to see for myself!"

Carefully, carefully... With the pointer finger of my left hand, I lifted up the lid of the bathtub ever so slightly. But there were no toxic smells assaulting my nostrils. Having expected something horrid, I breathed a sigh of relief. But this was no time for carelessness. This was, after all, a "present" from Father.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I flung open the lid.

And:

"You... you are our Master, are you not?"

In other words, that brings us up to speed.