When it came down to it, Miyoshi and I really were birds of a feather.

  Annotations

  Five milliliters of wheat flour to make the roux: This is a theoretical value. In reality, it would be extremely difficult to make it with such a small amount. Maybe if you used the tiniest pot in the world... Note that roux (a cooked mixture of flour and butter) is generally made using a one-to-one ratio of wheat flour and butter. “Fond” is used to produce soup stock. “Béchamel” and “velouté” are two of the so-called “mother sauces” of French cuisine.

  Quenelle: A dish made by mincing meat or fish together with a binder, rolling it into balls, and boiling it.

  Mysterious Kisaragi reference: Megumi Kisaragi was a colleague of Black Jack’s during their medical internship, and also his first love. As for the “one month off” joke, “Mutsuki” is the older, traditional Japanese name for the month of January, while “Kisaragi” is the equivalent name for the month of February.

  Commentary

  Here we have the first appearance of Megumi, whom everyone adores.

  I could never publicly admit that I started writing this short story based on the super cliché idea that “Hey, any story with children and small animals in it is sure to be a major crowd-pleaser, right?!”

  By the way, I had never realized that a cat seated in the pose mentioned in the story was referred to as “sitting Egyptian-style” in Japanese. Come to think of it, the famous statue of Bastet in the British Museum (also known as the Gayer-Anderson cat) sits in that very same pose. She’s even got a cute little scarab on top of her head. That’s right, she’s a black cat too! The Wadjet Eye adorning her chest isn’t an Eye of Horus, but an Eye of Ra—perhaps a nod to how cats tend to stomp violently all over people’s keyboards and ruin their hard work. (lol)

  The “incense box” sitting pose, as it’s known in Japanese, is mentioned in various literary works, but who came up with “sitting Egyptian-style” anyway? When did people start calling it that? Obviously cats have been sitting in that particular pose since time immemorial, and no doubt someone would’ve tried to express the concept in Japanese, but try as I might, I couldn’t find any answers. I even tried searching for the phrase on the Aozora Bunko website, but ended up with zero hits.

  Even if I had a massive dictionary in front of me that covered absolutely everything, without at least a vague idea of where to start looking, I’d never be able to locate anything at all. Sadness.

  My research seemed to indicate that in English-speaking countries, the same pose is referred to arbitrarily as things like “the statue,” “the pear,” or “the humpback whale.” The first two sort of make sense, but why humpback whale? Why something with a physical condition that gives it a bent back like a certain man from Notre-Dame, the Japanese word for which I can’t print here because it’s considered a discriminatory term? Why a whale at all? I don’t get it.

  By the way, the “incense box” sitting pose is apparently sometimes referred to as the “bean” or “meatloaf” pose in English, based on the overall shape, and from there the standard term became “cat loaf.” Strangely enough, there don’t seem to be a lot of names for cat poses in English. In the end, the best results seem to come from using proper descriptive terminology, like “a cat sitting on its behind with its front paws together, a prim and proper expression on its face as it tilts its head to one side,” or “a cat fully seated with its paws sticking straight out in front of it and its head high up in the air, scanning the area nervously.”

  When this short story first made its debut, Yoshimura and Miyoshi ended up learning that consuming dungeon-grown wheat gives people D-Cards after reading a report from the WDA. (That was because this short story originally came with volume 7, which discussed said phenomenon in the epilogue.) However, in the mainline story, they don’t actually learn about it until February 5, 2019 (volume 8), in a scene where Nathan blindsides the two of them by sharing that little tidbit in person. It also turns out that Nathan had come to Japan without reporting his discovery at all, just so he could consult them about it. (Annotation 12 in volume 8 is more or less just an apology for this discrepancy.)

  For that reason, this story has now been reworked and revised to take place sometime after February 5.

  Now that this book has been accepted for publication and I’ve managed to incorporate these stories into the official timeline, who knows, maybe Megumi and her mom will end up making an appearance in the mainline novels? For now, that possibility will have to remain a mystery, hidden behind a veil of countless stacks of pages. (That’s another way of saying I haven’t decided yet.)

  Oh, that’s right—in all honesty, I’m also the type of guy who always ends up hoarding his elixirs until the end.

  Chapter 8: Black Cat

  Foreword

  I wanted to write this story from Ai’s point of view, and it somehow ended up being a cross between Natsume Soseki and Edgar Allan Poe.

  This short story was also what motivated me to have this entire collection published in the first place. Please see the “About This Publication” section at the beginning of the book for full details.

  Black Cat

  As I understand it, I am a cat. I have a name: Mama. Sometimes they call me Ai instead.

  Of the humans living in this house, I once heard the one with the lower-pitched voice say, “For a black cat, we’ve gotta go with Pluto,” to which the one with the higher-pitched voice responded, “No way, I’d be afraid we’d start hearing howling noises from inside the walls.” I may be a clever cat, but I’m afraid burrowing into walls is beyond my realm of expertise, meow.

  Hmmm... For some reason I felt the strange urge to end the previous sentence with a “meow.” Why on earth would I need to do that? It almost feels offensive in a way. I’ll need to choose my words more carefully.

  Um, in any case, humans are these unbearable creatures who have a tendency to assign names to us when no one asks them to, in an effort to restrict our very existence. The least they could do is pick a name and stick with it; that would be far less confusing for us as well.

  I should add that up until recently, I thought that they were all just loud, screaming, unpleasant creatures. Then I was assaulted by that blasted monster and lost all coherence amid the throes of pain. By the time my head had cleared, I realized I could understand what the humans were saying.

  Though I have very little solid recollection of anything that happened prior to all that, for some reason my memories of the small human named Megumi giving me shelter and summoning the two larger humans to save my life are crystal clear.

  The location I was taken to after those events is far more sanitary than the cramped little space I had been in previously, and spacious enough to where my two daughters won’t have to fight over territory once they’ve grown up. Not only that, food is provided at regular intervals, and no one complains about our presence as long as we use the proper waste receptacles.

  With all those amenities, I’d say it’s a pleasant enough place to live—apart from the large building behind it that I’m glancing up at right now. I’ve always had the unnerving feeling that something awful is keeping a constant eye on us from inside that building.

  The humans always seem to be rushing about like crazy, day in and day out. They must be a bit too dim to enjoy the cat life like we do—curling up in a cool spot when it’s warm out, and curling up in a warm spot when it’s cool.

  There are several large dogs inside the house, but none of them ever come outside, making them completely useless as guard dogs. Don’t they realize that merely lying down in the yard occasionally would at least provide some intimidation factor? They certainly aren’t the brightest group of canines out there.

  Since I can understand what the humans are saying, I imagine I must have evolved from nyanzapithecus. But what is nyanzapithecus, anyway? I’ve had quite a few strange thoughts inexplicably pop into my head lately. I suppose that’s just a side effect of being wise, meow.

  A-Ahem.

  Anyway, as unbearable as humans can be, they can do laudable things as well on occasion. Today they are running around like busy bees as usual, doing something they call “work,” all in service to me and the maintenance of my high-class idler lifestyle. What choice do I have but to offer them my protection in return?

  “Mama—um, I mean, Ai! How are you?”

  Hm, that voice—has Megumi come to visit?

  “Hee hee hee. Lookie what I’ve got here!”

  The small human takes her hand out from behind her back, revealing some sort of soft stick with a fluffy object attached to the end of it.

  Sorry to say, but I cannot be swayed by such childish—

  “Mrowr!”

  “Ha ha!”

  Augh! I pounced at the blasted thing despite myself!

  I-I, uh... I’m only playing with it as a favor to this human. Yes, that’s right, meow. Sigh.

  ***

  “A new resident?”

  “Well, maybe ‘resident’ isn’t quite the right word, but it seems to have settled into the area at some point, and even follows them into the building sometimes.”

  The current leader of the British surveillance team, Carter, who had just returned to Japan after being summoned home for a stint, flipped through the report Allen had given him. Allen had been added to the team to replace Adams, who had mysteriously vanished and somehow ended up being deported right under everyone’s noses. The subject of said report was none other than—

  “A cat?”

  Denver, who had been teaming up with Allen rather often as of late, let out a subdued chuckle when he saw the scowl on Carter’s face.

  “A black cat is the perfect fit for a house of horrors like that, isn’t it?” he chimed in.

  Allen, paying no heed to the cold glare Denver’s joke had elicited from Carter, followed up with a joke of his own.

  “It is a witch’s abode, after all. I’m sure the cat’s got a girlfriend named Lily or something.”

  Allen was the team’s slightly eccentric Japanese expert. He was a brilliant man who spoke perfect Japanese, but sometimes the others had no idea what he was talking about.

  Carter gave him a puzzled look.

  “The report says it’s a female cat, though.”

  “What’s wrong with that? ‘Lily’ in Japanese is ‘yuri’—sounds like a perfect fit to me!”

  Hearing that, Denver rolled his eyes and shrugged hopelessly.

  “I bet you were the guy who burned all of J. M. W. Turner’s nudes, weren’t you?”

  John Ruskin was supposedly the one who first used the word “lily” in reference to lesbian relationships, perhaps as a symbol of purity. Ruskin was a patron of Turner, sometimes known as “the painter of light.” However, Ruskin, perhaps due to his inflated, biased sense of aesthetics, or his obsession with the artist’s creations, supposedly ended up burning all of Turner’s nude paintings.

  “There’s always the rumor that some of Ruskin’s lovers secretly modeled for those nudes, which royally pissed him off. I wonder if there’s any truth to all that?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  After skimming through the report and placing it down on his desk, Carter took a seat on the couch and started asking questions.

  “So you think we can use this cat to get more intel, huh? If I’m not mistaken, didn’t another country try something along those lines already and fail miserably—at the cost of about twenty million bucks?”

  “Technology has come a long way in the past forty or so years.”

  With that, Allen pulled out an injector meant for subcutaneously implanting microchip-sized digital listening devices into pets. He had gotten it through the embassy not long after they had come up with the plan.

  “It looks pretty small, but if the device stays under the skin, won’t they be able to feel it when they pick the cat up?”

  “That’s exactly why we’re aiming for the larger cat, even though the kittens would probably be easier to catch.”

  The kittens were handled fairly often, but it was rare to see that happen with the larger cat. Perhaps she wasn’t a fan of being picked up.

  “That makes sense.”

  “The house may have some kind of sound-blocking technology in place, but we know they’re using cell phones in there, so wireless signals should get through just fine. We should be able to obtain at least a little bit of info before they figure us out.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Not only that, but I’m betting our upstairs neighbors have similar plans in mind.”

  Their team was on the fourth floor of the Fontaine. It was a bit of an open secret that the United States and Russia both had spaces on the fifth floor—and no doubt those teams both knew about the British team as well. With all the groups stuck together in such tight quarters, conflict might have seemed inevitable, but a strange, unspoken rule had developed between them that prevented them from interfering with each other.

  “Early bird gets the worm, eh?”

  “The Yanks have been a bit on the namby-pamby side lately, haven’t they?”

  The members of Team Simon were on friendly terms with the targets and went inside the house frequently. Perhaps the Americans figured it wasn’t worth putting that relationship at risk by randomly rocking the boat.

  It would’ve been great if William had been able to get the same kind of in with the targets, but unfortunately Thomas had already managed to screw things up in that regard...

  “All right. If you can do it, do it. What’s the plan to secure the cat?”

  “Take a look.”

  This time, Allen handed a different document to Carter.

  “Operation Pluto?”

  “Well, since a black cat is gonna reveal their secrets to us from inside the walls...”

  Names can be awfully revealing, thought Carter, smiling bitterly as he flipped through the document. Naming the project something so obvious might well give away our entire mission.

  “Anyway, at around the same time every day, the cat takes one lap around the top of the fence surrounding the house. Provided it’s not raining, that is.”

  “Like she’s patrolling her territory or something, huh?”

  “She claws at the top of the fence sometimes too.”

  Carter rubbed his chin. They say cats like to leave claw marks in high places when they’re claiming their territory... What’s the point of doing that in a place so high up that nobody can even see it, though?

  “When she comes around to this side of the fence, we’ll shoot her with a fast-acting tranquilizer dart.”

  “It’s not easy to snipe a target almost directly below you.”

  “Ten meters is child’s play. Besides, it’s not like our lives’ll be in danger if we miss.”

  Denver, who was going to be in charge of the sniping, gave a brief nod, confirming that it shouldn’t be a problem.

  “Yeah, I suppose not.”

  Eckley, who would be waiting on the ground, would quickly use the injector, then carefully toss the target back over the fence, and that would be that. Twenty minutes later, the cat would wake up as if nothing had happened.

  The recorded data would then be transmitted back at regular intervals until the device’s battery ran out—and the targets would be none the wiser, as long as they weren’t on constant lookout for those sorts of things.

  Once he had finished going over the plan, Carter looked back up at his men.

  “All right then. Commence Operation Pluto.”

  ***

  “Hey Miyoshi.”

  “What’s up?”

  I glanced over toward the garage at the back of the office, where a large outline that appeared to be Drudwyn was hanging its head low in front of a small black mass.

  “I see them doing that every once in a while. Any idea what the deal is?”

  The tiny black mass pawed furiously at the ground, letting out several plaintive meows.

  ***

  I’m telling you, there’s something awful up there, meow!

  Don’t just sit there looking all apologetic and downcast! Get out there and start gnashing your teeth, meow!

  “Grrrrr.”

  You can’t let yourself be seen? Ridiculous, meow! A massive body like that is made to be put on display, meow! You’re no good to anyone if you stay cooped up inside, meow!

  Ugh, I’m doing the blasted meow-meow thing again, meow.

  ***

  Miyoshi peered into the garage from her spot in the dining room and started giggling.

  “Looks like Ai is giving Drudwyn a stern talking-to. She already got Cavall pretty good earlier.”

  “A talking-to...? Can they even talk to each other in the first place? They’re not even the same species.”

  “Good question. It kind of seems like both of them can understand what we’re saying sometimes, though. It wouldn’t really be that odd if they could talk to each other too, would it?”

  Hellhounds and cats? Sharing a lingua franca of Japanese?

  “No, that would definitely fall under ‘odd’ to me.”

  It sure doesn’t seem like they’re using sounds to communicate. And even if they were communicating using telepathy, “meow” was still the only thing Mama could say.

  Wait. Telepathy?

  A strange thought suddenly came to mind, and I couldn’t help but say it out loud.

  “Hey Miyoshi. If Monster A defeated Monster B, would Monster A get a D-Card?”

  “You know, I’ve never considered that...”

  It was a well-known fact that animals could get D-Cards to drop by defeating monsters. Nobody had ever directly confirmed any cases of monsters fighting with each other, so what might happen was beyond anyone’s guess. However, we did know that monsters could defeat other monsters—thanks to the existence of summoning magic.

  “The first time Cavall and the others defeated any monsters was right after we summoned them on the tenth floor, but I’m not sure whether we even would’ve noticed a D-Card drop in the middle of all that commotion.”