Chapter 65: What's Wrong with That?

"...I brought them all here, but there are really a lot of them."

"Jeez. Compared to Senior Alice's fame, this is actually a small amount. We only managed to send this much because everything was so rushed; if the schedule had been announced in advance and people had time to prepare gifts, there would have been ten times this much. The people sending gifts now are only the hardcore fans who prepared and sent one as soon as they heard the news."

"What a joke."

"I'm not joking."

"...Ahem. Anyway, I'll start sorting these. I'll ask you again tonight."

"Can't I watch from beside you again? You can read the letters yourself, and I can help sort the gifts. There looks like quite a lot, too."

"It's fine. How much could there... be..."

Now that I look at them, I guess there are quite a lot.

Just judging by the amount visible, there are four boxes like the ones I received before. Even if they aren't packed full, there must be at least three or four times as much.

"...Since you helped transport them, you'd probably misunderstand if I just sent you away, thinking they were something really strange... I'll show you. Honestly, I don't know what's in them either."

"What if there's something really weird? Like underwear worn by a fan!"

"You have quite an imagination."

Could there really be such a person? Someone who sends the underwear they've worn to an idol they claim to be a fan of?

The world is wide, and there are plenty of fucking idiots in it, so there might be someone like that somewhere. But people like that would be in prison, not out in society. Crimes targeting magical girls usually carry harsher sentences than ordinary crimes. Someone with no way to make a living who wanted to get into prison might try something like that.

...In any case, the company inspected everything before handing it over, so nothing that strange would ever reach me. Sapphire had told me that the gifts entering the company were all checked by a magical girl who could detect anything dirty, unsanitary, or otherwise dangerous.

These days, it might look like a job that merely wastes magic power because almost nothing is ever found, but apparently it was one of the few jobs where noncombat magical girls could work steadily while receiving a regular salary, so they kept it going.

One way or another, that company really did go all out supporting magical girls.

It's no wonder Emerald was treated as the chairwoman whom magical girls revered. Thanks to that woman's accomplishments, magical girls' lives had genuinely improved a great deal.

I hadn't received any subsidies, but I had benefited quite a bit from the social atmosphere and other such things without even realizing it, so I thought well of her.

...Although her trying to hug me whenever we met was a little uncomfortable.

...No, honestly, it was very uncomfortable. It might have been fine if she'd been a little more intellectual and composed, but she was far too tactless.

I'd met many magical girls over the past eight years, but even now, she was the only person who kept trying to hug Alice whenever she got the chance.

No matter how much of a character it was, who would dare hug Alice, a ten-year magical-girl veteran and the fourth-ranked S-rank?

The third-ranked S-rank does. Damn this rank worship.

"...Mr. Sejin?"

"I was thinking about tonight's menu. Let's finish opening them."

"How about hamburgers? I want some french fries."

"Hamburgers sound fine... You seem to be assuming we'll eat together."

"We're neighbors anyway. It'd be nice to eat together! And cleaning up would be easier, too!"

...It had been eight years since I started enjoying eating alone. Hearing someone say that it would be nice to eat together now...

"Since you agreed to help tonight, I'll buy. It's only polite to buy you a meal while you're doing me a favor."

"Oh. My favorite hamburgers are handmade, so they're expensive."

"You still seem stuck in your old impression of me... Even if I look unemployed, I'm not actually unemployed, you know?"

"Oh, right. That's true. Then I'll eat gratefully. Hehe."

Anyway, it was really time to unpack the boxes. It probably wouldn't cause any problems, but for now I transformed into Alice and sat on the floor where we'd laid out the boxes.

"We've spent long enough on digressions. Let's start unpacking. If we roughly sort them in advance... food goes here. Decorations with no function go here. Put functional things like cosmetics and perfume over here. And collect the letters separately, please."

As I said that and began unpacking the boxes, I could feel Mia staring intently at me.

"...Why are you looking at me like that?"

"...Do you sit differently when transformed and when you're not?"

"Different way of sitting?"

"That thing you're doing with your legs... Your knees are bent and your legs are spread outward."

Following Mia's gaze down toward my legs, I realized what she meant.

I was currently transformed. Alice's wide skirt covered most of my legs, so they couldn't be seen, but the outer sides of my feet poked out from beneath the skirt. That alone was enough to infer what position the rest of my legs were in.

"Of course they're different. Do you think I normally sit like this?"

"You sat down so naturally... I thought this was a pretty uncomfortable position for men."

"I was naturally flexible to begin with... and I practiced quite a bit. I almost never sit on the floor as Alice, but when I do, I sit like this. Besides, wouldn't Alice sitting cross-legged kind of break character?"

"Hmm... I suppose so."

Now she's gone so far as to wonder about how I sit. What's so fascinating about this?

I've always been flexible; it runs in the family...

"All right, no more digressions. We need to sort these. The sooner we finish, the sooner we can go again tonight."

"Gifts from other fans, huh? Yesterday was a little boring, but there are enough today to make unpacking them worthwhile. There'll be even more tomorrow, right?"

"...I'll bring them over after we finish filming tomorrow."

"True. The timing would be awkward. Then let's sort these."

She really stopped digressing and began unpacking and sorting the boxes. Food made up the largest portion by far. Perfume and cosmetics came next.

I have no use for them.

In the minds of the people who gave these gifts, Alice was a mysterious, beautiful girl who worked as a magical girl but blended into society in her everyday life, and they probably imagined her thanking them for their gifts while using the cosmetics and perfume they'd given her... But it was already too late. Ten years ago, it might actually have happened.

"This is food... Huh. It's soap. Senior, take a look at this."

"What happened... What is that? Chocolate?"

"It's soap."

"That's soap?!"

"Is this an assassination attempt? Would a magical girl's body be okay if she ate soap?"

"...Is it safe, Mr. Rabbit?"

[I found about three cases. They weren't life-threatening, but apparently the people suffered from indigestion for about a day. If you're really curious, eating it probably won't kill you, but I don't recommend it.]

...I hadn't asked because I expected there to be cases. People in this world really were all kinds of strange.

"This is... chocolate-scented perfume."

"There are more people who want to assassinate Alice than I expected."

"The soap does feel a little malicious... but with perfume, you'd know the moment you opened it. Surely no one would drink it."

[There are two cases involving perfume. Vomiting and indigestion. Don't eat this.]

"...I'll take that to heart, Mr. Rabbit."

I mean, why the hell did these magical-girl idiots keep eating that stuff?

Soap aside, why on earth would anyone drink perfume? Did they mistake it for a beverage or syrup?

And so, the box-unpacking job—long or short as it may have been—came to an end.

There were about thirty letters, just as Sapphire had said... and the quality of the gifts was higher than yesterday's. Perfume and cosmetics alone took up a lot of space, and there were about five of them in sight, so it was no wonder the number of boxes had increased so dramatically.

"The amount of real, edible chocolate has increased a lot too... When am I supposed to eat all this..."

I suppose so much arrived because chocolate was the representative food everyone knew Alice liked... Anyone looking at this would think it was Valentine's Day.

"If I deliberately collected chocolate as Alice, I could take a bath using nothing but the chocolate I've received as gifts."

"...People tend to think playing around with chocolate is easy, but chocolate in liquid form is hot. If you let it touch your body for no reason, you'll get burned."

"You're right?!"

So let's just use chocolate for its intended purpose and eat it quietly. Don't play around with food.

Most of it cost at least tens of thousands of won, and there wasn't a single cheap chocolate worth a few thousand won sold at a supermarket or convenience store. Was that it? Some vague mentality like, 'I can't feed cheap chocolate to my beloved Alice'?

'She never cared about that kind of thing.'

She'd simply liked chocolate; she wasn't the type to savor expensive chocolate and say, 'As expected, expensive chocolate really is different.'

Well, she might actually have preferred expensive chocolate, but that no longer mattered.

"Are you going to use the cosmetics? These look pretty expensive too."

"I don't think so."

"Do you already have products you use? Come to think of it, your skin is exceptionally smooth and pretty for a man."

"I used to use some things because I thought I had to take care of my skin to work as Alice... but these days, I don't really use anything."

Cosmetics were only useful if I had somewhere to go after dressing up... How often did I ever have reason to do that?

"...Even if you'd taken exceptionally good care of yourself, you don't look like you're twenty-seven—and you say you don't even take care of your skin?"

"Magical girls have good skin and stay young even without doing anything special."

"...That applies to men too?"

"Why wouldn't it? We're all human in the end. Anyway... I'll handle sorting the rest now. Go back and rest. If there's anything you want, you can take one or two things."

"Hmm... It's all right. Taking something another fan gave you would be rude. Then I'll go finish writing my letters too!"

"Yes, do th... Wait a moment. Are you still writing that?"

"It's a letter containing my feelings for you, Senior. How could I write it carelessly? I'll fill it to the brim until the deadline."

"...You didn't put the confidential stuff in the letter, right?"

"Of course not! Well, I did write it without thinking at first, but I deleted it, so it's fine! I lost 50 percent of the length, though!"

"That wasn't just something you wrote without thinking, was it?!"

"It came out that way while I was writing! Don't worry! I deleted it all!"

...She said that, then left my house and returned to her own.

"...But when am I supposed to read all this?"

Gifts were gifts, and letters were letters.

I'd said I'd read them all, so I intended to do it even if it took time... but before I could deal with these letters, another new pile was going to accumulate.

...It was one of those moments that happened ten times a day and made me really start to hate being a magical girl.