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Scrapped Princess | Canzonetta of the Unforgiven | The Travelers Come | Part 2/4
Amid the faint darkness, several figures quietly abode.
They were four in number . . . most likely. I hesitate to aver because those men just so happened to share a mutual resemblance of the kind in which individual differentiation becomes ambiguous.
Similar hairstyles. Similar statures. Similar garments.
No . . . it would be quicker to cite their differences than their similarities. Those figures had been stripped of anything that could be called individual; were they to stand in a line, they would look like the gathering of illusory images that abide in two facing mirrors.
Of course, flesh-and-blood humans cannot become mirror images--looking at each man's face, each had its respective distinctions. However, those distinctions were completely buried in the overall atmosphere of forced uniformity.
". . . listen well."
A white light sliced through the dimness.
The men turned to face it--their movements not so much as a moment off, and showing not the least bit of disorder. That light was enough to sear their eyes (which had grown accustomed to the darkness) but they faced it head-on, neither squinting their eyes nor turning their backs. As though they were puppets, all connected to the same string, they all simply gazed expressionlessly at the light--at the person who stood in that light.
"O Purgers . . ."
That was their name.
No other names denoted them. Not even names that would distinguish one personality from the next. Because there was neither need nor reason to do so.
"I bestow on you a new mission," the figure informed them in a still voice.
Backlit as it was, all details of that figure were blotted out by the blackness of shadows, rendering it indistinct. However, that abiding silhouette, which clipped through the light, possessed an exquisite symmetry.
You could not simply call it mere beauty. The lines that delineated that figure held nothing that could be called a flaw, and the elegance and dignity they spun were twined round by a coldness that echoed atrocity.
Beauty invokes passion. Furthermore, beauty that has been honed like a blade brings forth only dread. That is the kind of beauty that this person manifested.
"In the name of the Lord Mauser, purify the cursed soul."
Even so . . . the expressions of the men showed no strong emotion.
To them, neither beauty nor ugliness was anything more than a signifier. The only thing they had was their faith.
They were born for their faith, lived for their faith, died for their faith.
All other things were impure, worldly thoughts.
"The name of the cursed soul is Pacifica."
The men stirred. They quivered just like a bow and arrow, when the target is chosen and the string drawn fully back.
"It is the Scrapped Princess, Pacifica Casull."
All the same, the men's expressions did not change.
Purgers do not feel surprise. Nor do they feel wrath or sorrow. Laughter is out of the question. They do not worry, do not feel, do not think--they are merely loosed in the direction of their objective.
They are beings who have cast aside all that is human in them, in exchange for the ability to go through any obstacle and "purify" their target.
". . . go."
Moving in perfect order, they bowed, and then--as though their very existence were mere illusion--they vanished from that place.
Once their their target is decided, they run without leaving so much as an afterimage behind. They do not hesitate. They do not waver. They harbor no questions like . . . Why? For instruments of death and bloodshed--whose forms are all that remain of their humanity--that is probably the appropriate means of departure.
They think nothing. Doubt nothing.
Not even if, behind the shadow of the person before their eyes--behind that silhouette that was engraved into the level surface of the floor--the enormous shadows of wings were adjoined, though no such thing should have existed on the one who cast the shadow.
"Winia~! Wi! Ni! A!"
The afternoon found Pacifica toying with Winia's apron.
From the beginning, Pacifica had an air of cleverness about her that resembled that of a tiny, wild beast. When she started to play like this, as though the thought had just popped into her head all of a sudden (and yet, for all that, her demeanor somehow bearing traces of something like an awe-inspiring dignity), her appearance was, without a doubt, that of a cat itself.
"Come on, show me around the city. To the sightseeing spots and the stores you recommend and everything."
"Eh? . . . But I . . ."
It may have been a small inn, but there was a great deal of work to be done. Especially since--with her grandmother spending so much time abed--Winia was, in effect, the Big Bear's only staff. Washing the bed sheets and the curtains, doing preparatory work for supper, and on top of that, making any needed repairs . . . Her duties were enough to make anyone who was not used to such work dizzy just from hearing them.
But then, that was not the only reason Winia hesitated to grant Pacifica's request.
Having someone latch onto her so unreservedly, Winia found herself at a loss.
It was not that she was misanthropic, but she had a tendency to limit herself to the barest minimum of human interaction. She attended to others in a businesslike manner, hardly ever allowing her emotions to show on the surface. That was how seventeen years of life had taught her to conduct herself.
"Ah, am I bothering you?"
Pacifica pulled away from her with surprising readiness.
She may have been thoroughly selfish when it came to Shannon, but strangely, Pacifica was quite perceptive when it came to the feelings of others.
"Sorry, I guess that was pretty self-centered--I didn't even ask about your schedule, Winia . . ."
Seeing Pacifica withdraw so meekly, it was only human to feel even worse.
"Oh, no. I'm the one who should apologize . . . I'd love to show you around, myself, but we're coming up on the changing of the season, so I need to swap out the sheets and curtains for different colors and do the laundry, so I'm a little short on time."
"You should just leave that kind of thing to someone else."
"Someone else?"
Pacifica pointed at Shannon, who was enjoying a fragrant cup of postprandial tea.
Somehow managing to gulp the tea down instead of inadvertently spewing it everywhere, he looked over at the girls, an annoyed expression on his face.
"Wait a minute, Pacifica. Are you telling me to do the laundry and redecorate the rooms and all?"
"Yep."
Without a moment's delay or hesitation, Pacifica nodded in agreement. The expression on her face--a rare, beaming smile--told the whole story.
You think this is funny, don't you? Shannon thought, as the image of putting on an apron and doing the laundry arose before his mind's eye. Certainly, it was a spectacle that would send him into fits of laughter . . . had it not been himself.
As Shannon knew all too well from experience, if Pacifica hated a chore, it was futile to argue about it. Well, it's probably better than having Raquel do it . . . As he told himself this, Shannon waved his hand at Pacifica and Winia, as though to shoo them away.
"Ahh, fine, all right."
Incidentally, while Raquel may have looked gentle and domestic to a stranger . . . if you carelessly left the housework up to her, it would end in disaster.
It was not that she was incompetent. Cleaning, of course, and laundry and cooking--if she did them in the usual way, she could manage them all handily, and better than the average person.
If she did them in the usual way, but . . .
Even when making an egg sunny side up, she would use military-grade offensive magic for each one. For cleaning and laundry, too, she would use entirely unnecessary spells, each to excessive results.
In the past, when it was time for something like spring cleaning, it was all well and good for her to call up a virtual spirit that had been embedded with simple orders, but when that spirit went berserk and immediately started washing anything it could lay its hands on . . . And on top of that, Shannon had experienced near-drowning because a spirit had washed his clothes while he was still in them.
"Have it your way . . . Just make sure you have Raquel go with you."
"All right. I'll go get Raquel-nee, then."
Winia considered the brother and sister, a bewildered expression on her face. But Pacifica climbed up to the second floor completely unconcernedly.
"Um . . ."
"Guess I'll get the laundry out of the way to start. That means the sheets, curtains, and pillowcases, huh. Well, you'll have to show me how to redecorate after you get back, since that's more of a delicate operation."
At Shannon's wry smile, Winia gave a flustered shake of her head.
"I really shouldn't. Asking a guest to do this sort of thing--"
"Don't worry about it . . . It's not like she just suddenly turned selfish yesterday or today or anything. Well, I'll be working off the discount you gave us on the room, anyway."
Shannon shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
The shops that lined the main street.
Pacifica and the others could be found in one of them: the largest general store in Taurus.
It was a spacious store that dealt in everything from housewares to souvenirs. It had an abundant assortment of merchandise, and--having the advantage of being a large-scale retail store--its prices were low.
In the past, stores like this existed only in the Royal City, which had an abundant supply of goods.
However, for the past twenty years, Leinwand had not known war, and the maintenance of the high roads had continued, so the velocity of circulation of goods and the volume of those goods had risen concurrently. Thus, it had become more common to see large-scale retail stores even in rural areas. Because they offered various conveniences, they had numerous customers and were apparently flourishing.
Well then . . .
"Ohh, that one's so cute, so cute, hey, don't you think so? Ah, this one's cute too."
Just bursting with excitement as she flitted and bustled around the store, Pacifica . . . No, actually, the one doing that was Raquel.
She was meant to have come as a chaperon while Winia showed Pacifica around, but . . . to put it bluntly, the circumstances were such that it was difficult to tell just which one of them was the guardian. Of the local specialties (single-flower vases designed to look like dolls, engraved wood bookends, pencil cases made of patterned cloth, and so on), if Raquel saw one that had the slightest bit of quaintness about it, she would pick it up and fiddle with it.
Well, the fact that she drew the line at indiscriminate, impulse purchases probably proved that what little reason she had was in working order . . .
"This one's so cute too, oh, oh, and this one's so cute too . . . Ohhh, and this one too!"
For Pacifica, who had been sisters with her for fifteen years now, this came as no surprise, but . . . as you might expect, Winia watched in blank amazement as Raquel frolicked around, browsing the sundry knick-knacks.
The sight of that black-clad beauty, gamboling about while her eyes glittered like an infant's . . . it was strangely heartwarming.
"Want to take a little break outside?" Pacifica asked Winia, smiling wryly. "Raquel-nee, we're gonna have a little breather at the stand across the way."
After waiting for Raquel to give them a wave amid her torrent of so cutes, Pacifica left the general store with Winia and stood in front of the fruit water stand across the street.
"Oh, haven't seen you around before, Ojouchan1," the stand's owner called amiably. "You a traveler? Don't see many this time of year, but . . ."
"Yep, that's right."
For her part, Pacifica replied as congenially as though he were an acquaintance she had known for years. There were times when Winia envied that buoyancy of hers.
"Ojisan2, give us two of whatever you recommend."
"Now that puts me in a spot--I'd recommend everything I sell, you know."
"Unyu. That was rude."
Pacifica made a show of smacking her palm against her forehead. Perhaps the owner found that gesture fetching; he laughed comfortably.
"Well, if you twisted my arm, I guess I'd say the apple. This year's crop was a good one."
"We'll have that, then."
"You got it."
The finished cups of fruit water were topped by so much whipped cream that one could not help thinking, Isn't that more than enough?
"A little something extra on the house, for the darling ojouchan."
"Oh, stop it. If you do stuff like that, I'm gonna end up falling for you, you know."
"Hahaha. Be sure to drop by again while you're here."
After conversing along these lines, Pacifica seated herself in one of the chairs that were scattered around the area surrounding the stand. Following suit, Winia sat down beside her.
". . . my older sister's weird, huh?" Turning her gaze back to the general store, Pacifica held out one of the cream-topped fruit waters. "If she just kept quiet, she'd be a real beauty, too."
By that logic, Pacifica had that sort of "if she just kept quiet" mouth on her too. But as you might expect, Winia did not have the courage to point that out. Smiling vaguely, she accepted the fruit water.
"I think it's wonderful that there's something that delights her so much, though."
"Well, Raquel-nee used to collect a whole lot of little knick-knacks like that."
Remembering how her elder sister's room used to look, Pacifica smiled.
Raquel's room ought to have been just as spacious as Shannon's and Pacifica's, but in terms of the sheer density of things they owned--to put it bluntly--her brother's and sister's rooms were as different as a desert and a jungle. Raquel kept everything neatly arranged, so there had been no danger of stepping on anything, but still.
Pacifica had never understood just what was so appealing about them, but . . . she remembered that her elder sister had treated each and every one just as though it were a treasure, and had made as much of them as though they were her beloved children.
"But . . . when we set off on our journey, she had to throw them all out, so it must've made her happy to see those kinds of things again, after so long."
And then . . . she also remembered the sight of her elder sister throwing all of them onto the fire without exception, as though to sever any lingering attachments she had to the life they had lived up to that point.
"Oh . . . Speaking of which, why are you and your siblings on this journey, Pacifica-san?"
It did not seem that they were on a sight-seeing tour, and it was not the right time of year for Mauser's followers to go on pilgrimage.
In the week since they had come to this town, they had not seemed to do anything but relax and let the days go by.
"Nn . . . You want to hear about that?"
"I suppose . . . I know it's rude to ask, but I still wonder about our guests' backgrounds. Since our inn gets a lot of guests who . . . have their reasons to stay with us."
"Reasons?"
Pacifica's expression changed with a start.
"People who have debt collectors after them, people who intend to run off without paying their bills--things like that. We are a cheap inn, after all, and I more or less run it on my own, so maybe we come across as an easy target."
"Ohh, that's what you meant. Right, right. So that's how it is. Must be rough."
Even though she had cream all over her face, Pacifica nodded gravely.
"Well, I'm used to it."
"So that's why you'd want to ask about your guests' backgrounds, huh?"
"Oh, no. I mean, your family has already paid for the week in advance, so it's unreasonable of me to--"
"All right," Pacifica said, cutting Winia's words short. "If you'll drop that 'guest relations' way of talking, maybe I can tell you." She smiled impishly.
[Next] [Previous]
Notes:
1) お嬢ちゃん, variously translated as "Miss," "little miss," "young lady," "little lady," "girl," "little girl," "lass," "missy," or even, apparently, "lamb." Back
2) おじさん, literally "Uncle," but often used like "Mister," "old man," etc. Like お嬢ちゃん, I've decided just to leave it. That is the privilege of the fan translator, after all. Back
Pacifica is quite the charmer. And even though it's a relatively minor thing compared to everything else they've been through, the image of Raquel burning her things is pretty tragic.
The Purgers remind me a bit of Mistborn's Inquisitors.
Edit: Just for the hell of it, here are the results of the Scrapped Princess popularity poll that Dragon Magazine conducted for the Super Guide!:
[Disclaimer]
Scrapped Princess | Canzonetta of the Unforgiven | The Travelers Come | Part 2/4
Amid the faint darkness, several figures quietly abode.
They were four in number . . . most likely. I hesitate to aver because those men just so happened to share a mutual resemblance of the kind in which individual differentiation becomes ambiguous.
Similar hairstyles. Similar statures. Similar garments.
No . . . it would be quicker to cite their differences than their similarities. Those figures had been stripped of anything that could be called individual; were they to stand in a line, they would look like the gathering of illusory images that abide in two facing mirrors.
Of course, flesh-and-blood humans cannot become mirror images--looking at each man's face, each had its respective distinctions. However, those distinctions were completely buried in the overall atmosphere of forced uniformity.
". . . listen well."
A white light sliced through the dimness.
The men turned to face it--their movements not so much as a moment off, and showing not the least bit of disorder. That light was enough to sear their eyes (which had grown accustomed to the darkness) but they faced it head-on, neither squinting their eyes nor turning their backs. As though they were puppets, all connected to the same string, they all simply gazed expressionlessly at the light--at the person who stood in that light.
"O Purgers . . ."
That was their name.
No other names denoted them. Not even names that would distinguish one personality from the next. Because there was neither need nor reason to do so.
"I bestow on you a new mission," the figure informed them in a still voice.
Backlit as it was, all details of that figure were blotted out by the blackness of shadows, rendering it indistinct. However, that abiding silhouette, which clipped through the light, possessed an exquisite symmetry.
You could not simply call it mere beauty. The lines that delineated that figure held nothing that could be called a flaw, and the elegance and dignity they spun were twined round by a coldness that echoed atrocity.
Beauty invokes passion. Furthermore, beauty that has been honed like a blade brings forth only dread. That is the kind of beauty that this person manifested.
"In the name of the Lord Mauser, purify the cursed soul."
Even so . . . the expressions of the men showed no strong emotion.
To them, neither beauty nor ugliness was anything more than a signifier. The only thing they had was their faith.
They were born for their faith, lived for their faith, died for their faith.
All other things were impure, worldly thoughts.
"The name of the cursed soul is Pacifica."
The men stirred. They quivered just like a bow and arrow, when the target is chosen and the string drawn fully back.
"It is the Scrapped Princess, Pacifica Casull."
All the same, the men's expressions did not change.
Purgers do not feel surprise. Nor do they feel wrath or sorrow. Laughter is out of the question. They do not worry, do not feel, do not think--they are merely loosed in the direction of their objective.
They are beings who have cast aside all that is human in them, in exchange for the ability to go through any obstacle and "purify" their target.
". . . go."
Moving in perfect order, they bowed, and then--as though their very existence were mere illusion--they vanished from that place.
Once their their target is decided, they run without leaving so much as an afterimage behind. They do not hesitate. They do not waver. They harbor no questions like . . . Why? For instruments of death and bloodshed--whose forms are all that remain of their humanity--that is probably the appropriate means of departure.
They think nothing. Doubt nothing.
Not even if, behind the shadow of the person before their eyes--behind that silhouette that was engraved into the level surface of the floor--the enormous shadows of wings were adjoined, though no such thing should have existed on the one who cast the shadow.
"Winia~! Wi! Ni! A!"
The afternoon found Pacifica toying with Winia's apron.
From the beginning, Pacifica had an air of cleverness about her that resembled that of a tiny, wild beast. When she started to play like this, as though the thought had just popped into her head all of a sudden (and yet, for all that, her demeanor somehow bearing traces of something like an awe-inspiring dignity), her appearance was, without a doubt, that of a cat itself.
"Come on, show me around the city. To the sightseeing spots and the stores you recommend and everything."
"Eh? . . . But I . . ."
It may have been a small inn, but there was a great deal of work to be done. Especially since--with her grandmother spending so much time abed--Winia was, in effect, the Big Bear's only staff. Washing the bed sheets and the curtains, doing preparatory work for supper, and on top of that, making any needed repairs . . . Her duties were enough to make anyone who was not used to such work dizzy just from hearing them.
But then, that was not the only reason Winia hesitated to grant Pacifica's request.
Having someone latch onto her so unreservedly, Winia found herself at a loss.
It was not that she was misanthropic, but she had a tendency to limit herself to the barest minimum of human interaction. She attended to others in a businesslike manner, hardly ever allowing her emotions to show on the surface. That was how seventeen years of life had taught her to conduct herself.
"Ah, am I bothering you?"
Pacifica pulled away from her with surprising readiness.
She may have been thoroughly selfish when it came to Shannon, but strangely, Pacifica was quite perceptive when it came to the feelings of others.
"Sorry, I guess that was pretty self-centered--I didn't even ask about your schedule, Winia . . ."
Seeing Pacifica withdraw so meekly, it was only human to feel even worse.
"Oh, no. I'm the one who should apologize . . . I'd love to show you around, myself, but we're coming up on the changing of the season, so I need to swap out the sheets and curtains for different colors and do the laundry, so I'm a little short on time."
"You should just leave that kind of thing to someone else."
"Someone else?"
Pacifica pointed at Shannon, who was enjoying a fragrant cup of postprandial tea.
Somehow managing to gulp the tea down instead of inadvertently spewing it everywhere, he looked over at the girls, an annoyed expression on his face.
"Wait a minute, Pacifica. Are you telling me to do the laundry and redecorate the rooms and all?"
"Yep."
Without a moment's delay or hesitation, Pacifica nodded in agreement. The expression on her face--a rare, beaming smile--told the whole story.
You think this is funny, don't you? Shannon thought, as the image of putting on an apron and doing the laundry arose before his mind's eye. Certainly, it was a spectacle that would send him into fits of laughter . . . had it not been himself.
As Shannon knew all too well from experience, if Pacifica hated a chore, it was futile to argue about it. Well, it's probably better than having Raquel do it . . . As he told himself this, Shannon waved his hand at Pacifica and Winia, as though to shoo them away.
"Ahh, fine, all right."
Incidentally, while Raquel may have looked gentle and domestic to a stranger . . . if you carelessly left the housework up to her, it would end in disaster.
It was not that she was incompetent. Cleaning, of course, and laundry and cooking--if she did them in the usual way, she could manage them all handily, and better than the average person.
If she did them in the usual way, but . . .
Even when making an egg sunny side up, she would use military-grade offensive magic for each one. For cleaning and laundry, too, she would use entirely unnecessary spells, each to excessive results.
In the past, when it was time for something like spring cleaning, it was all well and good for her to call up a virtual spirit that had been embedded with simple orders, but when that spirit went berserk and immediately started washing anything it could lay its hands on . . . And on top of that, Shannon had experienced near-drowning because a spirit had washed his clothes while he was still in them.
"Have it your way . . . Just make sure you have Raquel go with you."
"All right. I'll go get Raquel-nee, then."
Winia considered the brother and sister, a bewildered expression on her face. But Pacifica climbed up to the second floor completely unconcernedly.
"Um . . ."
"Guess I'll get the laundry out of the way to start. That means the sheets, curtains, and pillowcases, huh. Well, you'll have to show me how to redecorate after you get back, since that's more of a delicate operation."
At Shannon's wry smile, Winia gave a flustered shake of her head.
"I really shouldn't. Asking a guest to do this sort of thing--"
"Don't worry about it . . . It's not like she just suddenly turned selfish yesterday or today or anything. Well, I'll be working off the discount you gave us on the room, anyway."
Shannon shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
The shops that lined the main street.
Pacifica and the others could be found in one of them: the largest general store in Taurus.
It was a spacious store that dealt in everything from housewares to souvenirs. It had an abundant assortment of merchandise, and--having the advantage of being a large-scale retail store--its prices were low.
In the past, stores like this existed only in the Royal City, which had an abundant supply of goods.
However, for the past twenty years, Leinwand had not known war, and the maintenance of the high roads had continued, so the velocity of circulation of goods and the volume of those goods had risen concurrently. Thus, it had become more common to see large-scale retail stores even in rural areas. Because they offered various conveniences, they had numerous customers and were apparently flourishing.
Well then . . .
"Ohh, that one's so cute, so cute, hey, don't you think so? Ah, this one's cute too."
Just bursting with excitement as she flitted and bustled around the store, Pacifica . . . No, actually, the one doing that was Raquel.
She was meant to have come as a chaperon while Winia showed Pacifica around, but . . . to put it bluntly, the circumstances were such that it was difficult to tell just which one of them was the guardian. Of the local specialties (single-flower vases designed to look like dolls, engraved wood bookends, pencil cases made of patterned cloth, and so on), if Raquel saw one that had the slightest bit of quaintness about it, she would pick it up and fiddle with it.
Well, the fact that she drew the line at indiscriminate, impulse purchases probably proved that what little reason she had was in working order . . .
"This one's so cute too, oh, oh, and this one's so cute too . . . Ohhh, and this one too!"
For Pacifica, who had been sisters with her for fifteen years now, this came as no surprise, but . . . as you might expect, Winia watched in blank amazement as Raquel frolicked around, browsing the sundry knick-knacks.
The sight of that black-clad beauty, gamboling about while her eyes glittered like an infant's . . . it was strangely heartwarming.
"Want to take a little break outside?" Pacifica asked Winia, smiling wryly. "Raquel-nee, we're gonna have a little breather at the stand across the way."
After waiting for Raquel to give them a wave amid her torrent of so cutes, Pacifica left the general store with Winia and stood in front of the fruit water stand across the street.
"Oh, haven't seen you around before, Ojouchan1," the stand's owner called amiably. "You a traveler? Don't see many this time of year, but . . ."
"Yep, that's right."
For her part, Pacifica replied as congenially as though he were an acquaintance she had known for years. There were times when Winia envied that buoyancy of hers.
"Ojisan2, give us two of whatever you recommend."
"Now that puts me in a spot--I'd recommend everything I sell, you know."
"Unyu. That was rude."
Pacifica made a show of smacking her palm against her forehead. Perhaps the owner found that gesture fetching; he laughed comfortably.
"Well, if you twisted my arm, I guess I'd say the apple. This year's crop was a good one."
"We'll have that, then."
"You got it."
The finished cups of fruit water were topped by so much whipped cream that one could not help thinking, Isn't that more than enough?
"A little something extra on the house, for the darling ojouchan."
"Oh, stop it. If you do stuff like that, I'm gonna end up falling for you, you know."
"Hahaha. Be sure to drop by again while you're here."
After conversing along these lines, Pacifica seated herself in one of the chairs that were scattered around the area surrounding the stand. Following suit, Winia sat down beside her.
". . . my older sister's weird, huh?" Turning her gaze back to the general store, Pacifica held out one of the cream-topped fruit waters. "If she just kept quiet, she'd be a real beauty, too."
By that logic, Pacifica had that sort of "if she just kept quiet" mouth on her too. But as you might expect, Winia did not have the courage to point that out. Smiling vaguely, she accepted the fruit water.
"I think it's wonderful that there's something that delights her so much, though."
"Well, Raquel-nee used to collect a whole lot of little knick-knacks like that."
Remembering how her elder sister's room used to look, Pacifica smiled.
Raquel's room ought to have been just as spacious as Shannon's and Pacifica's, but in terms of the sheer density of things they owned--to put it bluntly--her brother's and sister's rooms were as different as a desert and a jungle. Raquel kept everything neatly arranged, so there had been no danger of stepping on anything, but still.
Pacifica had never understood just what was so appealing about them, but . . . she remembered that her elder sister had treated each and every one just as though it were a treasure, and had made as much of them as though they were her beloved children.
"But . . . when we set off on our journey, she had to throw them all out, so it must've made her happy to see those kinds of things again, after so long."
And then . . . she also remembered the sight of her elder sister throwing all of them onto the fire without exception, as though to sever any lingering attachments she had to the life they had lived up to that point.
"Oh . . . Speaking of which, why are you and your siblings on this journey, Pacifica-san?"
It did not seem that they were on a sight-seeing tour, and it was not the right time of year for Mauser's followers to go on pilgrimage.
In the week since they had come to this town, they had not seemed to do anything but relax and let the days go by.
"Nn . . . You want to hear about that?"
"I suppose . . . I know it's rude to ask, but I still wonder about our guests' backgrounds. Since our inn gets a lot of guests who . . . have their reasons to stay with us."
"Reasons?"
Pacifica's expression changed with a start.
"People who have debt collectors after them, people who intend to run off without paying their bills--things like that. We are a cheap inn, after all, and I more or less run it on my own, so maybe we come across as an easy target."
"Ohh, that's what you meant. Right, right. So that's how it is. Must be rough."
Even though she had cream all over her face, Pacifica nodded gravely.
"Well, I'm used to it."
"So that's why you'd want to ask about your guests' backgrounds, huh?"
"Oh, no. I mean, your family has already paid for the week in advance, so it's unreasonable of me to--"
"All right," Pacifica said, cutting Winia's words short. "If you'll drop that 'guest relations' way of talking, maybe I can tell you." She smiled impishly.
[Next] [Previous]
Notes:
1) お嬢ちゃん, variously translated as "Miss," "little miss," "young lady," "little lady," "girl," "little girl," "lass," "missy," or even, apparently, "lamb." Back
2) おじさん, literally "Uncle," but often used like "Mister," "old man," etc. Like お嬢ちゃん, I've decided just to leave it. That is the privilege of the fan translator, after all. Back
Pacifica is quite the charmer. And even though it's a relatively minor thing compared to everything else they've been through, the image of Raquel burning her things is pretty tragic.
The Purgers remind me a bit of Mistborn's Inquisitors.
Edit: Just for the hell of it, here are the results of the Scrapped Princess popularity poll that Dragon Magazine conducted for the Super Guide!:
- Raquel Casull
- Pacifica Casull
- Christopher Armalite
- Shannon Casull
- Arffi Zeffiris
- Carol Casull
- Soupy-kun
- Kidaf Gillot
- Eirote Borchard
- Winia Chester
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-24 03:00 am (UTC)Pacifica is surprisingly sociable given the authorities wanted her dead and in tune with other people's feeling besides Shannon's.
"if she just kept quiet"
very funny, Winia.
"Pacifica is quite the charmer."
Totally, she had a lot of people wrapped around her finger easily.
"the image of Raquel burning her things is pretty tragic"
Yeah, poor Raquel.
I'm surprised that Chris was more popular than Shannon and Raquel more than Pacifica. This poll was sent out after volume 2? These poll results are usually very interesting. Thanks for including them :)
no subject
Date: 2011-08-24 03:18 am (UTC)I dunno, I think Pacifica's just as in-tune to Shannon's feelings, which is exactly why she's able to play the spoiled princess act around him.
It's fun being able to read Winia's thoughts, and the fact that she keeps them to herself makes a lot of sense. It's annoying when the supposedly beaten-down orphan is a mouthy smartass--how would that even happen?
This poll was sent out after volume 2?
Ah, no. After the entire series, actually, including the supplements. (One of the Shannon fans included a comment saying, "He's got a sister-complex, but still." I dunno, that made me chuckle.)
They had a few different questions on the poll, like "What's your favorite magic in Sutepri?" (Ragnarök, Fenrir, and Gungnir, in that order).
no subject
Date: 2011-08-24 02:25 pm (UTC)That's true. I'd want to know more of what the three siblings are thinking.
"He's got a sister-complex, but still."
Ha, Pacifica must be very cute as a baby :)
no subject
Date: 2011-08-24 04:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-24 04:54 pm (UTC)I remember chibi Pacifica from the anime, too. Must rewatch!