007: The Otherworlder
"Sister Selenia. In order to prevent any accident before it has a chance to occur, I would ask you to remove the magazine."
"An accident? What, do you think I'm going to walk in there and open fire?"
My impression of Hamil sat at a thoroughly ambiguous level.
Looked at one way, he might have been offering me a chance. Looked at another, it was just as easy to imagine he meant me harm. If he had something for me to do, couldn't he simply have me do it here and be done with it? And if he had business elsewhere that required him to travel, the place was crawling with people who believed in the god Nals. He could have asked any of them to pass a message along.
Then again, if this was some sort of appointment, there were people who treated procedure and formality as sacred. The more medieval the setting, the worse that tendency got. Even in the modern world, plenty of people had lived and died by empty ceremony—this rite, that banquet—and a company dinner that managed to combine both had been its own special kind of horror.
"Others may well think so. Suspicion of that kind could invite unnecessary wariness toward you, Sister Selenia. It would be better to remove the magazine."
"So you want me to take it out and hand it over to you, Brother Hamil?"
In truth, that was closer to whining. There was also the option of Hamil simply taking the gun back, and if he did, I'd have no reason to keep holding it. And yet here he was, leading me along with the gun still in my hand, asking only for the magazine. It made me wonder whether there really was nothing to it beyond the reason he'd given.
Then Hamil reached into empty air and drew out a belt fitted with several leather loops.
So that was an inventory. The adventurer's belt I'd only ever read about in novels. For a moment my chest fluttered with the real, physical sense that I had arrived in a fantasy world. Then he held the belt out to me, and I was bewildered all over again.
"Magazines are ordinarily kept in a place like this. But take care. Weapons from another world have limited means of resupplying their ammunition. What you store here could be stolen, so you must be cautious."
So he wasn't confiscating the gun. Even so, hearing him put it that way made it sound an awful lot like a promise that someone might steal it at any time, and that left me suspicious.
"Then do you have any know-how for not getting robbed?"
"It is a method the brothers would find difficult to use. The sisters, however, sometimes conceal things by means of a part of the body that men do not possess."
Ah. So hide anything important in a woman's secret place. That was what he meant. Now that I thought about it, the nun who had been hiding the pistol earlier had drawn it out from the folds of her skirt.
…Put it somewhere a man doesn't have. He couldn't actually mean that.
Even so, the way he'd said it sounded indecent enough that I was on the verge of shooting him a look of pure contempt.
"Even that method cannot be used by sisters whose breasts are small."
What followed, by comparison, was a relatively objective and dry explanation. That was a lewd thing to say too, of course, but set beside it, the thought I'd just had felt like garbage. I decided to keep my mouth firmly shut.
I couldn't actually hide a magazine in my cleavage, either.
In the end I buckled the belt Hamil had given me around my waist and secured the magazine in a leather loop that, under any other circumstances, would have held a potion. I did leave a single round in the pistol's chamber, against the one-in-a-million chance. Whether Hamil knew about that or not, he didn't bother to point it out.
I hoped I wouldn't have to fire the thing. So I engaged the safety as well. That way, at the very least, there would be no accident of it going off by mistake.
The place we arrived at, once Hamil announced he was taking me to the Holy See, was a tombstone behind some cathedral.
Surely he wasn't about to stand in front of a gravestone and summon someone like the Pope with a séance. True to that expectation, Hamil simply laid a hand on the stone.
"I will open the portal to the Holy See."
"Oh."
The letters carved into the tombstone began to shine with golden light. That light swallowed the two of us for a brief moment, and the scenery changed in an instant.
A gallery whose ceiling looked a good three stories high. Whatever religion this was, it seemed remarkably fond of the number seven: the symbol was carved in every direction, and worked into the stained glass as well. Priests, nuns, and monks moved busily through it all. So did paperwork, traveling on its own.
Most of the novels I'd read had religion and magic at each other's throats. Did they treat even magic here as just another convenience of civilization, and put it to good use?
I was craning my neck, marveling at everything, when Hamil strode on ahead without a word of explanation. Right. We hadn't come as tourists. He had brought me here with some purpose in mind.
He led me straight to the most out-of-the-way room, and the moment we headed that way I got the feeling something was wrong. No one was looking at us, so why a room tucked into a corner? Surely opening that door wouldn't reveal a spread of torture implements and the technicians who knew how to use them.
Ready at any moment to raise the pistol and slap the magazine home, I followed Hamil into that secluded room—and froze, blank, at the sight of him bowing his head with careful respect toward a young man conducting business in the middle of it. The room was clean, as religious buildings tended to be, but it was also austere, and small.
"Your Holiness. I have brought the otherworlder dwelling in Sister Selenia's body. She is someone with knowledge of firearms."
"Ho ho. Welcome, you who have come to us from another world."
"Uh, uh…? Ah, no? I'm Selenia, though?"
Why was the Pope reviewing paperwork in a hole like this? Why was the Pope so young? More than any of that, I was thrown by the fact that Hamil had already seen through me, so I denied it on the spot.
This is a burning waiting to happen. He's an Inquisitor. He'll curse me for snatching someone else's body and torture me for sure.
Seized by that fear, I was inching a hand back toward the magazine when the young man they called the Pope smiled with benign warmth.
"Ho ho. It is quite all right. Those who cross over from other worlds are hardly one or two in number, and we are already aware of such matters. If it will set your mind at ease, Sister, I ought to tell you that the original owner of that body had already departed this life before you came to dwell in it."
So it wasn't just one or two who had crossed over. Did that mean I might meet more people from my own world? But those words could just as easily be a trap, so I decided to deny it again. Later, if a real Korean turned up—or even if it wasn't a Korean, if someone appeared who knew the Statue of Liberty, or the pyramids, or Jesus, or the Buddha—it wouldn't be too late to believe them then.
"No, well. I mean, if you get shot that badly, dying isn't out of the question, but… the people who were there at the time just treated me, that's all. And as for handling a gun, the thing just looks like that. You pull this here, and a bullet comes out."
"I understand that you are not yet able to trust us, so if that is how you wish to tell it, we shall play along. And the gun is exactly as you say, Sister. An exceedingly dangerous object. Its method of use is simple, and so if it should fall into the hands of the wicked, something terrible will surely come of it."
The Pope's kindly face gradually took on a serious cast. Perhaps he hadn't become Pope at so young an age for nothing. Overwhelmed by the shift in an instant, I found myself listening closely.
"Brother Hamil brought you here, Sister Selenia, because he was deeply impressed by your character and by your ability in a fight. That is why I would ask this of you. Please recover those weapons. The Holy See will then dispose of them, so that the world is not thrown into chaos. At the very least, until there exists armor or an artifact capable of protecting ordinary people from guns, this weapon must not be revealed to the world."
It felt like watching the goddesses, kings, and princesses of every ordinary novel say, Hero, please slay the Demon King and save our world. Only I couldn't tell whether the scale of this was supposed to be large or small. And the objective wasn't even clear. A hero was finished once the Demon King was dead. This was nothing but a vague request to go and collect guns.
…Before any of that, I had to wonder what Hamil had even seen in me to arrive at an evaluation like that.
"Hold on. I'd like to know what, exactly, you saw in my character or my fighting that earned me a rating like that. The other brothers and sisters at our church spend every day cursing me for coming out of the back alleys and tearing me down behind my back. And my combat ability—knocking down one sickly woman isn't exactly grounds for high praise."
"Ho ho. I trust he had his reasons. The truth is that Brother Hamil was once a man who placed very little trust in otherworlders. At the same time, he is a man who was deeply moved by one. In the past, an otherworlder whom Brother Hamil interrogated endured every hardship for the sake of all, and sacrificed herself."
"What I mean is that an otherworlder is human in the end, and that they, too, can become as Saint Ivy did."
So someone who had crossed over from another world had become a saint and sacrificed herself for them. That was what he was saying. And he wanted the same from me?
No.
I immediately backed away, putting distance between myself and the two of them. If a fight broke out and I had to shoot, distance would favor me.
"I'm not that good a person, and I don't particularly feel like sacrificing myself for anyone. You've got the wrong person."
"Ah, that is a misunderstanding. We are not urging sacrifice upon you, Sister Selenia. We are only saying that being an otherworlder does not make you different from us. In fact, our previous Pope was an otherworlder himself. He persecuted the Saint, persecuted the other otherworlders, and caused the blood of the innocent to be spilled. They, like us, could become boundlessly good, or boundlessly evil. That gallows is the symbol of it—raised in memory of Saint Ivy, who willingly mounted the gallows in our stead."
What? It wasn't the number seven. It was a gallows? So they'd hung an execution stand up there and called it a religious symbol? I was about to reel at the thought of what kind of unhinged religion this was, when I remembered that the largest faith in the world of my previous life had taken a cross for its symbol, and I got my composure back.
That had been an instrument of execution too, when you got down to it. Counted that way, there wasn't much difference. And these people weren't some sect that wanted to burn the world down. If they at least claimed to stand for goodness, there was no need to look at them badly. More than anything else, I liked that they weren't preaching at me about gods and the rest of it.
"Well, even so. I'm grateful you're thinking well of me, but that job… in the end I'd have to deal with people carrying guns, wouldn't I? Even if it's only taking them from people who don't know how to shoot, it sounds dangerous."
"Ah, you may set your mind at ease on that point. We will assign you a partner—a priest capable of raising a protective barrier. And a difficult task requires a fitting reward. We will grant you compensation appropriate to the work, along with the authority of an Inquisitor, so that various conveniences may be made available to you."
"Hmm…"
The terms were good. And having lived something like a working life, I also knew that terms good enough to raise suspicion usually meant something rotten waiting underneath. How many job postings had looked like a perfectly decent company, only for the actual take-home pay to collapse once this deduction and that deduction came out of it? Or for the real working conditions to turn out even worse? I was tempted. It still wasn't a decision I could make lightly.
Seeing me waver, the Pope smiled benignly once more and gestured.
"I am not telling you to decide at this very moment. You are welcome to speak with the otherworlders who have already settled here, and give us your answer afterward. Ah, and as for the gun…"
"I believe it would be acceptable for Sister Selenia to keep it. A meteor scroll in a saint's hand is safer than a kitchen knife in a thug's."
"You may do as Brother Hamil says."
Talk it over with the otherworlders who had already settled in. That, at least, set me a little more at ease.