I Want Dialogue
A few Earth days after Medic Tentacle’s hollow muttering, far from the planet itself, there was another ship.
By Earth standards, it was the vessel that housed the truly high-ranking monsters.
Creatures with zero combat ability who had simply been lucky, or who excelled at political knife-fighting, and so now sat in lofty posts. In practice they produced nothing resembling sound strategy—only numbers and armchair theorizing. They would toss half-baked “what if we tried this?” ideas down to their subordinates, and those ideas became the real enemies of the monsters who actually had to fight.
“Seriously, why does the ship assigned to this planet called Earth keep filing so many claims?”
Compared with every other vessel, Earth’s performance numbers stood out—in the worst possible way.
One hundred forty-seven claims for intensive treatment of acquired mental disorders.
Development costs for “dignified death” procedures that the high-ups simply could not comprehend.
On paper nothing was irregular, yet certain executives on that ship hated the way the money seemed to pour out of a ruptured side. They’re just making a fuss over a few scratches. Not a chance.
So they cleanly slashed the budget.
The monster responsible for the cut received a promotion for his “meritorious service,” blissfully unaware of the rage boiling inside the field officers.
News of the reduction traveled with lethal speed straight to the recovery room, and from the recovery-room staff it reached Medic Tentacle himself.
Naturally, when the funding that had been flowing without trouble suddenly dried up, Medic Tentacle was only puzzled.
“What? Budget cut? Why?”
“We don’t know either, sir.”
“We’re in trouble. What do we do about this…?”
Suddenly confronted with a funding crisis, Medic Tentacle pressed a mass of tentacles to his face and crumpled his expression. He already had a migraine from figuring out how to handle Sun; now his subordinate’s question made his head hurt even more.
“What should we do? Shut down the treatment ward?”
“And just let those things loose on the ship?”
With a soft psssh the door of the intensive-care chamber opened. It was a door that opened only when recovery-room personnel alone were present, so as not to disturb the monsters resting outside. Beyond it lay pure darkness.
“Light, light! Krrheeeegh—!!”
“Th-that mask… uhihihi.”
“Oooo, fear the name of the one who will bring us the end…”
“Sun, Sun, Suuun.”
In absolute darkness meant to provide the most stable environment possible, all manner of monsters displayed all manner of symptoms, held in check by terror of a single individual.
In that sense, the beast-faced monster who still retained a relatively humanoid form—despite having met her twice—was a special case. And the fish-monster Quilpirret, who had not only escaped physical trauma on first contact but had even managed a conversation, was Medic Tentacle’s prime research subject.
A faint clue, combined with the sudden budget crisis, became the catalyst for a momentous decision.
“I’m going to the Black Zone myself.”
“…Sir?”
The recovery-room monsters could only stare back and forth between their superior and one another, stunned by the bombshell.
Perhaps thinking that a monster already destined to break didn’t matter, one subordinate raised a tentacle and asked out of nowhere,
“Have you decided to give up on everything?”
The short question carried layers of meaning: had life grown so dull that he now wished to pioneer the genre of pure suffering? Medic Tentacle shook his head.
With the solemn face of one prepared to die, he answered,
“No. I intend to talk. It would be more accurate to call it a negotiation in which I come crawling.”
“Will that woman even agree to talk?”
A reasonable doubt from a recovery-room monster. Perfectly reasonable. Precisely because she was human—or rather, because she could recognize them as a different species—she was capable of infinite cruelty.
“It’s still only a hypothesis… but even if she wears a monster’s skin, she is still human. If our interests align, she will listen!”
He answered with human nature as his example, yet even he seemed less than fully convinced; he lowered his head slightly and added in a mutter,
“…Probably.”
Matching that imperfect conviction, Medic Tentacle took out a device issued only to executive-grade monsters: a miniature ship-teleporter, the crystallized yearning of every creature that had ever been sent into the Black Zone. Like so much else on the ship, it was a lost technology; the manufacturing method itself had vanished, leaving only the remaining units as priceless relics. Drawing it out meant he was not joking—he truly intended to go to the surface.
“…Good luck, sir!”
Half worried, half hopeful, the recovery-room staff clenched fists and cheered him on. After all, if his conversation succeeded in any fashion, their own workload would shrink.
Yet Medic Tentacle did not depart at once. Instead he picked up a nearby white metal plate and, using ink that was essentially his own saliva, began writing with a tentacle.
“What are you doing, sir?”
“Writing in Earth’s language. It would be inconvenient if I got obliterated before I could even open negotiations.”
While Medic Tentacle was carefully composing his masterpiece of persuasion, an elementary school on Earth had just finished its opening ceremony.
Homework promised over the vacation had been turned in; seats had been reassigned for the new term. Inside that school, Sun—whose ruined sleep cycle had long since become second nature—finally let go of the craving for sleep. The very next moment she was assigned the rearmost desk.
Fuck.
The situation she had longed for had finally arrived, yet she could only curse inwardly. Her body, the traitorous thing, no longer grew sleepy at school even when she wanted to sleep.
After that came the class periods that, right after opening day, barely counted as classes at all.
“Haaahm.”
A yawn that escaped even though she was not sleepy. In the middle of it she felt something wriggling in her pocket—the unmistakable signal from her teddy-bear mascot. She immediately raised her hand, wearing the restless face of a child desperate for the bathroom.
“Teacher, I need to go to the bathroom…”
“Hurry back.”
A strategy that still worked, more or less, on elementary-school kids. Once she reached middle school—or even the upper grades—the answer would probably become “Hold it,” which would be a problem of its own. She couldn’t keep using the bathroom excuse forever; she would have to invent new ones soon.
Her footsteps climbed all the way to the fourth-grade girls’ restroom. By the upper grades, leaving class for the bathroom was nearly impossible. The first- and second-grade restrooms often had kids from other classes, making transformation risky. So she climbed all the way up here, inconvenience be damned.
After checking the corridor and confirming every stall was empty, she spoke the single-word transformation chant.
“Sun.”
She squeezed out through the high, wide, narrow window set far above children’s height, then received directions from the teddy bear in the sky.
“That way! Over there!”
“Hm?”
People had already evacuated. In the middle of a wide road far from the school, after the blaring emergency sirens fell silent, stood a single monster. Both of its… hand-equivalents were thrust high overhead, holding a metal plate.
On that plate, scrawled in ink-like fluid in a handwriting that even Siyeon could have improved upon, was a clumsy mix of English and Korean.
I want to talk
“…What the hell is that idiot?”
Normally a monster was to be eliminated without question. It was a hot summer day she would rather not spend outside, and she was in the middle of class. Ordinarily she would have finished the job in a flash and gone straight back. But the pattern was brand-new, so she tilted her head and decided to play along for the moment.
Whatever attack it threw, her transformed body was essentially running an invincibility cheat. Might as well hear him out, she thought, and stepped in front of him.
“What are you?”
“Ohhh, thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me.”
The octopus-like monster lowered the metal plate it had been waving like an enthusiastic banner, brought it to its chest, and smiled so brightly even its face made the gratitude obvious.
“Am I correct in assuming you are Magical Girl Sun?”
A monster she had never seen before already knew her name. That was not a pleasant feeling. Tapping her own shoulder with her still-unheated staff, she answered with a mocking Earth-style jab.
“So, to what do we owe the honor of this little reunion?”
“Reunion…? No, that isn’t important… The point is, I have brought a proposal that could be mutually beneficial.”
The monster introduced himself as Medic Tentacle. Claiming to be roughly executive-grade, he explained that the losses Magical Girl Sun—specifically she—had been causing were simply too much. He had come to negotiate terms limited solely to Magical Girl Sun.
The place they lived—what the monsters called the Black Zone—would, for the time being, receive absolutely no monsters no matter what happened. In return, he begged her never to leave this region.
Before she realized it, Medic Tentacle was kneeling in front of her like a student being punished.
“And the duration?”
“Twenty Setre… that is, by Earth reckoning, day and night will change one thousand three hundred twenty times.”
“Oho.”
She didn’t know exactly what a Setre was, but 1,320 days—roughly several years with no monsters appearing near home, and at zero cost to her side. There was simply no reason to refuse.
“So… how does that sound…?”
Medic Tentacle rubbed his tentacles together in the absolute pinnacle of self-abasement.
“I’m more than satisfied. Let’s do it.”
She nodded readily, accepted, and thrust her staff forward.
“Uh… then why are you pointing the staff at me?”
“Hm? Don’t you also need to die instantly before you can go back?”
He recoiled in horror at her casual mention of death and waved his tentacles—tentacle-waving, she supposed—in frantic denial. From something that imitated human clothing he produced a small device and adamantly refused to die.
“N-no no no! I can return on my own, so it’s fine!”
Medic Tentacle pressed the device. His form scattered like a hologram, streams of light rising into the sky.
The first day a monster had appeared and been allowed to leave without being eliminated.
An efficient monster-elimination method acknowledged even by a monster executive.
See? I was right all along.
