Monogatari Series - Volume 16 - Chapter 9.02

002

“For reals?!” exclaimed Shinobu, all of a sudden─while I’d had months to get used to her constant use of the phrase, hearing it out of the blue like that still startled me.

It made me cower in confused terror.

The strength of the exclamation made me feel like I was being yelled at. It was clearly a contraction denoting “Is what you’re saying really true?” but at this point, it had lost its original meaning, she’d lost sight of it, and she used it as if it meant hello.

Which made me want to ask her if she was for reals, or just prone to exaggeration.

It was December.

The end of the year─the month that my ancestors called “Tutor-Run.”

I’ve heard it was because even sensei got so busy that they ran everywhere, but apparently that’s just a folk etymology. I mean, it always made me think, They run even when it’s not the end of the year, so when Hanekawa told me it was nothing more than folklore, I was plenty satisfied. But that being the case, I still have no idea as to its origins.

And I’ve never asked.

Maybe that lack of intellectual curiosity is just one of my many faults─but given that we say January jets, February flees, and March makes its getaway, the idea of December running doesn’t seem far-fetched enough to warrant comment or question.

Well, regardless of whether or not teachers are busy in December, those of us preparing for our college entrance exams sure as hell are─the national was coming up next month already.

I had very little in the way of free time.

Though if we’re being honest, I wasn’t swamped solely because of my exam prep. In fact, I had so much to deal with that I would’ve loved to say forget it, I don’t have time for exams, and ditch out on my studies altogether.

But that’s easier said than done.

Because even when they know their death is at hand─even when the day of execution has been announced, the sentence handed down, human beings still have to keep on living right up to the bitter end.

To keep on going about their business.

Which is why I was, in fact, spending the day speeding down the home stretch towards my exams─but just as I decided to take a quick break to intake some sugar in between math and Japanese, Shinobu appeared.

With a For reals?!

“…Shinobu, ’sup.”

That was all the greeting I could muster for the little blond girl who’d come flying out of my shadow to peer intently around the room like a hawk, or a demon.

Shinobu Oshino.

Vampire─ex-vampire.

The king of aberrations─who spends most of her time lurking in my shadow. She was at present a fallen queen, but her brazen attitude was still every inch that of a monarch.

And, since she was by nature a vampire, which is to say nocturnal, even though she’d lost her power, lost sight of her true essence, she basically spent the daylight hours snoozing in my shadow. Yet here she was, awake despite the fact that it was only three in the afternoon.

At this point she seemed less nocturnal or vampire than someone with an unstable lifestyle─what’s next, is she gonna tell me mornings still count as nighttime?

Seriously, though, what the hell?

It wasn’t the witching hour, it wasn’t the dead of night, it was just snack time. She’d show up now?

“Morning.”

“Morealsning?!” Shinobu returned my greeting, half-heartedly.

A mash-up of “morning” and “for reals,” neologism in action… Things were going to get really out of hand with this verbal tic of hers if the variations started proliferating. And, after peering intently around the room, she finally looked in my direction─

“Mm,” she noticed me. “So there thou art. Hmph, as they say, ’tis truly darkest beneath the lighthouse.”

“Isn’t that a good thing for you?” Pleased at having been inadvertently likened to a lighthouse, a symbol of height, I returned her stare. “Come on. You had trouble finding me?”

“Nay,” Shinobu pointed at me.

No, not at me─at the tray in my hands.

“Be that the source of the odor?”

“Uh, yeah… I figured I should replenish my blood sugar while I was taking a break…”

Resting on the tray I brought up from the kitchen were a plate piled with snacks and a mug filled with black coffee… Did this girl really make the trip out of my shadow just for snack time?

Some vampire.

The behavior of the royal family is sullying the good name of aberrations everywhere.

“If there be no cake, I shall resign myself to eating bread. I have spoken.”

“You’ll ruin your body that way, you know.”

“And yet, I am troubled by how best to treat sweet buns. Be they sweets or be they bread, I cannot say! Tell me, be they staple foods or snacks?”

“Sweet buns are snacks. You can rest easy.”

“And yet sweetbreads are a fitting meal for a vampire indeed─kakak,” Shinobu laughed gruesomely.

Well, the laugh itself was all very picturesque, but it seemed wildly out of place when we were discussing the ontology of dessert with a tray of sweets between us…

“Now, tell me of these snacks. Be they donuts? They must surely be donuts. There can be no doubt of it.”

“Yeah… They’re donuts all right.”

I wasn’t actually as tall as a lighthouse (obviously), but given that Shinobu was currently the height of a little girl, she couldn’t see what was on the tray I was holding.

With those eyes full of delighted anticipation fixed on me, I was frankly at a loss for words. It’s just, if I didn’t properly explain what was going on, it could come back and bite me in the…

“Here’s the thing, Shinobu. They’re donuts, but─”

“Donuts, ye say! Superb!”

Shinobu reached up with both hands.

Just like a child.

It was impossible to detect in that action even a hint of the majesty she once possessed, when she seemed almost twice my height─even with both her hands stuck straight up in the air, she can hardly reach my chin these days.

“I had a premonition that today’s sweets would be donuts! Such unerring intuition! Now then, my master, render those donuts unto me, and not a moment too soon!”

“If it were a moment too soon, it wouldn’t be snack time yet…Anyway, listen for a second, Shinobu.”

Stumped as to how to explain things to an enigmatic little girl who ordered her master to render something unto her, I decided that in this case a picture was indeed worth a thousand words. I squatted down to her eye-level and placed the tray in question on the floor.

“Wahoo! …Hn?”

For an instant Shinobu’s excitement reached fever pitch, but her expression quickly turned dubious. Her gaze was fixed on the five donuts arranged on the plate atop the tray.

“My lord.”

“What?”

“What are these? Be they the new line from Mister Donut?”

“No, Shinobu. These are called handmade donuts.”

“The new line from Mister Donut which they hath dubbed ‘handmade donuts’?”

“Calling their new product ‘handmade’ would cast undue suspicion on all their other donuts. No, no. You must’ve still been asleep inside my shadow, but Senjogahara just dropped by with these donuts to support the troops.”

“…?”

Shinobu looked completely uncomprehending. If this couldn’t get across to her, what the hell good was our pairing?

“Look, I’m saying that she made these donuts in the kitchen at her house, then brought them over to keep me going while I study,” I tried slightly altering the wording and explaining again─apparently it was going to require a great deal of patience and perseverance to make this clear to her.

That is, I’d known it was going to be like this, which was the whole reason I’d planned to eat them all while Shinobu was still asleep instead of saving them for later…

“Huh? Um, hang on a sec. I’m thinking.”

“You’re talking totally normally. What happened to your old-timey speech?”

Hang on a sec, she says.

Dress it up a little.

“Then, the tsundere maiden (18) who counteth herself thy lady love hath─”

“You can leave out the (18) part, (600).”

“I am but (598). I’ll thank thee not to round up.”

“Says someone who was rounding down for, how long?”

“The tsundere maiden (even the most horrible demons were once eighteen)─”

“She’s not horrible, you can’t say that about a person’s girlfriend. Plus you’re the only demon around here.”

We weren’t getting anywhere.

Maybe that was a sign of just how discombobulated Shinobu was─she wasn’t being violent, but that might just be because she was still in shock. If so, I was scared of what lay in store for me. Beyond scared.

“The tsundere maiden hath wrought a counterfeit of Mister Donut? That will not stand, ’tis a crime.”

“They’re not counterfeit. They’re normal, regular donuts. Homemade donuts, the kind which, let’s get real, don’t require all that much expertise.”

If we were going to get even realer, these were donuts that even Senjogahara could make, but I preferred to avoid being so deprecating toward my own girlfriend if I could help it.

“I am yet mystified…”

Shinobu crossed her arms and stared down at the donuts on the plate like an inspector of some sort. Or maybe more like an executioner, her gaze was so intense.

She could bore a hole through you with that look─though, being donuts, they already had them.

“I understand this incident which hath transpired, and yet.”

“Incident? It’s not a crime, okay? My girlfriend just brought me some refreshments, don’t talk about it like it’s some historical affair. It’s literally as banal as could be.”

“Then, in order to bring donuts to bolster my lord’s efforts, the tsundere counterfeiter independently developed donuts in her own domicile, rather than hieing herself to the Mister Donut Shinobu Branch?”

“Developed… Whatever, sure. I mean, your word choice is kind of off, but you’ve got the basic gist.”

I’m not aware of a store called the Mister Donut Shinobu Branch, but since there’s only one Mister Donut in our town, she must be referring to that favorite haunt of hers.

Though as far as she was concerned, it might be more accurate to call it her personal outlet than her favorite haunt…

“Wherefore?” asked Shinobu with a serious expression.

She looked at me with round eyes full of earnest wonder, as if she were asking me why babies were born or why people die, but she was just asking: Why did Senjogahara make donuts at her own house instead of buying them at the store?

“Um, I don’t know how to answer that question… To encourage me while I’m studying for exams?”

And also probably to check on me, to make sure I was studying, to make sure I haven’t harmed myself out of despair─though I was pretty sure the overriding goal was encouragement. But that wasn’t what Shinobu was asking.

“I am telling thee ’tis the meaning I do not understand. What is the intention behind troubling thyself to produce that which can be bought?”

“‘Intention’ might be too strong a word…”

“Buying them would be cheaper, nay?”

“…”

I was getting lectured by an almost six-hundred-year-old vampire about thrift… From a cost performance standpoint, maybe she’s right? If we’re talking purely about the cost of the ingredients, then maybe homemade would be more economical, but when you factor in the time spent shopping and the hassle of making the donuts─Hitagi Senjogahara’s labor costs, in other words─the view that “buying them would be cheaper” wasn’t totally wrong…

Still, she just sounded like someone who sucked at household tasks…

“When they have a special offer, ’tis but a hundred yen a donut at Mister Donut. These five donuts would be but five hundred yen. Taxed, ’twould amount to naught but five hundred and twenty-five yen. Five hundred and twenty-five yen, well, verily doth it depend upon thy circumstances, but most would see that as a paltry sum, would they not? Miss Tsundere begrudges even such a meager expenditure?”

“She wasn’t begrudging anything… In fact, she took the trouble to make these.”

“And what I am asking thee is wherefore would she take that trouble.”

Man, was she persistent.

No, calling it persistent makes it sound like a legitimate line of questioning─this was just stubbornness.

“Even should the tax increase to eight percent…let me see, five hundred times eight…”

She began calculating on her fingers.

Sure, eight percent isn’t as easy to calculate as five percent, but I don’t think you can do multiplication on your fingers anyway.

“Feh! I know not! Fie on thy stepwise consumption tax increases, I would have them raise it to ten percent directly!”

“Getting a little ahead of yourself there.”

Sure, it would be a lot easier to calculate.

But I’d be the one paying it, not you.

Taking responsibility for Shinobu, practically speaking, meant providing for a whole other person for the rest of my life, I was beginning to realize.

“Anyway! Without tax ’tis but a single coin! Wherefore would she not pay! Wherefore would she try to pass off these self-serving donuts as our snack!”

Now she was just thinking about it minus my tax burden.

The consumption tax… Well, just because I’ve started not to ignore social studies doesn’t mean I know enough about politics to comment, but that’s one tax that seems inexplicable to me. A tax on consuming things… So then, living, just living, has to cost you?

“But when there isn’t a special offer, one coin wouldn’t be enough even without the tax.”

“Yet do they not have special offers throughout most all the year? I have noted that ’tis in fact the periods without a special offer that seem few and far between.”

“I mean, I don’t think that’s actually true, but…”

But it does seem like that donuttery, that famous chain, is having a hundred-yen sale every time I turn around. I’d be curious to tabulate the actual numbers.

“Speaking of, they were just having a half-off sale, weren’t they…”

Hm.

Speaking of that speaking of, it used to be that every single time they’d have a hundred-yen sale, this vampire would whine take me, take me (to the point that we once had a chance encounter with the swindler), but she didn’t say much of anything about this most recent half-off sale, did she?

“If they were half off,” I went on, “a rough estimate would be, a little less than three hundred yen for five donuts?”

“Methinks a half-off sale is beyond the pale. I would that they cease selling themselves so cheaply,” Shinobu said with heartfelt emotion.

So that’s why she didn’t press me to take her to the Mister Donut Shinobu Branch during the sale─it wasn’t out of consideration for my studying needs or anything.

“Perhaps ’tis the way of Japan in this day and age to raise the tax while making things cheaper, but behold, I envision the day when that shall make its end. ’Tis needful that the people of this nation come to appreciate that ‘the finer things are costly.’”

“Don’t talk politics. And don’t lament the state of the nation.”

You’re a little blond girl.

And a vampire.

“We must make the people realize that for such things to cost a pittance, so too must someone labor for a pittance.”

“And what I’m saying is, forget a pittance, Senjogahara made these donuts for me for nothing.”

“Eh? My lord, thou hast not paid her?”

“Who’s ever heard of a girlfriend who demands money for bringing her boyfriend a treat?”

“Balderdash… That miser?”

“…”

Senjogahara didn’t exactly have a great reputation.

Considering what happened last month, though, at this point Shinobu Oshino owed Senjogahara her life same as I did…not that this little girl seemed to feel any gratitude for it.

“Have a care, my lord. She may have put something in these donuts.”

“Come on, what kind of a girlfriend do you think I have… If she did put something into them, it was most likely love.”

“Last month thou didst experience firsthand the fact that cooked just so, even love may be transformed to poison, my lord.”

Shinobu cautiously plucked one of the donuts off the plate with a dubious hmm.

Exactly the way you’d handle hazardous material.

I bridled at Senjogahara’s home cooking being treated like that, but since I was well aware of the special place donuts occupied in Shinobu’s heart, I had no choice but to overlook her behavior.

She felt about donuts the way Doraemon feels about dorayaki─I wonder when they first introduced that into the comic?

“Hrrm. Nothing abnormal about the texture. Though like as not that toxic wench’s artifice would not reveal itself to the touch…”

“Toxic wench… She retired her acid tongue a while ago.”

“Hath it not reemerged of late?”

With another hmmmm, Shinobu brought the donut right up to her face and inspected it. She seemed to be using her former-vampire eyesight to visually confirm that there were no abnormalities on its surface. The only thing she’d be able to see would be the sugar it was coated with…

“No, in fact she’s been nothing but sweet lately, up to and including bringing me donuts like this.”

“’Tis only to be expected. All are kind to those whose death draws near.”

“Nobody’s death is drawing near. I’ll take care of it. Somehow. I’d stake my life on it.”

“’Tis that very tendency to stake thy life so readily that hath brought thee to this pass. My master hath not a whit of introspection within him─hm.”

Something in Shinobu’s attitude changed.

That is, she maintained the same severe expression, but the intensity stepped up a notch.

“What of this hole?”

“The hole?”

“’Tis suspect. Like as not she hath used it to inject something into the donut.”

So saying, Shinobu glared up at me─through the hole in the donut.

“…Come on, leave out the tired set-ups. Donuts have holes, that’s the whole point.”

“And why is that?”

“Huh?”

“Aye, till now I have accepted that such is their design, ne’er pondering deeply ’pon the matter, but…wherefore do donuts have holes? Is it not merely a waste of potential donut?”

This time she stuck her finger through the hole and started spinning the donut like a hula hoop.

Treating it so cavalierly just because it wasn’t from Mister Donut─I wanted to tell her not to play with her food.

I may not be well-educated enough to know when Doraemon’s love of dorayaki was introduced, but happily I did know why donuts have holes.

That is, I just found out today. Mere moments ago, in fact.

It was Senjogahara who told me, when she came to drop off the donuts─she was kind enough to lay it out for me when I displayed my ignorance by saying, Man, you must be a real perfectionist to put the holes in them like this.

Just to be clear, when I say she was kind enough, I don’t mean that sarcastically. She really did explain it in a generous manner that was easy to understand.

“Shinobu. Donuts with holes in the middle like that are called torus donuts. The hole allows the heat to pass easily and evenly through the whole donut while it’s frying.”

“Thermal efficiency? Is that of what you speak?”

“Yeah, something like that. If there was no hole in the middle, the center wouldn’t fry well. Which is why they remove it.”

Remove might be the wrong word in terms of how they’re prepared, but I was putting comprehensibility above all else.

“Ah…is that so?”

“Well? Are you impressed by my erudition?”

“So they call this shape a torus.”

“That’s the part you’re impressed by?”

“What difference be there twixt a ring and a torus?”

“That’s a question of volume… A three-dimensional form like a donut or a bagel is called a torus, whereas a ring just means a circle, I think, or…uh…”

“How now, my master. If canst not unravel such a trifling question, how wilt thou penetrate the exam put forth by the National Center?”

Nope.

This kind of question ain’t gonna be on the national exam.

“I wonder, is the same true of the hole in a Baumkuchen?”

“No, when they cook a Baumkuchen they stick a pole through the center─Baumkuchen and donuts are made totally differently…”

“And what of donuts that have no holes? How are they fried? Hast said that the heat would not reach to the center. Even Mister Donut maketh many such donuts, yet ’tis not as if they remain uncooked. Thus is the hole not superfluous?”

“I think you’re getting a little too deep into their structure… Don’t lose sight of your original goal. Which was to inspect these particular donuts.”

I looked at the clock. It was already 3:30.

My break was only supposed to be thirty minutes, so I’d already used up my allotment─it’s not as if I didn’t have some stoppage time factored in, but sadly my plan to enjoy a refined snack of donuts, replenish my blood sugar levels, and rest my mind seemed to have ended in failure.

Well.

Eating five donuts all by myself already seemed like a bit much in any case─so while it did change their purpose somewhat, I’d bring this scene to a close by providing Shinobu with enough donut to shut her up and stop her endless bellyaching.

“Shinobu. Enough with investigating the texture, it’s driving me crazy, move on to the flavor already.”

“Hm? Eh?”

“I’m saying the only way to find out if it’s poisoned is to taste it for poison.”

“Art thou telling me to serve as thy poison taster? How cruel my master is, to treat me as the canary in his coalmine! I am speechless!”

Even as she said this, Shinobu’s expression relaxed.

In an instant she was all a-sparkle.

To put it in anime terms, the marks on her cheeks got more pronounced─her eyes were glittering.

“Being thus treated by thee suffuses me with warmth, my lord! Aye, like a well-fried donut!”

“Trying to make it clever just makes it more complicated… Now eat up. Eat up and shut up.”

Hopefully she’d keep quiet at least while she was chewing the damn things─as her guardian I had no intention of teaching her that it’s okay to talk with your mouth full.

I mean, even supposing Senjogahara had poisoned these donuts, these provisions for the troops, that wouldn’t be an issue for Shinobu─sea bream even when it’s gone bad, as the expression goes, likewise for a drained vampire.

Someone who could gobble up a pair of iron handcuffs without batting an eyelash wasn’t going to die from a little thing like a poisoned donut.

“Now now, be not hasty, my lord. I warn thee, assume not that I shall eat anything so long as it may be called a donut. If thou thinkest one donut made by some nameless peasant can placate me, thou art gravely mistaken. If dost wish to slip the net of my investigation, wouldst do well to hie thee straightaway to yon Mister Donut Shinobu Branch and procure for me the new Pon de Ring Rare Choco Golden. Canst even believe it? The Pon de Ring Rare alone would be revolutionary, yet also have they made it in the form of a golden chocolate donut. How high might they fly, will they continue to heap glory upon glory? I have yet to taste the thing, but even as I envision it, ’tis as though the flavor fills my mouth. Aye, before all and sundry, surely I shall cry out at this donut of Japan for reals?!”

Cry out, she did.

Her cry cut off her discourse, so despite her earlier lamentations on the state of our economy, it came out sounding like a triumphant shout extolling our nation.