MaruMA:Doujinshi9:Story2

Alice

      After putting the child who had exhausted herself playing to bed, Yuuri finally comes back out of the bedroom into the living room and throws himself onto the cushioned chair. 

      It is bad manners for him to lie like that with his left leg hanging over the back of the couch.  If Günter were here he would probably admonish him, but Wolfram and I don’t mind anymore. Although, he probably would not think to act like that while the tutor was around.

      Yuuri heaves a large sigh and places a hand on his forehead before saying, “Honestly, playing hide-and-seek in the castle is against the rules.  It’s too big. There’s too many places to hide.  I’m completely exhausted.”

      With his elbows on the table, Wolfram made an objection.

      “Really?  I don’t think so.”

      “That’s because you’ve lived in a similar place since you were little.  For someone who lived in a normal house for a long time like me, this is a crazy test of endurance.”

      In actuality, Wolfram still had a nonchalant look after playing three games and even displayed so much composure while being searched for that he went and got something to drink.

      That’s not surprising as he is used to playing in buildings like this after being raised in castles and mansions as the successor to a noble and is therefore familiar with the sorts of places that children would think to hide in. 

      Because of his experience, he excelled at both hiding and seeking.  So, he did not have to run around the castle and go up and down the stone steps from the basement to the roof like His Majesty did.

      In all sports, experience is an important weapon. If there was a game called ‘Castle Hide-and-Seek,’ my little brother would surely get a considerably high score.

      “You should have asked me where Greta would have been likely to hide.”

      “Why!?  How!?  When I’m It you’re hiding too so in a way, you’re an enemy too.  Who would ask their enemy for advice?  And anyway hide-and-seek doesn’t have rules like that.”

      Luckily I missed the start of the game because of some business so all I was able to do was to brew some tea suitable for drinking before going to bed.  I chose something with a gentle fragrance that wouldn’t interrupt sleep.

      “How about if you designate the time after dinner for reading time only from now on?” I say.

      “Hm,” Yuuri smiles in a way that is both troubled and happy and then threads his fingers behind his head.  “Even so, we can’t be together all the time.”

      “That’s your fault for always leaving the castle,” Wolfram says.

      “Yeah, yeah.”

      He swings the leg hanging over the back of the couch around a few times as if saying that he agrees. 

      His Majesty’s habit of coming and going is at fault, but as Greta is living two separate lives with Hyscliff’s family and at Blood Pledge Castle, she isn’t necessarily in The Great Demon Kingdom most of the time.  For this reason, he might want to grant the wishes of his adopted daughter in the time that they are able to spend with each other.

      “But do ten year old girls still play hide-and-seek?  How old were you when you stopped playing hide-and-seek?”  Yuuri asks.

      “Let me think…”

      “You played,” I interrupted Wolfram’s train of thought after remembering a few things.  “You were still small and couldn’t hide very well so seeking was really easy.  Usually you were behind the curtains or under the bed, after all.  On the other hand, hiding was the difficult part.  If I hid in a proper place you wouldn’t be able to find me and you would end up crying so I had to find places that were easy to find me in.”

      “I wouldn’t be able to find you and I would cry?  Me?”

      “That’s right.”

      “Wo~lf,” Yuuri grins as he flips over onto his stomach.  He might have imagined small boy with blonde hair and green eyes ready to cry in the middle of a large room.  “You cried going ‘I can’t find my big brother!’ didn’t you?”

      “No!  I didn’t do that!”

      “You don’t have to pretend.  A demon ten year old is really small so I understand.”

      “Even if I was small I didn’t do that!”

      His cheeks flush with embarrassment and my little brother knocks on the table.

      “Even if I didn’t find Conrart hiding in the clothes chest I absolutely did not cry!”

      What’s the point in admitting it yourself?  His Majesty’s smile gets even wider.

      “Oh, then you cried when you couldn’t find your other big brother?”

      “No.I.Did.Not!”

      When I hold out an Earth-style tea cup, Yuuri energetically moves his body and fixes his sitting position before taking it.

      “Thank you.”

      And then he only puts down the saucer on the table like usual.

      “Well, whichever big brother it was it can’t be helped when you’re a baby.”

      “I was not a baby and I did not cry while playing hide-and-seek.”

      “Hm, is that so?”

      “How about Your Majesty?”  I felt bad for making my little brother remember a bad memory so I changed the direction of questioning.  “Hide-and-seek.  How old were you when you stopped playing?”

      “Me?   I was… let’s see, I was in fourth grade when I was ten so I was already an active baseball player.  I feel like I only played hide-and-seek when I was a lot younger.  Huh, I wonder, my retirement match might have been around second grade.”

      “A retirement match of hide-and-seek…”

      “Yeah, the last proper game of hide-and-seek.  Where did I hide that time?  My final turn at bat.”

      ‘You hide in cargo boxes and coffins these days as well.’  I thought those words, but I refrain from saying them out loud.  Right now we’re only talking about playtime, not ways to escape in life and death situations.

      “Did you hide in a clothes chest too, Yuuri?”

      “No, no.  Although I have hidden in a closet, not a clothes chest, I don’t think that was the last place.  And anyway, you have to hug your knees and curl up to fit into a clothes chest, ri-… huh…”

      Suddenly, Yuuri’s expression clouded over.  He slowly set his cup down on the table and pressed a finger to his temple after furrowing his brow.

      “Huh.”

      “What’s wrong?”

      “Right now I just remembered something like a clothes chest.  Hm, it’s a bit different.  It wasn’t a clothes chest.  It was something like, a wooden box that a child would be able to fit into easily… Ah, no, it’s not that ominous thing you’re thinking about.”  He had noticed that Wolfram had made an uneasy face and hurriedly denied that idea.  “It’s not that, the lid was rounder and, you know, you see them in pirate movies and picture books a lot.”

      “By any chance was it a treasure chest?”

      “Yeah, that’s it!”

      He points at me in a way that says ‘correct.’  In the past, has he hidden in a treasure chest?

      “There was a girl in the treasure chest.  She said she was playing hide-and-seek.  Yeah, that was it, but…”

      “But what, Yuuri?”

      “But… huh, when is this memory from?  I suddenly remembered it, really suddenly, without warning.  This isn’t someone else’s memory, right?  Yeah, it’s mine, isn’t it?  It’s a real memory from my childhood.  I’d completely forgotten about it.  Wow, man, I had completely forgotten about this!  When was it?  Better yet, why didn’t I remember it until now!?”

      This time he collapses face up and swings both of his legs back and forth on the couch. 

      Wolfram’s temper starts to flare a little.

      “What, is it something embarrassing?”

      “I’m not embarrassed.  But why did I forget?  It’s weird.”

      “It happens a lot, doors to memories opening because of some reason or another.  Especially childhood memories,” I say.

      “Is that really it?  If so it’s a shame I couldn’t remember it until now.  It was kind of a nice, heartwarming episode which is rare for me.”

      There isn’t anyone who would be able to not ask questions after hearing that.  Sure enough, Wolfram had his eyebrows furrowed in a pretense of displeasure, but he actually appeared very curious.

      “What happened?”

      “Hm?  Yeah, it was probably when I was five… was I five?”

      “You don’t know?”

      “It’s not that I don’t know, it’s just fuzzy.  I think I was four or five.  But you know, I only vaguely remember memories from before elementary school.  Well, if I ask my mom or dad they would probably immediately remember how many years ago we went to New York, though.  Although, I do have vague memories of when the family stayed there when I was three.”

      He got up and drank some tea and returned to his seat, but this time he calmly leans against the seatback and his gaze drifts in the air somewhere lower than the ceiling.

      The corners of his mouth are twisted in embarrassment.  Ah, I realize he’s thinking about his family.

      “Anyway, when I was four or five, unlike up until that point, I went to America for just a short while.  It was for my dad’s job.  Well, I guess it was about as long as a vacation.  That’s what I think, about two weeks.  Before Christmas during the cold season, my older brother had school so he stayed at my granddad’s house; it was just the three of us, my mom, dad and me… Now that I think about it, if it was only two weeks he should have gone alone.  It was work, not a trip.  But my mom absolutely won’t back down once she decides something and that time she said she was going with him and didn’t listen to anything else.”

      Ah, I see.  That part of him he got from his mother.

      “The top management has something like a responsibility to go with their spouses, after all,” I say.

      “My dad isn’t top management.” Shifting which hand he had laid across the other, he gave a sarcastic laugh.  “But there actually were gatherings like that, several times… Ah, I remember.  A babysitter came a few times.  They left me behind in the hotel and went out somewhere as husband and wife to do things.  That babysitter… Aw man.”

      He suddenly squeezed both of his eyes shut, startling Wolfram and I.  We were worried that he might have trauma from a harsh experience.

      “Yuuri, don’t tell me you were abused or something.”

      “Oh, no.  Um, no.  I just kept on remembering.  Conrad said it just now, right?  That thing about doors to memories.  Maybe that door really opened because it feels like it all came rushing in.  I was just confused by that.  I didn’t have a bad time or anything. I said that it was a nice, heartwarming episode.  The babysitter didn’t hit me or anything while my parents were away.  An evil person like that wouldn’t get hired.  In the first place, it was a woman.  But she was a very eccentric person.”

      From my perspective, he is the personification of good faith so he undoubtedly can’t believe that there are babysitters who would assault a child.  A part of me wants him to remain pure and a part of me wants him to learn how to doubt people.  It’s a complicated feeling.  I have not experienced becoming a parent, but I wonder if this is what parental love feels like.

      “She really was strange.  What was it, would you call her weary?  She smiled, but she always seemed lethargic.  She spoke super slow, like 2x speed in reverse.  Well, either way it was English so I didn’t know what she was saying.  A person who moved at a pace like that would have had a hard time looking after a four or five year old, huh.”

      “In other words, you were fidgety when you were little as well.”

      “Please say I had light footwork.  But I wasn’t the type of kid who would quietly sit in front of the TV and eat cookies.  That babysitter had a hard time with that part of me too.  There was a day she took me outside.”

      It seems that he’s destined to get wrapped up in some sort of special incident before Christmas.  It’s a pity that he can’t have an ordinary Christmas Eve despite being raised on Earth, but if I said that to him he would laugh and say ‘Well I’m not a Christian anyway.’

      I’m not either.  I don’t have any obligation to pray to a foreign country’s god, but my father taught me to take part in cheerful functions. 

      That man was really, from a modern Earth perspective, someone who loved events.  He knew how to enjoy life.  It would have been nice if I could have inherited a little bit of that personality.

      “Outside where?”

      “Hm, it was kind of an amusement park.  But, I don’t remember riding any new roller coasters or anything so I think it was an old kind of travelling one.  We wouldn’t have been able to go if it was a cutting-edge theme park because there wouldn’t have been many attractions for a small child.  Anyway, there were a couple simple rides and stalls lined up like at a temple festival and it was cold and somewhere a lot of people gathered.  Oh yeah, there was something like a frozen pond made into a skating rink, too.  It was a bit small to be called a rink, but it was round and everyone was going around and around in the same direction like they had all agreed upon it beforehand.  There was a Christmas tree with lights on it in the middle of the pond, too.”

      “In the middle of the skating rink?  I wonder, that seems dangerous.”

      “That’s why everyone was just going around and around.  That weary baby sitter brought me there and said I could ride on what I wanted.  And by myself!  It’s a mini-adventure for a four or five year old to get on a ride alone, right?  Normally I would only be allowed to ride in a carriage instead of on a horse when I was on a merry-go-round.”

      “Of course, a five year old is too young to ride a horse.”

      “A five year old demon is different.”  Avoiding Wolfram’s serious look, he takes a sip of his near-cold drink.  "Miss Weary Sitter probably let her guard down because they were all old-style rides.  Besides, at that time I was a happy kid who had already swapped out my stuffed animals with a toy bat so I don’t think I would have been satisfied with ring toss or target practice with cute prizes.  You know, it was a light, plastic one that was red and blue and hollow in the middle.  I had given it a name instead of my stuffed animals and even went to sleep hugging it.”

      “So what was the light one’s name?”

      “So you would have had fun if it was ball toss instead of ring toss?”

      His Majesty ignored Wolfram’s question and answered me.

      “Yeah, if it was a ball.”

      “So what was the light one’s name!?”

      My little brother had a fairly obsessive personality.

      “What’s the matter?  It was Leo.  That’s fine, isn’t it?”

      Content after learning the name, Wolfram nodded once and fell quiet.

      “Anyway, it’s really exciting for a child to be told that they can ride alone.  Hey wait, I was definitely alone that time, right?  Sho-chan wasn’t with me, right… No, Sho-chan was in Japan.  W-wait, I feel like there’s a memory even further back that I really don’t want to remember.”

      His Majesty held his head and groaned for a full twenty beats.  It seems to be a problematic memory.

      “It’s kind of a scary memory with an old amusement park and a mermaid…”

      “A merfolk princess?”

      “No, that’s not it… Well whatever, let’s just forget about it.  Let me not try and force myself to remember.  Anyway, I rode on the merry-go-round, I rode on the tea cups, I rode on this chair that shook around in the air, and I rode in these carts that smash into each other.  It was the first time I rode by myself so I was literally very excited.  In the meantime, the Weary Sitter was sitting on the bench the whole time, her usual weary and tired self.  If I waved she would just raise a hand at me.  She might have really been tired if she caught a cold from the cold weather.”

      In my opinion, that babysitter was probably smoking marijuana or something.  If there is a real god in the other world, I think they love Yuuri.  However, it seems that His Majesty simply wasn’t blessed with good luck with babysitters. 

      At any rate, since Yuuri is here right now that means that nothing happened on that outing so I force myself to calm my unease. 

      Unaware of my worries, he keeps on telling the story of his memory of his first time riding alone.

      “And then I rode on something where you had to step on a pedal and the chair would go up and down on a spring, and then finally I rode on that.”

      “That?”

      “Yes, that thing in question.”

      It seems he has come to the point of the story.  Yuuri’s expression turns into a serious one different than before and he nods deeply at his own words.

      “It was an attraction like a haunted house that you couldn’t walk through on your own.  How should I explain it?  It was like Disneyland or The Pirates of the Caribbean… The Pirate House of Fear; I think it was a name like that.  Now that I think about it, was it plagiarism!?  Anyway, it was a solid tent that made a wide and pitch-black room and they had partitioned it with several walls.  And then the ride went along on the rails laid down like a labyrinth.  It was kinda, it had a lot of curves in order to make the ride longer in both distance and time.  If you were pitching, the ratio would be a curve, curve, straight, and curve… Sorry, that was hard to understand, wasn’t it?”

      “No, I feel like I get the general idea.”

      “That’s unusually kind of you, Wolf.  Thanks.”

      My little brother is generally always kind to His Majesty, however.  Maybe he’s too close to him so he doesn’t notice.  Or perhaps he is using this opportunity to give his gratitude using a strategy fitting of the shy Yuuri.

      “When I saw the picture drawn on the tent it looked scary and fun, but it was pretty empty.  It was empty and there were hardly any customers.  I figured out why after I went in, but it was cold even though they had the heat on because they had shallow water for ambiance.  It was a tent after all.  So, there were hardly any other customers so it was pretty much private – extravagant.  Normally a babysitter would say I wasn’t allowed in, but since it was pirates and not zombies or monsters and I probably wouldn’t get nightmares, she said okay.  Although, if it were a haunted mansion or a haunted hospital I wouldn’t have wanted to go in in the first place.

      He once again picks up the tea cup and takes a sip of cold tea.  I extend my hand to replace it, but he stops me by saying he will drink it all.

      “You don’t have to drink cold tea.  It’s not good to chill your body before you go to bed.”

      “It’s fine.  I had the mattress aired out so the bed is fluffy.  That’s right, if we’re talking about cold things let’s talk about the water under the rails.  After it passed the third scare, the ride stopped because of an accident.”

      “It stopped?”

      “Yeah.  It was probably an electrical system failure.  Anyway, it stopped and swayed suddenly.  At first I thought it was another scare so I was on guard, but it didn’t move after I waited a bit.  No matter which way you look at it, it’s strange for the ride to have stopped without any puppets jumping out and with all the lights off, right?  That was when I realized it was an accident.  The ride broke.  You can imagine how alone I felt at that moment.  I mean, the third scare is right in the middle of the course.  The scares up to that point were skeletons and pirates with one arm or one eye so even if they startled me they weren’t very scary, but if you were riding by yourself and then got left alone in the dark, wouldn’t you be really nervous?  I was four or five, after all.”

      “If you were five, yeah…”

      If you were five years old and abandoned in the dark… Wolfram shivers slightly as he seems to have imagined it.  It’s to be expected.  After all, he was a child who couldn’t go to the bathroom by himself after hearing even a slightly scary story.

      I wonder how Yuuri was.  Not being able to persistently ask him ‘no way, what sort of childhood did you have?’ I have regrets.  Maybe I should have stayed on Earth a little longer.  I should have extended my stay a little longer if even just to watch over your growth. 

      The moment I thought that I had done something regrettable, I push down my personal feelings.  I had to stay level-headed.

      At the other end of my gaze, His Majesty’s speech was starting to pick up.  He was a person who knew how to understand the feelings of others from the very beginning, but these days I feel like he has gotten even better at that.  Maybe it’s because he puts his all into convincing people or he has a straightforward way of expressing himself.  He might have improved his intonation and ability to put emotion behind his words by reading to Greta.  Childrearing is magnificent.  Although no matter how much I praise him, he will say it’s an exaggeration and laugh it off.

      “So then in the dark – ah, there were emergency lights at my feet so it was in the almost-dark – I, as a child, was left alone.  The yell of ‘The great adventure starts!’ that I had let out while passing through the entrance and that feeling of excitement disappeared and it wasn’t just about some pirates anymore.  My fear was at the max and I was in an extreme situation where I was about to cry and wet myself.”

      “That’s, yeah, that’s normal.”

      “And because it didn’t start moving again no matter how long I waited, I had to get off the ride and the water went all the way up to my knees.  Of course it was probably only five minutes and the water was probably only high enough to cover an adult’s ankles, though.  I was a scared kid after all so everything ended up being terrifying.”

      “Yeah, I really understand that.”

      “But anyway, I thought that I needed to find the exit.  I didn’t know what emergency exits were yet, so I had decided on the normal exit.  It totally didn’t occur to me that if I followed the rails back the way I came I would get to the entrance and I was desperately walking forward thinking that if I went through the maze I would get a little bit closer to the exit.  With water up to my knees.  But…”

      Who left an innocent child like this alone at an amusement park!?  I want to hit this babysitter who isn’t even here.  Never mind just ‘here,’ she isn’t even in The Great Demon Kingdom so it’s a futile thought.

      “Like predicted, I got lost.”

      Ah, as expected.  Poor Yuuri.

      “A five year old lost in the dark is a nightmare!  Then what!?”

      After Wolfram’s passionate interjection, His Majesty paused for a moment and then sucked in a short breath.

      “Then I met that child.”

      “Who’s ‘that child?’”

      My little brother seems to be reliving his own childhood as well since he’s forgotten the usual addition of ‘A man?’

      “Even if you ask, who knows?  I didn’t ask her name or age.  I didn’t think that far.  She had white skin like snow, but she had pink cheeks and blonde hair so she wasn’t Snow White.  She had blue clothes on, probably a dress, with something like a white apron.  Ah, she looked like that Disney movie, Alice in Wonderland.  She looked about the same age as me, but now that I think about it, she might have been a bit older.  Anyway, she was an amazingly cute girl.  Enough so that you would think she was a princess from a picture book.  Aw, why did I forget such a cute girl?  She had a ribbon in her hair like Alice.  I didn’t ask her name, but I knew it immediately: ah, this girl is stranded during her independent adventure just like me.  It was a pirate’s world so she was shipwrecked.”

      “And then?  Did you and that girl head to the exit together?”

      “Yeah.  Actually, it’s kind of a lame story.” As he said so, he reached up to his near-overgrown bangs and flicked them with his index finger. “I wanted to take the lead and escort Alice who was about to cry to the exit.  Because I was a man, even though I was a child, I was a man.  However, things don’t always go as planned.  Actually, they went the exact opposite.”

      “… You ended up getting saved by the young girl, didn’t you?”

      “Yeah, rather than a young girl, she was a lot younger than Greta so she was a little girl about five or six.  To be clear, you couldn’t really call it getting saved.  She grabbed my hand and smiled and said she came to play.  Well, you could tell she was doing the same thing I was just by looking.  Children don’t go to an amusement park to work.  So then, while holding my hand, she told me to come with her.”

      If I wanted to keep listening to his story, I couldn’t interrupt with a rude question like ‘what happened to the lights?’  I can’t even interrupt with an opinion that might depress him like ‘you were reckless when you were a child too, weren’t you?’  Now I should just nod silently.  The ironclad rule of being lost is to not move, but a rule like that wouldn’t get through to a young child.

      “What was weird was that when that girl walked down the dark pathway, the decorations on the walls and the dolls moved like they should have.  Now that I look back, she must have known where the emergency power switches were, but when I was five I didn’t think of that and was surprised thinking ‘Wow! What kind of magic is she using?’  Basically the only person who was thinking she needed to be saved was me and she was a few levels better than me.  Saying ‘better’ is strange, huh?  Then let me say she was a veteran pirate.  She might have actually been a regular who rode on that ride a countless amount of times.  Thanks to that, I got to see the last three scares that I would have missed otherwise.  Although compared to the excitement when I was riding alone, the fear and surprise got cut in half because there were two of us.”

      “But it was reassuring, right?  That’s good.”  Wolfram, teary eyed, was as happy as if it had happened to himself.  He was like an audience member who was watching the happy ending to a movie.  “So then you managed to get to the exit without incident?”

      “Nope!  About that…”

      For some reason I get a bad feeling.  He might have been about to lead into a horror story because his gaze drifts away from Wolfram’s and mine.

      “At the sixth or seventh scare, for some reason that girl stopped.  Then she held a finger up to her pink lips, like this, and went ‘shh!’  When a guy does it it’s weird, but it’s cute when a girl does it.  ‘Shh!  Be quiet.’  Then while I was wondering what happened, that girl, Alice, said something.  ‘After this, scary pirates are going to come through here so let’s hide so they don’t find us.’  ‘If the pirates find us, they’ll scalp us and throw us in the ocean, so let’s hide somewhere.  Right, that treasure chest is good.’ And then she pointed at the treasure chest.  I said earlier; it was one of those with a round top like how you see in pirate movies.”

      Wait a minute.  I didn’t want to interrupt this rare story of his so I only said that in my head.  I remember hearing a rumor similar to this somewhere.  A story about a child hiding in a treasure chest at an amusement park.  However, I’m not sure if pirates were involved, but a five or six year old got into a treasure chest…  A chill ran up my spine.  It’s okay. Yuuri is here now so there definitely wasn’t an accident.  The story I heard and the story he’s telling me are definitely completely different stories.  Having no way of realizing my agitation, Wolfram was relieved and continuing to ask questions.

      “And then you two hid?”

      “Yeah.  There’s no way that pirates who scalped children were in an attraction at that amusement park, though.  I was a kid so I ended up believing it, but maybe there actually was something like that for the last scare at the end.  A big bang for the climax.  But those were the words of Miss Veteran who had been turning the electric back on like magic so I completely fell for it.  And then that girl told me ‘The pirates are going to come soon, but if you hide in this chest they won’t find you.  It’s okay.  It’s like hide-and-seek that you play all the time.’  And the two of us got into the big treasure chest, pushing fake coins and fake jewels out of the way.  The attitude I had earlier that I had to lead the girl out and act cool had completely disappeared so I was really depending on saying, ‘The pirates are coming, but you’re not alone so it’s okay.’ I was an idiot.”

      “Well, often times girls grow up faster during childhood.”

      “Yeah.  To be honest, she was very reliable and reassuring.  But her hand was really cold.”  He clutched his hands together as he if remembered the sensation.  “That was the only pitiable part about her.  She was probably cold.  It was pretty chilly inside the tent and I wasn’t exaggerating about the water being up to my knees so she must have been horribly cold.  I kept holding her hand the whole time we were hiding and I was squeezing with all my might.  I kept on repeating ‘It’s okay’ over and over again like an idiot while I clung to her tiny white fingers.  And then the most pathetic part,” Yuuri let his head fall onto the back of the couch and stared at the ceiling with a dejected face, “was that I fell asleep.”

      Unable to resist, Wolfram blurts out, “You fell asleep!?”

      “I was really little and I fell asleep holding her hand.  When I woke up, the lights had come back on and there were people like firefighters gathered around and the weary babysitter’s face was pale and my dad was furious and my mom was hugging me.  When I asked later, the lights really had gone out because of an electrical failure and I had been left in the middle of the maze.  In other words, it was my very first time being stranded.  Seriously, so I had already been stranded once in a travelling amusement park in New York before that time on the way to The Holy Sand Kingdom.  I wasn’t officially considered a missing child, though.”

      “And then?  What happened to that girl?”

      “I was completely out of it and by the time I woke up, she wasn’t in the treasure chest.  I think she must have been helped first.  America is a ladies-first society, after all.  Aw, man!” he suddenly cried out and held his head.  “It turned out like that in the end!  Memories of being lost are really embarrassing… so I probably drove it into a corner of my brain so I wouldn’t remember.  Even now I want to forget it again, but it’d be a shame to forget that girl.”

      He’s innocently carrying on saying ‘Well I mean, it’s one of those things.  It might be my very first memory of a crush.’

      My cheeks twisted up in my relief and I end up being stared at by His Majesty who didn’t miss that.

      “Ah, you’re laughing aren’t you, Conrad!?  You’re making fun of me for getting lost in a tent, aren’t you!?  I don’t have a particularly bad sense of direction.  It was just dark and cold then and I was a kid… Is it really that funny?”

      “No, I was simply thinking that it was truly enjoyable to hear a story from Your Majesty’s childhood.”

      “You’re poking fun.”

      “Of course not.  However,” I’m truly happy you were alright.  I want to thank whoever watched over him from the bottom of my heart. “If you’re not careful, you instantly end up lost.”

      ‘You’re the one who instantly disappears,’ he retorts not quite angrily, but in a semi-exasperated way.  Indeed, even my real little brother says the same thing.  I played hide-and-seek with him so much, but now that he’s an adult he treats me like this.

      Now then, while I was ‘training’ on Earth, I heard a story like this from a former East German soldier.  During the Second World War that occurred on Earth, a certain town had been bombed by Germany.  The residents scrambled about in the destruction and were cornered at the travelling amusement park in the town square. 

      Fearing an attack by the invading enemy soldiers, a single mother hid her daughter in a maze in the amusement park – in a box with fake gold coins and fake jewels in the deepest part of the maze after telling her a scene from the book she had always read to her.  I have no way of knowing what happened to that parent and child.  The equipment from that amusement park that escaped getting burned down was sold to various showmen in other countries, but ever since then there have apparently been cases of missing children all over Europe.

      The soldier who had intoxicated himself by drinking so much alcohol it was like had bathed in it had said that he had definitely seen it.  “You might not believe me, but I saw that girl.  That girl looks for brats who get lost in the dark maze.  She asks ‘Did you come to play?’  I was surprised so I didn’t answer, but my childhood friend who had come to the amusement park with me answered her.  And then the girl took his hand, left me behind in the dark and disappeared.  The power immediately came back on, but my friend never came back.  We searched every nook and cranny of the park, but all we found were a few hairs snagged on the lid of the chest in the maze.  And we didn’t know whose hair it was.  The color was different than the child who went missing and the results of the DNA analysis were inconsistent as well.”

      “But I think,” the drunken soldier mumbled. “The chest there at that amusement park was definitely that chest from the war.”

      If this incident keeps occurring, then the legend I heard and Yuuri’s experience are different events.

      But perhaps… if this sad incident never happened again…

      He has saved yet another young soul.

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