ch 011 (1/2)

The Inimitable Empty Can

“Whew. I’m so full.”

“Thanks for the meal.”

The idiot elf and I were facing each other on the wooden floor of the shop, having just eaten lunch.

Before and after eating, the idiot elf always put her hands together in thanksgiving.

I didn’t follow the custom, so for that 0.5 seconds, I felt a bit awkward. Maybe I should pray too?

But something about that felt wrong, so I never would. I would be disappointed in myself for following the idiot elf’s example.

Though, sometimes—very occasionally—vanis.h.i.+ngly rarely—I thought to myself it might be a wee bit excessive to call her ‘the idiot elf’.

But she also called me ‘Idiot Master’. So we were even. And anyway, she was always doing idiotic things, so ‘idiot elf’ fit.

“Stop licking that.”

I thwacked the idiot elf on the head.

She was licking the leftover juices out of a can of food.

See there? An idiot elf.

“Aww. But it’ll be wasted?”

“A bit might get wasted, but the thing is, it’s bad manners. And why are your manners so horrible for someone who prays before and after eating?”

“What are manners?”

See there!? An idiot elf.

“If you don’t want to waste the juices, soak them up with some bread or whatever and eat the bread. Use a trick like that. Either way, don’t lick the juices up directly. I won’t allow it.”

“Then please bring some of this ‘bread’ stuff with you next time, OK? It has a pretty delicious ring to it. I’ll look forward to it.”

“You really don’t do anything besides eat, do you?”

“What is there to life for a living creature besides eating and sleeping? Elves are living creatures.”

“Are you trying to sound sophisticated? It’s not working. Not at all. Not one bit.”

“Oh! Welcome!”

“Welcome!”

The idiot elf and I turned smiles on the customer who had come in.

Even when we sneered at one another, we could instantly switch to smiles.

Customer number one for the day was a dwarven man.

There hadn’t been a single customer all morning, so this one coming in after lunch was the first of the day.

Besides the humans, there were also several kinds of ‘demi-humans’ living in this town.

Given the elves, I wasn’t at all surprised there were also dwarves.

The dwarf looked exactly as one might expect:

Short. Stout. Stumpy arms and legs. But brawny. And bearded.

In personality, stubborn and straightforward. Always sullen-looking and taciturn.

You were never sure what they were thinking.

My goal these days as C-Mart’s owner was to put a smile on the face of every customer.

But what could get a dwarf like this old fellow to smile? I had no clue.

Er…? Was he an ‘old fellow’ to begin with?

Could I a.s.sume he was as old or male as he looked?

What if, despite looking like an old fellow, he was actually a kid? Or, despite the beard, he was a woman?

“The blacksmith is a man. He’s eighty-four. Dwarves live about twice as long as humans, so that’s like forty-two for a human. He’s in the prime of his life.”

“Ah-hah.”

I started to nod. Then, realizing something, I asked the idiot elf, “Wait. How’d you know what I was thinking?”

“It’s easy to guess what you’re thinking, Idiot Master.”

“c.r.a.p.”

I had no comeback for that since she had read me so easily.

“What, shopkeeper? Do I interest you?”

“Ah. Not really.”

“Nor do you interest me. But your merchandise does.”

“R—right. OK then.”

“Many an odd item here. Seeing with my own eyes if you’ve anything useful to a smith. Only trust my own eyes, y’see.”

“Er, all right, please help yourself.”

The dwarven blacksmith came off like a dwarf all right. Not so much as a milliliter of lube to ease the friction of his words.

Though…maybe he wasn’t angry, merely speaking the truth.

That brusqueness was a bit terrifying to a modern j.a.panese person.

He sounded just like your typical stubborn old b.a.s.t.a.r.d. If he was forty-two in human years, that put him smack in the center of ‘stubborn old b.a.s.t.a.r.d’ territory.

“Scissors, eh?”

The dwarf was checking out the scissors. He snapped them open and closed.

But this world had scissors too.

Extremely high quality hand-made scissors sold at such an extremely low price that modern j.a.panese scissors, even ones from a hundred yen shop, couldn’t compete quality- or price-wise.

So mine weren’t popular. They didn’t sell. I wasn’t bringing more over.

“What’s this? A…’stay-puh-ler’?”

The dwarf was checking out a stapler.

“You press here?”

He didn’t seem to know how to use— He was opening it and holding it to the palm of his—

Aaah! He pressed it!!

A staple pierced his finger.

He flapped his hand as if to say “Ow! Ow! Ow!” then cleared his throat with a loud “Ahem!” and…

…replaced the stapler on the shelf as if it was nothing.

And then went on to look at other goods for easily two or three more minutes before—

“Oy, shopkeeper.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Took a fairly skilled smith to make that, eh? Working iron into needles so thin and all.”

“You’re far too kind.”

By ‘that’ he meant the reason why he had been holding out his hand like “Ow! Ow! Ow!” three minutes ago, right? The staple?

But a smith hadn’t made that; it was probably ma.s.s-produced by a machine in a factory.

Well, I didn’t know all that much about it, not really, so I would leave it at that.

I left the dwarf to look at the merchandise and started to clean up from lunch.

The elf girl also began to stir, so I waved her off to go be with the customer.

This dwarven blacksmith. His sort just unnerved me a bit. Not that he wasn’t lovely in his own way, I’m sure.

But something about him unnerved me.

I began to tidy up the two people’s worth of cans that had been left lying around.

I gathered the empty cans into a convenience store bag. Along with the discarded food cans, a miscellaneous array of garbage had begun to pile up since my arrival here. Three of the largest size convenience store bags full of it already sat in the corner of the shop.

That wasn’t good at all.

But what to do with it?

Garbage pick up day was— Not a thing here, huh? Well, it was a fantasy world.

I supposed all I could do was take them back to the other world.

Except…

It depressed me to imagine myself heading back to the other side with bags of garbage in either hand—like a husband tasked with taking the trash out on his way to work in the morning.

That would be the worst thing ever.

“Oy, shopkeeper,” came the dwarf’s ominous voice.

I startled and paused in cleaning up.

If only he would quit it with the deep voice that seemed to promise murder from anywhere at any moment for any reason.

“Wh—what is it?”

“What’re those?”

“Uh…what are whats?”