Chapter 7 (2/2)
Seeing a shelf full of grapes, Feisha was about to take one to eat when he spotted a head of orange moving about.
“Dea?” he called out, softly.
The blur of orange turned around, revealing a set of beautiful features- it was Dea. Faced with such perfection, Feisha’s feelings were a little chaotic.
Being just as handsome as Dea, Isefel doesn’t make his breath catch in his throat, or his heart threaten to beat out of his chest, because despite how good-looking he was, Isefel exuded an undoubtedly male aura. On the other hand, Dea’s androgynous appearance sometimes made his pulse quicken without warning. Thinking back to Gin’s words when they first met, Feisha’s heart skipped a beat.
“What are you staring at?” Dea asked, frowning slightly.
Feisha snapped out of his stupor, schooling his expression into a serious one: “I’m looking into the distant future.”
“…”
“Err, you know, humans are full of wisdom and intelligence. They are often the first to worry about the troubles across the land, the last to enjoy universal happiness.” Seeing that Dea was now thoroughly confused, Feisha quickly changed the topic.
“So, what are you doing here?”
“Organising fruit.”
“Uh, isn’t that Antonio’s territory?” Shortly after arriving, Feisha had noticed that the people here didn’t like to use the word ‘job’ as much as they did ‘territory’ to assert their absolute authority in their particular area.
“He doesn’t understand the feelings of the fruits.”
I don’t either, thought Feisha. I can only understand my feelings of happiness when I eat the fruit.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m just, passing by. And taking foo…”
Dea looked at him.
“Fo…for granted the value of organisation. It’s very messy here, isn’t it?” Feisha forcefully wrenched himself from Dea’s scrutinising stare. “I guess you’re way more capable of understanding the feelings of the fruit, huh. Um, you take your time organising, I’ll be taking my leave.”
“Wait, do you have anything sharp on you right now?”
“Why?” Feisha asked while patting down his pockets.
“One of my buttons fell into a crack.”
There was indeed a small crack in the ground, discovered Feisha as he walked over, and embedded within it was a button.
“It’d probably come out if we could use something to pull it.”
“Which is why I asked if you had anything sharp on you.”
Feisha looked around, finally resting his gaze on Dea.
“What are you looking at?” Dea asked with a frown.
“Can you take your ears off?”
The answer was cold. “Can you put it back on after you’re done?”
Feisha awkwardly looked away. “I’ll go find you a pair of scissors.”
“There’s no need.”
“Why?”
Muttering a spell under his breath, the button levitated into Dea’s outstretched hand.
“Why did you ask for my help if you could do something like that?” asked Feisha.
Dea held the button in his hand and calmly replied: “I wanted to see how the intelligent human would solve such a problem.”
“We don’t normally do stupid things like stuffing buttons into cracks.”
With that, Feisha left the warehouse and his adventure for the day was brought to a close.
Translator’s notes
In addition to madly studying, Feisha also scouted his way through the floors of the hotel.
The Chinese word used here in place of ‘scouted’ is踩盘子cǎi pán zi (lit. step on plates). It’s from olden day Chinese argot and basically means to, well, scout out a place/stalk a person before setting fire to it/robbing them or whatever.
According to feng shui
I can’t believe I actually had to research feng shui for this:
“The werewolves are here to check in,” Isefel announced the next day.
It’s less of a joke or pun than a subtle nudge, but The Boy Who Cried Wolf is called 狼来了láng lái le (lit. the wolf has come) in Chinese, which is what Isefel says here.
“Other than sounding nothing alike and being spelt differently, what’s the difference between doing something intentionally and on purpose?”
Same old, same old; OG Chinese first: 有意和故意除了发音不一样，头一个字写法不一样外，有什么区别？yǒu yì hé gù yì chú le fā yīn bù yī yàng, tóu yī gè zì xiě fǎ bù yī yàng wài, yǒu shé me qū bié? (lit. Other than being pronounced differently, the first character being written differently, what’s the difference between intentionally and deliberately?) As you can see, 有意 and 故意 have the same second character. It’s pretty self-explanatory – Feisha’s just pointing out how Asa contradicted himself because he’s still salty about the pay deduction.
An eyebrow raised. “What’s so hard about that? Isn’t it just like playing ping-pong?”
Eyyyy another weird reference I dug up from the crevices of history. Instead of saying ping pong, what Feisha actually says is 不就是哼哼哈嘿吗 bù jiù shì hēng hēng hā hēi ma (lit. Isn’t it just heng heng ha hei?), which is a reference to Jay Chou’s song, Nunchucks. You can hear this exact line here: (1:17 if the timestamp doesn’t work). There are translations for the lyrics up on the internet should anyone be interested. In short, it doesn’t really have any meaning, just a few grunts of exertion as one uses nunchucks to beat people up.
Now for the English. It’s not that complicated really- the ping pong thing is just a reference to the famous Nokia ad, in which Bruce Lee plays ping pong with nunchucks (), which brings us to the next note:
The ad was fake anyway.
Following on from above, here Feisha actually thinks something along the lines of ‘I bet Jay Chou can only spin it a few times anyway.’ Sour grapes, man. Sour grapes.
Anyway. As everybody on the internet will be eager to tell you, the Nokia nunchuck-ping-pong ad is actually fake (what a surprise).
“My name is Moon, and they’re my little brothers Lune and Luna.”
Their names in Chinese are 大月(dà yuè), 中月(zhōng yuè) and 小月(xiǎo yuè), which mean Big Moon, Middle Moon and Little Moon respectively. Their translated names are just the word moon in English, French and Latin. The joke here is that Feisha painstakingly avoided saying the word 月, which also means month in Chinese, only to find out that the werewolves actually have no problem with saying it since it’s in literally all their names.
[…] besides the fact that its ceiling was nowhere to be seen, every corner one walked past seemed to lead to a completely new area.
The second half of this sentence was originally the second half of the Chinese proverb, 山重水复疑无路，柳暗花明又一村shān chóng shuǐ fù yí wú lù, liǔ àn huā míng yòu yì chūn (lit. After endless mountains and rivers that leave doubt whether there is a path out, suddenly one encounters the shade of a willow, bright flowers and a lovely village). The English counterpart to this would be “Every cloud has a silver lining”. You might notice that this doesn’t make any sense in context, and that’s because it doesn’t. What Feisha means by quoting this is not the overall moral, but likening the sudden appearance of a “lovely village” to his experience at Noah’s Ark, where rooms seemingly just keep popping up without an end.
“I’m just, passing by. And taking foo…” […] “Fo…for granted the value of organisation.”
Look, a pun. What Feisha was saying in Chinese was 吃。。。嗤笑一下安东尼奥放东西的品味chī… chī xiào yī xià ān dōng ní ào fàng dōng xī de pǐn wèi (lit. Eat…Laugh a bit at Antonio’s way of putting things.) The word for eat and the first character for laugh are both chī; basically, what Feisha did was start to admit that he came to steal food, then change it mid-sentence to a criticism of how disorganised Antonio was.