Maybe it hadn’t dawned on Yessica yet. To the outside observer, it was extremely obvious that Clay didn’t have a girl because he was saving himself for Yessica… But that wasn’t really something you could say out loud, so Earnest changed the subject.
“Um, so what’s an imaginary wife?” she asked.
“It’s like having an ideal girlfriend in your head,” Eliza said. “According to ancient records, unmarried men over the age of twenty who have never had a girlfriend in their life were said to have an average of two-point-seven-five ‘two-dimensional imaginary wives’ living in their brains. That’s from a report by the National Institute for the Study of Declining Birthrates.”
“Two-dimensional…? Great, another word I’ve never heard before! So basically, we’re talking about a guy who’s strong and good-looking but doesn’t have the right personality to be popular, so he holes up in some dark room and does a bunch of shady science experiments to create the perfect girl?”
“Anna, I said the exact same thing just now, though I worded it a little more nicely…,” said Yessica.
“But…that much hair? One hundred and ten pounds’ worth?”
Earnest put her hands on her curvy waist. The hair of dozens of his victims was stored in boxes all around the room. She wondered how much it all weighed. She eyed James’s stash. It sure didn’t seem like 110 pounds. He’d have to work at this for years to get that much. It was a good thing they’d stopped his crime spree, though—Earnest sure didn’t want any more girls to suffer such a cruel, hairless fate.
“Um…do you mind if I ask a question?” Claire timidly raised a finger, and Earnest nodded. “So…about the hair… If you needed that much, why didn’t you just buy it?”
“Huh?” James replied, dumbfounded. He looked at Claire.
“I mean, a few years back, before my hair got this long, I cut it off and sold it to pay for junior school.”
“You can sell hair?” asked Earnest.
Yessica nodded. “Oh, sure. They use it for wigs and dolls and brushes and stuff, I think.”
Really? Wow. That’s pretty neat. Earnest had learned something new today.
“That, or you could have just collected it from a barbershop. They usually just put the hair they’ve cut in the garbage.”
“Huh?” James looked astounded yet again. His awe was short-lived, however, soon replaced by his usual stoicism. “Heh…heh. I almost fell for that. There’s no point trying to shake me with your lies.”
“No, it’s true,” Claire insisted.
“It really is,” agreed Yessica.
“It sounds like they know what they’re talking about,” said Earnest.
“W-well, even if it is true! All my life, I’ve never been able to achieve anything I wanted! Never allowed to have anything I asked for! Not even once! So those methods have nothing to do with me! Ha-ha-ha! Too bad for you!”
“I think it’s too bad for you, really… But yeah, like you said, they probably would’ve said no anyway.”
“Right, so the only way for me to reach my goal was to cut the hair and take it myself! I failed, and now I’m probably going to prison for a long time, but I have no regrets!”
“Oh, so no remorse, then? Jotting that down…”
Earnest honestly didn’t know what to do. This guy was a total freak, yes, but under the laws of the kingdom’s charter, the biggest crime he’d committed was aggravated barbering. She was no expert in criminal law, so she couldn’t be sure, but there was a chance he might get off with only a fine.
Cutting a girl’s hair like that was an unforgivable sin… But if he went to each of his victims’ houses, offered some proper apologies, and swore never to do it again, maybe it’d be okay to let him off the hook. But if he wasn’t going to show any remorse, they couldn’t just let him walk free. He’d probably pick up right where he left off.
“Hey, Eliza? Any ideas?” she asked.
“Regarding?”
Eliza, who was working her way through the magic tomes in James’s bookshelves, turned to face her. Already, she had built a stack of thirty books to examine later. No wonder she was such a genius in the new field of “science.”
“Like, a way to keep this guy from committing any more crimes. Can you think of some way to make him into a good person, or an honest one, or maybe fix his weird personality and make him friendly? If we did that, he could find a girl, couldn’t he? Like, instead of an imaginary wife, maybe he could just get a real one.”
“Curse you! How dare you make fun of my Honoka!”
“Huh? Like I care. Who’s Honoka?”
“I’m sure he won’t do it again.”
“Well, I’m sure he will.”
Earnest waved at Eliza, who was about to return to her magic tomes.
“I mean, he seems pretty smart. If he realizes he’s wasting his time, I think he’ll just stop.”
“Wasting my time?” James piped up. “What’s so wasteful about this? I have the recipe for a homunculus right there in that book, and it requires hair. Women’s hair. At least one hundred and ten pounds for the ideal proportions. I could even compromise a bit and make do with around eighty-five pounds. In that case, I could just craft Madoka instead of Honoka.”
Oh, wow. Screw this guy. Doesn’t Cú weigh about that much? That definitely sounds like a crime.
“No, what I’m telling you is that magic tome is a bunch of quackery.”
“…What?” James froze at Eliza’s revelation.
“Yeah, this tome’s complete nonsense. All lies. A bunch of random lies, conjured up to sound plausible. The recipe’s absolutely impossible to recreate in real life. Mad scientists have tested this time and again, and none have succeeded. There are tons of reports on the topic. This book’s, like, notorious in the community.”
“Huh? What…?”
“You call yourself a mad scientist, and you didn’t even know that? Pfft. Ha-ha-ha!”
“Eh…? So I can’t do it? It’s impossible? I’ll never have her?”
“No. It’s impossible. You can’t.”
“Um…so…my Honoka is…?”
“Never gonna happen.”
“And Madoka?”
“Not her either.”
“Wh…wha…whaaat?”
“Oh, that reminds me… I was just thinking that I really need to hire an assistant soon. Looking at the equipment and research material you’ve gathered, I think you’d be decently useful… So, does anyone mind if I take him as my assistant?”
“Well, I don’t see why not,” Earnest said. “It sounds like you managed to dissuade him from this nonsense, so…”
And just like that, Eliza gained a new apprentice.