Chapter 4:
The Electric Cleaner
THE DRUGSTORE was scheduled to be closed today, so we were cleaning all the nooks, crannies, and shelves we never got around to tidying. Mina had come up with the idea, but I wasn’t opposed—the dust and stains were getting to me too.
Noela, Vivi, and Ejil all joined Mina and I. Noela tried to bow out at first, but when Mina got after her, she quickly fell in line.
“Would you please dust those shelves with a rag, Noela?” Mina requested.
“Groo!” Noela saluted and headed for the shelves per her commanding officer’s orders.
“What should I do, Mina?” Vivi asked, having finished tidying one section. The lake spirit was a part-timer at the drugstore, and she commuted from a lake deep in the mountains whenever she had a shift.
Er, spirit? Fairy? Frankly, I didn’t know the difference. According to Vivi, though, there absolutely was one—so I made sure to mix them up to mess with her.
“Um…please take a breather for now, Vivi,” Mina replied. I figured it was tough directing everyone the way she was.
“Am I just in the way…?” Vivi could get morose quickly, and it was happening again. Her moods could be hard to deal with.
“Huh? No, that isn’t it at all!” Mina reassured her.
“Mina just wants you to be ready for the next task,” I added.
“O-oh. In that case, I’ll wait, all right? I’ll do my very best on the next job!” Vivi giggled and then left with a painfully pure, innocent smile.
“There’s not much work left, is there?” I asked Mina. “The drugstore itself isn’t that big.”
“Tee hee! I can’t argue with that, Mr. Reiji,” Mina replied, smiling defeatedly.
Cool.
Having apparently finished tidying his area, Ejil raised his hand. “I’d like to clean the lab, Doctor!”
Ejil was supposedly a demon king and was in fact currently waging a war against humans. He became aware of Kirio Drugs thanks to my potions, and after meeting Noela, fell in love and became a part-timer as well. At work, he was clever and alert.
“The lab, huh? Now that you mention it, I’ve never deep cleaned it. Would you mind?”
“Absolutely not!”
Ejil was very useful, maybe because he was a demon king. He could be caustic with humans, but when it came to looking after the store, he was second only to Mina. Plus, whenever I needed product ingredients, he used teleportation magic to get them.
Noela wagged her tail, and Ejil’s knee-jerk reaction was to watch her, cackling creepily. That must’ve set off the werewolf’s instincts.
She turned and noticed Ejil’s stare. “Hate. Pervert. Die.”
“Heh heh heh! Noela, haven’t you noticed? Your cruel words and cold glare are simply rewards to me…”
That really isn’t the kind of thing he should say with a proud expression. In fact, that type of interaction was exactly why Noela hated Ejil. He was capable, but he couldn’t hide his raw desire when it came to the werewolf girl. I shooed him off to the lab.
“He’s so troublesome sometimes,” Mina sighed.
Noela seemed fairly accustomed to Ejil at this point. Rather than dwelling on the exchange, she wiped shelves with renewed gusto. Meanwhile, I cleaned product bottles with a rag.
Whenever I created a new medicine or treatment, it initially sold like hotcakes. Then, sales eventually dropped off a bit and evened out. Some products wound up sitting on the shelves collecting dust for quite a while. It was clear at a glance that dust never collected on our potions; they always sold exceptionally well. But cleaning the other bottles one by one was a real pain, frankly.
“Oh, Mr. Reiji!” Mina called out from behind me.
“Gah!” She must’ve realized I wasn’t taking the dusting seriously.
“Ahem! We’re supposed to clean this place thoroughly today, remember?”
“Sorry, Sergeant!”
“I-I’m no sergeant!”
“Careful, Master. Sergeant scary when mad,” Noela warned, clearly speaking from experience.
“Goodness! Stop calling me ‘sergeant’!”
At any rate, it was definitely frustrating to clean this painstakingly. If I had a product that got rid of dust better, it wouldn’t be so annoying. Also, it would make routine cleaning take way less time, and there’d be dramatically fewer occasions when we needed to clean this thoroughly.
“Actually…” I might be able to make something that does clear dust better. “Excuse me, Mina… Can I go create a product to make cleaning easier for all of us?”
Mina cocked her head at that. “Extra Strength Ultra Cleaning Gel, you mean?” That product left surfaces sparkling clean if you applied it, then wiped it off.
“We’re already using that, right? I meant something different.”
“I don’t mind. Go ahead.”
Having gotten the sergeant’s permission, I headed to the lab. Ejil was still in there, cleaning up a storm. Despite being a demon king, he was always serious about work. “Ah, Doctor! Is something wrong?”
“I thought I’d whip up a product to make cleaning easier.”
“May I watch?”
“Sure. It’s nothing crazy.”
“Thank you very much.”
Come to think of it, is this the first time I’m showing Ejil how I create products? Learning the potion-making process had always been one of the demon king’s goals. That was why he called me “Doctor” in the first place.
But man—it was hard doing anything with him staring at my hands. “Er, Ejil? Could you watch a bit less intently?”
“Why? I want to burn the process into my mind!” The young man was consumed with passion and drive.
“Fine…” If I made the product on my own, the demon king would just keep staring, so I decided to have him help me as Noela often did. “Ejil, could you grab some ingredients off that shelf?” I named the things I needed.
“Wh-wha—?! D-Doctor, this is…” Ejil pointed at an object I’d mentioned—the crystal I recently received from a wind spirit.
“Oh, right, that. I got it as a gift not long ago.” After glancing at it with my identification skill, I learned it was a crystallized essence of the wind itself.
“That’s insane, Doctor! It’s incredibly rare! Like, one-per-century rare!”
“Seriously?” And here I was, just leaving it wherever. I would need to keep it somewhere safe so it didn’t break. “So…what exactly is it? I figured it was rare, but…”
Ejil told me the same thing my identification skill had. “It’s basically the wind itself ensconced in a crystal. I’ve seen small ones, but never one this large.” The crystal was the size of my palm.