Chapter 118

AFTERWORD Hello everyone, this is Kisetsu Morita! The Service series has at last reached its final volume. The only reason I managed to get this far is because of all your support! This is the final volume, so I’ll be concentrating on my thank-yous. First, to the editors and the sales team—the only reason we managed to reach Volume 7 is because I had your help in selling Volume 1. I’ve learned so much, what with drama CDs and two manga adaptations. Thank you so much! To my illustrator, Hiroki Ozaki, thank you so much for sticking with the series for so long. It would have never gotten off the ground if you hadn’t drawn Shiren and Ryouta and all the others. And I owe a great debt to the manga artists, urute and Toshiko Machida. It was so fresh and exciting to put my characters in other people’s hands and allow them to come to life. In fact, it almost felt like a feedback loop, where I looked at the manga and saw the way I portray my characters in the novel change. That was especially true for Kiyomizu and Tamaki—I had to be careful, otherwise it’d be hard to tell which version was the original. Also, this might sound strange, but I’d like to thank all the characters who did whatever they liked throughout the series, all the way up until the end. Of course, I, Morita, the author, am writing this story, but the longer the series went on, the more I found the characters would do things on their own. There were more than a handful of times where I thought, Hey, I never planned for you to say that line! I had to adjust the plot whenever that happened, but it made the story much more interesting when the characters moved on their own. Kiyomizu, especially, was only supposed to be a stupid little girl character in the beginning, but at some point, she became an old soul and Shiren’s big sister figure. At first, Sasara was meant to be a minor character whose only role was to cling to Ouka, but she eventually started asserting herself and often ended up in the spotlight. I was like, “Hey, is this okay?” But I decided to let this series be driven along by its characters. This volume marks the end of the series, but—and I know this is a clichéd line—Ryouta, Shiren, and Ouka’s strange lives will keep on going. I decided to end it on a note that leaves the story open for a continuation. I want to leave the conclusion of the story to all of you who have read this seventh volume. I hope you come up with something good. This may be the end, but thank you so much, all of you, for sticking with me through seven volumes. Thank you, thank you! It was a lot of fun! Kisetsu Morita