Well, talking with Latifah about the fate of the park may be important, but it’s no reason to skip out on a drink after a hard day’s work. Moffle passed through the park’s service gate, caught the last bus of the night, and then walked another ten minutes from his final stop. He was heading for a small yakitori bar near the north entrance of Amagi Station.
The people he passed on the street paid him little mind. He got about as many glances as a foreigner wandering around in Roppongi. He owed that to the magical item provided to him by AmaBri: the Lalapatch Charm. As long as he wore that charm, any mascot—no matter peculiar-looking—would be treated like any other man on the street. Those charms were what let Moffle and his fellows buy lunches at convenience stores, splurge their earnings at pachinko parlors, and buy figures in Akihabara without arousing suspicion.
An older lady closing up her cigarette shop for the night called out to Moffle as he passed. “Oh, Moffle-chan. Running a bit behind tonight, aren’t you?”
“Moffu. I had a few things to see to, fumo.” He waved his plush hand in greeting.
“By the way, my little brother and his wife sent me some pickled radishes, and I have more than I can eat. Would you mind taking some?” she asked.
“Thanks, fumo.”
“Wait right there, Moffle-chan.” She withdrew into the back of the store. Moffle was left waiting for a fair while before the woman came back with a cold pack-readied plastic bag.
“Make sure that you eat them as soon as you can,” she instructed.
“I’ll do that.” He gave her a stiff bow, then continued on his way.
Three storefronts down from the cigarette shop was the yakitori bar, “Savage.” It had been in business for a bit over 20 years. Always that same enticing aroma wafting out from the ventilation fan, he thought nostalgically, and that same glass door, sticky with oil.
When he entered the bar, he found Takami, the part-time worker, filling a pitcher with beer from the tap right next to the register.
“Oh, Moffle-san. Come right on in,” Takami said, her tone lacking in affectation when it came to their regulars. “Your friends are already in the back, drinking away. You want your usual Hoppy?”
“Moffu.” AmaBri’s physician had recently advised him to stay away from purines. Gout was a surprisingly common affliction among mascots in the industry—hence the Hoppy. He was trying to avoid beer as often as possible.
“While I’m here, Takami-chan, do you want some pickled radishes? They’d make a fine appetizer, fumo.”
“Oh, I already got a bunch from the lady who runs the cigarette shop...” Takami said, wincing as she saw the plastic bag dangling from Moffle’s hand.
“Ah, I thought so. No big deal, fumo.”
He passed by the counter and made his way to the small, cramped tatami room in the back. His comrades from Amagi Brilliant Park—Macaron and Tiramii—were indeed already there, drinking. It seemed it would just be the three of them tonight.
Macaron’s mug was about half empty of beer, as was Tiramii’s. They were going to town on shichimi spiced heart and chicken-and-scallion skewers.
“Munch munch... This’s great, ron! This place’s got the best chicken-and-scallion skewers in the business, ron!” Macaron declared.
Macaron was a woolly white mascot who looked like a three-heads-tall bipedal sheep. He had an adorable little face, which was currently stuffing itself with yakitori and guzzling down beer, to be followed by a deep sigh and a rapturous puff off of a cigarette. His brand, incidentally, was Marlboro—each time the cigarette tax went up, he would go on a tear about the government and Japan Tobacco.
“Just delicious, mii! That’s the flavor of hard work, mii,” Tiramii added.
Tiramii was another mascot; he looked like a sweet little Pomeranian in three-heads-tall form. He was covered in pink fur that seemed very soft, and wore both a flower ornament by his ear and a small pouch over his shoulder. All in all, it was impossible to look at him without getting a warm-and-fuzzy feeling inside.
At the moment, he was gulping down shochu on the rocks and bitching about the day’s guests. “The kid tried to kill me five times in five minutes, mii. When a five-year-old hits you for real... sheesh, you just can’t understand unless you’ve felt it, mii! It freaking hurts! I should have hit him back. No court would convict me!”
“Yeah, I hear you, ron...”
“But oh, oh—here’s the part I really want to talk about! The kid’s mom, mii!”
“Oh-ho?” Macaron chortled. “What was she like?”
“Hot pants in mid-March. Long legs, porcelain white. Massive rack. Tears in her eyes, falling all over herself with apologies. An exquisitely aged thirty-something, mii.”
“Sexy, ron?”
“Hella sexy, mii! She’d get MILF roles in the AV industry in a heartbeat. And she was giving me all kinds of signals.”
“You’re gonna get shot down again, ron.”
“But she gave me her email, mii. See? ...I don’t mind older women, as long as they’re hot. And banging a kid’s mom is the best revenge, mii.”
“You’re a real creep, ron.”
The two adorable animal mascots—fluffy Pomeranian and the woolly sheep—were spewing vulgarities with beer mugs in hand. It certainly wasn’t anything they’d want a guest to overhear.
At last, the two realized that Moffle was there. “Hey, it’s Moffle, ron.”
“Took you long enough, mii!”
They raised their mugs in greeting.
“Moffu.” Moffle gave his clipped response, slipped off the fur slippers he wore as outdoor shoes, then stepped onto the tatami and knelt down. Incidentally, even with his shoes off, his feet were covered in the same fur as his shoes. ...The fact of the matter was, he’d had the outdoor shoes designed to look like his real feet. ...But then his feet were also quite large, so the shoes had to be as big as handbags to cover them, and thus, wouldn’t fit inside the usual shoe cabinets.
“...Listen up, you two. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times: Keep your conversations out of the gutter, fumo. The walls have ears and the doors have eyes... What if someone overheard you and started a play-by-play on Twitter, fumo?”
Yes, a rumor like that—“I’m here in Amagi yakitori bar ‘Savage’ and two AmaBri mascots are howling about trying to score with married women”—would be horrible if it got out. Opinion of AmaBri would plummet on the spot (although some might say it had no lower to go).
“Aw, this bar’s cool, mii. Besides, we’ve got the Lalapatch Charms,” Tiramii countered.
“You can’t even get wireless LAN or 3G signal here, ron,” Macaron added, holding up his smartphone. Both bars read “No service.”
“Be that as it may—” Moffle protested.
“Besides, our guests don’t even tweet, ron. You know how many followers I have? 128, ron.”
“......”
128 followers. Even for a mascot of a highly unpopular amusement park, the number seemed egregiously low. Though, he’d heard it was because Macaron’s account was mainly him tweeting out “pearls of wisdom,” which caused most of his followers to eventually get annoyed and unfollow...
“What about you, Tiramii?” Moffle asked.
“I forget, mii. Probably about 200. I get blocked a lot for some reason, mii!”
In stark contrast with his cute Pomeranian-like appearance, Tiramii loved dirty jokes. And the moment he learned one of his followers was a woman, he’d start hitting on her immediately. As a result, the story went, he too had been largely abandoned by his followers.
“What about you, Moffle?” Macaron asked.
“I don’t do Twitter anymore, fumo.”
He’d made an account on the others’ recommendations, but he’d barely touched it. He’d tried following friends and others he knew too, but even that he quit after less than a month. He’d quickly grown sick of watching Macaron’s lectures and Tiramii’s ill-advised come-ons, and the others’ accounts weren’t much better.
Furthermore, reading things on Twitter was a depressing experience for him. It was just a bunch of individuals rattling off the trivial events of their lives, yet seeing all those happy tweets day in and day out made him feel like... how to put it? Like “My life is so boring compared to theirs.”
The sense of inferiority made him feel limp and deflated, like on hot, humid nights when his fur retained moisture.
An objective appraisal would prove that each person was really only going to two or three fun events per month. Sadly, that wasn’t how it looked to him. After the hundredth “Heading out!” tweet, he couldn’t help feeling like everyone else was going out on the town and having fun all the time. It created the illusion of a world filled with light, in which he alone suffered in grim, dull darkness day after day.
The most pathetic part of all was the way it tempted him to compete, to post bragging “I’m living a meaningful life!” tweets. Look at this wonderful guest we had today! Look at this wonderful experience I had! I may be facing setbacks, but I’m still giving it my all! —Of course, none of that was true.
My life is awful. Monday mornings are the worst. Someone kill me. I wished this packed train car would explode and a meteor would hit my workplace. I hope you all die.
But could he tweet those things? Of course he couldn’t.
Thus, as Moffle was not a mascot who tolerated deception, he had no choice but to remain silent.
It was around that time that part-time worker Takami brought him a bottle and a mug. “Here you are, Moffle-san. Your Black Hoppy!”
“...Moffu.”
“Can I get you something to eat?” Takami asked.
“Chilled tomatoes and cold tofu,” he told her. “Some yakitori, too. Your choice.”
“Got it!”
As Takami left the tatami room, Tiramii gazed after her. His sweet smile, his button eyes... A small sigh escaped his mouth.
“Takami-chan... I love that junk in her trunk, mii.”
“Don’t you dare, you stupid mutt!” Moffle and Macaron both groaned simultaneously.
“You always, always go there, fumo!”
“Hitting on the part-timer got us banned from the last place, ron!”
“I-I just like to say it, mii... Don’t glare at me like that, mii...”