DAY 119
MIDMORNING
The key to good leadership is limiting access to your fine selection of meats and cheese. Yeah, deli-gating?
THE ROYAL PALACE OF THE KINGDOM
THE PIMPIN’ KING summoned us for a meeting. Apparently, there was a thank-you note from the Theocracy or something? To my teenage mind, thank-you notes were something you shoved into your teacher’s arms behind the gym on the day of graduation—but I wasn’t an expert, naturally. I’d certainly never done that. Obviously not. Anyhoo, I didn’t know why we’d get a thank-you note, ’cause we’d done nothing worth a thank-you. And hadn’t I been repaid with a copy of The Gentleman’s Guide to a Select Subset of the Church’s Nuns (Traveler’s Edition) courtesy of His Ancient Upskirtness? And a highly choice nun—okay, Saint—to boot?
“Oh ho, now here’s a humble hero. My daughter Shalliceres claims you neutralized Aryuca’s armies singlehandedly and cleared the path to the Holy City.”
“Uh, no? I was just performing reconnaissance? I must’ve said this half a hundred times? I was being sneaky? And spy-y? And all the loot I picked up is mine! Finders, keepers. You won’t believe how many unperceptive gatekeepers and dimwitted old men I passed on my way—and you’re no better! Don’t you know a covert operation when you (don’t) see one? I wasn’t systematically slaughtering! I was scouting! I was being covert and creeping and clandestine!”
How did he get blitzkrieg, mass slaughter, annihilation of whole armies from undercover, or underage agent? Were his ears going? His wits? He was getting up in years… You still remember your name, don’t you, pimpin’ king? Not like I’d know the right answer if he said it.
“No, my daughter Merielle insists you toppled the fortress the Theocracy had made of its cathedral. Surely you remember toppling an entire building?”
“Sure, the cathedral was destroyed, but how was that my fault? All I did was very sneakily eliminate enemies and report back the subsequent lack of foes. That cathedral was falling apart anyway. And don’t worry, me ’n’ the church are cool now. His Upskirting Oldness is now His Upskirting Popeness, and I gave him a sexy nun habit, so everything’s chill. And I didn’t do anything wrong?”
A person couldn’t be expected to remember every little thing they did in their pure, upstanding, sensible life. Why did everyone insist on pinning every nefarious plot under the sun on busy, busy me? All I’d done was scout, hand out letters, and maybe freelance tailor an outfit or two on the side. I don’t know how everyone else got a different story, but clearly it was a weird quirk of this world’s language. Something of my immaculate speech patterns evidently got lost in translation.
“The king of the Theocracy also extends his gratitude. I wasn’t aware you’d paid a visit to the palace, yet I struggle to imagine who else they could’ve been meant by the ‘mysterious black-haired boy who did not give us his name but repeated ‘y’know?’ with incessant frequency.’”
“Oh, I visited the palace. I dropped off the king’s mail? And I also gave him barbecue ’n’ shabushabu ’n’ stuff? I bet he’s thanking me for the barbecue. I made sure he ate the letter after reading it instead of eating the letter without reading it, but you gotta admit, a letter can’t be anywhere near as tasty as shabushabu. Especially with sesame sauce? That slaps. Get a little ponzu sauce and grated daikon, and mm-mm-mm! You can’t go wrong with ponzu and daikon. I was going to proselytize the wonders of sesame sauce, but I wasn’t allowed to talk? So if they got lost in the sauce and picked the wrong sauce, don’t ask me to sauce—I mean, suss—out what they actually ate?”
Like, I knew what I prepared. But I never saw them eat it, so if they got sauced up and swapped out the wrong sauce—well, I had no way of knowing. Man, I’d have killed for some wasabi soy sauce. Too bad I hadn’t had wasabi at the time. What if I make garlic soy sauce? Yoooo, now we’re talking.
Incidentally, why was everyone else sighing and looking at the ceiling? Was there something interesting up there? Eyes in front, people! Didn’t we all learn this in driver’s ed?
“Goodness gracious, Haruka…”
Sister Girl and the local gal gang were the ones who’d gone to war with the church and liberated all those towns. I’d been too busy spying and looting to join in, and the nerds had been too busy moe-ifying the Beast Kingdom. As for the idiots, I think they’d been off playing in the jungle? Gosh, this got complicated fast.
“The original plan was to sneak in, beat up the pope, and sneak out. Right? Then halfway through, it turned into a James Bond-esque infiltration crossed with corpse co-opting crossed with spirit stealing crossed with dungeon diving, and somewhere along the way I forgot all about the whole church and Theocracy thing?”
“Let me attempt to unravel this. The Cathedral, the impregnable source of the Church’s power, was destroyed and revamped into a…a what now? An eroticathedral?”
“Sure? I don’t remember that part all that well. What I do remember is the James Bond-esque infiltration crossed with a corpse co-opting crossed with a blah blah blah. That part was great! I loved every second of it. I’m still thinking about it even now—every night, in fact! A buncha dead old dudes and an old philosopher dude shafted me with their dirty work and everyone was so, so thankful, so I didn’t think they would mind if I took all the Cathedral’s relics, so I stole them all, and in the end, I was so busy with looting the place from top to bottom that I really did reach the bottom floor, and I picked up the spirit that was lying there, and then things got kinda dangerous, ha ha, lol. Anyway all’s well that ends well? Oh—and it wasn’t my fault. Any of it.”
Somehow, the king still failed to grasp all the details. Perhaps I’d beaten around the bush too much—I was beating right here and the bush was in the next country over.
“To put it in plain, directly-bush-striking terms, I went to the Theocracy to scout and found that there were no enemies, even in the Cathedral, and the Cathedral collapsed while I was in the middle of scouting it, and I had a job to do in the ultimate dungeon, so I went to the bottom floor, and then I went back up to the top floor, and the end. Simple. You got all that?”