Others from the Raph species had borrowed it from Raph-chan and played around with it themselves. Some of the tricks had been fun to watch, like turning the leaf into a fireball in midflight. Raphtalia hadn’t been so impressed. When I suggested using it like an ofuda to see if it might be able to activate the magic of Kizuna’s world—the world her katana vassal weapon came from—she had made a strange face. That was what you called “exclusive equipment.” So we had a template.
I immediately found myself fantasizing about exclusive equipment for Raph-chan. Raph-chan was very tanuki-like—just like her origin, Raphtalia. Thinking of a tanuki turning into a human made me think of fairy tales and the kind of items they used there. Mt. Kachikachi wouldn’t be any good. Putting her next to Ethnobalt would paint quite the picture, but in that story Raph-chan would be the bad guy, killed by the rabbit. She wasn’t a nasty tanuki who caused trouble for nice old people. I thought for a moment longer about other such items from fairy tales.
I took out some paper and started to sketch designs for my next accessory. One looked more like work for a blacksmith. I scratched it away with my pen. I was just getting my ideas down. First, I drew a Raph-chan shape. Then I added a fairy-tale bewitched teakettle and teakettle-style armor. I expanded it from there, working to make it suit Ruft as well. He was big, so I could use a teakettle for his armor. For Raphtalia, meanwhile, the miko priestess outfit suited her so well I made the kettle from wood taken from the sakura lumina.
“Mr. Naofumi? What are you thinking about over there?” Raphtalia asked. I snapped back to myself as Raphtalia placed a hand on my shoulder—a murderous feeling in her hand.
“Exclusive equipment for you and the others, Raphtalia. Something like this,” I said.
“I understand you want to make equipment for Raph-chan and the others, but why does it look so strange?!” Raphtalia exclaimed.
“The enchanted teakettle,” Ren guessed.
“Yeah, I thought so. From that fairy tale,” Mamoru agreed with a nod.
“It might suit Ruft,” Ren said, “but it might be going too far for Raphtalia.”
“A different tanuki-based spirit that might suit Raphtalia . . . how about the Akadenchu?” I pondered.
“Never heard of that one,” Mamoru said. Ren was tilting his head too.
“It comes from around Tokushima. Not especially ghoulish in nature, it’s about a tanuki in a red jacket that turns into a little kid and then asks to be piggybacked around. Doing so makes it happy,” I explained.
“It doesn’t, like . . . get heavy and squash you?” Ren asked.
“Nope,” I said. It was just happy at being carried around. Mamoru and Ren didn’t seem especially impressed.
“So it doesn’t do any harm . . . but not much good either,” Ren finally said. I was going to put little red jackets on Raph-chan and the whole tanuki gang. They’d look so cute, I knew it. The perfect piece of fairy-tale lore to apply to Raph-chan. “When you weren’t here, Naofumi, Ruft wore something like that when we were going to play in the ocean with Keel,” Ren explained. It sounded like Ruft had already worn something like it, but it hadn’t been tailored for him. The experiment could go ahead.
“Raphtalia, which do you prefer? The fact our model is wearing nothing but a jacket might cause some titillation,” I pondered.
“I don’t want any part of any of this,” Raphtalia replied. Fair enough. That was exactly the answer I expected.
“Whatever. I’ll have S’yne make a simple red jacket . . . No, anyone who can sew could do it. If we choose materials carefully, it could have some good effects. Ren, you handle the teakettle,” I said.
“Why? And what do you mean by ‘whatever’?” Raphtalia was fighting back hard, her tail big and fluffy. I’d hoped to muscle this through, but maybe not.
“I’m talking about testing some exclusive equipment,” I said innocently.
“You can’t expect that to work!” Raphtalia shot back.
“Raphtalia, be sensible,” I said persuasively, massaging her shoulders. “I won’t allow you to give up anything that could make you stronger.”
“I’m worried that if I back down here, you’ll realize it works on the Raph-chans, and then I won’t have any escape,” Raphtalia said. She really had grown up so much. I couldn’t just steamroll her anymore. She was fighting back with some intense logic. Of course, that didn’t mean I was going to back down. I had shouldered an important and mighty purpose—to power up the Raph species. Maybe I didn’t have to shoulder it, strictly speaking, but I loved the idea of “exclusive equipment.” The experiment would continue!
“You do have it hard, sister,” Fohl sympathized.
“You have an outfit from your species, right, Fohl? Does that give you some kind of equip effect?” I asked him.
“Some of them do have effects that only work with hakuko,” he told me, speaking honestly. Of course they did. That had to be a thing. Which meant weapons also had to exist with species-exclusive effects. “Sister, you could obtain something like that from Q’ten Lo, couldn’t you?”
“I know we have Natalia here, but we can’t borrow things from this time period,” I said.
“I’m sure Natalia will happily lend us whatever we need. It’s better than running the risk of whatever you might create,” Raphtalia said.
“Natalia isn’t here right now,” I countered. “What you’re looking for might not even be in Q’ten Lo in this time period. Rather than waste time finding out, wouldn’t it make more sense to just make some new exclusive equipment? Even if you have some for yourself, the Raph-chans have nothing but that leaf,” I argued.
“You aren’t going to back down, are you, Naofumi?” Ren stated.
“An exclusive ring for me . . .” Filolia said, still looking cowed, face red. This could be a good way to make her shut up in the future.