“S-Surrender?” Yu shot back, finally defying the girl’s intimidating command of the conversation. “What the heck’s that supposed to mean?!”
“It means admitting I am superior and joining my ranks,” she replied. “I will grant that Three made quite the impression, but that fake, overly dramatic attitude would be burned to ash in the face of my fiery passion.”
“Okay,” Yu said simply.
“The leader of the Power Rangers is usually red, I’ll have you know. I’d consider Three to be, hmmm...black or blue, maybe. But certainly not the leader.”
And now she was rambling about Super Sentai. She would have gotten along with Ijuin if she was into tokusatsu, but Yu was far too stupefied to give it much thought. Xueli was indeed passionate like fire, and Yu couldn’t hope to match that kind of personality.
She squinted suspiciously and scanned him up and down. “Who are you again?”
“Yu Ichinose,” he replied slowly. “I’m...Devicer Three’s manager, I guess.”
“Well, you tell them to contact me, because there’s an adjutant position on my team waiting just for them. I’d like to discuss terms.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that.”
Despite her talents, talking to this Zhou Xueli girl was quite the ordeal. Yu felt like he needed his armor just to hold a conversation with her, and it was everything he could do to smile and nod his way through this one. Aliya and Ein, on the other hand, couldn’t contain their grins. It must have been quite entertaining to watch the girl speak to Three as if they weren’t even there, and Yu’s suffering was apparently the perfect punch line.
“Anyway, Ein,” Xueli said. “You convene with your partner and consider my offer. The next time we meet, I hope you’ll be resolved and ready to join me. Oh, and don’t make me ask again. I hate tedium, and I’ve learned that the third time is, in fact, not the charm.”
And with that, she was gone.
The entire engagement had been conducted in English. Before heading abroad, Yu had installed an English translation tool onto his nanomachines, and without it, he would have been utterly lost.
“It feels, uh, pretty weird having all my thoughts in English,” he muttered. “Well, weird in the sense that it doesn’t feel weird. The elves can make anything, huh?”
“Relying on it too much can make your language cognition wonky, so leave it off when you’re not using it,” Aliya explained. She actually had no use for it, seeing as her vast, half-elf mind had already learned and grasped the English language. Ein had fared just the same.
“Now, I wasn’t finished,” the otherworldly queen said, returning to Japanese. “Let us bid farewell as true loves must.”
“Oh, yeesh, look at the time!” Yu sputtered quickly. “Bye, Ein!”
“Yu!” She spread her arms out wide. “I await the coveted ‘hug’ with bated breath! Embrace me as you did so passionately during our most recent game! When we scored the decisive goal! I know you remember!”
Ein stood there, arms outstretched and ready, while Aliya’s eyes were glued to the spectacle. Even without any onlookers, Yu would have felt horribly awkward, so he called out the nanofactors from his right hand and armorized, equipping the black and gold armor to effectively avoid the situation altogether.
“I’m heading back. Good luck with the Mark VIII,” he said. But the voice was not the temperamental Yu’s. The words, in all their androgynous, fake, and overly dramatic glory, came from Devicer Three.
Ein pouted her cheeks and settled for an excessively affected wave for her goodbye. The antigravity lifters came online, and Yu took off, setting a course for Japan at supersonic speeds.
He had one more job to take care of.