Studious diligence

The good thing about this job was that there was no need for him to loiter around the lobby making small talk with anyone; other than welcoming guests, Feisha was almost always off duty.

The bad thing about this job was that he had no idea what he could do with so much free time. There was no internet, no TV, no phones, not even another person to chat with. If he could, Feisha would really like to get a telephone company to drag a cord here; of course, it’d be great if they could drag him out in the process as well. He walked leisurely to his room, discovering upon arrival Hughes standing outside of his door with an armful of books.

Short, golden-brown hair, a gentle smile. It suddenly occurred to Feisha that perhaps Hughes was actually more attractive than Dea. At least he wouldn’t do stupid things like stuffing a button into the ground.

“How was it today?” Hughes asked considerately.

“It went well.” Feisha proudly patted his chest. “From now on, werewolves are man’s second best friend- after the invisible folk of course.” As the sole human representative on Noah’s Ark, Feisha naturally reserved the right to speak on behalf of humankind.

Now that he thought about it, wasn’t he basically an ambassador?

That’d make him a pretty high-ranking official.

Hughes handed him the books. “These are the files you wanted on our past guests.”

Feisha joyously took the books over, exclaiming, “Are these all the guests that have ever come here?” Rather than being happy about the chance to learn, Feisha was overjoyed at the prospect of finally having something to do. Ever since first starting to work in hotels, he’d always enjoyed browsing the database. Occasionally, he’d uncover an outlandish profile that forced him to unleash his imagination.

For example, a couple were arguing in their room, naked and with the curtains wide open in the building opposite to the hotel. A complaint was filed by a guest who had the unfortunate timing and room position to witness the whole thing. Feisha still didn’t understand how this concerned him exactly. What did the guest want him to do, ask a pair of strangers to stop arguing?

Hughes shook his head. “No, these are only from the last ten years. If you want all of the documents, you’d need a few dozen rooms to hold them.”

Oh, right, this was the oldest hotel in the world. “Have you maybe considered storing your information in a digital database?” Even if there was no internet, at least he could play a few rounds of minesweeper or solitaire.

“Why?”

“Because then you wouldn’t forget any information about past guests. You can just look up anyone you need information on, it’s very convenient.”

“But I can remember everything even without a computer.”

“..Didn’t you say that you’ve been working here for almost three thousand years?” Feisha said, shocked.

“Mm.”

“And you can remember every single guest within those three thousand years!?”

Hughes smiled. “I remember the first guest whose room I cleaned was called Alamoon.”

“..Why do all werewolf names have something to do with the moon?”

“The werewolf race almost went extinct, once. The hero that saved them was called Serena “Bunny” Moon, so to commemorate him the werefolk like to add something of the kind to their names.”

Serena? An image of a sailor uniform-wearing girl with pigtails who proclaimed the name of the moon before every fight came to mind. Uh, it’s hard to imagine a buff guy like Antonio needing her protection.

“Are you okay?” Hughes inquired at his twitching expression. Feisha forced himself to stop thinking about it, and asked-

“Does this hotel have any VIPs?”

“Of course- Lord Lucifer, Lord Cain.. It’s quite rare for them to visit though.”

Oh man, these are all legendary figures. Listening to the names made Feisha want to meet them, asking, “Why don’t they come?”

“Because the Novem Union haven’t had a meeting for a long, long time,” explained Hughes.

“The Novem Union? Does this have anything to do with that Liberation Resistance thing?”

“How do you know about the Liberation Resistance?” Hughes asked, surprised.

“Asa mentioned it before beating up that pig-head Darhk.”

“The ‘Liberation Resistance’ is a group that opposes the NU. They oppose the peace treaty that is currently in place to allow mingling between the nine worlds. They believe that heaven and hell cannot peacefully coexist, and that different species such as vampires and the invisible folk should not be together.”

A quiet scoff came behind Feisha, who whipped around to find a purple tailcoat-clad Gin standing elegantly behind them, rose bouquet in hand. His golden hair shone under the lights.

“Those bastards in the so-called Liberation Resistance are nothing but scammers who profit off membership fees. You can tell by the way they made a rule saying that you have to call people assholes instead of bitches, just to lure more werewolves into joining” Gin said scornfully.

“So you’d rather be called a bitch rather than an asshole?”

Gin spoke through gritted teeth. “You know, humans have always been the most fragile creatures here on Noah’s Ark.”

“Yeah, so everybody needs to cherish me,” Feisha said without pause.

Gin was taken aback at his sheer shamelessness.

Gaze flickering between his two companions, Feisha made to leave. “You guys have fun, I’ll be looking over files in my room.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to do that with you,” said Hughes, smiling.

“Huh?” Gin’s face looked about the same colour as his clothing.

“Why don’t you have a look at the files?” suggested Hughes.

Feisha flipped to a random page and paused.

“It’s all recorded in the language of the invisible folk.”

Feisha gave Gin an apologetic look. Gin’s knuckles were white around the roses, crushing some of the petals, but the expression he had was akin to that of a kicked puppy.

“Don’t interrupt us,” Hughes said, ignoring Gin’s pitiful expression and making to enter Feisha’s room.

“Interrupt you!??What exactly will you be doing in there? The room’s too small; it’ll be really cramped,” Gin’s shrieked, throwing his arms out in front of the door and refusing to budge. Hughes pulled at Feisha’s arm.

“My room’s fine as well, I have a dictionary there.”

Gin followed them like a shadow. Hughes stopped walking and turned around.

“What are you doing?”

“Supervising hi..” Gin watched Hughes’ face darken and forcefully changed his sentence. “..His study.”

Feisha gulped at the bloodthirsty look Gin gave him. As a sage had once said, a wise man knows when to retreat. Thankfully, there was a whole plethora of excuses he could choose from.

“I- uh, actually need to find Asa for something,” Feisha stuttered as he retreated a few steps. “I’ll just ask him to translate for me, haha..”

Looking at the pleased grin on Gin’s face, Hughes sighed, “Asa doesn’t understand our language, but you can ask Dea or Isefel.”

“Okay.” Feisha held the books tightly as he turned around to flee.

“Dea’s probably stealing fruit down in the warehouse, and Isefel’ll be swimming,” Gin helpfully called out.

Swimming? Feisha steps slowed to a stop as he gingerly touched his flabs.

“Could you point me in the direction of the pool?”

The pool in Noah’s Ark wasn’t so much a pool as it was a lagoon. This was Feisha’s first thought after climbing up thirty or so levels. Casting his gaze across the surface, he attempted to find a spot of black to no avail. The pool was very vast; the only way he knew it even had an end was because there was a wall on the opposite side.

Sitting down at the edge, Feisha started lazily flipping through the files. The language of the invisible folk weren’t invisible, but to him they might as well be. All he could see were circles and ovals- big ovals, small ovals, fat ovals, thin ovals. Some had compound shapes, like a little circle inside of a big one. After looking for a while, Feisha determined that the one that appeared most frequently was a big circle with four smaller circles around it.

“This must be the word for ‘the’.” Feisha’s future career as a linguist was bright.

His thought process was interrupted as a head of long black hair emerged from the water, dripping water everywhere.

Isefel walked towards where Feisha was currently situated on the ground.

Beneath his feet, was water.

Feisha sighed. Looks like it’s not only Jesus who could do that.

“Were you looking for me?”

Beads of water slid their way down from his hair and face, rolling off his shoulders and chest. Feisha felt a sudden wave of jealousy; these were?realmuscles, smooth yet firm. He even had a six-pack.

With this kind of body, even the presence of two gigantic chicken wings on his back could be overlooked.

Feisha touched his own belly. The folds of fat almost felt like abs.

“Is this about the guests?” Isefel asked again.

Feisha forcefully tore his gaze away from Isefel’s chest and onto his face. “Do I need to pay to use the pool?”

“Staff don’t; customers do.”

Ah, privileges. This was another good thing about Noah’s Ark.

“But you need to purchase your own swimwear.”

Feisha thought about the rows upon rows of identical suits and underwear in his closet.

“I like swimming.” Even if Hughes had paid off half of his debt, he still had quite an amount outstanding and was in no position to make needless purchases.

“Hughes helped you pay your debt.”

“Yes, I know.” His 18k gold coins that went up in smoke..

“It was the full value.”

“..Eh?”

“One and a half thousand gold coins.”

“Why?”

Isefel remained silent.

Feisha felt the back of his eyes heating up. He had always been kind of annoyed at all the staff at Noah’s Ark because he’d been more or less kidnapped, but now that he thought about it Hughes had been nothing but good to him. Before, all of Hughes’ kindness had been dismissed because he was the person who first brought Feisha to this place.

But now, Feisha could no longer live in denial.

Isefel was about to re-enter the pool, but was stopped by Feisha’s sudden yell: “I want a raise!”

How on earth was he going to pay off seven hundred and fifty 18k gold coins without a raise!?

Translator’s notes

“The werewolf race almost went extinct, once. The hero that saved them was called Serena “Bunny” Moon, so to commemorate him the werefolk like to add something of the kind to their names.”

Yes, you heard me right – that’s a Sailor Moon reference. The name Hughes says is Tsukino Usagi to a T. You don’t even need Chinese for this – the kanji for Usagi’s name literally means Moon Rabbit, so I just took one of her many dub names. Inb4 sub>dub

“Because the Novem Union haven’t had a meeting for a long, long time,” explained Hughes.

Original Chinese: 九界jiǔ jiè?(lit. nine worlds). It’s the name of the organisation, not unlike the United Nations. Novem means nine in Latin. It was going to be called the Union of Nine except that would make its acronym UN, which could get confusing.

“[..] You can tell by the way they made a rule saying that you have to call people assholes instead of bitches, [..]”

Chinese first: 规定会员不能把色狼叫做色狼，只准叫色魔guī dìng huì yuán bù néng bǎ sè láng jiào zuò?sè láng, zhǐ zhǔn jiào?sè mó?(lit. Regulations say that members cannot call perverts ‘colour wolves’, only ‘colour demons’). Going off the literal translation, you can probably tell that this doesn’t make sense, because it really doesn’t- the stuff in quotation marks are the meanings of the individual characters rather than the word itself. They actually both mean ‘pervert’, just written in different ways. In this context, the Liberation Resistance is trying to get werewolves to join by banning the use of the first variant. In English, the closest I could think up was the word ‘bitch’, because wolves are close enough to dogs, right? Right?

“This must be the word for ‘the’.”

Instead of ‘the’, Feisha (incorrectly) assumes that the character means 的?de. This character in Chinese is used in a plethora of different ways including but not limited to possessive form, ‘of’ and for emphasis. It’s a character that appears?quite?a lot in Chinese.

Looks like it wasn’t only Jesus who could do that.

Chinese: 凌波微步Líng bō wēi bù?(lit. Ling Bo Micro-step). It’s a move from a classic Chinese novel with which the user can walk on water. There is obviously no English counterpart to this, so the comparison is drawn to how Jesus walks on water instead.