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DRT1.1.12: Byakuya-sama is God, section 12
Find previous chapters at the Navigation Index.
Danganronpa Togami Volume 1: Multiple Counts of Attempted World Domination
Chapter 1: Byakuya-sama is God
12
Fittingly, when we were traveling with someone named "midnight sun", it was a nightless summer. By the time 8:30 PM rolled around, I thought it might finally be getting a little more dim, but it seemed true darkness was still far off.
Plzeň. By the time we reached this town near the German border, the sky was still light, and the slight drowsiness from fatigue and jetlag stacked on top of that led me to lose all sense of what time it was.
In Plzeň, there was a factory owned by a manufacturer of machinery called Škoda, not well known in Japan. "Even third-rate conglomerates've got some business partners!" Hiroyuki-san pulled into the Škoda Auto factory, revealing an underground tunnel. I recalled that Plzeň had the most expansive network of underground tunnels in all of Europe.
We got out of the car and started walked down the long tunnel until we reached an area about the size of a gymnasium. Fluorescent lamps dangled down from the bare ceiling, and in the corner a screen partitioned off a bedroom with a desk, and an incredibly bare-bones shower. Perhaps it was a slightly spruced-up bomb shelter.
"This is my hideout," Hiroyuki-san's voice echoed around the room. "When Škoda Works was dismantled, the Ketouin conglomerate bought part of it, and we've been pals ever since. We got this hideout and a vintage tank out of the deal, too. What was the type of tank called, again? Something the German military confiscated and used as their own."
"LT-35," I answered. "The name for it in the German military was LTz(t)35, though."
"M'lady, could it be that you're a military fanatic? The type that gets rabid about sharing obscure offhand trivia?"
"I'm not getting my information off the top of my head. I'm getting it from here." I tapped my right eye with my fingernail. "It's an artificial eye."
"And what a beautiful eye you have."
"Which one?"
"Both of them. Was that developed by the Togami conglomerate, I wonder?"
"It's an information retrieval library... I call it Borges, but basically it's an encyclopedia that updates in real time. It also has dictionaries, news, current events, and maps."
"Don't take this the wrong way, but couldn't you use that to make a call yourself, then? Also, you call it a library, and yet you didn't call it Babel?"[1]
"The data is displayed directly in my field of vision, so it also has perfect augmented reality technology, and takes the place of universal goggles. Also, it was when Borges was losing his eyesight and living in a world of perpetual dusk that he began residing in a library."
"Well, goodness me, your naming sense is just a goldmine of high society dilettante wit, then, isn't it!" Hiroyuki-san cried, so I decided to take the opportunity to look him up. Beep-bop-boop-bop-beep! (Disclaimer: It doesn't actually make any noise in real life.)
BORGES=SEARCHRESULT
#87654321
CLASS\CONGLOMERATE
TITLE "KETOUIN CONGLOMERATE"
A conglomerate originally founded by Saimon Ketouin, Sr. and then finished by Saimon Ketouin, Jr. It is not talked about in relation to the typical Eight Great Conglomerates, but instead tops the list of underworld conglomerates: Ketouin, Irikiin, Daiguuji, Sakura, Ozawa; however, details are unknown.
That's all I could get as long as I was offline. The Škoda-made tank had had way more information available on it.
Hiroyuki-san, the heir to such a small-time conglomerate, had at some point obtained some cigarettes and beer.
"It's illegal for minors to drink and smoke," I tried warning him.
"They'll just change the cigarettes into Chupa Chups in the anime version, so don't worry about it," Hiroyuki-san said, blowing out smoke. "I can handle them adding some original characters, and I won't even get mad if they wrap up the whole story in one season."
"What are you talking about?"
"These days, they crack down on video games even more than on manga and anime. Fuckin' CERO is like, Viderin levels of not being able to take a joke.[2] What were they even thinking, rating a family game for ages 18 and up only?"
"Do you want me to look it up?"
"Should you really be using that Borges of yours to go surfing the net like you're grabbing a midnight snack... Oh!"
"What is it?"
"You aren't using Borges to research lewd words every night, are you?! Like, clitoris!"
"..."
"Or, Bartholin's glands!"
"Just kill me now..."
"While we're talking about the word 'lewd', in your opinion, do you think it's hotter if you write it in hiragana, or in katakana?"[3]
"I know what I'll search for: a way to shut you up."
"No can do. Whatever I say or do, it can't be censored by CERO or by Viderin. Oh, sure, there's gonna be those folks out there who feel like it ought to be taboo to have even the slightest mention of child neglect or child abuse or sexual abuse, but it's been over a decade for us now where that's practically all we ever do..."
"Hey, Third-Rate Conglomerate, hurry up and get the satellite phone ready." At some point, Byakuya-sama had taken a seat at the desk, dressed up in the black tuxedo. Just to make him look even more suave, he had stuck a rose in his lapel. The way he looked sitting in the chair, legs crossed, pushing up his glasses, was also super suave.
Yuika-san was on the bed next to the desk, wearing a nightcap, fast asleep. I guess it was time for the young lady to get her beauty sleep. Perhaps she was as much comic relief as Byakuya-sama was eyecandy.
Hiroyuki-san set up the laptop-style satellite phone, said, "Help yourself," and then disappeared into the shower room. There was the sound of running water. Oh, right, he had been drenched in beer, hadn't he?
It was just the two of us.
Feeling awkward for some reason, I started trying to contact the Togami family, but—"Wait," a stern voice halted me.
"Byakuya-sama, are you thinking that... the impostor already made their way into the Togami family?"
"The very idea is ludicrous, but you could say the impostor is top-notch at their 'grandparent scam' game.[4] We must proceed with caution."
"What about Pennyworth-san? He couldn't possibly get you confused with an impostor."
"But if I were my enemy, I'd target him before anyone else."
BORGES=SEARCHRESULT
#00481837
CATEGORY\PERSONS OF NOTE
TITLE "ALOYSIUS PENNYWORTH (INFORMATION DISCLOSURE LEVEL 2)"
A butler who formerly worked for the Togami family. Survivor of the Worst Incident in Togami Family History.
He is one of the few people that Byakuya Togami is willing to open up to, which made him all the more of an indispensable asset to the Togami family, but at present he has retired from the front lines of service, and is currently running a members-only butler bar.
In a sense, Pennyworth-san was Byakuya-sama's Achilles' heel. In the event that the impostor struck first, going "Ohhh, I'm sooo alooone and helpless, weh weh weh" might advertise our vulnerability to the enemy and turn out poorly for us, and now that Pennyworth-san had left the Togami family, we couldn't expect him to have the power to assist us.
But manga and TV dramas had told me whom students like us could turn to for help when we couldn't rely on family.
Our friends.
Using Borges, I pulled up the directory for Byakuya-sama's classmates... the 78th class, and started contacting them through the satellite phone.
"Hello?"
There was no video or audio response.
Japan was seven hours ahead of us, so it was 3:30 AM over there. But high school students still in the thick of puberty had no reason to be asleep, since why would they need to get up early on a Saturday morning in the middle of summer? And yet, nobody picked up the phone.
This must be—what if, by some chance, Byakuya-sama was scorned by his peers?
Certainly his personality was pretty rough around the edges, and it seemed that he was given all of the flaws a corporate character could possibly have, but I never thought that he would be quite this friendless. I felt like a mother who had only found out that her child was unpopular when she attended Bring Your Parents to School Day. The Togami family's future looked bleak...
I kept calling down the list, but as I thought, there kept being no response. Names kept getting knocked off.
Next was the "Na" section. Na. Na. Na. Naegi...
"That's enough," Byakuya-sama said, most likely feeling a little stung. "Contact Hope's Peak."
That was an option. I used the satellite phone to ring up the Hope's Peak hotline instead. "Hello? Is anyone there? Please respond. Hey, anybody?"
"...just... ing though!" A female voice. "He... o... is... pretty bad here t..."
"Hello? Hello?"
The audio and video were both heavy with static.
"Hmph. What a cheap product. That's a third-rate conglomerate's work for you." Byakuya-sama clicked his tongue.
As he did, Yuika-san abruptly sat up in her bed like she was Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Still wearing her nightcap with a pom-pom on top, eyes apparently still closed, she twitched her tiny nose—"Achoo!"—and then, after that refined sneeze, she went back to sleep.
Now that I was paying attention, the static from the satellite phone had completely disappeared, hadn't it? Uhh, what the what?
"Hey, hel-LOOOO!" I heard the other person's voice. "Heyyy! Can you hear me? Say something if you can hear me. I don't care WHAT you say, just SAY it already, arrgghhhh!"
"I hear you. This is Hope's Peak Academy, correct? Where are the teachers? Is everyone all right?"
"Cut it out with all the questions! I'm seriously at like the end of my rope over here!"
A single girl appeared on the screen of the satellite device. She had extremely gaudily-colored hair that was tied off to the sides of her head, and incredibly show-offish bright red nail polish. Her prominent cleavage had its own gravitational pull that defied description. She had been very attentive to her appearance, from her eyes, to her mouth, to her nose, to her ears, down to each individual eyelash.
Showing off. Charming people. She seemed to crave that and only that, and seemed to aim for that and only that, and so having such a creature appear on the screen made me feel light-headed all of a sudden.
Fashion mag charisma. The Platonic ideal of girlish aspirations. The Super High School Level Gyaru, Junko Enoshima.[5]
Translator's Notes
[1] Borges/Babel - Finally, the name Borges is elaborated upon. Jorge Luis Borges was an author who wrote, among many other things, a short story entitled The Library of Babel, about a library that contains every possible book of a certain length. Borges became blind over the course of his life, while serving as the director of a library himself.
[2] CERO/Viderin - CERO is a Japanese video game rating organization, the equivalent of the USA's ESRB. "Viderin" is a Japanese nickname for NEVA, a video rating organization that ensured compliance with Japan's mosaic-happy obscenity laws.
[3] hiragana/katakana - in case you aren't aware, these are two different valid Japanese writing systems. The word in question is "ecchi", usually written in katakana, as katakana is used for loanwords and ecchi is a Japanese pronunciation of the Western letter H, but since it's totally naturalized and really a word that is uniquely Japanese in origin (H/ecchi only has that specific meaning to English speakers as a borrowing back from the Japanese usage) the standard script, hiragana, is also pretty applicable.
[4] grandparent scam - known in Japan as ore-ore sagi or the "it's me!" scam, this is a scam where people phone and pose as a relative, insisting that they are in an urgent situation and need money transferred to them right away. It usually involves posing as a grandchild to the elderly, who are more senile and distant from their grandchildren and eager to help, which is why the closest English equivalent I can find is the "grandparent" scam.
[5] gyaru - we all know Junko, but in case you aren't familiar with gyaru culture, Wikipedia is here for you.
Stay tuned for the next update next Sunday (PST)!
Read the rules before commenting! They're different from the DRK rules!!
Danganronpa Togami Volume 1: Multiple Counts of Attempted World Domination
Chapter 1: Byakuya-sama is God
12
Fittingly, when we were traveling with someone named "midnight sun", it was a nightless summer. By the time 8:30 PM rolled around, I thought it might finally be getting a little more dim, but it seemed true darkness was still far off.
Plzeň. By the time we reached this town near the German border, the sky was still light, and the slight drowsiness from fatigue and jetlag stacked on top of that led me to lose all sense of what time it was.
In Plzeň, there was a factory owned by a manufacturer of machinery called Škoda, not well known in Japan. "Even third-rate conglomerates've got some business partners!" Hiroyuki-san pulled into the Škoda Auto factory, revealing an underground tunnel. I recalled that Plzeň had the most expansive network of underground tunnels in all of Europe.
We got out of the car and started walked down the long tunnel until we reached an area about the size of a gymnasium. Fluorescent lamps dangled down from the bare ceiling, and in the corner a screen partitioned off a bedroom with a desk, and an incredibly bare-bones shower. Perhaps it was a slightly spruced-up bomb shelter.
"This is my hideout," Hiroyuki-san's voice echoed around the room. "When Škoda Works was dismantled, the Ketouin conglomerate bought part of it, and we've been pals ever since. We got this hideout and a vintage tank out of the deal, too. What was the type of tank called, again? Something the German military confiscated and used as their own."
"LT-35," I answered. "The name for it in the German military was LTz(t)35, though."
"M'lady, could it be that you're a military fanatic? The type that gets rabid about sharing obscure offhand trivia?"
"I'm not getting my information off the top of my head. I'm getting it from here." I tapped my right eye with my fingernail. "It's an artificial eye."
"And what a beautiful eye you have."
"Which one?"
"Both of them. Was that developed by the Togami conglomerate, I wonder?"
"It's an information retrieval library... I call it Borges, but basically it's an encyclopedia that updates in real time. It also has dictionaries, news, current events, and maps."
"Don't take this the wrong way, but couldn't you use that to make a call yourself, then? Also, you call it a library, and yet you didn't call it Babel?"[1]
"The data is displayed directly in my field of vision, so it also has perfect augmented reality technology, and takes the place of universal goggles. Also, it was when Borges was losing his eyesight and living in a world of perpetual dusk that he began residing in a library."
"Well, goodness me, your naming sense is just a goldmine of high society dilettante wit, then, isn't it!" Hiroyuki-san cried, so I decided to take the opportunity to look him up. Beep-bop-boop-bop-beep! (Disclaimer: It doesn't actually make any noise in real life.)
BORGES=SEARCHRESULT
#87654321
CLASS\CONGLOMERATE
TITLE "KETOUIN CONGLOMERATE"
A conglomerate originally founded by Saimon Ketouin, Sr. and then finished by Saimon Ketouin, Jr. It is not talked about in relation to the typical Eight Great Conglomerates, but instead tops the list of underworld conglomerates: Ketouin, Irikiin, Daiguuji, Sakura, Ozawa; however, details are unknown.
That's all I could get as long as I was offline. The Škoda-made tank had had way more information available on it.
Hiroyuki-san, the heir to such a small-time conglomerate, had at some point obtained some cigarettes and beer.
"It's illegal for minors to drink and smoke," I tried warning him.
"They'll just change the cigarettes into Chupa Chups in the anime version, so don't worry about it," Hiroyuki-san said, blowing out smoke. "I can handle them adding some original characters, and I won't even get mad if they wrap up the whole story in one season."
"What are you talking about?"
"These days, they crack down on video games even more than on manga and anime. Fuckin' CERO is like, Viderin levels of not being able to take a joke.[2] What were they even thinking, rating a family game for ages 18 and up only?"
"Do you want me to look it up?"
"Should you really be using that Borges of yours to go surfing the net like you're grabbing a midnight snack... Oh!"
"What is it?"
"You aren't using Borges to research lewd words every night, are you?! Like, clitoris!"
"..."
"Or, Bartholin's glands!"
"Just kill me now..."
"While we're talking about the word 'lewd', in your opinion, do you think it's hotter if you write it in hiragana, or in katakana?"[3]
"I know what I'll search for: a way to shut you up."
"No can do. Whatever I say or do, it can't be censored by CERO or by Viderin. Oh, sure, there's gonna be those folks out there who feel like it ought to be taboo to have even the slightest mention of child neglect or child abuse or sexual abuse, but it's been over a decade for us now where that's practically all we ever do..."
"Hey, Third-Rate Conglomerate, hurry up and get the satellite phone ready." At some point, Byakuya-sama had taken a seat at the desk, dressed up in the black tuxedo. Just to make him look even more suave, he had stuck a rose in his lapel. The way he looked sitting in the chair, legs crossed, pushing up his glasses, was also super suave.
Yuika-san was on the bed next to the desk, wearing a nightcap, fast asleep. I guess it was time for the young lady to get her beauty sleep. Perhaps she was as much comic relief as Byakuya-sama was eyecandy.
Hiroyuki-san set up the laptop-style satellite phone, said, "Help yourself," and then disappeared into the shower room. There was the sound of running water. Oh, right, he had been drenched in beer, hadn't he?
It was just the two of us.
Feeling awkward for some reason, I started trying to contact the Togami family, but—"Wait," a stern voice halted me.
"Byakuya-sama, are you thinking that... the impostor already made their way into the Togami family?"
"The very idea is ludicrous, but you could say the impostor is top-notch at their 'grandparent scam' game.[4] We must proceed with caution."
"What about Pennyworth-san? He couldn't possibly get you confused with an impostor."
"But if I were my enemy, I'd target him before anyone else."
BORGES=SEARCHRESULT
#00481837
CATEGORY\PERSONS OF NOTE
TITLE "ALOYSIUS PENNYWORTH (INFORMATION DISCLOSURE LEVEL 2)"
A butler who formerly worked for the Togami family. Survivor of the Worst Incident in Togami Family History.
He is one of the few people that Byakuya Togami is willing to open up to, which made him all the more of an indispensable asset to the Togami family, but at present he has retired from the front lines of service, and is currently running a members-only butler bar.
In a sense, Pennyworth-san was Byakuya-sama's Achilles' heel. In the event that the impostor struck first, going "Ohhh, I'm sooo alooone and helpless, weh weh weh" might advertise our vulnerability to the enemy and turn out poorly for us, and now that Pennyworth-san had left the Togami family, we couldn't expect him to have the power to assist us.
But manga and TV dramas had told me whom students like us could turn to for help when we couldn't rely on family.
Our friends.
Using Borges, I pulled up the directory for Byakuya-sama's classmates... the 78th class, and started contacting them through the satellite phone.
"Hello?"
There was no video or audio response.
Japan was seven hours ahead of us, so it was 3:30 AM over there. But high school students still in the thick of puberty had no reason to be asleep, since why would they need to get up early on a Saturday morning in the middle of summer? And yet, nobody picked up the phone.
This must be—what if, by some chance, Byakuya-sama was scorned by his peers?
Certainly his personality was pretty rough around the edges, and it seemed that he was given all of the flaws a corporate character could possibly have, but I never thought that he would be quite this friendless. I felt like a mother who had only found out that her child was unpopular when she attended Bring Your Parents to School Day. The Togami family's future looked bleak...
I kept calling down the list, but as I thought, there kept being no response. Names kept getting knocked off.
Next was the "Na" section. Na. Na. Na. Naegi...
"That's enough," Byakuya-sama said, most likely feeling a little stung. "Contact Hope's Peak."
That was an option. I used the satellite phone to ring up the Hope's Peak hotline instead. "Hello? Is anyone there? Please respond. Hey, anybody?"
"...just... ing though!" A female voice. "He... o... is... pretty bad here t..."
"Hello? Hello?"
The audio and video were both heavy with static.
"Hmph. What a cheap product. That's a third-rate conglomerate's work for you." Byakuya-sama clicked his tongue.
As he did, Yuika-san abruptly sat up in her bed like she was Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Still wearing her nightcap with a pom-pom on top, eyes apparently still closed, she twitched her tiny nose—"Achoo!"—and then, after that refined sneeze, she went back to sleep.
Now that I was paying attention, the static from the satellite phone had completely disappeared, hadn't it? Uhh, what the what?
"Hey, hel-LOOOO!" I heard the other person's voice. "Heyyy! Can you hear me? Say something if you can hear me. I don't care WHAT you say, just SAY it already, arrgghhhh!"
"I hear you. This is Hope's Peak Academy, correct? Where are the teachers? Is everyone all right?"
"Cut it out with all the questions! I'm seriously at like the end of my rope over here!"
A single girl appeared on the screen of the satellite device. She had extremely gaudily-colored hair that was tied off to the sides of her head, and incredibly show-offish bright red nail polish. Her prominent cleavage had its own gravitational pull that defied description. She had been very attentive to her appearance, from her eyes, to her mouth, to her nose, to her ears, down to each individual eyelash.
Showing off. Charming people. She seemed to crave that and only that, and seemed to aim for that and only that, and so having such a creature appear on the screen made me feel light-headed all of a sudden.
Fashion mag charisma. The Platonic ideal of girlish aspirations. The Super High School Level Gyaru, Junko Enoshima.[5]
Translator's Notes
[1] Borges/Babel - Finally, the name Borges is elaborated upon. Jorge Luis Borges was an author who wrote, among many other things, a short story entitled The Library of Babel, about a library that contains every possible book of a certain length. Borges became blind over the course of his life, while serving as the director of a library himself.
[2] CERO/Viderin - CERO is a Japanese video game rating organization, the equivalent of the USA's ESRB. "Viderin" is a Japanese nickname for NEVA, a video rating organization that ensured compliance with Japan's mosaic-happy obscenity laws.
[3] hiragana/katakana - in case you aren't aware, these are two different valid Japanese writing systems. The word in question is "ecchi", usually written in katakana, as katakana is used for loanwords and ecchi is a Japanese pronunciation of the Western letter H, but since it's totally naturalized and really a word that is uniquely Japanese in origin (H/ecchi only has that specific meaning to English speakers as a borrowing back from the Japanese usage) the standard script, hiragana, is also pretty applicable.
[4] grandparent scam - known in Japan as ore-ore sagi or the "it's me!" scam, this is a scam where people phone and pose as a relative, insisting that they are in an urgent situation and need money transferred to them right away. It usually involves posing as a grandchild to the elderly, who are more senile and distant from their grandchildren and eager to help, which is why the closest English equivalent I can find is the "grandparent" scam.
[5] gyaru - we all know Junko, but in case you aren't familiar with gyaru culture, Wikipedia is here for you.
Stay tuned for the next update next Sunday (PST)!
Read the rules before commenting! They're different from the DRK rules!!
no subject
Oh dear god, Togami is screwed.
The Craziness That Is This Novel
(Anonymous) 2018-08-31 02:21 am (UTC)(link)