From the fridge to the washer, from the computer to the bicycle, the Devil’s Castle crew had made more than a few infrastructure investments over the past year and change. But they still had no television set, for several reasons.
They could never find enough free funds, for one. That, and when Maou and Ashiya first fell into Japan, they didn’t even understand the concept of “watching TV” in the first place.
By the time they understood its use as a news source, weather forecaster, and font of colorfully inane advertising, they already had many other ways to gain that information.
Most of all, however, the greatest source of hesitance for the Devil’s Castle was the fact that Japan switched over to full digital broadcasting a while ago.
The antenna connectors in Villa Rosa Sasazuka were all from the analog era. There was nothing in the rental contract about providing for HD broadcasts, either.
They examined their options a bit, only to find that (a) signing on for an individual plan could put them on the hook for antenna construction costs, and (b) putting up an antenna by themselves could send the MHK man their way, demanding a television license fee and spelling yet more doom for their monthly budget.
So, to the demons, purchasing a single TV required the bravery and resolve of an Acapulco cliff diver. But they were too afraid to discuss it with the landlord. She could always seize upon the topic to put up an antenna herself and jack up the rent on them.
Besides, Japan was bubbling with other information sources. Compared to the fridge and washer—two essentials for keeping the demons clean and fed—a TV was far from first priority.
“Oh, well, you can get news and weather from the Net and your phone and stuff these days, so…”
“Something about
you
telling me that really pisses me off.”
Something about the smug way Emi, fellow newcomer to Earth, put it rankled Maou.
“Indeed. I, myself, have only just begun to comprehend how to obtain information on my cellular phone via the Internet.” Suzuno took out her Jitterphone 5, a basic Dokodemo model meant for the elderly and other Net newbies, to strike home the point.
“Yeah. If you really want to, you can watch TV on your phone, besides. It kind of kills the battery, so I usually don’t, but…” Chiba’s flip phone, meanwhile, had a screen you could flip around so the main screen was facing outside instead of in when folded.
Emi sighed. “We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries lately about batteries, actually. It depends on how you use your phone, of course, but…yeah, I wish they lasted longer, too. If you’re using a smartphone, I tell people they pretty much gotta have a portable charger with ’em at all times.”
Emi worked full-time as a customer service agent for cell phone giant Dokodemo’s main call center. Since her bosses began introducing thinner and more lightweight smartphones, there was a clear uptick in complaints about batteries and why the hell they didn’t last so long.
In practice more a portable computer than telephone, these devices’ battery lives varied wildly depending on how much users took advantage of their data packages and fancier features. But compared to Suzuno’s and Chiho’s older models, they almost always went dead more quickly.
Maou glumly interrupted the three women’s cell phone confab.
“Uh, girls, you think I’m living so high on the hog here that I can afford a phone to watch TV on?”
“Wait’ll you get a load of this… The King of All Demons has a phone with an extendible antenna.”
“Huh?!”
“Wha?”
“Pardon?”
Urushihara’s poetic turn of phrase made Chiho gasp, Emi gape, and Suzuno tilt her head in confusion.
“Yeah, well, I only have to recharge it every other day.”
“Whaa?!”
“Every other day?!”
“Is that long? Short? What are you trying to say?”
That was enough to even surprise Emi. Suzuno remained confused.
“Right after I showed up here, I just asked for whatever cost the least money, and I got this.”
Maou removed his phone from his pocket as he spoke.
It sported a few scratches, but looked fairly well taken care of. But even compared to Chiho’s and Suzuno’s models, it was clearly from another era.
“Ooh. My dad used to have one of those.”
For someone like Chiho, growing up in the digital age, a cell phone was a device whose constant presence around her was a given. Even she could tell with a single glance that Maou’s device was a modern relic.
“…Who made that?”
The carrier name on the back of the phone was something Emi, who worked for a phone company and had at least a passing knowledge of the competition, had never seen before.
“Your mail address is from AE, right, Maou?”
Maou nodded.
“Yeah, my phone bill comes from AE. But when I bought this, they kept yappin’ at me about base costs and data plans and stuff. I kept telling them that all I cared about was talk and text, and they gave me this.”
“Just talk and text… Wait, is that a Joose’d Mobile phone?!”
Joose’d Mobile had its heyday a while back, selling cheap prepaid plans and no-money-down phones to millennials with flashy in-your-face advertising. The original service died long ago, merging with AE—one of the Big Three in Japan’s carrier scene—a few years back.
“Yeah. The phone was free, it’s easy to use, and I figure I’m not paying more than what I use it for, y’know?”
Maou’s reply was indifferent. But in this era where even the so-called next generation of cellular devices were now old hat in the wake of all-purpose smartphones, sporting a Joose’d phone—one that ran on a network that didn’t even exist any longer—wasn’t exactly common.
The fact that Joose’d devices could even run on a modern carrier infrastructure was a miracle in itself. And as their old TV slogan “All Talk. All Text. No BS” hinted at, there was no web surfing going on with Maou’s handset.
“S-so…like, Maou, how do you know what the weather’s gonna be like, even?!”
“Huh? 177.”
The reply offered little explanation to Chiho’s disbelieving ears.
“’Course, I still wind up calling the voice-time number by accident every fifth time or so…”
“Emilia, what does ‘177’ mean?”
“You call that and a computer voice gives you the weather. You get the time by dialing 117, by the way. I think you need to dial some kinda special prefix if you’re calling from a cell. During training, they just kinda touched on it as something I’d never, ever use, so I forgot about it.”
Emi’s response belied her customer-service experience. Quick and to the point.
“I had no idea anyone
used
it, though. I mean, a lot of people have the weather on their lock screen these days. …And if you misdial it all the time, why don’t you stick the number in your directory?”
“Yeah, well, that ain’t the first time he’s tried to palm off crappy tech on us.” Urushihara dejectedly shook his head, eyes fixed upon his computer screen.
“Wh-what about the news, then?” By Chiho’s judgment, Maou never seemed too far behind at work when it came to current trends and topics. He seemed to have a working knowledge of politics, the latest scandals, sports standings, that sort of thing.
“Well, we have a PC here ever since Urushihara showed up, so… Plus, they have those video screens at the rail stations with news and stuff, right? I like to hang out at the bookstore magazine rack, too, so keeping up ain’t too hard.”
“……”
Chiho, a child of the information age, couldn’t make head or tail of it.
“Besides, what’s it matter what kinda phone I have? It’s not like I’m missing out on anything, and I’m not planning to upgrade anytime soon, either. But…hmm. We got an HD antenna now, huh?”
Maou gave a thoughtful look to the antenna hookup, then to the outlet occupied by Urushihara’s computer. He scowled.
“Hey, Ashiya.”
“Yes, my liege?”
“Wanna buy a TV?”
It almost sounded like Maou was talking to himself.
“Hahhh?!”
“Why
that
reaction?” Maou started quizzically at Ashiya, who sounded like someone had run a cheese grater over his throat.
“I simply reasoned from your conversation, Your Demonic Highness, that you didn’t see the need for one… You stated a moment ago that you needed no television to know the ways of the world. We already have a computer! And the Internet!” Ashiya frantically pointed a finger at Urushihara.
“Dude, could you stop pointing at me like my computer’s the only reason I deserve to live?”
“Hmph. I will admit, you are at least capable now of serving food to people. A living, breathing vending machine.”
“Yeah, see? I had dudes
lining up
for me. Beat that.”
The conversation between the two was not quite Great Demon General material.
“I think Alciel has a point, though. I’ve had a TV in my apartment for a while now, but it’s pretty much always off. I watch a few minutes of the morning news, maybe a drama or samurai show at night, then the weather, and that’s about it. I don’t see any major pressing need of one for you guys, just because your landlord installed an antenna.”
“You aren’t showing Alas Ramus any educational TV or anything?”
Maou turned to face Emi. She glared back. Alas Ramus, who spent the late afternoon napping in Room 202, was currently fused within her.
“Oh, what, you forgot already? The show at Tokyo Big-Egg Town? Shows like
Sunflower Street
and cartoons pretty much bombard kids with colors all the time. I don’t want her having another episode, so I’m trying to keep her away from TV as much as possible.”
“Huh. Gotcha.”
The live-action ninja-ranger show the three of them watched at Tokyo Big-Egg Town a while back was filled with color-coded warriors of justice bounding around the stage. The experience caused Alas Ramus to have something resembling an epileptic seizure.
She always had a pretty deep relationship with colorful things. The ninjas, and the enormous tree they somersaulted around, must have reminded her of the great life-giving tree Sephirot and the multihued Sephirah it bore, each governing over a different color and a different aspect of the world.
As of right now, nobody in the room knew anything about the Sephirot apart from what they heard elsewhere.
None of them could say for sure that the sacred tree had any lasting effect on Alas Ramus. But after that harrowing incident, Emi tried her best to avoid reminding the child of anything resembling Sephirot as much as possible.
“Thing is, though…there’s been one time before when I kinda wished I had a TV in here.” Maou’s voice took on a bitter tone as he thumbed through his memory banks. “It was before Chi joined me at the Mag. You know our Jolly Meals? The ones that come with toys and stuff?”
“Um, yeah, sure.”
“Well, the toys are always either really hot, or really cold, in terms of popularity. This one time, we were doing these Pocket Creatures—y’know, Pokétures—toys, and this kid who couldn’t have been much older than eight or so comes up and orders a Jolly Meal. So I asked him which toy he wanted, and he was like…”
Maou bunched up his eyebrows.
It was a look of anguish, one not even Ashiya had seen in several months.
“Gimme the one that goes ‘croak-a-loak’!”
The sudden scowl, followed by the otherworldly cry, bewildered the rest of the room.
“Yeah! You see? I felt, like,
exactly
what you must be feeling right now. What the hell’s this kid mean, the one who goes ‘croak-a-loak’? I didn’t even know that every monster in the game had their own unique cry like that, so I was totally clueless. And of course we had, like, ten different toys to choose from, so I couldn’t really spend the time guessing.”
The others, unsure what the point was to this ripping yarn, could do nothing but sit tight and listen. Surprisingly, it was Urushihara who broke the silence.
“I tried searching for it. Turns out it was from one of the movies,
Decahelios and the Path to the Sky King
. Decahelios is the mythical Pokéture in that one, and his basic
chibi
form is Dekalo, and
that’s
who makes it. He’s this little frog guy who lives in a bog somewhere, and eventually he evolves into a dragon.”
“You are speaking in tongues, Lucifer.”
To Suzuno, not very versed in modern Japanese subculture, Urushihara’s speech must have sounded like a runic inscription on the tomb of a long-forgotten ruler.
“But, my liege, if his cry was ‘croak-a-loak,’ that would imply to me that the correct creature would at least look
somewhat
frog-like…”
“Yeah, Ashiya, but you say that because you’ve been here on Earth for over a year now. Do the chickens say ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ back in the demon realms?”
Every language on Earth had its own unique ways of rendering animal cries and other bits of nonlanguage. The only person who had the right to take someone not native to Japan (or this world) to task for not knowing that
croak
was shorthand for “frog” was Mayumi Kisaki, Maou’s manager at MgRonald and a woman oblivious to his past.
“So anyway, these Pokétures were mostly movie tie-ins who first got introduced in the plot, so at the time, all you knew about ’em came from the maybe five seconds they showed up in the trailer. The kid didn’t remember the name of that Dekalo guy or what he looked like. So I had no idea, and his mom was like ‘Oh, Shocksqueak is
fiiine
, son…’”
Shocksqueak was the most well-known of Pokétures, a constant presence across the entire series and its merchandise.
“The problem, though, was that Shocksqueak was the most popular toy and we had already run out of it. So his mom wound up leaving with this freaky toy that looked like a jellyfish with a bunch of magnets stuck to it.”
“Jellyfish with a bunch of magnets stuck to it” provided little in the way of new insight to Maou’s audience of Pokéture neophytes.
“…Okay,” Emi impatiently spoke up. “So what’s the point of this story?”
“The point is, if I had a TV—if I saw some of the preview ads and knew at least a little bit about what we were selling to kids—I could’ve given that li’l guy what he wanted. It’s not my fault we were out of Shocksqueak, but we had all the other ones.”