The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 (14 page)

She walked from one end of the building to the other. The light dutifully changed its angle to match, constantly pointing inside.

“What’s
that
about?”

Having a reaction this close by was a surprise in itself. Having it be inside a hospital simply added to the confusion.

Putting everything that happened to her together, it seemed plausible enough that the woman in white worked inside.

Angel or demon, everyone had to work to live in Japan. Sariel, the Evil Eye of the Fallen, was now dutifully managing a Sentucky Fried Chicken. Even Gabriel apparently had the cash, somehow, to shop at convenience stores.

Another logical theory was that she was in the hospital, or at least visiting, due to injury or illness.

Emi had at least a general idea of who the woman in white was. If she was right, though, she wouldn’t necessarily be in this hospital under
that
name.

She focused a bit, but try as she could, she didn’t feel any holy, demonic, or otherwise nonnative energy nearby.

Thus, she began pondering over how to get in. She could pretend to be visiting a patient…but if someone spotted her, it could affect her entire social position in this world. For a Hero, she was being awfully indecisive.

“Um… Is that you, Yusa?”

The sudden voice from behind made Emi’s heart skip a beat.

“Wh-wha?! …Oh.”

“Oh, it
is
you! Well, this is quite a coincidence. Are you going inside, Yusa?”

It was no one Emi ever would have expected.

“M-Mrs. Sasaki?!”

It was Riho Sasaki—Chiho’s mother.

Why was she here—and leaving the hospital, too?

“Oh, I haven’t told anyone yet, either… You work near here, if I recall, yes?”

“Um, yeah, I… Yes.”

Emi vaguely nodded, unable to tell the truth, but even she noticed something odd to what Riho said.

“But…uh, what haven’t you told anyone? Is something up?”

Riho reacted with a disquieting shake of her head—like she was deeply troubled, or about to cry. It put Emi ill at ease.

“Do you have a spare moment, Yusa? I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind stopping in for a moment.”

Watching Riho venture back toward the hospital, for some reason made Emi’s sense of foreboding amplify itself in another direction.

Passing right by the front desk, Riho gestured Emi to join her by the elevator. She was wearing a visitor’s name tag, something Emi only noticed just then.

As they boarded the car, Emi suddenly realized she had forgotten to shut off her cell phone, as was customary in Japanese hospitals. She peered into her bag.

“……”

Inside, the light beam from the bottle was spinning like a disco ball.

The Yesod fragment was on the hospital grounds after all.

“Over here.”

Emi’s anxious pulse very well could have been racing faster than when she stormed the Devil’s Castle on Ente Isla.

There was a “Sasaki” nameplate on the door to the room Riho guided her to.

Inside, the space was divided into four quarters by a set of curtains. Riho walked up to one of them, gestured for Emi to come closer, then slowly lifted a drape.

“…!!”

Emi gasped.

The main Socket City location by Shinjuku station’s west exit was just about five minutes’ walking from Manmaru Udon as well. It was a huge electronics superstore bordered by the Keio long-distance bus depot.

The eastern exit was once dominated by Electronics Bazaar and its selection of themed storefronts, but they all closed a while ago, with places like Lovelace’s and Eggman fighting for mindshare in its place. On the other side of Shinjuku, though, Socket City had a near monopoly.

There were other electronics stores nearby—smaller ones, usually specializing in cameras or other enthusiast goods. But Socket City was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the neighborhood.

Maou, of course, swaggered in like he owned the place.

“Hah! This place is fit for a King, man!”

Purchasing a washer and refrigerator, then using their gift points to pick up a lightbulb, did not proffer ownership of the entire store. But there was no doubting that Devil’s Castle held a hoard of store points by now—the equivalent of 6,239 yen in cash, by Socket City’s reckoning. It’d be only human to want to squeeze as much shopping value out of that as possible.

It was a siren song, the perfect way to guarantee repeat customers. No wonder cashiers in stores worldwide were bothering customers to sign up for their own cards. Woe be to the hapless customer caught in their grasp. Until you wrung them dry, there would always be a little voice inside of you, nagging at you about not using those precious, precious points.

“Hey, Ashiya, you think there’s anything in the Devil King’s army we could point-ify?”

“Now is no time for such fruitless endeavors, my liege. Focus on the purchase before you.”

Ashiya, eyes fixed upon the store fliers in his hands, wasn’t interested in playing along. The ad-speak in Socket City and every other outlet’s circulars—“We will not be undersold!” and “We honor all our competitors’ sales for the same item!” and so on—caught him hook, line, and sinker. The moment he spotted it, he ran all the way over to Shinjuku station’s east exit by himself in the heat to snag fliers from the rest of the stores.

“Dang, Ashiya, you sure aren’t playing around.”

Rika chuckled as she looked on.

“But the prices aren’t gonna be that much different from outlet to outlet, will they? You didn’t have to go that far…”

“Nah, I think Ashiya has the right idea.”

Rika took Ashiya’s side, even though Maou didn’t see the point of fretting over an extra one or two yen.

“If that’s the offer the stores are giving, it’s up to us to make ’em live up to their end of the bargain, y’know?”

“…Well, logically speaking, yes. But it just seems kinda greedy to me…”

“See,
this
is what’s wrong with people in Tokyo. They actually think that’s being greedy.”

“Huh?”

Rika crossed her arms, a bit too deliberately to be serious about it, and began to plead her case.

“Shopping is all about bargaining, you know? I want to buy something as cheap as I can get it. The stores want to sell it for as much as they think they can get away with. It’s a game you play with them—how much the store is willing to compromise, how much customers can make the store compromise for them. That’s what doing business is all about. And to do that, you need to be informed.”

“Bargaining, huh…?”

“That, and people in Tokyo think that’s being greedy because they think haggling’s simply about making the other guy go down on the price.”

“Are you from the Kansai region or something, then?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you, Maou?”

She pointed at herself.

“I was born in Kobe.”

“What’s the nickname MgRonald has over there?”

“I’ve already had Tokyoites ask me that question a million times…”

It was a thousand times more important to Maou than Rika.

“But I mean… How to put it? Haggling is kind of like negotiation. You’re seeing how this relationship is gonna go, moving forward.”

“How it’s gonna go?”

“Yeah. For example…”

Rika pointed out a pair of customers in the TV section.

“You see that couple in their fifties or so? With the salesguy?”

Maou nodded.

“That salesguy’s really good. He’s breaking up all the difficult terminology into easier-to-digest chunks for them. You’re in the customer-service business, Maou. That kinda thing makes a good impression on people, right?”

“Yeah. You can’t do that without some product knowledge and at least a little hospitality.”

“But look at him again. Who does it look like he’s talking to?”

“Who…?”

From the side, it looked like the presumed husband of the pair was asking all the questions, the salesman rapidly replying to each salvo. But Suzuno had a different perspective.

“It looks like the merchant is accepting questions from the husband and giving his replies to the wife.”

“Right! That’s because he knows it’s the wife who has the final say on whether the purchase is a go or not. How she feels.”

“Like, she’s got her hands on the purse strings, that kind of thing?”

Maou sneered as Rika shrugged. She shook her head at him.

“Noooo… You men just don’t get it sometimes, do you? A TV is something used by the entire family.”

“Oh?”

Maou seemed lost. Ashiya, eyes still on his fliers, tried to elaborate:

“She means that a purchase by a single knowledgeable person, and a purchase with the confidence of its entire audience behind it, can seem like two very different things afterward. If the husband understood everything before his wife and made the purchase by himself, both sides would have had a different impression of the transaction. If the woman is convinced it’s a good deal as well, the experience is better for everyone involved. The man appears quite ready to break out his wallet right now.”

“Well done, Ashiya! There’s your househusband eye in action.”

“I appreciate the compliment.”

His eyes continued to study the circulars in hand as he spoke.

“But I suppose the haggling you mentioned plays into that as well. If the salesman can bring the wife to his side, then offer perhaps some token discount or point bonus, the deal is as good as done. Everyone involved feels like they came out ahead. And if you have an experience like that, what would you do next?”

“What would I do…?” Maou muttered.

“You would…want to shop there again next time, maybe. Point card or not.”

Suzuno picked up on it before Maou could. Rika nodded at them, satisfied.

“Exactly! And if the salesguy remembers them the next time they stop by, then everything’s perfect.”

Maou looked at the couple again, still not convinced. They were already being led to the delivery-service counter, the negotiations largely complete.

“So haggling, in the end, is all about making the store cut a deal for you so you’ll come back next time. The point cards just codify that into an official system. That way, even you guys in Tokyo who’re too timid to haggle face-to-face can join in on the fun, sort of. You know?”

Rika pointed to the loyalty card Maou still had lovingly clutched in his hand.

“Mmmngh…”

“’Course, it’s not like the store’s just showering you with random discounts. They’re trying to toe the line, turning visitors into repeat customers while losing as little as possible along the way. Haggling is a two-way street like that. You should see some of the old biddies over in Osaka! People think they’re, like, the epitome of cheapness, but once one of them takes a liking to a store, they’ll drag the entire family over there. Then they’ll do it again and again and again. From the store’s perspective, they’re willing to bet on shaving their profit margins a little if it means a sales jackpot later on. That’s why haggling works so well in Kansai—’cause there’s a chance of it making everyone happy in the future.”

Maou and Suzuno looked at Rika like she was discussing the mating rituals of an alien race.

“I mean, really, it’s the perfect way of shopping. It’s a way for both sides to handle things like a business transaction while trying to find common ground on a person-to-person basis. Meanwhile, all Tokyoites care about is getting the price on the tag as low as possible. They can’t haggle at all. They see the whole thing as
greedy
. But you shouldn’t just stand there and be a passive shopper. You have to do business with the salesguys, too. It makes it feel better for everyone.”

“That’s…one way of thinking about it, I guess.”

Maou paused.

“But that reminds me. When I purchased the fridge and washer together, I think they rounded down everything under the thousands digit without me asking. Was that kinda part of their game?”

“That, or maybe you just had good timing. When was this?”

“Just before summer…”

“Yeah, it’s possible, then. Spring’s a really busy season for moving, so once that wraps up, kitchen appliances start moving a lot slower. If you were buying two pieces at the same time, I bet the salesguy was doin’ a little jig inside his head.”

“…Would this be an apt period in time to purchase a television?”

Ashiya’s question made it difficult to anticipate what kind of answer he wanted.

“Mmm, it should be fine, I s’pose? I know they wanna push up TV sales as much as possible before the switch to full HD broadcasts. And…”

Apropos of nothing, Rika turned toward Suzuno.

“Mm? What?”

“Wellllll…”

Then she gestured Ashiya to come closer, moving away a bit from Suzuno.

“You two stay close, okay?”

“Wh-why…?”

“Think about it. What was her budget again?”

“Seventy thousand, as she so proudly trumpeted to us all a moment ago.”

The gears in Ashiya’s mind began to turn.

“Oh! Ah, yes! If the two of us could ensnare a single salesperson…”

“Good luck, man!”

Rika slapped Ashiya before he could finish. His old face, ponderous and irresolute as he pored over the circulars, was gone, replaced with a bright, fog-clearing smile. He took Rika’s hand in his reverie.