1

Kosuke Imina was in a love-hate relationship with his job. Managing idols had always been his aspiration, to bring rising stars to the biggest stages.

And he did. He created the most profitable duo of idols in the world. They had world tours, filled entire stadiums for their performances, and their word carried considerable weight when it came to the public’s perception of Magical Girls. One in every four children in Japan was using a branded pencil case that carried the face of the Celestial Sisters.

Today, however, his relationship with his job was more on the hate side of the spectrum. The Celestial Sisters, Luna and Sol, sat in front of him, dressed in their costumes, with their white and black wigs messily sitting on their heads as they browsed the internet on their phones or checked their nails – anything but listening to him.

“Hey, manager. How much longer are we going to talk? I’m bored.” Complained Luna.

“Yeah, manager. How much longer?” Sol chimed in with the sounds of various clacks as the lollipop she was busy sucking on rattled while she talked.

He knew that they were intentionally picking the most irritating tone of voice to annoy him. He heard them fluently switching between sweet idol speeches and slang-filled complaints before.

“We’re talking until all our bullet points for today are done.”

He grabbed two papers from his still terribly large stack and flicked them across the table. The motion was practiced enough that the two pieces landed perfectly in readable range and position in front of his two idols.

“What’s that?” Sol asked.

“The plans for your upcoming concert in September. You’ll have to practice the songs and accompanying choreographies until then. I’ll be in touch with your choreographer, and she will let me know if you skip. Is that clear?”

“Ugh! Sure, sure, manager.” Luna complained.

“I will not tolerate a repeat of Madrid. Is that clear?” he repeated himself.

“Yeah, yeah, you’ve been grilling us with that for three years, now, Kosuke. Relax! We know what to do.” Sol countered.

“If you know, then I’ll mark this as ‘I don’t have to worry about it’.”

“Now that’s uncalled for!” groaned Luna.

‘I don’t have to worry about it’ was his heavily coded way of saying ‘I know that I can’t take my eyes off you for even a second’.

“Anyway!” Kosuke himself wanted to move on, rather than linger on the possibility of his idols slacking off on their dance practice again.

“Furthermore, I finally received the fully compiled damage claims from last year.” He took a large quantity of papers from his stack and let them noisily slam down on the table for effect.

“About ninety-nine percent of this is from the flooding in Ginza and Tsukiji that you caused. Kabukiza in particular filed a large damage claim after the flooding pushed a car into its façade and had the theater fill up with salt water. Also, to add to that, Tokyo Cruise Ship are very angry about the Hotaluna sinking. It was the pride of their fleet, being one of two ships designed by Matsumoto. I’ll count it a blessing that he died earlier that year, so he didn’t see that happening to his boat.”

“Hey! That wasn’t our fault!” Sol stood up and looked at the stack of paper with anger in her eyes.

“Yeah, we aren’t responsible for dimensional rifts opening like that!” Luna added.

“But it was only a tiny one until someone made the hole bigger, wasn’t it?” Kosuke replied, making the two idols exchange some odd looks.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Well that was… never mind.” Sol said quietly.

“Fine, we made it worse.” Both agreed.

How unusual. Who are they covering for?

Kosuke narrowed his eyes, but then he nodded.

“As long as you are being honest.”

“How much do we owe?” Sol asked, fingers digging into the hem of her idol outfit’s dress.

“Hm? Oh, you don’t owe anything. It’s all covered by the city’s interdimensional incident insurance. The Triple-Eye.” He grinned at the two as they stared speechlessly at him. He considered that revenge enough.

2

“What else, manager?” After he gave them their little scare, the two were much more cooperative.

“Mail. Lots of mail.” He slid two more papers their way.

“We need to renew your consent forms so our assistants can open the fan mail to check if anything dangerous or disgusting is inside. Also, so we can categorize it all and summarize how many of them are just generic thanks, expressions of inspiration, or which are hate mail. We’ll be putting it all under black light just in case, you know how gross idol otaku can be.”

The girls shivered in response.

“Should we do the usual?” he asked. The usual in this case meaning that they would be picking around fifty letters that were obviously sent by children so the two of them could send them handwritten replies.

Both of them nodded, so Kosuke made a note.

“We also received… strongly worded letters from professors of the English language from around the world.” He noted.

“Eh?” Luna exclaimed with a quizzical look on her face.

“Complaints about your endorsement for the movement that one American Magical Girl started a while back.”

“I… don’t remember.” Sol said, a finger on her lip as she was lost in thought, desperately trying to recall the incident.

“Yeah, this American Magical Girl argued that the term ‘Magical Girl’ should be turned into a proper noun, to denote the defenders of the world as something special. Like a nationality, or an ethnicity. There were tons of complaints from linguists about it. To this day I don’t know why she reached out to the two of you since the only English you speak is whatever you learn to recite before an overseas performance. Terribly, I may add.”

He eyed them one after the other and they started to chuckle nervously.

“Is… that so? How did it play out?” Luna managed to ask.

“I brought the petition in front of you, both of you said ‘sure, whatever’, so I had our team announce your support as your official stance. Thanks to your international popularity, favorability tipped and now the English world has to capitalize ‘Magical Girls’ and linguists hate you for meddling with a language you don’t even speak.”

They didn’t reply, but he could see their discomfort at having caused something so significant with a disinterested ‘sure, whatever’.

“I think that about sums it up.”

Kosuke was satisfied with the meeting for now, packing his things together.

“I’ll let you know if there’s any more collaboration or crossover opportunities or if we have another show booked in the future.”

“Oh, manager!” Sol spoke up and hopped to his side.

“What is it?”, he asked as she handed him a little note.

“We need this soon. The usual.”

He checked the note – the content was absurd, but unsurprising. A large order for wood. A specific type, and two tons of it in ten by ten by thirty-centimeter blocks. Some twigs of mistletoe, too.

“You know, I never asked what you need that stuff for…”

“Then don’t start now.” The idol winked at him.