The first of the two cafe owners I meet with is the one who were interested but simply didn’t have the time right then. After being greeted at the door I explain why I’m here, first in simple english and then in horribly broken japanese, but after staring at me for a moment she turns around and soon after an older woman leads me to the back.

She stops me as a door opens ahead but lead me on when the girl who exits slides a thing on the door. Oh, it’s a changing room, so that text means free and can be slid to ‘in use’ or something?

The owner has that legendary asian youth-likeness, though I can see that she’s a slightly older woman, probably in her forties, or at least not younger than her thirties, and as we discuss that impression of her being quite mature just grows. She has done her research since we last met, and is practical and to the point.

I question her about this, since the japanese are usually very non-confrontational, and she apologizes with a little head bow, stating that foreigners usually prefer her being more direct. Well, I certainly appreciate it, so it doesn’t take long until she has all the information she needs to know whether this is something she wants to invest in.

She deliberates, so I help her out by suggesting a few options she might like, from directly teaching her employees to shapeshift, to teaching her (and possibly a couple others) enough that they, in turn, can teach their employes how to shapeshift not only themselves, but others.

She seems surprised at the latter, wondering if that wouldn’t be bad for my business, and the answer to that is ‘no, kinda’. Or rather, I estimate it to be rather insignificant, mostly because I can’t possibly service all the demand on my own, and induced demand is a thing.

Besides, my main income (by far) is from youth rejuvenation, and while it uses shapeshifting, that’s covered in the nice contract I had made in formal legalese and I could sue the hell out of any clients who did that, or taught someone else who did it.

So I show her the human-readable version of that contract, which lists the key points in simpler terms, showing her the proper, actual, binding contract when she asks for it (as per the last point of the simple version - it’s just made for initial impressions and the legalese one is what counts).

She deliberates again, before excusing herself for a moment.

I wonder what has her suddenly run off like that and sense her with a thin strand of mana, but she just went to grab someone.

“” She says, or at least that’s how my borrowed understanding interprets it.

“Okaasan…”

“What, for how long? Do you want to see how it looks?”

For a day, apparently. She wants to use her daughter as a test subject to test the waters, so to speak, and see what customers and the other workers think. Well, her daughter is okay with that, and I’ll come back tomorrow around noon. At that point the daughter will decide if she wants to stay like that (thus costing one permanent shapeshift) or not, and they will pay for whichever, and the owner will decide if she wants to buy any further services.

So then it’s discussions about how the daughter wants to look, and once I bring out a cat and the assistant puppet to demonstrate, her previously meek demeanor opens up a bit. She wants to see this and that option, with colors and shapes and eyes and ears and tails and even the entire body, and at some point her mother leaves to take care of something, having watched the last five minutes with a silent smile on her face.

“” she states when her mother returns.

The next part is a bit too fast and complex for me to understand word for word, but she wants to learn to shapeshift.

Wait, that was an option?

Her mother also seems surprised at this, and lower her voice to discuss.

She probably doesn’t realize I can still hear her, so I make a sound barrier in as obvious a manner as I can. Ugh, doing magic like this is both expensive and woefully inefficient, but while I tone it down I still leave it pretty obvious, or at least I hope it’s obvious to their senses. It’s so hard to tell, I don’t even know how magic feels if you haven’t learnt proper mana perception. If they have any sense of magic at all they should feel the initial burst, at least, but I should find someone to test this with.

Oh, she’s talking to me. I lower the barrier as she’s mid sentence (adding a minor shimmering effect to make it visual) and have her start from the beginning. Her daughter, as stated, wants to learn shapeshifting, so she wants to know the price and how long that will take, so I question the girl about her magic skills.

They are… not amazing. But she can perceive mana, and have played around with some effect magic, specifically some basic elemental magic. Effect magic is the term used for magic where you directly produce an effect , as opposed to manipulation magic, which manipulates mana and magic on a finer level to get the effect you want.

Well, that’s just a way to categorize on how directly you control the magic; a fireball can be made by just using a fireball spell, using chants or gestures or a magic circle or whatever, or by creating magical fire and forming it into a ball and launching it, or by using mana to create heat and light, combusting available material, then moving the spell towards the target.

I mostly use the latter, but it requires a lot more control and understanding, not only of magic, but of physics, so there’s definitely a tradeoff. The plus side is that you have full control and don’t need to do flashy stuff to do magic - you could do just as much damage by just applying heat to the target, and it’d be easier and cheaper, too. In programming terms, it’s just a matter of abstraction.

At any rate, I could probably teach her in a few hours. I would require at least one to get her up to speed on mana manipulation, but aspect magic is hybrid, it’s not like she needs to be an expert. Not that I think you can find many others in the world. Fuck, am I an expert? Is this imposter syndrome? I mean, it’s only been a year, but I would guess I’m at least top percentage of all active magic users, but…

“So two hours of tutoring in mana manipulation, and aspect magic if she is good enough at sixteen-thirty? I can do that, but it might not be enough time to teach her shapeshifting.”

“”

The usual price for tutoring in aspect magic, as per the price chart on my webpage.

She agrees immediately, and again I wonder if maybe I should raise the price, but, meh. Not like I need money that badly, and by now the tutoring is more to get to meet people than for the money.

“Do you want me to come as a woman? Since it might be awkward around a man.”

Oh right, these people don’t know. I hold my hands in front of my face as I shift it to a feminine version, figuring it’s better to just show them the result.

“I can change like this, and some girls find it uncomfortable if I have to enter their house or stay close to them while teaching, and am a man.”

They share a look, or rather they just look at each other; through the borrowed understanding spell I feel like they think quite different things, though it might just be different ways of thinking about the same thing.

We don’t talk for much longer after that, I just give the girl extra cat ears after making sure I properly understand what they want. She wanted a tail, too, until I subtly pointed out that a tail is not compatible with normal clothes that go on that part of your body. I’m sure some people would find it extremely moe to see her squirm, but honestly, even if I was one of those it would still be the correct decision to make, business wise.

Having too little time to do anything particularly interesting, but more than I need, I stop by a park with magnificent sakura trees and play around with the bird puppet I’ve been using to get a third person view of myself. I’m getting pretty used to it, to the point where I can now have it fly above my and work kinda like a minimap in games, though walking around or actually doing stuff while just using third person perspective is still a bit too weird.

The greeting at the butler cafe feels a lot more professional, as the greeter takes one look at me and then asks to verify that I am who I am, and immediately leads me to an extra fancy door, beyond which is… a tiny old lady? I don’t know what I was expecting, but this was not it…

She’s sitting in a large chair behind a huge desk, flanked by two butlers. With the large windows letting in a lot of light it doesn’t quite give that evil mastermind vibe, but it definitely gives some kinda vibe.

From that first impression I would assume her to be as to-the-point and serious as the other one, but instead she jokes and chitchats. What she says, and how she says it makes it clear she didn’t even google my name, and she tells me, only knows of me via a grandchild, who will apparently be “so jealous, fufufu!”

She readily admits to not understanding the younger generations and what they like, and that she doesn’t care as long as they enjoy themselves, then uses a projector I didn’t notice to show a video on the wall behind me.

It’s just a couple minutes long, and is a mix of animated, CGI, and live action (or just amazing CGI) footage catgirls, on various points on the sliding scale of anthropomorphism, dancing to music. In other words, a catgirl AMV.

“Can you do that?” She says in accented, but by no means bad english.

“What, no, I’m a terrible dancer. But if you mean shapeshift to be like any of those, then yes. Just… real life looks different than anime. And that awful CGI near the end. Sometimes it looks good, other times what is moe in anime becomes creepy.”

“Show me.”

Oh, what I don’t do for my clients. Heck, potential clients.

She has me cycle through various forms, with both my main body and puppets, from human-with-extra-features to upright feline, and after a while she has me end all sentences with ‘nya~’. I catch myself making cat-related puns and using the ‘ny~’ sound it (in-)appropriate places, and marvel at how good she is at manipulating people even though I’m the one being manipulated. Well, it’s all good fun, so it’s fine.

“Okay, you can leave now.”

“What?”

“I said, you can leave now.”

“What, you-!” I start, but catch my rising anger and forcefully keep my voice level.

“Then why did you use my time like this?”

“Isn’t it fine? You already have an agreement with my daughter’s cafe, and if that goes well I will consider consider it for my other cafes.”

“Wait, Kuramoto Reina is your daughter?”

Oh, it’s a family business, of sorts. This woman owns five cafes with various gimmicks, and have essentially given her daughter reins over one of them to give her the experience so she can eventually take over all of them when the older one retires.

That I managed to book meetings with both of them was just chance, and while they realized it yesterday, the woman told her daughter to do the meeting and they would talk afterwards. So they did, after Reina signed the (electronic) contract, and since she spoke so positively of me (and as she says this, the woman’s voice drops), she doesn’t need to ‘take care of me’, whatever that means.

Gee, I’m pretty sure the CEO of Moriyu is actual yakuza, but this lady feels a lot more like the boss of some criminal syndicate. Or at least a legally gray company, at least. One of those that haven’t become illegal purely because of strategic ‘donations’, and they know it.

Well, since I’m not going to get anything here anyway, I guess I will just leave.

At 16:30 I show up at the maid cafe as agreed; apparently it’s connected on the inside to some apartments, including Reina and her daughter, whose name I wasn’t told. I ask the greeter if she can tell Reina’s daughter that Lara is here, and a few minutes layer the nervous girl takes me to their apartment, to a living room with one of those low tables and pillows to sit on.

“Hello again. I am -right now- Eikeli Lara. That’s how you say it in japanese, correct?”

“Hello, I, am, Kuramoto Mitsuko. Uhm, I, don’t, very, good, english.”

“That’s okay. I have a magic,” I tap my left temple. “it connects my brain to yours, and then you understand what I understand, and I understand what you understand. May I use it?”

She shrinks back a little, then looks to the floor, collects herself and nods.

As usual I make the magic very ‘loud’, until it’s active, upon which I ‘fade’ it to a more efficient level.

“You can understand me now, right?”

She looks confused for a moment, before her face betrays that a realization has struck.

“”

“Yes, it’s really convenient. But, before we continue, I would like to point out that it’s a form of mind magic, and while I don’t know if -or how- it could be used to mind control someone, it can be used to read someone’s mind.”

I scratch the back of my head. “I won’t do that, or any other mind magic without asking, but of course that’s what some evil person would say, too. At any rate, you can both detect and protect yourself against it.”

“So!” I clap my hands together, then pull them apart, forming a sphere of mana with a slight glow to draw her attention to it.

“Your first goal is to improve your perception a bit, and then I will teach you how to protect yourself against mind magic. When both of those are satisfactory, we can move on to aspect magic. Does that sound all right?”