"Obviously mine is best, but there is a lot we can learn from the Naylor design."
"I'm sure there's a lot you can learn, certainly," she says with a Shiragiku-like smile.
She leans in close to you. Spirits, is she going to kiss—no, she starts to whisper in your ear:
"See you on Friday."
She walks back to the Naylor delegation with a wave of her fingers and a spring in her step.
Wait, did she just invite you on a date? No, she said it like it was already agreed. How were you supposed to meet? She doesn't… you agreed with whatever she was saying and wrote down your address while looking at the Caspian rifle.
Shit.
Shiragiku is suddenly beside you: "Good work, Katsumi, I thought she was going to hold out on you there."
From the other side, Kusunoki claps you bodily on the back.
---
You crawl bleary-eyed into the range for the second day of trials. Most of the bigwigs have gone home, and having spent a night in a draughty Army barrack room with Ikeda snoring you can hardly blame them. The excitement of yesterday is all gone and the sapping cold seems to have encouraged a slow start for everyone. Ikeda, chignon down and work kimono shabbily wrapped around a propaganda kimono with a print showing the Navy sinking Caspian ships at the Battle of Port Georgia, hands you a cup of green tea. Yadake's shirt, usually neatly pressed, is rumpled from the suitcase.
Squinting, you can see a Kobayashi representative engaged in a conversation with a group of procurement officers. Unlike the high-spirited conversation of yesterday, this seemed more like a negotiation. Or possibly a plea deal.
To keep warm you pace the area, hoping to find the beautiful woman with the fiery hair, but there's no sign of her. She was probably only here for the speed shooting, unfortunately. You then try to find Clara Rose but she's nowhere to be seen either. It's a bit disappointing, but it makes sense: William Naylor wasn't here today either and you think she'd said she was his secretary or something.
The durability tests pass without particular interest, although the Akibara grad confided to you that by the end of the day their rifles had been shot completely smooth. He seemed more pleased than anything, to see his ridiculous screw breech survive long enough for the barrel to wear out. You reembark the train around sunset with a sinking feeling. The Army brass obviously hadn't been impressed with the Kobayashi rifle, but they didn't seem disgusted with it. They had watched the sustained fire demonstration with the same stony silence they gave to all entries, they chatted with the designers over lunch today as though they had all done a good job. Were they too old fashioned to realise how bad this rifle was? Too corrupt to care? Had you missed some crucial implicit requirement that ruined your rifle's chances?
---
You spend Wednesday fretting, then on Thursday the other shoe drops. Waiting at the streetcar stop you can see the headlines: ARMY ORDERS 100,000 KOBAYASHI RIFLES. You come into work thinking about where you might have failed, and Ikeda meets you outside.
"Watanabe wants you. He sounds pissed. Come on."
She leads you to Mr. Watanabe's office and follows you through the door before shutting it. Mr. Watanabe glowers at you and launches into his diatribe before you have time to bow:
"How dare you embarrass me like this!"
He slams a newspaper onto the desk, open to the small articles of the business pages, and stabs at one with a finger.
MATCHLOCKS BACK IN SERVICE: ARMY ORDERS SPECIAL PURPOSE RIFLE
"How are we supposed to produce fifty thousand rifles! Did you think about that before you attempted this little stunt? Before you sycophantically attached my name to this debacle?"
You stammer a little. Ikeda shifts behind you.
"I told Mr. Akutagawa in no uncertain terms that it was a mistake to hire you and I have been proven right! You have embarrassed me, you have embarrassed him, you have embarrassed the entire company with this! I'd have thought an 'educated woman' could handle basic economics, but clearly you're too stupid to manage even that!"
He continues in this vein for another fifteen minutes or so, slowly losing steam and then remembering another way in which you have humiliated him and screaming at you again. Eventually he runs out completely and orders you out of his office.
You stand with Ikeda and shake spittle out of your hair for a bit.
"Why are you smiling, kid?" Ikeda looks at you askance.
"Did you read the Observer headline today?", you say, the smile widening on your face. "Kobayashi has fifty thousand rifles of slack capacity. They got a huge handout from the government to keep the lines open at the end of the war. There are thousands of returning soldiers expecting to find jobs at Kobayashi."
"So you're happy because they're fucked too?"
"No Ikeda, I'm happy because we can just let Kobayashi license-build our rifle! Sure, we won't make as much money off it, but who cares?"
"Mr. Akutagawa?"
"Well he's not making any money if we can't deliver at all!" you say and scribble a few profit estimates on a piece of paper. "Can you get this to Mr. Akutagawa's secretary? Before Mr. Watanabe goes to him and says we have to cancel the whole order, I mean?"
You turn into Workshop 3, where the rest of your team is and wait in silence. When Ikeda comes back and gives you a thumbs up, you share the good news.
---
Given how many hours of overtime you had all worked over the last week, you decide to take a half day and lead your victorious team to the bar. A few hours pass while you spend too much of your end-of-year bonus on beer, before switching to a gin-and-tonic. The bar may have run out of tonic by the taste, but you don't mind.
"And he's so tacky!" you say, taking a big sip, "Colonel Maruyama didn't name his rifle after himself, that was done by the Army board out of gratitude and respect! Like come on, and 'Watanabe'? Nobody's actually going to think it's named after him, it'll just sound like it's a rifle for the average Watanabe."
"To the Watanabe rifle," Yadake raises his glass of fizzy lemonade, "left behind in the dust by the Takahashi rifle!"
This raises an ironic cheer from your coworkers. Kashiwa leans over to you: "Hey, Tachibana, I've got a rugby match on Sunday. Us against the Navy team. Shiragiku is coming. Interested?"
"Sounds good! Give me the details, I'll be along if I have time."
You continue drinking merrily, and by the time the usual after-work parties pour in you're already paying your tabs.
---
Friday morning there's a special order waiting for you: an Army procurement captain who'd attended the tests and wanted a version of your rifle in 8 mm Maruyama for hunting deer. The rest of the workday disappears in drawing upscaled diagrams and machining new parts. You clock out with everyone else and take the streetcar home. You have a date some time this evening and you don't want to be late.
As you open the front door you hear a pair of voices chatting away: One is definitely Rumi, the other is rolling its Rs strangely… Oh no.
"Oh, there you are! I was just heading out when I met your friend, we've had a nice chat," Rumi says, and with a subtle emphasis Clara Rose probably won't pick up on, adds: "For an hour."
Spirits, you scheduled a date before working hours were up? What were you thinking?
"Katsumi!" Clara Rose says, "I was starting to worry you'd forgotten."
Someone like Shiragiku would have said "It would be impossible to forget you" confidently. You, however, only manage "Um."
---
And that concludes Arc 1! You have successfully sold some rifles to some people and still have your job.
Snippet votes are open for what you want to see on Katsumi's disastrous date and the rest of her weekend.
