The Sorcerer’s Receptionist: Volume 1, page 1
part #1 of The Sorcerer’s Receptionist Series
Table of Contents
Cover
Character Introductions
Prologue
Until I Became a Receptionist
Before I Became a Receptionist - At the Royal School of Magic
Working at Harré, Part One
Working at Harré, Part Two
Working at Harré, Part Three
Side Story: A Scene From Class on a Certain Day, Year Four
Bonus Short Stories
About J-Novel Club
Copyright
Prologue
If I look up at the clear blue sky, I can see a giant island floating there, gently, as if it had no better place to be.
The scenery I can see from here hasn’t changed one bit since I was born.
If I look further beyond, I can see another island of a different size, floating in much the same manner.
Of course, that hasn’t changed either.
Neither has what I’ve wanted to be, ever since I was little.
Where do Snow White Witches go, I wonder?
Back during that time when I had wanted to know everything about this world.
Back to when I had wanted colors to fill my snow-white world.
I had wanted so many colors.
Since then I’ve been led on, all along, by a single, brilliant ray of crimson light.
Just how many colors does my world have now, I wonder?
Until I Became a Receptionist
Magic has been all around me, ever since I was born.
If my mother twirls her fingers in an arc, objects immediately start to levitate, and if my father utters an incantation, flames burst from his fingertips and destroy demons. It is very cool to watch.
The old lady who lives next door uses magic on her flower bed, making the flowers sing every morning, and quite noisily at that. The old man who lives across the street, as if to counter her flowers’ song, casts a spell on his own vegetable field and makes them sing as well, probably out of spite for the old lady.
But his vegetables sing in somewhat lower tones than the old lady’s flowers, and so contrary to what one might expect, the combination of the two results in a pleasant harmony. I don’t think the old man has realized that.
Well then, why don’t I try? I think, and wave my fingers around as hard as I can. Yes! To the right, to the left, up, down; I try shaking my fingers all around. I even try making them dance in the air. Thanks to that, perhaps, yes, something happens: it seems like I’ve caused a bit of a breeze... My bangs fluttered a bit, didn’t they?
But nothing around me levitates, and no flames erupt from my fingers. The flowers do not sing, and I cannot make anything harmonize.
I’m just a young girl, so I don’t really know anything about incantations.
“Nanalie, we’re leaving soon!”
“Okaaaay!”
I hear my mother’s voice and turn away from the window in my room, where I was watching the islands float in the sky.
Starting today, I’ll be attending the kingdom’s Royal School of Magic. I’ve just finished packing my luggage. As it’s a boarding school, I won’t be able to come back home whenever I want to, so I’m a little worried that I’m going to forget to pack something.
Well, I suppose even if I do forget something, it’s not that important, so I guess I might as well not get all flustered.
And even though I said I won’t be able to easily come back home, it does seem like the school has long vacations, so it’s not like I’ll never be able to return. If I do need something, I’ll make arrangements to get it during one of the breaks.
I’m twelve years old now. I’ll be attending the Royal School for six years, until I turn eighteen.
“Alrighty then.”
Some slightly dirty white walls. A rickety wooden bookshelf that would be difficult to call “pretty.” On top of a desk near the window lies a box full of the textbooks I used as a student at the village schoolhouse.
A canopy hangs down from the ceiling over the simple bed. A long time ago, back when I was much younger than I am now and aspired to have a bed like a princess, my father had fixed a couple of rusty hooks in the ceiling and hung the sheets around my bed.
The stuffed toy bear I had begged my mother for a long time ago is looking down at me from his place up on top of the brown wardrobe.
I leave my room, carry out all of my luggage, and straighten the sleeves on my thin blue dress.
I twirl around and look back at the room whose owner will be gone for a while, this little space of mine, and try to burn the image in my mind—and then I rush off to where my mother is waiting.
＊ ＊ ＊ ＊
A small village in the Kingdom of Doran.
I, Nanalie Hel, was born here, with an archaeologist for a mother and a sorcerer-exorcist for a father.
We are neither aristocrats nor merchants, merely a very normal household, and we live among other families much like ourselves.
If there’s anything that can be said to be “unusual” about our family, it’s that my mother is an archaeologist. Or rather, she used to be. A long time ago, she used to travel all over to investigate different ruins, but she hasn’t done much of that recently.
My father’s job as a sorcerer, on the other hand, is quite normal in our kingdom and in the world at large. Down at Harré’s Sorcerer’s Guild, he makes most of his money by exorcising demons, as well as taking on a wide variety of other kinds of assignments. You have to be able to use a certain degree of magic as a sorcerer, because the job itself is actually fairly dangerous. Depending on the assignment, it might be easy or difficult work, but the harder jobs pay more.
“Daaaaaad, it’s early!”
“Can’t start complaining about that at this point, Nanalie.”
While I’ve never been to work with my mother, a long time ago, I went twice with my father.
As a little kid, I was afflicted with a special kind of curiosity, constantly asking him questions like “What’re you always doing at work?” “Where do you go?” “What island is that?” and “What kind of job do you do?” I was curious about everything in the world, and probably caused no end of nuisance for all the adults around me with my questions. Perhaps my father was good at hiding it, but he never showed any annoyance at my questions. Even just thinking about it now makes me realize what an irritating little child I must have been.
The job I accompanied him on was a comparatively easy one—a request that had a reward of only about twenty pegalo. (If I had to say how much “twenty pegalo” is worth, it’s about how much our family spends on food for one day.)
Harré is a kind of office that supplies jobs to the sorcerers that frequent the place daily. My first time visiting there with my father is an experience I’ll never forget.
“Welcome, little lady.”
I was quite excited, and was totally absorbed in taking in the décor. I had originally thought it would be a very stiff and serious place, but it was actually completely the opposite, with an atmosphere that felt a lot like the tavern my father often went to. Both the walls and the floor were made of wooden boards, making it seem quite warm and friendly. They also seemed to have a place to eat somewhere inside, as I remember smelling the pleasant aroma of some spicy meat.
“D’ya have anything that I can do with my kid?”
While I was in the middle of looking at everything, Father was asking the receptionist lady to find an assignment for him. It took her a long time. Since it had to be a job where it was okay to take a child along, I’m sure it was difficult to pick one out. Or so I think, looking back at it now.
And then it seemed like they had decided on a job, because the receptionist looked down and waved at me with a smile as I stood there, holding my father’s hand. “Good luck, and take care!” she said to me as we left.
I think I remember the request itself being quite easy—just doing a bit of work by helping out an old lady in her fields.
It all ended sooner than I had expected. Since I had been imagining something rather more fantastical, I was a little disappointed with the whole experience.
After all, there hadn’t been anything different about the work we did on the job from what we did at home.
“Welcome back. You’ve done well. Our little lady here has done a good job as well, hasn’t she?”
That’s what she said to me and my father when we returned to Harré after we had completed the job.
The receptionist had welcomed us with probably nothing more than a perfectly perfunctory greeting, but for some reason her expression, and the bright smile she gave us, stuck in my mind so firmly that I froze for a moment and stared at her, utterly and totally transfixed.
“...? Is something the matter?”
“Nanalie?”
Even if I had been ordered to explain myself in that moment, the feeling wasn’t something that I understood that well myself. It was something close to love at first sight, I think.
Regardless of what exactly I was feeling, to me, as the child I was, she looked positively radiant.
The dignified way in which she carefully gave us the documents for a job. The way her facial expression was the same regardless of whether the job was a dangerous or a boring one.
When we left she would wish us “good luck,” and when we returned to make our report she would greet us with a smile and those magic words: “Welcome back, you’ve done well.”
“Waa—!”
&nbs
Not at my father, who had worked so hard to take care of the actual work of the request.
Not at the big man standing at the next counter who was bragging about completing some difficult assignment.
My eyes were drawn only to the woman who sat there, the same as ever, always waiting with a smile. I felt something akin to intense longing and aspiration seeping, simmering, and boiling out of me as I stood there, staring at her.
And so I, who had stood there staring unblinkingly at the lady at Harré, was gently dragged away by my father, my shoes squeaking on the floor as he pulled me away. He thought I was tired or something, apparently.
“Aspiration” is something that isn’t achieved because you want to aspire to something or someone.
Before you know it, you find yourself aspiring to be something or someone. In my experience, it was a feeling that came on quite suddenly and without any particular reason. I might have dreamed of becoming a flower shop owner, I might have aimed to become a chef, or eventually chosen to do something else entirely. That’s where I was at that moment, just in that mental state of, “I want to become like that receptionist.” There wasn’t anything mysterious or strange about what I was feeling. It was simply what I wanted to become.
“I, I will be like that lady!”
And so what I wanted to be in the future turned into “Receptionist Lady.” It certainly wasn’t anything fancy, but it was something necessary. To me, anyway.
But when I told Father and Mother about my new dream, they, for some reason, tried very hard to dissuade me.
Their reasoning was: “You have to be an outstanding student in all of your magic studies. You have to be able to fight with magic and be smart enough to be in the top ranks of the students at the Royal School of Magic. Only those who have all of those skills can work there.”
Upon hearing that, however, I only wanted to become a receptionist even more.
After all, just thinking about how that incredibly graceful lady also has the skills to fight with magic and is intelligent enough to be at the top of her class—it made me admire her just that much more.
In order to persuade the two of them, I worked hard to become the number one student, even if it was only at the village schoolhouse. I would lock myself away inside the schoolhouse’s materials room, constantly pushing myself to figure out how to be able to do new types of magic, slowly understanding more and more, and asking my mother, who was well versed in such things, about how to make magic circles. Even with just that simple goal of learning the basics about magic circles, I felt that the way I threw myself into my studies was quite different from how I had studied before.
Thanks to my efforts, I was consistently able to be the top student at the schoolhouse, and was able to learn all the basic facts about magic that every child needed to know.
“You don’t have a familiar yet, so you’re going to ride in this horse carriage,” my mother says to me on the day I am leaving for magic school.
“Okay.”
“Don’t go catching a cold, alright?”
“I won’t, Mom!”
In order to get to school, I get into the flying horse carriage. There isn’t anyone else on board—not even a driver.
This is the only way I can get to the island floating up in the sky. Humans who have familiars get there differently, as they can use them to travel there quite quickly and easily. My father has a familiar, but it’s not permitted for parents to take their children to the island, so he can’t take me.
With that in mind, my mom has crafted this magical contraption especially for me.
At first glance it seems like quite the normal horse-drawn carriage: a horse connected to a humble, light brown carriage. But if you feed the horse a piece of paper that has the destination written on it, that four-legged creature will leap into the air and carry the carriage and its passenger to that place. It’s a magnificently magical carriage.
If I ever want to return home, all I need to do is have it eat a piece of paper that says “take me home,” so it’s quite convenient.
“I’m heading off!”
I feed the paper to the horse, get in the carriage, and we leave the ground. When I look down, I can see my mother, waving at me, growing smaller and smaller.
“This is such a comfortable ride! Just what I’d expect from a carriage my mother made.”
Above the Kingdom of Doran floats the “Royal Isle,” the island where the King resides. It’s the same in every kingdom, with the king’s castle on an island, and it’s very much taken for granted that the island will be floating in the sky above the kingdom.
That said, I don’t exactly know why the island is floating. When I ask adults, their responses are always quite vague, and their opinions on the subject differ. One theory I learned in the village schoolhouse was that long ago, in a time when demons rampaged throughout the land in much greater numbers than they do now, the greatest wizards of the age came together and lifted the castle and lands surrounding it into the sky, so that the royal family held in such high esteem by the kingdom would be just a little safer, protected from the dangers below. Or so I had been taught.
Of course, if there was one theory, there were others, but most were similar to this one.
And so now, on the Royal Isle, is a School of Magic. It’s a place with a rather long history, and also the school my father had attended. You have to graduate from this school if you want to be a sorcerer, and since he had indeed aspired to be one, it had been an easy decision for him.
Those who wish to join the Royal Knights, those who wish to seriously study magic... all of them come here. If you want to work in a place like Harré, you need a diploma from this school.
One can learn a certain degree of magic by studying at a normal school, but the difference between what you can study there and at the Royal School is a difference in order of magnitude, not simply degree. To put it more clearly, if you study at a normal school then you’ll learn how to cook simple meals for yourself at home, but at the Royal School you’ll learn how to create some of the finest cuisine in all the world.
Many of the children who go to the school have aristocrats for parents, who hold ranks like “duke” and “count,” among others. I’ve heard that many of those aristocratic children are half-forced to come here, with some wanting to attend and others attending against their will.
The aristocrats have an obligation to protect their lands from invasion by outside forces, so they take on military responsibilities. From an economic standpoint, managing their lands is part of their job, but as ruler of their domains it’s their responsibility to protect them as well. With demons still rather common in recent years, they need to become strong enough to defend their lands against them, as befit their roles as masters of their domains.
Must be difficult to be an aristocrat. It’s not all just wearing those fancy, flowing outfits.
“Wowwww!”
I can see the castle on the Royal Isle from my carriage. The white walls of the palace are far more beautiful than anything I’ve seen in pictures. I got quite excited by just thinking about how it was where the King and the Queen Consort lived.
In front of the castle and several times smaller, but still far larger than my own home, is a big building. I suppose that’s the School of Magic.
According to the map of the island that my mother gave me, there are several buildings in the town surrounding the castle where some of the King’s retainers live , and near the town, the campus for the School of Magic is indicated on the map.
I’m finally going to be able to take my first step towards becoming a receptionist lady.
I grip my hands together at my chest, my heart pounding in anticipation as I think about all the new adventures I’m going to have at my new school.
Before I Became a Receptionist - At the Royal School of Magic
It’s been one week since I became a student at Doran’s Royal School of Magic. My studies are, of course, different from what I’ve done so far. We aren’t studying how to levitate things or move them. At this school, they are having us learn a wide variety of magic, including combat and assault magic. Just because it’s my first year doesn’t mean we’re learning beginner stuff. Exactly what I’d expect from a top-level cooking class.
