I’m the Big Sister

♪Adagio (10 years ago)♪

I’m a man.

And yet, when the boy looked at my face and gave me a bright smile, he called me “big sister.”

My name is Adagio. I live inside the body of a young man named Allegro. As Allegro struggled through his painful days, part of his personality split away, and I was born as his second self. Since Allegro is a man, that naturally means I am a man too.

Ninety percent of the time Allegro is awake, the primary personality, Allegro, controls this body, and I serve as someone he can talk to when he is troubled. But every now and then, when he finds himself in a situation he cannot handle, he hands control over to me.

Allegro is bad with children. So when babysitting gets pushed onto him, he passes the role to me. That day too, six-year-old Poet, a distant relative of an important person at the Ministry of Magic, had come to tour the workplace, so I was the one showing him around.

As I led him through the office, the open laboratory, the cafeteria, and other low-security areas where ordinary people were allowed, Poet skipped along obediently after me. His long ears twitched as he bounced along in shorts, carrying a light-blue randoseru imported from Japan in the other world. He was adorable.

Apparently Poet was the second prince of the Rabbit Kingdom, where demi-humans lived. The first prince, who was meant to inherit the throne, was heavily guarded by bodyguards, but Poet, on the other hand, was being raised rather freely.

“Hey, big sister.”

“Haha. I’m a big brother, actually. I don’t think my appearance is that hard to read.”

But Poet only made his eyes shine brighter, unfazed by my correction.

“You know, I have this dream.”

“A dream?”

“In the dream, I kiss a beautiful big sister on a bench beside a flower garden, after I’ve grown up. The big sister in my dream feels a lot like Mr. Allegro. Not just her face—her aura too.”

He looked straight up at me with those round, sparkling eyes. I was a grown adult, and yet somehow I felt embarrassed and ticklish, while at the same time strangely warm inside.

“I have the power to see prophetic dreams. So I think this one will definitely come true someday.”

“Haha.”

It was the kind of dreamy thing only a child would say. All I could do was laugh it off.

Perhaps Poet had taken a liking to me, because after that he started dropping by from time to time. For me too, the days I spent with him were soothing. Allegro, who disliked children, always reacted with exasperation and brushed him off coldly.

My original self, Allegro, was suffering fierce harassment from his superiors. He was shouted at, given impossible workloads, trapped between contradictory orders—and yet he endured it all and kept trying.

And I, his other personality, watched by his side with an aching heart.

Before sleep, the two of us would hold meetings inside our mind.

You don’t have to force yourself so hard just to get ahead, you know. If you push too hard, all you’ll do is break your body. Times are against us right now. Even bears hibernate when winter turns harsh. If you just look after your health and quit your job for a while, you could recover your strength.

Don’t be so irresponsible. If I don’t grit my teeth in my twenties and build a foundation for my career, I’ll end up a miserable middle-aged man, spending my old age alone. In this country, career-building assumes you never leave blank periods and never change jobs. I’m going to rise through the Ministry of Magic, build a solid career, return home in glory, and marry Draco, the childhood friend I’ve always loved. That’s my life plan.

My primary self was too serious, too stubborn. Precisely because he had a personality that blocked off every path of retreat, malicious people around him could exploit that and pile more burdens onto him.

I don’t know... maybe it’d be better if you had a little more give in you. Like in architecture—structures with some play in them can survive earthquakes, but if every joint is fixed too rigidly, they snap clean in two. I guess what I mean is... even if you drop out once, that’s okay. You can start over.

You can say irresponsible things like that because you’re not the primary personality the one enduring this pressure every day! Oh, enough! I’ve got an early day tomorrow, so I’m sleeping! Don’t talk to me!

It was always like that.

I didn’t dislike how hard he worked. But I couldn’t help thinking that if things went on like this, it might lead to some irreversible tragedy.

If you fail at building your career properly, you can’t even get married, and the chances of girls rejecting and scorning you only go up. I could tell the darkness he carried was immense. But maybe he didn’t have to try to endure everything through sheer grit alone. Maybe he could blame the world a little more.

The only reason I had the space to think like this was because I was only a secondary personality who surfaced once in a while. If I were constantly exposed to pressure the way he was, I’d surely develop the same kind of tunnel vision.

One day, we were assigned to carry a cardboard box to a far-off department at work. Apparently it contained instruments. Allegro usually insisted on doing all work with his own hands, but when it came to simple manual labor, he handed over control to me and took a nap.

Walking from one end of the building to the other was exhausting.

“Lala!”

As I cast the spell, a trumpet appeared from subspace. If I used instrumental magic, I should be able to carry it much more easily. But the moment I brought the mouthpiece to my lips, a sharp reprimand flew at me.

“Hey! No loud sounds inside the building!”

“Sorry.”

Right. I’d forgotten.

Instrumental magic was forbidden inside this building. Only vocal magic was allowed. It was true that the trumpet was loud, so there was some justification, but even so, the unfairness was impossible to ignore.

I understood the reason. Vocal magic had existed in this world since ancient times. Instrumental magic, on the other hand, was a newcomer, only a few years into its spread. Minorities, women, and others who had never been able to display their full abilities in a world centered on vocal magic could, through instrumental magic, wield magic equal to that of the elite. It truly was an epoch-making invention. It was only natural that the Ministry of Magic—a fortress of conservative authority—would see it as a threat.

Of course, if they openly showed that attitude, they would be accused of discrimination. So instead, they suppressed it under the pretext that the instruments were too loud. It was no wonder that Allegro, who had joined the Ministry through the instrumental slot with the trumpet as his specialty, was sinking deeper into darkness.

As I passed by, I noticed the door to a meeting room standing open. Voices drifted out from inside.

“Troubling times, aren’t they?”

“Oh, absolutely. It’s always hard to survive a transitional period when a new technology is born.”

The conversation caught my attention, so I stopped and listened. I couldn’t see their faces, but the voices belonged to older men.

“Do you know about a period in otherworld Japan called the Bakumatsu? After long isolation, they suddenly had to face the fact that they had missed the Industrial Revolution and had fallen hopelessly behind Europe and America in technological innovation. It was an era when they resolved to catch up. Young people felt the crisis keenly, but the older generation was conservative, so bloody generational conflict broke out. Even in recent years, I’ve heard that the generation that first began mastering information technology was treated terribly.”

“Well, if you look at history from a broad perspective, technologies that bring new wisdom will, in the long run, bring happiness, equality, and democracy. But the transition is always difficult. That is especially true for tools like instrumental magic that bring new forms of information. For people unused to them, they create a vacuum of thought where rumors become easier to believe. Even in the other world, the invention of the printing press democratized information, but in its early days it also triggered witch hunts and caused countless deaths. Radio—that is, mass media—likewise gave rise to dictatorships, war, and discrimination during its period of expansion. And internet media, once it escaped being dismissed as just a gadget for nerds and became widely used...”

“Well, none of that means any one specific person is to blame. New technologies are always embraced first by the young. And when that happens, the words of young people—who lack life experience and philosophy—start being right more and more often. That dims the authority of elders. And that, in turn, isn’t good only for the young either. It means they stop being cherished by their elders, and things that could have been passed down to them no longer are. An unhappy structure takes shape. It becomes impossible to nurture the truly moral and highly capable leaders who ought to be the next generation’s hope. The pool of talent narrows, strange people get appointed, and भ्रष्ट organizations multiply.”

“The young people mastering instrumental magic now are going to suffer too, no doubt. And so will we who watch over them.”

“Do you know Allegro-kun?”

At the mention of my primary self’s name, I swallowed hard.

“Ah, the one who made Elder Serpent look ridiculous.”

I followed the thread of memory.

At the opera house, during the new recruits’ welcoming ceremony, the elder had performed in a beautiful tenor voice. He sang a section from the triumphal march of Aida. The audience burst into thunderous applause as he left the stage in high spirits.

Then came the next speaker: my primary self, Allegro, representing the new recruits. According to the plan, he was supposed to sing Radamès’s aria in a beautiful voice—a song pledging loyalty to authority.

But once he stepped onto the stage, Allegro pulled out a trumpet and began playing the solo part of the triumphal march right over the elder’s own performance. The hall was stunned into silence.

And then, when he finished, it erupted into applause.

The times had changed. It was a performance that seemed to declare that we would create the next age. Needless to say, Elder Serpent had ground his teeth in frustration.

“He shouldn’t have done something like that. These are delicate times. At this rate, a healthy generational transition will become impossible.”

Hey. You’ve been standing still too long. Aren’t you going?

My primary self, Allegro, had awakened. Come to think of it, I had lingered there too long.

As I walked on, I remembered something my superior, Mr. Chopin, had said to us over drinks.

“Allegro-kun, your name is the same as that of a bad influence I knew in my school days, so it throws me off a little. Unlike that carefree guy, you’re painfully earnest, and it’s hard for me to reconcile the gap psychologically.”

He’d laughed lightly, but then his expression turned serious.

“Well, putting that aside, you really ought to rein yourself in a bit more. I mean... if you want to impress people, don’t just show off the trumpet. You’re genuinely excellent at vocal magic too, so you should present yourself in a more balanced way. The next era will probably be opened by instrumental magic users like you, but right now is the age of endurance. Your generation—the first generation of instrumental magic users—will face countless hardships before the elders ever acknowledge you. You probably won’t climb the ladder the way you hope. That’s exactly why you need to respect the old authorities properly, save their face, and get yourselves onto the promotion track, so that the second generation can formally open the next era. I want you to become the foundation of that next age. That’s why you must not oppose your elders. If you do, it won’t just make things harder for you—it’ll hurt the second generation too.”

Allegro had nodded along at the time without really taking it to heart. But I understood what his superior meant perfectly.

When we reached the designated warehouse, I set the box down on the floor.

What could be inside?

I’d assumed it was an instrument, but the contents rolled around inside like a ball. Something like that should have been cushioned with packing material or taped in place, I thought.

Then the cardboard box began to glow.

Had magic been cast on it beforehand? The seal broke open automatically.

Inside was a human head.

Its eyes were wide open, stiff with rigor mortis.

I recognized the face.

It belonged to Serenade, a young female recruit who had joined the Ministry through the same instrumental slot as me. She had burned with ambition, declaring that from now on, women would open the future.

No.

No way.

Then I sensed someone else there. At the entrance of a warehouse where people should not normally have been coming or going.

“Kyahhh! A murderer! Everyone, come quick!”

It was Ms. Zophie, a woman favored by Elder Serpent—so favored that vulgar rumors even painted her as his mistress.

And then, unnaturally, people began swarming in.

Too perfectly timed to be coincidence.

It was as if a volunteer trash-picking group had been deliberately stationed near the warehouse for the sole purpose of becoming witnesses.

Thus Allegro—who was both myself and my partner in fate—was arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to what was effectively life imprisonment.