The Apothecary Diaries – 05 – Preparing for Battle

Only Gaoshun witnesses a shirtless, sweaty Jinshi elegantly sparring with a promising underling. If there were any women present they would surely faint from the hotness. But after the session, Jinshi asks about the apothecary, specifically whether she’s restored her weight and health after going all out for Lady Lihua.

Maomao is in good spirits owing to the fact she’s found some fresh Matsutake mushrooms on the palace grounds. She also learns from her girl on the street Xiaolan that a servant managed to seduce a military officer, and suspects an aphrodisiac was used. Maomao keeps quiet about the fact that Jinshi had her make it.

After enjoying some grilled mushrooms with salt and soy paste with her partner-in-crime, the quack doctor, the two new best buds are interrupted by a eunuch who believes he’s been cursed. He shows them the nasty rashes on his hands, and Maomao believes an ointment should do the trick.

When the lad tells the story of how the rashes came to be, and that a strange colored flame led him to believe it was a curse, Maomao replicates the many-colored flames he saw, and chalks up the rashes to the fact he touched the wooden tablets containing the stuff that changed the flame’s colors, like fireworks.

With this little mini-mystery solved with science, Jinshi takes Maomao aside and shows her a number of different salts that can color flames if they were mixed with water or oil. Jinshi asks Gaoshun to find anyone else who may have suffered burns; both he and Maomao suspect the colored flames could be a code, for possibly nefarious purposes.

If there is some secret scheming going on, Jinshi, Maomao, and Gyokuyou and her retinue have to be on alert, especially with the emperor’s lavish garden party on the horizon. Gyokuyou’s other ladies-in-waiting dress her up in the formal garb they’ll be all be wearing. All four of the emperor’s top concubines will be in attendance, and it will be a war of looks and charm.

Maomao, as ever, is extremely practical about the upcoming event. Since it’s autumn it’s bound to be cold and there’s going to be a lot of standing around, so she makes a candy with orange and ginger to help bloodflow and provide warming, and sews pockets into her underrobe so a warming stone can be placed there.

When her co-ladies-in-waiting learn of these hacks, not only do they ask her to make them for them, but even the emperor’s cook and seamstress reach out. By just being who she is, she’s making a lot of friends and turning heads in the court.

When the day of the garden party arrives, Gyokuyou dons exquisite crimson robes that set off her coral hair and jade eyes, while Maomao and the other ladies are resplendent in their pink formal robes. Gyokuyou “marks” her ladies with fine jewelry, explaining to Maomao that they may otherwise attract “bad bugs.”

She marks Maomao with an elegant necklace of gold and precious stones, and then the ladies accost her and prepare to hit her with the (non-toxic) makeup kit. The first step is to wipe down her face and get rid of her infamous freckles.

But to both their shock and Jinshi’s upon laying eyes on her in her garden party best, Maomao never had freckles to begin with. She made fake ones with clay. When Jinshi, who is clearly bowled over by Maomao’s beauty (those eyes), asks why she would do such a thing, Maomao is blunt: so she wouldn’t be dragged down an alley.

She proceeds to tell him that in the red-light district where she worked, the short, skinny, ugly girls were less likely to be scooped up by awful men. Turns out she was anyway, but they only sold her, they didn’t do worse. Jinshi is angry on Maomao’s behalf, and she admits she’s angry about it too, but it’s not his fault.

Maomao is as thrown off by Jinshi being straightforward rather than his usual games, but it’s Jinshi who is so smitten by Maomao that he puts one of his hairpins in her hair, which is what Gyokuyou was trying to prevent. Now, by custom, Maomao is not just hers anymore.

The “curse” of the man’s hand rashes foreshadows potential foul play during the party, especially as the four concubines are vying to become the emperor’s official consort by marrying him. Eyes will be on all four of them, and a woman in the darkness preparing to serve a meal suggests she’s an agent in treachery to come.

But if it’s food meant for Gyokuyou, Maomao will be tasting it first. But her glow-up this week confirms the beautiful dancing Maomao in the OP is no illusion, but what she looks like when she doesn’t frump herself up. The preparations are complete; now it’s time to party.

Hyakkano – 05 – Human for a Reason

Next girlfriend up: the Cool Beauty, Eiai Nano; the girl who is not only atop the school exam rankings, but got a perfect score; the girl who is rumored to not be a girl at all, but an advanced AI, supported by her distinctive name. But when Nano and Rentarou’s eyes meet in class and the soulmate magic happens, she’s revealed to be as human as his other girlfriends.

However, things are a bit different with Eiai. Unlike Hakari and Karane, who were fighting for his love from the start, or Shizuka, who wasn’t sure she deserved it, Eiai actively tries to suppress the love for Rentarou that’s been bestowed upon her, hiding behind cold logic and efficiency. That said, she also uses those things as an excuse to suck on Rentarou’s finger when he cuts himself during lab.

(While this is happening, Karane takes her tsundere-ness to new heights by declaring “It’s not like I care about looking at some stupid cells or anything, okay?!”, to which Hakari responds by asking her what she’s even fighting against in life. Chef’s kiss.)

When Rentarou thanks Nano later, she gives a logical explanation for an illogical action, and rejects his offer of a thank-you soda. She feels such gestures, and indeed all non-academic activities such as “having fun” to be meaningless and devoid of value. She goes on to define value as something created only by utility and benefits.

But that night, in her completely undecorated room, Nano finds herself preoccupied with thoughts about Rentarou and unable to focus, even when she writes out hundreds of digits of Pi (“Pi is Life”). The next day she decides to ask Rentarou out, but when he heartily accepts, she then rejects, hoping he would decline.

Nano is convinced in this moment that simply drawing a line in the sand and ending her love via rejection will resolve her current emotional upheaval. But Rentarou has been rejected too many times to let one more faze him. He asks Nano for one date to prove to her that romance is more than just a means to matrimony and childbirth … that it has meaning beyond that, unable to be calculated.

Nano agrees, and I believe it’s largely in part because a part of her wants to go on a date with the boy she suddenly loves, even if she’s as cold and skeptical at the theme park as she was at school. Her scathing commentary on the various illogical and absurd contraptions and practices they go through is well worth the price of admission. “Horse simulator” and “human house” were gold!

But something happens when they ride the Ferris Wheel: her acrophobia kicks in, and creates a crack in her calcified armor. Her hand trembles, and Rentarou can tell she’s afraid and sits beside her. When she grabs his sleeve, he places his hand on hers to steady it, and she interlocks her fingers with his. It’s without a doubt something Nano has never experienced, and she cannot hide her enjoyment.

After that vulnerable moment, the two go over the instant camera photos Rentarou had taken throughout the day, and to her surprise, he can discern her emotions in each one, from boredom to genuine enjoyment. Everyone always calls her emotionless, but that’s simply not the case; they just aren’t watching her closely enough.

That said, she continues to insist this day and everything that happened in it was meaningless and a waste of time, and that she gained nothing. Rentarou is happy she was straightforward as always in telling him what she thought about the date, and prepares to light the photos—which have no digital files or negatives—aflame.

But just as one corner of the photos begins to singe, Nano instinctively rips them away from the fire with a look of sheer panic. Rentarou admits he tried to burn them in order to prove to Nano that the times they had weren’t meaningless and that she did gain something. She may not understand what it is, but when she grabbed the photos it proved she didn’t want to lose it. And she can’t lose what she doesn’t have.

There’s a meaning to good times, and enjoying those times makes life meaningful. Realizing that she was too quick to conclude she wasn’t missing out on anything by avoiding fun and romance, Nano again asks Rentarou out. He accepts, and she makes it official with a surprise kiss, afterwards declaring that she intends to fulfill her desires “without fretting about the means.”

All that’s left is to introduce his fourth and newest girlfriend to the ‘cule, which at this point is a mere formality, especially considering the other three are now thick as thieves. We even get a preview of their future interactions together, as Karane chides Nano for “optimizing his death” when she suggested he kill himself with poison rather than seppuku if he doesn’t do right by them all.

The other girls are a little jealous Rentarou went on a date with Nano, something they haven’t done yet, so Hakari wastes no time suggesting a group date to a pool, which means we’ll be getting the swimsuit episode next week.

Until then, Nano’s intro was fantastic, and her calm deadpan logic hiding an aggressive assertiveness makes for a great new wrinkle to the dynamic that includes Shizuka’s quirkiness and Hakari and Karane’s chaos. I also hasten to add that Rentarou didn’t seek out to change Nano, only to introduce her to a part of life she hadn’t bothered to access, knowing the rewards would far outweigh the inefficiencies.

Spy x Family – 30 – Cruise Control

Yor is assigned a new mission by the “Shopkeeper”—someone with skills comparable to hers and who was possibly her master. He tests her by distracting her with his lovely garden, but by dodging his surprise attack Yor proves that she’s ready to not only defend herself from attacks, but to “end any evildoer at any time.”

In this case, Yor is not being tasked with ending anyone, but with protecting the last surviving member of a mafia family, Olka Gretcher, and her infant son.

Olka is seeking asylum in another country, but the man who took over the crime family is sending all manner of bounty hunters her way. Olka will be traveling via luxury cruise liner, which just happens to be the exact same cruise Anya wins in a raffle by reading the mind of the official who is scamming everyone else.

It’s quite the coincidence; one that has Yor contemplating for the first time whether this will her last job as Thorn Princess.

Yor, Loid, and Anya take a train to the port town from which  the Princess Loreliei cruise liner, pride of Ostania, will depart. It is a massive ship, close enough in size to the much older Titanic, and while Yor, Loid, and Anya are aboard, so are a number of people seeking to find and kill Olka.

Yor must undertake a job in the same venue where her family is taking an ordinary vacation by sheer coincidence. With all the unknown variables in play it already feels like it’s not going to be smooth sailing.

When Yor meets Olka, she’s in full-on disguise as Shaty Grey, wife of a department store magnate. Her “husband” takes one look at Yor and is skeptical that she’s enough to protect his “wife”, but Matt from City Hall assures him that Yor is strong and more than capable of protecting “Shaty”.

That said, Yor is weary of undertaking this mission in such close proximity to her family, which she’s come to see as not fake.

While Yor is aboard the Lorelei under the auspices of “advanced urban planning”, Loid and Anya are simply there because she won a raffle, and accept that Yor will be busy on official business. Olka, meanwhile, dresses Yor in one of her leisure dresses in order to blend in more.

While Yor manages to gain the trust of both Olka and her young son Gram, the cruise ship is essentially a den of vipers, with one particularly focused individual listening in on multiple conversations on the ship via strategically placed bugs. As soon as Yor and Olka are speaking plainly to one another, this person picks up on it and zeros in on “Shaty Grey’s” cabin.

No doubt Yor will have to flex her not inconsiderable skills to defend Olka and her son, while also trying not to expose her skills to Loid and Anya. At the same time, I have no doubt that both Twilight and Anya’s ESP would come in handy for Yor, so we’ll see how successful she is in keeping her mission a secret.

At any rate, I’m just glad we’re finally getting a Yor-centric story that explores whether she even needs to keep killing now that Yuri is largely self-sufficient and she has a fine husband and daughter.