Chapter 7: Proficiency (Part 1)

Showing initiative

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There were three key elements to travel passes; apart from the three colors red, green and black representing business, personal and asylum respectively, printed on the pass also were official approval signatures and the guest’s name. If the pass were to fall into the possession of anyone else, it would immediately be dyed bright red as a warning.

An example of this would be Darhk’s pass.

During these past few days, Feisha had been furiously cramming knowledge into his brain. Besides the fundamentals, even the customs of different worlds and areas weren’t neglected. To quote his own words, it is essential to establish a relationship of fellowship with each and every customer in order to reduce their discomfort in this foreign place, and thus create a home away from home.

To this, Gin scoffed. “Guests who come to Noah’s Ark in the first place all stay for longer than a front desk manager who can’t even find the dining hall.”

Gin slept outside Hughes’ door that night.

In addition to madly studying, Feisha also scouted his way through the floors of the hotel. Despite the fact that every room was identical, he still caved into old habits and forcefully allocated cardinal directions.

According to feng shui:

Faeries should live on the East side; faeries are close to nature, and the element of the East is wood.

Vampires should live in the North; it’s relatively colder.

Dwarves should live in the West; the element of the West is metal, and dwarves love gold. This is the conclusion he came to after being demanded to pay a fee as compensation for all the questions he’d asked in the past few days.

Invisible people should live in the South, because he likes Hughes the best out of everyone. South is generally considered to be the best, due to the excellent air circulation and an abundance of sunlight.

Titans can live in… open-ceiling halls.

Fallen angels can live up top since they have wings anyway.

After assigning everyone a place, Feisha realised that he had left out the werewolves. He fervently hoped that there would be no werewolves checking in to spare him the headache.

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“A group of werewolves are here to check in,” Isefel announced the next day.

As backup, Feisha brought Asa down to front counter with him. With Asa’s gigantic body towering behind him, Feisha felt very safe and secure; it almost felt like opening an umbrella on a stormy day.

“Darhk didn’t do it on purpose,” said Asa suddenly.

“You mean he threw me across the room for fun?”

“No, he didn’t do it for fun- it was intentional,” Asa scrambled to explain.

“Other than sounding nothing alike and being spelt differently, what’s the difference between doing something intentionally and on purpose?”

“No, no, I meant that he came to find me. You just happened to be there.”

“…You know, I’d rather he came just to find me instead now,” Feisha sighed heavily.

“Darhk’s actually a good boy.”

Feisha shuddered in disgust while Asa started reminiscing about the past.

“I was the one who taught Darhk how to use nunchucks when he was still young.”

An eyebrow raised. “What’s so hard about that? Isn’t it just like playing ping-pong?”

Asa was astonished. “You know how to use nunchucks?”

“Er…I don’t,” admitted Feisha. The ad was fake anyway.

“We of the titan race can’t wield magic, so we have to rely on our strength and skill in combat. Every titan starts training in different weapons under a mentor from a very young age. I was Darhk’s mentor.”

“You’re very good at combat,” Feisha complemented genuinely.

“Thank you.”

“But your quality of education sucks.”

“…Darhk is in fact very talented. It’s just a shame that in these two thousand years, he had forgotten to practice his techniques in his narrow-minded pursuit of a chance to fight me.”

Feisha thought meanly: Are you sure a person of his intelligence can be considered talented?

“Why is so he insistent on fighting you?”

“Because I promised to fight him after he wins the World Championships, but got called to become the security guard at Noah’s Ark the night before the finals.”

Who said that soap operas were too melodramatic? Real life is clearly worse! Feisha could imagine how the situation played out after that even without Asa telling him, it’s just that Darhk’s persistence was kind of suspicious.

He turned around to fix Asa with a serious look.

Under Feisha’s scrutinisation, Asa could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Wh- What’s wrong?”

“Are you sure Darhk isn’t doing this because he actually has a crush on you?”

There was an awkward pause.

“Nevermind, it was just a thought.” Despite the fact that he hated Gin with a passion, Feisha has to admit that out of everyone he knew, Gin and Hughes best fit the gay couple stereotype.

“What kind of joke was that!?” Asa suddenly yelled, jumping up.

Feisha pinched his hair, completely soaked with Asa’s spit, and calmly asked, “Do you have a hairdryer?”

Asa found a hairdryer, but there was no socket to plug it in. He then proposed to blow on it, an endeavour quickly halted as Feisha’s eyes rolled back into his head from the bad breath.

When the werewolves finally arrived, they noticed that the human had pretty cool-looking slicked hair.

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The reception of the werewolves was very successful; Feisha made sure to fully utilise his skills as the front-desk manager of a five star hotel, including but not limited to his choice in words.

He knows that werewolves were naturally sensitive to the topic of the moon, and thus used choice phrases such as “these thirty days” and “the next twelfth of a year” when introducing the monthly specials. In his careful selection of words, each phrase was never repeated and all flowed together without pause.

Feisha was very pleased with this, and asked for the guests’ names as they left.

“My name is Moon, and they’re my little brothers Lune and Luna.”

Feisha’s smile remained perfectly in place. “I am very honoured to have served you.”

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Since the guests were all welcomed and settled, Feisha had no more duties to carry out and started wandering around the hotel. To say that Noah’s Ark was big would be an understatement; apart from the fact that its ceiling was nowhere to be seen, every corner one walked past seemed to lead to a completely new area. He’s always wanted to know what Noah’s Ark actually looked like on the outside, or if it simply had no end, like space.

When he asked Hughes about this, Hughes gave him a clean answer: “It looks like whatever you think it looks like.”

Because of its name, most people think of it as a ship before arriving, and so they see a ship. Feisha, on the other hand, thought of Hotel Noah as a hotel, so what he saw was the grand hotel of his dreams. He committed this fact to memory, resolving to firmly perceive Noah’s Ark to be a gold ingot before he leaves and to take a chunk with him.

Soon, he found himself at the entrance of a large warehouse. Faced with towering shelves of food, he was no longer shocked and surprised at the blatant display of abundance. No wonder they ate so well every meal, since the food supply here was infinite. If this place was a warehouse on ground floor, then on the second and third floors would be an identical warehouse and so on, which Isefel could easily bring down with his powers.

Seeing a shelf full of grapes, Feisha was about to take one to eat when he spotted a head of orange moving about.

“Dea?” he called out, softly.

The blur of orange turned around, revealing a set of beautiful features- it was Dea. Faced with such perfection, Feisha’s feelings were a little chaotic.

Being just as handsome as Dea, Isefel doesn’t make his breath catch in his throat, or his heart threaten to beat out of his chest, because despite how good-looking he was, Isefel exuded an undoubtedly male aura. On the other hand, Dea’s androgynous appearance sometimes made his pulse quicken without warning. Thinking back to Gin’s words when they first met, Feisha’s heart skipped a beat.

“What are you staring at?” Dea asked, frowning slightly.

Feisha snapped out of his stupor, schooling his expression into a serious one: “I’m looking into the distant future.”

“…”

“Err, you know, humans are full of wisdom and intelligence. They are often the first to worry about the troubles across the land, the last to enjoy universal happiness.” Seeing that Dea was now thoroughly confused, Feisha quickly changed the topic.

“So, what are you doing here?”

“Organising fruit.”

“Uh, isn’t that Antonio’s territory?” Shortly after arriving, Feisha had noticed that the people here didn’t like to use the word ‘job’ as much as they did ‘territory’ to assert their absolute authority in their particular area.

“He doesn’t understand the feelings of the fruits.”

I don’t either, thought Feisha. I can only understand my feelings of happiness when I eat the fruit.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m just, passing by. And taking foo…”

Dea looked at him.

“Fo…for granted the value of organisation. It’s very messy here, isn’t it?” Feisha forcefully wrenched himself from Dea’s scrutinising stare. “I guess you’re way more capable of understanding the feelings of the fruit, huh. Um, you take your time organising, I’ll be taking my leave.”

“Wait, do you have anything sharp on you right now?”

“Why?” Feisha asked while patting down his pockets.

“One of my buttons fell into a crack.”

There was indeed a small crack in the ground, discovered Feisha as he walked over, and embedded within it was a button.

“It’d probably come out if we could use something to pull it.”

“Which is why I asked if you had anything sharp on you.”

Feisha looked around, finally resting his gaze on Dea.

“What are you looking at?” Dea asked with a frown.

“Can you take your ears off?”

The answer was cold. “Can you put it back on after you’re done?”

Feisha awkwardly looked away. “I’ll go find you a pair of scissors.”

“There’s no need.”

“Why?”

Muttering a spell under his breath, the button levitated into Dea’s outstretched hand.

“Why did you ask for my help if you could do something like that?” asked Feisha.

Dea held the button in his hand and calmly replied: “I wanted to see how the intelligent human would solve such a problem.”

“We don’t normally do stupid things like stuffing buttons into cracks.”

With that, Feisha left the warehouse and his adventure for the day was brought to a close.

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Translator’s notes

In addition to madly studying, Feisha also scouted his way through the floors of the hotel.

The Chinese word used here in place of ‘scouted’ is踩盘子cǎi pán zi (lit. step on plates). It’s from olden day Chinese argot and basically means to, well, scout out a place/stalk a person before setting fire to it/robbing them or whatever.

According to feng shui

I can’t believe I actually had to research feng shui for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui

“The werewolves are here to check in,” Isefel announced the next day.

It’s less of a joke or pun than a subtle nudge, but The Boy Who Cried Wolf is called 狼来了láng lái le (lit. the wolf has come) in Chinese, which is what Isefel says here.

“Other than sounding nothing alike and being spelt differently, what’s the difference between doing something intentionally and on purpose?”

Same old, same old; OG Chinese first: 有意和故意除了发音不一样，头一个字写法不一样外，有什么区别？yǒu yì hé gù yì chú le fā yīn bù yī yàng, tóu yī gè zì xiě fǎ bù yī yàng wài, yǒu shé me qū bié? (lit. Other than being pronounced differently, the first character being written differently, what’s the difference between intentionally and deliberately?) As you can see, 有意 and 故意 have the same second character. It’s pretty self-explanatory – Feisha’s just pointing out how Asa contradicted himself because he’s still salty about the pay deduction.

An eyebrow raised. “What’s so hard about that? Isn’t it just like playing ping-pong?”

Eyyyy another weird reference I dug up from the crevices of history. Instead of saying ping pong, what Feisha actually says is 不就是哼哼哈嘿吗 bù jiù shì hēng hēng hā hēi ma (lit. Isn’t it just heng heng ha hei?), which is a reference to Jay Chou’s song, Nunchucks. You can hear this exact line here: https://youtu.be/OR-0wptI_u0?t=1m17s (1:17 if the timestamp doesn’t work). There are translations for the lyrics up on the internet should anyone be interested. In short, it doesn’t really have any meaning, just a few grunts of exertion as one uses nunchucks to beat people up.

Now for the English. It’s not that complicated really- the ping pong thing is just a reference to the famous Nokia ad, in which Bruce Lee plays ping pong with nunchucks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SncapPrTusA), which brings us to the next note:

The ad was fake anyway.

Following on from above, here Feisha actually thinks something along the lines of ‘I bet Jay Chou can only spin it a few times anyway.’ Sour grapes, man. Sour grapes.

Anyway. As everybody on the internet will be eager to tell you, the Nokia nunchuck-ping-pong ad is actually fake (what a surprise).

“My name is Moon, and they’re my little brothers Lune and Luna.”

Their names in Chinese are 大月(dà yuè), 中月(zhōng yuè) and 小月(xiǎo yuè), which mean Big Moon, Middle Moon and Little Moon respectively. Their translated names are just the word moon in English, French and Latin. The joke here is that Feisha painstakingly avoided saying the word 月, which also means month in Chinese, only to find out that the werewolves actually have no problem with saying it since it’s in literally all their names.

[…] besides the fact that its ceiling was nowhere to be seen, every corner one walked past seemed to lead to a completely new area.

The second half of this sentence was originally the second half of the Chinese proverb, 山重水复疑无路，柳暗花明又一村shān chóng shuǐ fù yí wú lù, liǔ àn huā míng yòu yì chūn (lit. After endless mountains and rivers that leave doubt whether there is a path out, suddenly one encounters the shade of a willow, bright flowers and a lovely village). The English counterpart to this would be “Every cloud has a silver lining”. You might notice that this doesn’t make any sense in context, and that’s because it doesn’t. What Feisha means by quoting this is not the overall moral, but likening the sudden appearance of a “lovely village” to his experience at Noah’s Ark, where rooms seemingly just keep popping up without an end.

“I’m just, passing by. And taking foo…” […] “Fo…for granted the value of organisation.”

Look, a pun. What Feisha was saying in Chinese was 吃。。。嗤笑一下安东尼奥放东西的品味chī… chī xiào yī xià ān dōng ní ào fàng dōng xī de pǐn wèi (lit. Eat…Laugh a bit at Antonio’s way of putting things.) The word for eat and the first character for laugh are both chī; basically, what Feisha did was start to admit that he came to steal food, then change it mid-sentence to a criticism of how disorganised Antonio was.