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I’m reading along
I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this chapter yet
I guess this chapter is a bit more vocab heavy than the rest
Still, the science talk is kept to a minimum, so if you are familiar with the concept of gravity, you should be fine.
Onward to spoilers!
Aria社長 has the best hats.
I half expected that the lack of interactions with the ノーム was because of secrets relative to their work. I guess not (or they are very smart at hiding it)
p85 of my book (I’m too lazy to check what that means in the masterpiece edition), 灯里 jumping at the call. 「てゆーか送らせてくださいっ！」 (That face too)
アル really talks like an old guy, I kinda thought that somehow he was actually that age, and that ノーム were simply leaving much longer than regular humans. (To be fair, he is older than he looks, but not that old)
I first thought of elves, then, by association, I realized that ノーム probably comes from gnome? That’s not how we would say it in French (that’s a hard “g” for us), but I guess it’s correct in English. That goes well with the fact that they are small and leave underground too. Small except for that fricking giant on the first page we see them.
The sciencey stuff is a bit BS, but whatever, it’s cool. If I want hard SF, I can always go and read Last Order.
あ 藍華 what are you saying? 「そのひかれあう力に導かれたからかもね」
That’s a well deserved 恥ずかしいセリフ禁止 in your face too.
Still, I ship it
And we get to learn that アル is 19 and 藍華 is 16. She should not have been drinking in the previous chapter.
It is super quiet this weekend, isn’t it!? I have been working on an assignment today and was sure I’d come back to find lots of conversation, but no. Where is everyone?
I am on my second read through and putting vocab into the spreadsheet. @Belthazar I hope you are having a great trip, but I’ll be glad when you’re back as I appreciate the fact that you do a lot of this.
ノーム人 - If you wear sunglasses out in the open and nearly pass out from the glare, I would expect that you live somewhere dark… but it seems to be just as light underground as outside!
That is really cool architecture on p282, going down into the abyss… although I have no idea why so many people would need to live there… or where all the smoke goes from all those chimneys!
Clearly still far too secret to make any sense
p275 How exactly were you planning to row/steer that boat? Jedi mind powers?
I’m currently on p 293. So I’ll be finished later tonight.
Maybe the art is drawn from the perspective of their eyes having adapted to night vision. And just like night vision (the human kind, not the military night vision goggles-green one), everything looks black and white. Coincidence?
One thing in the story that… dare I use the word… had me “triggered” just a little bit is
that being a yuubinya-san myself, I climb a hundred flights of stairs or so every day. And for Aika to have the nerve to complain about going down stairs. Man… Kids today… or rather kids in couple hundred years
I thought the bigger boat would pull the smaller boat. Everyone else went in the bigger boat. But they all just left him behind. That’s cold. The bigger boat doesn’t seem to have any oars either. Maybe it has a motor or something.
I know, I thought this was hilarious actually I guess with this kind of episodic storytelling there isn’t a lot of scope to set up scenarios like this many chapters in advance.
But on the other hand, they do need to go to the surface to get stuff once in a while. The fact that they haven’t been around for awhile means that they should come up at some point soon-ish.
There could have been a time skip between the conversation with Alicia and being in town (i.e. a few days), to make it feel more random, but fine.
Gravity pot
Funnily enough, I had キノコ鍋 like two or three weeks ago (it is getting chilly, after all).
It was delicious.
I was just rereading the last part as I still had a few pages of vocab to double check, and only now noticed the grandpa ノーム人 giving Aria社長 a
And on the next page he’s eating そば.
We’ve certainly come a long way from when cat food falling off the bench into the water was a crisis!
Well, I caught up to this chapter at least!
All I really have to say is that アル is 超かわいい ><
I don’t care if he’s 19 and he talks like a grandpa, he’s adorable. I want to pat him on the head and put him in my pocket. He’s younger than me, so I’d be allowed, right? xD
Also, the picture on pg 282-283 is awesome, I would get so dizzy looking at that in real life, but it looks so cool in there.
I was kind of hoping there’d be an anime episode of this so I could hear what the pipes sound like, but if there is one, I didn’t find it.
Ah, the magic of Akari - she complains how cold it is, so Alicia randomly brings up gravity and mentions how the Gnomes are rarely seen above ground, and on the very next page she encounters Gnomes above ground. The power of plot!
That’s kinda his schtick. I mean, Aika does hang a lantern on it on page… uh… 88 for you, I think. Among others.
You wot, mate? You’re dissing the Special Theory of Relativity?
Though honestly, what bugs me is that it’s controlled by a pipe organ. Some old-time settler has a ridiculously overblown sense of the dramatic.
There’s a big difference between sunlight and even well-lit interiors.
Because she’s well aware that every single step she goes down is one she’s going to have to come back up again later.
Yeah, in the anime, Al basically just shows up, and we never see the underground world - his introductory episode takes its inspiration from a different Al-centric chapter of the manga. Still, he gets things better off than one other character we haven’t met yet: Woody’s introductory chapter is completely tossed out, and replaced instead with an anime-only episode in which he simply functions as a means to get Akari where she needs to go.
I guess it just sounds like a pipe organ filled with ball bearings?
(That face too)
Where is everyone?
this is making me think of 
