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Ranpo was being more impatient than usual about Poe’s writings.
“It takes so long,” said Ranpo. “Can’t you write faster?”
“Writing is an art, Ranpo, it takes time.”
“I want to read something now!” demanded Ranpo. “There’s no way I’ve read every single thing you’ve ever written. You’ve been writing your whole life, right? So you must have a ton of stories hidden away.”
“You’ve read everything worth reading, trust me,” replied Poe “You would hate my older stories. I hate them.”
Ranpo perked up. “So there is more! Well, maybe I won’t like them as much. If you’re the best writer now, then your old stories would still be above average. Show me!”
Ranpo’s excited face paired with the compliment was enough to make Poe’s face heat up. "I… If you really think that, I can see what I can find."
Ranpo jumped up. “Hooray!”
Fortunately, Poe had shipped all his old notebooks from overseas once he decided to stay in Japan. Ranpo followed him into the storage room and perched himself on a box as Poe picke one at random and began rifling through it.
“You sure do have a lot of notebooks, don’t you?” said Ranpo, reaching towards an opened box.
“Don’t touch that! Not all of them are stories. Some are journals.” Ranpo certainly wasn’t seeing those, even if there was nothing in there he couldn’t probably deduce. Ranpo sighed, but pulled back his hand. ”Others are notes, or…” Poe skimmed through a notebook. “Poetry. You wouldn’t want to read it.”
“Poe-kun, I love you, but no.”
“That’s what I thought… Oh!” Poe finally found a notebook he recognized from his high school creative writing class. He opened it up. “I remember this story. I got a C on it because the teacher thought it was too grisly.” He had to speak to the student counselor in an event that was quite high on his list of top ten most mortifying high school moments “I could probably find something better if you give me a bit more time.” Just looking at the story was making Poe cringe.
“I love grisly! Gimme!” Ranpo held out both of hands.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Poe placed the notebook in Ranpo’s hands, who excitedly opened it up.
Poe turned back towards the box and pretended to continue to look through it. It was terrifying enough to watch Ranpo read when he handed him something he was proud of. Surely it would take merely a millisecond for Ranpo to figure it out. So why wasn’t he saying anything? Poe turned back around.
Ranpo was staring… And staring… And not saying anything? He always had an answer. Was the random high school story the winner? Had he been overthinking things this whole time?
“It’s in English,” said Ranpo blankly..
“I did go to school in America. Ah! Is your English not very good?”
Ranpo held up the notebook towards Poe and tapped on the page. “I don’t know any of these words.”
“So that’s a yes.” Poe took the story from Ranpo. Was he that pretentious of a writer in high school? Surely Rannpo was exaggerating. He skimmed the first page. No, it was annoyingly simple writing. “You don’t know hello ?”
Ranpo looked up and thought for a second. “That sounds vaguely familiar. Is it a popular word?”
“It means hi.”
“ Hello ,” repeated Ranpo slowly. "Now I know one word in the story."
Even Poe knew what hello was in Japanese before he learned the language, and it wasn’t a very popular language to learn in America. “You really don’t know a single word?”
“Of course not. There’s no point knowing things you have no reason to use if you ask me. Why would I ever need to speak Englissh?” Ranpo’s eyes narrowed. “At least before. Maybe now...”
“If you give me a bit of time, I can translate it for you.” And maybe edit it a bit to bring it up to his current standards.
“No!" shouted Ranpo, snatching the notebook back. "You’re going to cheat and edit it. I’ve got a better idea!” Ranpo grabbed ahold of Poe’s hand and pulled him out of the storage room.
“What is it?”
“I don’t like that you know something I don’t. I know how you feel all the time now.” Ranpo looked down and muttered, “it’s not very fun.”
“You get used to it,” Poe assured.
“Well, I don’t want to.” Ranpo . “So Poe-kun, teach me English!”
“I don’t know how.”
Ranpo had finally reached his destination of the study and sat himself down at a table. “Come on. You’re a writer, aren’t you? So you know every word.”
“That’s not exactly how it works. Besides, there’s grammar, and the alphabet.”
”I’m not stupid. I know romaji. I could probably spell your name if I tried. Got a spare notebook?”
Poe quickly retrieved a spare notebook and pencil from his study and handed it to Ranpo, who began writing. Poe sat across from him, waiting.
Ranpo held up the paper, where he had neatly written ‘EDGAR ALAN POO’ in all caps.
"That's not right. That’s not right at all," said Poe.
“How is it not?” Ranpo looked at the paper and frowned.
“Allan has two ls, and-”
“Why? Shouldn’t it be pronounced as Alllan then?” Ranpo dragged out the l.
“It’s spelled that way because…” Why was it? It didn’t make a difference at all with the pronunciation. The name Alan was pronounced exactly the same way, wasn’t it? “It’s Scottish. Scottish has different rules. Hello has two ls too, for example.”
“Is that Scottish?”
“Probably not.”
“ Hellllllllllo ,” said Ranpo.
“Also, Poe has one o and an -e at the end of it.”
“Then it should be Po-eh. What a stupid language.”
“Your language has three different writing systems,” said Poe.
“That makes perfect sense!”
“Because… Anyway, my name isn’t important.”
“It’s important to me.” Despite his complaints, Ranpo wrote down the corrected spelling of Poe’s name.
“If you say so. Let’s begin.” Where should he start? Simple vocabulary? More spelling rules he couldn’t explain? Grammar? What was an adverb again? The difference between a subject and object of a sentence?” “Let’s start with how to count.”
Ranpo shook his head.“I don’t need to know how to count, just teach me important words.”
“Important words?” So counting wasn’t important? What qualified as an important word to Ranpo? Well, there was one that was a pretty safe guess. “Like detective?”
Ranpo nodded, smiling. “Exactly!"
“ Detective, ” said Poe.
Ranpo carefully wrote it down as DETEKTIV. “It has an -e on the end. And a c, not a k.”
“What’s the point of the letter c, by the way?” asked Ranpo, looking up.
“The point?”
“Sometimes it’s an s and sometimes it’s a k, right?”
That was correct. “... When you put it with an h, it makes a -ch sound.”
“Why isn’t that a separate letter then?” asked Ranpo.
“... They were Roman letters.”
“So? Make your own. Japanese has Chinese letters and our own," pointed out Ranpo. "The people who made English were lazy if you ask me.”
“English wasn’t sat down and made, it changed overtime to how it is today.”
“It’s not too late to fix it.”
Time to change the subject. “What’s another important word you want to learn?”
Ranpo chewed on his eraser for a moment, before saying, “How do you say great detective?”
“ Great detective.”
“Easy!”
Ranpo continued questioning Poe on ‘important words’. Mystery. Candy. Cake. Deduction. Snack. Poe continuously corrected his spelling, and was questioned on various elements of writing he had no answer to.
Ranpo was pleased with himself once he had written down fifty or so words on the paper. He read over them carefully.
“This should be enough to give reading a rry.”
“Are you sure?” asked Poe. “You didn’t learn any pronouns or conjunctions or-”
“Who needs pronouns?" interrupted Ranpo, reaching for the notebook. "Now that I have the basics, Super Deduction can just fill in the rest.”
“But these aren’t the basics," Poe tried to explain. "You need grammar also-”
“Grammar’s just patterns, isn’t it? This should be a piece of cake.”
Ranpo laid the short story in front of him and put on his glasses. Poe watched in awe. Was Ranpo really so amazing he could learn a language by learning only a few seemingly insignificant words and just filling in the rest? Ranpo stared at the page for a long moment before shaking his head. “It doesn’t work on languages. Well, maybe it could, but not a single word you taught me is on here. And I learned so many too.” Ranpo sighed and leaned back in the chair. “I hate studying. My brain is fried. Hey." He sat up. "How long did it take you to be able to read in Japanese?”
“A year. A bit longer to be able to write fluently in it. ” Ranpo groaned. “But English will probably take less time! You don’t have to worry about learning a new alphabet. Someone with your abilities could surely pick it up in no time at all.”
“Of course, I know that. But I want to know it at this very moment.” Ranpo bit his lip.
“I promise I won’t cheat and change it if I translate the story,” said Poe.
“But you think in English, don't you?” asked Ranpo.
“When you're not around."
“I read once that the personality of someone changes depending on what language you use, so the true Poe would speak English.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well then, I’ve got to learn so I can understand you better.”
Ranpo ran into Poe’s study the next day.
“I spent the entirety of last night studying English on an app! I only fell asleep three times too!” Ranpo jumped up and down. “Give me the notebook!”
“Just wait a moment.”
Can you really do an all-nighter on an entire language? Poe supposed it wasn’t impossible with Ranpo’s near eidetic memory. Poe retrieved the notebook and handed it to Ranpo, who threw himself on an armchair and patted besides him for Poe to join. Poe did so, Ranpo nearly sitting on his lap
There was silence as Ranpo followed the words with his finger slowly. He frowned.
“I know some of it. They’re going somewhere?”
“They’re going away from somewhere. See? It says headed away and not headed to ,” Poe explained.
“Close enough. You know,” Ranpo looked up at him, “if you had trapped me and Yosano in an English book, I would’ve never figured out what was going on. You would have defeated me.”
“I needed to defeat you fairly,” said Poe. “Even if you didn’t speak English, it’s unlikely you would be fluent in it.”
Ranpo sighed and rested his head on Poe’s shoulder. “I’m burnt out. No more studying for the rest of the week. I’ll learn some more another time.”
Despite Ranpo’s statement, he was looking at the page wistfully
“You don’t want me to translate it for you,” said Poe, “but maybe I can just tell you the words that you don’t know yet.”
Ranpo sat up “Like an instant dictionary! Of course!” Ranpo scooted even closer to him. “What’s this word, Poe-kun?”
“ Gate. ”
Poe continued helping Ranpo out, until a few paragraphs in...
“He’s the one who did it? Am I right?”
“... I don’t remember, to be honest.”
“How don’t you remember your own story?” Ranpo asked.
“I’ve blocked the majority of high school from my memory.”
“Well, I’m right, it’s obvious. Would’ve figured it out sooner if it was in Japanese, but English takes more thinking to figure out.”
“Do you still want to finish the story?” asked Poe.
“Of course. You are a much better writer now, but this is still better than most other mysteries I’ve read.”
This mediocre high school story? “Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
Poe worked through the rest of the story with Ranpo (he was of course, right about the culprit). It was slow, but Ranpo seemed pleased with himself.
“That was fun! A much better way of learning than reading a textbook," he said, stretching after they finished.
"I don't think it's as efficient."
"So? It’s more fun, and that’s all that matters. You have more English-only stories, don’t you?" Ranpo asked.
"I do have a few more in storage…” said Poe. “ Or I can write something closer to your reading level."
“No! I want to read every single thing you wrote, regardless of language. Well, expect the poetry of course.”
“I wrote a story for French class once. Do you want to read that?” asked Poe.
Ranpo shook his head. “That doesn’t count. French isn’t important. Why would I ever go to France? Air travel is a pain. The only other country I ever want to go to is America with you.”
“With me?”
Ranpo beamed. “Of course! You’re going to take me there someday, so I need to learn English so I’ll know what’s going on.”
"I see." Poe hadn’t really thought about going back, but a tour of America with Ranpo by his side… “That sounds fun.
"It will be! I’m really glad you come from a country with good food, by the way. America’s basically the world capital of cheap snacks. Besides, there's lots of things you can do there that you can't do in Japan. Like gay marriage and weed. People put weed in chocolates, right? How does it taste?"
"I’ve never had it, so I wouldn’t know. I don’t think people really eat it for the flavor?"
“Why else would you eat something though?”
Of course his main motivation was to try a new type of sweet… Wait, what was the other thing he said?
“R-Ranpo-kun.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”