Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 14 - Chapter Pr

A certain distinguished mage lost his life due to an accident during an experiment.This great man had lived a long life, creating countless spells and items, and the people of the Magical Kingdom mourned his loss.

A few months after his death, his representative began sending invitations to his surviving relatives. The invitations instructed people to come to a little uninhabited island the deceased had used as his getaway/laboratory. There were also some conditions written on said invitations.

They read: 

Identical letters have been sent to all those with the right of inheritance. It will be decided at the designated location who will inherit the estate of the deceased. Those who fail to respond to this invitation will lose the right of inheritance. Each heir is to bring a maximum of two magical girls to accompany them.

Mana had received a letter as one of these potential heirs, and though she was suspicious about its content, after careful consideration, she contacted two magical girls with whom she was close…

PROLOGUE

If you said the official title of the place, which was prefixed with the name of the founder—“The Pos Rapvu Deim Multipurpose Disaster Management Laboratory”—some mages wouldn’t know what you meant, but if you said only, “the Lab,” they’d nod, going, Ah, that place. Some would be frightened, some would look away, and some would put on polite smiles.

Ever since the age of legend when the first mage had created the Magical Kingdom, as many organizations as there were stars had been created to research the magical craft that was the foundation of the nation itself. And of these organizations, the Lab had the worst reputation.

Rumors said they performed heinous human experiments that ignored laws and ethics, and those rumors were further exaggerated in the telling. The place wasn’t actually that awful, and the fear was beyond the reality. But the people at the Lab didn’t deny the rumors—in fact, they took advantage of them to establish their image. It was useful to them, and it pushed negotiations to their advantage.

“We’re aware of the rumors that we’re cruel and inhuman and all that, but do those who lambaste us for emotional reasons understand what’s going on at ground zero? We’re just highly flexible, making the best choices we can in order to do what needs to be done,” the higher-ups at the Lab would say, flattering themselves while they were at it.

They were, in fact, flexible. They could pull off things that other more respectable research organizations wouldn’t be able to do, since their pride would get in the way. If it looked like they wouldn’t be able to manage something themselves, they would turn right around and go bow their heads elsewhere to seek their aid. Even for major projects that could turn the tides among the factions, they wouldn’t fixate on making the product entirely in-house. That was how the Lab operated.

This project had already gone through a mountain of iterations and failures. No matter how they switched up the methods or the equipment, it was clear to everyone that it was far from success—here is where the Lab showed its flexibility. If they couldn’t accomplish it themselves, they just had to get help from someplace else.

Chosen from multiple candidates was a mage named Lyr Cuem Sataborn. He was at an age when he would see a mage hailed as an old veteran from the Lab as still a young sprout. However, he was brimming with youthfulness in his own way, and he had inspiration.

Sataborn used the wealth he’d inherited from family generations for hobby experimentation. But despite engaging in experiments and research from such an untroubled and carefree position, he covered all the necessary fields on his own. Such a feat could normally not be accomplished outside of the social framework for it, and without any expertise or anything, you wouldn’t be allowed involvement in scholarship. The most you could expect would be to have your master scold you, saying if you did something like that, it would never get properly finished.

But Sataborn had had no master to get angry with him, and formidably enough, his abilities were generally acknowledged. Ever since his youth, he’d been praised as a mage who could do anything—the sort of genius who hadn’t been seen since the dawn of the Magical Kingdom—and when it came to his ability to develop new magical formulas in particular, it was no exaggeration to say his skills were incomparable. And those skills of his never declined even as he got on in years; Sataborn was still actively developing new magical formulas that enlivened the industry.

There was no question of Sataborn’s competence, but that wasn’t to say there were no issues. Others claimed he was awfully eccentric and pigheaded. If he was completely off the rails and couldn’t be controlled at all, there would be no point in hiring him. An intelligence unit under the employ of the Lab set out to investigate Sataborn’s character.

Sataborn was satisfied so long as he was doing research. He wouldn’t even express anger if his results were stolen from him, moving straight to his next project and astonishing the others around him.

He’d had a lover once, but he wasn’t the one who had pursued it out of wanting her. Rather, she’d marched herself in on him before disappearing not long after having a child. Was that because she’d gotten sick of him or because she’d been worried her child might also be used for experiments?

Sataborn would never laugh at anyone’s jokes. But then he would sometimes smirk to himself over nothing at all.

Someone could be right there, but if Sataborn wasn’t interested in them, he wouldn’t notice them. It wasn’t that he deliberately ignored people, but he truly didn’t realize they were there.

If someone was able to chat with him, that would tell you they were an excellent researcher. They had to be, or the conversation would never happen.

Sataborn had once been so into an experiment that he’d forgotten to eat and had almost died. Then he had developed a spell for nutritional replenishment, eliminating the danger of starvation.

He didn’t seem to value his own life, performing dangerous experiments on himself. When people tried to stop him, he would look at them curiously as if to ask why.

After going a long time without seeing his brother, Sataborn even forgot what he looked like, asking him, “Who are you?”

He’d go so long without bathing that the smell would build up in his room. One time, a maid carelessly opened the door of his research lab and was hit full-on by the stench and passed out.

It was also not uncommon for him to turn his back on ethics. He had once attempted to buy illegal magic items from a suspicious pawnshop, and the authorities were still monitoring him as a result.

The more someone looked into him, the more awful things came up. Everyone asked about him seemed both aggravated and yet also enthused to talk about just what an eccentric Sataborn was.

He wouldn’t be easy to deal with—but he was too valuable not to make use of. Maybe one had to use a researcher this extraordinary in order to create something new that had never before existed. Besides, it wasn’t a bad thing for him to be the type to be satisfied so long as he had research to do. That was far preferable to an unwisely ambitious mage who would try to get into their business.

The Lab often used the fact that they were feared to make outsourcing requests that amounted to intimidation or blackmail, but such methods probably wouldn’t work on Sataborn. It would be a disaster if they were to offend him through such careless means. Nonetheless, bowing their heads deeply and offering a huge stack of cash probably wouldn’t make him listen and acquiesce, either.

The faction had many meetings about the matter but never quite came to a conclusion, moving one step forward and two steps back as time passed in vain. Eventually, they even got sick of meetings, and when the chair said, at this point, why not just toss everything off on him, everyone leaped on that idea and decided that for now, they might as well ask what Sataborn’s conditions were.

It turned out they were simple and straightforward: arrange the research facilities to his demands. He would do everything on his own. No interference or complaints.

Not many mages could demand this much from the Lab, but this was the Lyr Cuem Sataborn. He was the kind of eccentric who might say anything out of the ordinary, so you could even say they were grateful he’d come up with such basic demands.

For the time being, they made it look like they’d left everything to him, kept him under observation as needed, and put him to work. As such, Sataborn received a single island as a research facility.