Chapter 107: Kuoh
"Oh! Before you come in, you have to take off your shoes!" Rias waved her hands down at my feet excitedly, grinning from ear to ear, "It’s a human thing! All of them do it!"
"All of them?" I raised an eyebrow at her as I reached down, pulling off my boots at the entrance to the wooden, old-looking building.
"All of them," Rias confirmed, a bit smug at her ’immense knowledge’ about humans and their culture, which she had gained from visiting the human world frequently over the past few months.
"Wow, very cool," I replied dryly, playing along as I didn’t have the heart to tell the excited woman that this was mainly only a Japanese thing, and she didn’t know that because she had only been visiting Japan.
At the moment, we were heading into what was now the Occult Research Club’s clubroom. Compared to most ’clubrooms,’ it was more like a club-building, as that’s literally what it was. The small two-story building was covered in vines, leaves, and plants as it clearly hadn’t been taken care of in a while.
"It’s pretty nice, right?" Rias smiled at me, her face practically shining with beauty as she gestured around at the rather modest, and frankly unappealing, room around us, "It’s not big and fancy, but it’s so... human! So Japanese!"
I also didn’t have the heart to tell her that the room around us, which had various broken, scuffed, and dirty boards of wood, no air conditioning, and even a broken window in the corner, was less ’human’ and more ’abandoned.’ The building was positioned within Kuoh Academy’s gated campus, but it was behind the main building and kind of shoved away in the corner between a mini-forest of trees, so it wasn’t all that surprising that it’d become this way with a lack of a caretaker.
"It’s definitely pretty ’human,’ but I’d still recommend getting that fix," I gestured dryly to the broken window, and Rias paused, her face twisting in a level of concentration that was far too much for such a simple window, though she looked cute as she did.
I’d come to the human world at her request, as she’d been spending a lot of time here, though she still returned to my palace every night. Her desire to live in Japan and explore the country hadn’t been curbed by the events in the Underworld, and I wasn’t going to stop her. As a result, both she and her peerage had started attending Kuoh Academy.
"What made you choose this place anyway?" I asked before she could think more on the window situation, as I was genuinely curious, "I thought you’d want to live somewhere more active, like Tokyo or Kyoto."
Kuoh became a supernatural hotspot in the show, but that was largely because of her and Sona’s presence here. Otherwise, it was a pretty small and frankly boring town with not much to do. Rias definitely wasn’t the ’party with no morals’ type that most young devils were, as they tended to have more money than they knew what to do with and the power to do whatever they wanted in the human world, but I still wouldn’t expect her to want to live in such a small city.
"I wanted somewhere independent," Rias answered easily, glancing away from the window and back to me, "All the big cities are already being managed by other devils, or someone else, like how Kyoto is being managed by Yasaka. I wanted somewhere for myself, though Sona wants to come here as well, so it seems like I’ll end up sharing anyway."