Little Devils: Chapter Eight
Fantasy serial. Velma works at Hamish’s, and the two chat childhoods.
Velma Kuroda, a young specialist in magical and enchanted antiques, is taken under the wing of Hamish MacKinnon, a master enchanter and centuries-old immortal — a crotchety old man possessed by a horde of little demons.
Her mother mustn’t have realised she’d come in last night, because when Velma woke blearily from the sofa, it was to the sound of biting arguments on the phone. She had to blink a few times, rubbing at her eyes, to try to understand what she was saying — when she and Kaito had been kids, learning and studying Japanese in extra classes or going through bits of homework or games with the family, Mum had always taken care to neutralise her accent a little bit, and while they’d learned some of her dialect, Kimi had always been pretty strict about them learning to speak “properly”.
She never spoke English with either of them — Velma could count on one hand the number of times she’d heard Aunt Kimi actually speak English while she’d been in the same room as the woman — but had been funny about dialects.
Ginchiyo said it was ’cause she’d brought old-fashioned attitudes when they’d left home, that she…
