“Yahoooooooooooooooo!”
As Toriko was exiting the Strawberry Inn, a blur of orange- accompanied by a maniacal hollering and the unmistakable roar of a motorcycle engine- came hurtling up the street and skidded to a halt a few feet away from the ryoukan‘s front doors.
When the voluminous cloud of dust that was kicked up during this process started to settle, the source of the commotion was revealed to be a teenage girl astride an extremely unusual bike.
It was painted vibrant orange with black tiger stripes. That would have been odd enough, but the 121 centimeter tail sticking up off the back end like a flag was… something else. The vehicle would easily have blended in at a bousouzoku gang meeting in Ibaraki. …And for that matter, so might the rider. Since she wasn’t wearing a helmet, her bright blond ponytail was windswept and sticking out at crazy angles, and it was a wonder that her glasses were still in place on the bridge of her nose. The royal blue jacket that she wore over a tiger-striped tank top- which, yes, matched her bike almost perfectly- looked like real leather. In short, she was the very picture of a shady character, right down to her red high-top boots.
And she was wearing denim short-shorts.
“Yo!” she greeted Toriko cheerfully, standing up and leaning forward over the handlebars of her bike. By all rights and the law of gravity, she should have been toppling over, and so should her motorcycle. But she wasn’t. “Innkeeper! Innnnkeeeeper! Do you know the way to Kagashima Shrine?”
She assumed that Toriko must be the innkeeper, anyway. After all, he’d walked out of the ryoukan to greet a guest, hadn’t he? So Innkeeper was what she’d call him. According to her calculations, there was a 99.9% probability that she was right.
Aoyama Sei was never wrong!
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