It’s not a Valentine’s themed Q&A so it’s fine that I put this out last right?
Again, thanks to SilverKanon for basically sending me Rikyako’s entire feature. (xD)

I’d been saying since my first translation for this particular feature that I wasn’t really keen on doing the Q&As in this one but I figured, Kanon went through the trouble of sending me these so I might as well do every bit of RIkyako content on this here volume 2 of VOICE Channel for completion’s sake — plus it’s not like I’m in any sort of rush to get to my other planned TL projects (in the sense that this is a self-incentivized endeavor on my end).

More updates and stuff after the TL proper~

– –

Rikyako answers your questions in this Q&A!

Some notes before we start:
– （笑）, generally used to indicate laughter in transcribed Japanese interviews were transliterated into (xD) for this TL, ’cause lol why not (“lol” could work too I guess …)
– words found in parentheses are either words that I put in to clarify certain things, or words that I add to make up for nuances and inferences in the language.

Ｑ＆Ａ
Rikyako candidly answers questions submitted by fans over Twitter
on the 18th of December 2017!

Ｑ．If you can jump into a movie, so as to experience its world first-hand, which work would you want to enter?
> Fish Story and Shimotsuma Monogatari

Ｑ．Clothing, Food, Shelter*; how would you order these?
> Clothing > Food > Shelter. So long as the toilet and the bath are separate, I can live pretty much anywhere (xD)

*Note: The Japanese word for basic life necessities, “衣食住” (ishokujuu), is made up of the kanji for clothing (衣), food (食), and shelter (住) respectively; very cool.

Ｑ．When you think of “the taste of mom’s cooking”, it has to be…?
>Tomato Curry.
I also try to make it myself like how she does it.

Ｑ．If you were serialized for a column in a magazine, what kind of theme would like to write about in your column?
> It’d have to be something that I can write about every week so, the artists that I like.

Ｑ．Do you have a horror story involving alcohol?
> I don’t wanna say (xD)
I don’t drink alcoholic beverages all that often but, whenever I do end up drinking I don’t really know about the alcohol content (of what I drink), so I’ve had times where I ended up feeling sick after trying a lot of different kinds of drinks. There was also a time where I locked the door to the bathroom and fell asleep I think.

Ｑ．If you could talk to animals, what would you like to talk to them about?
> “What do you think of humans?”

Ｑ．An attractive (one that would make you go *kyun*) female gesture would be?
> The meaning might be a bit different (from what the question intended) but, I can’t get enough of people who eat their meals in a cute manner. When I see someone just beautifully eating their meal, I end up staring. People who eat like, say, Gal Sone* are just wonderful I think.

*Note: Gal Sone

Ｑ．You put a halo* above the <3 in your signature but, what’s the reason for that?
> The wings I put at the side of my signature are actually angel wings. That’s why I wanted it to have a little more of an angel-like feel to it.

*Note: Rikyako’s signature

Ｑ．If given the choice to receive either — the power to stop time only once per day or the power to split yourself into two; which power would you want?
> If I can clone myself, I can have one body that’s sleeping, and then one body would go to work………. how’s that for you?

Ｑ．If you won the lottery jackpot, what’s the first thing you’d do?
> Break into a smile (xD)

Ｑ．After shouting out “Henshin!”* what would you like to become?
> My beloved Sailor Moon.
She’s an existence that I admire after all, so I’d like to try turning into her.

*Note: lit. ‘transform!’
in reference to how magical girls (and sentai heroes)
shout the word before changing in to something

Ｑ．Have you ever made a purchase that you regretted after the fact?
> Happens to me a lot, yeah. At this one shop the moment I saw this one pair of sneakers I thought ‘wow these are so lovely!’ so I bought ’em, but they didn’t really match the Western-style clothing that I was carrying at the time to so I thought “Why did I buy sneakers in such color” and I immediately regretted it.

Ｑ．A recent embarrassing event for you would be?
> I fell asleep in the middle of a dubbing session. Before I realized it I dropped my script and the staff around called out “hands up! (who dropped their script)”. I raised my hand and apologized to everyone.

Ｑ．Please tell us what food surprisingly tastes better when you put vinegar on it, and what food you’re better off not eating.
> Round orange slices garnished with olive oil and vinegar* is amazingly good; please try it out when you can. Something I’m better off without……… short cakes. They taste just like cheesecakes so, there’s so no need to go out of my way for ’em (xD)

*Note: Yeah…

Ｑ．Do you have a question for your fans?
> Normally, what do you guys do for a living?
There are a lot of events that fall on the weekends so, I’m curious as to how everyone manages to sneak into this world away from their usual lives.

Ｑ．Do you fall asleep in trains?
> It’s scary to sleep at places where there’s a lot of people so for the most part I don’t sleep in trains. That said, I haven’t fallen asleep in one either.

Ｑ．Since when did you stop receiving “New Year’s money”
> Right around high school.

Ｑ．Please share with us an unforgettable scenery for you.
> I will never be able to forget the sea of lights made by the audience that I got to see from the stage.

Ｑ．Are you good at remembering people’s faces and/or names?
> I’m really bad at it. But, I do my best to remember the people whose faces I see at work on a regular basis.

***Thoughts and Takeaways
– A lot of questions/answers here have already come up in other Q&A’s and interviews to be honest, but well, consistency is also key right xD
– Rikyako falling asleep during recording gets referenced quite a bit in Aqours’ different programs (the most recent one by Satou “HinaHina” Hinata from Episode 99 of Uranohoshi Girls’ High School Radio, but now I wonder whether it was an isolated incident that just gets brought up often, or it happens often enough that everyone has seen her asleep during a recording at least once.
– Her asking about what her fans do for a living is such a Rikyako question, lol.

– –

I’ve actually had this done for quite some time now (a couple of weeks at best), and it really was just a matter of me putting the time in to actually format the TL into a post on here. Peeling the curtain back a little bit; as a final editing pass I usually dump my TL over on Google Docs which I then send on over to Digiroko‘s Discord Server. Usually I’d just leave ’em as plain text for QC purposes, but some of the people in the server just opt to read it from the doc itself, so I started pre-formatting ’em so it’d be easier on the eyes (despite it being a wall of text essentially).

I just didn’t want to do another run of formatting immediately after (xD). I love WordPress and all, but I can only play around with it so much as a free user, lol. I was toying with the idea of just doing these TLs over on GDocs from now on, but that feels so… I dunno, distant? Alternatively I could just provide links to the GDoc version whenever I publish the TL here, but really, what would be the use of that. So TLs will be here to stay on this blog, and I’ll just have to keep trying to be creative with how I present ’em.

All of Rikyako’s features from VOICE Channel vol 2 have been translated now BUT I won’t be closing this magazine for good just yet as there’s still some things that I could work on there (I’ll have to check though whether someone else did a TL for those already). That’s on the backburner, and will be there until I finish this thing that I’ve finally gotten around to starting, so stay tuned for that in the weeks to come.

As always, translations may not be all that exact, but I do my best 😀

Till next TL!