Be Careful You Don't Go Extinct, Too (2)
Light shattered along the current, and a blue head of hair wavered through it. For a little while I just stared, struck clean out of myself by how beautiful it was.
"Ooh~ Hena-noona, you look thharp~"
With a pearl clenched in his teeth, Seo Gwan-yul's pronunciation came out hopelessly wrong.
"Client meeting's about to start. Focuth—"
Pascal stopped the instant he realized he had chewed the word. He scowled, plainly unhappy about it, and rolled the pearl around in search of a spot that would let him talk. It clicked against his teeth.
Hena, the only one whose mouth was free, let a small smile slip. Ha. Usually she was the one whose pronunciation went sideways. Now it was the rest of us.
The ringing cry caught us still getting used to the new surroundings, and only then did the scenery actually register: a lavish palace interior, its soaring ceiling worked all over with coral of every color.
"You have labored much, children of the land, coming into waters not your own."
Someone whose dress alone marked him as high rank swept in with retainers at his back. This client would be the Dragon King, then? That was the read, if I went by what the vassal had said earlier. Hmm. I'd been expecting a white-bearded grandfather, and this was not that.
"As commissioned, we mean to develop a base upon the land. Hear the particulars from my ministers."
The Dragon King offered a brief greeting and withdrew. Right. Unless you were dealing with a Minotaur who had completely lost it, a leader of that rank showing his face and leaving was basically the unwritten rule.
"A pleasure to meet you! I'm Master To!"
"You may call me Minister Flounder."
A cute rabbit in something like a spacesuit, and a fish dressed in an official's robes, stepped forward to greet us. A talking fish was astonishing enough. What was more astonishing still—
…Why is there a rabbit here?!
Master To must have caught the baffled look on my face, because he laughed as he explained.
"They told me I've got a gold-born, water-dwelling physiognomy! Born under the energy of gold—it means if I live in the water, wealth and glory follow!"
……Hold on. Please tell me a turtle didn't talk you into coming down here. In the old story, that's how a rabbit loses his liver. Yours still attached?
Hena supplied the rest.
"Master To is a famous civil official of the Dragon Palace. He came from the moon, cured the Dragon King's illness, and got scouted. These days you might say he serves as the brain of this place."
…A clever moon rabbit, living under the sea, actually existed?
"Ahem. Ahem."
Minister Flounder, who had failed to draw any attention beside the sheer cute audacity of Master To's existence, cleared his throat as if the whole situation displeased him.
"Jellyfish-folk getting into the Dragon Palace these days. Degenerate times, I say. Degenerate times."
I gasped. Before I could stop myself, my eyes went to Hena. Her face, usually blue, had flushed red.
Are the Jellyfish-folk treated badly?
What was I supposed to do with that? I snapped my head the other way, fast, pretending I hadn't been looking at her.
"Aigoo, honored guests, rather than standing around like this, let me explain while we walk!"
Flustered, Master To rushed to change the subject and guided us out of the Dragon Palace. The awkwardness loosened thanks to him, and we were finally able to start on the work.
"Would you explain the land base you commissioned us to brand."
The pearl seemed to have settled in his mouth by now; Pascal managed it in a pronunciation that wasn't half bad. …He looked faintly satisfied with himself.
"Yeees! As you can see, we're life-forms who live in the sea! …Well, not me, hehe."
He folded his ears on that last bit, shy about it, and the effect was ridiculously endearing.
"Lately it seems an ice age might be coming, and the temperature's been dropping… The sea is freezing, and the sea level is falling. The population keeps growing, though, and the resources are running out."
The rabbit's head dipped, all the spirit gone out of him, and I was hit with a powerful urge to bite those cheeks.
"So we decided to develop the land! The future of our king's people hangs on this project—which is to say, on all of you!"
I was pretty sure I'd seen the premise in some science-fiction movie: pollution lifts the sea level, so humanity goes off to pioneer space. Here it was the other way around.
"I'll show you the island where our land base will be built! Come along!"
We boarded an enormous lotus leaf, just as the ministers directed. Light as a bubble, it surged up the waterway.
"Ahem. A special private vehicle, granted to ministers alone."
…Nobody had asked, and the fish said it anyway.
Wow. The moment we drew away from the Dragon Palace, the whole of the castle came into a single view—a roof inlaid hair-fine with mother-of-pearl, throwing the light back in a blaze. What human could look at that and not marvel?
"That slum between the borders is where the Jellyfish-folk live."
Hena's face heated all over again.
Ugh. Would it kill anyone if I just shoved that flounder off?
The mood went bleak once more. An uncomfortable silence closed around us. Fortunately, it wasn't long before the lotus leaf reached an island above the water.
"Here we are! Everyone, get ready to go ashore!"
Master To set foot on land first and took off the helmet of the spacesuit he'd been wearing. His front teeth stuck out, and he grinned wide.
"Ahem. Stifling. How is one meant to live on land."
The fish minister, by contrast, had already pulled something like a spacesuit on over himself. The helmet was full of water. He looked like a man wearing a fishbowl upside down.
"The place that will be our land base—let's look it over together!"
An ordinary island, of modest size. Thick with overgrowth. We walked it together.
"Time to go meet the second client."
The island tour done, we parted from the ministers and, instead of heading back to the company, stepped into the sea once more.
Two projects in a single world this time?
A second client. It was an odd situation, but I kept my mouth shut so I wouldn't let on how keyed up I was.
"Follow me!"
Hena, her spirits back, guided us with easy skill. She seemed to have shaken it off already, which was a relief. We followed her to a station made of conch shells and waited, and before long a giant sea turtle appeared. We paid the fare and climbed onto its shell. Mm. Exactly like catching a bus.
"This is the border!"
Once the turtle crossed the border zone, houses built of earthen walls came into view.
Is this a Western cultural sphere?
They weren't modern buildings. The old-fashioned design was the same as on the Dragon Palace side, but the straight earthen walls and the reddish-brown roofs felt Western. The turtle stopped in front of an enormous stone building among them, and at Hena's direction we climbed down off the shell.
Practically a Greek temple.
The style was nothing alike, but the sheer grandeur was a massive structure that could go toe to toe with the Dragon Palace.
"We go in through here!"
Inside, there was a high seat that looked like a throne. …This was Western culture, wasn't it? No temple-style bowing? We had just finished bracing for an audience—polite, backs held stiff—when a voice reached us.
?!
A man took the great chair, receiving from the attendants around him the sort of deference reserved for the highborn. Sea-foam hair rolled like the waves, and his clothing was a great cloth draped so that his upper body showed.
……Anyone looking at him would have said Greek god.
For real? Poseidon?
Why are you here! Shouldn't you be in the same world as the Minotaur?!
H-he wouldn't know I impersonated Poseidon that one time, right?!
I was standing there dumb, as if someone had just hit me, over a client I had not seen coming. …And then our client produced a line that was more shocking still.
"I leave the land-base branding project in your hands. My son and my vassal will explain the details."
……
What. A land base?!
…The same commission as the Dragon King?!
I was floored, but we followed the Merman Prince—and Capricornus, a goat whose lower half was a fish—out of the temple, to tour the island that was meant to become the land base. On the way I asked the Merman Prince, carefully.
"Has Lord Poseidon always lived here?"
"Uh… well. We used to live in the same world as our relatives, but we immigrated partway along."
The Merman Prince hesitated, then pressed a hand to his brow and added, quietly,
"……The truth is, my father has a Second-place Complex."
……A Second-place Complex?
Even for Koreans who grew up on Greek and Roman myth comic books, that was an unfamiliar story. Curious, I worked the smartphone inside its waterproof pouch and asked Vanta Bot.
A pleasant buzz rolled through the phone, and a tidy summary appeared.
— Raised a rebellion against Zeus, and failed.
— Competed separately with Athena, Hera, and Helios for the seat of a city's patron god, and was defeated.
Yikes… He really did lose to just about everybody……
Didn't look as if he'd managed to fulfill that wish of being number one here, either. There was a Dragon King's country of about the same scale.
"Here—please board the carriage!"
The Merman Prince had us get into a hippocampus carriage. A hippocampus… upper half horse, lower half fish, so it was, quite literally and with perfect honesty, a sea-horse!
……Capricornus looked built more or less the same way, so why were the hippocampi pulling the carriage while the goat got to ride?!
As the carriage rolled on, Hena and Capricornus murmured greetings, plainly glad to see each other.
"Funny, running into you like this while we're working."
"Whoa, right?! You doing okay? Ever since you made it, I never get to see your face!"
Friends, then. The two of them looked pretty close. Thanks to that, we traveled to the island in a warm mood, nothing like the ride on the lotus leaf.
"We've arrived. Please step down."
Maybe because the Merman Prince and Capricornus were both land creatures from the waist up. They went ashore with no special preparation, and we followed.
"This is the place that will be our land base."
An ordinary island, of modest size. Thick with overgrowth, and somehow familiar.
"……"
Here.
No way.
…This wasn't that island from earlier, was it?!
Look at it plain, look at it with my eyes scrubbed clean, turn a full three-sixty and look again—it was the exact same island!!
"What's the matter? Is something wrong?"
The Merman Prince and Capricornus tipped their heads. Among the Vanta Design party, nothing passed but silence.
"Huh."
"Haha."
"Haa…"
……
Pfft—forget it. Just forget the whole damn thing!
All that came out of me was a hollow laugh.