Painless, Chic, and Deeply Disturbing
“Now, everyone at Bada Kindergarten, eyes on me~!”
Yoo Jinchae stood in the middle of the research department corridor, one arm thrust high in the air.
“Focus!!”
The children chimed back in a hearty chorus, perfectly following her lead. What devastatingly adorable teamwork.
And, naturally, that breathtaking cuteness ensnared the gazes of the poor office drones around us.
“So cute.”
“There's nothing to see here, though….”
“Yes there is. Us. What's the difference between us and the monkeys at the zoo? Trapped in here, working, eating, working, eating, over and over.”
“Cuteness really is the ultimate cure. I was worried I'd need to pop a blood pressure pill, but I think I can survive today….”
Um, excuse me, teachers?
At a glance it sounded like they'd lost their minds to the children's cuteness, but listening closely, it sounded more like they'd simply lost their minds, period.
“Whoa, did you see the look in people's eyes?”
Park Edeun, who'd been casually scanning our surroundings, must have sensed something too, because he turned to me with the question.
“Yeah. Seems like the work here is rough.”
Needless to say, the 'look' Park Edeun was talking about wasn't about the shape of anyone's eyes. It was the light in them — he'd recognized something familiar in those gazes, something we shared.
Their eyes are all a little bit gone, aren't they.
Was everyone who worked in a lab just like this?
It reminded me of the eyes of an old high school classmate of mine after he went to grad school — the look of a man who practically lived in his lab. I caught myself involuntarily counting the makeshift cots visible over the cubicle partitions and nodded to myself.
Apparently this place is an overtime hell too.
“A lot of people in the research department suffer from malnutrition and chronic sleep deprivation….”
“Wow, so their tempers must be vicious. No wonder everyone looks half-zombie. Or half-corpse?”
Zombie, corpse — what's the difference, exactly?
Park Edeun pinched the wet towel hanging over a partition between two fingers, then shook his head in disgust and dropped his voice.
“We must be quiet in here…! Whisper-whisper is okay. Loud-loud is not okay~”
Of course, there are always a few people around who are zombies, or jiangshi, or simply stubbornly minding their own business.
Her complexion hasn't changed one bit.
Yoo Jinchae modulated her voice at will, crouching to the children's eye level as she carried on with her explanation.
That's not an easy thing to pull off, you know.
Being able to act that shamelessly in a hallway full of onlookers is — putting it kindly — a talent.
“Now then, whisper-whisper?”
“Okay…!”
“Loud-loud?”
“No way!”
“That's right~”
Yoo Jinchae beamed and nodded in satisfied approval.
“The first place we're going to visit is a team called the Product Development Team~”
With that, she swung open the glass door bearing the Product Development Team sign and marched right in without a hint of hesitation.
“Ah! T-teacher!”
The instant the door opened, a man seated in the corner shot up and greeted Yoo Jinchae with a beaming smile. A conventionally handsome man with long brown hair and round glasses, he looked exhausted all the same.
But wait — where had I seen him before?
“Wongang's father.”
…So the father's genes won out in this family, huh.
“W-Wongang, buddy!”
The man swept the boy up into his arms with a goofy hehe. The smile seemed to breathe a little life back into that weary face.
“Welcome to the Product Development Team…! I'll show you around.”
I quickly read the name embroidered on his lab coat.
Product Development Team — Manager
Lee Wonwoo
Lee Wonwoo led the children around the office with practiced ease. He clearly had plenty of experience with situations like this — his explanation rambled without any real structure or order, but the unhurried, easygoing guidance was pleasant enough to listen to.
“This is the Product Development Team's conference room. We use the computers to build and run virtual product simulations ahead of time. The accuracy isn't great, but it spits out clean concept designs, so….”
He gestured toward a large table dominated by an enormous monitor. This was supposedly the biggest conference room in the department, but my honest impression was that it looked less like a conference room and more like a break room.
Since when do conference rooms come furnished with cots and a sofa?
Glance in another direction and the walls were plastered edge to edge with movie posters and sketches. But Lee Wonwoo, apparently unbothered by all of it, continued his tour with perfect composure.
“Most of our products use something called WVET, which extracts a portion of an awakener's mana wavelength and infuses it into the product….”
He explained with all his might, but in the end, the only ones actually listening were the adults.
Yeah, this would bore the kids senseless.
“Daya, come hold hands with me, okay?”
“Yeah!”
“What's that one?”
“Looking at the picture… a robot that cuts grass?”
“Ugh, lame.”
Several idea sketches hung along the conference room wall, and the bored children — along with a handful of adults whose concentration had already collapsed — found those far more interesting than the presentation.
“Ooh, the 'Grow, Grow, Hair Growth Serum.' If this actually launched, it'd print money.”
“The Pied Piper…. Says it can forcibly round up three or more people.”
“A laser sword built with the help of an S-rank light-wielding awakener. Now that one I kind of want.”
And just as I was about to pick one out for myself, something caught my dead-on.
“…The Painless Chic-Popping Ability Restraint.”
Hold on a second.
Wait, this… could actually be useful?
Restraint devices.
These days they're used on awakened criminals, or kept on hand for emergencies at certain awakener training facilities and hunter academies. Beyond that, the principle is to avoid using them whenever at all possible.
The reason is obvious….
Because they're suffocating and terrifying.
Simple as that sounds, actually wearing one is another matter entirely. The moment it locks on, it temporarily severs the wavelength that flows only through an awakener's body — and with it comes a crushing tightness in the chest, a terror on par with a threat to your very existence.
And every single awakener wears one of these at least once in their life.
It's one of the government's mandatory requirements, after all. Everyone except awakeners under fifteen must, the moment their ability manifests, undergo four weeks of training at an awakener education facility.
There, you spend day after day being drilled not on how to use your ability, but exclusively on how awakened criminals are punished and what rules you must observe.
The message being: listen carefully, and quietly behave yourself and die a natural death.
Then, on the day before you graduate, you put on one of these restraints one last time and feel it for yourself. The unspoken lesson: if you're in your right mind, would you ever want to wear this again?
Because for awakened criminals, regardless of how minor the offense, three months in a restraint device is non-negotiable.
Which brings us to the problem: this horrifying thing is, every so often, put on children.
Poor ability control. The same reason Kwon Haeseong had tried to collar the twins on his very first day of work.
I'd been quietly wondering why something like this had never made it to market, and so I sidled up to Manager Lee Wonwoo with a careful question.
“Um, Manager…? That product over there — has it, by any chance, been released?”
Lee Wonwoo's eyes went wide at my sudden question. Then he looked at the sketch my finger was pointing at… and deflated?
It didn't stop there. A shadow slowly crept over his face — drooping brows, a strained smile that carried a whole world of awkwardness.
Had I asked something I shouldn't have?
But Lee Wonwoo gave an answer I never saw coming.
“Well… that one is, my personal obsession.”
“Your obsession?”
“Yes. The sketches over there are actually all slated for disposal. So in reality, only the prototypes exist — not a single unit was ever properly manufactured. But… I-I just can't bring myself to give up on it, so my teammates hung them up there for me to stare at until I get sick of it and clear them out.”
“……Ah.”
All of that is slated for disposal…? So in other words, the product never happened.
At the sudden deflation of both me and Manager Lee Wonwoo, Yoo Jinchae peered at us curiously and cut in.
“The Painless Chic-Popping Ability Restraint? Hmm… but that seems like it would have demand. Did they just refuse to approve it?”
“Well, you see….”
Why are you getting depressed again?
“That sketch is the early design, and once we actually built the product, the design turned out to be really terrible. On top of that, while there's no pain, we discovered some other side effects, so….”
Hold on. So what you're telling me is, as long as I can stomach an ugly design and a mild side effect or two…?
“Could we take a look at the prototype?”
I latched onto it before my brain could catch up.
If it exists, let's get it for our kids first and think later.
“……Oh, y-yes, yes! Of course I'll show you. Although I made it myself, and the design really is awful….”
Just how bad can it be?
I silently rejoiced. If it was headed for the scrap heap anyway, the prototype would end up there too. Better yet if I could pick it up cheap.
Getting it for free would be even better.
Manager Lee Wonwoo hurried off, hauled back a box from the corner of the storage room, dug through it, and hefted something heavy into one hand to show us.
…When I saw it, I was a little shocked. Okay, no — a lot shocked.
“Whoa. That's a straight-up dog collar, what is that.”
Park Edeun clapped his hands in awe.
We probably shouldn't insult it.
“Seora, look at that.”
“Seoro! We could put it on Ddolri!”
For the record, Ddolri is the twins' pet dog.
“Sir, this is meant to be worn by a human being, right?”
Perhaps he'd anticipated the reactions, because Lee Wonwoo let out a hollow laugh and launched into a long, rambling explanation.
Still clutching the dog collar in his hand.
…So, yes. That thing is the Painless Chic-Popping Ability Restraint.
Where, exactly, did the "chic" get sold?
“When we tried to adapt it for everyday use, we kept stuffing in more and more features, so it got really heavy…. We considered the wrist or the ankle, but that would've meant removing a few components, and the waist or torso just looked too cumbersome, so we settled on the neck, but….”
Don't cry, sir. Please just speak.
Believe me, I want to cry too.
“The design was drawn up by the rookie on our team, and since he talked such a big game, I left it to him. As you can see, the design scores were cut hard. And in human trials we judged the side effects severe, so the decision to scrap it took less than an hour….”
Anyone else would have grabbed that so-called rookie by the collar and dragged him out to beg on the street together.
“…And the side effect is what, exactly?”
At my question, Lee Wonwoo handed over the collar with a wry smile.
The black, choker-style collar in my hand was surprisingly heavy.
“……It makes you itch. Badly.”
“That's it?”
I heard Park Edeun burst out laughing — hahaha-snrk — utterly incredulous.
This guy is laughing way too hard.
“The itching is pretty extreme. The intensity varies depending on the subject's rank and wavelength, but for the most part, people end up laughing nonstop without so much as a one-second break.”
“Wow….”
“Itching was the first thing I ever found sc-scary…. I watched an employee get rushed to the emergency center from laughing himself into respiratory failure, and that's when I gave up too. Ha, ha.”
At a side effect far more serious than any of us had imagined, everyone present fell silent.
Can't use that on the kids, then.
Park Edeun, too, was muffling his mouth and brooding — when an unexpected voice of approval popped up from out of nowhere.
“Sounds like a pretty good torture method to me.”
Yoo Jinchae was eyeing the dog collar resting in my palm with unmistakable interest.
So that's a line of thinking you're capable of. Good to know.
I gave her a frost-bitten look and hastily hid the collar behind my back.
Die, Jinchae. Just die, you horrible human.
“Really…? Hmm, I'll try approaching it from that angle sometime, then.”
But whether he'd been genuinely inspired by Yoo Jinchae's blood-curdling advice or not, the light in Lee Wonwoo's eyes changed.
The research department has a lot of weirdos too…. Be careful.
And so it was proven, beyond any doubt, that this was advice I could not afford to ignore.
“……Would you like to take it? Calling it a gift feels presumptuous, but please take the restraint and all of these as well. If they disappear from before my eyes, I think I can finally let go completely.”
Apparently the dog collar alone wasn't enough — now Manager Lee Wonwoo was handing me the entire box he'd dragged out of storage.
“Then can we just throw—”
“Yes, thank you. We'll put it to good use.”
Kwon Haeseong. Silence.
I swallowed the rest of that tactless man's sentence before it could escape.
Remember that this man is a parent, Haeseong.
I accepted the box being pushed toward me with both hands. Red stickers reading DISPOSAL were plastered haphazardly all over the pile of shoddy-looking items inside.
“Still, I'm sure they'll be useful if used well. A few of the things in there were scrapped simply because they wouldn't make money, not because they didn't work….”
I glanced around the room.
Who's going to carry this thing?
…Nobody. Of course.
Burdened with a gift too awkward to refuse and too useless to want, I could only think one thing.
I really can't imagine ever needing this.
But then — who was it that said no one knows what life holds even one inch ahead? In less than a single day, I would be forced to revise that thought entirely.