Soeun's Show (1)
The morning we opened, the articles started detonating. People had been snapping photos all up and down the queue, and those people, it turned out, were reporters.
Not that I could blame them. Just as the pieces said, an enormous line had already been waiting before we even unlocked the gates. It stretched so far the end vanished, and merely looking at it was enough to make your head swim.
"Whew. This is no joke. Guest services is gonna drop dead today."
Even Elephant Ajusshi, standing right beside me, sounded impressed. And just as the man had predicted, the guest services team had already gone sheet-white.
With a line that had no visible end, they knew that even if all they did was sell tickets, they'd be tearing them without a moment to breathe. The self-service kiosks beside the booths didn't matter. The crowd waiting out there was far beyond anything a machine could swallow.
"You do know this is all your fault, Suhwan?"
Noona, who'd been standing at my side the same as the ajusshi and watching the very same sight, turned a soft smile on me. I had nothing to say in my defense.
This was on me from the start. While I'd been remodeling the zoo into a—well, not a magic realm, a new kind of zoo—I'd been posting photos to Outstar now and then. Once word got out that the animals were simply loose, wandering wherever they pleased, there was no way people wouldn't show up already expecting a spectacle.
Who stays home after watching Namcat break into the tiger enclosure, beat the tigers senseless, and the Chubbies steal the tigers' food while he's at it?
By Outstar's reckoning, the most pitiful animals in my zoo, Nest of the Shinsoo, were the tigers. Shoved around by Namcat, robbed of their meals by the Chubbies, and forced to perform tricks in front of Soeun—of course they'd taken first place as the saddest creatures on the grounds.
"Oh, right. Where's Soeun? It's not a kindergarten day, so we brought her."
"She's probably in the tiger enclosure by now. She's been going around since morning going rawr, rawr."
Noona said it as calmly as if she were mentioning the weather. Any ordinary parent would have had a very different reaction, but the two of us were perfectly at ease.
For one thing, Soeun's superpower worked beautifully even on tigers. On top of that, I'd already drilled the predators within an inch of their lives, so there was nothing to worry about. I wasn't sure whether my own power had simply grown stronger, but the big beasts showed not a shred of aggression.
In truth, the only reason they were still locked in enclosures at all was to prepare for a one-in-a-million chance. Not one of the predators currently in the zoo was actually dangerous.
Humans, though, were the sort of animal that would let out a dying croak and be finished if an elephant sat on them, or if a tiger gave them an affectionate smack—so we'd isolated the predators for the humans' sake.
Soeun, free of that particular problem, was one of exactly two humans allowed to come and go from every predator enclosure as she pleased. The other, of course, was me.
"Suhwan. It's time. Let's open."
Noona, who'd been watching the clock and tracking the opening hour, let me know we'd hit it. I headed straight for the chain-link shutter drawn across the entrance.
"Whoa! It's Lord Shinsoo!"
The people waiting beyond the mesh spotted me and cheered. I gave them a light wave and pressed the button to raise the shutter.
With a clank, it climbed, and the crowd began pouring into the zoo. Families, couples, people who'd come alone—they spilled inside and each set off into the grounds in their own way.
"Ooh! Mommy, a goose! Honk, honk!"
"Babe, look over there! I think that's Bboni."
"Hey hey hey hey—there's a monkey!"
"Let go, will you let go? I didn't bring this for you, you know? I like deer, not camels!"
Everyone stepping into the zoo for the first time shared a single reaction. They weren't staring at animals penned in display cages. They were staring, stunned, at animals wandering the grounds as they pleased.
One visitor had been walking around with a bunch of carrots, only to get waylaid by a camel instead of the deer they'd been hoping for—but for the most part, people began roaming the zoo with delighted faces.
And among all the places they wandered, one spot left them the most aghast. The tiger enclosure.
"There's a kid on that tiger's back! That's dangerous, isn't it?"
"You don't know that kid? That's Lord Shinsoo's daughter. The Princess. A tiger's nothing to the Princess."
What had shocked them was Soeun, sitting on the back of one of the most pitiful animals in our zoo. And not just any of them—she was perched on Hodori, leader of the tiger troop, the most pitiful of the pitiful.
Whether the crowd gasped or not, Soeun wore a bright, sunny smile and began circling the enclosure on Hodori as if she were out on patrol.
Partway through, her eyes landed on a tiger sprawled belly-up, blankly watching the people. She suddenly let out a little hee of a laugh and tugged Hodori's ear to turn him.
Once she was close to the gawking cat, she hopped—boing—right off his back.
"Rawr!"
"Graaaawr!"
Having jumped down nearby, Soeun threw both hands in the air and did her best impression of a tiger's roar, just as she'd learned it in kindergarten.
It was a sight made for the word adorable, but to the tiger suddenly confronted with it, the whole thing seemed to be pure shock. Startled out of its wits, it sprang up from the exact sprawl it had been lying in and rolled over and over, announcing its surprise with its entire body.
"Bwahahaha! Did you see that thing freak out?"
"I think I saw this on Mytube. Except it was a red panda, not a tiger."
"That was basically a scream of terror, right? I've never seen anything get that scared out of its mind from a yell."
"Guess tigers really are cats. That flinch is pure house cat."
"Heeheehee!"
Faced with a tiger that couldn't voice a single complaint because its opponent was Soeun, and with the people around them bursting into laughter, she beamed.
Even so, she must have felt a little bad for scaring it. She walked up to the tiger, still hunched in shock, and stroked its head.
"Sowwy!"
Whether the petting settled the fright or not, the tiger started rubbing its head against her hand. After a moment of that, Soeun climbed back onto Hodori.
"Go!"
She settled onto his back and gave the nape of his neck a few light taps. And in that instant, something enormous happened.
"Aaaah! A tiger's escaped!"
"R-run!"
"This is a scoop!"
Hodori, with Soeun still riding him, had cleared the bars on nothing but a few running starts. A fence nearly sixteen feet high, and a moat more than six feet across—he'd taken both in a single jump.
Naturally, a tiger breaking out of its enclosure sent people into a panic. Tigers were what most folks pictured the moment anyone said predator, and plenty of them drowned in fear.
But the panic didn't last.
"Bye-bye!"
Hodori had leapt out, set Soeun down off his back, and jumped straight back toward the enclosure. The tiger that had burst from the cage looking ready to charge the crowd at any second returned to it with Soeun seeing him off, and what people felt wasn't terror so much as a daze.
Then the very next thing turned that daze into outright shock.
"I told you to save the good stuff for me, didn't I? Smack!"
"Wh-why do I have to save any for you!"
"Don't get it? Then you get hit!"
People who then witnessed Hodori getting the stuffing beaten out of him by a Namcat no one had seen arrive seemed to forget the fear they'd felt a moment ago.
"Am I dreaming?"
A few of them pinched their own cheeks, unable to tell dream from waking.
I was snickering at the sight when Soeun took off running again—tod-tod-tod-tod.
"Follow the Princess and you're guaranteed to see something amazing!"
And people began trailing after her. After what she'd just pulled at the tiger enclosure, they'd decided that sticking with Soeun meant seeing, in person, sights you couldn't easily find anywhere else.
"Follow her!"
"Princess, we're coming with you!"
"Ack, let go! Just eat all the damn carrots yourself, you camel bastard! I have to follow the Princess!"
"Just follow her for now!"
In the end, a huge crowd was chasing after wherever Soeun ran. It was exactly like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Since it's Soeun... the Pied Piper Princess?
I was thinking how much the whole thing looked like something out of a fairy tale when Soeun reached the destination she'd wanted all along.
"Bbwoobbwoo!"
"Woooh! My adorable little friend!"
In front of the enclosure of the elephant—a fellow who'd had a perfectly good name once, until Soeun's will had renamed him Bbwoobbwoo—she waved both hands wildly. Spotting her, Bbwoobbwoo swung his trunk back and forth in answer.
Grinning at the elephant returning her greeting, Soeun glanced around. In her heart she wanted to just climb right over, but for a Soeun who was still so small, that was a long way off.
Soeun, though, was a child who always found a way.