Endangered Species
After the Rolling Man shoot, even more people started finding their way to the zoo.
It had been fairly well known already, but now even the ones who had never bothered to come—on the comfortable assumption that a zoo was a zoo, much the same wherever you went—were beginning to show up. The animals roamed free, and a visitor could commune with them to their heart's content, so there was little reason to stay away. It wasn't only the dogs and cats anyone might meet on a street corner, either. There were plenty of strange and wonderful creatures besides, and that alone drew the crowds.
Before long, a set of unofficial tips, something like the zoo's own house rules, began making the rounds.
A camel at the entrance plunders carrots. Hide yours, or buy them at the shop in the center.
There is a cat that even beats up the tigers. If you see the cat, run.
If you see a raccoon, check your pockets. If something's gone, find the raccoon keeper.
If you lose a helium balloon, grab any crow or magpie and point at the sky.
The elephant is an attention hound. Walk past pretending you didn't see it, and it sprays you. If you're going by, at least wave.
Come on the little princess's day off from kindergarten and you may have a wondrous experience. Don't be startled even if you come face to face with a tiger.
Other scraps of wisdom circulated along with those, and people wandered the grounds each armed with a survival guide of their own.
Thanks to Rolling Man, who already commanded a sizable following overseas, the share of foreign visitors was creeping upward as well. Where once some ninety-five percent of the guests had been Korean, that figure had now slipped to around eighty.
Walking the zoo as I usually did, I found myself flinching more than once or twice when foreigners came up announcing that they were fans. Clumsy Korean I could manage. What startled me was being chattered at, rapid-fire, in some language that wasn't even English.
This time, though, the surprise was of an entirely different kind.
"The hell is this? What're you lot doin'?"
Daepodong had appeared out of nowhere, and he stared in blank bewilderment at the people thrusting all manner of devices at him. Visitors did sometimes reach out to pet him and play, but no one had ever shoved machinery in his face like this. It wasn't a phone, and it wasn't a camera, which only made the whole thing stranger.
"You givin' that to me? I'll take real good care of it, don't you worry!"
The trouble was that even bewildered, those light fingers of his never quit. Daepodong snatched the device being pushed at him and bolted.
"Noooooooooo!"
Robbed in a blink, the foreigner screamed and tore after him. Catching Daepodong, though—a phantom thief in all but name—was a distant hope. Where the raccoon flowed over the smallest obstacles as if they weren't there, a human had to climb or detour around every one of them, and that alone made the chase a losing game. Worse, this was a raccoon soaked to the brim in my power. A person had even less chance of running him down.
Of course, that was everyone else's problem.
"Yubu. Go grab that little thief for me."
I murmured it lightly toward the empty air, and an owl came winging in from somewhere. Yubu closed on Daepodong in a flight that was all but silent and snatched the raccoon clean off the ground.
"Aaaagh! Leggo! What're you grabbin' me for?!"
Caught without warning, Daepodong thrashed and fought to get free. He did not get free of those solid talons.
"I have brought him."
"Good work. Here—go tell them to get the beef out for you."
"Heh heh. You have my thanks!"
I scribbled a note for the keeper in charge of meals and passed it to Yubu. Hand that over, and they'd give him the food he loved. I watched him vanish as suddenly as he had appeared, then turned my eyes to the raccoon caught in my hands.
"Hey. What did I tell you about stealing from the guests whenever you feel like it?"
"I ain't stole nothin'! They gave it to me!"
"Gave it to you, my foot. You grabbed it and ran."
"Tch. World gonna end if you let it slide just once?"
Not a shred of remorse—just that brazen shout. I sighed and pulled the device out of his arms.
"Dang it."
"Dang it, he says. Quit stealing the guests' things."
Once I had the device, I let him go. He lingered a moment, plainly still attached to what I'd taken, then shook the regret off and fled. He knew perfectly well that if he dug in, the only thing waiting for him was a snack ban.
And just as he slipped away, the owner of the machine in my hand came slowly over.
"Um... h-hello?"
He was tall, with a thick beard and light brown hair—foreign at a glance, no question about it. I looked at him with a face gone a little tight. Fortunately, foreign or not, he could speak Korean, and quite well, by the look of it.
"Hello. I'm the owner of that device."
He dipped his head in a small bow and pointed at the machine in my hand. I'd watched it get stolen—not by a pickpocket, but by a raccoon—so I smiled and handed it over.
Handing it over was one thing. I was still curious what the thing even was, and why on earth he had been shoving it at Daepodong.
"What is that machine, that you were holding it up to a raccoon?"
"It's a muscle-density meter."
"A muscle-density meter? You mean... the kind that measures muscle and bone and water, that sort of thing?"
"That's right. The catch is, it's expensive for how small it is. You could buy a car with what this costs."
Something that fit in one hand, priced like an automobile—that startled me more than a little. The thought rose, strong and clear, that I was going to have to do something about the raccoons' thieving, and soon.
"But why were you sticking a muscle-density meter in that guy's face? There are plenty of raccoons that aren't here."
Rather than answer, he drew a business card from his wallet and held it out.
"Rhino Rescue?"
"I'm David, a researcher with Rhino Rescue."
David, who introduced himself as a researcher with an organization called Rhino Rescue, began to explain why he had come to the zoo with a muscle-density meter in hand.
"As I understand it, the Druid superpower acts on animals and plants. That's the part we're focused on."
He had come, he said, to see what that power actually did, and he was measuring the results as they showed up in the animals. He wanted to know whether the force of the superpower simply remained in a creature for it to draw on, or whether it strengthened the individual's own muscle and the like.
"So—did you get a result?"
"I haven't been able to check every animal, but I've checked several. The results are remarkable. Their muscle density comes out above the average."
David produced a tablet and showed me a screen crowded with graphs of one kind and another. It was written entirely in English, and just looking at it made my head swim, but I could piece the gist together from a few of the words. The graphs set the average of dozens of randomly chosen animals of the same species beside the measurements taken from the animals at our zoo.
The difference was striking. I had known the animals here were strong, but I hadn't imagined the gap would be anything like this. The two lines on the graph sat a long way apart, and even the numbers marked along the left side made the distance plain. Creatures like Namcat and Yubu were showing figures more than ten times the average.
Looking at those numbers raised another question, though. What, exactly, did they mean to do with measurements like these? That my ability made animals healthy and strong was already common knowledge.
David's next words all but erased the doubt.
"There's only one reason I took these measurements. To move the project we're running forward, we have to give accurate data to the people who sponsor us."
"And what project is that?"
"Hm... please give me just a moment. I don't know the Korean name..."
He fiddled with his phone for a few seconds, then looked up.
"Do you know of an animal called the northern white rhinoceros?"
"Isn't that just a rhinoceros? I don't really know the details."
David nodded as if that were entirely fair, and then he told me about it.
The northern white rhinoceros was an animal poised on the very edge of extinction. In the whole world, only two remained, both of them in Kenya—and those two were females getting on in years. Extinction, in other words, was as good as decided. His organization, he added, was already trying to restore the species, using those two animals together with genes that had been preserved ahead of time.
And the reason he was here, measuring our animals, was that they hoped—with support from several countries—to send those two individuals to the pet hotel.
"We're a multinational scientific consortium, but we aren't exactly well funded. Explaining why they have to come to the pet hotel, and securing sponsorship to cover that cost, was a step we needed to take."
Originally, he said, he had meant to take his measurements quietly, without my catching him, go home, and only then make a formal request for cooperation. Measure first, then ask the sponsors for a budget.
I couldn't have cared less about any of that. Budgets, feasibility studies—none of it stuck. Only one thing lodged itself in my head.
"Endangered..."
Two females left, extinction already as good as settled, and still they were trying, somehow, to bring the species back. They were throwing everything at it—artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, all the rest—and still the words wouldn't leave me: the two animals that remained were not in good health.
In the end I looked at David and spoke.
"If it's just the two of them, I'll take them. You get the permits in order. I'd do it for free if it were up to me, but there's the question of fairness, and I don't want my zoo turned into a madhouse. I'll only charge the minimum."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Honestly, when something's right on the brink of extinction, looking the other way doesn't sit well. We've already bred red foxes here, so I think it'll work."
At that, David's face bloomed bright.
"Right now—! I'll get the permits and come straight back!"
He took off at a run, looking fully prepared to seize his superiors by the collar and shake them if they refused.
A few days after David left like that, a request for cooperation arrived from Rhino Rescue.
We request admission to the pet hotel of the northern white rhinoceros—individuals that must, without fail, breed successfully.
The contents were simple, and of course I accepted the rhinos' admission, just as I had promised. The facilities team paid for it, and dearly, putting together a brand-new rhino enclosure.
"Rhinoceros! Graaaah!"
Whether she had learned it at kindergarten or not, So-eun took to racing around with one index finger held up in front of her nose like a horn.
Around the time her brimming anticipation and our preparations both came to an end, the rhinos arrived. Flown straight from Kenya, they were settled into the enclosure prepared for them under strict protection and the care of a medical team. They had come in somewhat poor health, but the moment they fell under my influence they began to recover—and then they succeeded at the very thing everyone at Rhino Rescue, David among them, had longed for so desperately. They bred.
As the rhinos' bellies slowly swelled, the researchers who had been standing by went half wild with joy, and people's interest in my superpower only grew. Whether I ought to call it a blessing or not, endangered species of every kind began taking up residence at the zoo, until ours became the place in all the world where such animals were easiest to meet.