Survival Dream Team (1)
After I showed the world what a Druid was truly capable of, my story set the internet ablaze for a while. It wasn't only the usual communities where people gathered to kill time — academic societies and scholarly forums burned just as hot.
The thread running through nearly all of it was the same. How far did my superpower actually reach, and if it pushed living things past their natural limits, just how far past those limits could they go? The fervor came from the honeybees beating not ordinary wasps but giant hornets, and from the dogs and cats taking down elephants and giraffes.
In the ordinary communities, the talk mostly came down to a single question: just how far could the animals I raised go, and what else might they be able to beat?
Talk of me and my animals in those everyday spaces leaned mostly on fun and curiosity. In the academic communities devoted to animals, though, the conversation about me turned decidedly technical.
Those scholarly forums dealt mostly in knowledge, and they weren't even content to talk among themselves. They went so far as to send me requests asking permission to study the animals. When mail, fax, and the telephone weren't enough, some of them came in person to make the ask.
I assumed the man who'd come looking for me now was one of them. Call it prejudice — he simply had the look of someone who'd done well in school. My guess, however, was spectacularly wrong.
"Hello. I'm Do In-mu, a producer with the Variety Department at BBS."
The man who'd sought me out was a producer from the variety division of BBS, one of the country's major broadcasters. Then again, a producer at BBS would be highly educated.
"May I ask what brings BBS all the way out here?"
"I have a proposal I'd like to make to you. Rather than simply sending it by email or fax, I thought it would be better to come and explain it myself, so I came in person."
I nodded at his easy smile and took the few sheets he drew from his briefcase.
"Survival Dream Team?"
"Yes. It's a program we're developing now. A pilot — a one-time production."
I went straight to the contents of the proposal he'd given me.
The line written across the very first page leapt straight into view.
"What exactly are the top five superpowers you'd need if you were stranded on a deserted island?"
"It's based on a survey we ran ourselves — a ranking of the superpowers people said they'd most want if they were the ones stranded. The order is on the very next page."
Just as he said, when I turned the page there were numbers from one through five, each followed by a kind of superpower.
"...I'm in first?"
"Yes. The rankings shifted after you held the sports festival, Suhwan. Originally Architecture was first, and the Druid superpower was second."
He added that even before that, commanding animals and raising bees and plants to enormous size had already settled me firmly in second.
People rating my superpower so highly made my shoulders lift despite myself. I let the corner of my mouth tick up and kept turning pages as I read.
The Survival Dream Team proposal came down to this: gather the people who held the superpowers the public had chosen as the top five you'd need if stranded on a deserted island, and film them surviving. The other superpowers could be found readily enough if you looked, but a Druid existed nowhere else in the world but with me, which was why they'd come to me first. If I, the number one, didn't take part, the proposal itself became worthless. You could hardly call it a top five with first place missing.
"And where would this survival be filmed?"
"For now we're looking at an island chain in Southeast Asia. The premise is being stranded on a deserted island, so we intend to shoot on an actual uninhabited one."
"Hmm..."
The proposal left me no choice but to sit with it. I won't pretend I wasn't tempted. I'd always enjoyed those survival shows, so the pull was real — but it was just as obvious that I'd suffer, and that made me hesitate.
In the end I sent Producer Do In-mu off without a firm answer. He left hoping, he said, that I'd give him a good one.
"Suhwan?"
Even after he was gone I was still staring at the proposal, turning it over, when Noona came up looking puzzled.
"What's with that look."
"It's nothing. A broadcast offer came in for the first time in a while, and I'm stuck on it."
"What kind of offer?"
At her question I handed over the proposal Producer Do In-mu had left behind and gave her the short version.
"What do you want to do?"
"I don't know. I want to do it, but it feels like I'd suffer."
Hearing that, Noona suddenly broke into a sly little smile and wrapped her arms around me from behind.
"You? I don't see you suffering."
"Why not? It's a deserted island."
"There'll be animals there too, won't there? Even if it's uninhabited, it says they plan to film somewhere pretty big. Which means you'll just make them do all the hard parts anyway, right?"
"That's... fair."
I caught myself agreeing before I knew it.
"You do know you work those kids pretty hard, right? If you weren't at least getting some cardio in while you walk them, you'd have put on a little weight by now."
As she said it, Noona poked my stomach. I didn't exactly have a spare tire, but it wasn't a well-cut set of muscle either. Just as she'd said, if I weren't out running around on walks with the animals, I'd definitely have gained weight.
"And you're not even going alone, so I don't think it'll be that rough. Everyone there has a superpower. Looking at the concept, it seems less like they want to film people suffering through a survival and more like they want to show how much of a difference superpowers actually make."
At any rate, once I'd heard her out, I started to think giving it a try wouldn't be so bad. If I slept in a house raised by someone with an Architecture superpower and ate whatever the Fishing and Scouting abilities brought in, I honestly couldn't picture myself suffering. And even if there were dangerous wild animals, with me there, there wouldn't be any real danger.
"If you want to go, then go. You said it yourself a while back — that you'd like to try survival at least once. Was that when we were watching Jungle Survival?"
"And if I go, what about you? You'll be bored. Counting travel, it'll be close to two weeks."
"I'll go have some fun of my own. My friends were already saying we should take a trip to Jeju Island. I'll just bring So-eun along."
"So that was the real goal."
When I looked at her steadily — no wonder she'd told me to go so easily — Noona smiled that sly little smile again and brushed her lips lightly against my cheek.
"My friends said we absolutely have to go this time."
"Haa, fine. Go on, then."
I pulled her in as she laughed, bright and unbothered, and hugged me tighter, then called Producer Do In-mu at once.
Setting aside his thanks — I could practically see him bowing and bowing with his phone in his hand — I started gathering information ahead of time. How to start a fire, things of that sort. After a handful of meetings about the shoot, and after a fair stretch of time had passed, I found myself with one day left before I left the country.
"I wanna go with Daddy too."
"Daddy's going for work, so I can't take you, So-eun. What should we do?"
"Then it's okay! I'll go play with Mommy!"
She was plainly sorry she wouldn't see me for two weeks, but the prospect of going off to play with her mom seemed good enough on its own, and So-eun was beaming. A little wistful at how quickly she let go, I held her close while I packed.
The producer had asked me to keep the luggage to a minimum for the castaway concept, so there wasn't much of it. A few changes of clothes, and mostly food I could offer as payment if I met any animals and needed to trade.
When I reached the airport, the starting point of the shoot, a large crew was already stationed there. The other team members, who'd arrived ahead of me, were waiting as well.
Besides me there were four of them — two men and two women — and each wore a name tag on their chest. The men were labeled Architecture and Scouting; the women, Fishing and Craftsmanship.
We were trading light greetings when Producer Do In-mu came over to say it was time to leave.
"Shall we head out, then."
We boarded under his lead, and before long the plane was in the air. I passed the time talking with the teammates I'd be filming alongside, and we were on the ground again before I knew it. That, though, was only the beginning of the journey. Afterward we spent long hours on a light aircraft, a bus, and a boat before we finally reached the vast uninhabited island where the shoot would take place.