Sharing Memories
"Noona! Come look at this!"
I'd been sprawled lazily across the sofa with my phone when I called out to her in a hurry. Startled by the sudden summons, Noona came over wearing a puzzled look.
"What?"
The moment she reached me, I held the phone out so she could see exactly what I'd been watching.
"Digi-Pocket? Isn't this that cartoon we used to watch when we were little?"
"Yeah. Turns out they uploaded the whole series on Mutube."
I'd stumbled across the news by chance — the anime from my childhood was up on Mutube. It wasn't some copyright mess, either. The studio itself had released it. Nostalgia struck me out of nowhere, so I went in and checked with my own eyes, and there wasn't a lie in any of it. Someone, maybe the fans here at home, had even been kind enough to put Korean subtitles on the whole thing.
"Maybe I should binge it while I'm at it."
"...Right. You were crazy about that show."
Even after Noona and I had started dating, even after I was grown, I'd still loved that anime. I wasn't anything you'd call an otaku, but I'd liked it enough to hunt down every series. Once she'd even given me a handful of figures no bigger than a finger and called them a present.
For all that devotion, life had quietly erased it from my memory. A job, a superpower, marrying Noona, raising Soeun — somewhere in the middle of all of it, the show had simply slipped away. Being able to watch it again left me strangely, brightly excited.
Noona, unlike me, looked distinctly unimpressed.
"Honestly, I could never tell what was fun about it."
"What did you watch when you were little, Noona?"
"Hmm..."
We had plenty of memories piled up from high school on, but I barely knew anything from before that. When I asked, she thought for a moment, then answered.
"I think I watched Phantom Thief Girl Jetty? Or Celery Moon, something like that."
"Oh... I never watched a single one of those."
"So cartoons were where our tastes didn't match?"
We were a couple who lined up on food and on most other preferences, but our childhood cartoons seemed to have run in opposite directions. Unlike me, who'd loved the usual boys' manga and adventure stories, Noona had apparently gone for the romance comics girls her age adored.
"Those aren't up. All they've got right now is Digi-Pocket and a couple of things I've never even heard of."
"I'm fine. It's not like I particularly want to see them again."
She waved me off and told me to watch as much as I liked. I nodded and hit play at once.
"Now it begins —"
"Go and find the secret key!"
Hearing that opening for the first time in years brought the memories flooding back. Whenever the song came on the television, I used to plant myself right there and not move for the whole half hour. Then the story I remembered so well began to unfold, slowly, and watching it now I couldn't help thinking those kid heroes had nerves of absolute steel.
"Daddy, wha's this?"
I'd sunk into the nostalgia when Soeun came pattering over and shoved her face at the phone. The picture was rougher than the crisp animation she'd grown up with, and that alone seemed to fascinate her. A whole crowd of animal-like characters kept appearing, too, and her interest only grew.
"Well, this is a cartoon Daddy used to watch when he was about your size. These friends who look like animals are called Digi-Pocket, and the story's about them teaming up with these kids to go on adventures."
When I added that they entered a digital world and became gym leaders, Soeun stared at me as if she had no idea what any of that was supposed to mean. I laughed lightly and gathered her into my arms.
"Want to watch with Daddy?"
"Yeah!"
She didn't seem to care what it was, so long as she was watching it with me. She stretched out across my stomach and settled in, and I held her easily as I sent the video to the television. The big screen was much kinder on the eyes.
"Woooow!"
A creature that looked like an animal threw a body slam. Another breathed fire from its mouth in a way that defied all reason. Soeun watched, utterly spellbound.
"Daddy, do cwocodiles bweave fire too?"
A character that looked like a crocodile was spewing flames, and Soeun's eyes shone as she stared. For a second I thought about teasing all that pure, shining innocence — and then I shook my head.
"That one's not a crocodile. It's a dinosaur, so crocodiles can't breathe fire."
"Then dinosaurs bweave fire?"
"Hmm. Daddy doesn't know much about dinosaurs, so I couldn't say."
Maybe what had mattered to her wasn't dinosaurs at all, but whether a crocodile could breathe fire. She turned back to the television with a face full of disappointment. If I'd told her they could, she would absolutely have marched off and ordered one to prove it on the spot.
Either way, Soeun was soon as absorbed as I was, and we tore through several episodes in a blink.
"Come eat dinner."
We hadn't even gotten up for the bathroom. We stayed glued to the screen, unmoving, until Noona's call to eat finally reached us.
"Is our Soeun having as much fun with that as Daddy?"
"Yeah! It's amazing! When they go boom it goes bang, and when they go fwoooosh it goes kwaaang!"
"...R-right. Of course."
Noona, who hadn't understood a word of that, let out an awkward little laugh and stroked Soeun's hair. For the record, I hadn't understood it either.
We finished the meal quickly and went straight back to the anime, but that stretch didn't last long. After dinner and a wash, we'd only just settled in again when Soeun started drooping.
"Daddy, I'm sleepy..."
"Yeah? Then how about we save the rest for tomorrow?"
"Yeah..."
Her head bobbed and bobbed, and in the end she lost the fight. She slipped into sleep with soft, whiffling little breaths.
Once I'd put her down, Noona and I decided to turn in a little early ourselves.
"I guess it's because the characters are based on animals. Soeun's completely hooked. Any other day she'd be outside running around with the real ones."
"Most of the other cartoons she's watched had animals as the heroes, remember? She likes the ones with animals even more than the princess movies girls usually love, like Summer Kingdom."
"Looking at that, our girl's tastes are pretty set in stone."
Noona laughed lightly and said that at least made her easy to please, and we traded a few more idle words before sleep took us just as quickly.
Soeun had fallen for the Digi-Pocket we'd watched together — fallen hard. For nearly three days she wouldn't stop bingeing it with me. When the heroes became the strongest gym leaders in the digital world, she clapped her hands in sheer delight. She was well and truly sunk.
And once she was that far gone, she started acting the story out, the same way children do at school the morning after an episode airs.
"Bboni, Flint Flash!"
Astride Bboni, Soeun ordered her to use the technique for running at tremendous speed. It was the move from the cartoon, true to the old idiom itself — a dash as quick as the tiny gleam and sparks thrown off when flint strikes stone.
What Bboni did in answer caught me off guard. The animals adored Soeun, but that had never meant they understood her words. Even so, Bboni moved exactly the way she wanted.
"...Light?"
Bboni shot forward in a blur, and for an instant I wondered if I'd seen it wrong. I could have sworn a faint glimmer had flared as she moved.
"Soeun, do it again."
"Huh? Okay! Bboni, Flint Flash!"
At Soeun's shout, Bboni kicked off the ground and tore ahead once more. I watched closely this time, but no light appeared. Whether I'd misseen it, or a handful of things had lined up into a coincidence, it didn't happen again. Soeun ordered Flint Flash after that as well, and nothing like the first time ever returned.
Bboni alone wasn't enough for her. She began calling all sorts of techniques down on the other animals too.
"Bbwoobbwoo, Water Cannon!"
"Gyaaak! This raccoon's a goner, I tell ya!"
The path to the tiger enclosure was blocked, and Daepodong had been lingering along the canal, unable to let the grudge go, watching for a gap — and he became the victim of Bbwoobbwoo's Water Cannon. He went bobbing off on the current.
"Hanmu, Harden!"
At Soeun's cry, Hanmu looked as if he hadn't the faintest idea what she meant. He glanced this way and that, then hunkered down as far as he could go, pressing his body flat against the ground and tucking his head and legs as deep into his shell as they would fit.
"Super hard!"
Soeun rapped his shell with satisfied little taps and beamed.
"Pwatypus, Surf!"
The platypus drifted along on a tiny current Soeun had made herself. The creature hadn't really done anything, but watching it bob on the water she'd called up seemed to be enough for her.
She roamed all over the zoo, drilling technique after technique into the animals, and she looked thoroughly pleased with herself. She couldn't make them shoot fire or generate electricity, but that alone appeared to be plenty.
And then, at the very end of all that training, she caused one spectacular accident.
"Rhinos! Tackle!"
She had given an order that should never have been given to rhinos grown even healthier than they'd been in their prime, steeped in the influence of my superpower. Soeun pointed at the wall as if telling them to charge, and a rhino took off straight for it. The wall wasn't sturdy enough to withstand a beast soaked through with my power, and it came straight down.
If there was any mercy in it, the space beyond was only the empty buffer between the enclosure and the visitor path, so no one was hurt.
No people, at least.
"Nooooo—! My reseaaarch!"
The trouble was that David of Rhino Rescue, the one who looked after the rhinos full time, had been storing some of his materials right there. Those materials, buried under the rubble of the wall, were the damage.
In the end, Soeun — author of one very large accident — was caught by Noona.
"Hiiing... I'm sowwy."
It was the first time she had ever been scolded so hard. Caught in Noona's grip, she cried her eyes out, and then she had to apologize to every animal she'd tried to teach a technique. Whether it was because they loved her or not, not a single one of them got angry. David, too, who had nearly lost his materials, managed to dig them out from under the rubble perfectly intact — and perhaps because of that, he forgave her without making much of it.