Ppeppiro Day
Open the community boards and it was nothing but Monster's Nest. From the very first day people had screamed and fled, so the clear rate sat under ten percent, and now everyone was piling in to take a run at it with finishing the course as the goal. Plenty of others, of course, had come for the merch handed to every challenger, and for the rewards that scaled with how many of the challenge tasks you actually cleared.
There was real demand for the goods — enough that some people came back every single day, trembling the whole time, just to collect every kind. You couldn't simply buy them. They went only to people who took on the challenge, and that alone had a fair number of collectors hooked. Visitors were even turning up from overseas: my own fans, naturally, but also people utterly lost to horror experiences. On the strength of that, if you could call it a strength, word was going around that we might land in the Guinness World Records — some oddball entry for the world's scariest zoo.
I couldn't have cared less about any of it.
There was exactly one reason.
"Heehee, Appa! I'll make it yummy for you!"
November 11th. All because of Pepero Day, a holiday some snack company had cooked up as a pure sales gimmick — a day for giving those long biscuit sticks coated in chocolate. And not just any Pepero Day. This was the one where Soeun and Noona were making them for me with their own hands.
"Mommy! Like this?"
"Yeah. Squish it all up like that and it turns into dough."
They were starting from the biscuit itself, the part that would get dipped in chocolate, working flour into dough. Noona had her heart set on the idea that something like this only felt worthwhile if you did every step yourself from start to finish, so she and Soeun were each kneading a batch of their own.
I took one look and switched the stream on. Soeun had a little white chef's hat pulled down over her head, her tiny hands working away with total concentration, and keeping a sight like that to myself would have been a waste on a global scale. She'd already gotten into a full round of mischief before the kneading even started — the proof was the white flour dusted over her cheeks and her nose — and the moment that face hit the screen, people rushed to fill the chat.
Over Soeun making Pepero, people were falling over one another to call her cute. That's my daughter.
I was watching, thoroughly pleased with myself, when the donation messages started coming in one after another.
Right in the middle of everything, someone who knew how things stood with Noona had started volunteering for the job.
I was about to answer the donation, but Noona beat me to it.
"We're not planning to hire a housekeeper. Even later, when it gets hard for me to move around, I've got friends who'll help."
She looked into the camera and smiled, soft and easy. Then she checked the chat, saw the viewers buzzing with curiosity over these friends of hers, and — happy to satisfy it — called them in.
"Of course."
Noona smiled gently and ran a soft hand over the animals that had come up beside her. Kongkong-i, the astonishing gorilla who played the drums. Wonsungi, bearer of world-class balloon-art skills. And a kangaroo learning to box from the bodyguards. Those three were the friends she had meant.
"You have no idea how well these little ones look after me. Right, Soeun?"
"Yeah!"
Soeun had been nodding along when her eyes suddenly went round.
I looked over, wondering what was wrong, and found her grabbing a plastic bag, scooping the dough into it, and pressing the whole thing into Kongkong-i's hands.
"Kongkong-i! Dough!"
"Kik!"
Soeun mimed a squish and a knead, and Kongkong-i set to work on the flour exactly as she wanted — or, more precisely, started clamping down again and again on the plastic now sitting in his grip. With a hold stronger than any ordinary person's, he worked the dough to a steady creak and crunch. The bag looked one squeeze from bursting, and yet the plastic somehow held out until the dough was done.
"Kongkong-i's pretty good at the kneading, isn't he?"
When Soeun had been squishing away, it hardly felt as if dough were coming together at all, but the moment Kongkong-i took over, the job was finished in a flash. Noona, standing right there, even went so far as to casually hold out another bag of flour. The big guy finished both batches in no time, then happily chewed the fruit she gave him for his trouble.
Meanwhile she set about clearing the flour scattered over the table, with help from the kangaroo beside her. The two of them wiped it down with a dishcloth, perfectly in step, and then Noona showed Soeun the finished dough.
"Pretty different from before, right?"
"Yeah! It's not powder!"
Soeun poked at the dough, marveling at it — and then suddenly planted her face straight in. Squish.
"Heeheehee! My face!"
Delighted to have stamped herself into the dough, she held the imprint up to the camera, enormously pleased. Donations worth several million won came pouring in at once. Nearly all of them were about how unbearably cute she was.
"For that, you'd have to let Kongkong-i knead you first. You sure you're all right with that?"
I said it with the camera on Kongkong-i, and one donation immediately took its own words back.
By then Noona had finished tidying. She picked up the two lumps of dough and looked at Soeun.
"Now we're going to roll this out with a pin and shape it. Just make it long and skinny, like a stick biscuit. Could you hand me the rolling pin?"
She set the dough down and beckoned the kangaroo beside her. At a gesture that seemed to sketch a long stick, the kangaroo produced the rolling pin she had been keeping in her pouch. It had stayed wrapped so it would remain clean. Noona peeled the packaging away and went straight to rolling, and the lumpy mass flattened in no time. She showed Soeun how it was done, and Soeun followed, grunting with effort as she shoved the pin along. It looked like hard work for her. Whether the pin sat crooked in her hands because she was so small, or she simply couldn't manage her strength, the dough came out bumpy and uneven.
"Mmm..."
Soeun stared at that dough for a moment, the very picture of a child thinking hard. I was certain she was deciding whether to ask her mom for help or try to fix it herself.
…Yeah. That wasn't it.
What she did next was not what I had expected.
"Soongie! Roll this!"
She had dumped the rolling pin on Wonsungi, who had been standing there beside them with a blank look on his face. He eyed the thing, puzzled, then saw her gesturing and nodded.
"Kik!"
With that short cry he took her place and started rolling. A balloon-art master to the bone — a master ape, if you wanted to be precise about the title — he drew the pin through a few smooth strokes and the dough spread out perfectly even. He even watched Noona cut hers, then sliced his own into the exact same shape.
"Soongie, you did well too."
Noona smiled faintly at the sight of him helping Soeun and passed him a banana. He peeled it on the spot and made quick work of the fruit.
"We're going to bake this in the oven now, and it's suuuper hot, so you can't touch it, Soeun. Got it?"
"Uuung, but I wanna..."
"Then how about you just turn the power on?"
"Yeah!"
Soeun broke into a happy smile and switched the oven on, right where Noona pointed. They got it running, let it preheat, and slid the dough in to bake. The work, though, had only just begun. Noona melted chocolate with her over a double boiler, mixing in milk here and there, and with what was left she stirred in a little chocolate and made them chocolate milk.
"Yummy!"
While Soeun sipped her chocolate milk and the chocolate melted down, the oven let out a ding to say the biscuits were done. Noona brought them over, gave them a moment to cool, and then the two of them sank the sticks deep into the melted chocolate. A dip and a lift was all it took for Noona to finish a Pepero, and she held it up for Soeun with a ta-da.
"Me too! I wanna do it too!"
Soeun took one look, declared she was doing it herself, grabbed a biscuit in each fist, and plunged them deep into the chocolate. Maybe it was only that she loved sweet things, but she sank her fingers halfway in along with them.
"Hot! It's sweet!"
The double boiler had left it a little hot, but she popped her fingers in her mouth and ate the chocolate off them, and if anything she seemed to like it better that way. Noona and I burst out laughing, and so did everyone watching. The Pepero that came of this method was a creation whose chocolate ran to a solid ninety-nine percent.
"Soeun, let's wrap them now."
Once she saw that Soeun had turned out a few, Noona brought over a box she had prepared ahead of time and packed them up nicely — the sticks wrapped in paper, settled into the box, finished with a ribbon. Soeun tried her very best to copy her, but her hands weren't quite there yet, and the result came out decidedly crooked. One bit of help from Wonsungi, of course, and it turned perfectly neat.
"Appa, present!"
"Suhwan. It's Pepero Day, so this is a gift."
I took the Pepero the two of them held out and tasted it right there on the spot.
"Then this is my gift."
After I'd had a taste, I scooped Soeun up and planted a big kiss on her cheek, and I led Noona out of the camera frame to give her a real one. When I came back, the chat was nothing but people keysmashing themselves into flustered little spirals. I got the sense Noona's face had colored just a bit at the sight of it, but I only laughed and ended the stream.
That last message nagged at me in a way I couldn't quite shake. I decided to pretend I hadn't seen it.