Practice for Now
"Doesn't sound half bad, does it?"
Noona's eyes lit up, and she nodded, looking thoroughly pleased.
"For real?"
"Yeah. Maybe not before, but I think it'd be fine now. We've got you."
I could see why she reacted that way. If what I had was the superpower of Animal Communicating, running a pet cafe couldn't possibly be a problem. One of the headaches a pet cafe always ran into was everything to do with the animals and their bathroom habits, but with my ability I might even get them to leave their designated spots and use the very toilets people used.
Animals using toilets... I can already see the views exploding...!
And that wasn't all. If I could talk to the animals, I could sort out any problem the moment it came up, and I could make sure nothing like an animal attacking a customer ever happened in the first place.
Even so, there was one problem.
"Noona, there's something important."
"What is it?"
"I don't actually know if it really works. Sure, it feels like I can talk to animals, and like they take a certain liking to me, but I don't know the exact level of it, you know? If they blow off whatever I tell them to do—or not to do—and just ignore me, we could end up with a completely mediocre pet cafe. And you know what most mediocre pet cafes are like."
"Mm. That's fair."
Noona nodded, looking as though she understood me well enough. Yeongji, however, did not.
"Then we can't do the pet caaafe...?"
She looked ready to cry at any second, voice wobbling, and a bead of sweat slid down my temple.
Help!
I shot Noona a desperate distress signal. Whether she'd caught my telepathic SOS or not, she stroked Yeongji's head and spoke.
"It's not that we can't. It just means we have to make sure of Suhwan's ability first. Raising animals takes a lot of preparation, and so do we. You understand, right?"
At the assurance that it wasn't impossible, Yeongji finally found her sunny smile again, and I let out a sigh of relief. Yeongji, who slipped into an airheaded act every so often, was not, in fact, some outsider. She was Noona Ha-eun's younger cousin. At the cafe she was scrupulous about calling her Boss Unnie and never once let on that they were cousins, but that didn't stop Yeongji from being Noona's cousin all the same.
In any case, if I failed to soothe her and Yeongji ended up sobbing her eyes out, there was no telling what kind of revenge a Noona who'd burned through her patience calming her down would visit on me. Once I'd confirmed that this particular random bomb had stopped short of going off, I knocked back my coffee. The heat that had surged up with all that tension died against the iced americano.
"So you're thinking of going straight to a full evaluation?"
"Have to. A full evaluation's going to take a little time, though, so I should run my own test first."
"Your own test? How?"
"That's the thing... Cottonfist's already fully trained, so trying it on him wouldn't tell me anything..."
The only people around me who actually kept a pet right now were Noona's parents. But Yeongji, who had been listening to the two of us, shot her hand straight up into the air.
"I've got a cat!"
"Huh? You had a cat?"
At that, Yeongji wagged her head no. Wondering what on earth she meant by saying she had one when she didn't even raise it, I looked at her—and she inhaled her coffee in a single gulp and stood.
"Follow me!"
"...Let's just go see."
Yeongji whipped around and made for the cafe's back door, and Noona and I had no choice but to trail after her, a little dazed. What we found when we stepped through that door was Yeongji peeling a sausage for some cat.
It looked like an ordinary stray, except that for a stray its cream-colored fur was sleek and glossy. Beyond that, it didn't seem sick, or hurt, either.
"What the— where'd this cat come from?"
"It's Namcat!"
"...Namcat?"
"Male Cat! I made it up!"
I could not, for the life of me, understand how Yeongji's head was wired.
"The hell you lookin' at. First time seein' a cat?"
"Why do these alley-cat punks always have such filthy mouths..."
On top of that, the cat glaring at me as he spoke—the one called Namcat—didn't have a scrap of manners you could find if you rinsed your eyes and looked.
"Suhwan."
"Ah, sorry."
At the steady look Noona gave me for using rough language in front of Yeongji, I threw both hands up and crouched down. Wherever he'd come from, and whoever's cat he was, he was a perfect subject for testing the ability.
"Namcat, right? Don't just stay there. Go over that way."
At my words, the cat Yeongji had named Namcat stared straight at me. Right around the time I started thinking it wasn't going to work, he got to his feet and moved. Right to the spot I'd pointed at.
"Waaah!"
At the sight of Namcat doing exactly as I'd said, Yeongji broke into a bright, delighted laugh and even clapped her hands. I had no intention of being satisfied with that alone. I didn't stop at sending him here and there; I went so far as to order him to fetch things, the way you would a dog.
And there was only one result.
"You little shit, am I your errand boy?"
"Ack!"
Unable to put up with my bossing him around, the cat drove a Nyangnyang Punch into me. Of all the luck, I was still crouched, and it caught the tender, nerve-rich part of my knee. I jerked hard. A neat little knee-jerk reflex kicked in, and my whole body flopped.
"Pfft."
"Heehee, Boss-Unnie's-Boyfriend-Oppa got hit by Namcat!"
And the two esteemed ladies who had witnessed the whole performance burst out laughing.
Mortifyingly.
"What do you think you're doing?"
Yeongji was one thing, but I glared at Namcat for embarrassing me in front of Noona. Namcat, however, didn't feel the slightest bit threatened by my stare.
"And what the hell are you doin'? You wanna order me around like some errand boy, you better be feedin' me while you do it. I'll play along, since you're a human who can actually talk, but who do you take me for, some sucker?"
Faced with Namcat staring me down, looking ready to throw another Nyangnyang Punch at any second, I shut my mouth. And I was reminded, once again, that my ability wasn't about dominating animals. It was about talking to them.
Fair enough. If somebody told me to run myself ragged with nothing in return, I'd be pissed too.
Putting myself properly in his shoes, I snatched the sausage poking out of Yeongji's pocket.
"Aaah! My sausage!"
"I'll buy you something tastier next time."
"Take this one too, and buy me two!"
Unable to resist the promise of something tastier, Yeongji foisted the sausage from her other pocket onto me as well. I stared at her in disbelief for a moment, then immediately peeled one and held it out to Namcat. Chomp, chomp, chomp—the sausage, freed of its wrapper and offered up, vanished into Namcat's mouth in a flash. Having polished it off with a few more chomps, he settled onto his belly as if to say this was plenty, dropping into what people called the loaf.
"Waaah! Boss-Unnie's-Boyfriend-Oppa! Can I pet Namcat?"
"Huh? You haven't petted him?"
"He comes when I call and he eats when I give him treats, but he wouldn't let me pet hiiim."
The way she wiggled her fingers, desperate to touch him even once, was incredibly cute.
"Namcat. Mind if she pets you a little? She won't hurt you."
"...Fine."
Maybe because he'd already gotten a fair amount out of Yeongji, Namcat thought it over for a moment and then allowed it. I looked at her at once and nodded. Catching what the nod meant, Yeongji set both hands on him and started petting like mad. The dopey hee-hee-hee of her laugh made it perfectly clear just how happy she was.
"Our Yeongji, you like it that much?"
"I love it so much!"
At Noona's question, Yeongji nodded with a face that looked ready to ascend to heaven on the spot.
"O-okay, th-that's enough...! N-not there!"
Perhaps because she had been petting him so vigorously, in every single spot, Namcat started to resist. Every spot—and far too every spot.
"Yeongji, that's enough."
"Hnnngh."
"Namcat says he doesn't like it. You wouldn't like it if someone grabbed your belly, right? Namcat's the same. You can't just pet him all over like that."
At my words, Yeongji let him go with her face full of disappointment. Freed from her arms, Namcat quietly edged away from her. If her hands had been smeared with fluorescent paint, he would unquestionably have been a cat glowing all the way down to his peanuts, so I could understand the reaction.
"But it really does work, huh? Doesn't this mean we've got a shot?"
"Yeah. I think so too. Still, just in case, I should run a few more experiments."
He'd gone along with things like moving around and fetching, but I needed to test more than that.
"Then should we keep him here for a while? We can't bring him inside, since it's a cafe, but... out here should be fine."
"Let's keep him! Let's keep him! Let's keep him!"
At Noona's question, Yeongji shot her hand up over and over and bounced in place.
Has she been possessed by the ghost of someone who died without ever getting to raise a cat?
Looking at Yeongji, who had at some point grabbed me by the collar and was shaking me back and forth, I had no choice but to nod. And quite apart from her intentions, Namcat's training proceeded very smoothly.
"Paw!"
"Mrah."
I really don't get why she likes cats that much.
I shook my head at Yeongji, crouched right in front of the cafe's back door. After the few days we'd spent training Namcat, I couldn't understand her—how, the moment there were no customers, she would without fail fling the back door open and play with him.
Well... playing with a well-trained cat is pretty fun, I'll give her that.
Of course, it wasn't that I couldn't understand it at all. He wasn't even a dog. He was one of those dog-cats who did exactly what you told him, so there was a real pleasure in playing with him. A cat who followed, perfectly, the kinds of commands well-trained dogs did—"paw," "sit," "down," "play dead." It would be strange if that weren't fun.
"Play dead!"
"Mraaaaooow..."
Letting out a long yowl, slowly toppling onto the floor, and dropping his head with a soft tok, Namcat was a sight and a half.
Granted, I was the one who trained him. But still.
"Watching Yeongji again, are you?"
And as I stood there watching the two of them, Noona came over with a cup of coffee and a slice of cake.
"Honestly, looking at them, it's cute."
"...You do know Yeongji's my cousin, right?"
"...?"
"I-I haven't watched any dramas with a-affairs in them!"
I was briefly thrown by Noona's strangely startled reaction, but the buzzing of my phone left me no choice but to let it go.
"Oh, Mother's calling!"
"Why are you so glad about it?"
"J-just answer the phone! Mother's going to be waiting!"
At Noona's urging, I had no choice but to take Mom's call.
"Son~ I'm out front of your company. Mind stepping out for a minute?"
"Uh...?"
At the sound of Mom's voice coming through the speaker, I went blank for a moment.
Come to think of it, I'd never actually told Mom I'd quit my job.