A Roadblock
"Did your mom's friend leave?"
"Yeah. The hack said she had to file an actual article before she started writing a novel, and off she went."
Noona let out a soft puff of laughter and cleared away what the woman had left behind, a cup with a little coffee still sitting in the bottom.
"Noona. So why has Yeongji been moping like that?"
I watched her a moment as she wiped the beads of water that had gathered on the cup and run down its side, then asked about the thing that had been nagging at me since morning. It was Yeongji. From the moment the woman had come into the cafe for the interview, Yeongji had been draped over the counter like someone had let all the air out of her. On any ordinary day she would have been waving both hands in a bright, frantic blur of a greeting. Instead she was slumped across the counter.
Still.
"Ah, that..."
As if she'd only just remembered, Noona breathed out a small sigh and sat down.
And then I understood why Yeongji was so down.
"The landlord told us we can't run a pet cafe here. Says he doesn't even like animals, and he doesn't want complaints coming in because of them."
"Ah..."
So that was it. The landlord had shut the pet cafe down before it could start, and Yeongji was miserable over it. The more I thought about it, though, the less it seemed like a real problem.
"Honestly, this might be for the best."
"For the best?"
"I was already thinking this place might be a little tight. A pet cafe's going to need a decent number of animals, and those animals need room to run. This works out. Let's use it as a chance to find somewhere else."
"Oppaaaa! So we are doing the pet cafe?!"
She must have been eavesdropping, because Yeongji came barreling over, her feet hammering the floor in the frantic patter of a cat or a toy dog at a dead sprint.
"Uh... well, as long as nothing major comes up, we should be able to."
"Waaaaah!"
Yeongji threw both arms overhead in a full-bodied cheer, then took off for the cafe's back door.
No question what she was after. She was going to go play with Namcat.
"But... are you really going to do it that way?"
"Yeah. I think it's better. The more space the cafe has, the more people we can take. Same goes for the animals."
"That part's true, but... what about the money? Even if we clear this place out, we don't have enough to open a cafe on that scale."
Noona looked genuinely worried, and she had reason to be. Saying we'd take a bigger space was the same as saying we'd pour in that much more money. It was obvious enough that a cafe roomy enough to hold a few hundred people in comfort would cost far more than one so cramped a single employee could barely find a chair to sit in.
For me, though, it wasn't much of a problem.
"Look at this."
I held my phone out and told her to look at the screen. What was up on it was a webpage, and the text there was very simple.
"Gorani Financial Group, massive startup loans for superpower holders?"
"Yeah. Gorani Financial is lending to superpower holders. And only to High Rank and above, at that. The minimum alone is the kind of number that makes your voice crack."
Gorani Financial Group, one of the country's giant financial groups, was pitching it as a new line of business: enormous loan products reserved for superpower holders of High Rank and up. A rank measured the level of the ability, sure, but the higher that rank climbed, the easier it was to make serious money. High-rank holders practically all ran businesses of their own, and that was exactly the opening the bank had its eye on. The principal was as good as guaranteed to come back, and lending huge sums meant collecting equally huge interest, so they were going after high-rank holders on purpose.
"You're saying we take out a loan and open the cafe with it?"
"Yeah. A really big one. If there's no suitable property on the market, I'm even thinking of building it ourselves."
Noona kept looking at me like she was still worried. Hearing that I meant to take on debt just to open a cafe, of course she was.
"What if we go under...?"
"There's no reason we would. You know it's actually harder for a high-rank holder to end up looking like a beggar."
Not a single high-rank superpower holder who had gone into business had ever gone completely bust. Not unless the business had nothing to do with their own ability, anyway. Noona knew that. She still wore a worried look, but she had no choice but to nod.
There was an old saying that a scarlet skirt drew a crowd all by itself, and this was no different. Once superpower holders opened a business tied to their own ability, people flocking in was practically a foregone conclusion. The way you'd pay a little extra to eat something that actually tasted good, there was that much value in it.
"And it won't just be a cafe. It's a pet cafe, so even more people will come the way they'd visit a zoo. With Yeongji around, the coffee will be good too, so some of them might show up just for that."
The coffee Yeongji brewed was good enough that you could have believed a superpower holder made it. Judging by the fact that she couldn't even get the water right on something like instant coffee mix, she wasn't one. But still.
Either way, I'd made a strong enough case that even a massive loan couldn't sink us, and most of the worry had lifted off Noona. What she had left was something else entirely.
"Still, nothing happens until the precision evaluation decides your rank. Do you really think you'll get High Rank or above, the way you're expecting?"
She was worried about the rank I'd come out of the precision evaluation with. If I didn't land High Rank or higher, everything we'd just talked about would be wiped back to a blank page.
I wasn't worried. The odds of my ability failing to rate High Rank or above were, for all practical purposes, zero.
"A superpower that can translate a language you've never studied is already Supreme Rank. So what rank do you give an ability that lets you talk to animals, creatures that can't learn a language in the first place?"
"Ah..."
One light example was all it took. Noona accepted it at once and nodded, and only then did the last of the worry leave her face. She'd been afraid we might fail. Once she knew failure wasn't really on the table, she had nothing left to worry about.
"So stop worrying, and let's decide where we're going to put the cafe. Isn't that the more productive thing to do?"
At that, Noona let out a short laugh and nodded.
I flipped open the folder phone I'd had shut and launched the map app, and the two of us started picking the city apart, place by place. We began by looking for a property we could use as a cafe, but that turned into a search for land almost at once. A cafe on the scale I wanted either wasn't on the market, or it was, at a price that was frankly absurd.
"What about out toward Gijang? I think it could work, in its own way. They're in a frenzy developing it these days. They're putting in a tourist complex, and a theme park went up too."
"Oh... that could be good. Prices have been climbing a bit lately, but if we stay a little off from the middle of it, it still won't cost what a downtown lot does. And we could buy a decent stretch of land and actually use it."
"Then we'll need to look at land, and track down a construction company too?"
"We'll have to. Think we could ask Dad to handle that part?"
"Dad? Well... if it's Dad..."
Noona went along with it.
Her father was retired now and taking it easy, but until his mandatory retirement he'd been a civil servant, and not in just any post. He'd spent a long time on the side that handled construction-related complaints. He knew plenty of people in the building trade, and he knew the procedures inside and out. That was Noona's father.
This was exactly the moment to play the connections card.
He was a daughter-doting dad among daughter-doting dads, so a single request from Noona would get the whole thing handled in a flash. He was already retired, but connections like his didn't just vanish.
"He's been whining at me about being bored lately and wearing me out, so this is perfect. I'll just tell him to make himself useful to his daughter for once."
"Haha..."
The way she handled her father seemed a little harsh, but she had her reasons. Ever since he retired he'd been interrupting our dates now and then, so I let it go with a light laugh.
"Then you just keep a casual eye on land for me. We can't buy right away anyway, so a shortlist is enough. Size, price, location. That's all I need."
"Me? Mmm... all right."
Noona nodded with the look of someone wondering whether she could really pull it off. She wasn't entirely without confidence, though. She pressed her lips tight and steadied herself. It wasn't a final decision she was being asked for, and settling on a handful of candidates was something she could do without the weight of it crushing her.
"But... if I'm looking at the land, and we leave the construction to Dad... what are you going to do?"
She'd been pumping herself up on her own when she suddenly tilted her head, as if something felt off, and landed on one pointed observation. She'd gotten the distinct sense that everything was being dumped on her.
I had no intention of dumping everything on her, obviously, so I held both hands out like a man pleading innocent.
"I've got things to do too. I have to get the loan, and I have to grow MyTube. No matter how big we make the pet cafe, if we don't promote it we'll be swatting flies in an empty room, right? I need to grind on MyTube and use it to get the word out."
Noona stared at me, wide-eyed and unblinking. It was the look of someone checking whether I actually meant it.
"And I have to prepare for the precision evaluation. No matter how good my ability is, I still need to show I can apply it, at least to some degree."
"After the precision evaluation, you have to help too. Got it?"
"Of course. You think I'd just leave you to suffer on your own?"
"When I came to your studio, said it was filthy, and started cleaning, you didn't help at all. You just lay on the bed and watched."
"Haha... haah..."
I quietly slid my eyes away from hers.
Even so, honestly, cleaning was kind of a pain... It wasn't like leaving it a few more days was going to cause a problem...
Noona looked at me and let out a small sigh.
The sigh slipped right into my ear and I flinched, but I didn't want a lecture.
Answer the phooooone—
The phooone—
Pick uuup—
And then, for me, a lifeline. No. A ringtone, ringing out through the cafe.