Our House!
"Nabi! Unni's heading off to work!"
"Yeah. Have a good one."
I gave a little wave—not with a front paw this time, but with a human hand I'd already grown used to.
The Animal Farm episode we'd filmed a little while back still needed quite a bit of time before it would actually air on television. That was just how broadcasting worked. Rolling cameras didn't mean the footage went straight into living rooms the same day.
The hours we'd spent tumbling around the shoot location alone had easily stretched past several dozen. Putting that entire mountain of footage on TV was physically impossible. Eventually the producers would have to hole up in the editing bay, clutching their heads while they snipped and sliced, checking for anything that might trip the broadcast censors or any unexpected incidents that had slipped into the takes. All told, the cutting and polishing alone would eat up a solid week.
And that gap was exactly why Yuyeon had to scrape together some kind of income in the meantime. Fortunately, her information network was sharp enough that she found another part-time gig almost immediately. It wasn't that infamous parcel-loading job she'd fled on day one like an escaped convict. This time she'd landed something a little easier on the body—a short-term public-works position, something funded by a government budget. A public job, roughly. As someone who'd gone straight from college graduation into a regular company without so much as a breather, that whole world was a mystery to me. At least it wasn't a full eight-hour shift; it was a light part-time arrangement that only required four.
"Hmm..."
I padded quietly over and pressed my nose to the window glass, watching Yuyeon's retreating figure head out of the villa building far below.
"Ah—Nabi~!"
As if on cue, Yuyeon glanced back just as she cleared the building, spotted me plastered against the window, and broke into a huge smile, waving with wild enthusiasm.
"Be careful out there~"
I waved my small hand back at her through the glass. Then her figure slipped out of sight.
I bolted out of Yuyeon's place. Across the hallway I went—straight into the unit next door. My real home. The one that had belonged to me when I was still an ordinary human man. Luckily, even in cat-beast form I wasn't so tiny that I couldn't stretch up on my toes, punch in the familiar door-code, and slip inside.
Beep-beep. Click.
The apartment was empty. Of course it was. I hadn't set foot in here under my own power once since the absurd day I'd turned into a cat.
I hurried through the rooms and started putting things in order. The silver lining was that I'd always styled myself a minimalist and kept almost nothing in the place, so there wasn't much to tidy. A little dusting, and tossing the expired food rotting in the corners of the fridge—that was about it.
Then my eyes snagged on something in the corner of the bed.
"My phone!"
I stared at the smartphone sitting alone on the mattress, eyes shining with something dangerously close to tears. God, how I'd missed this lump of machinery.
The whole time I'd been freeloading at Yuyeon's, I hadn't even gotten a glimpse of a phone. My entire cultural life had consisted of blankly watching her game at her monitor from behind. Why? Because I'd been a cat who couldn't talk.
Sure, once I'd unlocked the beast-human form my range of motion had opened up and I'd been able to breathe a little—but handling a smartphone registered in my own name was on a completely different level. By some miracle it had been left plugged into the charger, so the battery was sitting pretty at a full one hundred percent.
"Hngh..."
I sniffled and woke the screen, but for someone who'd been missing for weeks, the incoming messages were suspiciously sparse. Well. That tracked.
The company I'd been working at had almost certainly processed my resignation by now... and my parents had never existed in this world to begin with. There was no one left to worry about the absence of the human called me.
I turned the phone over in my hands.
Still, having a living smartphone meant I wouldn't hit any snags with identity verification—the beating heart of Korea's digital society. With nothing but a phone and a fingerprint, you could handle every payment and financial task this country threw at you.
I opened the banking app and checked my balance right away.
Thanks to the stocks and funds I'd scattered around during my working years, well over a hundred million won was sleeping quietly in the accounts. I didn't bother selling any of the stocks to pull cash out. The money was rolling along just fine on the market's currents whether I was there or not.
The monthly rent, though—that I still had to pay, on time, every month.
This cramped studio was the last remaining bastion proving, however indirectly, that I had once existed in this world as a man and not a cat-beast. It was my only shelter. Watching cold hard cash vanish every month stung, but if I thought of it as being covered by the gains on my rising stocks, it sat a little easier.
A brief temptation flickered through me, but Yuyeon and I weren't close enough yet to share every secret. I shelved that choice for now. More importantly, if assets under my name started moving—or if the rent went unpaid and the room got cleared out—the world would start noticing that I had disappeared. And I couldn't exactly text the landlord a one-line notice terminating the lease. Real-estate contracts were the kind of thing adults handled face-to-face, with paperwork.
So what, then—walk outside looking like this? Looking like a lost little kid who'd wandered out of the house? I'd be lucky if some passerby didn't immediately call the police or child services. Right now, the only human on earth who knew what I really was... was Yuyeon.
Meeting people was out of the question with cat ears and a tail attached. A beanie and stuffing the tail down my pants might get me halfway there, but still...
I topped up the auto-pay account for the rent with a comfortable cushion of spare cash. Then I sprawled out on the bed and took a genuine rest for the first time in what felt like forever. I binge-watched the YouTube videos I'd fallen behind on and scrolled through the hot posts on my favorite internet communities. It was a perfect reenactment of the little daily routines I'd kept when I was fully human.
Remembering how I'd nearly died of boredom as a cat in Yuyeon's apartment, I almost teared up.
Part of me wanted to come clean the second she got home—Actually, I'm the guy who lived next door!—but there was zero chance she'd take a story that ridiculous at face value. And when I quietly replayed all the unfiltered, raw versions of herself she'd shown me... maybe it was better for both my mental health and her social dignity if she just kept thinking of me as a little girl.
From rolling around the house without washing up to every undignified moment where she'd set human dignity gently aside—I'd witnessed all of it through a cat's eyes.
"Haaah...!"
But happy hours never last forever. Yuyeon would be back soon.
I scurried out of my place and slipped back into hers. I'd known Yuyeon's door code from day one. She'd carried me around the villa in her arms looking for my owner, and I'd memorized the numbers with both eyes wide open while she punched them in.
Beep!
I opened the door and stepped inside. My second home, I supposed I should call it now.
Back when Yuyeon first moved in next door, I never could have predicted any of this. What contact would a grown man like me even have with a twenty-year-old? In this day and age, hitting on a younger woman got you labeled a creep. So aside from the occasional nod in the hallway, we'd had nothing to do with each other.
Things were different now. This wasn't "contact" anymore. It was closer to family. That something like this could happen at all... Living long enough really did bring days you never saw coming.
Beep!
The door opened, and there was Yuyeon.
"Nabi! Unni's home!"
"You're back?"
I scampered over. Yuyeon ruffled my hair as she spoke.
"And I bought us something to eat!"
"Ooh...!"
My eyes lit up. I peered into the plastic bag in her hand.
Samgyeopsal. Pork belly!
I swallowed hard. Foods cats weren't supposed to eat meant nothing to me. Last time I'd stolen some of Yuyeon's chocolate and nothing bad had happened. I was a beast-human, so I'd decided I had the same palate as a regular person. Otherwise the chocolate wouldn't have gone down fine.
"It's a party!"
"Yay!"
And just like that, Yuyeon and I threw ourselves a pork-belly feast.