They Say Watching a Fire Is That Fun
After a single bite of the spicy stir-fried pork, I finally understood why they'd served that pale, milky noodle dish.
Among the people who'd crossed over from other worlds, there were bound to be some who couldn't handle heat. Of course, there were also people like Helena, who ate it like it was nothing. That just meant Helena was impressive. It didn't mean I was the weird one.
I'd seen people on YouTube calling fried udon made from cup ramen spicy, after all. I probably just had an average tongue. Anyway.
Thanks to that, Helena and I swapped dishes. The pale noodles turned out to be exactly what I'd guessed: ramyeon in ox-bone broth, topped with slices of boiled beef. Nutty, salty, and clean on the palate—it was exactly my kind of food.
Honestly, it felt like seolleongtang with noodles in it, and I was dying to mix rice into the broth too. But I was eating someone else's food. I had to restrain myself. It was a little disappointing that I didn't feel any real sense of fullness, but I'd just count it as more than enough that Helena had fed me at all.
I still felt bad about unilaterally making her my heroine. That was fair. But still—my own movie star, or drama actress, or novel protagonist, had fed me a meal. Was this how a fan felt when the idol they adored spoon-fed them? Or was it more like being fed by a child you'd raised? I'd never experienced either, so I couldn't compare.
Anyway, I was in such a good mood that I figured I wouldn't get angry no matter what Agent Park said now.
Wait. Had I ever gotten angry in the first place?
Anger... how did you even do that?
I'd seen other people fly into rages often enough. Helena herself had lived as the incarnation of vengeance, with rage as her driving force. But when I actually tried to picture myself getting angry, nothing came to mind. If I hit someone, it would hurt. And just shouting at them—would that even make them change?
Hmm. Difficult. Even how I'd gotten angry back when I lived as a human in this world was hazy now. Well, I'd just hope nothing came up that would make me angry. If something did, I'd figure it out then.
With the meal finished, we headed back toward the interrogation room in a refreshed frame of mind.
"Did both of you enjoy your meal?" Agent Park asked.
"Yes. The red stir-fried meat was nicely spicy and sweet, and the white noodle dish was delicious too. The fried meat you shared with us was also quite good, Agent Park. So was the pickled red vegetable that came as a side. What are they called?"
"Jeyuk-bokkeum, seolleongtang noodles, pork cutlet, and kimchi, respectively. I'm glad they suited your palate. How about you, Yeonmin?"
"The seolleongtang noodle broth felt a little empty, which was a shame. It would've been nicer if there were more things to chew. Drinking the broth by itself was tasty, but it felt too thin to eat as a soup. The flavor was good, of course."
"Ah, I see. People usually mix rice into it. They just happened to serve it with noodles here. Next time I treat you, we'll try it with rice."
I'd actually thought people mixed noodles into seolleongtang instead of rice these days. I'd figured maybe other races who couldn't eat rice had made that the new custom. Hearing that wasn't the case was a bit of a relief.
I'd already been feeling robbed that I couldn't eat even a little of those blazing-red dishes—kimchi jjigae, doenjang jjigae, budae jjigae, jeyuk-bokkeum, dakgalbi, gopchang! If the other dishes had changed from what I remembered too, I would've felt even more cheated.
Anyway, we were walking along while I reviewed this world's cooking for Agent Park when I spotted smoke rising in the distance.
Smoke in that other world hadn't been anything particularly unusual. If you cooked over firewood, of course smoke came out of the chimney. No—houses that heated with fire in winter smoked constantly. And factories that were running, too. But in this world, unless you were in an industrial district, was there any reason for smoke?
I tilted my head at the thought. Agent Park noticed where I was looking and sighed at the smoke.
"Ah, it looks like there's a fire over there. It won't spread this far, so you don't need to worry about that... Have you taken an interest in it, by any chance?"
Come on. Interest? ...How was I supposed not to be interested? People always said watching a fire was that much fun. It was only natural.
When you watched flames flicking their tongues until they'd swallowed every last log—didn't it look just like a human life? Burning a fleeting instant as brilliantly as a flame, then fading away—fire and humans were the same that way.
But if I said something like that, Agent Park, being the one involved, would obviously hate it. Helena beside me would feel distant from me too. I knew that. So I spoke from a human point of view.
"With so many tall buildings around, a fire could spread pretty easily, couldn't it? Will it be all right?"
"It'll be fine. In our world, there's an agency that deploys the moment a fire breaks out. In some countries, they even named them after the idea of people who fight fire. That loud siren you hear right now means the firefighters are on their way. They're asking people to clear the road so they can get to the fire quickly."
"Oh..."
I'd already known that, of course. But in that other world, there hadn't really been a professional agency that put fires out. I nodded, thinking, now this is a developed world.
Over there, if a fire started, about all you could do was wait for everything to burn down or pray for rain. If a river was nearby, and the house on fire belonged to someone of some standing, the neighbors might help put it out. Either way, a fire meant the place would be left in ruins.
"If you're curious about how they put out a fire, would you like to go take a look?"
"Oh, would that be all right?"
"It's a sight you wouldn't have seen in your world, Yeonmin, or yours, Helena. I thought this might be a good chance to see it."
"I've often seen flames sweep through a building and burn themselves out," Helena said. "Watching them actually get put out does sound interesting."
Had she noticed I was quite interested? Agent Park had been the one to offer first. Helena looked interested too, which was icing on the cake.
I'd thought "take a look" meant climbing somewhere high to watch from a distance. Instead, Agent Park started tapping at her phone, facing an empty stretch of road. A hologram projected from the phone secured a space, and a white passenger car materialized right there.
Helena and I both dropped our jaws.
Honestly, implanting a phone in your body? Operating phone apps as holograms? I'd imagined things like that. But here they were summoning cars with their phones. Was this even possible with science? Had this world started using actual magic?
The two of us stared in such wonder that Agent Park seemed quite pleased. She grinned and opened the back seat for us.
"You said you came from a world with carriages, didn't you? Think of this as a carriage that runs on a power source other than horses."
"Steam locomotives do move without horses," Helena said. "This feels like a miniaturized version of that."
"Huh? How did you know? The principle is the same, actually. You burn fuel and use the pressure to turn an engine."
Wait. Cars and trains used the same principle? Why was I only learning this now?
Suddenly Agent Park felt like a stranger, and so did Helena. I'd never been particularly interested in cars, sure. But Helena knowing something I didn't made me feel somehow shabby. I was being treated as a goddess, after all. Not that I'd ever thought of myself as a goddess, or put on airs about it. But they say the position makes the person. I'd thought I had at least a little dignity...
And that goddess didn't even know something ordinary people knew? This was embarrassing! I should study some common knowledge later. That way I could also check how much this world had changed.
We climbed into Agent Park's car and headed toward the rising smoke.
Even outside rush hour, traffic in a downtown like this should've been a little congested. Surprisingly, it wasn't. They'd said the population had shrunk. Had that solved traffic jams too? Then again, if you could summon a car with your phone, parking wouldn't be an issue. The world really had gotten better.
And the traffic lights lined up perfectly for us. Before long, we'd even caught up to the fire truck that had been far ahead. Or maybe Agent Park had put her foot down a little. We arrived at the fire scene in less than two minutes.
The firefighters climbing down from the truck were as diverse in species as the people who'd been around the building we'd been held in. A muscular green human who had to be over two meters tall. A lizard-person, smaller than that but still bigger than an ordinary human. Lizardmen were a more common race than I'd thought. There was even a mechanical spider in heat-resistant gear. And mixed in among them, looking oddly out of place, was a single human man. He had a fairly sturdy build, but the others were so huge he looked relatively scrawny.
And among the people gathered in front of the apartment building, the moment the firefighters arrived, a middle-aged woman came running over, pleading.
"Aigoo, Firefighter. I think my kid's still in the house. I don't think they got out."
"Don't worry. We'll get them out. Which floor?"
"The seventh."
The moment I heard that, an exclamation mark popped up in my head.
A child trapped and isolated in the flames. Rescued at the last possible second by a firefighter, inspired by the one who saved them, dreaming a certain dream... Wasn't this an incredibly delicious story?
Just thinking about that delightful development, the corners of my mouth started to lift—I glanced around, then managed my expression. Everyone else was in funeral-home mode. Smiling here wouldn't just get me treated as crazy.
Instead, I extended my thought-form and looked inside the building. If I sent it out in the open, I'd get caught, so I burrowed underground and slid it up along the building walls.
First floor. Empty, of course. Anyone on the first floor would've already gotten out. Second floor. No presence here either. Third. Same. Confirming floor by floor that no one was there, I reached the seventh—and saw a child collapsed on the floor.
The fire hadn't even reached that far. For them to just be lying there when they should've been fleeing for their life... something had clearly gone wrong.
"There's a child collapsed on the floor in unit 704. They're unconscious."
I didn't know how it'd happened, but if I told the firefighters, they'd handle it. These people were professionals, after all.
The firefighters all turned toward me with odd expressions when I suddenly said that. Then they glanced at my restraints and nodded. Wait, what was that supposed to mean?
"Thank you for letting us know. High chance of carbon monoxide poisoning. We'll smash a window and send them straight out—get a drone ready to catch them."
See? They planned it out and handled it themselves. All that was left for me was to watch...
The moment I felt Agent Park's suspicious gaze on me, I thought, uh-oh.
Hmm. Would this get me extra restraints...?