A Lucky Day (1)
"That's the last of them."
We finished planting the eighth seedling she'd brought home.
"What kind of crop is this, anyway?"
"Jewel Star."
…Never heard of it.
This place had carrots, cabbages, pumpkins — crops you'd find on Earth — but of course it also had plants from this world I'd never seen in my life.
An old, still-tender memory stirred awake.
"Dongha~ here, take this. I bought fire-chicken noodles, but you said you can't handle spicy food, right? So I thought about it, and I figured this would be perfect. It's called Skok."
Dorothy had come back from the market and held out a round little fruit.
"…Did you coat this in rat poison? Or put an exploding spell on it?"
"…Excuse me? What are you talking about."
"There's no way you'd ever give me a present."
Dorothy looked genuinely flustered. The hand offering the fruit went limp and dropped. Her nail tips, dyed the same violet as her hair, fidgeted over the fruit with nowhere to go.
"…Baek Dongha. That's a bit much, is it not? Dorothy spent a good while picking that out for you. Even when I asked her for it, she insisted it had to go to you and would not give it up…"
"…It's fine, Yuria… Forget it, Dongha. I'm sorry. I'll just eat it myself…"
"…Sorry. For doubting you. You went out of your way to pick it out and everything… I'll enjoy it."
Had she finally grown up? Or had she belatedly figured out that a Luggage Porter was actually worth something?
Whatever it was, suspecting people was an ugly habit. After apologizing, I took a bite.
Sorry for all those times I hoped you'd drink gramoxone and drop dead. From now on, I'll slowly start opening up to—
Wait. What the fuck!?
"Hack! Kack! Ptoo! Uegh! You goddamn purple bitchhhhh! Hack… why the hell is this so spicy! What did you feed me… ugh!"
"Kyahahahaha! Success! It's a success!"
"Kyarr! Oh that's too funny! Look at his eyes, they've gone all red!"
"Puhaha! That burning face is a masterpiece. Dorothy, hurry and seal his mouth with magic! Don't let him spit the fruit out!"
"Yes! Incanting right now!"
"Get lost! Hack, get lost! You pieces of trash!"
A low hum of magic.
"Mmph! Mmph-mmph!"
With my mouth clamped shut, the food and the curses that should have come pouring out had nowhere to go. Hatred leaked down my face instead, in tears and snot.
You little shit of a woman—!
Stab. Stab.
"Wh-what are you doing! You're going to hurt the seedlings!"
Ah. Whoops.
I could still feel that sharp, tingling heat ghosting over my tongue. Luckily, the wild swing of my hands hadn't wrecked the Demon King's precious, ambition-laden crops.
"…Hey. This isn't a tree that grows insanely spicy fruit, is it?"
"Whaat? There's no way I'd plant something that nasty. I hate spicy food too. Kimchi-level heat is about right."
The kimchi the Demon King pickled was mild, leaning sweet more than hot, and somehow addictively good. Then again, it wasn't as if we had a wide variety of side dishes to be picky about…
One way or another, the Demon King and I had a lot of common ground. If you set aside the way she got cheap during games, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better roommate — or a better friend.
"We could live together for the rest of our lives, huh."
"…..!"
"…What?"
"Ah, nothing."
…What was that. Her cheeks had gone pink, somehow. Maybe it was just the miniature sun hanging right overhead.
"So what does Jewel Star taste like?"
"Kihihit. Curious, are you? Want to know?"
"Yeah."
"Hmmm, no. Nope. Not enough longing. Learning about Jewel Star with that little effort would be greedy, don't you think?"
"Yeah? That's fine, then. You don't have to tell me."
"…What?"
"I'll just eat it when it ripens."
"…."
"…"
"………."
"Okay, I want to know. About Jewel Star."
"Can't be helped, I guess. You're the type who can't stand not knowing, aren't you? Jewel Star is a round little fruit — sweet, but with a sourness that pops and fizzes on your tongue."
She had the engine of her explanation running now.
"…and so it grows well in hot, humid environments…"
After that, we spent a good long while discussing the Demon King's Jewel Star cultivation plans and the crop's bright future. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that she had a bit of an infodumper streak.
Still…
She'd gone so long without anyone to talk to. That was probably why.
Once I thought of it that way, I could always wait her out in silence, no matter how long she went on. And honestly, watching the Demon King flap her hands with her cheeks all flushed was so cute it never really got boring.
According to her, the first Jewel Star fruit would, by some strange coincidence, ripen right around the one-year mark I'd promised her.
"The funniest part is that ten little berries grow in a cluster, and one of them is so, so sour your whole mouth starts trembling!"
Yeah, you'll be eating that one.
It was oddly similar to those sour candies they sold on Earth — Ice Sour. Practically designed for penalty games.
"You just thought 'yeah, you'll be eating that one,' didn't you? Didn't you?"
"No way."
Yes way.
"Kihihit."
She was looking at me with a wicked little grin. She had the exact face of one of Germ Man's minions, huddled up hatching a scheme to jump Anpanman.
"…Why are you smiling like a villain? Something good happen?"
"Ohohoh. Today's me is invincible, you see."
"Why?"
"Alright! If you don't throw, you lose! Rock, paper—"
She challenged me to rock-paper-scissors out of nowhere. Why was she volunteering for a suicide run? She must have eaten the thunderbird steak wrong last night.
"Paper."
"Paper!"
?
"Kihihihit! I win! Get wrecked!"
"Don't say that. I'm begging you."
I lost.
That made two. Once during the lottery rock-paper-scissors, and now this.
"Heheh. See! I told you! The me right now doesn't feel like I could lose to anyone!"
Isn't that, like, always true?
"Ohohoh. I should've bet my entire fortune."
"You shouldn't try to coast through life like that. So? Why the sudden lucky streak?"
Whenever this perpetually unlucky girl caught a break, something awful always followed. Last time she'd won at rock-paper-scissors too — but looking at how the draw actually turned out, it might as well have been her loss.
A glint flashed in her eyes.
"If you're curious, I'll show you. Follow me."
She reeled me in like a seasoned angler who'd been waiting for the bite, winding the reel with practiced ease.
Who's getting hooked here.
THIS IS A SNARE.
STEP HERE AND GET ABSOLUTELY WRECKED.
A sign might as well have been standing there, lettered that bluntly.
If I followed her now, I'd be walking onto a stage she'd set down to the last prop, for a match stacked against me. However much of a bungler the Demon King could be, she wouldn't telegraph a lure this hard unless she had something prepared. Water torture, maybe.
Best friend or not, I was neither a charity nor Rebecca — whose intellect sat one thin notch above a bagworm's. I had no intention of walking into a trap that obvious.
The correct play here was to talk my way out by bringing up work.
"Nah. I haven't watered the cabbages yet. And the carrots…"
"I did all that before you woke up."
"Little Farm. The produce show is only a few days away…"
"I already picked the crops. The nicest-looking ones."
"The sewing…"
"Finished."
"The floors…"
"You scrubbed them pretty well yesterday. I checked when I mopped them again at dawn."
…
She'd already locked down every variable.
It even occurred to me that planting the Jewel Star might have been part of the buildup.
"…"
So the last stop on this line was inside the Demon King's trap, then.
I didn't know the details, but something had clearly shifted in her luck.
Fine. The Demon King, who always ate loss after loss on nothing but bad luck, had gone and laid out a whole feast… I'd just take the hit this time.
"Alright. Let's go see. This reason you've gotten lucky."
"Mm. Follow me."
She took my hand and led me to the warehouse.
Been a while since I'd been in here.
While the Demon King went to fetch whatever it was, I occupied myself poking at a robot that fired death-lasers from its eyeballs if you pressed its back.
It looked like junk, but this thing was a Pluto-class ancient weapon — the one that had incinerated every last piece of the Demon King's clothing. If this thing and Dorothy threw down, Dorothy would lose.
"This is it."
I turned around to find the Demon King holding out a little box.
"…A secret box?"
"No! You try making something that nasty one more time, see what happens."
A fond little current of electricity ran through her fingertips. Afraid of looking like a counter-revolutionary, I set the murder-robot down at once and put both hands up in surrender. Why was a kid like her so violent.
"Kihihit. So actually, I've been drawing from this every morning."
"Drawing what?"
"Ohohoh! Today's fortune!"
She'd seen a horoscope spread by star sign on the back of a magazine, thought it looked fun, and built a box that would tell you your fortune for the day.
There were ten kinds of fortune in all. The Demon King had made this box and drawn from it every single morning since long before I arrived — and in all that time, she had never once pulled the best result, Great Fortune. A truly staggering run of bad luck.
"And then this morning, Great Fortune just popped right out!"
Grinning so wide her mouth could barely hold it, the Demon King pulled a paper slip from her clothes. Great Fortune — Fortune is greatly on your side — already her handwriting was crooked on a good day, and putting it in classical characters gave the whole thing the distinct air of an undecipherable ancient hieroglyph.
"You'd better brace yourself today! Forehead! Fingers! Butt! I'm paying back every last bit of pent-up resentment."
…
Every time she lost at the hitting games, she'd clutch her bright-red forehead and go, …sniff, hnkh. I'm not mad, okay? I-it's just a game. I don't hold grudges. And then she'd say that.
Apparently she'd been keeping a ledger this whole time, all for today's revenge. Wow. Petty.
…
I was nervous. Very nervous.
If experience had taught me anything, the Demon King's most confident predictions always ended about the same way.
H-how could this be. Sniff.
N-no…
"…You want to play the hitting game?"
"Obviously. What, were you trying to wriggle out of it like a loach?"
"…You're going to flick gently, right?"
"Hmmm, that's up to me."
Not "up to the person doing the hitting." She made a point of saying it was up to her. With the Great Fortune slip stuck to her forehead, she looked like she had nothing left in the world to fear.
"Kihihit. Then first, this."
"…What's this?"
The Demon King had brought out a deck of playing cards.
"Haven't seen these around."
"…"
"…"
"Y-you don't know? I, uh… cards and stuff."
…I can see right through you, you little—
Why else would this gamer-girl Demon King have never brought out a deck of cards? Every game you played with them had luck baked in. Judgment mattered too, sure, but there was no way it could fill the hole her misfortune left behind.
After a certain string of incidents, she must have decided she had no chance of winning a luck-based game, and left the deck to gather dust.
"…So what are we playing?"
"Hm? Old Maid. What else is there?"
Old Maid?
Talking to her, it seemed the only card game she knew how to play with a deck was Old Maid — or Joker Draw, if you liked. You shuffled the cards, held them, discarded pairs as they came, and whoever was stuck with the Joker at the end lost.
"Kihiit. I always played it by myself. I wanted to try it with two people."
"…How do you play this by yourself?"
"Hmm… like this."
Her one-person, two-role rules went as follows.
1. Split the deck into A and B. Discard every pair from each.
2. Sit in A's seat, hold A's hand, and draw one card from B.
3. If you have a pair, discard it. If not, shuffle the cards, set them face-down on the floor, then sit in B's seat and pick up B's hand.
4. Repeat.
…That's just sad. Genuinely sad.
The Demon King's shut-in energy was off the charts.
A sight like that could make your chest ache — and then.
"Kihihit. Forehead flicks. Forehead flicks. Brace yourself."
Watching her spend the whole morning lovingly assembling my execution scaffold, just to dunk on me… and just like that, the ache evaporated.
"I know the rules. Want to start?"
"Ohoh. You sure about that?"
Tick. Tick.
The Demon King flicked her forehead-flick fingers a couple of times, testing them. The wind pressure alone sent my hair streaming backward. One hit from that and I was on a one-way flight to America.
"Yeah. Turn off your buffs."
"Fine, then. Heheh. Deactivating Titan's Head…"
…
I could see the future without even looking. I almost wouldn't have minded taking that cannonball of a flick, if it meant the Demon King could win a luck game for once. All this time, she'd been…
Ow!
Uuuugh…
Sniff… g-go on, hit me. Don't hold back.
Hoo.
There was no point debating her strength.
It was a probability game, anyway.
Anyway, there was no way I would lose.
Please. Just one round. Let the Demon King — my dearest friend — win just once…
Five minutes later.
"Get over here."
"Time out."
Murder leaked from the Demon King's narrowed eyes as she came at me, forehead-flick fingers cocked and ready. In my retreating hand, reading the room with all the grace of a brick, a single Joker grinned its idiot grin.