Chapter 10: Going Out
Chapter 10: Going Out
A single night of sweet dreams doesn't magically turn your daily life upside down the next morning.
"Cadet Han Ye-ji, your outing pass has been verified."
"Thank you!"
The stress and fatigue, though—those got wiped completely clean. Normally she'd be nodding off through the brutal three-hit combo of physical training, meals, and theory lectures, racking up demerits left and right. Today was different.
Her eyes were wide open, alert, locked on a lecture about the duties of an Incarnation. At least half the other Incarnations were swaying their heads, losing the fight against sleep. She'd dumped every bit of pent-up lust, stress, and exhaustion back in that dream, and now she didn't need an instructor cutting her slack to keep her record spotless.
A few of the Incarnations who shared her theory class were burning with jealousy. The girl who used to doze off right alongside them now sat there perfectly composed. They'd jumped to the obvious conclusion: her Constellation must've already granted her some Authority for mental focus. Most Constellations only handed out Authorities tied to combat strength and special skills. Nobody went around handing out powers this early for something as mundane as a Special Incarnation Act lecture. Jealousy born from that simple logic. Put crudely, if an Incarnation could barely scrape by on stamina and legal studies and looked pathetic everywhere else, any further investment was just throwing points away.
[Lethargic Nightmare is curious about your schedule.]
"Ah, yes. Finally seeing my little brother's face after so long, eating some home-cooked food... and playing some games. Heh."
At the pier—a facility every bit as massive as the Academy itself out on the island—Han Ye-ji murmured her answer into the air. Nobody stared at her like she'd lost her mind. Half the people on the pier were doing the exact same thing.
[Lethargic Nightmare observes the collective murmuring and thinks it looks like a mental hospital.]
"Oh, you think so? Well, yeah, everyone really does look like they're talking to themselves... I heard there were con artists who used that to pretend they were Incarnations. After that, Constellations started sending messages to people near their Incarnation too, not just to the Incarnation herself."
I'd meant it as a joke, but her reply was genuinely news to me. A world where Constellations were real, where their Authorities and monsters from other dimensions existed, and yet there was still some lunatic with the guts to impersonate a god. Impressive. As we chatted about everything except what had happened in the dream, a colossal cruise ship came into view in the distance. A luxury liner the size of a small building. One of four vessels granted access to the Academy, each serving one of the four continents—East, West, South, North. From the captain to the crew to the serving staff, every soul aboard was an Incarnation. A floating fortress roaming the inland sea. It told you exactly how much this world treasured its Constellations, its Incarnations, and its institutions.
"Your first outing, is it? Hope you have a wonderful time. And please enjoy the amenities inside the ship as well."
"Thank you."
[Lethargic Nightmare advises his Incarnation to rest well.]
Two uniformed Incarnations scanned her outing pass with an odd-looking device. They were just as strict about people leaving as they were about people coming in. Clang, clang. Han Ye-ji's footsteps fell lightly across the metal gangway. The ship was so enormous the gangway connecting it to the boarding platform was practically a pedestrian overpass. Besides the students on leave, hundreds of others crossed it—instructors, government officials. Women in suits clutching briefcases. Clusters of men and women still wearing instructor uniforms as they headed off-duty. Men in tight trousers and dress shoes walking with crisp click-clack steps. Female cadets with their gazes locked onto those men, mouths slightly agape.
After a solid month of seeing nothing but textbooks and track drills, it felt like I was finally catching a glimpse of how ordinary people lived. Ever since my Incarnation started grinding away at the Academy, I hadn't had much appetite for sightseeing the wider world, so I'd mostly kept the camera panned around campus. I'd ridden this cruise ship once before on the way to the Academy, but a single voyage wasn't nearly enough to see it all. The thing was so huge there was a rumor that a cadet who graduated in the standard one-year track would still leave without seeing half of it. Glamorous lights bathed the passing crowds, and there were supposed to be beautiful sculptures and indoor fountains—but beauty didn't fill an empty stomach. Han Ye-ji had been gearing up for this outing since the crack of dawn, then got bogged down in pass inspections and multiple pier-side security checks, leaving her no time for breakfast. Who's going to stop and admire statues and water features on an empty stomach? Her feet carried her straight toward food.
The ship was lavishly decorated, but Han Ye-ji, like a proper woman of this world, paid zero attention to art or aesthetics. She simply headed for the cadet café she'd spotted on her last trip. Either a lot of people had the same idea or the ship was just that packed, because the path there was thick with bodies.
Soda and a handmade burger. She clutched the quick meal in one hand and stared intently at her smartphone with the other. I zoomed my mouse in as far as it would go. Panning, zooming, rotating the camera angle—all with a single mouse—was a hassle, but after three straight months of fumbling with it I'd gotten fairly adept. Still, it was absurd that my only window into the world's information was peeping at other people's smartphones and computer screens. I'd have to look into whether there was some kind of internet access service for Constellations.
Burger in her left hand, phone in her right. Whether she was trying to kill time during the long voyage or just catching up on internet content she'd missed in the dorms, Han Ye-ji was glued to her screen. Then, all of a sudden, she darted a furtive glance around.
'Ugh, what the fuck...'
Curious what was going on, I synced my viewing angle with hers and zoomed in on the phone. A hideous sight swelled across the screen. A man's briefs, blown up bigger than my face on a TV.
'Looks like total ass, seriously...'
A wave of revulsion hit me as I stared at the 19+ magazine cover featuring a male Incarnation in a swimsuit. I was reminded of the female wanderers from my past life who'd get disgusted by racy pinup calendars. Did those women feel the same way I did about slingshot bikinis and microkinis? Whatever humor site had posted this as clickbait, Han Ye-ji's face went beet red as she frantically scrolled to the next post. She wasn't browsing outright porn, at least—the next one was about some variety show I'd never heard of.
Somehow, I had a feeling there'd be swimsuits in someone's nightmare tonight.
※
I stayed invisible, didn't touch the chat, and quietly spied on Han Ye-ji's internet habits as the ship sailed smoothly toward the Eastern Continent. Soon she'd dock, get her pass checked again, and board a shuttle bus that would take her near her home—all for free with that same pass. Through it all, Han Ye-ji never put her phone down, like she was binging months of missed screen time in a single marathon. Between the studying, the training, and the unfamiliar dorm life, she'd never had the cunning to sneak in much phone time before.
The humor site she scrolled through seemed to mix political screeds and news articles in with the jokes. The posts she passed on the ride home told me more about the world than all the news broadcasts I'd secretly peeped at these past months. Back at the start, I'd been perfectly content with a single clean room. But time wore on, and watching all the trappings of modern civilization parade right in front of me was making me greedier.
Especially after I caught a glimpse of something Han Ye-ji skimmed right past: radical Machismo activists arguing, in total earnest, that "boxer briefs are a female-centric garment designed to facilitate rape, while briefs are a female-centric garment designed for sexual commodification." Honestly, I desperately wanted to read what kind of brain-dead logic backed that up, but she clearly thought it wasn't worth a second of her time. She saw the headline, glanced at the first sentence while it loaded, and immediately flipped to the next post. I never got to read the rest.
The question gnawed at me the whole way to her house, lingering even as she waited for her little brother. Boxers, a loose garment for rape? Briefs, a tight garment for sexual commodification? Did that mean the Radical Machismo men waving the banner of male supremacy were out there staging no-underwear protests?
An image surfaced from my past life—topless Russian beauties at a demonstration—before morphing instantly into a crowd of muscular men marching bottomless. Just picturing guys letting it all hang out in public put me in an inexplicably foul mood. But what could I do? Human curiosity doesn't take orders. I could shout get out of my head! all I wanted; the thought kept stampeding right back in.
"Noona! You're home—you should've called!"
"Didn't you see my text? I told you I was on leave today. Pick what you want for dinner delivery."
"We're not going out to eat?"
As I wrestled those rampaging elephants out of my skull, Han Ye-ji's brother walked through the door in his school uniform. He looked far more animated than the last time I'd seen him. Simply being family to an Incarnation entitled him to medicine imbued with a Constellation's Authority. This world really did pamper its Incarnations and everyone connected to them. The sallow face, the sluggish movements, the hunched shoulders of that gloomy schoolboy were gone. In his place stood a bright, energetic young man who was the spitting image of his sister.
"So, how's the Academy?"
"First six months are just grinding physical conditioning until you drop. And the law studies make me feel like my head's going to explode."
"Well, noona, your head was never exactly the study type, was it?"
"You little punk. You want to die?"
I'd half-considered doing a little neighborhood sightseeing, but watching the two of them squabble over chicken legs after ordering delivery left me in a strange, restless mood. Once I'd earned a lot more points, could I manifest an avatar and experience modern civilization firsthand? A distant prospect, maybe.