On Strike
These days I was living what, for me, counted as a busy life. Anyone else might have looked at it and thought, That's busy? But for a terminal loner like me, it was an enormous undertaking. I was the sort of person most at ease when I had fused completely with my bed.
Just stepping outside was enough to set my legs trembling, and now I was going all the way to school. Was there a more aggressively social act in the world? Still, I was lucky enough not to have become an outcast. There were two kids I got along with—Jiyu and Yumi, the ones I'd been talking to more than anyone lately.
On school days it was hard to see Bora and Haru, and maybe because of that I ended up talking with those two even more.
Today, too, I ended the livestream and collapsed onto the bed. Lately I never seemed to have any time, and my streaming hours had shrunk. Viewers asked what was going on; when I told them vacation was over, the mood was an understanding yeah, yeah, you can't fight school.
But recently I'd had no energy. No—that wasn't quite right. Maybe it was the rift of a body and a mind that refused to match. My body was perfectly fine. My spirit was in tatters.
In a way, it was only natural. Into the body of a child—an Energizer body that never stopped no matter how many times it ran down—had come the mind of a man in his mid-twenties. The body was a little kid's. The mind was an adult's. Perhaps because of that disharmony, my mind sometimes turned childlike as well. My flesh was wide awake and sleep wouldn't come, and yet my spirit was utterly exhausted.
Of course, none of this had anything to do with liking Rumi. Rumi was always right.
Anyway, I was shuddering under the weight of that disconnect. What would it take to have a mind that fit this body? Even if I told Bora and Haru, I probably wouldn't find a way.
There couldn't be another case like mine. An adult mind inside a child's body—if anyone found out, it was a one-hundred-percent ticket to an underground laboratory.
"Do I have to drink this...?"
"What if you don't? It's good for your body, Hana!"
Haru had brought me a juice that was supposed to be good for my health. She seemed to be thinking of my body's well-being, but there was no helping the fact that it tasted awful. Face scrunched, I had no choice but to drink what she held out to me.
I could have refused if I really didn't want it. But if I saw the sad look on Haru's face when I did, I didn't think I'd feel any better.
Things I once would have laughed off with a hollow chuckle now snagged in my chest. I felt as if I'd gotten petty. Even a tiny mistake lodged huge in my heart. Other people's kindness felt unwelcome. I knew perfectly well that feeling this way wasn't right, and still emotion was beating reason.
Didn't they say you turned emotional once you became a woman? Was I, being a girl now, under the influence of hormones too?
"Hana, you didn't forget today's homework, did you?"
Bora tossed it out in passing. It was nothing more than a hello with a check-in folded in. It didn't land that way on me. If this had been a comic, a vein-popping emoticon would have burst onto my forehead.
The me inside my heart spoke up. It was my heart, personified—the part of me that did nothing all day but eat snacks and watch TV.
"Just wreck the whole thing! What are they gonna do if you don't do anything? And they haven't been keeping you in line at all lately, so they don't even know how scary you are!"
Once, I would have snapped Who do you think you are? and torn into that voice without mercy. Now, somehow, my ears pricked up. I knew it pointed toward ruin. Somehow it still sounded like something I ought to hear.
"Hana! You should go to bed early, right?"
I'd been caught watching TV late into the night. Haru came into the room, settled me gently onto the bed, and said it—and, for good measure, switched off the TV and the lights on her way out.
I'm not a child!
It felt as if something inside me had gone out with a soft puff.
When I opened my eyes in the morning, I muttered.
"I'm not doing anything."
My brow furrowed like someone truly angry.
Studying? Why would I? It isn't even fun!
Vegetable juice? Tastes awful!
Going to bed early? Why should I have to sleep early!
Cartoons? Those, I still have to watch...
As of today, I declared an absolute strike. It was what people usually called burnout syndrome. True, it was far too young an age for a child like me to come down with it—but counting my previous life, I was already in my mid-twenties.
I had every reason to strike.
The very day I went dark, Starlight Research Institute was thrown into emergency.
From Starlight Guild's point of view, Korea's food industry was a sector of very little importance.
Finance, hunters, and the guild's various other industries earned far more. Would the money from food even amount to a tenth of a percent? The cash cows bringing in hundreds of trillions of won ran on finance, on selling weapons to hunters, or on the profits from byproducts of Gate subjugation. They had never once intended to run on the food ordinary people ate.
In a sense, that was only natural. To Starlight Guild, the food market simply didn't match their prestige.
When you introduced yourself in society, I run a restaurant, or I work in distribution, never sounded as flashy or impressive as I work in the financial markets, or I work in something to do with hunters. It couldn't be helped.
Ask people living in the modern world and nine out of ten would probably rather work in finance or in something hunter-related. Plenty of them lived and died by social standing. How many jobs were slighted for the single reason that they didn't look cool, no matter how well they paid?
Even so, there was one existence inside that same Starlight Guild that could not be ignored. At first they had taken her for a monster that merely resembled a human and all but tossed her to Starlight Research Institute, convinced she was nothing worth noticing.
Then the potency of Hana's hair came to light, and that hair dragged Starlight Food back from the brink. Starlight Guild had no choice but to look on with covetous eyes. Of course, having already said what they'd said at the start, they couldn't very well demand her back.
"This is no longer something we can afford to leave alone."
An analyst who worked on the leadership side of Starlight Guild said it to Kim Sewon, third of Starlight Group. The man had come out of Hankuk University with every course of study behind him, hustled his way into Starlight Guild, and poured everything he had into the grind of networking until he reached a position from which he could advise the third of the guild's direct line. And he offered Kim Sewon his advice with great courtesy, and with very great deference.
"The economic value of the hair Hana possesses at Starlight Research Institute is still small, but not small enough to ignore. Limited supply does restrict how we can use it, yes—but the addictiveness and the flavor are extraordinary."
"Is that so?"
On the desk of the Kim Sewon who said it sat a cup of Starlight Coffee. Not a brew made from beans alone—a premium coffee with Hana's hair in it as well. Ordinary coffee tasted fine, but Kim Sewon preferred the premium. The price was enough to make your eyes pop, though from where he sat it was all the same.
"Now that she's been granted an official identity, I believe the time has come for headquarters to take direct control of the human resource known as the student Hana. She is far too precious a child to be left to Starlight Food and Starlight Cosmetics. Green tea and coffee both—if you look only at their impact on the market, they hit harder than advertisements shot with A-list celebrities."
To boil down everything the analyst had been saying: Hana's economic value had grown too large to leave in the hands of Starlight Food and the cosmetics division, so they ought to make a move and control her directly. Opportunity costs would arise, of course, but set against the power in Hana's hair, the price was by no means small.
Even so, from Kim Sewon's seat, the analyst's advice was a trivial, little thing.
"What you're saying sounds nice enough. But she's a child Sehee and Seyoung adore. If I take her away, won't it look a little ugly, coming from their older brother?"
Because it would mean seizing her by force, the thought snagged on him. If the family got along poorly, he could have shut his eyes and taken her. They didn't. They still saw one another at every holiday, Chuseok included.
"And wouldn't it be better to focus on finance, or on Gate-related business? I looked through this report. The economic value coming out of Hana doesn't even reach a trillion won a year, does it?"
Kim Sewon said it while turning the pages of the report.
"Finance and hunter businesses start in the hundreds of trillions. The number of digits isn't even the same. I think we'd do better concentrating on that side."
Looked at a certain way, it was a fair point.
"But..."
From the analyst's side, pressing the recommendation too hard would do nothing good for keeping his seat, and so the matter could be left to die quietly.