Cookies
"Right. So what brings you here?"
Kim Sehee put the question to Manager Lee Hangyu. She already had a fair idea of why he'd come, but some things had to be spoken aloud by the person concerned.
"Well... I came to ask for your help, Chairman."
"What kind of help?"
She smiled on purpose as she said it, making it plain she had no intention of helping unless he stated exactly what he wanted. At that, Manager Lee Hangyu hesitated, then went on.
"I heard the farm you operate came through this typhoon with relatively little damage."
"That's right. Frankly speaking, we'll be running it as normal again by next week."
She already knew what he was after, but she put on a look of surprise all the same, as if she couldn't imagine how her own farm had come through unscathed.
The typhoon had all but ruined the nation's rice crop. Vegetables and fruit had taken a hit as well, but if any sector had suffered worst, it was rice. Would shipments even reach ten percent of the usual volume? Judging by the storm's force, they might not manage one. Then Manager Lee Hangyu carefully produced a remark she had not expected.
"Because of this typhoon, the grain warehouses run by the government took severe damage."
"Did they? I assumed the storm would do some harm, but... not every warehouse was hit, surely?"
"The thing is... a renovation happened to be underway at the grain warehouses, so some of them suffered even worse."
The typhoon had sprung up without warning. The government's complacent certainty that no storm would ever arrive in spring was what had produced the disaster. The government might feel wronged, of course. A typhoon in spring was absurd enough on its own, and this one had been the strongest in Korean history.
They had scrambled to cancel the renovations and brace for the storm, but there simply hadn't been enough time. That was why grain warehouses across the country had been so badly damaged.
It was the first Kim Sehee had heard that the warehouses nationwide had taken such a blow, and her expression hardened slightly.
"Then...? Is there no rice reserve left anywhere in the country right now?"
Manager Lee Hangyu wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief.
"No. In a month or two, Korea's rice will hit bottom."
"Good grief... it's that serious?"
"It is. We're urgently reviewing rice imports from abroad, but at the pace this is being handled, there won't be a grain of rice left in Korea before any imported rice can arrive."
"This is... far more serious than I thought."
Even so, from where Kim Sehee sat, more than one or two things failed to add up. She couldn't understand why the Food Policy Division had gone out of its way to seek her out.
The harvest her rice farm could produce was small. True, if she ran every acre at full capacity and brought in a crop every week or two, she could more or less meet the volume the government wanted—but the government wasn't asking for anything like that much.
And Kim Sehee was a merchant. She still couldn't see the full shape of their intent, but at the very least it was a deal on which she would not lose.
"In that case, you're saying you want to buy the rice our farm produces?"
Color rushed back into Lee Hangyu's face.
"Yes! We'd like to purchase the rice grown by Starlight Food at a fair price."
Plug the gap for now with rice from the Starlight Food farm, then fill the grain warehouses with imports—that seemed to be the plan. And the reason they'd chosen Starlight Food was probably that the Starlight Guild had pointed them her way.
Her older brothers did dote on her, after all. And at present, the only farm in Korea that could actually grow rice was Starlight Food.
"Hmm..."
If she turned the offer down, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs would take a serious blow. Rice might matter far less in the modern age, but people still lived on the strength of a bowl of rice, didn't they?
No one was going to starve for lack of it. There was plenty of other food. The ministry, though, would catch hell from the public—how do you manage things so badly that there isn't any rice? Heads would start rolling from the top of the ministry down. Kim Sehee, however, saw a chance to make money, and so she decided to let the people at the ministry keep theirs.
"All right. Then let's draw up a contract."
It was the sort of contract that would have drawn a sigh of relief from the Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, had he been there to hear it.
"Hana. Hana."
"Yeah?"
I answered Jiyu as we walked down the hall. She was pointing at the restroom.
"Okay."
I caught the gist well enough and went in with Jiyu and Yumi.
"Hana!"
Ack—mistake!
I'd been about to walk straight into the boys' restroom without thinking when Yumi caught my sleeve and yanked me back, so I never made it inside. If I had, the boys might have taken one look at me and screamed.
"Why do you keep trying to go into the boys' restroom?"
Yumi asked, but all I could do was hem and haw. I'd been using that one for more than twenty years. Say it was instinct and they'd treat me like I was crazy, so I fudged something plausible instead.
"Hnn... Hana's just peculiar, that's all!"
Hearing Yumi put it like that felt like a nail driven into my chest. I might have a child's body now, but what would they do if they ever saw the original me? Scream and run, most likely.
"Today's hands-on class is making cookies!"
"For real? I can't wait!"
Yumi and Jiyu chatted while they washed their hands. From the sound of it, the next class was a hands-on lesson in cookie-making. Whether our school simply had too much money or harbored some other ambition entirely, it never seemed to skip these odd little experience classes. Nothing like high school, where all you ever did was sit through lessons.
Was it just that times had changed? Back in my day, elementary school had been nothing but class...
"Hana, what shape of cookie are you gonna make?"
I almost said I wanted one shaped like the alien from a game, but they wouldn't have understood a word of that, so I went with a safe animal instead.
"I'm making a rabbit-shaped cookie!"
"Really? A rabbit cookie made by Hana? I want to see that!"
I turned and asked Jiyu. It was embarrassing to be the only one who'd announced a shape.
"Me? A monkey?"
"I want a cute animal! A rabbit like Hana—or else a dog, or a cat!"
Each of them named the animal she wanted to make. I, meanwhile, was busy worrying whether my barren imagination and clumsy hands could manage a rabbit at all. Making something had never been that easy, had it? Turning out a rabbit cookie so cute you could tell what it was at a glance, on the very first day, might well be impossible.
And so I arrived at the cookie classroom with Jiyu and Yumi. The room was set up like a cooking academy, tools of every kind laid out on big tables, an oven tucked into the corner.
The kids were already snatching up the tools and messing around. Someone must have worried about leaving them to themselves, because there wasn't a dangerous implement in sight—no knives, no scissors. Not that any of them were the sort of tough little guys who'd grab real knives and start a duel, anyway...
"Hana, Yumi, how do I look?"
Jiyu had put on an apron from the table and spun in a full circle. A cute rabbit face was printed on it, and the style suited her perfectly. I shot her a thumbs-up.
"It looks amazing on you!"
Then she went and put on a chef's hat as well. She looked like she'd stepped out of a commercial. I clapped and praised the wardrobe change. She was adorable—exactly right for a third-grader.
Seeing how much I liked it, Yumi quietly slipped into an apron of her own. Hers was printed with giraffes, and I praised her just as I had Jiyu. Embarrassed, Yumi flushed bright red and broke into a wide smile.
Kids really did look best when they were smiling. A moment later, though, I felt Jiyu and Yumi closing in, aprons in their hands. I backed away, only to be caught between them.
"Ack!"
I let out a yelp as they fastened an apron onto me. Uncle Elephant's face was printed across the front. Is this proof I used to have an elephant...? Jiyu and Yumi looked me over and clapped in delight, thoroughly satisfied.
They seemed to like the sight of me in it even more than I liked wearing it. We kept goofing around like that until, before I knew it, the teacher had come in and was getting ready for us to make the cookies.