Interior
Starlight Food, in the midst of one expansion after another, was hiring at a staggering pace. A staff of a few hundred had swollen into the thousands, and that alone said everything that needed saying. That they had taken on so many people in less than a year was proof enough that Starlight Food was swelling its business to an almost absurd scale.
The company had grown so large that it was peeling its divisions away one by one and establishing them as separate corporations. One of the corporations born that way was Starlight Distribution.
Starlight Distribution handled the crops produced by Starlight Food and its farms—cherry tomatoes, coffee, green tea, and the rest. Back when Starlight Food did not yet have Hana, a single department had been more than enough to manage distribution. The multiplying crops and foods had since reached the point where the company needed an entire firm devoted to distribution alone.
They were making so much money that they had even bought a building in the heart of Seoul to use as their headquarters.
Every day, Starlight Distribution shipped an enormous volume of produce. The crops already mentioned would have been enough to overwhelm them, and with the arrival of Starlight Rice bound for Japan, the distribution network from the days when it had all still been Starlight Food could no longer cope.
So they established Starlight Distribution as its own company, found suitable freight carriers, and placed shipping orders day after day. To those carriers, Starlight Distribution was an enormous customer.
The staff were buried in the same work every day, but a steady infusion of new hires—and pay and benefits that held their own against any other major corporation—let them go about it with smiles on their faces. The company's own growth was visible, day after day.
From an employee's point of view, working at a company on the rise was better than working at one on the way down. Too much work was better than none at all, wasn't it? At least you no longer had to worry about being let go. Of course, that depended on the person.
Then an order came down from above Starlight Distribution.
"What kind of order came down?"
"I hope it isn't anything too hard. We're already swamped with the work we've got."
The task Kim Sehee assigned to Starlight Distribution was not a particularly difficult one.
Establish a network to continuously distribute Starlight Rice to the personnel employed by the Starlight Guild.
The order was to build a separate system for handing out Starlight Rice—rice that was not sold on the open market—to the employees. The moment the staff laid eyes on it, they could not help but cheer.
They had seen Starlight Rice selling in Japan. Some of them had even tasted it themselves, and that flavor was impossible to forget. Starlight Rice was so good that every bowl of rice they had eaten until then deserved to be dismissed as mere stuff.
Honestly, a plain bowl of rice made with Starlight Rice could have sold at a restaurant for two thousand won, and people would have ordered it with a smile. And this in Korea, a country with a culture in which a bowl of rice that crept past a thousand won was enough to make you scowl.
"So the chairman wants Starlight Rice distributed at home?"
"There's been a real craze for it in Japan lately, but Japanese people don't much care for foreign rice. We'd be better off breaking into the domestic market."
"But didn't we already settle things with the government? We aren't allowed to sell it inside the country, are we?"
"For now we punch a single hole in a very large dam, on the grounds that we're releasing Starlight Rice to the guild. You think the people who work for the Starlight Guild are going to eat every grain by themselves? Their families will eat it with them, and a few will quietly pass some along to other people."
If the farmers' opinion meant they could not sell it, then they would open one little window so ordinary people could have a taste. They had released the rice from the reserves because of the typhoon, and yet more than half the nation still had not tried Starlight Rice. The more citizens tasted it, the better their position would be when it came time to shape public opinion.
Anyone who did not eat the Starlight Rice could always hand it to someone else. A little money might change hands along the way. A certain famous automaker had seen the same sort of thing—an employee-only discount on car purchases being used for other people. It was a benefit meant for staff, but people put it to work all around in order to make money.
Of course, this was not a sale of Starlight Rice. It was being handed out as an employee benefit, so legally there was no problem at all.
"This shouldn't be too hard."
"Right. We only have to give Starlight Rice to the people working at the Starlight Guild."
And so Starlight Distribution set about the work of distributing Starlight Rice to the Starlight Guild's employees. They had called it an easy job, but getting rice into the hands of hundreds of thousands of people meant they would have to move quickly.
"No!!! Bora, I was wrong!!!"
I latched onto Bora's leg and wailed.
"Hana..."
Bora looked down at me with aching, pitying eyes. Don't look at me like that... People were swarming into my room like a demolition crew, and the place was already a wreck. I had been reduced to a refugee.
"Don't!!!"
I screamed like a tragic heroine with a shattered heart. Bora looked at me and spoke.
"Hana. I told you to have everything tidied up by yesterday. They're doing the interior work."
She was right. My room had grown old, so they were going to redo the interior and make it neat again. The whole room had been arranged so I could get around easily, and they were carrying all of it outside. Even Rumi's transformation set was among the things going out.
"I'm sorry..."
It really was my fault. I had left the room in a terrible mess, and Bora had even given me about a week. But I had not wrecked the place without a system. There was a formula to all of it: Rumi's magic wand, close enough that three steps put it in my hand, and the teddy bear that gazed softly back at me whenever I lay in bed and turned my head.
At a glance the room looked like pure disorder, but every object in it held a formula of my own. And now the workmen had descended and were clearing it all away.
Held in Bora's arms, all I could do was scream. Every time another toy went out the door, it felt as if my heart were tearing. They were not throwing anything away, of course. Once the interior work was finished, it would all be brought back in.
I saw the workmen carrying materials and hurriedly started clearing the toys still scattered across the room. It was my fault for putting it off. Even so, I had already put some of them away after listening to Bora, so there was not all that much left to move.
Once things were more or less in order, the workmen set to hammering at my room, knock after brisk knock. I stared at them in a daze. I had been told this had not originally been anyone's room at all, just an empty one, and that after I appeared out of nowhere there were no rooms left, so I had ended up here.
They had cleaned it, but there was no helping that distinctly worn interior. There had not been time for construction. I had nowhere else to live. So they had settled me in this room for the time being, planning to renovate whenever a spare moment came along—and that plan had been put off all the way until now.
Still, it was a room I had grown fond of, and knowing it would turn into something new left me a little wistful. It was vintage in just the right measure, a room that suited me perfectly. There were other rooms, of course, but they were airy things that called a princess's bedroom to mind, and moving into one of those felt wrong.
I was not some little girl. There was no way I was going to live in a room trimmed with pink lace. A boy had once asked why, then, I liked Little Magician Rumi—but Little Magician Rumi was my life. That did not even deserve to be compared. Rumi was my idol, after all.
Watching the workmen labor so hard, I decided to prepare a little surprise: drinks for the men sweating through their work. I set cold cans on a tray and carried them over.
"Thank you, little one."
"I'll enjoy this!"
These were the people renovating my room, so making a good impression mattered. If they did not like me, they might do a sloppy job, mightn't they? Of course they were being paid to do the work properly and legally, so there was no reason for them to cut corners—but there was such a thing as goodwill. Helping one another like this set the heart at ease.
Bringing them the drinks left me deeply satisfied. Caught up in the mood, I tried to help by carrying construction materials, but Bora stopped me with everything she had. The moment she saw me holding a drill, she came rushing over in a fluster. The workmen beside her stopped me too.
"Hana! The way you help the gentlemen is by staying perfectly still."
With that, Bora scooped me up and carried me out of the room. I could not help the pang of disappointment. I had already gotten a little drilling in while they worked on my room, and it stung that I would not get to show off my fantastic work with a drill.