Let's Wear Something Pretty
On the Starlight Research Institute's channel, A Day with Hana — set aside in a category of its own — was climbing in popularity at a rather striking rate. It wasn't pulling in hundreds of thousands of views all at once, but set beside the videos the channel had posted before, the view counts ran two or three times higher.
And so, perhaps because the channel was right on the verge of blowing up, I now had a reason to wear something like this.
"Hana, couldn't you try this on? Just once?"
"No!"
Bora held up a fluttering dress and turned the question on me. I hadn't forgotten that I'd been a man, so I refused with everything I had. I was in a hoodie and shorts for now, but if I put that dress on, I had the feeling whatever masculinity I had left inside me would vanish completely.
"If you wear it, I can do one thing you like..."
The sight of Bora so deflated made my chest ache for no good reason. She was already going through all this trouble because of me; answering her with nothing but a refusal didn't feel quite right.
"Then..."
The moment I left the word hanging, her face lit up. It felt as if things were going exactly the way she wanted, but I needed people's attention too, so wearing the dress was something I would simply have to stomach.
"I'll wear it, Bora."
"Thank you, Hana!"
Beaming, Bora started peeling my clothes off. I shouted that I could dress myself, but it didn't seem to reach her ears. Fortunately only the two of us were in the room, so at least no one else got a look at me in my underwear.
If Baldy or Haru had been around, I would have died of shame, but with only Bora there I could more or less hold myself together.
And so, by her hands, I ended up in the airy little dress. The girl in the mirror flaunted a cuteness that steamrolled every other child that age. Even in rags, a face like this would have been ridiculously adorable; with a dainty dress on top of it, the destructive power seemed to have more than doubled.
For no particular reason, I gave a little spin in the dress.
"Well? How do I look, Bora?"
"P-perfect! The best!"
Looking at me, Bora seemed even more excited than I was. I was the one wearing it, and yet somehow she appeared to like it more. She could have been pretty enough herself if she dressed up, but right now she looked every inch the office worker ground down by the job.
She picked up the camera and started shooting. There wasn't really any content to it. It ended at the level of me watching television, or sitting in the sunlight and answering a few of her questions. The dress suited me so well that the grin never left her face.
"Hana, you know you've got lessons again today, right?"
"Yeah."
Every day I was learning this world's common sense, and all sorts of other things besides. I already knew most of it, but I put on a diligent show of studying. If I kept at it like this, maybe they'd even give me a phone someday.
With nothing but a television, the room got boring whenever I stayed in. No internet meant I could hardly see how people were reacting to my videos. Bora had said that if I learned just a little more, she'd buy me a hundred phones, so I was taking my time and learning with patience.
When would I be able to leave this building? I was waiting for that day with everything I had.
Maybe because I'd worn the clothes she wanted for the first time in a while, Bora took a few more photos for her private collection before I could escape her arms. I supposed it was because I almost never wore anything like this. Feeling as if I were working overtime, I struck a few poses for her and let myself be photographed.
Not Just Any Green Tea — A Look at What Starlight Green Tea Actually Does!
A Magical Ingredient Inside the Starlight Green Tea Bag?
Selling Out Faster Than They Can Stock It. Consumers Are Begging Them to Sell Starlight Green Tea Now — Even If the Price Goes Up
More than a month after Starlight Green Tea appeared, the press slowly began running more and more stories about it. Perhaps because the reporters themselves loved drinking it, the articles carried their own grumbling about limited stock keeping them from having as much as they wanted.
The executives at Starlight Food could only break into wide grins at the flood of coverage. Why? Because the articles made it plain that even if they jacked the price up by an insane margin, buyers would still be lining up.
"Excellent. The coverage as well — everything's moving nicely in our favor, wouldn't you say?"
Kim Sehee, president of Starlight Food, said it with a smile. She was of the Starlight Guild's direct bloodline, but as the sixth daughter she hadn't inherited a choice piece of the business the way the older brothers and sisters ahead of her had. Battered this way and that by the competition, she had grown sick of it, and worn out by that blood-soaked fight over management rights, she had been all but driven out into the presidency of Starlight Food.
As a share of the Starlight Guild's revenue, Starlight Food probably didn't even account for one percent. She had blamed heaven for giving her five older siblings, and yet, born a chaebol's daughter, she had grown up wanting for nothing.
Then a blessing found her. The humanoid monster captured by the Starlight Research Institute had a talent that was simply too good to ignore. It was hard not to like something that, with her barely lifting a finger, brought in several million dollars a month.
Even so, from the vantage of the older brothers and sisters above her, it still wouldn't be enough to keep them from sneering. They moved money by the billion; this place was still counting in the millions. The sums themselves were different, which was why they hadn't paid it much attention. Kim Sehee only hoped they would go on ignoring her. She gathered Starlight Food's executives in one room.
She smoothed her expression and, with superhuman patience, held back the smile that kept trying to rise, then addressed them.
"Then I suppose it's time we set a new price for Starlight Green Tea."
At that, every one of them clammed up and started reading the room. Online and off, the clamor for Starlight Green Tea was already overflowing. Frankly, even at ten dollars a tea bag, wouldn't people still buy it? Luxury spices sold just fine at prices that made ordinary people's eyes pop.
Starlight Green Tea no longer had any reason to glance nervously at the other green teas beside it. Winning consumers over cheaply, then hiking the price sharply and still getting them to buy — that approach had worked. Sold dear from the start, it would never have flown off the shelves the moment it came in, the way it did now. If it cost more than other companies' tea, shoppers would simply buy those instead; they had no reason to pick up a Starlight Green Tea they had never even tasted.
They had originally meant to sell it at a high price, but the earlier Starlight Green Tea — the version without any hair in it — had crashed and burned, so they'd had no choice but to sell this one cheap. The prejudice clinging to that failed tea wasn't something you shook off easily. If the earlier launch hadn't flopped, they might have been able to sell it differently.
"What if we raise it to a dollar? Even with the benefits our Starlight Green Tea has, those effects are still modest next to other products."
"I think we could go as high as five dollars. Our tea's effects may be modest, but that doesn't mean it lags that far behind."
"If we're raising it anyway, why not ten dollars?"
"Ten dollars would overlap with the saber-tiger mane our Starlight Guild already sells. A single hair from a saber-tiger's mane goes for ten dollars, and its focus effect far outstrips our tea. There are a few side effects, and it doesn't last long — that's the catch. Put bluntly, the moment our tea starts selling at ten dollars, consumers' psychological resistance could spike."
"And if we push the price any higher than ten, there are plenty of substitutes for our tea. People praise it because, for what it does, it's cheap and there's a lot of it."
"Then we should sell it a little lower. We're family, after all. We can't have overlapping goods hitting the same market."
As the meeting went on, opinions poured out one after another. With every executive from the plants gathered, there were quite a few of them, and because Kim Sehee wasn't especially authoritarian, even those of relatively low rank could speak their minds without shrinking. They talked for dozens of minutes and still couldn't easily reach a conclusion. Human beings can't see straight into a consumer's heart, and yet they had to capture hearts as fickle as reeds in the wind. Catching those hearts was difficult. It was hard.
As the marathon meeting dragged on, Kim Sehee slowly tapped the desk with her fingers and sank into thought. If she, the president, spoke, the meeting would end right there — so she couldn't easily open her mouth.