Let's Find a Second Home
Hana got up early today, because she had somewhere to be. Of course, "early" meant sometime past nine in the morning. On vacation, she was a sleepyhead through and through—though the staff had no idea she stayed on her phone until dawn before finally dropping off.
Vacation meant she could sleep as much as she liked, but the people around her made that difficult. The moment morning came, Haru or Maru showed up to wake her, and even if she pretended to still be asleep, they tickled her until she gave in. They wouldn't have minded letting her sleep a little longer, but feeding her breakfast and then settling her back down was part of the job.
Hana was still a child, far too young to be skipping meals. Parents raising kids that age had their reasons for making them eat even when they fussed over the food. Let a child skip a meal just because they were being picky, and it was bad for them. There was no helping it.
It wasn't as if anyone were dragging her out of bed at five or six, either. Rising at nine was reasonable enough that she had little to complain about. The proof was that once woken, Hana tended to get up right away, with hardly any of the usual whining about wanting to go back to sleep.
"We're going to the real estate office today, so you have to dress up nice, okay?"
Bora said it as she produced a little girl's outfit from somewhere and held it out. The face that received the clothes wore a subtle smile—or was it a frown? Impossible to say. Only Hana herself knew the answer.
Even so, hand her clothes and she would grumble her way into them. Watching her go along with everything while complaining the whole time was like watching a tsundere. She was cute enough to eat. Was this how parents felt, raising a small child?
People said raising a child was hard work, but it seemed to come with rewards to match. She was beginning to understand why parents called it exhausting and worthwhile in the same breath. Once Hana was fully dressed, Bora took her and stepped outside the building.
Stripped of every wing of the Starlight Research Institute, the building looked strangely lonely. Maybe it was because the surrounding structures had all been torn down, but there was something awe-inspiring about the tower rising alone from the cleared ground. How long would this building keep standing?
Bora took Hana through the security checks and got them ready to leave. The guards who knew Bora's face waved them out after a brief once-over. In this building, the only employees who wouldn't recognize Hana were spies sent by a rival company. Considering how she scurried all over the place, nearly the entire staff had to know her face by now.
Whenever Hana got bored, her hobby was slipping off the tenth floor to wander the others. She always came back wearing a sullen look, of course, after some other employee caught her and sent her home.
"Bora, where are we going?"
Hana asked from the passenger seat. She was so small that once she sat down her legs didn't reach the floor, and her feet dangled in the air.
"To a real estate office. We're going to find you a house close to school."
Bora said it while driving with easy confidence.
"Huuh? So I'm leaving the building now? I don't want that..."
Hana liked this building. The food was delicious, there was a lovely cool garden plot out back that she could tend herself, and talking with the staff was fun.
"Oh, you don't have to worry about that, Hana. We're not moving you out for good. Think of it more like a hotel."
They meant to buy a house near the school in case Hana couldn't make it back to the building after class. Anything might happen, and putting her up in some unfamiliar hotel or motel was too dangerous.
They had money to spare, so a second home for Hana was the plan. The building and the school sat a fair distance apart, and buying a place close to school while they were at it wasn't a bad idea. Naturally, it would be somewhere expensive, with security locked down tight.
A poorly policed apartment complex, or a residential neighborhood full of alleyways—those were out, just in case. With this much money, living in a well-secured building was only sensible. And a new build was obviously better than an old one.
There had been talk lately of builders leaving out the rebar when they put up new homes, but even with rumors like that, the popularity of new construction was shooting straight into the sky.
Starlight Foods and Starlight Wellbeing were wrestling with one problem in common. The two companies wanted for neither people nor money. What they wanted for was factories. Starlight Foods had started out with a small plant, but once they began turning out a wide range of products, the flaw in that setup finally burst open.
Keeping up with the demand customers were throwing at them was more than they could manage. They were building plenty of factories, and even so there was still far too much left to produce. A factory did not spring up overnight.
"We ought to look into contract manufacturing."
"Our own plants simply cannot handle the volume."
The easy way to picture it was the famous cola companies: you shipped the necessary ingredients, and the factories that received them did nothing but package the product. Ordinarily you would have to swallow the risk of patent infringement and the like, but Tangle was different.
It was not a fruit that bore anything just because you planted it somewhere else. Rival spies would grind away at nothing but wasted effort. Realizing that the plant grew without Hana, yet never set fruit, would cost them a great deal of money. Some might cling to false hope and keep pouring cash in, but that was none of Starlight Wellbeing's concern.
The money being thrown away wasn't Wellbeing's. It was the competition's, so if anything they would welcome the wasted labor. They certainly wouldn't mind it.
Korea had plenty of idle factories anyway. All they had to do was pick one that was competitive and reasonably priced, and hand the work over. Tangle was a magic product whose demand would only grow from here on out. It was never going to shrink.
There was the drawback that production costs would rise, but packaging Tangle didn't take all that much money to begin with. An expense of this size was well worth bearing.
"But why is it called Tangle?"
"I know, right? There are fun names out there, like Grow, Grow, Little Hair, or Lush Locks. Seems like they could have gone with something else..."
"Oh, that. I heard it means the hair comes in all plump and springy. Tangle-tangle."
"Really? I don't know who named it, but it sounds a little childish..."
"Word is the president named it herself."
"What a lovely name. I genuinely love it."
"Right?"
And so, once again today, one nameless executive lived to see another day.
A middle-aged man without a hair on his head sat in a café chair. One look at those sharp, clean-cut features and it was obvious he wasn't Korean. He was a foreigner. Back when he'd had hair, his was the sort of face that made women weep.
Westerners could carry baldness better than East Asians. Their features sat differently on the face, so a bare scalp still suited them well enough. Even so, there was no denying he would have looked finer with hair. Anyone who looked good bald would, of course, have been even more handsome with a full head of it.
Across from him sat a woman with a slender figure she clearly took pride in. She might have been a model. Young and beautiful, blond-haired and blue-eyed, she sat with her legs crossed.
Whether it was their aura or something else, no one had taken a seat anywhere near them. The two were speaking in English.
"So this is the magic fruit that's supposed to cure hair loss?"
The middle-aged man stared at the fruit with eyes full of expectation. If this had been a drama, lasers might have been shooting out of them. That was how hot his gaze burned.
"Wouldn't it be all right to try eating one?"
"I already ate one. Doesn't seem to do much. Right now my hair is complete radio silence."
The woman had spoken while reading over the instructions. She could handle both English and Korean, which was why she had been able to come along on this business trip. In her department, she was the only one who spoke Korean.
It wasn't even a neighboring country—just some small nation far from home—so of course few employees could speak the language. Americans rarely felt any need to learn anything besides English. Go anywhere in the world, and if you could speak English, you at least wouldn't struggle to make yourself understood.
Such was the majesty of the world's common tongue. Head to Africa or some developing country and you might not get through at all, of course, but that was true of every other language as well.
"For now, it might just be an inflated rumor. Let's keep watching."
The moment they received word that Korea had a magic fruit capable of curing baldness, they had come straight out on this trip. It might well have been the usual empty boast, a sliver of an effect puffed up into a miracle, so they had come to see for themselves.