The Little Troublemakers
Kim Yeonwoo was an elementary school teacher, and at present she was the homeroom teacher of Class 3-1 at Starlight Elementary.
"Aigoo, thank you for all your trouble, teaching the children how to bake."
She had stepped out of the classroom for a little while to talk with the baker. Trivial small talk of that sort was the oil that kept a social life turning smoothly.
Hearing her, the baker waved the thanks aside.
"Not at all. I enjoy teaching children, so it's perfectly fine. Please call me in often."
A baker of that skill had volunteered her talent and taught them to make bread without taking a single won, and to Yeonwoo she seemed an altogether admirable person. Yeonwoo herself was paid to teach children; if someone told her to do it for nothing, the way this woman did, she wasn't sure she could manage it. Not that such a thing would ever happen, of course.
So Yeonwoo sat in the lounge well away from her classroom, sharing drinks and conversation with the baker, until the baker asked, as if something had been nagging at her.
"By the way, is there an air freshener in the classroom?"
"Pardon?"
Yeonwoo's eyes went wide, as if she hadn't the faintest idea what the woman meant.
"The scent in that room is so lovely... I wanted to ask what kind of freshener you use."
"Oh, that?"
Yeonwoo understood at once what the baker was smelling, and repeated the explanation she had given so often it might as well have been a recording.
"There's a child named Hana, and they say it's her ability. Like the hunters — something she was born with."
"Aha. You mean the child with the green hair?"
Hana's hair was so unusual that the girl called Hana had burned herself into the baker's memory. She was cute, and strikingly pretty besides, so the baker found herself looking forward to the child's future. People blessed with looks usually showed the foundation of it from a young age.
"Yes. And you wouldn't believe how well she studies. From what I can see, she's sharp. She must work very hard at home."
Of course, she had no way of knowing that at home Hana loafed about like someone with no job, watching movies and variety shows. Those high marks were possible only because Hana was, in truth, a grown-up.
"Shall we head back to the classroom? Say whatever you need to say to the children, and then you can clock out."
"All right."
The two women started toward the classroom where the children were waiting. The kids would be eating their pizza bread anyway; all that remained was to tie the day off neatly.
But the closer they drew, the more an unaccountable unease crept over them. From inside came the racket of children's voices, loud and lively. Well — with no adult in the room, a certain amount of chatter was understandable. Yeonwoo herself had talked the moment a teacher stepped out, back when she was a student.
She opened the door, and what met her was a classroom full of drifting white powder. For a moment her mind went blank. Then she pulled herself together.
"Stop—!"
Yeonwoo shouted as she came in, and the children who had been playing with the flour sidled back to their seats. Looking at the flour scattered over the floor and hanging in the air, she could only sigh. The moment you took your eyes off them, children found a way to cause trouble. Little bundles of disaster, the lot of them.
The baker left without saying much of anything. The situation was simply too much of a mess. Yeonwoo scolded the children at the top of her voice, and the ringleaders of the chaos hung their heads, well aware of what they had done.
Jiyu was dusted with flour, though not too heavily. Hana, on the other hand, had it caked over her entire face, as if someone had ground a cake into it — the classic aftermath of a birthday-bread smash. The sight was so absurd that laughter nearly escaped Yeonwoo, but she held it in with superhuman restraint.
Then she put on a stern face.
"You threw flour on your friend's face?"
"I-I'm sorry, Teacher."
Jiyu bowed her head, unable to meet anyone's eyes, standing there like a criminal. Beside her, Hana bowed as well.
"You little troublemakers."
Yeonwoo said it while pinching the cheeks of the two culprits.
"Euuwehh..."
"Euing!"
Duly pinched, the two of them slunk back to their seats.
"All right, let's clean!"
What was done was done, so Yeonwoo set about the cleanup as best she could, herding the children through the wreck of the classroom until it was fit to be seen again.
"Hey, this is actually really good?"
The man said it with a bottle of Starlight Wine in hand. He had bought it on his junior's recommendation and tried it once, and it was more than all right.
"Right? I picked some up at a convenience store the other day and it was delicious. I like wine, so I've tried all sorts, and at this price I think Starlight Wine is the best there is."
"Yeah?"
He turned the bottle this way and that. The price stung — fifteen thousand won for a single bottle. Soju and beer had climbed as well, so he didn't fuss over it too much. Drink prices at a restaurant had always been absurd. Soju or beer you ordered in a place like this ran something like four times the supermarket price. Charging more to cover rent and the rest of the overhead was understandable, but lately those numbers seemed to be stepping over the line. Even the beer here was eight thousand won, a painful hit to a college student's wallet.
"Should we order another bottle?"
He looked at the woman as he asked. She nodded at her senior's suggestion, happy to agree. Starlight Wine was good enough to make every other drink taste like swill.
The two of them drank and carried on all night. Their final stop, of course, was a motel.
Danaka, an executive at Kara Sushi, had been spending more and more of his time in Korea lately. He had little choice. The Starlight Rice he had discovered was selling far too well, and perhaps that was why he had taken to looking up news about Korea so often.
He was reading a newspaper translated into Japanese when good news arrived on his phone.
Stores that adopted Starlight Rice posted sales nearly double those of stores that did not.
Going forward, that figure would be powerful ammunition at the board for the argument that they had to use Starlight Rice.
The rollout had been slower than Danaka expected. Relations between Korea and Japan were, after all, none too good. The younger generation might not think that way, but the people who actually ran this company were still in their forties and fifties. In the common Korean phrase, they were fogeys with one foot still planted in an older era.
"We could put it in every store this very moment and it still wouldn't be enough..."
One man in particular came to mind, someone who had opposed the idea with fierce stubbornness. Of course, the moment it became clear the company would profit, people like that shut their mouths and vanished.
Danaka's own thinking was fairly open. If something benefited the company, he did not waste time on sentiment. He was still fiddling with his phone when an email arrived from Starlight Foods.
Standing on the weaker side of the partnership, Danaka sent word at once that he would come. He had his interpreter draft it, of course — carefully, and with every courtesy.
"So this is the Starlight Research Institute?"
Danaka said it as he stepped out of the car. Ordinarily he handled business at the Starlight Foods building, but today they had asked to meet at the institute, and he was curious what they meant to tell him. He started toward the building — and found the security astonishingly tight. Even a top-tier restricted zone might not be guarded like this.
"Where are you visiting from?"
It was not some elderly guard who blocked his way, but a young man packed with enough muscle to walk onto a bodybuilding stage. Danaka didn't speak Korean, so the interpreter beside him answered.
"Ah, we've come from Kara Sushi on business with Starlight Foods, and this is..."
The interpreter explained this way and that. Fortunately Kim Sehee had already put in a word, so getting inside was no problem. Danaka and his party passed through a metal detector identical to the ones at an airport security check.
"This place is under far tighter watch than our own headquarters."
Danaka said it with Kara Sushi's head office in mind. He straightened his clothes and went in. He couldn't help wondering why they had thrown up walls around the building like a military compound, when it was only a single building standing there by itself. He wondered whether there was really anything here worth guarding so fiercely, and half suspected the institute had once been badly burned by industrial spies.
Calling it a research institute felt odd in itself. Danaka had no way of knowing, but the institute that had originally stood here had been moved long ago, because of the gate.