Something Terrible Has Happened
"Bora, we still can't find the reason Hana ended up like this, can we?"
Haru stepped out of Hana's room with Bora for a moment. It wasn't that Hana couldn't overhear them, but talking about it right beside her felt wrong, and those wide eyes, already brimming as if the tears might spill at any second, softened Haru's resolve.
The girl reminded her so much of her niece. She wanted to fuss over her and coo that she could do whatever she liked, but the situation was nowhere near good enough for that. If no one had been watching, she might have done exactly that.
"No. Hana's body isn't built the same way a human's is, not even in its basic composition. Give her medicine meant for people, and there's no telling what might happen."
Even a physician from the research institute, someone exceptional at treating other species, had come, and still they couldn't pin down the exact cause. Hana's body differed from the genetic level up, so of course a solution was out of reach. Even so, simply walking away felt wrong.
If this gets really bad, what do we do? Should I try going overseas?
Countries abroad had far more gates and managed a wider range of other life-forms than Korea did. Go somewhere like the United States, she thought, and maybe a solution would turn up. Of course, getting there wouldn't be easy.
Bora kept talking with the doctor beside her while Haru could only watch, dazed. Someone who had spent a long time with Hana would know her better, wouldn't they? Bora had been with her longer than Haru had, so it was right that she be the one asking.
"All right. I understand."
They still couldn't find the exact reason. Outside, though, a faintly chilly wind was already blowing, as if autumn had arrived.
"Ehehe."
I came outside on Haru's back. We hadn't left the institute entirely—only stopped by the park on its grounds.
Fortunately I felt much better than before, and being stuck in the room had grown stifling, so I'd asked Haru to take me out. She refused at first, but my ultimate move left her with a look that said she had no choice, and out we went.
"The sun's still blazing..."
It was autumn, and afternoon besides, yet the sky stayed perfectly clear, not a cloud in sight. Looking up, I felt as if something inside me had opened wide.
I basked in the warm sunlight from Haru's back and let myself heal. I wanted to be carried around like this forever.
"Hana, do you like being outside?"
Haru asked, and I nodded.
"Yeah!"
"The way you're kicking your legs, you definitely like it. If I'd known you enjoyed coming out, I would've brought you more often."
I stopped swinging my legs without thinking. Show them a face this delighted, like a child's, and they'd treat me like a child, wouldn't they? I was an adult through and through, sound in both body and mind.
Haru set me gently down on a nearby bench. Fair enough—she'd carried me all the way from the lab, so she had every right to be tired. I weighed more than a sack of rice, and for Haru, who hardly exercised, going any farther would have been too much.
I sat on the bench and soaked in the warmth. Early on, Bora, who hadn't known any better, had tried to put sunscreen on me, but once she learned that sunlight was as good as a meal for me, she stopped.
"Hana, feeling good?"
"Yeah, Haru. It feels like the sickness is flying right out of me."
"I hope you get better soon~"
Haru sat down beside me and stroked my hair. No matter how often she touched it, Hana's hair always felt nice beneath her fingers.
We stayed planted in the park until the sun went down, and little by little my body seemed better than it had at the start. I climbed onto Haru's back again, returned to my room, took her goodbye, and lay down on the bed. My hair, of course, was still cut short.
I watched the glow-in-the-dark dinosaur stuck to the wall and slowly drifted off. The next morning I woke, and the moment Bora saw me sit up, she was horrified.
"Hana, your hair didn't grow back!?"
She was right. My hair hadn't restored itself the way it always had. It simply hadn't grown, and that had never happened before.
Kim Sehee couldn't close her mouth, which had fallen open. The ship that had been running before a fair wind had struck a reef and was going under.
She couldn't accept how suddenly everything had changed. Shoving an employee aside, she drank the green tea brewed with the hair. She drank Starlight Green Tea often herself. Her office was always stocked full of it, because when work wore her down, nothing helped more than a cup.
But the moment she tasted the Starlight Green Tea on the table, she all but blacked out. It didn't taste like that special tea at all. If anything—as if someone had swapped the ingredients out from under them—it was worse than the Starlight Green Tea they used to sell.
"Get the chairman onto a bed, now! And call an ambulance!!!"
At the sight of Kim Sehee collapsed on the floor, the employees could only scatter in a panic, like a flock of startled grasshoppers. Fortunately, before anyone actually called an ambulance, she managed to get up on her own.
Starlight Guild belonged to a major conglomerate. Yes—by corporate classification, it was a chaebol. Dig into Starlight Food, though, and it was worse off than your average mid-sized company.
It was a conglomerate in name only, the karma of Starlight Guild stretching its arms into every business under the sun like an octopus. The trouble was that the karma fell not on headquarters, but on Starlight Food.
For a company that barely survived on support from the main office, Hana's appearance had been a resurrection from the brink—heaven's own luck, in a way. If she had never shown up, they might have shut the business down eventually.
In a sense, it was only natural that Kim Sehee had been handed a company on the verge of collapse. She had essentially typed GG and walked out of the power struggle inside Starlight Guild, and her brothers and sisters were never going to give her one of the profitable ventures.
That didn't mean she had been cast out completely. She was still of the direct bloodline, and the dividends on the shares she held could have kept ten generations of her descendants fat and happy. But Kim Sehee had refused to live as an idle heiress, and she had taken the failing company into her own hands.
She had tried everything to save it, and none of it had worked. For one thing, they simply didn't have enough people. The same was true of the Starlight Research Institute. Both places were scraping by on headquarters' support; spare staff was out of the question.
Both companies were already wringing their people to the limit, so a sloppy disaster like this was, in a way, inevitable. The fruit had simply been too sweet. President Kim Sehee had known a day like this would come—she just hadn't expected it so soon.
They hadn't even been selling Starlight Green Tea for two full months, and already there was a defect. She had thought it would last at least a year, but the tea betrayed that hope and didn't even make it two months. Two companies wearing nothing but the shell of a conglomerate had always run on makeshift improvisation.
"Shall we send a formal protest to the Starlight Research Institute? Pressing them to come up with a solution quickly might be worth considering as well..."
The executive never finished. Kim Sehee raised a hand and stopped him.
"Starlight Food is the weaker party here. Send the institute a letter like that, and they'll cut off even the support we still have."
Protesting now would do them no good. Staying silent, though, would drop Starlight Food's pride straight through the floor.
A stable supply of materials was, in a sense, the institute's responsibility, and she wanted to demand why they weren't delivering properly. But the contract stated that the effects of this life-form could change at any time, and that clause tied their hands. There was little Starlight Food could do. The institute had already sent an official notice claiming the disruption was due to the life-form's capriciousness—one of the cautions written into the agreement.
It was precisely because of that instability that the revenue split had been set in Starlight Food's favor. From the institute's side it would sting a little, but not enough to turn them upside down the way it would Starlight Food. The penalty would fall on Food, not on the Starlight Research Institute.
"For now, we release as little tea onto the market as we can so we don't owe a penalty, and we have to find a solution before the stockpile runs out."
The one mercy was that the hair they had stockpiled from Hana still performed as it should, so they could keep using it as it was.
Then Kim Sehee spoke.
"I think I need to go to the institute myself. Whether I drop to my knees or bow until my forehead hits the floor, we have to resolve this somehow."
She truly believed she could kneel before the life-form that supplied this material and beg. Set against what the tea was worth, the value of her knees was nothing at all.