The Research Lab
Screeeeech.
The trailer truck that had been hauling me along—imprisoned, yes, but hauling me all the same—lurched to a dead stop, as if it had finally reached its destination. The brakes came without warning, and I toppled over inside the iron cage.
Something soft had been laid over the floor, thankfully, so the fall didn't hit me too hard. Still, a fall was a fall, and a sound escaped me before I could stop it.
"Ack!"
The truck hadn't even been going that fast. My body was simply that small, and I hadn't been in it long enough to handle it with any grace. My sense of balance was nothing like it had been in my old body. Watching me go down, Kim Bora looked utterly beside herself.
She clearly wanted to pick me up, but she couldn't open the door of the cage she'd locked me in. I was just sitting there minding my own business; it was Kim Bora's fault I'd been shut inside an iron cage in the first place. Even so, I was strangely embarrassed, so I got back to my feet as if nothing had happened. Kim Bora saw it, broke into a wide grin, and then left me behind, opening the door and stepping out somewhere.
All at once I was alone inside the trailer. A moment ago I'd wanted to be by myself, but the instant I actually was, the quiet turned lonely, and lonely turned frightening. Even the far corner felt like the sort of place a ghost might crawl out of if I so much as looked at it. Scary things were strictly off the menu.
"Waaah!"
I wailed as loudly as I could, the universal demand to be let out this instant. Maybe someone heard me. The door opened, and a whole crowd of researchers in the same clothes as Kim Bora began filing in. Faced with that wall of sheer presence, I had no choice but to shrink in on myself.
They looked like mad scientists. Standing tall in front of them was simply too frightening. Ever since my body had changed, it felt as if my thoughts had gotten younger too. Normally none of this should have bothered me at all. And yet the moment I saw strangers, tension and fear welled up all on their own, bright and bubbling.
The researchers studied me through the bars, then opened the cage door, took hold of me, and started off somewhere. I looked around with frightened eyes, this way and that.
I even considered making a run for it along the way, but they had me by the leash, so that plan never had a chance. We climbed down from the truck and walked a little, and a building painted white—some kind of research institute, by the look of it—rose up to greet me.
It was enormous even from the outside, and the sight of it alone pressed down on me. Guards stood watch in grim numbers, and there were a great many of them. The researchers ran through one security check after another and pressed steadily deeper inside. Once we'd gone in a fair way, they shut me into something that might as well have been an isolation room. I tried to resist as much as I could, but I was afraid of what might come after, so in the end I had no choice but to go along with whatever the researchers wanted.
It was absolutely not that I was too scared to do anything. And so I was locked into a room plastered wall to wall in a white so pure that looking at it felt like it might drive a person insane.
I rose onto my toes and knocked on the door with my tiny hands.
There's a person locked in here. Somebody save me...
If I knocked, maybe they'd let me out. The researchers outside did not respond. They did look—once—and then went straight back to talking among themselves, ignoring my signal entirely.
This couldn't be. Was the famous Starlight Guild the kind of place packed with vicious demons who snatched innocent ordinary people and used them as lab specimens?!
I'd seen plenty of Starlight Guild's promotional ads on TV, but I'd never dreamed that something this ugly might be hiding behind such a massive guild. The bigger the guild, the fouler the secrets. That much was obvious.
I stopped knocking and tried shouting at the top of my lungs, resisting in every way available to me, but they wouldn't so much as glance my way. The researcher called Kim Bora did look at me. That was all.
When every effort came to nothing, the strength drained out of me and I flopped onto my back on the floor. I had no energy left. Ever since the truck, I'd had the nagging sense that my hunger wasn't being dealt with. My throat was dry and my stomach was empty, and the candy Kim Bora had given me earlier hadn't so much as sent word to my liver.
The researchers went on talking among themselves for what felt like a very long time. As the discussion dragged on, all I could do from inside the isolation room was lie there with my eyes open, blinking, and watch them leave. With the door shut, I couldn't even hear what they were saying to one another. I was certain that criminals thrown in prison for actual crimes were not treated like this.
Stop people walking the streets of South Korea and ask them to name the country's most famous guild, and ninety-nine out of a hundred would answer the same way.
"Starlight Guild has to be the most famous, doesn't it?"
"Starlight Guild is number one in the country. No question."
Set aside the rare soul so far removed from the world that they knew nothing of society, like a newborn, and everyone else would point to Starlight Guild. The largest guild in South Korea was built like a chaebol conglomerate, a sprawl of affiliated companies.
It wasn't merely a guild. It had sunk deep into everyday life, reminding people at every turn that Starlight Guild was alive and well, and it was spreading octopus-like in every direction, making money while it was at it. At this point it wasn't a guild so much as a corporation. Things had gotten so bad that the government itself had stepped in with a stern warning: stop muscling in on the food ordinary people eat.
That warning, however, fizzled out within a matter of days—likely because someone high up in Starlight Guild and someone high up in the government had a quiet word...
In short, Starlight Guild was a guild with the power to run all manner of businesses. Even so, it had not forgotten its original duty. They were the ones who faced the otherworldly lifeforms inside the gates, and they were the ones meant to protect ordinary people who had no power of their own. That principle was why Starlight Guild maintained a separate research institute devoted to other species. Know your enemy as you know yourself: by studying those lifeforms, they learned their physical traits, their weaknesses, and everything else of the kind.
Kim Bora, who belonged to that other-species institute, was having a wonderful day. A humanoid lifeform—something only a handful of which existed in all of South Korea—had been discovered inside a gate!
The specimen didn't seem to have any abilities, and there wasn't much to look at, but so what? Other guilds spent their days turning up nothing but cockroach-like lifeforms.
She was so delighted that she'd taken all sorts of photos in the truck on the way here, and those had become part of her collection. Even a creature that looked feeble and powerless might be hiding a trump card, but it was wearing a restraint device, so there was hardly any tension to be felt.
With a restraint on, a specimen couldn't muster even ten percent of its original strength, which meant that unless it was an exceptionally powerful individual, even an ordinary person could subdue it with ease. And looking at the one they'd brought in now, tension was simply impossible.
Once before, they had somehow managed to capture a monster of enormous size, only to find that even with the restraint on they couldn't pacify it, and in the end they'd had to dispose of it. Compared to that case, handling this lifeform was child's play. It had come along quietly, and once it took the shape of a little child, the thought that it might be dangerous never even occurred to her.
If its specialty was lulling large numbers of people into dropping their guard, then being fooled outright would hardly have mattered.
At any rate, once the lifeform was inside the temporary isolation room, Kim Bora and the researchers who had come with her launched into a fierce exchange of opinions. When to begin the research, and how to proceed.
Ordinarily they would simply have followed the established guidelines, but this specimen was different from anything they'd caught before, so every researcher had a different idea about how the study ought to start. Then one of them, who had been listening to the debate unfold at a leisurely pace, raised a hand and spoke, and the rest had no choice but to fall into line.
He was the department head. The researchers, mere employees, could only listen carefully to whatever opinion he handed down.
"Can't we just... follow procedure?"
In a sense, that was the orthodox answer. But the lifeform they'd just brought in wasn't like the others, was it? Adjusting the experiment to the changed circumstances would have been the sensible thing to say—yet not one researcher had the guts to defy a boss who might as well have been the heavens.
They were only ordinary researchers, forever anxious about when they might be fired, their thin wallets trembling in their pockets.