Getting Fitted for a School Uniform
"This is truly... a remarkable discovery."
Professor Park Guil, who would turn sixty this year, was a linguist at Hankuk University, regarded as the finest institution in the country. He had originally devoted himself to the languages of Korea, but once Gate Language came to light, he had turned every line of his research in that direction.
Even so, among the public and within academia alike, the language of the Gates was still treated as a second-rate, derivative tongue. It was not considered important. Most people poured all their attention into the byproducts of monsters, and so the language found inside the Gates was, by comparison, something they could afford to neglect.
There was no obvious use for it anyway. Hunters spent far more time arguing over monster attack patterns, and over how to hunt safely and cleanly, than they ever did fretting about characters carved into some rock inside a Gate. In a sense, that was only natural. What good could come of understanding the language of a Gate?
Park Guil thought otherwise. Decipher it, he believed, and one might uncover the principles by which Gates formed, and the habits of the monsters themselves. It was a notion that lived entirely inside his own head.
Then, last week, something happened that would overturn his entire life as a linguist. It began when a component installed in his laboratory—that is to say, one of his graduate students—walked in carrying a strange notebook.
"The more I look at it, the more extraordinary it is!"
At first Park Guil had taken it for a nasty prank by someone who had dabbled in Gate Language. The script had never been properly deciphered, and yet the contents of the notebook soared far beyond every decoding pattern established so far. There were entirely new characters, and the existing ones were tangled together in bewildering complexity. Beneath it all, someone had kindly supplied a Korean translation.
Half convinced and half doubtful, Park Guil set the notebook against the materials he had already compiled. He and his graduate students worked day and night, and in the end the contents were confirmed to be genuine.
"Who could have written this?"
Printouts lay heaped on the desk like a mountain. The notebook had already been saved to the computer and to every other device they had, lest the original ever be lost. Park Guil lifted a single printed page and stared a hole through it. He had been staring ever since he came in that morning. Once he had hold of a thread, he lost all sense of time.
Until now it had felt like groping through a cave where not a single point of light could enter. The moment he grasped what was written in the notebook, a shaft of light seemed to pour down. Lunchtime was drawing near, and still he was too absorbed to care.
"Never. Never. This is no sentence concocted as a joke. Someone who truly knows this Gate Language wrote it. But why, of all things, the theme song of a children's cartoon?"
He could only conclude that whoever knew the language was a thorough eccentric. He had expected some scrap of ordinary daily life. They had written something else entirely.
"Professor, do you suppose it might have been a child?"
He had been subjected to the preposterous theory that the writer of this Gate Language was a young child. One of the graduate students had insisted on it, and it was utterly groundless. As far as Park Guil was concerned, the hand behind those characters belonged to someone with a perfect command of the Gate's language. The theme song of a cartoon children would like, he decided, had been chosen precisely so the writer could not be identified.
He burned to find that person. Meet them, and the study of Gate Language would advance considerably—no, enormously. It was astonishing that someone of this caliber remained unknown to academia. This was no reclusive grandmaster of the sort that turns up in every martial-arts tale.
Park Guil set about grinding the graduate students under his charge as if they were grain in a millstone. Research that had been drifting like a ship on a vast sea, unable to see an inch ahead, had found its lighthouse, and the first thread of a solution had appeared. It was a good sign.
The car slid along the road. I leaned against the window and watched the world go by. People hurried along bundled up tight, as if the cold had gotten into them.
I hated the cold myself, so I was wearing a fur hat and a thick puffer. The heater kept the car cozy, but I didn't take anything off.
"Where are we going?"
I had eaten lunch and been planning on a nap, only for Bora and Haru to haul me off somewhere. They aren't fattening me up to sell me to someone, are they? For no good reason, I scraped at the window with my fingers. The glass was fogged, and my nails left marks like scratches.
"We're going to get you fitted for a school uniform, Hana."
Bora, at the wheel, said it brightly. Just as she said, I would be starting school soon. Our guild had founded a private school, she told me—Starlight Elementary.
What made it unusual was that hunters and ordinary people attended it together. Normally the two would have been kept apart, but the Starlight Guild seemed to think it was better if they grew up alongside one another from a young age. Perhaps because of that, there was a uniform to be worn from elementary school on. Didn't people usually start wearing uniforms in middle school? A vague unease crept over me. I could already see it, plain as day: a future in which I would be dressed in some fluttering skirt.
We talked as we went, and before long we arrived at the shop that handled uniforms for Starlight Elementary. I climbed out of the car. The cold wind worried at my cheeks, and white breath drifted softly from my mouth. It felt a little like smoking.
I took Bora's hand in one of mine and Haru's in the other, and we went inside.
A bell chimed.
The little bell on the door rang through the shop as we stepped in. Bells were always pleasant to hear.
"Welcome!"
"Hello."
A shop employee greeted us.
"Is this your first time here?"
"Yes... we found you on our phones..."
Before I knew it, the two of them had left me behind and were deep in conversation with the clerk. Any old uniform would have done for me, but Bora and Haru clearly didn't see it that way.
I looked over the uniforms hanging on the racks. The boys' uniforms were exactly to my taste—neat, clean, stylish. Then I turned my head and saw the girls'. In weather this cold, the bottoms were skirts. How was anyone supposed to survive? It was obvious enough, in its way, but I truly did not want to wear a skirt.
So I hid in a corner of the shop, as if we were playing hide-and-seek. If I stay here, they'll never find me. Bora, however, found me with no trouble at all.
"I knew you'd be in here!"
With that she scooped me up and headed off somewhere. I thrashed as hard as I could by way of protest, but it was hopeless.
She set me down in front of the employee.
"Please fit Hana for a uniform properly."
"Of course! Don't you worry."
The woman answered Bora kindly. Then she knelt, took hold of my shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said,
"Hi there. Big sis is going to fit you with the prettiest school uniform in the whole world."
From somewhere she produced a tape measure, held it up to me, and began taking my measurements.
"Could you lift both arms for me?"
I said nothing and raised both arms. Time passed, and there was still no sign of it ending. Whatever she found so delightful, the employee kept smiling as she measured.
"Our Hana's going to break so many boys' hearts when she grows up!"
She tossed out idle remarks like that while she worked. Not to brag, but objectively speaking, I was rather pretty. My arms were long, and so were my legs, and there was more of a Western look to me than an East Asian one. The highlights were green hair that no ordinary dye could quite cover, and green eyes that not even colored contacts could reproduce. Mine was an exotic face, not one you often saw in Korea.
It felt as if no time were passing at all, and yet somehow I succeeded in getting every last measurement taken and was a free person once more. I went hopping around the shop.
"You can come pick it up next week."
"Ah. We'll be counting on you."
Bora was still talking with the employee. Please take good care of the uniform, don't you worry—the sort of mechanical pleasantries you could hear anywhere.
With that settled, we made our escape from the shop. I looked up at Bora.
"Can't I just not wear a uniform and not go to school?"
No matter how I thought about it, studying alongside elementary schoolers felt strange. I had even tried the test questions, and with my ability I could have handled middle school, or even the first year of high school, right away. Korean excepted, of course.
"Nope~. Going to school isn't such a bad experience either, you know?"
Bora coaxed me all the way home.