A Tour of the School
RAWRRR!
I turned the roaring dinosaur over in my hands. No matter how many times I looked at it, it was cool. Back at the burger place, I hadn't been able to hold in my awe at the display case packed with their whole dinosaur collection.
Thinking about it, though, I wasn't even sure I'd ever get to go back there. It was a shame, but I'd probably have to be satisfied with this one dinosaur.
I played with it until, before I knew it, we were standing in front of Starlight Elementary. If we hadn't stopped at the burger place along the way, it wouldn't have taken nearly so long...
Before going in, we parked in the lot. Outside vehicles were banned from the school grounds, so we had to leave the car nearby and walk the rest of the way. An elementary school had to use every means it could to protect the children, and letting outsiders' cars roam the campus could be dangerous.
I wasn't one of them, but I figured most elementary students were easy targets for crime, so the precaution made perfect sense to me. Still — we were only touring the place. Did I really have to wear the uniform?
It was vacation, so there weren't many kids around, and among the ones who'd come to look the school over, not a single one seemed to be in uniform. Most showed up in comfortable clothes. There was no reason to arrive dressed in a cumbersome school uniform.
I shot a glare at Bora, one of the reasons I'd ended up wearing it. She didn't seem to care in the slightest. She simply took my hand and headed for the school gate as if she were having the time of her life. Once again, I would have to be the bigger person.
The security wasn't quite as tight as at the research institute, but the gate was still guarded in earnest. Since I was a student here, a simple identity check and a single form were all it took. The guards barely spared me a second glance — I was wearing the uniform, proof enough that I belonged to this school. As expected, Bora had been thinking ahead when she put me in it.
I picked up the pen to fill out the entry form, and got stuck on an unexpected line.
Relationship to the person accompanying you?
Hmm... what was I supposed to write? I glanced at Bora beside me, thinking I might take a hint from whatever she put down, but I couldn't quite see. My brain briefly short-circuited. After turning it over and over, I scratched the pen across the page.
Honestly, I'd wanted to write subordinate. But Bora had told me before that whenever we went out, I should think of her as my mom, so what I'd written wasn't really a problem. The guard who took my form, though, wore a subtly changed expression.
"You sure you filled this out right?"
After checking Bora's face, he asked me again. Fair enough — she looked like she was in her early twenties, so the misunderstanding was understandable. Still, she'd said what she'd said, so I simply nodded.
"Got herself in trouble young, I bet..."
He muttered it under his breath so we wouldn't hear, but it reached my ears clear as day. What kind of trouble? It seemed Bora had caused some incident I knew nothing about. See? Even she had her clumsy spots.
Bora and I received our pink visitor passes and headed into Starlight Elementary. The school was enormous. Maybe because hunters and ordinary people studied here side by side, the buildings were split apart like a university campus.
I was an ordinary person, so we'd be going that way, right? Contrary to my expectations, Bora kept hold of my hand and headed in the opposite direction. That side was where the hunters studied...
I had no abilities at all. I was a regular person. I had no idea why she was dragging me over there.
"I've always wanted to visit Starlight Elementary. Thanks to you, Hana, I even get a rare look around. This is wonderful."
"Yeah...?"
I wanted to finish the tour as fast as possible and go play games. I was a homebody. Outings like this didn't suit me — and it was bitterly cold, besides. Every breath I took, the air was so sharp it felt like my lungs were freezing solid.
We stepped into a building that glittered as if it had been slathered in gold leaf. One look at the exterior and you understood why the Starlight Guild was rolling in money. They didn't even bother hiding how thickly they'd plastered the place with cash.
Someone was studying even during vacation — one classroom had its lights on. Just the one. The rest stood empty.
Walking the hallway, I tried to get a look at the kids inside. My height made that impossible.
"Bora! Pick me up!"
"All of a sudden?"
"Yeah!"
Used to it by now, Bora gathered me into her arms and kept walking. Only once I was held could I see into the classroom: a teacher instructing the children with practiced ease. I couldn't believe that in a few months, I would have to study like that.
I hadn't even regressed, and yet I was going to elementary school for the second time. I never could have imagined it. They said I'd be entering as a third-grader, and one look at the level of the work left me stunned.
Math and English weren't memorization subjects, and I could score a perfect hundred on them with my baseline skills alone. Adding three-digit numbers was supposedly the hardest problem in third-grade math, and I could solve that just by looking at it. Korean, though, was a little difficult, so I'd have to study hard for that one.
I was watching the classroom when my eyes seemed to meet the teacher's. I hurriedly buried my face against Bora. Surely I wasn't about to have to meet that teacher?
Bora and I spent hours wandering the school. It was so big that no matter how far we walked, there seemed to be no end.
The teachers at Starlight Elementary each carried a pride of their own. Working at the finest private school in the country was enough to intoxicate even an ordinary person.
The appearance of hunters had changed the structure of society. Even so, people's hunger for entrance exams hadn't changed. If anything, it burned hotter.
Children with a hunter's talent were admitted to this school automatically. There weren't many hunters to begin with, and within Seoul the place had the reputation of being the very best. Hunter schools existed out in the provinces, but in fame and standing they inevitably fell short of this one.
Kim Sera had landed a job here at a young age, and her pride overflowed. The moment she received word she'd been hired, she threw a feast for the whole neighborhood. Her family circumstances hadn't been good, so the single fact of finding work at a fine place was enough to change her life.
But she was at the age of just starting out in the working world, and she was living buried under the work, tasting its bitterness. The school compensated her well enough, of course.
Huh?
Walking the hallway, she looked out at a familiar scene. It was common for parents of incoming students to tour the school with their children during vacation. There was plenty to see on campus. Come in spring, and you could take in the cherry trees in full bloom. Come in autumn, and there was the lovely tree-lined path with maple leaves scattering on the wind. Winter offered less unless it snowed, but if you looked, there were still sights worth finding.
Curious about the class, perhaps, both of them were peering into the classroom through the window. Watching the two move in perfect sync, you could easily have taken them for mother and daughter. Then again, looking at how young they appeared, maybe they were sisters...
The moment she saw the pink visitor passes, though, she couldn't help but flinch. Each pass color roughly sorted who was allowed in, and pink meant parent and child. Those two, then, were unmistakably mother and daughter.
And yet the one who looked like the mother could have passed for a college student. How long had she kept up an appearance like that, even with a child? And the child looked like an elementary student. Then just how young had she been when she had her? It was beyond imagining. She'd have had to give birth in middle school, at the latest, for the math to work out — wouldn't she?
In all her time working here, Kim Sera had met plenty of young-looking parents, but by the time their children entered this elementary school, they were at least past thirty. It was, after all, the school that boasted the highest tuition, so only people with a certain amount of means came here. And people like that tended to marry late. Even the earliest marriages were in the mid-twenties. By the time they had a child and that child started elementary school, they were generally over thirty.
Still... they really are pretty.
The woman who seemed to be the mother was beautiful, but the child's looks shone even brighter. She could easily have played a child actor on television. Already that stunning as a little kid — there was no predicting how much prettier she would become when she grew up.
Leaving a pleasant fragrance behind them, the two disappeared somewhere. Somehow, she had a feeling she would see them again.