8 – First Outing, And… (Part 1)
Yeoul silently stared at Soyoung, who had fallen onto the dining table. Soyoung repeatedly made incomprehensible whimpering noises. Her tail and ears fluttered around as if they were no longer under her control.
Yeoul quietly stood up and began cleaning up.
It wasn’t difficult. Since Soyoung had finished off all the chicken, it was just a matter of organizing the bones and paper boxes for separate recycling. He also piled up the crushed beer cans in one place.
The only thing left was the most challenging task – Soyoung.
First, Yeoul lightly tapped her shoulder with both hands.
“Soyoung, are you alright?”
From Noble mtl dot com
“Ebbebe… Uhbe…”
It seemed like she was completely drunk.
As Yeoul briefly looked at her slumbering head, she gently lifted her body out of the chair and held her.
Soyoung, embraced in Yeoul’s arms, seemed quite content without even knowing what situation she was in.
With her eyes closed, a radiant smile adorned her lips, and her tail playfully tickled Yeoul’s arm as she held onto it.
“Uung…”
She buried herself deeper into Yeoul’s embrace, seemingly without a care. She sniffed, then burst into another heartfelt laughter.
Yeoul watched all of this with no particular emotion, and with Soyoung still in his arms, he entered her room.
Her room was nothing special. It was just filled with clothes scattered here and there. It left the impression of a room belonging to someone who lived alone.
Yeoul gently laid her down on the bed. Soyoung instinctively recognized it as her sleeping spot and tossed and turned before pulling the thick blanket towards herself.
And then, she fell asleep…
Snoring peacefully, Soyoung’s ears and tail, which had been moving restlessly, finally found calmness.
Yeoul suddenly realized that she was still wearing the same clothes she had worn to work, and wondered if it would be uncomfortable for her to sleep like that.
But he had no intention of changing her clothes, so Yeoul happily left Soyoung, who was sleeping soundly, and went back to his own room.
After habitually taking a shower, Yeoul lay down on the bed.
Perhaps it was because she hadn’t had a drink in a while, Yeoul felt a gentle fatigue enveloping her body.
It wasn’t difficult to get rid of the hangover, but Yeoul chose to surrender her body to the long-awaited exhaustion.
Closing her eyes, she slowly immersed herself in her thoughts.
Yeoul thought to herself, “It might be nice to go outside tomorrow.”
* * *
“I’ll be back….”
Soyoung stepped out of the door, grabbing her head as if it would split from the hangover-induced headache.
Yeoul saw her off at the entrance, just like she always did.
Even though this strange cohabitation had only just begun two days ago, their actions seemed natural as if they had been doing it for a long time.
With a thud, the door closed.
Once again, Yeoul was left alone.
However, Yeoul had no intention of staying at home by herself even on this day.
She had recently registered her biometric information on the door lock with Soyoung’s help, and she also received a spare keycard for the shared entrance.
After two days of returning home, she finally gained the freedom to go outside.
Yeoul dressed in the simple clothes that Soyoung had given her yesterday.
The feeling of the unfamiliar yet familiar fabric against her body. She tidied her appearance and put on her coat before wearing the shoes that Soyoung had bought along with the clothes.
If someone else saw her, they would probably think she was a college student. Yeoul had made great strides in a short amount of time, going from a barefoot beggar to someone with substantial progress in just two days.
Yeoul opened the door and stepped outside, holding the recyclable trash in her hands.
As she pressed the button for the elevator, Yeoul glanced at the neighboring apartment, where her younger sister lived.
She still didn’t know how to deal with Leoyoon. Even if she put aside the unknown pain that struck her heart whenever she thought of her sister, questions of whether the anger had dissipated, when she should come back, and how she should approach her sister came to mind.
What happened with the contact from the extraordinary police officer, Park Byung-hoon, who was supposed to deliver a message to her sister?
She couldn’t continue living in Soyoung’s house indefinitely, and she knew she had to go back soon. However, the timing of her return was still a problem that needed to be thought about.
What could Leoyoon be thinking? Was she worried? Or was she planning to completely cut off ties with her family?
Regardless of what she thought, Yeoul knew that her sister would never know that her older brother was relying on the other side of the wall.
Although it would have been better if there was a means to contact her, it seemed that it was still not allowed for Yeoul.
Thinking about these issues, Yeoul realized that it wouldn’t be easy for a returnee to adapt to life on Earth, and she found herself already in the elevator that had arrived.
* * *
Yeoul didn’t have a specific plan for what she would do when she went outside.
It was simply a way to see how the world had changed in the past 10 years, so he blindly stepped outside his house.
Although he could have easily found out by using the internet or other media, he chose to experience it firsthand.
Yeoul, who had left the apartment complex, looked around his surroundings.
Everything was unfamiliar.
The narrow alleyways that used to be filled with students smoking in school uniforms, giving off a dull atmosphere due to lack of development, had now transformed into a bustling commercial street with young people walking along the wide roads.
It was still early, so only students who seemed to be going to school could be seen, but it was easy to predict that it would soon be filled with people by late afternoon.
Yeoul walked along the unfamiliar streets.
To his recollection, there used to be an internet cafe that he often visited with his friends in this alleyway. But now… it seemed to have disappeared, washed away by the waves of time.
There was no Chinese restaurant where he used to go for lunch on days when the school meals were tasteless, and no karaoke room that he would visit when he got bored of internet cafes.
They had all been replaced by new stores with clean and sophisticated signs.
Yeoul simply walked silently along that street.
A contradictory space of a quiet downtown area in the early hours.
A road that seemed to directly confront the 10 years that had passed.
In the end, he crossed the street, leaving behind the street that was once bustling but now seemed empty.
As Yeoul was walking slowly, a person suddenly approached him.
It was a female student wearing a school uniform who looked more like a high school student than a middle school student.
As she approached him with flushed cheeks, she awkwardly pushed her side bangs behind her ears and spoke.
“Um, hello…?”
“Yes.”
As always, Yeoul answered without expression, but for some reason, her face blushed even more at his response.
“I’m sorry… but your style is really nice, um, can you give me your contact information by any chance…?”
When she said that, the female students who had been watching from a distance shouted in excitement.
Upon hearing their voices, her face blushed even more. It was almost as if her face would explode.
Carefully extending his smartphone to her, Yeoul replied with an indifferent tone.
“I don’t have any contact information.”
“Yes, um…?”
“I don’t have any contact information. I’m sorry.”
Leaving those words behind, Yeoul turned around and continued on his way.
The female student who was left behind in the seat was muttering like she was having a seizure.
“No contact information…?”
As she was frozen in place, female students who were making noise in the distance approached her. How did it turn out─? She couldn’t answer her friends who were asking her about her contact information.
She was either swallowing her tears or not caring about them, while her thoughts were elsewhere.
She was wondering about the long ears of the female student who had asked her for her contact information.
When she shyly passed by, the long, protruding ears had caught his attention. Thinking about it, her appearance and skin color were quite different from Koreans.
She was not the kind of beautiful that you would find in a novel. She was an elf.
An elf who attended high school. The sort of sentence that would only appear in a work of fiction was actually present in real life, right behind him.
This was the second time he had confirmed the existence of an elf up close, after So-yeong.
And both of them seemed to be adapting well to life on Earth. So-yeong had a job, and this elf was still in school, as far as he could tell.
He couldn’t help but wonder how these two elves had ended up living on Earth.
Had they come from another dimension? What was the reason they had come? How many others had come to this place? What was the situation in other countries?
He felt a sense of foreboding.
That was the most appropriate word to describe the situation.
And the upside-down world that he found himself in was also the same as the one that Yeo-ul had attended middle school in.