I’ve spent a little over a week in Korea now, and I’ve learned a few things.

The weather is… nice here. Its less cloudy then back home, that’s for sure, and it’s like ten degrees warmer to. My costume is really not made for this kind of weather, so I’ve been keeping this fan on in my room.

Well, I’ve been keeping it on most of the time, but the second thing I heard was that electric fans are bad for you. The old man Yeoung Kim, told me that in order for the fan to circulate air, it has to use air. Which, I don’t really think that’s a thing? I don’t understand how it would use air by simply creating a vortex.

But…

Looking over at that thing in the corner now, I’m thinking there’s gotta be a reason people are superstitious. Right?

What ground do I have to stand on? I’m afraid of Tuesday.

The third thing I learned… I can't think of anything. I’ve sort of… turned myself off, for the most part. It’s sort of a dreamlike environment being in another country, though I have been a broad before.

When I was in Irminsul.

I’ve only been able to talk to three people since getting here. One of which left half way through.

Mongkeh Baturbah Went back to Russia after the funeral. He didn’t say good-bye, though he did wave. I didn’t attend the ceremony, Kim and Mongkeh gave the ok, as long as I wore something appropriate. I’d be totally fine with not wearing my costume, so long as I could cover my face, but still, it wouldn’t feel right.

I felt like I should give Clover some space. Shamrock hasn’t really been much help to her. And from what I heard from the gate outside, things were complicated by gang power struggles. I didn’t hear the specifics, but it seemed to be that Han guy. He speaks English, though I’ve never talked to him.

He’s intimidating.

Clover said he didn’t cause too much trouble; it was a move she'd predicted.

I was talking to Kim, the most memorable conversation we had was on souls, a topic I’m honestly getting sick of.

“I’ve said before, that you, me, and Han are kindred spirits.”

I sat across from him at this little round table. He’d asked to speak with me.

“Though, that way of phrasing it’s contradictory, haha.”

It was awkward to say the least. I had been trying not to start anything here, I thought we’d be leaving right after the funeral, but Clover was told to go through Ae’s things, to take anything of sentimental value.

If I could choose, I’d have gone home. Bear in mind, I think I’d actually be able to get home in a day. If I ran as fast as I could, if I knew the route with the least ocean to travel over, I could have gone back to beating up drug dealers.

However, I didn’t want to leave Clover.

Though I didn’t want to be too close to her either.

This was the best distance to keep at, not only in the event that this syndicate tried to do something to her, but in case she did need me.

“Uh, haha…”

So here I’ll stay, until called upon, talking to a weird old man.

“If I had to summarise the lack of a soul, I’d say that it means you’re a slave. Me and Han are slaves to the spirit of the Seong-Soo family. If you don’t mind me asking, what are you a slave to?”

For him, this wasn’t a strange question. He seemed to have taken an interest in me, he’d already gotten through the initial questions, where are you from, what’s your name, what’s with the costume, et cetera.

“I’m not a slave. Nobody stole my soul.”

“Ahhh,” he started with a satisfaction in his voice, “Then you’re a slave to something, opposed to someone. A master of your own making. When I say I’m a slave, I don’t mean I’m being clamped with iron chains, or lashed with a wip-”

“-I mean that even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to stop chasing this goal, conquering Korea.”

In lew of recent global events, I was a little frightened by the talk of conquests, so I tried to steer him away.

“Right, and you think I’m a slave to what, wearing costumes?”

“I think you’re the only one who can answer that question. Maybe you’re a slave to that girl, maybe you’re a slave to violence…”

With a little effort he was able to lift his lips into a grin.

“But above everything else, you are a slave to life. You lack the will to live. Time and time again you will go chasing your own death, spurred by the lashing of your dreams. Time and time again, you will refuse compromise, favouring pain, your hollow wants. And again, you will face death.”

“Shut up.” Surprising myself, I sidestepped any guestly courtesies.

“I don’t care about any of this Mr. I couldn’t care less if there was some cosmic reasoning for why I don’t turn and run in the face of danger. I don’t give up, I don’t go back on my word, and I’ll only stop when I’m dead. I already know these things about myself.”

He gave a laugh, “Alright, I’m just trying to figure out what sort of boy you are.”

Something about how he said it actually struck a chord.

“Just listen to an old man’s advice, hmm? Though you might see merit in not bending, people will use that to break you, and you will break someday. I hope you don’t, but everyone does. Everyone is a bull-headed slave. It just so happens that you and me are lower creatures. We have less, so we are less. We are fundamentally incomplete.”

I was going to get up, but he said something that gave me a bad case of déjà vu.

“Have you heard of the golem?”

I froze, half way through the uncrossing of my legs.

I wonder what face I was making.

“I’ll… take that as a yes. If not, an intimate relationship with the myth.”

“I’ve heard it.”

I thought back on the first two weeks I spent in Irminsul’s first gifted world.

“Well, for the sake of clarity, let me tell it, the Golem of Prague. In 1580, Prague was a city of clashing beliefs, between the Christian empire, and the Jewish populace living in the city's walled ghetto. Foe a thousand years there had been conflict between their people, but it it was in that year that the tensions reached their peak.

“The Christians had accused the Jewish people of doing a ritual known as the blood libel, accused of kidnapping children and mixing them with batter to eat. The truth was that the Jewish people had done no such thing, and yet they were wrongly persecuted.

“Rabi Loew, the head of kabbala in the city, received a divine dream. The words Golem carved into his mind. As a respected practitioner, he knew what was being asked of him. He took two other Rabbi with him to a river and shovelled clay, bringing it back to the Synagogue, where they recited the torah over the molded shap of a man.

“With the inscription of ‘truth’ written in the figure’s forehead, it was given life; it had become a Golem. A man, but not. A human without God’s light. Bound by someone else’s light.

“The Golem served peacefully, clearing the name of the Jewish people by catching the true culprits of the blood libel, and more mundane acts of kindness. An unforeseen result of this was that the detractors of the Jewish people were actually more enraged. They stayed true to their beliefs.

“They assaulted the walled city, ramming at the door. The Golem with its super natural strength tried to keep the gates sealed, he held it in place, thought it had been blasted off its hinges. There was no longer a choice. To protect the people, his main objective, the Golem turned violent, raging against the invaders. Killing many of them. He ignored a lesser value to uphold his robotic purpose

“Once the fighting had ended, Rabbi Loew was filled with grief at what his will had brought. The Rabbi was brought before the emperor, making a deal for the guaranteed safety of the Jewish people. He returned to the Synagogue where the Golem was housed. There he struck the word for truth from its head, leaving only the word Met, meaning death.

“And the Golem was clay again, its purpose lost. Filled by a more absolute and certain protection.”

He took a drink from his tea.

Under my breath I mumbled, “They recited the Kaddish for him…”

He heard that I had said something, though I shook my head, finally rising.

“Is that all, Mr. Kim?”

He gave a little laugh, “Really, your generation is so impatient. Just let me tell you this last thing.”

I looked down to him as he took another sip.

“A soul and a mind make a spirit. A soul and a body make a zombie. A body and a mind make a golem.”

He took another sip, while I was frozen. Again, I wonder what kind of face I was making.

With a smile, I told him, “Thanks old man.”

With a laugh he shook his head. Maybe I was as weird as that guy after all.

I didn’t even get to the door when there was a knock.

“It’s open,” Kim called.

As it cracked open, I saw a girl with long black hair was shown.

Even after a week, it was hard to know her as Clover.

“Rocky, let’s go.”

With a slight grin, I said, “Back home? Have you done everything you wanted to?”

She shook her head, “Not home. I need your help with something.”

“Oh… Ok.”

There was a snicker from the old man behind me. I half turned to him as I left.

Walking down the red-pink corridors I’d gotten familiar with over my stay; I had a few things to ask Clover.

“So, what do you need? Is it another box in an awkward place? I already told you I’m not dealing with any monster bugs.”

That wasn’t a literal use of the word monster, though in comparison to the fauna in Ireland, the insects here were huge.

“No. I don’t need any of the crap from her dirty old store room.”

“Ok,” I said with a nod, “Then what?”

“We’re going to bake a cake. I’m going to bake a cake.”

I starred behind my mask once more, silent in my confusion.

“Then we leave. That’s what I’ve decided.”

“Whatever you need.”

“Right.”

I said it was awkward talking to Kim, but since Baturbah left, I’ve had trouble talking to Clover. I’ve posted what we did when we got here, our argument abou Ae, but we were alright for a while. I just… didn’t really know how to act after the funeral.

I’ve kept in touch with her as Sam, and she’s being texting me about Ae’s death. She told me that the reason she hasn’t been around lately is because she had to go back up north for the funeral. I don’t know if she’s been keeping it vague because its harder to explain with all this supernatural crap going on, or if she’s having trouble talking about it.

I can understand her not talking about it to Shamrock. She thinks I’m preachy, and that’s not really the type of person you want to grieve with, is it?

She swiped the key, and we walked in.

I hadn’t seen Ae’s room since the first day here, and since then it really hadn’t changed. Everything seemed to be in place.

'Well', I thought to myself, 'this is just the living room. Did I expect her to take Ae’s sofa or Tv'?

“The kitchen is on the right,” Clover pointed.

“Alright.”

As she was walking to another room, I asked, “Do you want me to set it up?”

She looked at me with surprise, “Can you bake?”

“A little,” I shrugged, “I know the basics.”

She fluttered her eyes and walked away.

I took that as an invitation to get the stuff out.

First, I got the ingredients, because I didn’t know where any of the equipment was.

Looking in the fridge, I found eggs, butter, and milk. That made me think, are eggs supposed to be in the fridge, or left out in the open?

Checking the cupboards, I found a ton of pans and bowls. I wasn’t sure what Clover wanted to cook, so I made a mental note for later. The cupboard above it was full of… stuff. The labels were all in Korean.

I heard Clover walk back into the room, “Hey, you bought this stuff, can you maybe-”

She was wearing an apron and hairnet. It’s a bit ironic for me to be laughing at someone's appearance, but that’s what I did.

“Aren’t you a little over dressed for this? HAHA, I can see why you keep your bangs long, if I had a forehead like that, I’d do the same.”

She frowned for a second, then she slowed into a smile and I was happy at first.

That’s when she walked over to the cabinet by my knees, opening it.

She brought a cast iron pan down on my head.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

I cried out, it was a minor throbbing pain, minor in comparison to getting battered by a giant fox.

“Owowow!” I rubbed my head after she pulled it away from my head with a laugh.

I looked to her and she was starting to look like her usual self.

“It helps me get into the mood, brick-head. I found you one too.”

She tossed me an apron and a hair net, the type of thing a stereotypical 50’s housewife would wear. Wrapped around and tied at the back of the head.

“I look stupid.”

She nodded, “Yeah, with that cape, it sort of looks like a dress.”

After I put it on, she threw the pan into my arms, I noticed now the caped dent in it, smiling nervously. My guess is that her luck kicked in for comedic affect or something.

“Go put that in the bin, will you? You’ve ruined the damn thing, asshole.”

I set it out of the way, but I didn’t bin it. “So what, you’d rather it caves in my skull than the other way around?”

“Yeah. One of those two can fix itself with some weird ability. The other cost thirty thousand won.”

I shrugged and smiled, “And I have no idea what the conversion rate is.” It faded after I reflected on the first half.

“I’m not using my secondary power anymore,” I admitted.

She paused, setting a glass bowl down on a counter. “That’s dumb.”

I nodded, but realised what she said, “Wait, no, that’s debatable. I haven’t a clue where these powers come from, using them irresponsible would be dumb.”

She grabbed some white powders and started dishing them into the bowl, in an amount that honestly concerned me.

“You don’t know how you got so freakishly durable, but you're fine with me hitting you over the head.”

“I’m not fine with that!” She smiled from my reaction.

“I can’t turn that one off Clover. But I can stop using my SP2.”

“Still stupid.” She started to stir what I assume, or rather hope, was flour and baking powder.

“If you purposefully handicap yourself, it’s only going to land you in hot water, or worse, it’ll screw me over.”

“One super power is more than enough.”

She gave a snicker.

I pointed, “I don’t see why you’re laughing, are you even following a recipe?”

She gave a quieter snicker, “I figured I’d rely on my natural good luck.”

“Natural,” I repeated. She shot me a glare.

“I’m not using my primary.”

I snapped at her, “So you’re being hypocritical as well as, in your words, stupid.”

“Just for this,” She at last admitted.

“Ah, so this’ll be a powerless fight.”

“Yep.”

The conversation was sagging ever so slightly, so I asked a random question, “Was Ae into cooking?”

She was struggling to mix the dry ingredients, “Yeah. Get started on the wet stuff, butter and sugar.”

I thought I knew better, so I got milk out of the fridge while she wasn’t looking.

“Shouldn’t I be whisking?”

She had turned her back on me, a dark veil falling over her.

“Powerless, remember? It'd be too easy for you to stir it.”

I moved another bowl closer to myself, and started to add the ingredients, trying to give her some physical space.

“What were her powers?” I was still trying to talk to her. Even after I’d told myself I’d just try and keep our social relationship limited to Sam and Saoirse.

She let out a manic laugh, “Is that the only thing you can think of? All this super-crap?”

I searched my mind, “Yes. But only because if I talked about anything else you’d get some clues as to my secret identity.”

She shrugged, “Really, I’m not even trying to find out who you are under there. If I wanted to, I could just cross my fingers and hope to see you without your mask.”

I laughed, making a bad joke, “I think you mentioned before, but can’t that ability of yours work as a monkey paw? What if you use that and you see me without my mask, and without my he-”

It was a very bad joke.

I honestly hadn’t even put any thought into it, I was just trying to lighten the mood.

Yeah, I'm still shit at conversation.

After I cut myself off, we put the two bowls together.

“She could turn someone into a pinball hole.”

I looked to the other side of the room, as she started mixing the wet and dry ingredients.

“Huh. What does that mean?”

“Not a clue. Basically, she could launch a big pin ball and if it touched you, you’d die or something. It could only have one target at a time, falling towards them like they’re the centre of gravity. I never saw it.”

I reflected on my poor excuse for a joke, thinking back further to the few times I met Ae.

“Yeah, I don’t see why you’d go around showing your balls to your friends.”

It was a little juvenile, but it got a surprised spit laugh out of her.

One of the things I remembered about Ae, though my memory from way back then was foggy, was that she was always laughing, and joking, though I was never in the mood to join along.

I figured that I should try to be like that.

While she was mixing it together, I made a start on the eggs.

“Did you bake with her? You don’t seem like you're very good at it Clo.”

She scowled at me, jokingly I think, “A few times, just whenever I was in Korea. We’ve met up all over the world, England, Ireland, America- Japan for a killer concert. Remind me to take you to see them sometime, Kay? But yeah, I was never very good at this sort of stuff.”

While picking up one of the eggs, I managed to crack it open by accident before I’d even lifted it out of its box. Clover was still insanely invested in her slow churning motions, so she didn't notice. I got three or four in after the first three failed attempts.

“What kinda stuff?” I asked, sweeping the box of egg shells into the bin.

She tilted her head, a little hesitant to answer.

“Artisan work. Creative stuff. Painting, sculpting, putting together furniture, and cooking, I guess. Whatever you need to think about to do. Call it an unhealthy by-product of always getting either a direct route through situations or a misfire from my luck. I’ve got a weak imagination.”

“Is make-up not an artform? An expression of creativity?”

She switched the hand she was using to stir the mix, while I got to work on beating the egg yoks, I was being more than careful now, pinching my whisk.

“Uh, no?? What’s artistic about that? It’s just a morning routine.”

“Oh. But, I mean, it’s something you enjoy, right? Like, before June, you had a lot of it on, and you seemed to know how to get it looking pretty good.”

I couldn’t see what kind of face she was making, though there was a pause.

“I was just getting some use out of some stuff I hadn’t the time to try.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.”

Then, we fixed the two bowls, I’d have liked to whisk hers a little longer, but she said that wasn’t my job. She started to mix the last bowl.

After an extended break, she started talking to me again.

“Her second power was addiction manipulation.”

I was kicking my feet, not doing much of anything while she was trying to do all the work on her own.

“That seems like it’d be useful for a casino owner. I mean, I don’t really get what that one means either, but gambling is like the second thing I think of when I hear addiction.”

She flicked a wrist at me, “And what’s the first thing you think of?”

“Tv.”

Clover rolled her eyes, and seriously scowled now, “You're hopeless, hero. Do I have to spell it out to you? D-r-u-g-s! Me and Ae used to argue all the time about how I should have her powers and vice versa. She’d always say that she was glad that things turned out the way they did. I’d always said that I’d prefer to think my way out of situations. Maybe then I’d learn something. She always seemed so put together. Even though she was basically an orphan, she was always cheery. Although she was catered to, she knew how to look after herself.”

I stroked my chin, “And you aren’t well put together? You don’t know how to look after herself?”

“In comparison to her,” She shouted, “No, the gap between me and her is the same as the gap between you and me. In terms of common sense.”

I was going to argue against her, but remembered what I had outfitted myself in. Both the cape and the apron.

More importantly, I noticed her use of the present tense.

Once she was finished, or at least, when her arm got to tired, she poured the mix into two cake tins, and put it in the oven.

“Don’t you need to pre-heat it,” I asked.

She scrunched her eyebrows, “What??”

“You’re supposed to leave the oven on at 220 degrees for about twenty minutes before baking, or it won’t rise properly.”

Her mouth fell open, “If you knew that, then why didn’t you put it on earlier??”

I tried to think of a reason, “I…” I couldn’t even think of a joke.

She groaned before pacing around the room, “Where’d you put that dented pan?” She checked the bin, not finding it.

I flicked the oven on, “I’d rather not tell you.”

She found it over at the table, bringing it back down on my head, though a little softer.

“Turn the damn thing on. What’s the worst that can happen??”

I did as I was told, and she almost dropped the pan into the trash.

“Wait,” I called from the oven, “I’m keeping that.”

She laughed, “What for?”

“I keep souvenirs from all of my adventures.”

It was a blanketed statement, and not entirely true. I’d only started keeping little trinkets to remember experiences or good things that happened. Obviously, after I got super powers, I started collecting a lot more stuff. My old costume’s remains, the stone I skipped at Feoli, a beer bottle I got from Bob, claws I got from a monster, stuff like that.

The one adventure I got nothing out of?

Irminsul.

“I didn’t think you were the sentimental type,” I half noticed a mocking in her voice.

“I just like to have something physical. To remind myself, I guess.”

She nodded, “Right, so not super tumours, super dementia.”

“No,” I shouted, “at least I don’t think so. It’s just, like in comic books, most characters are like sixty years old, there’s a lot that gets forgotten in that time. The bigger opponents tend to drown out everything else. I don’t want to look back on my life as a highlight real. I want to remember everything”

She scooched herself onto the counter opposite me, “Are you afraid you’ll forget?”

I gave it a lot of thought.

“I’m afraid that, I’ll reach a point where when I look back, I’ll tell myself that most of this was a waste. If I have stuff like this,” I grabbed the pan from her, “It’ll make everything more tangible for me later.”

She gave her next question some thought.

“What did you get from me?? As I recall, you were there for a few minutes, then left with your cape between your legs.”

I pointed, “Scar on my temple.”

She laughed until I said, “At least, that’s what it was. It’s gone now.”

Her expression took a serious flip, “Do you heal now to?”

It was finally my turn to laugh at her for saying something stupid.

“No, I got some of that foam stuff from an International agent. Remember when I told you I found a monster? I was on the verge of death, with a little thanks to you. He showed up after I put the monster fox down and used a fire extinguisher worth of that foam to put me in a cocoon.”

Despite my joking tone, she kept a serious glare on me.

“A cocoon’s worth?”

I stopped laughing, “Yeah?”

She leaned in, “I thought you were poor. How could you afford that?”

“Remember how I was working for Axel? That paid the debt off.”

“They get that much a year, I think. And they aren’t supposed to use it on outsiders, to stop their rivals from getting any clues to how the stuff works.”

I was a little confused about why she was so serious now, “So, what, he could be charged with misconduct or something?”

“Try treason. He probably talked Right into corroborating some story, something like, ‘Mr Agent had to use rebirthing fluid to recreate my lungs and intestines and legs’, thought that’s really unbelievable. Not only would he have to somehow convince Right, he’d have to make a scenario where he needed to use enough of the stuff to form a cocoon. If he’s lucky, they won’t have him imprisoned.”

I jerkily shook my head, “No way. It couldn’t have been that big a deal.”

Looking down, I considered the fact I hadn’t spoken to Bob, or any Internationals since then.

“Shit. I’ll call him,”

Clover stopped me, “Let’s just have the damn cake now, ok??”

Was she angry?

I got some frosting from the fridge, and as she took the flat cracked discs out of their pans, I got ready to squirt it out.

“I’ll do that.” She put her foot forward.

I put the syringe above the cake, “You can spread it, Clover. At this rate I’ll have done nothing to make this cake. Tell me Clo, why’d you want to bake this cake?”

I finished my part and she stepped forward was a spreading knife.

I slowed into the question, “Was it to… remember Ae?”

She spread it evenly enough.

“No. If I wanted to remember Ae’s cooking, I would have tried to find one of her recipe books, had somebody translate it.”

She lifted one, plopping it on top of the other.

“That looks good. Let’s go.”

As she moved the cake onto a plate, and left the kitchen with it, I called out, “What? Where?”

I followed after her, she knew I would. She grabbed a hand bag, and carried the desert through the door.

“I used to think Ae was great. Better than me. Because she was always honestly smiling. She’d faced death, she’d grown up as a third-worlder but it wasn’t the smile of a psychotic monster; it was the sort of smile that said, ‘I think it’ll work out. Eventually.’ She was the same age as me. But she never cried.”

Clover turned a corner, getting into an elevator, me just barely wedging my foot in after her.

“Well, that is until the second time I tried baking with her. Her dad showed up. Her dead dad. He was a ghost, one strong enough to keep to another plane. It was the first time she’d seen him in years. And she cried. Not because she was happy, not because she was overwhelmed.”

“She cried because no matter how she looked at it, that thing was no longer her father.”

When we got out, Clover circled around to a flight of stairs, peering upwards.

“Piggy back,” She ordered.

I rolled my eyes under my mask, and slung her over my shoulder. I don’t know how many floors we went up, though I started to feel like right now, we weren’t in the same rosey halls.

“You wanted me to cry, Rocky, you admitted it.”

I tried interjecting, “I was trying to say that-”

“But what would I be crying over,” She continued, “On some level, she still exists. You were talking about keeping old memorials, but what good will that do?? Looking backwards won’t get you anywhere, and it definitely won’t let you go back to the way things were. Things change, scars heal, all we really have are our memories, Rocky. No idols. Nostalgia and lament isn’t for her, it’s for me, the living.”

“Where ever Ae is, whatever she is- she was, she isn’t the person I knew. She no longer exists.”

She hopped off when we got close to the roof.

I finally said something, “But she did exist. For a fraction of your life, but she was still there. That’s what makes crying morally right. Regardless of whether or not she was perfect-”

“I will not mourn.”

It was a baffling statement, “It doesn’t make you-”

“I want to honour her.”

What? Again, I was getting a serious case of déjà vu.

I felt like…

I was… forgetting something. When she said that.

It was like having a thought a few seconds ago, giving a guess at what it was and being close, but no cigar.

We were on the roof, the glare of the sun was a big surprise, I hadn’t known this is where she was taking me.

She walked out, keeping the cake close, I was following behind her.

“Relax, ya monkey. I’m just here to dump some crap.”

She was getting closer to the edge.

“I’m not doing anything stupid, idiot,” She jostled her purse with one hand, putting the cake down with the other.

“Then what,” I asked, more than concerned.

“All that will be left of her is a bunch of junk she didn’t need and a syndicate she never wanted. I can’t get rid of the latter, but I can toss the former to the wind.”

She pulled out something that looked like a feather, letting it blow away in the wind. She tossed a phone at me, asking me to snap it.

I looked down on it, and did as I was told.

I don’t really know what’s best for luck girl right now. All I know is that she isn’t an idiot, all I can do is trust that she actually does know what she’s doing, at least when it comes to this stuff.

“I think you know this Rocky, but the actual service was shit. None of the people she actually cared about were invited. A bunch of old people she probably never spoke to and some foreign Units. Do you really think people self-centred enough to refer to themselves as Units, would actually have cared enough to get to know their enemy??”

I looked to my feet.

Selfish. I repeated it to myself.

“I’m getting rid of anything that made her a Unit. After this, there won’t be anything to degrade her. She won’t have been a person who was broken by existential terror, she’ll just be the daughter of a rich guy.”

That sounded familiar.

“Is this what she would have wanted?”

She passed some sort of ball to me, “Chuck that.”

She continued after it passed a few miles, “Yeah. This is what we agreed. This is the funeral she wanted. All this trash disposed of. In a few weeks, her real friends, classmates, teachers, they’ll go to a fake funeral. I half convinced Kim to put it together, though I think he knew it was the right way to handle things.”

“You said that we’d leave after we bake the cake.”

She nodded, “We are leaving. I don’t think Ae ever brought me up in her… real life. She liked to keep us separate.”

I felt a personal investment in the next question, “Why do you think that is?”

She was done tossing memories away, she pulled a butter knife out of somewhere, getting to work on the cake.

“Because this," She stabbed around, "is pure, undiluted dog shit. She was cursed. Me, Kim, Mongkeh, we were the real ghouls, horrible memories of what happened to her family, her real family. This world is built around the monster at the end of the tunnel.”

“It’s pointless. But we keep going.”

She handed me a slice from the cake with pinkish icing, not even half the size of her own.

I argued against her for some reason, “It’s not. Just because nothing we do matters… just because it doesn’t actually change anything, doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth the effort.”

She gave a dry laugh as she bit into her cake, “Now you’re just saying shit.”

“Listen Clover, I don’t know what I’m saying half the time, but-”

I stared up at the sky.

Like I said, I learned from my stay in Korea that there is warmer weather here. With it, the sky glows more vibrant and varied colours for longer before sunset. The sky wasn’t just bathed in yellow and red, it had mixed with the natural colour of the sky, creating a line of green above the horizon. The sky scrapers of Seoul blocked out some of it, but not enough, the sun was still beating through the dark pillars, crushing us in a final wave of heat.

“-is it not beautiful?”

She made a laugh like she was going to make another snide remark, but this time I cut her off.

“There’s no way you don’t appreciate it, Clo. Earlier, you lamented your lack of artistic talent, which you wouldn’t have done if you didn’t appreciate stuff like this. Visual marvels. It’s something that no effort was put into improving, in fact, human involvement serves to obscure it. This, is as natural a part of this pointless universe as-”

I suddenly remembered where I’d heard somebody call the world pointless.

Not just Irminsul.

Somewhere…

Ah, whatever, it was gone before I could chase the thought.

“The point I’m trying to make, is that if this was meaningless, if Ae really thought this world was hopeless, then she wouldn’t have cried. Those tears were a refusal, just as much as her laughter had been.”

Clover was holding the plate of cake in one hand, and a small portrait in the other hand.

Her mouth was open a slight, that’s all I saw of her face. After she’d removed her hair net, it was bellowing against the wind, black as the silhouettes in the distance.

I looked down to my feet, cursing myself, cursing Irminsul still.

She stretched out her left hand, and the cake slipped off the plate.

Then she dropped it to the floor, surprisingly, the plate didn’t so much as shatter.

The same can’t be said for the cake, which flaked apart as it fell.

Honestly, I don’t know what I was expecting from it. We hadn’t used any precise measurements, we hadn’t baked it properly, so why was I so disappointed when that dry brick fell?

“Now there isn’t a demon. Just Seoung-Soo Ae.

“Right. Let’s go home Shamrock.”

I held my hand out.

“Can I look at it?”

Her mouth was still held open a crack.

She handed the picture frame over, while she got her phone out.

Well, I can see why she was so obsessed with the aprons. In the photo, both Ae and Clover were covered batter and grease, Ae was laughing and Clover was on the verge of tears, two very different reactions to someone clumsily spilling a bowl.

I looked to her once more, seeing in the place of a whining child, not the usual substitute of a sadistic bitch; I saw a woman.

Shit, was my next thought.

I wasn’t paying attention to any of the stuff she was saying while she was on the phone, my laid-back attention was divided between the scene, and my own thoughts.

When I was looking over to her, I noticed her face return to a scowl.

“What I-”

She raised a hand, completely serious. I was listening now.

“No, listen lady, I’m Clover. Bastard’s Clover. From The Mountain. I’ve been living there for the past six month- No, I don’t give a shit about the Internationals VIPU- Do not fuck- Or I’ll get The Mountain on your ass... Oh, haha, listen, I paid for the return, I have a guy with me, he doesn’t have a VISA.”

She shouted an increasing number of profanities at the operator on the other end.

I didn’t know what was happening, but I realised we weren’t going home today.

She hung up, and stared vacantly for a few seconds.

She scrunched half her face, deliberating what to do next.

“Phone the International.”