"So... You met with the higher-ups from the Institution?"
"Yeah."
Carol, whom I hadn't seen in a while, spoke as if it were no big deal.
In fact, she seemed even more composed than the last time I saw her, which made me feel somewhat relieved.
"Summoning Peter Pan was a huge deal in many ways... Did you get in trouble?"
"Do you think an organization of such scale would just scold me and let it go?"
Among the tale devils, Peter Pan's power could be said to be considerable.
With the ability to create Neverland and kidnap people in an instant, and to disappear himself, was akin to a natural disaster from the Institution's perspective.
Before I dealt him a blow, they couldn't even communicate with him.
So, summoning Peter Pan, who could do who knows what, was only slightly better than launching a missile."Well~? They might be more lenient than you think. After all, the head of the Institution is human too. That's why they've been lenient with you so far."
The Institution must have some way to deal with me.
Yet, the fact that they're letting me roam freely is suspicious, to say the least.
This isn't the first time I've had this doubt.
But unless I meet them directly, it'll be hard to figure out their reasons.
If they're human, what could they possibly want from me?
"It's hard to believe. But I'll return the favor. We all make mistakes, after all."
"..."
Carol probably understood what I meant.
But she didn't respond.
"So, Carol, has anything big been happening lately?"
"Huhuhu... I'd like to say it's all peaceful, but... Actually, yeah, there is something."
I started listening carefully to Carol.
I wondered what world-shaking event had occurred now.
Or maybe it was something that had been happening for a while.
But Carol was reluctant to speak despite my attention.
"But it's not something I should tell Alice. You're not a jack-of-all-trades or a representative responsible for us. This world is full of chaos and monsters. We can't involve you in everything. Just as we shouldn't rely solely on Alice."
I particularly liked Carol's last words.
And I nodded in agreement.
"...Right. Besides... It's not like I can handle everything."
"Exactly. Alice can't handle everything. Don't waver, Alice. You're beautiful and strong, but still. You're a child."
I quickly noticed that Carol's voice was more energetic than usual when mentioning things I couldn't handle.
It felt a bit off, so I denied being treated like a child.
"I'm not a child, okay?"
"Want some candy?"
"If you're offering."
I took the honey candy Carol handed me.
I like classic things.
Just so you know, liking sweets has nothing to do with being an adult.
Don't look at me like that, dear readers in my head!
"Huhuhuhu..."
"Your laugh is creepy, Carol. Anyway... It's been a while, so I'll let it slide this time. I'm going to sleep. Good job today~. Oh, right."
I still had something to ask.
I turned back toward the bed and asked Carol.
"By the way, I can't reach James. Do you know where he is?"
"James is on a mission. Don't worry. If anything dangerous happens, I'll let you know right away. He went with the Red Shoes Special Forces, so his safe return is guaranteed!"
I don't know what the Red Shoes unit is, but I guess it means he's safe.
I didn't particularly feel the need to protect James.
He has his own trials, and if he dies in the process, that's his fate.
It's not something I can interfere with.
...Unless it's something no human could possibly overcome.
"..."
James didn't look too pleased when I tried to protect him before.
It was a completely different reaction from when I tried to keep the children within my boundaries.
Maybe James wanted to point that out to me.
I should try to listen to James more from now on.
I thanked Carol for her reassurance and went back to sleep.
POV Switch - 3rd Person
As Alice fell asleep, Carol left the isolation room, muttering to herself.
"It's truly a joy to see Alice grow~"
After saying that, she completely wiped the smile off her face and looked at her pen.
A pen that made a faint sound of gears.
A powerful force was trapped within it.
"...But don't try to take on everything. I don't want you to grow that much."
Carol was afraid of the child becoming an adult.
...
POV Switch - Alice
Lunchtime.
I was sitting under a tent on the playground, watching the children play.
They looked happy.
Then Suho, who was playing ball, stopped and waved at me, coming over.
"Hey. Alice."
I waved back at Suho.
"Come on over, Suho."
"What's for lunch that you're not eating?"
"Stir-fried eggplant, seafood soybean paste soup, vegetable fried rice, and for dessert, mint chocolate ice cream."
"I was going to eat, but the last one's a no-go."
Hearing the disastrous lunch menu, Suho seemed relieved he chose to play ball instead.
"Guess it's snacks today. I don't like mint chocolate either."
I decided to sneak out of school and head to the convenience store.
The teachers don't like students leaving school for safety reasons, but since it's just right outside, they probably won't scold us even if we get caught.
"Here you are. This is Alice's bread. This is Suho's."
Just as I was about to get up, a piece of bread was thrown at me.
I caught it with my chest.
A skill I picked up from playing ball with Suho sometimes.
Seeing the bread stay stable on my chest without falling, I guess my technique has improved?
When I turned my head, I saw Kyeong-min and Eun-jeong looking embarrassed for some reason.
"Oh... Did Kyeong-min throw that?"
"Y-yeah, You could say that!"
"Thanks~"
As I munched on the bread and looked around, I quickly figured out who Kyeong-min was looking for.
"If you're looking for Ha-rim... She's over there."
Ha-rim was near the school gate, arguing with someone dressed in green with blond hair... The beanstalk devil.
It was Jack.
"Your name is Shin Ha-rim, right? You got that book from Peter Pan, didn't you? Let me see it once!"
"Shh... Shh!"
"What are you guys doing?"
As I approached, Ha-rim quickly stuffed something into her bag with the speed of a magician and acted as if nothing had happened.
"Ehehe... I was just observing a suspicious person when this guy suddenly showed up."
"Ooh! Alice! I've come to find you! It looked like you were doing something fun, so I thought I'd say hi."
Ah, I didn't expect him to keep his promise from last time so soon.
Honestly, Jack doesn't seem like a dangerous devil, and since we're on cooperative terms, it should be fine to hang out with him.
Seeing my positive reaction, Jack got excited and started rambling.
"Alice! I have so much to say! When you blasted Peter Pan and made that grand entrance, it was so cool! It was truly a dazzling and beautiful sight!"
"I'll take the compliment, thanks."
"You overcame adversity and did a great job! That ending was truly ideal."
I flinched slightly at the word ending.
Ending...
It's a word that's always on my mind.
But no, not now.
It's not something to think about now.
"..."
"What's wrong, Alice?"
"Nothing. Jack, did you come to play with us?"
"Hmph. You could say that! I'm tired of seeing Ariel sing and laze around! I want to go on an adventure too!"
I don't know how Jack saw our adventure, but it seems defeating Peter Pan made him aspire to it.
If he wants an adventure, there's no need to stop him.
I nodded.
"Jack, what can you do? As a devil, you must have some special abilities, right?"
With my approval, the kids started showing interest in Jack.
"Me? I'm strong!"
"That's all?"
"...That's all..."
I was surprised.
Ariel, Pinocchio, and Peter Pan all used their abilities naturally, but Jack didn't seem to have that.
"Hey, don't feel bad. We were the ones who set high expectations. And being strong is pretty great!"
Ha-rim handed Jack her share of bread, and he looked touched.
"Ooh... Alice's friends are so warm."
As Jack swallowed the bread, wrapper and all, I asked Ha-rim.
"By the way, what were you really doing?"
"See that person over there?"
Ha-rim pointed to two people in the distance, and if I had to pick the suspicious one, it was obviously the left one.
Well, of course, since the person on the left was wearing a strange mask with a smiling face.
"That person with the smiling mask? Oh, I know him."
Eun-jeong said she knew him, so I turned my attention to her.
Eun-jeong quickly cleared up my curiosity.
"That's the new volunteer group that just formed. Their goal is to make everyone smile."
A volunteer group.
It sounds wholesome, but somehow...
After facing all sorts of scary things, to us...
"They're super suspicious."
They're definitely suspicious.
In horror movies, when someone with a creepy face suddenly approaches, you think they're a murderer, right?
That's the kind of suspicion I have about this weird group.
"...Oh, the security guard is keeping an eye on them."
"Guess we're not the only ones who find them suspicious."
"I saw it in a movie! Usually, those kinds of people brainwash and kill people!"
"Eun-jeong... That's going too far."
We all found the masked person suspicious, but we didn't stop them or report them to the police.
It was just our speculation, and they hadn't done anything wrong.
Maybe we're just being rude...
"They're giving out chocolates as gifts?"
I want some.
I felt the urge, but I'm not stupid enough to accept snacks from a suspicious stranger.
Of course, the same goes for our kids.
"Hey! Give me some chocolate too!"
...Jack seems to be the exception.
Before we could stop him, Jack was already behind the person.
Was Jack always behind the masked person?
While I was puzzled, they kindly handed Jack some chocolate.
"...? Oh, sure."
"Wahahaha! Thanks!"
Jack eagerly ate the chocolate.
His carefree laughter reminded me that he's just a kid.
"That idiot..."
And such innocent kids are easily influenced by bad adults.
The masked person quickly started telling Jack about their group.
"Are you interested in joining our Smile Alliance?"
"Smile Alliance? What's that?"
"It's a group created to make people smile. We bring smiles to gloomy and depressed people. It's both an artistic and volunteer activity."
"Ooh! That's amazing. People smiling is truly beautiful!"
"Right?"
The Smile Alliance... At first glance, it seems like a good group, but the mention of artistic activity made me uneasy.
In a world full of monsters, art might just be a medium to express something twisted beyond human comprehension.
Jack seemed positive about the Smile Alliance.
For a devil, he's surprisingly supportive of human happiness.
Well, Jack was once human, so it's not that strange.
Peter Pan and Pinocchio also had their own ways of wanting to save humanity.
I don't know why devils want to save humans, but maybe Jack has a similar side.
"Smiling! How wonderful!"
I caught a faint whisper in Jack's positivity.
It was a chillingly cold voice.
What's the price?
"..."
"If you're interested, please come here~"
"Thanks!"
Jack received a map and more chocolates before returning to us.
Suho scolded Jack.
"You should've at least said something before going."
"The chocolate looked too delicious!"
"Haa. Whatever. You're not the kind of devil to get into danger."
Suho seemed to think Jack was quite strong.
Having seen Peter Pan and me, it's natural to think that way.
"Nom nom... That's right! I'm not as strong as Alice... Nom nom..."
But this guy really enjoys his chocolate.
This is bad. If he keeps eating like this, Jack might get diabetes.
"...Just one bite."
"No!!!!"
Do you hate it so much that you put four exclamation marks on it?
...Cheapskate.
"This place... If you turn right at the supermarket and keep going straight, you'll see a karaoke bar. I thought they were suddenly remodeling it, but I guess these people bought it."
Kyeong-min looked at the map and said that.
Ha-rim asked.
"Are we going?"
"Well... I'm bored. Should we go?"
"Yeah. Let's go after school!"
The kids were positive.
So, we unanimously decided to go to the place marked on the map after school.
"Hmm."
Then Jack tilted his head and acted like he saw something strange.
Ha-rim asked Jack.
"What's wrong, Jack?"
"It's not my place to say, but... You're humans, right? Why are you going to a suspicious place? It's like moving into a haunted house from those horror movies Ariel showed me. In short..."
"In short?"
"You guys are weird."
"Guh."
Ha-rim froze, as if her common sense had been denied.
Ah, honestly, that's a normal reaction.
It's not like we don't know the risks, but deciding to go check it out is definitely strange.
...But maybe that strangeness is what binds us together.
Sometimes, don't look at things realistically.
Don't look too deep.
You have to look at things like a dream to enjoy the surface-level fun.
Ha-rim said to Jack.
"But Jack, you came to go on an adventure too. This is just part of it!"
This time, Jack froze a little.
It seemed like she hit a nerve.
Jack's expression turned cold for a moment before returning to his carefree self.
"...Then I'll go too! I'll wait with you until then!"
"You're not a student here, so you can't attend classes."
"No way!"
As Jack despaired, I sighed and handed him a mirror.
...
"Good thing Alice's mirror lets Jack study with us too."
"Ditto!"
"You even know fancy words."
Jack said that from within Ha-rim's hand mirror.
Tch. That hand mirror used to be my spot.
Having it taken by Jack didn't feel great.
Feeling grumpy, I decided to sleep.
...Good night.
POV Switch - 3rd Person
"But what's Alice doing?"
Jack asked Ha-rim.
Alice, who was blatantly sleeping on the desk, clearly wasn't paying attention to class.
"She's sleeping."
"Isn't she supposed to be in class?"
Ha-rim awkwardly smiled and answered.
"...Sometimes Alice uses her perception-blocking device to... Um... Take a break."
"I see..."
Alice is sleeping.
Ha-rim often gets sleepy during class too, but sleeping so blatantly is just...
"Should I prank her?"
Jack, in the mirror, reacted to the word prank with anticipation.
Ha-rim placed a glass marble from her pencil case on her finger and aimed it at Alice's chest.
"The perception-blocking device becomes unstable with even a small impact. I found that out when I tried to poke Alice while she was sleeping."
"Ooh..."
"Watch this."
Ting~!
When Ha-rim flicked her finger, the marble accurately hit the perception-blocking device inside Alice's clothes.
"Huh..?"
"Who's sleeping in class?!"
"Eek?!"
When Alice jumped up in surprise, the whole class's attention turned to her.
Alice's face turned bright red.
"Was there a girl like that in our class?"
"Why didn't I notice? She's really pretty."
The teacher didn't seem to know Alice's name.
While the classmates whispered, the teacher looked for Alice's name on the seating chart.
"Hmm? Hmm... Alice...? Can you explain the solution to the problem I just solved, including the steps?"
"Uh... Well..."
Alice frantically flipped through her textbook, but since she hadn't been paying attention from the start, there was no way she could know the answer.
Alice rolled her eyes, hid her face behind the textbook, and confessed the truth in shame.
"...Sorry. I was sleeping from the beginning."
"Stand with your hands up for ten minutes."
Oops. Ha-rim didn't think the prank on Alice would go this far.
"..."
"Alice is glaring at us."
'I know, Jack.'
Avoiding Alice's gaze, Ha-rim finished the last class.
"...Sorry, Alice."
"Ha-rim, you...!"
"Ow ow, sorry Alice! It hurts!"
POV Switch - Alice
I pinched Ha-rim's cheek.
Ha-rim struggled but couldn't break free from my strong grip.
Realizing she couldn't overpower me, Ha-rim shoved the hand mirror into my field of vision for me to imprint it and then gently, sometimes forcefully, stroked the mirror.
Then I twitched and twisted my body.
It... It tickles!
This is a secret only Ha-rim, who's been observing me for a long time, knows.
She used my habit of unconsciously synchronizing with mirrors in my field of vision.
While I was squirming from the tickling, Ha-rim broke free.
"You jerk!"
"But it hurt!"
"Calm down!"
While Kyeong-min, Suho, and Eun-jeong tried to calm me down, Jack laughed.
"Wahahaha! Having lots of friends is great!"
During the commotion, Eun-jeong teased me the same way Ha-rim did, making her the new target of my retaliation, but regardless, Ha-rim asked Jack for his thoughts.
"Jack, how was school?"
"Sitting together and learning something is more boring than I thought."
"Have you never been to school?"
"I've learned various things from the people in my village, but I've never been to school."
"..."
Ha-rim felt a bit of pity for Jack.
But she didn't show it.
From Ha-rim's perspective, it was easy to understand how unwanted sympathy could hurt.
"Then. We'll have to show you everything!"
The kids decided to introduce Jack to school.
I had been shown around the school by Ha-rim before, and the first place she showed me was...
"First, this is the restroom."
"Is the restroom really the first place you should introduce?"
"If something weird chases us, hiding here would be the most effective."
"Sometimes I just don't get you."
Ha-rim ignored my words.
Jack didn't seem to mind either.
Jack looked around the boys' restroom and said things like, "There's no smell of cigarettes here!".
"Ooh... So this is what a school restroom is like. Not much different from other places. Hey, Alice. What's the girls' restroom like?"
"I haven't been in there, but I guess there's no urinal."
I wanted to say that the girls' restroom isn't much different, but for innocent and young Jack, it's uncharted territory.
Jack frowned, seeming puzzled by my answer.
"You're a girl, so why haven't you been in there?"
"Because devils don't need to do things like that, right?"
"...?"
Jack's reaction bothered me, but we didn't have much time before the end of school.
We quickly moved to the next location.
"This is the music room. It's where we learn music."
"Ariel would love this."
When we showed him a recorder, Jack started bouncing around excitedly.
He asked if he could play it, but when we told him the owner wouldn't like someone else using it, he gave up quickly.
"There's a ghost story about this music room. They say the piano plays by itself at night!"
"Ah, that's because a ghost who likes singing came out of my mirror and played it every night. I made a deal with him to only play for a week, so he's gone now."
"That's kinda fishy."
"...A ghost story?"
With nothing left to see in the music room, we headed to the art room, which had more interesting things.
Inside, there were countless drawings made by the kids.
"This is the art room! It's where we learn art. By the way, we're all terrible at drawing, so our grades are awful."
"Even Ha-rim has something she's bad at, huh."
Jack spent some time looking at the drawings and then suddenly plucked one off the wall and shoved it at Ha-rim.
"Ooh... This is really bad. I don't know much about art, but I can tell this is an insult to the field!"
"Um... That's Alice's drawing."
This guy...
"Ow! That hurts! Ariel, help me!"
I dragged the mess that was Jack to the next location.
There were more places to explore, but it was almost time for dismissal, so we had to wrap it up.
"This is the club room. There are lots of clubs, but you can't just walk into any of them. The only one we can freely enter is ours."
"Sometimes if you wait in front of the cooking club, the nice kids give you snacks."
"So that's why Alice sometimes turns off her perception-blocking device and waits there."
"Can you guys stop with the pointless chatter?"
Our final stop was the Mystery Exploration Club room.
It was a fairly spacious room, so even with Jack inside, it didn't feel cramped.
"This is the club room. It's the Mystery Exploration Club!"
"Pretty spacious, huh?"
"More importantly, what's this mystery thing?"
Jack seemed more curious about the word 'mystery' than the club room itself.
Ha-rim, the club president, stepped up to answer.
"Well... We call the strange things that live in Alice's mirror mysteries, but beyond that, we also use the term for scary things that are hard to understand, like urban legends."1
"For example?"
"Right. Jack, have you ever met someone exactly like yourself?"
"I've never met someone exactly like me, but I've heard rumors about it!"
"That's it! That's the doppelganger urban legend we talk about. Exploring weird ghost stories like that is the current goal of the Mystery Exploration Club!"
Jack sort of understood.
He nodded and fell into thought for a moment.
Then he made a face like he still didn't get it.
"Why would you do something like that?"
"...Because it's fun!"
"Finding scary things fun... I can't understand that."
Jack is honest, like a child.
So rather than trying to convince him with roundabout explanations, it's better to let him experience it firsthand.
Ha-rim seemed to think the same way, as she shut Jack up with one sentence.
"You'll understand soon enough."
"..."
As Jack fell silent, the bell rang.
It was the bell signaling the end of the school day.
"Ah, it's dismissal time. We have to go now. Dismissal won't take long, so wait for us, Jack!"
We all rushed back to the classroom.
As long as the bell hadn't finished ringing, there was an unspoken rule that we were safe, so we managed to get through dismissal without getting scolded by the homeroom teacher.
POV Switch - 3rd Person
Jack was left alone.
As he watched the kids running off, he muttered to himself.
"...Enjoying fear... I still don't get it. But if that's why you all shine so brightly... No, I still don't understand. Being scared is about uncertainty, right? Even things that seem certain can betray you. Growing something as uncertain as a beanstalk, not knowing if you can climb it or what's at the top... It's weird. How can you be so sure the adventure will turn out well?"
Jack saw.
He saw Ha-rim and the other kids running through the mechanical monsters, heading towards Alice.
Where did they get the confidence that they could meet her?
How could they keep running even after getting hurt? Jack couldn't figure it out no matter how much he thought about it.
"I don't get it, Alice. I'm a fool, but sometimes I'm not a fool, and that's when I understand even less. So tell me."
Jack looked out the window at the sky and finished his muttering.
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