Ramblings of a Lebanese Toaster

K-POP DEMON HUNTERS | What It Sounds Like

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.

It is still dark, or at least as dark as it ever gets in the city, lights spilling in through the giant windows.

Rumi is a notoriously light sleeper. It comes with the job. And the whole—herself. She’s been waking up before her alarm for going on nine years now; she used to be able to sense a hand on her doorknob before it made contact.

The Honmoon flickers in the corner of her eye, and the mutt’s shoulders tighten. It’s not as bad as it was yesterday, lingering, tugging at her, racing after her when she ran.

But it is bad.

She bares her teeth at it, and ducks into her favorite hideaway.

The Honmoon is here, too, of course. It is not dissuaded by the carefully set up noisemakers that the mutt uses as a warning system—or, more likely, a notification, at the sight of toppled over buckets and newly cracked bottles. But it made her feel better.

She puts her hoodie down and carefully unwraps her stolen containers. They look like she could keep them, use them for other things.

If she had anything to hold in them.

She is not sure she does, but she doesn’t want to get rid of them, either.

Cold, lonely, stolen breakfast does not taste as good as dinner did.

The mutt misses the Hunters already. Misses them terribly, aching deep inside. And that is why she had to leave, before that could realize what she was and make her and it would hurt even worse, but—

The mutt misses the Hunters.

She packs back up the food she has left, checks her shirt collar again for the orange sticker, and slips back out around her defenses.

It is a good long way from where she had first started, and this means the mutt can consume herself with running.

Humans run for fun, sometimes, and often without purpose. The mutt has never understood this before.

Running is something she has always done to get away from a clear and present danger—her father would not like it when she ran, and he always made sure she did not like it when he caught her. So she did not run unless she was too stupid to think of these things, even when she was little.

(At the park, when she climbs up in the trees, she watches the children run after each other, and their parents laugh and smile. Sometimes they run, too, and when they catch the children everyone laughs.)

(Well. Not always. Sometimes the parents catch the children by the wrist and they are angry as they shake them and say no, and this is not so strange as everything else the mutt sees. But usually, at the park, families are happy.)

But, now, the only danger is in her thoughts, and she wants to run very much.

So maybe the humans make some sense after all.

The issue being, of course, that it does not work.

All she thinks of is how warm she was. How Rumi stared, as if she were something that mattered. How Zoey laughed, sweet and bright. How gentle Mira’s hands were over hers.

Live until you die, her dad used to say sometimes, with a look of desperation. The mutt knows this—she stays alive, even when it is hard, unpleasant work.

No one has ever helped her to do that before. Not without wanting something in return.

Her father always wanted to understand.

What happens if I don’t feed the mutt? How much taller has the mutt gotten over the last year? What happens if I keep the mutt in the dark? How hard can I press before the mutt’s skin breaks?

Rumi wanted to understand, too.

But…

They’d canceled the first item on their schedules, which had been miserable, sitting and waiting and hoping without any distraction, so Rumi had insisted that Mira drag them all downstairs to the studio.

It’s just been a waste of their backup dancers’ time, though, and she knows it. Everyone knows it.

“Take five,” Mira says. “Or ten. Whatever.”

Her usual cool is frayed at the edges. Rumi sees Yeeun and Yunseo exchange a worried look.

She doesn’t know what to tell them. She should know what to tell them. She thinks about the kid. Are you a mutt too?

The way she’d flinched. The way she’d smiled, like she didn’t even realize she was doing it, surprised and fascinated by the smallest things. The way she’d looked like Rumi.

Is she okay? Has she come back? What if she has? What if they aren’t there and then they aren’t consistent and then the kid hates them and thinks that they’re liars and she never wants to talk to Rumi again and—

“I’ve got water, and I’ve got half-water,” Zoey says cheerfully, holding up Rumi’s water bottle in one hand and an open sports drink in the other.

(Celine always insisted they had to be watered down if they were actually exercising, with how much sugar was in them. Rumi can’t drink one without diluting it, even still. Tastes wrong.)

“Thanks,” she says, and takes her water.

“She’s fine,” Zoey says, nervously fiddling with the lid. “It makes sense that she left, but she’s gonna be fine. She’s been doing this for years.”

Rumi nods. “I know.”

“It doesn’t make sense to be scared, because she’s fine,” Zoey says.

Rumi shakes her head. “It doesn’t.”

“I’m still really, really worried,” Zoey says.

So someone has been to her shelter. That's okay. It happens. It happens a lot. It's not the end of the world. She can deal with this. Here we go.

The bottle she’d set up as alarm isn't broken, but it is gone. It might just mean that somebody wanted the 100 won deposit. She might still be able to come back here after a few days being careful. She'll just grab the food containers, and—

And of course they're gone. 

Stupid. Obviously someone who'd carefully deconstruct her little system for 100 won will want the food too.

Her hoodie is gone, and her little pile of rags. Her stash of plastic bags are scattered and torn. Only the Honmoon is still there, untouched and undisturbed, curled like a cat in the empty ruin of her home. 

I bet you like this, thinks the mutt. You don't really care what I want. 

She walks away from her favorite hideaway, stripped and marked by an unknown hand. She sticks close to the walls. She feels unsettled. Which is dangerous. 

How did one day and one night tip her so far off balance? 

And now it's like that day is simply erased. Their delicious food. Mira had made it for her. Mira had made it for her and made her laugh after. Zoey had held her hand, and Rumi had held her all night. 

Did they really? It seems so unlikely. Fanciful. You're a daydreamer, her father's echo agrees. 

The mutt reaches a hand inside the collar of her shirt. She feels carefully along it, searching, searching, and—

Her heart freezes. Her dad is always right. 

It’s gone it’s gone it’s gone.

It shouldn’t matter. A sticker from a piece of fruit that got peeled off and restuck four separate times was bound to be barely hanging on—she was always going to lose it. She’d be stupid to think otherwise.

But she is. Stupid. Always has been.

This is the life of a thing like the mutt: cold and lonely and miserable. There is no kindness for useless things like her.

Like an echo of her misery, something bangs against the wall behind her head.

She jumps, inadvertently releasing the collar of her shirt. (Rumi’s shirt. Soft and clean and—)

Someone yells, words muffled and unintelligible through the wall. The mutt scowls to herself and clambers to her feet. How hadn’t she noticed someone getting so close? Was she really that self-absorbed?

She climbs the wall, quick and practiced as she shimmies up a pipe and then hops to a crate, scrambling from there to one of the high window ledges. It cracks under her foot as she pushes off, wobbling, and the mutt has a feeling she won’t be taking this route again.

The glass has long since been busted out—one of the reasons she doesn’t use this shelter much in winter—and she pokes her head out, bracing on the inside of the frame as she looks down into the alley below.

Distractingly, the Honmoon loops around her shoulders. She bats a hand at it, uncomfortable, taking in the scene:

The woman is bleeding as she bares her teeth. She looks like the mutt, ragged and thin. Her voice shakes as she says, “Just fuck off. I’m not—last warning. I’m not joking around.”

The men… the boys, closer to mutt’s age than the woman’s, laugh, nudging each other. They are sleek and clean and cruel.

“Come on,” the one says. “Show us what you got, huh?“

The other two laugh.

“Just hand it over,” says the short one.

The one with the hair snickers. “Hey, no, if she wants a fight, we can give her one, right?”

They laugh again. Always laughing. This is a game.

The woman cowers. She has a bag pinned to the wall behind her, the mutt realizes.

(Run, her dad hisses. You useless creature, you’d better run, because if I catch you—)

All three figures turn to her.

Oh no. Oh no. What is she doing? What the fuck is she doing? This is not what she does. This is not what a smart stray does, a stray that doesn’t want to get kicked. 

But—she really, really isn’t. Smart.

And this, this woman—she looks so much like her. Small and scared and hungry. But the mutt isn’t hungry, not today. Today, she is well-fed, and angry, and here.

The mutt gets her feet under her, and shifts into a crouch. 

One of the boys takes a step toward her. He laughs. “Hey, what? Wanna join in the fun?”

“Fuck off,” the Mutt growls, and pounces.

He doesn’t know how to fight; the mutt can immediately tell. He doesn’t know about the switch you have to flip to stop worrying about getting hurt so that you have an actual chance to avoid it. He flinches, when she grabs him by the shirt and bites into his arm. He yelps and tries to shake her off, but she can just sink her teeth in deeper and hold on.

“Fuck!” He screams. He’s loud, loud. “Let go! Let go!”

The mutt doesn’t. She locks her jaws. He still doesn’t hit her. He doesn’t know how.

The other boy takes a step. “Please let him go,” he says. His voice shakes a little. “We’re gonna go.”

The mutt eyes the woman behind the writhing boy. She’s huddled, making herself small. She isn’t looking at them. She doesn’t want to invite violence by looking at it directly.

The mutt lets go.

The boy stumbles back, holding his wounded arm. His sleeve has a wet ring of red. His breath is heaving. “This bitch is crazy!” he gasps. “She’s got rabies or something!”

The other boy grabs him by the sleeve that isn’t bloody and tugs. “Dude, shut up. Come on.”  

The bleeding boy looks at her with his lips peeled back, his eyes wide. He’s trembling. He looks scared. “I hope they put you down,” he tells the mutt, and stumbles away after his friend.

The mutt watches him go, and considers why that doesn’t sting. He’s scared. And she—isn’t.

You hope they put me down, she thinks with a strange satisfaction, because you can’t.

The mutt turns to the woman, still cowering against the wall. She’s trying to hurriedly stuff some containers back into her bag with shaking hands. 

The woman flinches. She drops a container. It thuds against her bag, and makes glass clink.

“I—I don’t want a fight—I didn’t—“ She scrabbles at it, picking it up off the ground and offering it out to the mutt. She’s is trembling so hard it nearly falls again.

The mutt blinks, trying to grasp what is happening.

The woman skitters in front of her bag—dark, stained canvas, ratty from overuse—her posture fearful and protective. This is all she has. Even if she thinks she will fail, she has to try to hold on to it. “What, you want all of it? Are you fucking—“

“No,” the mutt says.

She understands: the woman is afraid of her. The mutt could bite her, too, could snarl and rip and take.

Or… she could not.

“I took them first,” she says. “I hope—I hope you eat.”

She thinks the Hunters would have wanted her to eat.

The woman stares at her. The mutt goes to smile, the way Zoey would smile, like a promise: this is okay. Then she remembers her teeth are covered in blood.

She jerks her head down and wipes at her mouth with the sleeve of her stolen gifted shirt. “It is okay,” she repeats. “I hope you eat.”

She watches through her eyelashes as the woman snatches up the container and edges around her on careful feet, slipping out of the alleyway and taking off at a run.

The mutt looks at the stain on Rumi’s shirt. It will dry and fade, red-brown and immutable.

But the Hunters had so much food to share, and so many clothes to share, and so much warmth…

The mutt swallows around the taste of iron in her mouth, and she thinks about her dad, again. Live until you die.

But she isn’t. The apartment is dark and empty and exactly as they left it.

She can see Mira physically wilt, like a long leggy underwatered flower. Rumi walks over to wrap her arms around Mira’s middle and pick her up a few centimeters off the ground until she  laughs, and Zoey grabs Rumi in a hug from behind.

“Okay,” Mira squeaks finally, “you can put me down now, I need to take off my makeup.”

Rumi obliges, but Zoey holds on for a few more waddling steps. Rumi twists around to give her a kiss on the head for her effort.

Zoey flops dramatically on the couch. “This is not a bad sign,” she says convincingly. “We are not catastrophizing.”

“Right.”

“Don’t catastrophize, Rumi!”

Rumi sighs. “I’m just gonna go grab us some emotional support ramyun.” She pulls on her sneakers.

“And some turtle chips for me, please,” Zoey says forlornly.

Rumi swings around to squint at her. “We had like four packs?”

“Had being the operative word,” Zoey agrees shamelessly.

Rumi snorts. “All right. Any special requests, Mira?”

“My youthful carelessness back,” Mira calls back from the bathroom.

“Never had that!” says Zoey. “Korea’s number one give-a-fucker.”

Rumi smiles and goes in search of Mira’s lost nonchalance. And snacks.

But she doesn’t quite manage. Because standing right outside the building, near the back door, with her wild purple hair and Rumi’s t-shirt, is the kid.

She looks okay. She looks good. Not like she’s horribly injured—more injured than she had been—or like she’s been horribly mistreated—more mistreated than she had been. If anything, there is a certain air about her that hadn’t been there before; not quite confidence, but not too far from it.

“I don’t know what that says,” says the kid, gesturing at Zoey’s sign. “But I think that’s for me?”

Rumi nods fervently, eyes blurring with tears. “It’s the security code for our back door,” she chokes out. She wants to hug her so, so bad. “In case you wanted to—come back.”

The kid makes a face. “If you’d just written the numbers, I could’ve gotten it,” she mutters. She turns to look at Rumi. “Can I have the sticker?”

That’s a dangerous thing to say, but the mutt thinks she understands it a little more now. So she doesn’t tell Rumi she can’t.

Instead she waits, careful and still, as Rumi peels the sticker off the sheet of paper with patterned fingers, and gently presses it to the mutt’s cheekbone.

Rumi smiles, and the mutt smiles back, just a little.

And then Rumi shows her the code to the back entrance—1-0-1-1-star, and the light on the keypad flashes green—her finger moving much slower than the mutt knows it usually would.

They walk into the same stairwell the mutt had snuck out through this morning, large and concrete and echoing up, up, up.

And then, Rumi takes the mutt out through the other door of the stairwell, and into the kind of place that the mutt would normally get kicked out of, shiny and clean and big, with a fountain and men at the front desk, but when the men at the front desk see that Rumi is bringing the mutt in, they turn the other way.

They get in the elevator, and go up, up, up. Rumi looks at the mutt, intense and single-minded.

The mutt thinks maybe this is okay. Rumi wants to understand, but she is… and she is gentle and kind. And being gentle and kind is good. So she will probably keep doing it.

The elevator doors open.

“Mira,” Zoey calls from the couch, throwing one arm up into the air. “I have ballet videos so you can critique their turnouts instead of catastrophizing. And I want snuggles!”

The mutt snorts. She doesn’t know what half those words mean, but Zoey sounds very silly either way.

“Two minutes!” Mira calls back.

“I’ll do you one better,” Rumi says.

Zoey sits straight up. Her eyes go wide.

“Mira!” she shouts, vaulting over the couch. “Now!”

The mutt tries to resist the urge to skitter backwards, but Zoey still skids to a halt in front of her, smile big and wide and bright, hands spread wide. “Hi! Is a hug okay? No is fine, I’m just—we’re really glad you’re okay. Is that blood?”

“Blood?” Mira echoes, jogging into the room. “Sh—kid! Where’d you come from?”

“Blood?” Rumi squeaks.

“Outside.” The mutt shrugs, tugging at the stained sleeve. “It’s not mine.”

They all stare at her.

She remembers the other question, and the idea bites her like an angry squirrel. Her face gets hot as she ducks down her head.

What is clear is that before her death, there was a fantastic harvest of persimmons on the property and she canned an abundance of persimmon jam. After her death, my great great great grandfather Robert ate the persimmon jam on toast every morning and cried. I remember this because my great grandmother used to tell my grandmother about being a girl and seeing her father sitting at the kitchen table bawling for his wife. Alone in this world, missing the woman he had been married to for 16 years, thinking of her as he ate the last of the things she had made for the family. Most widowers with young children got remarried quickly in those days. He didn’t. He raised his girls alone and died at 60, never having remarried.

My grandmother is named Mary, after her mother’s mother who lies in a cow pasture with a rock to mark her grave. A woman who died entirely too young, who died wanted and loved and needed.

Very much did in the sense that I literally do not know where my job is at the moment. But, for the time being I haven't been let go because nobody else including the store owner knows where it is either.

So, I don't wanna risk doxxing myself by posting pictures but goddamn am I tempted because this is not a believable event. This is a cartoon problem. For looneytoons.

But yeah, so, I work(ed?) at a kiosk selling boba tea, right? Freestanding kiosk in the mall with full water and electrical hookups and multiple fridges and sinks and a mini kitchen and the works. Fully functional tea shop. Very important to note that it was there last night, The work chat was discussing another issue last night at closing time. I'll get back to this.

It's been showing signs of being on the way out with how business is being handled lately and I've been considering other options, which is probably why I'm not as torn up about this as I should be, but maybe it just hasn't set in yet, but that's not the point. The point is there's been a lot of shit breaking and not being replaced and nobody mentioning anything about it until I walk into work in the morning and have to figure out why shit like the fucking cash register isn't there today. So I'm kinda used to having to ask questions about big things that nobody bothered to update me on. I was out for two weeks recovering from a surgery, so I came to work this morning assuming there'd be some kind of bullshit, yeah?

So, the question I had to ask the chat this morning was:

Not a text I ever thought I'd have to send in sincerity, but there it is. Because what I found instead was a fenced off patch of discolored tiles and a few holes in the floor where my entire place of employment used to be.

And the answer? Nobody knows! It was there last night when the mall closed, and every single trace of the structure and all its contents including drink making supplies and our safe and cashbox was gone when it opened again. And when I say nobody knows, I mean everyone from last night's closers to the actual (former?) owner of the store jad no fucking clue about this until getting that text from me this morning. For once I am actually the first to know. 🎉.

So. I guess I didn't so much lose my job as had it stolen. Not by AI, but good old fashioned hands-on human beings picking it up and carrying it away somehow. All mall security would tell me was that they were instructed not to tell me anything and have us contact our management. Who also don't know anything. And later on I came across some construction workers around the gravesite of the kiosk discussing filling in the holes, asked them about it, and was told that they "weren't at liberty to say".

So, not only is my job gone in the most literal physical sense of the word, but it was taken in some kind of super secret kiosk extraction in the dead of night without any warning or witnesses and nobody is allowed to speak of it. The store owner said she was gonna figure it out 10 hours ago and still no word back.

My mother in law thinks the FBI took it.

Not any of the other stores around the state. Just the one little kiosk.

Why? Because she loves a conspiracy and is just a little bit extra.

Also because she was around for the massive crackdown on Yakuza-owned businesses in Waikiki (in her homestate) that did actually involve the FBI seizing stores (no confirmation of making kiosks cleanly disappear in the middle of the night though).

Still no word from my job on what's actually going on, but the most likely theory so far is that maybe the kiosk was on lease and got repossessed? The mystery continues

According to the owner, based on what she's been able to find out, the kiosk was not removed legally and they're starting a potentially long process of legal action. I hope she gets to sue the shit out of whoever did it but for now at least I know for sure I'm unemployed.

Really hoping for more details in terms of who/why/how, so I'll keep updating if I learn anything.

For now the summary is: An unnamed entity that is most likely mall management (on account of mall security cooperating with them) stole an entire kiosk and all the contents including money and machinery with barely a trace in the middle of the night grinch-style, with zero warning or explanation, and ensured the silence of both security and the construction crew, in an action that was definitely preplanned and illegal, and as far as I know nobody knows its whereabouts.

Enjoy the unintentionally funniest text I've ever sent in my life

Aaand a close-up:

HEY HI HELLO THIS ONE'S MY FAVORITE

more of jinx + vi's texts as requested from the last one :3

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bonus bc yes i did draw both of their pictures just to shrink them down to 4 pixels