A Name For The Nanny

The juice bottle in her hand went flying onto the bed. The hands working at her were every bit as merciless as they had been when they stripped her for the bathtub.

“I’ll do it myself! I can manage on my own!”

She shouted it in a panic, and it made no difference at all. The nanny peeled off the jeans and T-shirt with brisk, practiced speed, then caught sight of the underpants and bra and scowled.

“And where in the world did you get something that indecent!”

Dong-hui fought her off with her whole body until the nanny gave up on the underwear. In exchange, she had to put on a dress hung all over with trailing lace.

A princess in a fairy tale might have worn a dress like it, and pretty it was, but layer upon layer of lace made the thing ridiculously heavy. She had barely taken a few steps before the weight of it started pressing her shoulders down.

“Is there anything besides this one? It’s so uncomfortable.”
“Something else? Really?”

Is that such an astonishing thing to say?

The nanny asked it again, and then a few more times after that, as though the answer could not possibly be the one she had heard. Her sparse eyebrows shot straight up into the middle of her forehead, which really was something to see.

Dong-hui ran a hand over the dress, spread wide in every direction like an umbrella, and nodded. As a little girl she had dreamed of going around in one like it, but not now.

There’s a quest saying I have to tour the estate — how am I supposed to walk around in something this uncomfortable?

The nanny watched her closely for a while, studying her, then went into the dressing room and came back out with a dress that at least looked plainer. The navy one looked far neater and far more comfortable than what she had on. Nothing about it fanned out in every direction like an umbrella, and no lace trailed off it like sea foam.

“This one’s good.”

Dong-hui took to it, so the nanny sighed and changed her clothes all over again. Simple as the design looked, it was built so that nobody could possibly get into it alone, and she had to submit to being helped a second time.

“You’re not to go changing your tune about it later.”
“Yes.”
“But my lady, why do you keep speaking to me so formally, ever since this morning?”
“Sorry?”

The blue status window bobbed in the air right in front of her eyes, and the nanny did not so much as blink at it. Dong-hui was certain now that nobody but her could see the thing.

“Emma?”

Dong-hui blurted out the first name that floated into her head. The nanny pulled a face like she’d bitten into something rotten.

“Where exactly are you looking?”

Here she was standing right in front of her, and Dong-hui was staring off at nothing and talking nonsense. The nanny gave her a very strange look.

Ugh, I knew it.
Then…

“Delma?”

She was seriously wondering whether she’d have to fall back on Yo-Mama if this one flopped too.

“Yes? Was there something you needed?”

The nanny asked it in a fond voice, smoothing Dong-hui’s dress as she spoke. Delma’s hands went over every corner of it, careful and gentle.

Whatever the nanny was doing, the status window carried on appearing with its text changed.

The list of activated areas somehow seemed to be making fun of her. Dong-hui picked number one without much thought, because the convenience store carried the widest variety of goods and the most food.

“Number one!”

She whispered it, quiet as a mouse, in case the nanny heard, then worried it had come out too faint to make out. The status window responded at once.

Even while she was being congratulated, something about it sat badly. Dong-hui put the flat of her hand up to block the blue status window out and beamed at Delma.

“Delma, I’m very pleased with this dress. I mean— I like it.”

She wasn’t used to talking down to someone older than herself.¹ Delma had clearly relaxed, though; her face was brighter than it had been before.

“It does look a little plain. Would you like to put on some accessories before you go?”

Delma fetched the jewelry box over with a flourish and lifted the lid. Dong-hui’s heart swelled with anticipation and thudded away. Never mind a gold ring; she had never owned so much as a silver one in her whole life.

And now — jewels!

The box was not even a large one, and most of what it held was empty space.

“This is all of it?”
“You had trouble enough getting hold of even these.”

A necklace with a round red ruby, a pearl necklace of small beads, a gold necklace set with a diamond the size of a bean. Three, and that was everything. No rings, no bracelets, no brooches. She’d got her hopes way up at the word ‘lord’, but apparently ‘dirt-poor’ had been written there for a reason.

“It’d be a jackpot if something like a jeweler’s opened up as an activated area.”

Dong-hui muttered it into a jewelry box that held more empty space than jewels. Without any warning, a blue quest window came bobbing up in front of her eyes.

Favorability 1? Isn’t that way too easy?

For a quest that would turn a jeweler’s into an activated area, it was far too easy. She was grinning away, thinking it really was a piece of cake exactly as the status window had promised, when the screen flashed and the display changed.

“Ah, dammit, what is this!”
“Well, that’s what comes of saying you’d wear that dress.”

Delma had put the grumbling down to the navy dress she’d changed into, and grumbled right back.

“It’s not the dress. I was just thinking about something else.”

Delma met the excuse with a suspicious look, held it a moment, then gave the front of the dress a couple of brisk pats and stood up.

“I’ll go and check whether the carriage is ready. But you really are happy with that dress, aren’t you?”

Her eyes were still full of suspicion, and she plainly hadn’t let the matter go; the bundle of lace Dong-hui had shed earlier was still draped over her arm.

“Mm. I love it.”

Who on earth would wear a thing with lace dangling all the way into the armpits.

Dong-hui shot a glance at the dress that had looked ready to bury her in lace and shook her head. Chloe, the owner of this body, might have had a pretty face, but her fashion sense had evidently been a disaster.

Once Delma had left the room, Dong-hui checked that the door was shut and decided to try calling up the status window again.

“Status window, open!”

Nothing changed. Everything simply stayed quiet, so she tried summoning it a second time.

“Open up! Status window!”
“Open sesame, status window!”

The space in front of her stayed as clear as ever. There was no sign of a status window arriving, not even the faintest tremor in the air.

“Would you blue window open please?”
“Kindly open, status window.”
“Sesame, perilla, blue status window.”

She worked her way from scraps of English up to a properly respectful phrasing, and got not one word in reply.

“What on earth am I supposed to do.”

Still grumbling, she turned her eyes to the gray front door that took up part of the wall like a picture frame.

“Shall I try over there first?”

Dong-hui checked the closed bedroom door one more time, then walked up to the front door.

Who’d have thought walking up to a shabby, ugly front door could set my heart pounding like this.
You really never can tell what life will do.
Maybe I still haven’t woken up from the dream.

Dong-hui thought it in a vague sort of way as she keyed the front-door code in again.

— Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Maybe it was how quiet everything else was, but the keypad rang out unusually loud. Dong-hui glanced around for no reason at all, like someone with something to hide, and took hold of the front door handle. The cold metal under her palm brought it home: this was not a dream. Fear and a flutter of excitement tangled messily together.

“Hoo…”

She let out a deep breath and pulled the handle, and the basement studio revealed itself, reeking of mildew.

Soft fabric whispered against her ankle bones with every step. Standing in the middle of a basement studio in a navy dress that fell all the way to her ankles struck Dong-hui as deeply out of place. Either way, checking the newly activated area came first.

“Let’s go and see.”

Dong-hui turned her back on the front door that connected to the dirt-poor estate and took hold of the handle of the one leading outside.

At last the status window appeared in front of her eyes.

“Yes!”

She answered on the spot, afraid that now she’d finally found a question it might vanish again.

All right!

She could walk out the front door at last. Back when her one wish had been to loll around in her room all day she had never once wanted to go outside, but knowing she couldn’t go out no matter what she wanted was something else entirely.

Her lips had gone dry. Dong-hui wet the lower one with her tongue and shoved the front door hard.

“Huh?”

The first thing to appear should certainly have been the stairs leading up to street level. Instead, outside the front door it was bright as broad daylight, much the way it had felt the first time she opened her eyes over on the other side.

“If I go up these stairs, am I going to die?”

They looked like the stairway to heaven that turns up now and then in movies and dramas. Thick fog covered the top of them, and there was no making out what lay beyond.

Dong-hui hesitated a moment, then climbed with firm tramping steps, as though she had made up her mind. The long trailing skirt kept catching under her feet, so she gathered it in both hands and hitched it right up.

The closer she got to the fog, the faster her heart beat. She stopped with one step left, but all she could see was still the same murky fog.

“This is kind of scary.”

Dong-hui’s voice shook as she looked into the blankness ahead.

“Hoo…”

She drew a big breath, and the instant she set foot on the last step the fog packed solid in front of her split wide to left and right as though it had never been there. Space itself must have been wrenched out of shape, because barely ten meters from the stairs stood the convenience store she went to work at every day. Normally the walk took ten solid minutes without stopping.

“Something really did happen, then.”

The whole way from the front door to the convenience store was hazy and blurred, as though it were packed with fog. Fear dropped on her all at once. Walk into all that fog, she felt, and she would never come out again.

Who knew a single step could be this hard.

Dong-hui couldn’t quite bring herself to move, and then, with a ding, the status window appeared again.

“Nobody? What about everyone else? Have they all disappeared? Has the Earth actually ended or something?”