Oppa, Which One's Prettier?

After that we talked and talked, as if to make up for all the longing that had piled up between us, until a good long while had gone by.

“Anyway, Sia. Shouldn’t we start thinking about going somewhere else?”
“Why, Oppa? There’s nobody around here.”
“No, it’s not that. Anywhere else and I wouldn’t care, but this is a cemetery. Staying here much longer is a little…”

And not just any graveyard, either. The body Sia had as a human was buried right there, which made it a somewhat unsettling place to linger.

Sia nodded when I said so.

“Now that you mention it, you’re right. Come to think of it, my own corpse is buried right next to us. Ugh.”

She scrunched up her face, then grabbed my hand.

“Oppa, hold on tight.”

At those few words, everything in front of me went white for an instant, as if a flashbang had gone off.

A moment later came Sia’s voice.

“Well? Do you like it? Much better than before, right?”

The scenery had changed in the blink of an eye. Only moments ago we had definitely been standing in the cemetery; now the ground under my feet belonged to a small beach without a trace of anyone else around.

“Sia, did you… just use teleport?”
“Mm-hm! Remember how I used to say my dream was for us to camp out on a deserted island together for a whole day, just the two of us? It came back to me all of a sudden.”

Sia did seem to have said something like that once, but that wasn’t what had me startled right now.

She used teleport… this easily?

Teleport was by no means a simple spell, the kind you could pull off with no formula calculation and no incantation. Just how amazing was our Sia?

“Sia. So does that mean you could teleport to the other side of the planet like this? Somewhere like Paraguay?”
“Of course! Why, does Oppa want to go to Paraguay?”

Name anywhere at all, she urged me, since she could take me anywhere.

“No, I was just wondering. Though anywhere’s good if we go together.”
“Hehe.”

After we’d traded a few more embarrassingly sweet words, Sia suddenly seemed to remember something she’d forgotten. She tapped her own head, scolding herself.

“Ha, look at me. Oppa, wait here just a second.”

With that, she cast teleport again on the spot.

“Ta-da!”

She was back within seconds, holding the takeout bag of tteokbokki I’d brought in one hand.

“Oppa got this tteokbokki ready for me, so there’s no leaving it behind.”

Maybe it was the thrill of eating tteokbokki for the first time since her reincarnation, but she was beaming from ear to ear.

From where I stood, though, I couldn’t help wondering whether eating that was really all right. Sure, I’d bought the tteokbokki for Sia, so her eating it wasn’t the problem. The problem was that it was, at bottom, food from a memorial rite. If Sia herself wanted it, I couldn’t very well stop her, but personally I’d sooner have gone and bought fresh tteokbokki.

But just then, Sia spoke up in a trembling voice.

“Oppa, what’s wrong?”

I’d said nothing, just kept staring, and she must have sensed something was wrong. Her whole body trembled, not just her voice, like a puppy that had just been caught misbehaving. If I didn’t say something right now, she looked ready to burst into tears on the spot.

Flustered, I quickly waved my hands.

“No, it’s just… that tteokbokki, I brought it as offering food for the rite, so it feels a bit off. I was weighing whether it wouldn’t be better to just buy a fresh batch.”
“Absolutely not!”

Sia let out a breath of relief at my answer, but she still shook her head firmly.

“Oppa got this tteokbokki ready for me, so not eating it would feel far worse! And the drink, too…”

The moment the word drink came out, Sia and I realized it at the same time: the cheongju, and only the cheongju, had been left behind back there.

“…I forgot.”
“I’m pretty sure in the fantasy novels I used to read, dragons never forgot a single thing. Are real dragons different, maybe?”

Half joking and half serious, I teased her affectionately, the way I always used to.

But at that, Sia’s face fell, like someone who had done something terrible.

“Why did I… leave it behind?”

The old Sia would have taken a joke like that in stride and fired one right back at me. Now she couldn’t settle over a single bottle of liquor. She asked me to wait, vanished, and reappeared within seconds with the cheongju we’d left behind, her eyes unfocused, as if her mind were elsewhere.

“The drink Oppa brought for me… that’s right… I mustn’t leave it behind…”

Something about the state she was in looked wrong. Muttering quietly to herself, she stroked the cheongju bottle with great care.

“Sia?”
“I’m sorry, Oppa. Oppa got it ready for me and I forgot about it… I’m sorry…”

Anyone could see at a glance that Sia wasn’t herself. How to put it? Maybe two thousand years of researching nothing but dimensional-travel magic had left her mind unstable, or maybe this was the aftershock of using the dimensional-travel magic. Either way, her condition looked terribly precarious.

If she’d been like this from the moment she came out of the Gate, I could have chalked it up to something that just happens. But she had looked perfectly fine only minutes earlier, so all I could do was panic.

I held her tight so she could calm down.

“It’s okay, Sia. When has Oppa ever gotten angry over something like that? You came back to me. What does one bottle of liquor matter?”
“…”
“It was a joke, just a joke. I was so glad to see our Sia, I teased you the once.”

As I soothed her with the gentlest words I could find, little by little she began to steady herself.

“…I’m sorry, Oppa. I scared you, didn’t I?”
“No, it’s fine. As long as you’re all right, Sia, that’s all that matters.”

I stroked her back gently again, and she seemed to settle; her face softened, and before long she broke into a bashful little smile.

“Then, Oppa, let’s eat the tteokbokki together now!”

With a bit of magic, Sia conjured a simple table and chairs and set the tteokbokki and the drink out on the table. She finished tearing open the half-opened packaging, pulled out the two pairs of wooden chopsticks that had come in the bag, and handed one pair to me.

“Well then, thanks for the food!”

With that brisk little grace, she dug into the tteokbokki in earnest.

“Wow, how long has it been since I last had tteokbokki?”

From the very first bite she carried on as if she’d been served a royal feast, and she worked through the tteokbokki at a considerable pace. She didn’t forget to drink the cheongju in between, of course.

Tteokbokki with liquor, and memorial-rite cheongju at that. I’d never have imagined such a strange pairing, but Sia didn’t care in the slightest and happily enjoyed both.

“Oppa, you know, back when I was a hatchling I wanted tteokbokki so badly that I gathered the ingredients myself and tried making it? But maybe my cooking wasn’t good enough, or maybe the ingredients just weren’t the same as Earth’s. It never tasted right.”

Having demolished a third of the whole tteokbokki by herself in no time, she gulped down the rest of the cheongju like water.

“But thinking about it, it was neither of those. The real reason was something else.”
“So what was the real reason?”
“I guess it was because I wasn’t eating it with Oppa.”

With that, Sia met my eyes lovingly and took a dainty bite of fish cake.

“The tteokbokki was delicious too, but I loved the time I spent eating tteokbokki with Oppa. I think that’s why I liked tteokbokki so much.”

It hit me then. She had loved eating tteokbokki with me that much, and I used to grumble that it was always tteokbokki. Regret washed over me again, and I felt I owed her an apology.

“From now on I’ll buy you so much tteokbokki you’ll get sick of it.”

So what if she ate it until she couldn’t stand the taste? Not when it meant I got to see our Sia happy.

I’d said it out of guilt, but she seemed quite moved by it, squirming all over with embarrassment.

We ate the tteokbokki in that cozy mood, talking about this and that, and before I knew it the takeout container had been wiped clean.

“Did you enjoy it?”
“Mm-hm! But Oppa, I’m still hungry.”

Hungry?

I stared blankly at the container, scraped clean without so much as a scrap left in it.

Normally this much would have fed Sia and me both with a little left over.
And she’s still hungry?

“You’re… hungry?”
“Mm. Since I’m a dragon, I eat a bit more than I used to.”

Fair enough. That could well be true. I had no real idea what actual dragons were like, but the dragons in fantasy novels all had true forms so enormous no human could compare. Maybe it was only natural, then, that she felt no fullness even after eating this much.

“Then shall we go buy some tteokbokki?”
“Let’s! Buying it in our neighborhood works, right?”
“Yeah.”

We cleared away the trash before teleporting, and in the middle of that my gaze landed on Sia’s clothes. If she went out like that, other people would obviously stare. For one thing, no modern person would wear what she had on; if I had to describe it, I’d call it an elaborate cosplay costume.

“Sia. Are you planning to go out for tteokbokki dressed like that?”
“I was going to change anyway. Oppa, what should I wear? I’ll wear whatever Oppa picks for me.”

Well, now.

There was no particular outfit I wanted Sia in. An elegant dress, a pastel top with a tennis skirt, a baggy tracksuit, I liked them all. But saying anything was fine might sound like I didn’t care, so I named the first outfit that came to mind.

“A white T-shirt and jeans?”
“Love it!”

Sia changed everything she was wearing with a single gesture. At one wave of her hand, the outfit a medieval European might have worn turned into a clean white T-shirt and jeans.

“Does it suit me?”
“Yeah. Our Sia is really pretty.”

That wasn’t empty flattery; it was the truth. The original Sia before her reincarnation had been quite pretty too, but the Sia in front of me now was beautiful enough to inspire awe. And not just because she was my girlfriend. Objectively, she looked less like a human being than a living work of art, the kind someone like me had no business touching carelessly.

Then again, she was neither human nor artwork but a dragon. Anyway.

With a figure that flawless, anything would have looked good on her, but this outfit suited her especially well. Effortless-chic, it was the kind of look that would make every passing man glance her way at least once.

So the tteokbokki we’d eaten was all cleaned up, and she’d changed into clothes that suited a modern person nicely. All that was left now was to teleport.

But then.

“Oppa, wait a second.”

Instead of casting teleport, Sia suddenly stopped me.

“Is this face I have now better, or was my original face before the reincarnation better?”
“…Huh?”

Her question left me struck dumb.

…How am I supposed to answer this?
I’m f*ed.