Gio smiled.
“Did you come to see me?”
“Yes!”
Cha Yisol smiled too.
“But where are we? This isn’t the beach.”
“It is one of the rooms in the ‘Temple of the Deep Sea.’”
“What were you doing, Hyung?”
“As you can see….”
Clank.
Gio waved a hand.
“I was chained up.”
“Oh.”
“This must be your first time seeing someone in chains. Are you emotionally all right?”
“Why—why are you chained? And it isn’t my first time. I saw people like that on the news….”
“My situation is somewhat different from theirs.”
Gio had not committed a crime and been detained pending prosecution.
“Strictly speaking, my very existence is illegal.”
“What does that mean?”
“Indeed. What could it mean?”
People these days seemed to live such complicated lives.
“In my day, even if an alien appeared, people simply accepted it and moved on.”
“Wow, really?”
“Of course.”
Would people not simply dismiss it as nonsense? But perhaps because it would not be strange for a real alien to appear in the present world, life had become quite difficult for a Portrait like Gio.
“How did the conversation come this far?”
“Why are you chained?”
“Ah, right. Wicked merfolk kidnapped me.”
“Eunha?”
“That is correct. Student Eunha did it.”
“Uh….”
Cha Yisol was flustered.
“Why would Eunha do that?”
“He says he wants to live and die together with me.”
“Why would he say that? That’s too much pressure.”
“Is it not?”
Gio smiled and asked,
“But are you sure it is all right for you to be here?”
The place…