"There's that and whatever other things one of the most powerful men in Korea could do to make our lives a nightmare, which I don't know what it is due to not being him but I can't imagine he'd just let it happen if he disliked it. And for a similar reason it would be really really difficult to get him convicted of anything like that."

"Is this like, a corrupt justice system situation, or is there something else going on?"

"Mostly that, yeah. I'd be surprised to learn it's substantially different elsewhere but I'm nowhere near as used to the bullshit of other countries' old money."

"I mean, maybe it's the same everywhere. I'd be fairly surprised to hear about it happening in Canada but that could be an artifact of what reaches the news or something. Ugh."

"I don't know. It's just—I don't know. Maybe I'm just still a scared kid who's made his demanding and cold father out to be a bogeyman."

"Well, even if he isn't one yet he might get that way if pushed harder, it's wise to have an eye on what he could do even if you've got nothing but a gut feeling about whether he might."

"And hopefully Nam Hee-seo will be able to help with that."

Usually, when his Haru is not around, Cricket just watches videos, or goes for a flight, or terrorizes the wildlife, or naps, or goes through his kanji anki deck, or has a snack. He's a cat. Cats are not very socially needy creatures.

However, on this particular day, Cricket goes for a flight that happens to end at Park Yoo-Min's place. He knows where it is because he crashed there in the fleeing-from-Hasegawa-just-in-case incident. Ding-dong a cat is here to bother you.

Park Yoo-min opens the door in short order because he knows Cricket doesn't like to be kept waiting. "Cricket! To what do I owe the honour?"

"My benevolence, of course." He rubs right up on Yoo-min's leg on his way in. What is there to be seen in here.

Yoo-min and Seungjoo's place isn't the mansion Jaeha's is but they're still high-ranking combat espers so it's not a shoebox either. And right this moment, it seems Cricket interrupted them in the middle of watching a movie. Seungjoo looks up from where he's using his phone on the sofa and lifts a hand in greeting. "Hello, Cricket," he says in lightly accented Japanese.

"Is there anything I can get you? We don't have sashimi, I'm afraid, and I'm not sure if there's anything else you like that we do have."

"I've eaten but I want seltzer water. What movie is this?" He jumps up on the back of the couch to have a look.

"Coming right up!"

"Movie is..." He has no idea what it'd be called in Japanese. "The World In Her Eyes," he says in Korean, then translates the words literally to Japanese and adds, "It's a romance."

"Will it make sense without the dialogue?"

"I think so? There are a lot of conversations but most of them don't really have much content." Yoo-min has plates from when Cricket came to visit and can get him seltzer water.

Seungjoo looks at the plate and his smile widens a little bit like he finds something mildly funny.

"What?" Cricket asks Seungjoo, before setting in to lap up his seltzer.

"I usually prefer," he looks at Yoo-min and says, "Plain water?" in Korean.

"Plain water," he translates.

"You may prefer plain water," says Cricket magnanimously. "It is allowed."

Seungjoo seems to find this really funny for some reason.

"You want to watch, too, or would you prefer to do something else?"

Lap lap lap. "How far in are you?"