"Did you know, Haru, that I used to know a lot of people? I kind of collected them. I made them like me, did them favours, made them owe me, connected them with each other. Do you know the Korean actor Kim Sejin? He was pretty famous a bit under a decade ago. Happily married, did you know that? I introduced him to his wife. That wasn't my power, that was me. Or, well, I was still a monster back then, so I did use my powers to make myself seem more likeable to him, of course, but you can't use powers to introduce people, you just introduce them. I got to know him, and I knew his now-wife, and I thought they'd hit it off, and they did.

"So, you know, the thing you did today? I could've helped. That was the kind of thing I used to do, liked to do. I could've helped get you phone numbers, find those people faster. Could've pulled strings.

"You like interviewing people for your blog, don't you? I bet there were so many people I could find for you to interview. Could've found."

"What I did with this extensive network, instead, was stalk my ex, keep prospective partners from meeting him, and find someone to try to kill one of said partners when I failed to prevent them from partnering up.

"Now I'm poison.

"So those are the horrors. If you wanted to know."

"...yeah. Pretty horrific."

He gives himself a little shake.

"Let's go flying anyway."

"Sure!"

Bundle bundle bundle and out into the frigid dark. There are so few buildings on the island that it'll be easy to find their way back just by leaving the kitchen light on.

WHEEEEEEE

Sure, sure, whee.

Just a short loop over the lake, maybe shorter than last time since Jaeha didn't want to take off his bracelet. "So if I wanted to transliterate 'the horrors' into Korean how would that wind up sounding, I don't have a great sense of the orthography yet?"

"Well, 'horror' is gongpo, but I'm not sure how you'd just render 'the horrors' using hangul and Korean pronunciation. Maybe deo horeo*."

* 더 호러

"Is gongpo the genre, the emotion, both...?"

"Both, horror movie would be gongpo yeonghwa."

"Is yeonghwa a compound, or otherwise - obviously derived from something -"

"Not obviously, it's just a word, like 'movie'."

"Well, 'movie' is from the fact that movies move, unlike still photographs..."

"—okay, I did not know that. I don't know of anything like that for yeonghwa."

"For a while when silent movies gave way to ones with dialogue they called the latter 'talkies'!"

"...that's adorable. And also awful, I'm glad it didn't stick, but it's adorable."

"Well, maybe if we'd been calling them talkies as long as we've called them movies it'd sound totally normal by now. There are some silly words in English. Like 'fireplace'."

"You're ruining your language for me, I hope you know that."

"Oh no! Okay, no more of English's shameful secrets, what's Korean for 'English'."

"Yeong-eo. The eo suffix is used for languages, Japanese is ilbon-eo and Cantonese is gwangdong-eo, but the word for language is eon-eo."

He comes in for a landing. "What's Korean-the-language, then, I wanna start asking how to say things in Korean, in Korean."

"Hangug-eo. Hangug is 'Korea'."