04. Crossroads at a Choice

The fog cleared from her hazy eyes as they began to focus sharply. Blinking twice as if not fully awake, Olivia suddenly sat up with a short scream.

“Where am I?”

She had clearly kept her eyes open the whole time, yet everything felt hazy as if she had just woken up. Looking down, she saw herself in light nightclothes without shoes.

“This is crazy. Why am I here?”

She tried to trace her memories. She definitely heard someone calling her while she was sleeping, and half-asleep, she went looking for the caller, and at the beach…

“What? I’m completely fine?”

Startled, Olivia jumped up and looked for the source of the voice. A man entered, scratching his cheek with one hand, and placed food on the table. Huh? After calmly checking her surroundings again, she realized she was in someone’s room. She had been sitting on a stranger’s bed.

“Um, excuse me… where is this?”

“Hm? My house.”

“Could you explain why I’m at your house… huh? Huh?”

Asking cautiously as she couldn’t grasp the situation, Olivia pointed at the man. Normally, she wouldn’t make such an impolite gesture as pointing, but she was too surprised to mind her manners.

“You’re that person from before! The one who was bothering the rabbit, right?”

“Ah, seriously, I wasn’t bothering it! I really thought it was an abandoned rabbit and was trying to protect it!”

The suspicious man she had met when she went to the exhibition with Alois.

Whatever the circumstances, she never expected to meet this person again, especially not in an unfamiliar place. They say three coincidences make a connection, and this was already the second coincidence.

“This is your house?”

“Yes. Just so you don’t misunderstand, I absolutely did not kidnap you. The kids who brought you here just dumped you at our house and left.”

“The kids who brought me? Right! I’m sure there was a dolphin, no, was it a person? Huh?”

The scenes from her hazy memory mixed up chaotically.

Far across the sparkling sea, dolphins and fish as large as humans flew up into the sky, and then transformed into people? As she tried to recall each memory, Olivia couldn’t distinguish whether the surreal situations she had witnessed were dreams or reality, leaving her unable to finish her sentence.

“You remember quite well! I thought you’d be so heavily enchanted that you wouldn’t remember anything……”

“So everything I saw was real?”

“From what I can tell, you didn’t come here entirely of your own will, but don’t be too angry at them. They meant no harm. They were just curious about you.”

No sooner had the man finished speaking than voices could be heard chattering outside, and then the door burst open.

“Wow! She’s awake!”

Children rushed in, opening the door with a bang, and surrounded Olivia in a circle. With sparkling eyes, they touched her arms and pulled at her nightgown, fascinated by it. The children, who appeared to be about five or six years old, had such good energy that they instantly drained Olivia’s spirit.

“Big sister, big sister! Tell us about what happened outside!”

Olivia covered her ears and crouched down at the sharp noise. She felt goosebumps from the instinctive sense of otherness. Seeing her reaction, the man stepped between her and the children.

“It seems she’s uncomfortable with you talking like that. Speak in human language.”

“Like this? But yesterday she definitely under, understood us.”

The speech changed to a much more comfortable tone. Though the pronunciation was awkward, it felt less alien and was much easier to understand.

“I need a detailed explanation.”

“Ask these guys directly. They’re the ones who called you and lured you here yesterday.”

The word “lured” seemed inappropriate as they were just children. They swarmed around her, begging her to play and tell stories, leaving no room to properly ask questions. The man, showing no intention of rescuing her, simply waved his hand saying she should play with them, and left the room.

In the end, Olivia had to mingle with the chattering children. A hellish question time began where for every one question Olivia asked, more than ten questions flew back at her.

Finally, after playing with the children until they collapsed from exhaustion, Olivia managed to stand up, patting her stiff back. They say children are most adorable when they’re asleep, and it’s true. She covered each of the sweetly sleeping children with a blanket.

“They really look like fins. Ah, no, they are actual fins.”

Since they said they were beast-people. Based on the information she extracted from the children, Olivia discovered that this island was the island of escaped beast-people mentioned in her mother’s notebook. Beyond that, she couldn’t get much proper information, perhaps because the children were too young.

‘Beast-people really exist.’

Their sleeping forms didn’t look different from ordinary human children, which made the scales scattered across their skin and their elongated fins seem even more alien. Some had smooth, glossy skin like whales.

After barely making it outside without waking the children, an unfamiliar village greeted her. Seeing the dreamlike village, her sense of reality, forgotten in the chaos, returned.

“Ah, I shouldn’t be here now……”

The sun was already high in the sky. Having left the tent in the middle of the night, she had spent nearly half a day here. By now, Alois would certainly have noticed her absence, and she could vividly imagine how worried he must be.

“I’m the one who insisted on coming here, so this is problematic. I need to get back quickly, but how?”

With a dejected expression, she rushed out of the house and looked for the man who seemed most likely to communicate with her.

The strange village was completely covered in green plants, as if it were in the middle of a jungle. The houses were intertwined with enormous tree trunks, giving the feeling of living inside a massive tree. Even without shoes, the soft grass covering the ground didn’t hurt or cause any discomfort.

“It’s just like a fantasy village from a fairy tale.”

“Of course it is. Most of the fairy tales and legends spread throughout human society are stories about our ancestors.”

The man who had finished the household chores that had piled up while Olivia was looking after the children came out to the clearing wearing an apron. He set down the laundry baskets he had been carrying and hung up a clothesline, looking quite accustomed to such tasks.

“I’m sorry, but what do you mean by ‘our ancestors’?”

“What? You really don’t know anything? I thought it was strange back then too, but have you never heard about who you are?”

Olivia Friche. Healer. Has an adoptive mother and a younger brother named Lime.

And now, Alois’s lover.

Olivia recalled the sentences that described her. She had lived her whole life knowing these things, but the identity the man spoke of didn’t seem to be referring to this. Olivia awkwardly smiled and subtly avoided the man’s bewildered gaze.

“Since I lived alone from a young age before being adopted, I don’t really know what I should have heard from someone……”

Her earliest memories were only of her childhood spent wandering the streets alone. With only a vague concept of having been abandoned, she had struggled to survive solely for the sake of survival, until she met her adoptive mother and finally had a proper family. Since she didn’t have clear memories of the people who abandoned her, though she was hurt by the fact of being abandoned, she had never longed for her original family.

“Yet you’ve managed to survive until now. When I saw you before, it seemed like you could understand animals, right?”

“Ah, if you mean that rabbit, huh? You knew? How?”

“Sigh, because I could understand it too. That’s why I tried so hard to explain back then. Really, both that rabbit and you just don’t believe what people say. Is everyone like that when they live with humans? Anyway, the reason you can understand animal speech is because our tribal blood runs in your veins.”

The man irritably swung the laundry he was holding, making loud slapping sounds in the air. Olivia, who had tightly closed her eyes at the splashing water, grinned and helped him hang the laundry. The man shook his head, thinking she was quite sociable.

“Then can you understand animal speech too?”

“Of course. I’m closer to that side than you are. From what I can see, your blood is very diluted even though it’s mixed.”

“You mean I’m of mixed blood? So with your ancestors?”

“Now you’re starting to understand.”

“Then do you have fins or scales like the children inside?”

“I’m not a sea creature. If you’re asking about animal physical features, I do have them, but showing them to others is a mistake only children make. Adults all know how to hide them. By the way, why do you keep calling me ‘you, you’? It’s embarrassing.”

The man deliberately scratched his slightly reddened neck roughly and stepped away from Olivia. Do all humans use such embarrassing speech? The kind, gentle tone, different from both his aggressive tribal members and the continental humans he had met, made his whole body itch strangely.

“Then shall we introduce ourselves properly? According to you, we’re distant relatives anyway. I’m Olivia Friche.”

“I’m Prow.”

“Nice to meet you, Prow. It’s both fascinating and surprising to suddenly have many distant relatives, but more importantly, I’m in a hurry… I need to return to my original village. Can you help me?”

“You want to go back right away? When you’ve just arrived at your homeland?”

Homeland. Olivia looked around the village with fresh eyes. Based on the man’s words, this seemed to be the ancestral home and clan village where beast-people had lived for generations. But for Olivia, the small village in Schraien territory, where her memories were still vivid, felt more like home than the existence of distant ancestors she had just learned about.

Above all, since this was all Prow’s one-sided claim, it didn’t particularly resonate with Olivia. The fact that he could understand animal speech and that there were special children with animal characteristics made it somewhat plausible, that’s all.

She had vaguely wondered why she could understand animal speech, but here, people who naturally understood animal speech were everywhere, which did give her a somewhat familiar feeling. More so than the disconnected concept of “homeland.”