Getting Approval from Otherworld Clients - Chapter 19

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 19.
The Orbit of Saturn
……
Beep—
[It’s been forever since we’ve gone traveling with Mom and Dad, over!]
[Ha ha, let’s have a blast, over.]
The child chattered through the Toy Walkie-Talkie.
In the car on the way to the Gangwon Province Cabin with his parents!
The rain was a shame, but it couldn’t dampen the child’s excitement.
Thanks to his boundless energy, he bounded through the rented cabin until he finally collapsed, exhausted.
“Should I run out and grab some groceries for dinner?”
“Yeah, let’s not wake him. We’ll be quick.”
The adults felt a twinge of hesitation about leaving the child alone at the cabin.
“But the rain’s getting worse….”
The downpour had intensified into a deluge.
Leaving him somewhere warm and safe seemed like the better choice.
So the couple left a note beside the sleeping child and departed.
— Mom and Dad are going shopping. Don’t go outside, don’t open the door for anyone, just wait for us!
But not long after the car drove away, a deafening sound jolted the child awake.
A tremendous crash—Boom!
“Unh…. Mom? Dad?”
Pitch darkness.
The fluorescent light that had been burning brightly flickered and died with an anticlimactic pop.
“Mom, Dad! Where are you?!”
This was an era before mobile phones were commonplace.
Frightened, the child tried calling his parents on the Toy Walkie-Talkie he’d been clutching.
[
Mom, Dad! Where are you?!
]
But the walkie-talkie his parents had left behind only echoed his own voice back at him from nowhere.
“I told you not to leave it behind…!”
The child, upset, grabbed his parents’ walkie-talkie as well.
Then.
A deafening crack—Crash!
The sky seemed to tear open with an enormous roar.
And with it, a torrent of earth and debris buried the cabin.
Crash!
Bang!
The sounds of heavy soil and rock crushing and crumpling the structure.
“Ahhh!”
Startled, the child ran toward the opposite side of the cabin, rushed into a corner room, and locked the door behind him.
“Hhh… sniff sniff….”
What could a fragile child do? He only crouched in the corner, trembling with fear.
“Is… is it over now?”
After some time passed and things grew quiet, he opened the door.
Every broken window was crammed with dirt; stones had punched through the walls in countless places. The interior was devastated.
The sweet family trip had vanished completely. Everything was ruined.
…Nothing but a complete mess.
“Sniff… the door won’t open….”
He couldn’t get the door open to go outside.
The cabin had been buried.
“Hhhh…. Mom…. Dad….”
The child called desperately for his parents, but he knew they couldn’t hear his voice.
Perhaps, ever again.
He gazed up through gaps in the collapsed ceiling, seeing dirty mud seeping in with the rain.
“…?!”
And through a black hole in the sky above, something disc-shaped darted out.
That was the last thing he saw through the gap in the ceiling.
After that, even that small opening was covered over by earth.
* * *
“Rain, of all times.”
The office worker had come to Earth for vacation days.
Aboard a spaceship—what the planet’s inhabitants called a flying saucer!
He’d come to pursue his art, the work he couldn’t manage during his usual days at the Company.
Since he’d only ever done flat painting before, he’d chosen a rocky region, eager this time to attempt three-dimensional sculpture—and yet!
“The equipment I brought won’t even perform properly because of the rain.”
Really, the heavens have no mercy!
It’s always like this. It only rains on my vacation days!
“While I’m here anyway, maybe I’ll swing by Saturn. Someone from the other team wouldn’t stop raving about it as a vacation spot.”
As he considered rerouting his course, an unfamiliar biosignal registered on the monitor.
He’d installed the device as a precaution—to warn if any native life might be harmed during his Land Art work.
“Hmm… it doesn’t look like where Earth creatures usually operate. I thought most of them were active above ground, except for the very small ones?”
His large black eyes caught sight of a biosignal beneath the soil—something larger than a mole.
“That’s odd. I thought I’d seen most Earth organisms by now. Should I take a quick look at what’s down there?”
Artists, as a rule, tended to be curious. So this office worker decided to descend and investigate.
Whoooosh—!
He descended along a beam of light into the underground space. Oh, so there are species that build and live in subterranean structures!
What came into view was a deteriorating structure buried and crumbling into ruin.
“#$%^&@!*”
And a small Young Alien, chittering in an incomprehensible language.
“Earth’s mammal young are mostly protected by adults, or so it seemed.”
Scanning the surroundings, he detected no additional biosignals.
“Hmm… should I just leave it as is? These Aliens seemed to breathe oxygen.”
In a sealed space like this, the young one’s survival would be at risk if left alone.
“But they said I shouldn’t pick up a young creature carelessly. The parent might be desperately searching for it.”
Taking it aboard the spacecraft seemed unwise too—it would frighten the young mammal in such an unfamiliar environment.
He’d heard that when the research lab next door—the one developing the Translator Device—interviewed an Alien male and female aboard their spaceship, both had entered near-panic states.
So they’d conducted a physical examination and then released them, or so he’d heard.
“What do I do now… on this golden vacation, and all these troubles pile up.”
His Company allowed only five vacation days in a 748-day year—a brutal arrangement. The desire to rest deeply during this precious time began to creep in.
“In our world’s time, that’s five days. Converted to Earth time… about three days, I’d say?”
Tap—
Then the small creature that had been chittering grasped his finger.
When he looked down, he saw large eyes glistening with moisture, gazing up at him.
“…….”
The weary office worker thought: letting go of this hand wouldn’t be a difficult thing.
Yet on the other hand, he also thought: caring for a young creature wouldn’t be difficult either.
“Ah, well—even a solo getaway on Saturn would be dull anyway. I’ll stay with you for exactly three days, my vacation period.”
The parents might return within that time, so he decided to remain in the same location.
“At least I’m glad I brought the Gas Generator and Physical Barrier.”
The simplified spaceship, stripped of most cutting-edge features, fortunately carried basic equipment.
“I’ll adjust the oxygen concentration to around twenty percent… and if I activate the barrier, the space won’t collapse further and I can secure more room.”
It was all simple work. No harder than throwing a beached fish back into the sea.
A small kindness, really.
“Playing together like this, three days passed in a flash.”
So over three days he brought the Young Alien food, stayed with it, listened to its unintelligible speech, and held its hand.
Crunch-crunch-crunch—!
Fortunately, as the third day drew to a close, an enormous sound erupted.
“Excavator entering—step back!”
“Gwan-yul! Gwan-yul, are you there?!”
“No… sob… I was wrong, Mom! Please, please…!”
Human voices beginning to echo from afar.
The office worker felt a timely sense of relief and prepared to depart, so as not to complicate matters for Earth’s inhabitants.
“Take care now. Oh, is this a gift for me?”
The Young Alien handed him some sort of plastic object.
An identical one it held itself.
“*(&@#$”
…And it said something, though of course he couldn’t understand a word of it.
“I don’t think I’ll need it much, but… well, I’ll take it with thanks. Take care~!”
He accepted the mysterious object and quietly slipped away aboard his spaceship.
* * *
The Pascal stopped playing the video.
“…….”
“…….”
Gwan-yul had nothing to say.
I couldn’t bring myself to speak either.
We stood there in silence for a moment.
“This box… could it be… it’s here!”
Rustle—Gwan-yul broke the quiet, rummaging through the box beside the Pascal.
“…He didn’t throw it away.”
What lay in his palm was an old Toy Walkie-Talkie.
The passage of time was written all over it, yet the 8-bit LCD screen still flickered to life.
“The batteries are still working… Ah. Looks like they switched them out for some kind of alien tech.”
He opened the plastic casing and examined the inside, letting out a small sound of wonder.
Then he pulled something from his own bag.
Another Toy Walkie-Talkie.
A matching pair, identical in every way.
“I had a feeling this client might be that same alien from back then… so I put fresh batteries in and tried it out.”
“…Oh, it still works.”
“Yeah. It even has an auto-message scheduling function, and when I tested it recently, that worked too.”
“…Auto-message… scheduling?”
“Right. You record a message, set a specific time, and it broadcasts automatically on the walkie-talkie. When I was little, I’d set it to go off every day at one in the afternoon, and I’d just… wait by the radio.”
Beep—
Gwan-yul pressed the button to play the recorded scheduled message.
Out came a child’s innocent words, thanking him for saving him back then, promising to come pick him up next time.
Listening to this touching story with a tender heart, something inside me suddenly tightened.
“…….”
This message.
It wasn’t about thirteen seconds long, was it?
Oh.
Could it be….
The radio waves from this toy disrupting the spaceship’s systems… destroying the computer data… what if that’s what caused it all?
“Look, if you press this button, the two walkie-talkies communicate—”
“Wait, wait, wait!”
I cut him off urgently. Enough, enough already! No more disasters!
That’s when.
Whirrr—
A door slid open, and someone entered.
“There were biosignals being monitored on a spaceship that should be empty… I wondered if you’d gotten lost.”
…The keeper of the memory vault had arrived.
Gwan-yul met the Alien’s dark gaze.
“…I’ve failed to keep my promise again. You came looking for me instead.”
“?”
Gwan-yul held up the toy walkie-talkie, but the Alien seemed to have no idea what he meant.
Well, it must have been quite a while ago.
Maybe to him it was such a small thing that after backing it up on the Pascal, he’d simply forgotten.
‘Oh, that’s right—there’s a tattoo on Gwan-yul’s arm.’
I realized the image shown by the Pascal and the design etched across Gwan-yul’s skin were identical.
A diagram stored on the spaceship, explaining Earth and humanity.
‘He really did commit to the bit consistently.’
Whirrr—
Behind our confused client, another door slid open.
A familiar face appeared in the gap.
“Pardon the intrusion.”
It was Pascal.
My team leader gave the client a slight bow and came toward us.
Gathering up the door keyring and personal belongings I’d left in the conference room.
“You guys never came back, so I came looking. Now get out of here—it’s quitting time.”
Ah, the sweetest sound in the world!
No day has made quitting time feel quite so urgent as today. …Actually, quitting time feels urgent every single day.
“Thank you for coming to find us.”
“Ha, well thanks to you, I’ve avoided becoming a cosmic castaway~”
Pascal regarded Gwan-yul, who seemed unusually animated, as if wondering what had transpired, but chose not to press the matter.
“We caused considerable trouble for your staff.”
“Not at all. Please, take care on your way out.”
The three of us exchanged parting words with our client and stepped through the swirling portal.
And so our brief ordeal aboard the Spaceship came to an end.
It wasn’t long before the time came to work on the logo design again.
I didn’t know it then.
That scattered creature of his harbored an entirely different side.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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