Hiding a House in the Apocalypse - Chapter 30

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Potter

◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈

Chapter 30: Sea Monkey Papa

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I had never kept animals.

I had spent a long time in places where I couldn't keep them, and after dealing with mutations so often, I couldn't think fondly of animals.

In fact, none of the former Hunters I knew with war experience kept pets.

Meanwhile, a few users in our community did keep animals.

The ones actively raising them were friends who had chosen collective survivalism.

Anonymous424: Our dogs

Dies_irae69: Come see our dogs

These friends gathered like-minded people or family into groups. Rather than bunkers, they tended to base themselves in exposed houses and control fairly large territories.

With so many mouths to feed, their food stores couldn't keep up with consumption, so they had to farm. Farming inevitably required a lot of land.

Well-trained dogs helped secure that land.

They could stand guard, scare off wandering outsiders, and sometimes even be used in combat.

But their love didn't last long.

Dies_irae69: Our dogs. I killed them all... With my own hands...

It couldn't be helped.

Not killing an animal that had begun mutating was no different from suicide.

That was what keeping animals during the apocalypse required.

Either the resolve to kill an animal once it changed, or the even greater resolve to embrace it after it changed.

There was someone with that greater resolve.

He kept Sea Monkeys.

I first learned about Sea Monkey Papa when I was gradually getting used to life in the apocalypse and starting to accept the end of the world as part of life.

At the beginning of the war, I had been pretty tightly wound.

If I saw even a suspicious shadow on the horizon, I would wait for hours with a gun in hand. I checked my equipment with near-paranoid thoroughness.

It was my first time experiencing the apocalypse as an individual rather than a Hunter, so I must have been on edge.

As time passed, I grew used to the changed world and gained experience. I began to relax.

That was around when I, once only a community lurker, began writing posts.

At the time, Sea Monkey Papa was an unpopular user with tendencies similar to mine.

He worked hard at creative pursuits and tried to draw attention, but never received as much attention as he put in.

In my case, I had simply been unlucky. Sea Monkey Papa, however, had chosen the wrong path from the start.

Who in the world would look at something like Sea Monkeys and feel cuteness or emotion?

Most people who first saw his posts clicked because they wondered what Sea Monkeys were. When they discovered that Sea Monkeys were flea-like things barely visible in a tank, they clicked back without a second thought.

Sea Monkeys were officially called brine shrimp, creatures similar to shrimp.

They were resilient, easy to raise, and highly active, so they became popular as ornamental pets toward the end of the twentieth century. But they quickly lost popularity. Now they were mortal little beings children raised briefly for school projects before they all died or got flushed down the toilet first.

Sea Monkey Papa had a knack for video editing. Every video he uploaded included carefully prepared explanations and care information, all in an attempt to spread awareness of the Sea Monkeys we knew so little about.

He used exclamation marks frequently.

Naturally, he was at the very bottom in popularity. Perhaps Sea Monkey Papa knew it, because he prepared a masterpiece he had high hopes for.

It was the result of several troublesome, technical tasks.

Feeding the Sea Monkeys luminescent food so they would glow in the dark. Carefully adjusting the lighting so his poor camera could capture them clearly in the darkness. Beautiful New Age-style classical music. Glowing Sea Monkeys swimming, multiple angles, slow motion, careful subtitles, and an excessive number of exclamation marks.

That painstaking video was uploaded to the board.

SeamonkeyPAPA: The Splendid and Majestic Night Dance of Self-Luminous Sea Monkeys, “danse en groupe”

I had been about to upload a post around the same time, so I clicked on his. Sea Monkey Papa added an awkward little reflection saying that he had spent a full eighteen hours filming and preparing the video.

Eighteen hours.

My video had taken barely one minute.

What astonishing dedication.

As always, reality was cruel.

If I recreated the scene back then, it would have looked something like this.

unicorn18: Red Archive Hotaru-chan.jpg

SUNBI: A Western Babe's Tantalizing Butt Crack

SeamonkeyPAPA: The Splendid and Majestic Night Dance of Self-Luminous Sea Monkeys, “danse en groupe”

Defender: Proof

anon118: Super Maria No-Install Version

SKELTON: (SKELTON Video) SKELTON's Beatboxing (3)

Judging by the titles alone, it wasn't all that different from the board today.

But if you pressed the button to view the number of views, a dark truth was revealed.

unicorn18: Red Archive Hotaru-chan.jpg (22 views)

SUNBI: A Western Babe's Tantalizing Butt Crack (93 views)

SeamonkeyPAPA: The Splendid and Majestic Night Dance of Self-Luminous Sea Monkeys, “danse en groupe” (8 views)

Defender: Proof (232 views)

anon118: Super Maria No-Install Version (1,023 views)

SKELTON: (SKELTON Video) SKELTON's Beatboxing (3) (5 views)

That was right.

Sea Monkey Papa's masterpiece had received only eight views.

Only eight. He had spent eighteen hours on it and received only eight views.

Considering that one user could raise the view count repeatedly, fewer than eight people had probably clicked his post.

If I had been Sea Monkey Papa, I would have despaired too.

Fine, he could lose to famous users like Defender or anon118, now Foxgames.

But falling so far behind the vulgar butt-crack picture that the now-dead SUNBI had spent maybe ten seconds picking out of a lewd folder and uploading made no sense.

He had beaten me, SKELTON, at least, but that probably wasn't much comfort.

Maybe that was why.

Sea Monkey Papa seemed deeply discouraged and barely posted after that.

He only occasionally reacted to DragonC's comics.

While I transformed from an unpopular user into a notorious one, he remained a user with such a faint presence that nobody would notice if he vanished.

Time passed, and now, just before Christmas, Sea Monkey Papa suddenly made a popular post.

SeamonkeyPAPA: The Sea Monkeys Got Bigger!

The moment I saw it, I muttered without realizing it.

“So he was alive.”

More importantly, what was this?

Something about that title felt strange.

Curious, I clicked the post.

“...?”

An unbelievable sight unfolded before me.

It was a reservoir.

It looked no different from the reservoirs around my territory, but its dark, murky water teemed with white creatures with red eyes, large bodies, and long tails.

SeamonkeyPAPA: At some point, our children suddenly got so big that I couldn't handle them anymore, so I put them in a reservoir. They got this big while I wasn't looking haha

It was the first time I had seen it.

A mutation occurring in primitive animals like Sea Monkeys.

Kyle_Dos's webtoon had described crayfish turning grayish white, but that was probably just a comic-book device. Human eyes on grayish-white ground would see everything as grayish white.

Mutations occurred only in advanced animals with brains and spines that breathed through lungs.

I had seen giant rats, cats, dogs, and pigs in China, but never giant cockroaches or centipedes.

Yet that one photograph utterly shattered that common belief.

There was no mistaking the identity of the child-sized monstrosities swimming through the reservoir on many disgusting legs and long tails.

They were mutated Sea Monkeys.

“...”

For a moment, I hesitated.

Should I report this shocking discovery or not?

If mutations could spread to such lowly animals, it was thousands of times more serious than Rifts or Monsters.

It meant humanity might be destroyed by mutations before Rifts or Monsters.

Woo Minhee was my only contact now.

I didn't want to get involved with her, but this wasn't a matter where personal feelings could interfere.

Personal Identification Number: REDMASK

This was the first time I had contacted someone through a personal identification number since Kim Daram disappeared.

As before, Woo Minhee answered promptly.

One of the few good things about a woman made entirely of flaws, I supposed.

“Oh, Senior. What a surprise. I never thought you'd be the one looking for me. I thought you'd never contact a bad girl like me again. Why? Did you run out of food?”

She was still good at getting under people's skin, though.

“...A mutation has occurred in an invertebrate.”

“An invertebrate?”

“Yeah. An invertebrate. Something like shrimp larvae.”

“Sea Monkeys?”

“!!!”

An extremely dangerous possibility flashed through my mind.

“...How did you know?”

“How did I know? I was just guessing. I kept Sea Monkeys in elementary school. They all died, though. It suddenly came to mind. Is there something wrong with Sea Monkeys?”

“I found Sea Monkeys that had grown gigantic. They're mutations. There's no doubt about it. Mutations are appearing in invertebrates too.”

“Oh, really? Thanks for telling me, but I already knew that.”

“You did?”

I knew the gap in my knowledge was large.

But it seemed even larger than I thought.

To her, my shock was something obvious.

“Anyway, I have work to do now.”

A deep ship horn sounded through the speaker.

Was she at a dock?

I was curious what she was doing, but we weren't close enough for me to ask about personal matters.

Strictly speaking, ours was an ill-fated connection.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Senior, isn't that a little early? There are still three days left.”

“When else am I going to contact you?”

“That is true. Merry Christmas to you too, Senior.”

I ended the call and took a moment to steady my breathing.

I thought back on our conversation.

More than anything, Woo Minhee's immediate response of “Sea Monkeys?” stuck with me.

“...”

Surely it was a coincidence.

It probably was.

I wanted to believe it was.

But I couldn't let my guard down.

Woo Minhee had always liked things like online communities.

Meanwhile, I was the kind of guy who didn't even join group chats.

While I was speaking with Woo Minhee, however, chaos broke out on the board.

Defender: No, just kill them all. They look dangerous at a glance. Those are mutations.

SeamonkeyPAPA: Shut the fuck up, you parentless killer bastard! Who the fuck are you, you uneducated lowborn trash, to tell me what to do? They're my children! I raised them! They're my children!

Defender and Sea Monkey Papa.

Two users with no overlap had clashed.

As I watched their keyboard battle, I became puzzled.

How should I put it?

It really took the shine off.

Until then, I had thought Sea Monkey Papa was a courteous, quiet middle-aged gentleman who simply liked Sea Monkeys.

His voice was polite, stately, and strongly intellectual.

The glimpses of his bunker had made it seem fairly spacious too. I thought he might be a financially comfortable professional in his early to mid-fifties.

But Sea Monkey Papa's true face, revealed through the keyboard battle, was completely different.

Rather than ugly, it was childish.

He poured out vulgar, lowbrow insults too filthy to put into writing. Thirty percent were slang terms for genitals, another thirty percent insulted other people's parents, and the rest consisted of dog-related profanity and the exclamation marks Sea Monkey Papa loved so much.

I couldn't stand looking at it, so I turned on the profanity filter.

SeamonkeyPAPA: F***!! F*****!!! M*****! ******* ******! *********!! ********!!

Meanwhile, Defender replied calmly, though everyone knew his patience wasn't particularly high.

Defender: I'm saying this because I'm worried. If you want to die, go ahead. But I'd appreciate it if you took back what you said about our parents.

Defender: That reservoir in your picture. I know it. I think I know where you are.

In that moment, I could vividly picture Defender's cold eyes, especially the brother's.

This was getting dangerous.

Not just me. Everyone on the board must have felt it.

Defender was serious.

If I had been Sea Monkey Papa, I would have apologized or at least taken my hands off the keyboard.

But Sea Monkey Papa did neither.

SeamonkeyPAPA: *********!!!!

“Ah.”

Defender: You want to die?

SeamonkeyPAPA: F*****!!!

SeamonkeyPAPA: F********!!!!

“This isn't right.”

This went far beyond crossing a line.

No matter how Defender didn't touch board friends, this was too much.

I immediately sent Sea Monkey Papa a message.

SKELTON: Defender's a piece of work, but he's right. That's dangerous. Apologize and end it. Why are you fighting like children?

It was mediation, in my own way.

If Sea Monkey Papa wanted, I was even willing to calm Defender down.

For better or worse, he had been a companion who had passed through the same time as us. I didn't want to see another board user disappear.

A little later, a reply came from Sea Monkey Papa.

Message from SeamonkeyPAPA: *******!!!!

Maybe it was because I had turned on the profanity filter.

Or maybe the gap between what had happened to him and the image I had of him was simply too great.

The user who messaged me looked like nothing more or less than a Sea Monkey.

Message from SeamonkeyPAPA: Not funny, ****butter*better******

SKELTON: *********

Defender: Proof

Two days later, Defender's post was a chilling mixture of horror movie dread and mystery.

Using the reservoir as a coordinate, Defender had gone to find Sea Monkey Papa's residence.

I didn't know whether he was sincere or just saying what sounded good, but Defender said that if Sea Monkey Papa apologized there, he planned to shake hands amicably with him and upload proof of the apology.

Defender found the bunker without much difficulty.

The door to the bunker was open. Inside were what appeared to be Sea Monkey Papa's Sea Monkey set, an old laptop, and various other equipment.

But Sea Monkey Papa himself was nowhere to be seen.

It wasn't only Sea Monkey Papa.

The shadow of privation, of poverty and want, hung gloomily over the bunker.

Defender: That guy had almost run out of food and supplies. Looking at the boiler, it seems it hasn't been used for heat in a long time. It's amazing he managed to write posts on the board at all.

The only food Defender found was a week's worth of moldy hardtack, two cases of soju, and half a bottle of seventeen-year-old whiskey lying on the floor with its cap open.

Defender remembered the proof Sea Monkey Papa had posted and drained the reservoir.

To kill all those disgusting mutations.

When all the water had been drained, not a single Sea Monkey remained.

In the soggy mud lay a corpse reduced to white bones, lying at attention like an exclamation mark.

The careful subtitle saying Sea Monkeys died in freshwater surfaced unbidden in my mind.

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