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It was mocking him.
They were mocking him.
Zoey knew exactly what she was doing when she put the device in front of Jinu, he was sure of it. She called it a “laptop” yet when he moved to set it on his lap, her and Mira laughed and she told him it was better if he set it on the counter. That made no sense to Jinu given its name, but he did as she suggested so they would leave him alone.
It worked and Zoey turned away to continue making a mess of the kitchen with Mira. The little one is pure chaos, he thought to himself as he glanced over at the trail of dishes and food items left in her wake. Mira was following behind to quietly pick things up behind her. That one is the pink menace. Each time Rumi tried to get them to be nicer to him, they went on a tirade. Something about the train math.
Unfortunately, he was resigned to being around them if he wanted to continue being around Rumi, as they seemed to all be a package deal. He supposed they were letting him crash on the cramped loveseat in the office (they claimed the large couch in the main room was too “sacred” for him). Plus, Zoey made Rumi smile and Mira challenged Rumi to be kinder to herself, so he tolerated both of them. Barely. Begrudgingly.
Jinu sat on his stool at the counter, returning his attention to the laptop’s blank screen. He recognized the letters on the buttons but not how to actually turn it on. He tapped a few keys, but the screen remained resolutely black.
He looked over at the document next to him. Rumi had instructed him to sign it and upload it (whatever that means) to a website. Last night, Rumi had shown him the website and they had printed the form to complete (that was a weird experience - the machine had sounded angry). But Rumi’s computer had already been on when she showed him and this laptop (still a dumb name) seemed to operate differently. He also didn’t understand how he was meant to “upload” the document. He had inspected the edges to the laptop and there didn’t seem to be an opening big enough to insert it.
He peeked over at Zoey and Mira, who were ignoring him while they worked. Zoey was shaping some kind of ground meat into discs while telling Mira an animated story about something called animal style fries at a place called Inninout (sounded like gibberish). Mira listened intently while she sliced a tomato, commenting here and there. When Mira glanced up at him, he immediately looked down and pressed a few buttons. He was thankful they couldn’t see the blank screen so he could still maintain some dignity.
They probably knew he needed help, but he would be damned if he asked for it. They had been laughing at him relentlessly since he started staying with them about all the things that required explanation. How was it his fault Gwi-Ma had never bothered to add modern conveniences in his realm of torture and shame? Now he had to learn to actually live in the world, instead of just popping up for souls every now and then. So here he was, needing to send some stupid document for an application for a stupid card that would apparently prove who he is. Or, the identity Rumi had helped him fabricate. Being a 400 year old demon was turning out to be surprisingly challenging.
He decided to pretend like he knew what he was doing until Rumi came out. She never gave him a hard time when she had to explain things to him that everyone else seemed to think was basic knowledge. It still made her laugh sometimes, but she was better at hiding it behind a smile most time. He didn’t mind because she was pretty when she smiled like that.
He was startled out of his daydream of Rumi’s smiles when Zoey suddenly yelled out loudly “Alexa play In Another World by EJAE.”
Who the hell was Alexa?
Before his thought was even complete, a strange, disembodied voice answered “playing In Another World by EJAE” and music started playing. If Jinu hadn’t been so panicked, he would have found the voice extraordinarily pretty. His eyes darted around, trying to locate Alexa. Was she here and he missed the arrival of another person in the house? The music seemed to be coming from a round ball that sat in the corner of the kitchen counter. Mira and Zoey seemed unbothered, singing along to the song.
Maybe Alexa is an assistant who controls it from another location? Jinu had seen them use remotes on the television, but that device seemed to require you to be nearby the television to use it and Alexa was clearly not in the room. Besides, Alexa’s response seemed to have come from the direction of the ball too. He had observed them all using phones and considered it worked something like that. Maybe the ball was a similar communication device that connects to Alexa somehow and she waits for their instruction. He hadn’t been to the office for their music label yet, so maybe she worked there with Bobby.
Mira and Zoey thankfully hadn’t seemed to notice his panic, so he made a mental note to ask Rumi about it later.
As though summoned by his thoughts of her, Rumi walked out from the hallway. Jinu couldn’t help but stare, because Rumi was stunning. Her hair was still damp from her shower, loosely braided and hanging over her shoulder. She wore a simple cropped t-shirt and cotton shorts, and he admired how she let her patterns show with such confidence nowadays.
It took Jinu’s breath away, how she stepped out with ease. Sure it was just him and those other two, but it still showed how much she was embracing her true self now. A far cry from when he first met her, and he felt a surge of pride. He turned a smug look toward Mira and Zoey, knowing he had a hand in Rumi accepting them. When he did, he caught them staring at her as she walked over.
They stared at her often so he assumed that’s something friends did now. He didn’t recall staring at Abby that much, but he had noticed others looking at his abdominals with frequency. Maybe he should have?
“How’s it going in here?” Rumi asked as she took a seat on the stool next to Jinu. He was relieved she was there so she could help him, and hopefully run some interference against the gremlin and the menace.
Mira looked straight at Jinu and quirked a brow, saying “Zoey scared Jinu with Alexa.” Damn, they had noticed.
“I was not scared,” Jinu said, glaring at Mira. That one definitely had it out for him. “I was just…curious about its functionality.”
“Sure, the panicked look in your eyes was just curiosity,” Mira said, looking over at Zoey, both of them laughing.
“Yeah it’s so easy to make fun of the 400 year old demon in the room,” Jinu said petulantly.
“You’re right, it is easy,” Zoey chimed in. “In fact, I have a notebook of 84 things you probably have no clue about to torment you with later.”
Jinu didn’t have 84 ideas at the moment, so he just mocked Zoey in a high voice, “I’m Zoey and I have notebooks full of cheap shots.”
Mira and Zoey both laughed harder. Jinu glared. Rumi looked between them and rolled her eyes and just said, “all three of you need to figure out how to be nicer to each other.”
Jinu was a little offended that Rumi didn’t immediately take his side when they were clearly ganging up on him. But, he chose not to bring it up this time because he did still need her help. He waited until the two hellions went back to whatever they were doing and turned to Rumi.
“Do you want help?” She was looking at him with a smile, so he forgave her lapse immediately.
“If you wanted to help that would be okay,” he tried to play it off as cool.
She chuckled lightly. “Let’s start by turning this on.” She said it kindly, but one corner of her mouth was quirked up in amusement. He watched intently to see which button activated the device and made a mental note for the future. “Then you’ll need to save the document as a PDF.”
“What do you mean save it as a PDF? I can’t become that, I don’t even know what it is.”
Rumi blinked at him and he knew immediately he had misunderstood. Zoey and Mira started cackling again.
“Don’t you two have someplace else you can be?” Jinu really wished Rumi didn’t insist on living with these two. He brought up the possibility of her own place once and based on her response he sure wasn’t going to suggest that again.
“Mira and I are making burgers and we are being nice enough to share them with you,” Zoey said, wielding a spatula and pointing it at Jinu for emphasis. “So no, we don’t have anywhere else we should be in our own home.”
Rumi perked up at that. “You’re making Zoey Burgers?”
“What’s a Zoey burger?” Jinu hesitantly asked. He hated asking them questions, but he was genuinely curious if it made Rumi this excited.
“It’s an American food and Zoey makes the best ones,” Rumi explained with a huge smile on her face, eyes glittering with excitement. Jinu was transfixed and vowed to find something that made her smile as much as Zoey was right now.
“It’s the only thing she can cook,” Mira said, with a smile and a playful shove of Zoey’s shoulder. She’s never that nice when she makes fun of me.
“It’s so true! I learned to make them when I was living in Burbank,” Zoey added.
Since I already started asking. “What’s Burbank?”
“It’s a city in California,” Rumi answered.
I really shouldn’t. “Where?”
Mira snickered a little. “Part of the United States.”
So many regrets. “Huh?”
Mira continued. “…of America.”
Like that helped. “What’s the United States of America?”
Mira started to open her mouth but Rumi cut her off. “It’s just a country across the Pacific and Zoey grew up there. You’re in for a treat because her burgers are delicious.” Rumi gave Mira a look and Jinu was grateful for it.
“Yeah, sounds good,” Jinu said begrudgingly, resisting the urge to stick his tongue out at them.
“Let’s get back to this,” Rumi gestured to the laptop. “So you don’t send as a PDF yourself, you scan the document so it becomes a PDF, which is a type of electronic file.”
“How do I change this into something electronic?” This whole concept was perplexing.
“We can use the scanner, come on.” Jinu had no idea what a scanner was, but he followed Rumi without question to the small office off the hallway.
“Should I have brought the laptop?” Jinu asked. He wasn’t convinced they could change the document to a PDF and put it into the laptop if this scanner device was in another room. Shouldn’t there be some sort of connection? Unless it worked like Alexa. Maybe she communicated with multiple devices from wherever she worked.
Rumi looked at his empty hands. “No, but you should have brought the document since we need to scan it.” Oh.
Walking as quickly as he could, he went back to the kitchen counter to retrieve his signed form, resolutely avoiding eye contact with Mira and Zoey. Their laughter followed him back down to the hall. He flipped them off without turning around and the laughter got louder.
Rumi smiled and shook her head when he re-entered the office, taking the document from him. “I know they’re giving you a hard time, but you have to admit it’s a little funny sometimes. I mean, you don’t get so upset when it's me teasing you.”
Jinu shrugged. “You’re nicer about it.” She made a soft little hmm sound and took the document from him. He watched as she placed the paper through the top of a plastic box, sliding it into an opening and pressing a few buttons on a small screen. It made a strange keening noise and sucked the paper into the opening, and an identical document came out another opening on the side, landing in a tray. Jinu pointed at it and asked, “is that the PDF?”
Rumi looked at him like she was trying to bite her tongue. “Uh…no. That’s the same document. The scanner takes an image and sends it to a shared folder on our private network.”
“Oh, that makes sense.” It did NOT make sense.
She grabbed him by the arm and directed him back down the hallway and into the kitchen, resuming their seats at the counter. The no-longer-blank laptop showed a soft green screen with a little white box in the middle. He had seen this on Rumi’s computer too, it required a secret code to enter. Despite it being Zoey’s laptop, Rumi reached over and tapped in the code. Guess it’s not that secret if Zoey shared it with Rumi.
When the screen changed, it took Jinu a moment to register what he was seeing. Rumi’s computer had opened to a serene backdrop of a hillside and blue sky with a neat column of icons along the bottom that Rumi had used to navigate into things she called apps and the internet. This looked more like…chaos. The backdrop wasn’t even visible with how many icons were layered across the screen, scrunched together and overlapping in some places.
He looked to Rumi, who thankfully looked just as overwhelmed. Bolstered by their joint confusion at this absolute mess, he asked, “Zoey, what is this absolute mess?”
“There’s a system, Jinu!” Zoey said without lifting her head up from the stovetop, offering no further explanation. The meat she was cooking was sizzling and Jinu hated to admit it but the scent wafting over smelled incredible and Jinu’s mouth watered. It made him unaccountably angry at Zoey.
“A chaotic system,” Jinu said petulantly, trying not to inhale the delicious scent too much.
“I know, right?” Zoey answered as though he had meant it as a compliment, which annoyed him more. “Thanks for noticing!”
Rumi frowned at the screen and took the mouse, clicking on an icon, made a grunt of frustration and closed the large box that had popped up. She clicked on a few more, her irritation growing. Zoey looked over and smiled broadly at Rumi, who softened a little before sighing in resignation. “I think we might need some help. I can’t find the folder where the scans should be.” She looked over at Jinu apologetically. “I’m not actually great at computers beyond the basics.”
“I’ll help,” Mira said gently to Rumi, walking around the counter and leaning down over the laptop between Rumi and Jinu, effectively pushing him to the side. Rude.
Mira navigated the laptop with ease, clicking onto an icon that opened a window containing several more icons. She clicked on one and an image of Jinu’s document appeared on the screen. She clicked a few more things, humming to the music still playing from the ball in the corner.
“You’re good at this Mira,” Rumi said fondly, leaning against Mira and putting her head on her shoulder. Mira smiled and shrugged.
“It’s pretty easy once you learn. You could figure it out,” Mira said, nudging Rumi with her elbow. “Okay, so I saved the PDF right there, so you just need to open the website and you can drag and drop it to upload into the online form. Oh, and her internet browser is over in the bottom right corner.” Mira pointed to various spots on the screen and Rumi nodded with understanding. Jinu hadn’t been able to follow a thing Mira had done, which he knew was intentional. He narrowed his eyes at her back as she walked back to the other side of the counter. She definitely has it out for me.
“Jinu, do you want to take over from here or do you want me to finish up?” Rumi asked, looking over at him. He quickly rearranged his expression to wipe away the irritation.
“Sure…you can, if you want,” Jinu was grateful because he was tired of the gremlin and menace laughing at his expense.
Rumi gave him another of her dazzling smiles and resumed navigation of the laptop, opening the website he recognized from when she showed it to him yesterday. She kept clicking away and he kept watching her. Every now and then her eyes would drift to Mira and Zoey as they worked in the kitchen, finishing up dinner. She did that a lot, Jinu had noticed. Probably because they were loud and distracting.
“Aaaand done!” Rumi said with an emphatic click of a button. “We should get an email back in a few days with the status of the…” But she had stopped mid-sentence, squinting to look at the screen that seemed to show a summary of their submission. Her eyes narrowed but the corner of her mouth twitched just a little. “Mira!”
Mira started laughing, hard. Like she had been holding it in and waiting for something to happen.
“I thought…you’d notice before….before you sent it,” Mira finally got out with some difficulty, unable to control her laughter. What had she done?
Jinu looked at the screen, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It took him a moment and then he noticed it. Under “documents successfully uploaded” it read jinu-is-stupid.pdf in bold, underlined letters.
“Why does it say Jinu is stupid?” Jinu said angrily, glaring at Mira. She laughed even harder, tears flowing down her eyes. She’ll be crying when I get back at her. Realizing what Mira had done, Zoey started laughing. Next to him, he felt a slight shake and he whipped his head to look at Rumi who was practically vibrating, her face scrunched up looking like she was in pain. Jinu groaned, sitting back and looking up at the ceiling. “You’re all against me.” Rumi couldn’t hold it in any longer and she burst out laughing.
Jinu folded his arms, pouting. He couldn’t even blame Rumi, the whole thing was pretty ridiculous. He could blame Mira though, which he did. He resigned himself to waiting it out while they all got it out of their system.
He was waiting a while, the three of them wheezing while he stared at the ceiling, sighing dramatically and rolling his eyes.
Zoey was the first to regain any sort of composure, sucking in a breath. “Okay…burgers are done!” Mira and Rumi each took a few deep breaths, regaining some level of control. A stray laugh or two still escaped as they settled down and wiped tears from their eyes.
“Come on old man, let’s go eat,” Rumi took Jinu by the hand and pulled him off the stool. He prickled at being called an old man, but kept quiet because her hand felt so good in his. She led him to the dining table, where Mira and Zoey were putting out plates of food and bottles of some sort of brown drink.
He looked at the burger with interest as he sat down. It looked as though the disk of meat had been placed between two pieces of bread with some additional toppings. He lifted up the top piece of bread to inspect it and found tomato, lettuce, and sauces that were bright yellow and red. The scent of the meat was making his mouth water and he replaced the top piece of bread. The three of them were chatting around him as they ate. They seemed to just be picking the whole thing up, so he followed suit and lifted the burger, taking a large bite.
Oh, this is good. REALLY good. He tried not to groan with satisfaction, but it was hard not to. He took another bite and closed his eyes. The meat was juicy with a crispy crust that held a mix of spices seared into it. The sauces provided a tangy taste, with the bread adding a soft texture. He opened his eyes to find Zoey staring right at him. Damn.
“Amazing, right?” Zoey said with a sparkle of satisfaction in her manic eyes.
Okay, you win this round Zoey. “Yeah…it’s tasty,” Jinu begrudgingly said. He set it down and eyed the beverage. He sighed, hating to ask as usual. He pointed at it and asked, “what’s this?” Jinu was not expecting the response.
All three of them looked at him, clearly surprised by the question. As usual, he regretted asking almost immediately.
With a smirk, it was Mira who finally said, “you mean to tell me you sang an entire song about soda pop and don’t even know what it is?”
“That’s soda pop?” He asked, looking down that brown liquid. “I was expecting it to be…I don’t know, pink or something.” This earned him a snicker from both Mira and Zoey. Again.
“I guess some soda pop is pink,” Rumi considered. “Like strawberry soda. But this is cola.”
“Cola?” Jinu thought that was a dumb name. What kind of flavor was cola supposed to be?
“Just try it, you’ll like it,” Rumi said encouragingly, taking a drink from her own bottle and finishing with an exaggerated “Aaahh” sound. He didn’t understand what the sound indicated, but he went ahead and lifted the bottle and took a gulp.
He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. He tried to swallow it, but the urge to spit it out was overwhelming. He felt a prickling sensation across his tongue and down his throat. It practically burned in his mouth. His attempts to swallow resulted in the sharp liquid getting caught in his windpipe and suddenly he was choking, heightening the burning sensation. His eyes watered as he struggled to breath.
Predictably, Mira and Zoey were no help, sipping their own soda with barely contained amusement. How are they doing that? Rumi at least stood up and began pounding on his back. He wasn’t sure it was helping, but at least she was doing something. Slowly, the liquid was cleared and air flowed into his lungs again, although with a slight wheezing sound.
When he finally regained the ability to speak, he looked around at all three of them, asking “why is it spicy?”
All three paused for a beat before bursting out laughing, yet again. He glared at all of them, even Rumi, although with significantly less malice that he gave the chaos gremlin and the pink menace.
He ignored the offensive beverage the rest of the meal, finishing the burger without comment.