Pathbreakers: Multiclassing For Fun And Profit

6/20

San Francisco, California

6:39 PM

[ Speaking in Korean ]

Dad: Did you pay for that girl?

Me: What? Like a prostitute?

Dad: She's sexy. You like that kind of thing, eh?

Me: Yes. But Dad, this isn't about me or her. Where's Hak-Kun?

Dad: I haven't seen him in weeks. He says he has some project. He looks like you now. Big muscles.

Me: We think he's involved in some bad stuff.

Dad: Drugs?

Me: No, like the Dracosys stuff.

Dad: He's not stupid like you are.

Me: Ahhhh right, right. I'm stupid because I went into the military.

Dad: No, the military makes people stupid. That's their job. They make people into stupid obedient dogs. That's what you are now.

Mercy: Jun isn't stupid.

Dad: She speaks Korean!

Mercy: A little.

Dad: Jun, are you going to marry her or is she your side piece?

Jun: Dad!

My Dad's town house is in the Sunset District of San Fran. He bought the place during the 2008 financial crisis when prices were low, so it's not my childhood home. More like my teenage-hood home. It's one of those tall narrow homes wedged between other tall, narrow homes. Like in the opening of Full House.

So we're in my dad's living room. He lives here with my brother, Hak-Kun. Aaand my brother is missing. Great.

“He only emails, never uses phones,” I say to Mercy and Jose, who are here with me. “He doesn't like the GPS knowing where he is.”

“So he was prepared for the Dracosys?” Jose asks.

“No he is just a paranoid,” my dad says. He came over in the 90s when he was 18. He's still got a little bit of accent, but not much. He talks fast and uses too many articles. He says it's a Seoul thing. I'm not sure it is. “Always that way. He uses a VPN to hide his internet tracks.”

I squint at him. He's a pharmacist, not an IT guy. “You know what a VPN is?” I ask, suspiciously.

“They advertise on my podcast,” he replies defensively. That checks out. He does like podcasts.

“I want to see his room,” Mercy says, and stands up, glancing at the stairs.

“Maybe he left a note,” Jose says.

“No note,” my dad chides us. “Besides, the FBI took almost everything three days ago.”

I yell, “Dad! You have to tell me important things like that!”

“No, and fuck the police!” he says, then turns to Mercy. “Sorry for the language, young lady.” Also, my dad thinks he's woke now. The guy listens to one NPR podcast about police corruption and now I hear about the police state when I talk to him.

Mercy starts upstairs, “sure, but maybe they missed something.”

“The FBI?” Jose asks incredulously. “Missed something?”

“Sure, maybe something personal, Jun, come on, let's go!” She then proceeds to march upstairs and we hear her open and close doors as she looks for my brother's room.

“What's her deal? She thinks she's a detective?” asks my dad. “She is into the copaganda?”

---

My brother's room is a mess. It looks like it's been ransacked, which it mostly has been. There are unplugged wires coming out from under the desk where a computer tower used to sit. The bookshelf where he had his server set up is literally in pieces. Basically everything looks like it was pulled apart and not put back together again.

“Damn, they even opened up the 360,” says Jose from over my shoulder.

I trudge through the debris. Some of it is the FBI's fault. A lot of it is my brother's fault, including comics, fast food wrappers and Magic The Gathering cards. I look at the Xbox 360 that's had its case taken apart.

“This is it,” I say. I grab the nearby screws and try to piece the mid-2000s Microsoft console together. “No way he'd have this out for no reason.”

Mercy slides some manga off the office chair and sits down. “Was that special to you guys? The Xbox?”

“Oh, hell yeah,” I say, finishing the repair job. As an aside, you should always carry a multitool. You never know when you'll need a screwdriver. “We spent thousands of hours with this thing. And we hadn't played it in years. I think you're right, Mercy. He might have left me a message.”

I gather the cables and a controller and we head downstairs to the TV. I quickly hook up the x360 and turn it on. It asks who's playing. There are three profiles listed. Mine from back then, “Saturn's First Ring,” Hak-Kun's profile, “Saturn's 2nd Ring,” and our older brother Ji-Ho's profile, “bravetiger.” He didn't play much with us. He was too cool for video games. To be honest, he still is.

I log in as Saturn's 2nd Ring. The menu boots up and I fiddle around with it until I find what I'm looking for. It's a draft message. “Jun Kyung, you suck, you took my class. Fuck you, dude. But it's fine, I guess. If I'm missing, I put something in the last thing you'd take apart.”

I dash back upstairs to my old room. It's been converted into an office, so I check the closet. Sure enough, there's a box of my old gundam model kits.

Gundam model kits, or gunpla to fans, aren't something you take apart. They aren't legos. They're high precision, no-glue-needed, fully posable models. And they're fantastic. I rummage through the dozen bubble-wrapped kits until I find him. Gundam Exia, my favorite gundam. The last thing I'd take apart. Soooo now I have to take it apart.

If I'm my brother, and I'm hiding something like a micro SD card, there's one place I'd put it. The Exia features a large grey sword which, even on the 1/144 scale High Grade version, is almost 6 inches long. I pop apart the GN Sword aaand there it is. I hold it up so that Mercy can see it.

“An SD card,” she whispers over my shoulder.

“A friggin micro SD card,” I whisper back.

---

Back downstairs we use Mercy's laptop and check it out. There are copies of the conversation logs that we already got from dungeon R-32. That's when it really hits me.

“It was him,” I say. We're back in the living room, Mercy and I on the couch, Mercy hunched over the computer, me leaning back in a state of shock.

“What was him?” my dad asks.

I don't want to say it. I don't want it to be real. To be out in the world. I don't want-

Jose flatly says, “your son was part of the group that made the Dracosys. He has the blood of millions on his hands.”

Nobody moves. Nobody says anything. My dad's face turns shocked, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Hak-Kun,” I say, “he helped design the system. He helped the people who fucked the world with monsters and dungeons.”

“No, that's crazy,” my father said. He's wringing his hands. He knows the FBI was here for a reason, he just didn't know what. “He's just a gamer nerd. He writes a long story online. He doesn't have a real job. He can't destroy the world.” My father looks at me, almost pleadingly. It breaks my heart. “He can't even clean his room, how could he change the world?”

“We... That is, people with certain information...” Her voice is even and soft. “Think that he was recruited because of his story. Because he knew how to describe the monsters and dungeons and-”

“Get out,” he says looking down at his hands.

Mercy tries, “we don't know if he was deceived or something, he might-”

Then he looks directly at me. “She is, you are, talking like this is real. He can not have done this. Not my baby boy.” Hak-Kun was born only a year before 9/11. He was still a baby when my mom died. He's still a baby in my father's eyes, the last gift his wife gave him.

Mercy closes the laptop and begins to stand up but I hold her back. “You can't deny this too, dad.”

“Get out of the house.”

“He's responsible but I'm taking responsibility.” I'm shouting. It always comes down to shouting between him and me. “He fucked up and I'm trying to fix it. Fix it for everyone.”

“Get out of the house!”

I suddenly stand up. I don't say what I'm thinking. I don't say, “for once, for once, I'm not the fuck up, and you just can't deal with it?” I steady myself. I just turn away from him, towards the door. Towards being out of his damn house. The house he bought with settlement money from my mother's death in 9/11. “Fine, I'll go.”

I step towards the door and grab my shoes, taking off the house slippers.

“Just go. Get out.” He's not shouting anymore. I think he's on the verge of tears. Or, knowing him, another eruption of anger.

I open the door, but turn back to him. I calm my voice and take a breath before saying, “you can still call me whenever.” I have to leave the door open for him. I have to be better than I used to be. “I'll listen to whatever you have to say to me.” With that, I leave and shut the door behind me.

I sit down on the stoop and feel tears falling from my eyes. This is too much. This is more than I can handle. My brother, a mass murderer. My father, still taking his side. I sit there and shudder, waiting for an eruption of emotions.

That's when the door opens again and Jose and Mercy step out. I'm not alone anymore. I have people on my side. With tears in my eyes, I stand up, still holding my shoes in my hand. “Well, should we go meet Quins and Madeline at that burrito place I told you about?”