chapter.4  »  this new world.

I was slightly confused by Prince's actions.  He just stayed staring up at me as water dripped from the ends of my hair strands to the floor.  He made a slight howl, and reluctantly ran to go get his ball.  I shrugged and walked into my room to change.

In the solace of my bedroom, thoughts of the previous day tried to fill my head.  But I had moped around enough.  I sighed for the last time and tied my hair up.  As I faced the vanity mirror in my room, I forced a smile on my face before I stuffed a small backpack with my personal things.

“Let's go, Prince.  We'll go buy you stuff.”  I called him up, sitting down on the couch where I tied my shoes.  Prince walked around my ankle, his tongue hanging out.

I picked Prince up and exited the house, locking it before I stepped off to the street.

My goodness, did she look breathtaking wrapped around in that towel.

I probably looked extremely stupid when I ended up staring at her.  She had such a nice figure.  Admittedly, it was my first time seeing a girl with only a piece of cloth covering her.  Back in the kingdom, the women wore rough gowns with corsets that promised to hurt them enough to give their torsos a shape.  They covered their skin as much as possible, and that was what the kingdom considered as beautiful.

They had obviously not seen a girl wrapped around in a single towel before.

We walked—or Soojin walked since I was just in her arms the entire time—to the bus stop at the end of the street.  Before that street, though, we had to pass by a couple of houses.  On the way to the stop, I spotted the trash bin the witch had put me in after I was... cursed.

It was only yesterday, probably the same time as it was in this certain place On Earth.  Father and Mother, the respected king and queen of the kingdom, had arranged a gala for my ninteeth birthday.  Of course, it wasn't my birthday yet, but as part of tradition, we celebrated birthdays twice: a week before, and on the day of.

Invitations had been sent out to the other kingdoms surrounding ours, inviting the most prestigious aristocrats, politicians, relatives, and other royalties to my pre-birthday party.  It had to be the most glamorous party I'd ever had.  Both wings of the castle were decorated and renovated to the fullest, the food had been thrice the quantity from my previous parties, and I had been dressed accordingly to the elegance of the night.

As the prince of the most historical and mysterious kingdom in all of Under Earth, I had to make sure the guests were comfortable and, as people On Earth would say, having fun.

That was when the old woman—or the witch—appeared at the scene.

One of the guards had blocked her pleading entrance into the castle grounds.  Another one of them notified us of the stranger.  I searched for Father and Mother since they were better at handling situations like that than I, but they had been too preoccupied with the guests already.  I had no choice but to face the woman myself.

She begged for water and... that was all.  I recalled the rules of the party, that no outsiders were to be allowed in the castle grounds without an official stamped invitation.  I shoo'd the old woman away, and my parents came running down the long and wide set of staircase behind me, the entire guest population following them.

And before our eyes, the old woman transformed into a witch.  All of the guests gasped aloud, including my parents, because all of them knew of the legends.  One of them spoke of an aged woman in kingdoms who liked to go around asking for some sort of something, usually water, to test the beauty and the orderliness of said kingdom.  If the kingdom behaved properly, the woman turned into a beautiful goddess, blessing that kingdom will all sorts of riches they could (or could not) imagine.  However, if the kingdom did not behave the way they should, she turned into a witch, cursing the sole culprit to teach him or her a lesson they had to figure out on their own.

Of course, the latter was what happened.

Ancient and all, as widespread the legends were amongst the people, nobody knew if the curse could be broken or not.

Did I regret it?  Sure, I did.  But if they ever interrogated me about it on my return, I would just say what the invitations said.  After all, I had a point, and I couldn't really be the one to blame.

We stopped at a pet shop in the middle of the city after a lengthy bus ride.  The shop was filled with other animals such as birds, frogs, crickets, snakes, cats, and dogs.  The dogs in the shop gritted and barked at Prince.  He tucked himself further against my arm, hiding from the dogs' angry faces.

As we walked the cramped aisle of the shop, the shop owner hobbled over to me with a huge, almost terrifying, smile on his face.

“Hello, ma'am!  What can I do for you today?  That's a cute dog you have there!  What's his name?”

I didn't know which question I should answer first, so I just said my business straight.  “I- I'm here to find out what kinds of things this dog needs.  I found him on the street last night and I've never really had a dog so...”

The shop owner seemed to have forgotten that I didn't answer his questions.  He brought me over to the counter.  I stood there quietly while he went behind the counter and began typing on the computer by the cash register.

He told me I needed to go to the veterinarian to get the dog checked, and if I wanted to adopt Prince, I could do it at a nearby place  where they allowed pet adoptions.  But since it was the city, ‘nearby’ meant walking for twenty minutes minimum.

We left and the shop owner bid us a good day.  When we had entered the shop, the streets hadn't been that busy, but it was so much more different when we got out.  It was almost the middle of the day, around 11:45 AM, and people had decided simultaneously to leave their houses to flood the middle of the city and everything in it.

The appalling amount of people walking in the busy streets of the cityterrified me.

According to my minimal knowledge of Under Earth geography, the Kingdom of Preriloth and all the others lay, indeed, under the earth.  My teachers and mentors had told me that there was a completely different world above us, labeled On Earth, but I didn't believe them.  Above us was the sky, and it was impossible to have another land with another sky above our sky.  I didn't believe it until what had happened to me... happened to me.

And now, everything was happening all too fast.

People with different attires and faces walked past us, and I was more than surprised to see Soojin casually threading through the ever-growing crowd.  The people also came in different sizes, compared to the kingdom where almost everyone looked the same, except for foreigners from the other kingdoms.

They scared me, the way they looked so serious walking around.  They wore some sort of tinted squares to cover their eyes, and they wore clothes that revealed too much skin.  If I had been in my human form, I would have gagged, but as a dog, it just came out as a whimper that made me seem like I was hungry.  I was not.

Soojin pushed open a door, the wind chimes on the doorway ringing.  We walked to the front desk where Soojin signed a piece of paper, then we sat down on one of the fluffy sofas.  I looked around calmly as I rested on Soojin's lap, her hand my back.

Pictures of animals, mostly dogs and cats, were plastered on the colored walls.  They told of words that described an animal's body parts, the food suitable for them, and other things I didn't pay attention to.  There were four other people sitting down around us, with their animals on their laps.  I wondered why it seemed normal for them to own animals.  In our kingdom we let animals roam around freely, unless the animals wanted to live with us.

“Soojin Go?”  Someone called out.  I felt Soojin stand up and walk in the direction the person pointed her to.

The veterinarian checked Prince for bruises and such.  As she checked, I noticed the dog tag hanging from Prince's neck was gone.  I squinted, trying to see if it really was gone, and it was.  I felt like I was being delusional when I read it last night.  Maybe it really wasn't there, but it was, and I couldn't be more wrong despite the miniscule size of the tag.

“Your pet does not have any bruises or wounds, but he needs vaccination,” the veterinarian said.  I nodded my head, then she excused herself from the room for a second.

I turned my attention back to Prince.  He was sitting up on the metal observation table, looking up at me with his head tilted.  I rubbed his head and smiled.  “The doctor just went outside to get something, she'll be back in a minute.”

As if my words were magic, the veterinarian came back.  She apologized for the wait and put on synthetic gloves.  She rummaged through her drawers to find a new and sanitized syringe, fitting a needle to the end of the barrel.  She inserted it into a medicine bottle, and Prince seemed to know what she was doing, because he started inching away from her and began moving towards me.

“Are you scared, Prince?”  I joked, slightly chuckling.  Prince made another one of his signature whimpers, ducking his head as he blinked.

“It won't hurt, little one, don't worry.”  The doctor put on a face mask and shook the syringe.  She pushed on the plunger a little, and a little of the medicine spurted.  She had a good grip on Prince as she inserted the needle into his skin.

I winced.  When the veterinarian finally removed the needle and Prince jumped off of the small bed onto my lap, still scared, my heart broke a little.

I petted him, softly his fur.  “It's done, Prince.  You're good now.”

Earth was such a strange place!  Just what kind of tool was that she used on me?!  That hurt worse than getting hit by an apple straight in the head!

If it weren't for Soojin's comforting coos, I would have bitten the lady's hand.  She sat back down after she put away the tool and started talking to Soojin.  They were talking about things I could careless about since I was still fussy from the nasty object.

Not long after their conversation, we left the place and I was relieved.

We went to a bigger establishment, a square one filled with lights and dotted with more people.  I saw the word ‘store’ outside, and I had a clue we were about to buy the things I would need that Soojin had been talking about since yesterday.

She bought absurd things.  There were at least a pack of five rolls of some sort of... black plastic, if I could remember what I had learned from my mentors.  She bought two small metal containers, one labeled ‘DOG FOOD’ and the other ‘WATER’.  She also bought odd-looking “dog toys” and a huge sack of “dog food”.  I thought that was silly because back in our kingdom, dogs ate what humans did.  I guessed they were treated differently here.

Our last destination, according to what I had heard from Soojin's conversation with the animal doctor, was the pet adoption center.  I wasn't quite sure about what that meant, but I recognized the word ‘adoption’.

The pet adoption center was much nicer than the ones we had gone to.  The animal-filled place was too rowdy, the animal doctor's place was too terrifying, and the store was too busy.  The adoption center was cleaner, and the soft breeze inside smelled like fresh lemons even when there weren't any lemon trees in sight.

The downside of this good place was we stayed here the longest and Soojin dealt with a lot of papers.  The papers they used were thinner than the parchments we had back in the Under Earth, and they were cleaner-looking, too.  Now and then Soojin would whisk her hand and sigh, tired from all the writing.  I could only do so little, but I wished I could have done something better than just rubbing my head against her hand.

After several more minutes in the adoption center, Soojin stood up and gave the papers to the person at the front desk who took them somewhere else.  She came back and placed me on her lap again, my back softly.  I was drifting off to sleep when she put me down again on the chair and stood up.

“Miss Go, here are your adoption papers.”  The man in some sort of crisp outfit, with a plaid rectangular cloth hanging from his neck, smiled at Soojin.  I barked at him, but he just laughed at me.

“Thank you, Mister Kim.  I appreciate it a lot.”  Soojin replied with the same sweetness in her smile.  I barked at her, but she just laughed at me as well.  Woman, can't you understand I don't want you talking with other men?!

“No, no, thank you, Miss Go.”  The man grinned.  I gritted my dog teeth.  “Well, I have to go back to my office.  Have fun with your new pet.”

“Yes, Mister Kim.  Thanks a lot again.”  Soojin bowed at the man called Mister Kim.  She was starting to agitate me with the way she acted towards that man.  I couldn't figure out why, but I really didn't want her sharing another conversation with the opposite gender.

I barked at her, then she laughed again, touching my nose.  I made a soft, low noise, then she picked me up and smiled at me.

“I have great news!”  She grinned.  “You're mine now, Prince Jinki!  You're all mine now.”

Those words turned my agitated attitude all around, sending my dog heart beating very rapidly.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

update agaaaaaaain ~ i can't promise i would be able to update when it's the weekdays like today, but i hope you liked this update!  i really like the gif i used, LOL.  thank you guys for reading and the subs and the comments!  i love you all~! ^^

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