Banished Divinity: Learning to be Human

The purple dinosaur sat proudly under my arm.

I had won it. Well, technically, Minjae had won it. But I had provided tactical advice, which was arguably more important.

"That isn't how claw machines work," Minjae said.

"It worked." I said proudly

"You spent almost an hour telling me to threaten the machine." Minjae raised his eyebrow.

"The machine was being unreasonable."

"It was a machine."

"Exactly."

Minjae laughed.

I still wasn't entirely sure why humans laughed so often. They seemed to find joy in the strangest things. Dad laughed at Mum's slipper attacks. Mina laughed, no, giggled evilly, at her own drawings, which at times made me think she might be possessed by a drawing demon, if such a thing existed. Human Sera laughed at the sound of her own voice, which made me think the lightning may have struck her harder than it struck me. None of it made logical sense. But Minjae's laugh was... nice. Not logical. But nice..

---

The late afternoon streets glowed around us. Neon signs flickered in every colour imaginable. Street vendors shouted about fried snacks and grilled meats and things that smelled illegal in at least three dimensions. Humans moved in every direction, talking and laughing and carrying bags filled with things they probably didn't need.

It was chaotic.

But I liked it.

"Come on," Minjae said. "There's a tteokbokki place around the corner."

What is that? I thought. Some kind of hellhound hole that Minjae has kept hidden in a dimension I didn't know about?

"Sera, it is just food. Nothing more. Your face is scrunched up like shrivelled paper, and you are thinking out loud again." Minjae laughed. "Now come on, Warrior."

I sighed. And when I was about to follow, I stopped.

---

A sound drifted through the air. A melody. Not loud. Not modern. Not one of the K-pop songs that Human Sera, Mina, Jiyoung, and Haejin had all spent weeks attempting to force into my education, which I still did not understand the craze about. Was it about cute boys? Or was it the music? I couldn't really tell.

Anyway, the music playing at this moment, filling the air, was something else. Something older. Something familiar.

The rhythm reached me before the words did.

My heart skipped.

I stood completely still.

The song wrapped around me like a hand reaching across time. It was soft. Warm. The kind of song that made humans slow down and remember things they hadn't thought about in years.

"Sera?" Minjae's voice sounded distant.

The music grew louder. Somewhere ahead. I followed it.

"Sera?" he called again.

I ignored him. The song pulled at something buried deep inside me. A memory. An old memory. Older than this body. Older than this life. Older than the mismatched socks I was currently wearing.

I turned a few corners and stopped in front of a small record shop hidden in a small alley, tucked away from the hustle and bustle of life that existed just a few corners outside.

The display window was filled with flat, circular discs in black and silver, some large, some small, all tucked inside square paper sleeves with faded pictures on the front. A cardboard cutout of some musician from a decade I couldn't identify stood nearby. The music drifted from big blocky boxes with strange textured grilles hidden somewhere inside, soft and persistent, and definitely familiar.

I stared through the glass.

And suddenly, I wasn't standing in Seoul anymore.

---

Rain. I remembered rain. Not the gentle kind. The kind that fell in sheets, turning streets into rivers and sidewalks into mirrors. The kind that made humans run for cover and curse the sky.

I had been hunting a shadow beast that fed on loneliness. The creature had crossed more than two hundred realms before arriving on Earth. Eighty thousand and forty-two victims across those realms. When it came to Earth, there were about one hundred casualties across the globe within half a day. Humans had called the deaths unexplained. I had called the creature extremely irritating.

I remembered standing in the rain outside a place where humans sat and ate and ordered food. It was small, with chrome counters that gleamed under fluorescent lights. Red vinyl booths squeaked when you sat on them.

And in the corner stood a glowing box.

I had never seen anything like it. It was tall and boxy, made of wood and glass and something that glowed red and gold lights pulsing from its belly like a heartbeat. Rows of flat, circular discs were visible through the glass, each one labelled with writing I did not recognize. The machine hummed softly, as if it were alive.

At the time, I thought it was a shrine. Some kind of altar where mortals paid tribute to their gods of sound. The girl kept feeding small circle shiny metals into a slot on its face, and each time she did, the machine shuddered to life and played music.

The same music. Over and over.

I had not come for food, celestial beings did not require diner food, which was fortunate because the coffee smelled like regret but because the beast had passed through this place. I needed to track it.

But before I entered, I needed to look less like a celestial being and more like a customer.

A quick shift of form and fabric, and I was wearing a long pale purple dress that pooled around my feet. The fabric was thin. Uncomfortable. But it served its purpose, it hid my boots.

Humans would go crazy if they saw my boots. Not because the boots were particularly impressive—though they were, forged from the scales of a star-serpent and lined with the blood of a creature that no longer existed in any dimension but because they moved. The scales and blood shifted. The shadows beneath them rippled. To a human, they would look like the boots were alive.

Which they were. Sort of. It was complicated.

I also changed my hair. My natural celestial hair was purple and silver and faintly glowing, like someone had bottled a nebula and poured it over my head.

Humans noticed things like that. They tended to stare. One particularly brave mortal child had asked if I was a fairy princess when I arrived on Earth. She and her miniature fabric companion, a small, soft, stitched creature with button eyes and a painted smile, were seated on her front porch, playing what looked like some kind of ritual battle. They were pouring water into cups and serving pretend food to each of the little fabric beings lined up before her.

I had told her I did not know what a fairy princess was, but I was significantly more dangerous than any fairy princess and could end any life as fast as the blink of her eye.

She screamed, burst into tears, clutched her fabric companion as if her life depended on it, and ran back into her dwelling.

At the time, I thought she was being rude by crying, as I was trying to tell her that I would protect her from the worst of the worst.

Humans, even the little ones, are so difficult to understand.

So now, my hair was dull and mortal. The kind of hair that no one looked at twice. The kind of hair that belonged in a world where nothing glowed and nothing moved and nothing reminded humans that they were not alone in the universe.

I hated it. But I knew it was necessary, because the beast was close—I could feel it. But instead, I found the song. And a girl.

She was young. Nineteen, maybe. Her dress was pale blue with white trim—identical to the dress I had conjured, which I found deeply annoying. Her name tag read MARGIE in block letters. She had been feeding small circle shiny metals into the glowing machine, playing the same song over and over. The same melody. The same lyrics about love and loss and the ache of something you couldn't quite name.

I had found it annoying.

"You know that tall, boxy, wooden-and-glass glowing box has other flat discs," I had said, gesturing at the machine. I had decided to give it a title, as it deserved such a title. I also suspected a deity might be living inside, having built an altar so it could live peacefully within the glowing box. But I had decided not to call it out, as I was hunting an annoying and irritating beast.

Margie looked at me like I had grown a second head. "Let me guess," she said. "You're not from around here."

"I am from significantly farther than 'around here.'"

She laughed. It was a nice laugh. Not like Minjae's, different, warmer, the kind of laugh that belonged to someone who hadn't yet learned that the world would eventually disappoint her.

"You're weird, and this is called a Juke Box. Not glowing Box" she laughed.

She fed another small circle shiny metal into the machine. The glowing lights pulsed. The music started again.

I stayed. Not because I wanted to. Not because the beast had led me there. But because the rain was heavy, the diner was warm, and Margie kept feeding those small circle shiny metals into that strange altar of sound. And somewhere between the third and fourth replay, I stopped finding it annoying.

The beast escaped during that hunt. Entirely because I was distracted by the music and the girl who wouldn't stop playing it.

The Tribunal was not pleased.

"You let a shadow beast escape because of a SONG?"

"It was a very good song."

"THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A VERY GOOD SONG, SERAPHYNE."

"There is. I just heard it. Multiple times. In a row. From a Juke Box that eats small circle shiny metals. You should try it."

The Tribunal had no response to that.

I tracked the beast down eventually. But as time went by, I had forgotten the diner, Margie, and the song. And the glowing box that had somehow distracted me enough to let a shadow beast escape.

Until now.