When Soo Jin told her parents about her adopting a child, they couldn't not be happier for her. They knew she always had a wish to have children. And they always wanted to have grandchildren as well, but they never had pressured her. They were happy when she seemed happy, but the way she told them the news mad them feel as if something finally went right for her.
When Soo Jin and Ba Reum finally started to live together, she quickly noticed some weird things about him. The first thing she noticed that he seemed to have trouble expressing his emotions and that whenever he did something wrong, he got even more blank.
Sometimes he got very quiet and got this empty look about him. One day she saw him hurt a cat after he got that look, and she knew that she would have to dig deeper to know where this behavior was coming from.
Ba Reum had seen her standing there and got that carefully blank look in his eyes again. She knew that she was going to have to thread carefully with him.
"Ba Reum, why did you do that?" she asked in a neutral voice. She kneeled beside him to make sure that they were on eye level.
"I wanted to see what it would do." He said to her, looking away.
"Most people would be upset because you are hurting an animal." She offered. That made him look up at her.
"Are you upset?" he asked, watching her for her reaction.
"I am a bit." She said honestly. "I want you to think about why you did it, and what you gained from doing so."
"I wanted to see her reaction, that's what I wanted." He said. He sounded not too sure of himself.
"Yes, you got that, but you also got me a bit upset. If you continue doing stuff like this, you will only estrange people around you." He was listening to her now. She tried to think of a way to make him understand.
"Think of it like this Ba Reum, don't do to others what you don't like to be done to you." A simple truth, perhaps easiest for him to understand.
He looked at her questionably.
"If you are mean and go around hurting things, things will hurt you." She explained.
"But if you are kind to others, they will be kind to you." He looked thoughtfully at her.
"You know what Ba Reum, if you aren't sure that you are doing the right thing, ask me. I will help you figure things out." She bumped her shoulder in his.
"Thank you." He said, surprising her. She smiled. Perhaps it was because his head injury that his thinking was bit messed up, but at least he seems willing to accept her judgement. And in time, he would learn what was right and what was wrong.
"Good, and now, don't hurt any animals anymore, or soon all the cats in the neighbourhood are going to go after you everytime you show your face" She said with a smile. "And don't forget, tomorrow it's your first day of school".
Chi Kook sat behind the new kid. He was a weird one. He never smiled or laughed, or even saw the need to interact with any of his classmates. The other kids didn't really try to get him involved in their conversation. Since the new kid joined half way through the year, no one really wanted to have another kid join their social group and distjurb the balance.
Everyone knew that Ba Reum had been in a car accident, so they just thought that that was the cause of his weird behavior, but that didn't mean that they accepted him easier.
His grades were seriously good though, the best in his age group.
Chi Kook tried to start a conversation several times, but he was always shot down. But that just made him more determined to make friends with this strange boy. Dong Koo thought that he was weird because of his intense need to make friends with weirdo's.
"That's why we are friends, right?" Chi Kook quipped.
Dong Koo sighed and sat down next to Chi Kook.
"Al right, we'll try to befriend him." He sighed, "should have stayed in bed this morning." Chi Kook just smiled at him.
Then one day there was a group assignment and they had to split up in groups of three. Chi Kook rushed out of his chair to make sure no one else would ask the new kid. He shouldn't have feared. No one wanted to do the assignment with the weird kid, no matter his grades.
"Want to pair up with me and Dong Koo?" He asked. Ba Reum looked at him and looked around in the class. Everyone else was already making their groups.
"Okay." He said. Chi Kook smiled widely, happy to finally have an opportunity to get to know this kid. Dong Koo looked resigned, but at least they were with someone who at least got some brains in him.
They met up at each other houses twice a week.
They noticed that Ba Reum always seemed awkward when he was at their houses, but when they came to his house, his mother seemed so happy that he had finally made friends. She gave them lots of yummy snacks and seemed relieved that her son was finally getting some social contact his age.
One day, when they were at Dong Koo's house, his sister came crying to his room. Ba Reum looked a bit alarmed at seeing a crying girl.
"What's the matter?" Dong koo asked. His sister kept on crying, but she started to tell him what happened.
"There's this awful teacher in my class, I think he makes pictures under girls skirt. He even stole my sport shorts." The sister cried.
"I tried to report him to the school director, but they said that I am lying because I had no proof. He's going to fail me now." She was in complete hysterics. Her academic live would be over now.
Dong Koo calmed her down and promised to see if they could help. He was absolutely furious.
"You don't have to get involved Ba Reum." they told him.
"No, it's okay" he said. He actually looked very interested to join their forces.
"How can we unmask him?" they sat there brainstorming a bit about how to unveil the pedoteacher.
"We can film him and send the movie to the parents emails." Ba Reum eventually said, " it wouldn't be too difficult". Chi Kook and Dong Koo looked at him.
"But how?" Chi Kook asked.
"It's not that hard, all you need is a good camera, an internet connection and a computer." They two watched in amazement when Ba Reum explained how to set it up.
They procured the equipment from the computer class at school, and Ba Reum showed what to do during a test.
The hardest part was trying to find a target to get the teachers attention. They took turns in watching the filming, sometimes they even skipped class because of it.
One day the girls had PE and they could get a good angle on the teacher trying to peek in on the girls changing, even using his cell phone to take pictures.
Afterwards, when the class was done, they even got a filming of the teacher stealing one of the shorts from the girls and smelling it and using it to masturbate.
"Yes, we finally got proof." Dong Koo said, feeling happy, but nauseaous at the teacher. "Let's send it to all of the parents". Then a thought occurred to them.
"How to we get the emailadresses?" he asked. Ba Reum snorted, "give me 5 minutes."
Ba Reum hacked the school data base and was about to send the movie to all the parents and teachers.
"Wait, can you pixel their faces?" Chi Kook asked before Ba Reum could send the movie.
"Yes, but why would you want to do that."
"I don't want everyone to know who the girls are. They could get bullied because of this". Chi Kook said. Ba Ruem looked at him weirdly, but he anonymised the movies, just the teacher was visible.
The day after, a huge uproar was finding place at the school of Dong Koo's sister.
The teacher was fired in the end, just like the director who said she was just lying.
All the girls got counselling afterwards and it made national news.
Everyone wondered who made the movie, but they couldn't trace it back.
"Have you seen the news." Ba Reum said when they met again for school.
Chi Kook and Dong Koo where surprised. This was the first time that they saw Ba Reum look so excited and the first time he started a conversation instead of the other two.
They became the best of friends later, and they spend their school days unmasking other bullies to the authorities.
Chi Kook and Dong Koo noticed that something wasn't quite right in their friends head, but he seemed harmless enough, he was using his intelligence and love for a hunt to help people. Sometimes when he was the new, a bit of manic laughter escaped, but he seemed to smile more in general.
What they didn't know was that it was going further then just high school bullies.
He unmasked his first murderer a year later, sending the evidence he found to the cops and seeing them finish it off instead of him.
Whenever he completed a hunt, his chest felt lighter and he felt happier then before. Knowing that he made his mother proud, and his friends proud, made it even better.
Still, since everything he was doing was highly illegal and dangerous, he thought it best to keep them out of the loop. Now he just had to find the easiest way to find out new targets.