Fireworks | ATEEZ story

21 - Mingi

To find the Cromer, we must go to the Android Guardian's bunker, but the only person who knows the bunker is Left Eye, the manager of the Strictland dump. So, we had no choice but to come to this place.

As if they were continuously burning trash, the yellow smoke, which is said to cause hallucination, was constantly soaring. Perhaps because of that, the man named Left Eye was mumbling to himself in the air. Whew...how do we locate the Android bunker from that person?

Thanks to nosy Woo Young, we decided to find out the location of the Android bunker as well as regain the voice of the Grimes girl. That dude is always so unnecessarily nosy like that.

By what we have heard form Hong Joong and the Grimes siblings, that Left Eye man seems to have his own story too. Whatever, there's no one without a story.

Anyway, we split into teams Members who will go into a pile of trash that looks like a cave to find the voice and members who will convince Left Eye to find out the location of the Android bunker. I was in the latter.

The bastard of the family is probably all Mingi's gonna be whatever world or place he's in. The part where he gets the happy ending has not yet arrived, as he sat on the floor, nibbling on a piece of dry biscuit Kyung-Hu generously gave him out of pity. Mingi has been longing for the day where everything would fall into place without much effort, but it seems as if he was gnawing on the biscuit for quite some time now.

His family's debts have taken most of his childhood that he hadn't realised how out of touch he is from reality, fitting that he didn't even know how to talk to another child properly without the latter crying from fear. He had dealt with this inevitable reaction from other children that he decided that it would be better if he stopped meddling with something he could not control. Coming from a low-class family, he had often met with other bullies who looked and acted exactly like him. In return, he would throw out the second punch and continue the fight without much satisfaction from the results; which mostly ended up with Mingi raising his own fist in victory.

When a strange child that had suddenly come up to him noted how this sort of thing was abnormal, Mingi's tiny little head would often turn sideways in confusion. His parents had never taught him about kindness or consent, so how would a naive little child like little Song Mingi could distinguish how hurtful it is to raise a brawl? Maybe it was because Jung Wooyoung was part of a middle-class family that he could not understand such knowledge, nonetheless, his little head now turned away and ignored his little friend's notion.

This carried out until the day of the incident wherein Jongho was the one to raise the fist first. After that mistake, he stopped making any connections with everyone in the group, including his best friend, Wooyoung. Had he not regretted it, no. Those debt papers kept piling up like gold castles in his little house that it could be used as a pillow. His family had never wanted to help, so he had to sort this dilemma as an adult.

Whoever said "teenage years are the best years of your life" had lied. Mingi couldn't believe how utterly stupid and close-minded this classist bitch had quoted. The quoter had never seen how desperate someone from the lower-class family could live, nonetheless someone who had no one his entire life. How can one become so detached from reality that they made a worldwide statement that was entirely false? All because they could not understand that some children in this world could not afford the luxury of happiness and material? Much less an environment not fit for a small child?

"We are all a different babe..." Mingi would often quote in spite of himself.

Thus, he continued his life the same way he had started it. No amount of satisfaction would come out from it either.