May It Reach Your Orbit ★ (1)
The man who had returned from his long leave looked about my age, and there was nothing quiet about him. Black roots were climbing out beneath brightly dyed hair, worn half tied back.
A hint of pink in the ash beige.
How many rounds of bleach did a color like that even take? More than anything, the Hawaiian shirt demanded attention. A foreign firm with a freewheeling culture—no. An otherworld agency, fine. Even so, of every specimen I had seen at this company, he was the most extreme case of unrestrained freedom yet.
"Henna, now that you're suddenly the only woman on the team, you're gonna get lonely, huh? Tell Yeon-woo she ought to come back~."
"I've got a peer on the team next door, so I'm fine, you know? You just have to not be the one rotting my nerves!"
Instead of office titles, Henna and the man addressed each other in a private, familiar way. So they were close. They traded a few more idle how-are-yous, and then, at Henna's urging, the stranger came over to my desk and offered a greeting.
"Hello~ I'm Seo Gwan-yul. I was disappointed there wasn't another guy my age in the design department, so this works out nicely."
"Choi Lee-hyun. Looking forward to working with you."
Seo Gwan-yul seemed a little keyed up. He seized my hand and shook it hard, up and down. The only thing that stood out was the tattoo on the inside of his arm—no webbing, no beast claws, a hand shaped exactly like mine.
Could it be.
...Human?
Was I finally going to have a human coworker?!
No. Don't count your chickens.
How many times had I been sure someone was human, only to be betrayed? This time I would not nurse a vain hope....
"Lee-hyun, you're from World #000255 too, aren't you? A fellow human—I'm glad."
Whoa!
He really was human? At last, a normal coworker of my own!
While I was still drowning in the feeling, a familiar voice drew near.
"Gwan-yul. Vacation go all right? Been a while."
Pascal, finished with his meeting and back at his desk, was greeting one of his own. He was back awfully fast. He hadn't stormed out of there, had he?
"Pascal~ Getting along fine without me? You weren't feeling, like, empty in some corner, were you?"
Seo Gwan-yul had already drifted over toward Pascal's desk to ask after him. That anyone could lay the cheek on that thick in front of our expressionless team lead was, frankly, astonishing.
And he's as hard to miss in height as he is in personality.
They stood side by side to talk, and the difference in build showed, just a little. I'm around 180 centimeters, and Pascal looks a bit taller than me, so mid-180s. Factor that in, and Seo Gwan-yul had to be late 180s. Set aside the non-humans I'd met through the agency, and among actual people he might be the second tallest I'd ever seen!
"Everyone been well~?"
As if he were on a touring circuit, Seo Gwan-yul finished his greetings with a full lap of the desks, then went back to his own seat and sat. Right beside mine. He tapped at his computer for a moment, craned his neck over the partition, and dropped his voice.
"Lee-hyun~ I'm a senior now too, so I ought to buy my junior a drink at least. If you're not busy, how about a coffee break?"
Right. Humans have that custom where the senior buys the junior coffee. Among the staff I'd actually spoken with at this company, the only one who drank coffee was the CEO, so I'd forgotten. Glad, for the first time in ages, of a perfectly ordinary convention, the two of us set out for a café and morning coffee.
We badged through together, stepped out into the human world, and headed for a café in the middle of the busy streets.
"A human coworker really is the best~. We can even hit cafés outside the company together."
That much was true. Since I'd joined this place, it was my first taste of an ordinary hour of getting paid to slack!
"We look about the same age. How old are you?"
The moment age came up, I answered in a voice that had lost a little of its nerve.
"Twenty-nine."
"Oh~ Same age! Wow—human, same gender, and the same age on top of it! That is genuinely rare at this company. I am so glad to meet you~."
At a firm where every species from every world had gathered, an overlap this large couldn't be easy to find. If I played this right, I might actually get a coworker I could relax around.
"Lee-hyun, should we drop the formalities, then? You call me Gwan-yul too."
...Ah.
The same-age offer, so free of hesitation, startled me a little. He was trying to get close faster than I'd thought.
I don't usually drop honorifics with people I meet at work.
Once you're tied together on a job, it can turn awkward. But the joy of meeting my own kind inside this bizarre agency was greater, so I decided to take the high-speed offer.
"Yeah. Let's get along from here."
After the coffee break I returned to my desk and started organizing work from the previous projects, to upload it to the company site. A portfolio job, of a sort.
"Between one project and the next, whenever a spare moment opens up, the team chips away at it, yes we do~."
So the whole team had split the work and taken their shares. Everyone except Seo Gwan-yul.
He only just got back, so the work cycle's probably awkward for him anyway.
He hadn't been on the last two assignments, either. He was probably enjoying a blessed stretch of time without even this little busywork. I envied him.
This man, so overblessed he didn't know what to do with it, must have grown bored of loafing. He came over the partition and hovered at my desk.
"Lee-hyun, whatcha doing? Oh~ the company portfolio. Right—what was your portfolio like when you got hired? I'm curious. Show me~."
...Hmm.
People don't usually ask to see your portfolio the first time they meet you, do they? It felt like being graded, and I didn't want to show it. The feeling sat wrong, but we weren't at a point yet where refusing would be comfortable either. I hesitated a moment, then plugged in the USB I usually carry and pulled the portfolio up.
Fine. It wasn't as if showing it would wear it out.
"Oh~."
And then Seo Gwan-yul snatched my mouse and whipped through the PDF, scrolling at speed.
"This portfolio's no joke. The range of styles you can pull off is wide, and the finish is high—you're a full hexagon, no weak side. If you're this good, why'd you join here? Let me see the résumé too."
"......"
This did not feel good. But he had already seen that a résumé file was on the USB as well, and with my mouse in his hand, Seo Gwan-yul opened it however he pleased.
"Ahh~. Nothing but petty little credentials, no meaningful experience. So that's why you got obliterated on paper before they even opened the portfolio~. These days, if you want a major company, you need a career with some weight to it."
......
Thaaanks so much for the free career consult.
No—who did he think he was?! My motto at the office is to go with the flow and not make enemies, but I got a little heated, and one line slipped out anyway.
"...You seem to know an awful lot about job hunting. So why are you working at this agency?"
"Me? I didn't have anything you'd call a meaningful credential either. You at least did contract work somewhere like a startup. This is my first job, period."
Give me a break. A guy hardly any different from me, and he'd been swaggering like that!
"And more than anything, I figured if I worked here, I might get to see aliens~."
A question mark went off in my head. The follow-up bombshell set my skull ringing, a long hollow da-ang.
...What was that—did a flower nursery just bloom inside his skull?
Only then did I realize that every miniature crowding his desk was a UFO, or something else to do with space.
Now that I think about it...
He was a human who voluntarily worked at this unhinged agency. Right. There was no way he was a normal person.
It stung, having my hopes for a human coworker break, but I was done dealing with strange people. Avoidance is the best policy. I sent him off with the excuse that I had work to do, and focused on the job.
...But it wasn't long before the messages had piled into a stack.
And what exactly am I supposed to do with that, you alien otaku!!!
I am not curious about a single word of it!!!
Had he caught some kind of communication addiction? How was he worse than Blaire?!
Thinking back, the month of long leave he'd taken right around when I joined had already been a bad sign. That was when the research team had just gone missing, and when Yeon-woo resigned, too.
The mood in the office must have been a mess, and they must have been short-handed.
The Brand Design Team especially. If that guy took annual leave, it would have been just the team lead and Henna. Two people.
"......"
Right. A sensible person would never have taken a sudden long vacation at a time like that!
Then again, for an emergency leave like that to go through, someone had to approve it.
Pascal was already groaning about the shortage of people, so it wouldn't have been him. Of course. The damn CEO must have signed off. A man with no feel at all for how things actually were on the ground!
Aagh!! Peer review and CEO review—minus one thousand points!!
It meant nothing, but I docked the villains in my head a massive number of points. Why was there not one normal person in this place? Right—if they were a sensible human, they would have resigned like Yeon-woo. Truly wise of her!
I can't take this...!
If I didn't tell someone, somewhere, about this agony, I felt as if a sacred relic were going to crystallize straight out of my body. The CEO had mentioned before that VantaBot had a counseling function.
Good. VantaBot works through the company messenger, too.
Use it during work hours, and no one would know I wasn't working. I found VantaBot in the employee directory, opened a chat, and started typing.
A cooing, fuss-over-you tone I recognized from somewhere set about comforting me. The replies were obvious, but an obvious little confessional was exactly what I had wanted! Thanks to it, I felt a little better.
An AI coworker, far more comforting than any human one, gave the conversation its due and then closed it out with tact. Right. Office small talk, by rights, is supposed to know when to land a blow and when to pull back—not carpet-bomb the messenger like that bleach-haired guy!
I finished hammering the keys with a considerably lighter heart, and today, too, Pascal's voice arrived.
"You guys. A new request just came in. Conference room."