Aegyo Training (1)
It hadn't even been a full day since I'd edited the footage and uploaded it, but the view counts were already climbing at a vicious clip. The video of Namcat turning into a seasoned drill instructor and putting the other animals through toilet training, especially, was racking up views at an absurd rate.
People were rewatching it and insisting what they'd seen couldn't possibly have been real. Thanks to that, it had pulled ahead of the clip where Namcat knocked the other animals flat — more views, and more comments besides. And because I'd lightly translated what the animals were saying and burned it in as subtitles, the comments were full of people demanding to know if any of it was actually true.
Comments flooded the videos. They started in Korean, my own language, and ran through English and Japanese and on into tongues I couldn't even place. I left a comment of my own and pinned it.
That only dragged in another avalanche of replies asking if it was really true. If I hadn't switched Mutube notifications off ahead of time, I was fairly sure the alerts alone would have drained the battery dry. There were that many of them.
And views and comments weren't the only things that had swollen.
A few days ago, the moment Auntie Jangmi's article went up, the subscriber count I'd checked sat at thirty thousand. Now it had exploded past ninety thousand. The spike was Namcat's toilet-training session. A handful of people who'd watched the video had lifted it, chopped it into those short looping clips everyone passes around, and flung them across every community board they could find.
Clips of the animals getting toilet-trained on an actual toilet spread far and wide, all of it wrapped in worship of the god-tier dog and the god-tier cat. The one of Jjamong the Welsh Corgi trembling as she locked into her stance got passed around under clickbait titles, and that was the spark that set the explosive growth off. Huge crowds poured in to look at those posts, then spilled over onto my channel.
Which is what I posted them for, granted.
It went without saying that those clickbait posts were mine. Nothing pulls aggro like a bait title. Sorry — I farmed the clicks so I could show you this.
Wait. It isn't even bait. Jjamong's butt really was trembling in the bathroom.
Thinking about it, it didn't seem like aggro at all.
Anyway, with the channel having shot up like that, I checked my Mutube ad revenue.
"Heh. Heheh."
I couldn't help it. A loose, unguarded laugh slipped out of me the moment I saw the number, because at a rough twelve hundred won to the dollar, it came to something like 2.57 million won. Exchange fees and the various taxes would shrink it, sure, but it was still a lot of money. And I'd only been receiving Mutube ad revenue for about a week. By the time the payout actually landed, the figure would only get bigger. For someone whose loan interest alone ran to several million won a month, it was rain in a drought.
If it keeps up like this, that's nearly ten million won a month, isn't it? That's no joke.
I could see why people dreamed of making it on Mutube. Income like this, you couldn't not dream of being a Mutuber. Of course, my views ran several times higher than you'd expect for a channel with a similar subscriber count, so the money did too.
Anyway, once I'd confirmed the income, I felt the need to push on toward more videos and more views. For someone like me, who could upload the kind of unique footage other people would struggle to show, more videos meant more money.
"Noonaaa!"
I took off toward her at once. What she filmed simply looked a little better than anything I shot on my own.
I did wonder, briefly, whether my face was doing some of the work — then caught myself. I was pretty quick to read a situation. Even if it wasn't hurting anything, it obviously wasn't helping either.
"What!"
The answer came from the yard. I came down from the second floor to the first, taking the stairs several at a time, and headed outside.
As if it hadn't been a lie that a house with a yard was her dream, Noona was out there playing with Jjamong and Maru. The yard wasn't enormous, but it was still space enough for the dogs to run, so she was tossing two balls this way and that and playing with both of them.
"I'm thinking of filming. Could you shoot it for me?"
"Me?"
"Yeah. You're actually pretty good at it. Hey — while we're at it, want to just handle the camera whenever I film?"
At that, Noona looked like she was turning it over.
"I want to, but…… once the café's finished, I'll have to run that too."
"So what? Most of the time we'll be filming in the studio on the third floor. When we are, we can leave the café to Yeongji. She's a little naive, sure, but she's not an idiot. On the college entrance exam her worst score was still a Level 3. How is that an idiot? The best I ever pulled was a Level 4. So I'm the moron?"
"Mmm…… then maybe we should?"
I told her that was the right call and handed over my phone.
Come to think of it, I ought to buy a real camera. An action cam or something, not just my phone.
I couldn't keep filming everything on my phone forever, so I decided to order one. No — while I was at it, I decided to buy every last piece of gear I'd need for filming and editing. Construction had cost less than I'd expected, so there was a little spare cash. It was doable.
"So what are you trying to film?"
"Training. You know — aegyo, that whole business of acting cute. If we open the café and all people do is look at the animals, that won't be any fun, right?"
They've got to lay on the charm and show off their little tricks, or it isn't entertaining — and at that, Noona nodded hard, like she agreed with her whole body.
"Mmm. True. If all you're doing is looking, you might as well just go to the zoo."
"Exactly, so I've got to drill the aegyo in properly. I'm teaching them how to fuss and whine for treats. Then they'll stick to the customers, right? The customers will buy treats to give them, right? We'll save on feed, right? And in the end, we make money!"
Noona said nothing at all.
For whatever reason, she was looking at me as if I were faintly pathetic.
What's wrong with it! I'll have you know I still owe several billion won! Well, looking at the way Mutube's growing, I'll probably pay it off soon enough……
"Just try teaching them once."
Noona lifted the phone like she was telling me to go ahead and show her. A bright little chime — she was already starting to record.
The only animals nearby were Jjamong and Maru, the ones she'd been playing with. The rest were surely sprawled asleep somewhere in the house, or tangled up playing with each other. I decided to call every one of them out to the yard.
"Every beast in this house — assemble!"
I stuck only my head in through the door and bellowed it. The nearest houses sat a hundred-odd meters off, so yelling wasn't a problem, and they were already hammering and banging next door, putting the café building up.
Anyway, the moment my shout rang through the house, our beasts came pouring into the yard.
Would you look at that. They actually listen.
They crowded right up beside me even as they asked what was going on, and I nodded, thoroughly pleased.
"Suhwan. Kim Natae didn't come……?"
"……Ah."
Looking again, one of them was missing. Whether it was because of the name she'd been given, or because the name — Natae, sloth itself — fit her entirely too well, Kim Natae, lazy beyond all reason, wasn't there. I figured out where she was almost at once.
"Hey. It's not like you're off somewhere you couldn't hear me. You're lying on the couch and just not coming. What's that about."
Natae had wedged herself into the crack between the sofa cushions and was only blinking, slow and vacant.
"………………It's a booother……"
This one really had no equal when it came to sloth. But there were no exemptions from today's training. I scooped up the dog who had no intention of getting up and carried her out to the yard.
"Uuuugh……"
When I set her down, Natae wobbled for a moment, then collapsed flat on the ground. I wondered if something hurt — but her tail gave a single lazy swish, so there didn't seem to be anything wrong. She'd just flopped over because moving was too much work. That was all.
"Ha…… Is the name the problem?"
"She really lives up to it……"
"Ah, forget it. Training first. All of you, line up. Nice and straight. Yeah, like that."
At my word, the animals shuffled into a row a couple of steps in front of me. Kim Natae actually moved, surprisingly — then lay right back down the instant she had her spot. I shook my head at the sight, but what mattered now was aegyo training.
I cleared my throat — ahem — settled the mood, and changed the way I spoke. Something close to the tone Namcat used when he drilled the others through toilet training.
At that, Namcat strode over to my side on a proud, haughty step. He'd learned that whenever I gave an order, a fitting reward followed after — a treat — so these days he didn't complain about my instructions.
"What you're learning today is aegyo. Productive behavior. You put on a cute show for people, and through that, you obtain treats."
"Ooh! Treats!"
"That's right. This is about getting the treats you love! Do you remember what I told you the day you first got here? That we're building a café right over there, and that you'll be in it. You'll come home at night."
"Yes!"
They answered with real force, like they hadn't forgotten a word of it.
"A café is a place where humans eat snacks. All you have to do there is get along with the humans. Is there any beast here who's scared of humans? Anyone who doesn't like them?"
Midway through explaining what a café was, it occurred to me that figuring out whether they could actually live mixed in with people came first. My income depended on it, sure — but I had no intention of forcing something unwanted on creatures who'd become family.
Fortunately, not a single one of them feared it or disliked it. They were kids I'd brought home from the shelter, so I'd worried there might be some unhappy history behind them, but the worry was unfounded. Even the cats, who are supposedly harder to befriend than dogs, didn't dislike people. They weren't refusing. Of course, whatever the reason they'd been abandoned, they'd all been raised by human hands.
And the dogs, if anything, looked as if getting to jostle around with a crowd of people was even better. Maru and Jjamong especially — a Golden Retriever and a Welsh Corgi, both of them people-loving breeds to the bone — looked thoroughly excited.
"People! People! I love them!"
"When do we get to go to that café place? I want to go now!"
Were they really that happy? The two of them were bouncing in place, springing up and down to show it. If I hadn't told them to hold their spots in line, I had a feeling they'd have done a few laps of the yard.
I settled Maru and Jjamong down, and went straight into aegyo training.