Gartic Phone

Mumyeong put up a post on the Cheongram Gallery.

I left a comment and checked Discord. The server chat was already noisy with the same conversation.

Just reading the chat was already enough to make my head spin.

The Gartic Phone link went up, and I joined the room the moment it did. There were only a few of us at first, but as time passed the room kept filling. It wasn't only the people who lived in the Discord. Fixed-nick regulars I'd only glimpsed a few times on the gallery, and guests I'd never seen at all, drifted in one by one.

Then a familiar name showed up on the participant list.

jolly.

A fixed nick who had been following me around the Cheongram Gallery for nearly a year. Sometimes he commented on my posts, but more often he simply wrote new threads—and most of those threads were calling my name.

He'd first shown up around the end of February. I'd figured he would carry on like that for a few days and quit. A month passed, then half a year, and even now, long after all of that, he was exactly the same.

jolly joined the voice channel too, but he never turned his mic on. Now that I thought about it, I'd been seeing him for nearly a year and had never once heard his voice. Well... we'd only ever talked on the gallery.

I switched my mic off and joined. The voice channel blew past ten people almost at once. Complaints that the link wouldn't open piled up beside demands for a new room, because there was no seat left. Mumyeong tried to count heads, then gave up.

"I'll just wait five more minutes and start. At this rate we won't get to it today."

"Sayu, be quiet."

No answer came back. Five minutes passed like that, and the game began.

In Gartic Phone, the prompts had barely made it around before the results came out as sentences that had nothing to do with the originals. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Every time a drawing was revealed, laughter and swearing exploded through the voice channel at once. We hunted for whoever had drawn something unhinged. We wrote lines insulting each other and tried to guess who the author was.

Every time I drew something, I got cursed out for being bad at it. Mostly by Nammisae.

"Sayu draws like absolute fucking shit."

"No, seriously, why does the head look like that?"

"I think it's cute!"

Partway through, a few people started naming the artist the second my drawing appeared.

"This is Sayu, right?"

A moment later, the author was revealed.

"What do you mean, of course it is. It's way too obvious, Sayu."

It was a little strange. Ordinarily, trading a few comments on the gallery was the whole of our acquaintance. We'd played a handful of rounds together, and already they could pick my drawings out.

After Gartic Phone we moved on to Catch Mind. Over there, not using a mic wasn't a problem at all. The moment a drawing came up, I dumped every word that occurred to me into the chat.

Mumyeong, unable to watch any longer, called me out.

"Sayu, quit spamming."

A moment later, the correct-answer notice popped up.

Boos erupted in the voice channel. Nammisae spoke up.

"Lucky-guess goblin. Whatever."

We played several more rounds like that. I couldn't remember exactly how many. People kept coming and going in the middle of it, and it was chaos.

The voice channel stayed loud. Even with my mic off, it wasn't particularly uncomfortable. If I typed, someone read it aloud, and if I said something stupid, someone volleyed it back without being asked. At some point I was talking naturally with people I'd barely spoken to before.

Byeol said, "Playing all together is more fun than I expected!"

I thought about it, then sent one more line.

Someone said, incredulous, "Saying that with your own mouth. Are you actually this full of yourself?"

Nammisae cut in too. "She's always like that on the gallery."

Even after the games ended, not many people left right away. Everyone stayed in the voice channel and kept talking about nothing in particular. The topic changed every few minutes, and I kept slipping in through chat.

Posts I'd seen on the gallery came back to me all at once. The mute line. The freezing out of guests.

"......That's not it."

At least today, nobody had been deliberately left out. Guests who wanted in had come in, and even I, who never touched a mic, had mixed in as if it were nothing. If anything, I felt like I'd talked to far more people than usual.

When I opened the Cheongram Gallery, a few posts about ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠today's games were up, just as I'd expected.

For today, at least, even being called a mute didn't really bother me. I'd had that much fun.

When I came back to Discord, the server chat was in the middle of picking the next game.

I sent a message without much thought.

Byeol, still in the voice channel, said, "Sayu, you're not saying the usual thing this time."

"You always say, 'We'll see.'"

"Right? I had so much fun today too."

It had gotten late, and people left the voice channel one by one, flipping over to offline. The mood turned toward wrapping up, and when I stepped out, a Discord DM from jolly was waiting.

I closed the DM and scrolled up through the general channel. The messages piled up over the day ran on without end. A glance across the names showed far more people I knew than before.

......It would be nice if we could all play together again.

After the day we played Gartic Phone, the Discord server got a little louder. Once a bunch of us had hung out, meaningless videos and game-recruit posts started showing up in the chat all the time. I even ended up trading comments on the gallery with people I'd spoken to for the first time that day. It wasn't a bad change.

Today, though, the server was quiet to an unsettling degree. Nobody was in voice. Mumyeong was offline, and so was CheongramEagles. Nammisae only had the phone icon up. And Limit was in a game.

"Playing alone, maybe."

I sent the message, but a reply didn't come right ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠away. Well, she was in a game. She was probably busy. It wasn't urgent, so I turned on Nutube, put on one of the recommended videos, and browsed the Cheongram Gallery.

A few minutes later, a Discord notification popped up.

Ah. So that was it.

I closed the chat. A moment later I checked Byeol's status too.

Same as Limit. Below that, CaffeineAddict was on Apex too. Nammisae, who a little while ago had only shown a phone icon, had at some point switched to in-game.

All four of them were in the same game.

"Everyone's really on Apex......"

A single party only went up to three. Just because they were playing the same game didn't mean they were all together. Apex had plenty of players to begin with.

I was staring blankly at the Discord window, not thinking of much, when a message appeared in the server chat.

It vanished almost immediately.

"......?"

A moment later Nammisae typed again, as if nothing had happened.

That was the end of it.

Well... people could play on another server. Plenty of them used more than one Discord. Even I, who didn't spend all that much time on it, was in a few servers right now. There were places I'd joined briefly and left.

......And yet, strangely, that message wouldn't leave my head.

In the end I paused the video and stared at Discord.

I moved the mouse a few times, then opened my DM with Limit again.

I waited a moment, and a reply came.

I sent it that far, then stopped my hands.

They'd said they were all playing together, but the gallery server's voice channel was still empty. So were they on that server Nammisae had mentioned?

The moment I sent it, I regretted it a little. Why had I even asked. I could have just let them play.

"......"

Another server.

Limit didn't seem to think anything of it.

......Of course. What was so remarkable about there being one more server.

I set my hands on the keyboard. Two sentences rose up, one after the other.

Who's in there?

Could you invite me?

I didn't type either of them.

"......What are you doing, Sayuri."

It wasn't as if I had to be in every server. No matter how I looked at it, that was pure main-character syndrome. There was no reason I needed to be in a server just because Limit was. Byeol, CaffeineAddict, and Nammisae had known each other to begin with, so it wasn't strange for them to have a separate server of their own.

The conversation ended there.

I thought about playing something else by myself and turned a game on, but the urge never came, and I quit almost immediately.

......So it was the Cheongram Gallery again, in the end.

A game-related post had just gone up.

A secret server. The phrasing was funny. It wasn't some secret society. Just another server, surely.

I considered leaving a comment, then stopped. If I said I knew another server existed, the first question would be how I'd found out. I didn't particularly want to drag the thread out. One little piece of bait like this had a way of turning into a gorosi.

I came back to Discord, but nothing much had changed. The four of them were still on Apex.

"......Nothing to do."

I hesitated a moment, then this time sent Byeol a message.

"What......"

Had I been the only one thinking something strange? It wasn't that I hadn't been invited. They were just playing among themselves because I hadn't said I wanted in.

I sent the messages and stared at the screen.

......Why had I turned it down? It wasn't that I didn't want to play. I'd been the one, just a little while ago, to ask Limit whether she was on Apex.

Thinking about it, jumping in late felt a little awkward. Sliding alone into a spot where close friends were already hanging out seemed a bit strange, too.

The conversation ended there.

......I was the one who had said no.

"Guess it's fun without me."

I said it to myself and closed the window.

Much later.

I took a nap, and when I opened my eyes there was a message from Limit.

I looked at the screen for a moment.

"......I didn't know about that."

I remembered Byeol telling me to come. I hadn't known they'd already cleared a spot.

Now I was embarrassed for having thought something strange all on my own......

The four of them hadn't been trying to leave me out after all. Byeol had been the one to say come, and they'd even meant to make a spot. The one who hadn't gone was me.

"Maybe I should just shower......"

I started to get up from the bed, then without thinking opened Discord on my phone. One swipe left across the chat, and the server list came up.

I was in five servers in total. The one I entered most, of course, was the Cheongram Gallery server. The other one—the server where Limit and Byeol had been—wasn't among them.

"......"

I turned the screen off and set the phone down.

It wasn't a big deal.

Really.