Star
It was a little past noon the next day before my eyes finally opened.
Maybe my body had only just caught up to the fact that the CSAT was over. I had slept more than twelve hours.
The instant I opened them, a spill of pure white hair poured down over my face.
"Ack."
I shoved it to one side and pushed myself up. Still half-asleep, I sat on the bed for a while.
Still a girl.
I hadn't really expected to wake up and find everything back the way it was. Even so, confirming that nothing at all had changed left me feeling strangely off.
I picked up the phone I had tossed beside the bed. Most of the notifications that had piled up while I slept were from the Cheongram Gallery Marblecraft server. A few people must have kept playing for quite a while after I went to bed. Scrolling up through the general channel, I could see they had been raising Cheongram Academy's main building until well past four in the morning, and a handful of construction screenshots had gone up in the photo channel too.
In the shots, the front-gate pillars stood much taller than when I had logged off, and the first-floor outer wall had climbed nearly halfway up.
"...What is this. Annoyingly well made."
Stuck to the side of the building was an enormous eagle head that hadn't been there yesterday. The eagle—Cheongram Academy's mascot. It was well made, except the eagle's face was bigger than the main building itself.
There was a message Mumyeong had left around three in the morning.
Nobody had answered under it.
"Who made that."
I saved the picture to my phone. Maybe, someday, even something like this would turn into a memory.
I got off the bed and headed for the bathroom. Having already suffered through it once yesterday, washing up went better than the first time. I dried off roughly, pulled on an oversized T-shirt and black shorts, and on my way out paused in front of the mirror. For no real reason, I smoothed my bangs down with one hand.
"Pretty again today."
Satisfied, I went back to my room and turned on the computer. Five people were already on Discord. Mumyeong was there, of course, along with Limit, CaffeineAddict, and EssayOnly. There was a fixed nick called Nammisae, too.
The name alone made him easy to mistake for a girl, but he was a guy. Some anon had started teasing him for materializing like a ghost whenever the academy's boys or male idols came up, and he had liked it enough to lock it in as his permanent nick. That was about all I knew.
I launched the game at once and joined the server.
The little wooden shack I had thrown together yesterday was still standing. What hadn't been there before was a sign planted beside the door.
"..."
I broke the sign without a word.
Over by the main building, Mumyeong was on one stretch of outer wall, lining the window spacing up again. Everyone else was scattered around, each of them building something. I did as I had yesterday, took a shovel from a chest, and started clearing the leftover dirt. Crunch. Crunch.
Maybe ten minutes had passed when a Discord notification chimed. I checked it, and an unfamiliar nick had appeared in the general channel.
The nickname was a single star. Literally, a star. I had never seen it before. I didn't remember a fixed nick like that on Cheongram Gallery, but there were anons on the server too, so it wasn't exactly strange.
In the meantime, Star left a short hello in general.
All three reactions were a little too easy for people meeting a stranger.
So they know each other.
A moment later, a new join message appeared in the game chat.
Star didn't move from spawn. After a little while CaffeineAddict went to fetch them, and the two of them walked over toward the main building together. I kept digging and stole a glance at Star's character. Pink hair, an oversized hoodie—a girl skin. Star turned this way and that in front of the building, then stopped in front of me.
Star's character looked at the giant eagle stuck to the side of the building. A moment later, a single laughing emote went up in the chat. Then Star took a shovel from a nearby chest and started breaking dirt beside me.
Somehow the two of us had ended up pushing dirt side by side, but neither of us bothered to keep talking. We went on building like that until Mumyeong called everyone into a voice channel to settle the main building's interior. Fixed nicks like CheongramEagles and ChemBio filed in one after another. Even people who usually never used voice were gathering.
I stared at the participant list and hesitated.
If I just leave the mic off, it should be fine. Right?
I muted myself and carefully stepped into the voice channel. The moment the headset was on, several voices overlapped.
"I'm telling you, the front gate needs to be two blocks wider from here."
"No, then the window spacing won't line up."
"Can't we just build the first floor and think about it after?"
"Do that and we'll be tearing the whole thing apart later."
Talk flew back and forth—how many blocks wider the front gate ought to be, which direction the study hall had faced—too fast to follow. I stayed muted and only watched the screen Mumyeong was sharing.
Then a voice I had never heard slipped into the conversation.
"I think building it like this, right here, is right."
High and clear. Openly a girl's voice.
Curious who it was, I checked. A green border was glowing around Star's profile.
Someone asked at once.
"Wait, you're a girl?"
Star laughed for a second.
"Come on, no way. It's just a voice changer."
"For real?"
"Yeah. There are a lot of people I'm meeting for the first time, so I'm embarrassed to talk in my real voice. That's why I use it."
It was so natural that I accepted it without much doubt. So voice changers had gotten that convincing. Technology really had come a long way. That was all.
My voice, as it was now, was prettier than that one anyway. There was no reason to make a special fuss just because it sounded like a girl.
The others, on the other hand, got interested in what program it was. Star was brushing them off with a claim that it was a secret when Nammisae cut the conversation short, plainly uninterested.
"So where are we putting the study hall."
The talk swung back to the game almost at once. Still muted, I watched the screenshare, and whenever I had something to say I typed it short in the general channel. A few minutes later, nobody cared anymore whether Star was using a voice changer.
Once the first floor's layout was roughly settled and the meeting ended, the people on building duty went back to the structure. The ones gathering missing materials scattered with pickaxes and axes. I filled the interior floor of the main building with light-colored blocks, and at some point Star had come up nearby and was placing the same ones.
Nammisae, meanwhile, wandered all over the place, to the point it was impossible to tell whether he was working or getting in the way. Then he dug a pit two blocks deep in the middle of the lobby and ran. A moment later, Mumyeong found it.
"Who the fuck dug this."
The curse came through the voice channel.
"Anyone can see it's Nammisae—"
I clapped a hand over my mouth. A glance at the mic icon—off, of course.
"God, that scared me..."
My heart was racing for no good reason. I dragged my attention back to the game.
Star stayed near me more often than I had expected. Once, while I was setting ceiling blocks up high, I put a foot wrong and my character dropped straight to the first-floor floor. Not enough to die, but I didn't have much health left.
"Ow..."
A few pieces of bread dropped in front of me. I looked up. Star was standing there. I picked the bread up off the ground, ate it, and typed a thanks.
Instead of answering in chat, Star shook their head and stepped forward and back twice, then went off to stack blocks again. On a server build, passing around a little food was normal. Nothing worth dwelling on.
A few minutes later, though, I heard Star's voice.
"Sayu, you're not talking?"
My nick, out of nowhere, made me jump. I was used to other people reading my fixed nick as Sayu, but even if it was a voice changer, hearing it in a girl's voice felt a little strange.
"Oh."
A short silence followed.
"The way you talk is cute, though. Now I'm curious about your voice, too."
The hand on my mouse stopped again.
What are they even saying...
CaffeineAddict laughed.
"That's just how Sayu talks."
"Yeah?"
"Like that on the gallery every day."
Star answered at once.
"It's cute."
"..."
I rested my hands on the keyboard and thought for a moment. I thought about it, but nothing came to mind for what I was supposed to say back.
A few people burst out laughing in the voice channel. Star laughed along. It wasn't an unpleasant sound.
After that, we didn't talk about much else. We just did the work we had each taken on, and occasionally asked for a block we needed. Even so, whenever that pink character showed up at the edge of the screen, my eyes went there before I noticed.
Inside the game, the sun set and rose again more than once. By the time I came back to myself, real time was already sliding toward dawn. The first floor of Cheongram Academy's main building was nearly finished inside, and the front gate looked halfway convincing. At the end, everyone still around lined their characters up in front of the building for a group screenshot. I stood at the very edge. Limit was beside me, and Star was beside Limit.
He said that, but everyone stood still.
Click.
Once the screenshot was taken, people left the server one by one. I quit the game and stretched. A few were still talking in the Discord voice channel, but I had nothing to add, so I slipped out quietly. I took the headset off, and the room went suddenly still.
"...Today was fun, too."
Only the Discord window was up on the monitor. Scanning the user list, my eyes stopped on Star—the nick that had come in for the first time today. Without thinking much of it, I opened the profile. The bio was empty. The picture, though, was a little character perched on a yellow star. Looking closer, even the pupils were star-shaped.
"Really does like stars."
I was about to shut the computer off, figuring I ought to sleep.
Ding.
A short chime, and a DM arrived.
I took my hand off the power button. A sudden DM from someone I had met for the first time today was a little unexpected. Did they have something to say?
The reply came back almost at once.
So it wasn't anything in particular. I leaned back in the chair and typed.
The conversation itself wasn't about much. It was closer to going back over what had happened in the game than to getting to know each other. Maybe that was why it felt easy. When I sent a line or two, Star answered in three or four. Just when the talk seemed about to die, Star brought up something new.
I looked at the last message for a moment.
...I was going to log on tomorrow anyway.