The Five-Million-Won Advance
There was a chance someone had copied over a clause that belonged in a completely different contract, so I fired the text off to Jiyoon noona just to be safe.
She'd be busy. I wasn't expecting a reply anytime soon. In the meantime, I had my own work to get through.
"Oh, so this one's going up this week."
A video I'd had a blast watching not long ago was sitting in this week's editing queue, which meant it was slated to drop soon. Yeah, that tracked — it was a new release, and the footage had come out genuinely fun. Better to get it cut and uploaded as fast as possible.
Alright. That one goes to the top of the pile.
Next was... oh. A LoL video, first one in a while. That could be second.
"Yeah, that should do it."
I stacked everything Dayeon noona had specifically asked me to prioritize at the front, then lined up the rest in the order I actually wanted to sink my teeth into.
"Alright. Let's get started."
I pulled up the new-game footage first — the one that needed to go out soonest — and started sorting the keepers from the cuts.
"I want to save this part, so I'll lift the audio separately..."
Whenever the visuals were nothing special but noona's commentary was gold, I stripped the audio, dropped it over a better shot, and slapped on some captions. A little emphasis effect here... ah, this one worked better.
I was deep in the edit when a welcome knock sounded at the door.
"Yeah, noona. Come in."
I assumed it was Dayeon noona without thinking twice and told her to come in.
The door flew open.
"Wrong! It was me~!"
Eunchae, pulling a fake-out.
"What? Since when do you knock...? Has Jung Eunchae finally grown up?"
"As if~ I was just pretending to be unnie so I could mess with you~"
Right. The day that girl grew up would be the day the sun rose in the west.
"What's with that face? You're thinking the sun would rise in the west if I ever matured, aren't you?"
"Oh, so you've picked up mind-reading now."
"No, you're supposed to deny it! Why are you agreeing with me?!"
She'd gotten bored working and come in to mess around. I hadn't played with her this morning, so now I was paying for it with a mid-shift invasion.
"Can't focus?"
"I just feel like playing around today, but you look busy, so I'll watch from the side."
"What's fun about watching someone work?"
"Nothing. But a guy completely locked in on his work? That's sexy."
"...Do whatever you want."
Fine. As long as she didn't get in the way, I didn't care if she sat there and stared. Once I actually dropped into a groove, I barely noticed anything around me anyway.
"Don't interrupt. If you do, I'm kicking you out on the spot."
"Yes, sir."
She answered surprisingly well, so I nodded and was about to dive back into the edit when something occurred to me.
"Oh, Eunchae. You've seen this video, right?"
"Which one?"
She leaned in, took a look, and nodded.
"The new game! Of course I have! So it's going up this time, huh!"
"Yeah. She asked me to do it first, so it'll probably drop tomorrow or the day after."
"Ooooh~ that one was so good~"
"Yeah. So, about that — between this track and this one, which BGM do you think works better?"
I'd been stuck picking a background track. Both of them fit so perfectly I couldn't decide. Eunchae was a dedicated viewer of noona's channel, so putting our heads together on this would probably get us somewhere good.
"Oh... they both fit insanely well."
"Right? That's why I'm stuck."
"Hmm, I'd still go with number two? That eerie vibe of it comes through a little better."
She wasn't wrong. Track two did a better job of selling that ominous atmosphere.
"Alright, number two it is."
"Yeah, yeah. Number one feels a bit too fresh compared to two."
They were both maxed out on eerie, so I had no idea where she was getting "fresh" from... but whatever. I'd been torn because neither was bad, and now that number two had an extra vote, that settled it.
"Okay, number two. Thanks."
Once the BGM was locked in, nothing else held me up. I'd already mapped out the entire edit in my head ages ago. All that was left was laying down effects, trimming the dead weight, and swapping in better footage, piece by piece. Before long, the video was heading into the home stretch.
"Alright, drop in the outro..."
A cute little "please subscribe, like, and hit the bell" bit, plus the outro, and that was essentially a wrap. Not that I sent it off to noona right away. I played the whole thing back from the top, checking for anything that felt off, anything I could punch up a little more — whether the effects landed, whether the BGM sat underneath without getting in the way.
"Okay."
Only once I got the green light from myself did I email the file to noona and call the edit done.
"Ooooh~ you're amazing, as always~ The way you lock in is so sexy~"
Finishing one video loosened my focus just enough that I became aware of Eunchae again, clapping beside me.
"I'll take five minutes, then get back to it."
"Haaah? Only five minutes? Isn't that a little Spartan, teacher?"
"It is what it is~"
If I wanted to start planning Jiyoon noona's videos too, twenty-four hours wasn't going to be enough. Well — it actually was enough, but still.
That reminded me. I pulled out my phone to see if a reply had come in yet.
She'd answered not long after I'd sent the message.
"Ugh, if I'd known, I would've finished talking to her before I started working."
"Hm? Who is it? Oh, that lawyer unnie?"
Lawyer unnie... this girl and her titles.
"Yeah. We were going over the contract. There's a clause about a signing bonus that I figured had to be a mistake."
"A signing bonus?"
"Yeah. It said she'd pay five million won up front. She probably mixed it up with some other contract."
It wasn't like people typically got a signing bonus when they started a regular work contract, after all.
I'd figured she might reply quickly again, but I hadn't expected her to answer instantly. Was this noona... not busy? If she was a high-powered lawyer at a major firm, shouldn't every second of her day be packed?
More to the point — it wasn't a mistake? What was that supposed to mean?
It had been a little over two weeks since I'd started working with Dayeon noona, and it was true I still had a while to go before my first paycheck. The money from my convenience store job was already stretched thin covering rent and living expenses — there wasn't much left over to spend on anything else. I'd even been thinking about cashing out my savings just to raise my stats...
If I took this money as a signing bonus, I wouldn't have to touch the savings at all.
"Hmm..."
Even so, I wasn't sure taking a signing bonus to start a job like this was the right call.
I hadn't even shown her a proper proposal or a real sample of my editing yet. Was it really okay to just take a signing bonus like this? Jiyoon noona was a lawyer, and I wasn't about to take her money and run — but still. Was it alright to trust someone this much?
This kind of bottomless trust and faith... I was genuinely grateful, but it was also a lot of pressure.
...No, I already thought five million was a lot.
So this was what a loaded, high-powered older noona looked like...?!
"Big-firm lawyers... they really do make bank, huh."
I muttered it half to myself, and Eunchae tilted her head.
"Right? I heard those people start at like a hundred million won a year."
A starting salary in the hundred-million range... Jiyoon noona was thirty-one. She'd graduated top of her law school class and joined a major firm at twenty-six, so...
Yeah. She was making an absurd amount of money.
Online or in person — I didn't really care either way.
Did it? Online contracts worked pretty well these days, didn't they? Either way didn't make much difference to me, so I sent back an okay.
"Alright, time to start the next video."
"Eek, he really only rested five minutes. You're a monster. A total monster."