Author-nim, Please Conduct Community Activities by Mutual Agreement (2)
Today, Lee Suho was unhappy: the warmth of Song Gaon he was used to feeling was nowhere to be found. His small pleasure, every morning, had been waking to the sight of her still wrapped around him in her sleep, showing not the slightest thought of letting go. Yet when he opened his eyes, neither the heavy weight that usually greeted them the instant he woke nor the arm holding him was there, and a hollow ache settled in.
"Noona...?"
He called out softly, but no answer came. Slipping quietly out of bed, he glanced around — outside the window it was still dark. Puzzling over where on earth she could have gone at this hour of dawn, Suho carefully let himself out of the room.
Anyone else might have broken into a panic, wondering whether Song Gaon had run. Suho was different.
My noona's a secret coward. Run away? Please. She's hiding somewhere around here.
With the collar of a contract now fastened around her neck, he judged she wouldn't pull anything rash — and so Suho set out to search the house. He didn't even bother closing the doors behind him, wary of making noise. She might, after all, have suddenly found herself struggling and be crying alone in some corner; in that case, the kinder course was to feign ignorance, to act as though nothing had happened. She wouldn't want even her crying to be witnessed.
The Gaon he was hunting for was in neither the living room nor the kitchen. Only after he had checked everywhere worth checking did Suho turn to the one room left, padding down the hall on tiptoe.
The room where books had taken the seat of the noona who had quit serializing and walked away — now a room where a noona preparing, at last, to serialize again might plausibly be found. Suho headed for it and eased the studio door open, slipping inside.
A faint glow bled from the monitor; she seemed to have gotten up early to rewatch yesterday's broadcast.
"Tch... what am I gonna do about this..."
Song Gaon's voice — for all the world like some middle-aged uncle's — spread through the room.
Her speech is still exactly as it ever was... At least she isn't crying. Small mercies.
There was no hurry. Making her notice him would be easy. However things played out, he intended to make his noona his.
At the sound of nails raking through hair and a small sigh, Suho slid to her side, took Song Gaon by the shoulder, and called to her.
"Noona."
"KYAAAAAAK!!!!"
Jolted out of her skin, Song Gaon crossed her arms in an X over her chest and, with that piercing shriek, whipped around to glare at Suho.
Suho deftly plucked the earbud from her ear. "Noona. What are you doing up at the crack of dawn?"
"I... haa... you scared me half to death! I was, checking over yesterday's stream and, you know, browsing the community."
Song Gaon snapped her answer waspishly, her chest heaving in quick, urgent beats. Suho let his gaze drift, ever so briefly, over that vibrantly alive chest of hers, then turned to the monitor and replied without missing a step.
"Is that so?"
Seeing his noona take the initiative put him in a good mood. Today, he found himself grateful for her sense of responsibility — so little changed from the thirty-something Song Gaon who had supposedly closed out every freelance job without a loose end.
"But I think I screwed something up, Suho."
His good mood sank at once. If she was calling it an accident, she had to have done something wrong.
Song Gaon pulled her eyes from the monitor and scratched her cheek. Suho studied her a moment, then leaned his face right up to hers.
"What is it?"
"I couldn't decide what to do first, so I left a post asking which work would be coming out first..."
"Go on."
"The opinions are way too split... everyone's at each other's throats."
It was not, in fact, an accident. No one would ever know who had written it anyway.
"As long as it doesn't get out that it was you, what's the harm? You didn't post it while logged in, did you?"
"Obviously I didn't log in! And sure, not getting caught is the whole point, but..."
He had wondered what on earth this "accident" of hers could be, but it was hardly a catastrophe. If anything, an idea for what to theme her next broadcast around sprang to mind, and Suho drew back a step from Song Gaon.
"Why not make it a chance to talk with your readers — a retrospective on your old works?"
"Huh?"
"Post about it on Neotube and Twitwitch."
"Don't you need subscribers before a personal board even shows up?"
Both platforms required a minimum of one thousand subscribers before a streamer was granted a personal bulletin board — but Song Gaon's streaming IDs already topped eight thousand on each. It was anyone's guess which of her five author IDs she might post under, and she could just as easily create a brand-new account and funnel everything into it. Which was precisely why the readers who genuinely cared about Song Gaon's writing had gone and followed her broadcast IDs instead, leaving her with more than eight thousand subscribers apiece by the time of her very first stream.
"Look here. See?"
"Why is this even... gah... why do I have this many subscribers?"
"That's the number of people who either refused to believe you'd ever betray them, or chose to trust you one more time."
"Ugh..."
Hollowed out by Suho's words, Song Gaon could manage no reply; she simply lowered her hands onto the keyboard.
"Oh — before that. What are you doing about your ID, noona?"
"Starting fresh seems better. I only ever posted on Novel World anyway... and everything's under exclusive registration."
"Then we'll need to reach out to the Novel World contact and arrange it. I might as well send it over tomorrow as an official management document, too..."
"Yeah. That thing..."
Swiveling her chair a full ninety degrees to face him, Song Gaon clasped both hands together at her chest. She had clearly picked the pose up somewhere — a pleading stance that belonged in a film still, complete with fluttering eyes.
Suho exhaled, if only to keep the corners of his mouth from climbing, and answered. "Hahh... Yes. I'll see to it."
It was a sight far too beautiful to refuse. Suho couldn't quite shake the feeling that Song Gaon was the one steering him.
"Thank you!"
Watching her beam, Suho decided that being steered might not be so bad, and asked, "And what pen name will you be using?"
"Returned Pretty Girl! Heehee! Funny, right?"
"I'll pass that along exactly as stated."
"Wha—?? That was supposed to be a joke!"
To Song Gaon, gaping at him and shaking her head back and forth, Suho added, "It beats Vanished Pretty Girl, at least. You are a pretty girl, after all... Although — could it be you're starting to enjoy yourself now, noona?"
"Hey!? Who said anything about enjoying?! You're the one who told me to haul back everything that vanished and write it!!"
"Of course~ You're doing wonderfully. Now, as for what you'll be writing..."
Suho looked at Song Gaon — whose behavior betrayed hardly any awareness of herself as a woman, and yet whose mind seemed, in truth, closer to a woman's than not — and answered with his soul visibly absent. A girl fully aware she was a pretty girl, yet acting the man. Deciding that he would have to commission a psychological evaluation later under the pretext of a routine health checkup, Suho fixed his eyes on the monitor and recited the things she needed to write down.
"First — that a new ID will be created on Novel World so that all of your works can be gathered under a single account."
"Mm-hm."
—clackclackclack
"Next — that you'll be going live this evening to poll readers on which of your twenty-nine works they'd like to see serialized first."
"Yeah."
—tap-tap clackclackclack
"And last — that the pen name you'll be writing under from now on is Returned Pretty Girl, and that you ask for everyone's kind support. Write it up just like that."
—clackclack... tap-tap...
—tap. tap. tap. tap. tap. tap. tap. tap.
Song Gaon's fingers, which had been rattling the keyboard like a stenographer taking down Suho's every word, stopped dead — then pounded a single key over and over, scrubbing out the line she had just labored through. At the sight, Suho glanced over, and Song Gaon rounded on him.
"Hey?! I told you it was a joke! I'm using a different pen name!"
"No need to worry — that's precisely what I'll be telling Novel World. The pen name you'll be writing under from here on out is the Re~turned Pretty Girl."
"Heyyy!!"
She snarled at Suho's ingratiating grin, but before long she drew a deep breath and tried to talk him around.
"How about IHaveReturned for a pen name."
"No. You sound like some middle-aged guy calling shotgun."
"ImBack."
"No. It makes it sound like your fellow authors are about to isekai their way over."
"Ugh~~! Seriouslyyy!"
"Well, you are a real author, noona. Hurry up and register it in the announcement."
"Heyyy!"
"Or shall I do it for you?"
Faced with Suho, who wouldn't yield so much as a syllable — who was, if anything, steamrolling her — Gaon's head sank.
"Fine. I am none other than the Returned Pretty Girl! Ah-hahahahah..."
Song Gaon's laughter filled the room with a strangely broken sound. Muttering the words Returned Pretty Girl over and over like something in her had short-circuited, she was watched in silence by Suho, a faint smile playing on his lips.
I dropped the anchovy-and-kelp pack I'd set aside for broth into the pot, let it come to a simmer, and then added the udon I'd stocked up on beforehand.
Watching the udon squirm in the furious boil, I couldn't help feeling it looked like my own heart, wailing at the top of its lungs for someone to save it.
Returned Pretty Girl.
I'll have to ask them to change the pen name later.
Since I could presumably swap it out before the exclusivity review, I decided to shelve the whole pen name question for now.
"Come to think of it, don't I need to get my paperwork in order too...?"
The problem was that today was Sunday.
"Suho."
"Yes?"
"How do I go about applying for a legal gender change? Fine, you'll be handling the work inside your company, but if I have to send official letters and whatnot, the change has to come first, doesn't it?"
"You can do it online."
"It's Sunday today, though?"
"That part works on weekends too."
Oh. So that was how it worked.
"How come you know all that in such detail?"
I found myself wondering where the limits of Suho's knowledge lay. He had the air of a STEM type, yet his knowledge sprawled in strange directions. In everyday life the man was pure airheaded bluster, but the care he took combing through documents was meticulous beyond imagining.
Usually, this kind of thing comes from experience — or from a personality that insists on hoarding every last scrap of information.
"...I am, as it happens, the CEO of Mirae Co., Ltd. Naturally I have all the relevant information down cold."
"Huh. Fair point."
Put that way, it was true. Grand reasons aside, Mirae Co., Ltd. was the one and only pharmaceutical company on Earth dealing with ASCS.
Well, of course he'd know. How could he not?
"Ms. Yeji did say she'd help me with the paperwork..."
"Did she, now?"
"Calling her on a Sunday feels a bit much, though..?"
I'd only said it out of wistful reluctance — but Lee Suho already had his phone pressed to his ear.
"Hey?!"