Gabi's Perspective
"Wow, it's been forever since I've been to a PC bang. What is this place, some kind of café? They really went all out with the décor."
"Yeah, PC bangs these days go completely overboard with the interiors. And they don't just sell ramen anymore—apparently they cook actual meals for you. Of course, that also means they're expensive."
"Huh. Makes sense."
Sweeping her long black hair back over her shoulder, Gabi looked around.
Just as her friend had said, the PC bang they'd walked into was nothing like the dingy places she'd tagged along to as a kid. The interior was bright, and the menu of food you could order right from your seat ran to dozens of items. At this point, you could almost call it a PC café—or a PC restaurant. Were the part-timers here basically chefs? Or did they keep a separate kitchen staff?
"I bet there are people who come here just to eat."
"There are. Office workers who like games supposedly just drop by for lunch."
"Huh."
"Seriously, Gabi, what did you even do for fun in school? If I had your face, I'd have dated ten guys by now. For real. When studying stressed you out, shouldn't you have at least hit up a karaoke room or something? You said last time was your first time at karaoke, and you look totally lost in a PC bang."
"Ahaha, I just studied hard. Didn't you guys?"
"Well, yeah, fair. But you've still got to blow off steam somehow. I even blackmailed my mom and dad—told them I wouldn't study unless they let me play games."
"Whoa."
Trading light jokes like that, Gabi bantered with her friend. For someone who'd lived nothing but a model student's life, the stories were pretty stimulating—and more than a little tempting. Even so, Gabi figured that even if she could go back, she still wouldn't have been able to live the way her friends had.
She knew she was on the pretty side, but she didn't have the spark to become a celebrity. She wasn't especially gifted at art, either, and she didn't have some genius talent waiting to be discovered. So for as long as she could remember, her parents had told her that studying was the easiest path if she wanted to make a living. As a kid she'd simply done as she was told; once she hit high school, she'd felt the truth of it in her bones. Kids who actually had talent were already raking in money on YouTube by leaning into whatever made them special, and some had gone off to learn a trade altogether. That left studying as pretty much the only option left—so she'd buckled down and studied hard alongside her childhood friend.
Unfortunately, the two of them had ended up at different universities. Still, both had gotten into well-known schools, so that hardly mattered. It was only after lectures started that things got hectic—maybe too hectic. Both she and her childhood friend had been so swamped that, in the brief stretch when they stopped texting, contact with him had cut off completely. That was the part that still stung.
He was a guy and she was a girl, sure—but they'd spent so long together that she'd honestly thought of them as practically family. Had their connection really been something that could snap this easily?
A gloomy thought flickered through her for a moment. To push it away, Gabi followed her friends' lead and launched a game.
"So what should we play? War Grounds?"
"Gabi's here, so not that. Using newbies as level-four loot bags is just cruel. Let's keep it simple and do something like LoC. Wait—Gabi, you don't play League of Champions either?"
"I used to, a long time ago."
Of all games, her friends had picked the one she and her childhood friend used to play together now and then. Even then, it had only ever been the occasional free-for-all after exams, when everyone piled into a PC bang at once.
Logging into League of Champions, Gabi spotted a familiar nickname in her friends list.
Noel. The ID her childhood friend had made straight from his real name, Noeul. She could still remember teasing him about it—why pronounce it "Noel" when that was your name?—and him getting flustered, insisting it was his English name. How could she ever forget those four letters?
Part of her wanted to demand why he'd cut off contact. But the rush of happiness won out, and Gabi sent him a chat full of smiles.
After a brief pause, an ordinary reply came back.
That bland, detached answer didn't sit right with Gabi. It was as if even cutting her off completely barely registered as a big deal to him. Guys really were hopelessly undetailed, weren't they?
Even through the happiness, a hurt feeling kept climbing higher. So Gabi teased him, half-joking.
"Gabi, what's your ID? I'll invite you. Whoa, Jiseon! Check out Gabi's nick!"
"What's the nick? Something dirty? Ah—GabiPrincess. Lame."
"Lame? It's adorable! How is that not funny? But Gabi, who are you chatting with?"
She was still sunk in that bittersweet rush of reunion, and next to her the friends who wanted to queue were already making a racket.
"Oh, my childhood friend. We've been together since kindergarten."
"Whoa. That's pure love right there. Wait, though—that nick looks familiar."
"Who is it? Oh, that's Noeul. The one who got flamed by the hack-accusation crowd, then came out, cleared it up, and schooled them all."
"Wait, that's her?"
"Could just be the same nick, but… what's the battle tag? Let me look it up."
Somehow, her friends recognized Noeul. Had Noeul gotten so deep into gaming that he'd ignored her messages? Maybe his parents had caught him and shut off his phone. Gabi had seen that kind of thing around her often enough. Kids who'd studied themselves breathless all the way through high school would get into a decent university, let the tension snap, and completely fall apart. Some drank themselves stupid. Some got obsessed with clubs and wrecked their GPAs. And plenty, late to the party, fell so hard into games they couldn't climb back out. Was Noeul one of those cases?
Worried, Gabi checked his profile.
Master tier.
Even Gabi, who barely played League of Champions, knew that was a ranking you didn't reach by casually gaming a bit.
"Hold on—that's almost Grandmaster points. Okay, yeah, this has to actually be Noeul."
"Whoa, when you said you were dating I thought you were building up some pure-love arc with your childhood friend. So it was just girls messing around."
"Girls can date each other too, you know. What's your problem?"
"Fine then, Jiseon—want to go out with me?"
"Are you insane?"
"Rejected so hard it hurts."
So Gabi had been half-jokingly fretting that Noeul had been secretly gaming nonstop—and then the things her friends were saying took a strange turn.
A girl?
The person she was talking to right now was definitely Yoon Noeul, the one who shared all the same memories she did. What on earth were they talking about? Gabi asked her friends.
"How do you guys even know Noeul?"
"Anyone who plays LoC probably knows? This kid was so good people sniped the games thinking it was a hack—turns out it was just raw skill."
"I mean, it really did look like a hack to anyone watching. But no, it was all hand-played. When they came out to clear it up, we found out it was a girl around a hundred and forty centimeters. And you're saying she's Gabi's friend? How is someone that height twenty years old?"
"There are short adults sometimes. It happens. Honestly, looking at how skinny the kid is, it doesn't seem like they've been eating properly—hard to grow tall like that."
"What? No way. Noeul wasn't like that at all…"
But every single thing she was hearing sounded wrong. Noeul wasn't a girl who only came up to a hundred and forty centimeters. He was a perfectly ordinary guy, taller than she was. Noeul wasn't some kid so poor he went hungry. He hadn't been from a chaebol family, but he'd lived a life no one needed to envy.
And yet the photos and stream footage her friends pulled up proved they weren't wrong, either.
A girl streaming in a mask. And right now, at this very moment, a girl streaming under Noeul's ID. Gabi didn't have the skill to identify someone by their hands alone—but she could tell well enough whether those hands belonged to a girl or a guy.
"If she's your friend, can't we just queue with her? Come on, give us a free ride."
"If all of us queue that's a four-stack. We can't even queue flex. Let's just do normals."
"Ah, damn."
Going along with her friends' energy, Gabi did invite Noel into the game lobby. But if there was a girl sitting behind that monitor right now—then what had happened to Noeul? Why was this girl pretending to be him? She'd even linked CocoTalk to Noeul's number and started sending messages.
So Gabi pressed her.
She was going to find her childhood friend.