Group Project One-Man Carry
Once the group project got underway, Lua started showing some seriously incredible leadership.
“Alright then, Jinwoo can handle the video, and Jihye and Goeun can take care of the research.”
“Should I just solve the video part with TTS, like the example I showed you?”
“TTS has gotten incredibly natural and good thanks to AI these days… but still, I’ll try doing the dubbing myself.”
“You sure? You’re already handling the presentation.”
Lua wasn’t just taking the presentation. She had mapped out the entire script and the flow of the video as well.
She was organizing everything so cleanly that it was a huge help to me, but in a situation like this she was also volunteering to handle both the presentation and the dubbing? Was Im Lua some kind of superhuman?
When I asked, half in a fluster, Lua just laughed and nodded.
“I’m confident I can do it well. Trust me.”
When she put it like that, there wasn’t much I could say.
“…Alright. I’ll trust you.”
“Thanks. And you two don’t have any objections, right?”
At the question about objections, both of them nodded.
Meanwhile Lee Goeun, who had taken on the role of secretary, was writing every single word down without missing a syllable.
Somehow, this was the first time a group project had ever felt this harmonious and smooth.
It was probably a problem that had come from me acting so uncooperative all this time. No—rather than uncooperative, “incompetent” was the more accurate word. I’d been cooperative enough; I just hadn’t been much help.
Either way, the fact that I hadn’t been nearly as useful as I should have been was undeniable, and that made me feel bad for my previous teammates.
“Great. Then later, once you’ve got a rough cut of the video, send it over, Jinwoo. I’ll need to time the dubbing to it.”
“No, do the dubbing first. Matching the video to the audio later is way easier.”
“Got it. Then I’ll finish all the dubbing by tomorrow and send you the recording files. MP3 works, right?”
“That’d be perfect.”
Talking with Lua, I realized she actually had a decent eye for video work too.
How to put it—she didn’t seem like an absolute expert, but she knew all the basics. At the very least, it was on a completely different level from someone who had zero interest. She was even easier to talk to about it than Jihye Kim, who’d actually made videos before.
And it wasn’t only a new side of Lua that I was discovering.
“If you’re matching it to the dubbing, how are you planning to edit?”
“I’m just going to cut the source footage you guys give me to roughly fit the dubbing length. That’s way easier. It’d be rough for a normal video, but for an informational one like this, this method’s more convenient.”
“Ohhh…”
I was also getting to see a new side of Jihye Kim, who always came across as so prickly whenever I saw her at school.
Calling it a “new side” was a stretch—she was just asking me about video stuff and learning as we went—but at least inside my head, Jihye Kim had only ever been “that hardworking, sharp-tongued girl who studies a lot.”
Which was why it threw me off even more.
Once I’d given Jihye a quick rundown of the video basics, Lua, sitting right beside me, looked over and grinned.
“Ooooh, our Jinwoo. You’re actually pretty good at teaching now, huh?”
“Teaching? We were just talking. I’m nowhere near good enough to teach anyone in the first place.”
“Why not? At least in our class, I don’t think there’s anyone who makes better videos than you.”
There was no way that was true.
People who make videos are often a little weird.
They’ve got enough of an attention-seeking streak that they want other people to watch what they’ve made, and at the same time they don’t really want to put themselves out there. More precisely, they don’t want anyone to know that they made the video.
So… yeah. That was it. As Mangjjonku, I wanted as many VTuber fans as possible to see Mangjjonku’s videos. But as Seo Jinwoo, I wanted to keep the fact that I was the one making those videos a secret from everyone.
I didn’t even have to look far. Jihye Kim herself didn’t strike me as someone who was great at making videos, but she said she’d made some before. And from the way she talked, it sounded like she’d done it recently too.
I hadn’t known she made videos. Why? Because she’d never once brought it up herself.
There were probably more people like that. And among them, there were bound to be people better than me.
So I couldn’t go around assuming I was the best. That kind of snap judgment only led to arrogance.
Mangjjonku? That channel was only sitting at around eighty to ninety thousand subscribers. It seemed like it had gone up a bit recently, but I hadn’t checked carefully. I’d just been too busy lately.
When I looked later, it was already at ninety thousand. Ten thousand more and it would hit a hundred K.
By the way, did you get a silver play button at a hundred thousand? If it came, would I have to film some kind of real-life vlog? Or an unboxing?
I was still mulling that over when Lua poked my cheek with her finger.
“Hellooo~ Seo Jinwoo-ssi~ Can you not hear me~?”
“Ah—uh, sorry. My bad.”
“No, you don’t have to be that sorry… So, what were you thinking about so hard just now?”
“Um… uh… video stuff?”
“Not thinking about Jihye?”
She was having weird thoughts again.
For the first time in a while, I flicked her forehead with a solid flick.
Thwack!
“Ow!”
Lua’s clean little yelp rang out, and while I listened to it I flicked my fingers once in the air.
Yeah. That sound had been really clean just now. Very satisfying.
“What the hell, why’d you hit me all of a sudden…!?”
“Just because you were being annoying.”
I meant it. I’d hit her purely because she was getting on my nerves. There was no other reason.
Lua kept glaring at me, clearly irritated, and as I looked back at her I quietly thought to myself.
There was zero reason for me to be thinking about Jihye Kim. Sure, she was relatively pretty compared to average girls, but she didn’t really do anything for me.
My standards were: in 3D, Im Lua. In 2D, Lulu.
In real life, someone would have to be prettier than Im Lua before I’d even start noticing their looks. In 2D, they’d have to hit my tastes harder than Lulu before my eyes would wander.
Ah, of course Lulu’s figure wasn’t my type. The second I said that body type was my preference, I’d get branded a lolicon and socially buried.
Lua, on the other hand, had a really nice figure too. She worked out hard but also ate well—was that why? Either way, she was a seriously attractive person.
“You were having weird thoughts again just now, weren’t you?”
Startled, I immediately shook my head and denied it.
“Nope.”
“Yeah right, you pervert.”
Thwack!
“Ow!”
This time Lua fired a forehead flick right back at me.
Honestly it didn’t hurt that much, but I made a big show of it anyway.
As if she’d seen right through me, Lua snickered and started teasing me.
“You’re really gonna scream that loud just because a delicate girl hit you?”
“Delicate? That’s a very different meaning of ‘delicate’ from the one I know. If anything, Goeun’s more delicate.”
Lua wasn’t particularly tall, but she was about average for a girl. Lee Goeun, on the other hand, was a good six or seven centimeters shorter than average. I was pretty sure you could count on one hand the number of girls in the entire school shorter than her.
So if Lua counted as delicate, the word “delicate” itself probably needed a redefinition.
If Lua was delicate, then “delicate” meant “extremely sturdy and tough.”
Of course I had zero intention of saying any of that out loud.
If I did, my neck might get twisted a full hundred and eighty degrees. I didn’t want to die.
Thinking that, I went over the script with Lua.
How should we do this part, how long should she talk here—that kind of conversation.
It ran a little longer than planned, but that didn’t really matter.
Because the whole time, it was just really fun.
Talking with Lua… how should I put it? We just clicked so well, and it was always enjoyable.
How could a conversation like that not be fun?
That night, while watching Lulu’s stream, I was also listening to the voice files Lua had sent me.
“In July of 1441, the twenty-third year of King Sejong’s reign. A new king was born in Joseon.”
It was a clear, calm tone that brought ordinary Lua to mind—the kind of voice that sank right into your ears.
On top of that, she enunciated so cleanly and carefully that just listening made it easy to focus.
“No no no no, why! Why would you do that! Whyyy! Why are you doing this to meeeee!!!”
Meanwhile, Lulu was once again getting thoroughly trolled and running into every kind of unfair situation.
I was smiling fondly at the sight and marking the timestamps when, for a split second, the voice of Lua I was listening to overlapped with Lulu’s.
Yeah. Just for a brief moment, they overlapped.
……I must have been pretty tired.
There was no way that bright, energetic… or, less charitably, almost manic tension of Lulu’s could ever overlap with the calm, demure voice of Lua.
No—maybe their timbres were just similar. Timbre was different for everyone, but if you went looking for similar ones you could always find them.
Both voices were familiar to my ears, both sounded good, and both had a subtle cuteness to them. That was probably why I’d gotten confused.
Yeah. That had to be it.