The Calm Before the Storm
A man trudged down the mountain path, lantern in hand—the kind that took a big six-volt battery.
A woman with a bewildered face followed close behind.
"My name is Cha Su-hyeon."
When the man suddenly turned mid-stride and offered his name, the woman tilted her head and simply stared.
"I just figured we ought to at least know each other's names..."
The man who had introduced himself as Cha Su-hyeon scratched his head at her reaction and started walking again.
Then the woman trailing him spoke.
"I'm Hong Yu-jeong."
Cha Su-hyeon gave a quiet nod at Hong Yu-jeong's words and pointed to a silver bicycle leaning against a streetlamp.
"The nearest police box is farther than you'd think. From here on, let's take that."
"...A bicycle? Isn't that someone else's?"
"Well, it belongs to Grandpa Chun-sik from the house below, but he's gotten too old, so I always ride it. I only use it when I head into town for his medicine."
Hong Yu-jeong decided soon enough that whether it was Grandpa Chun-sik's or Cha Su-hyeon's, she didn't know either of them, so whose bicycle it was hardly mattered.
Her head was still a tangle; she couldn't sort out what had happened and felt nothing but confusion.
In the meantime Cha Su-hyeon wheeled the bicycle over and pointed to the rear rack.
"It's meant for hauling loads, so your backside might get a little sore, but you'll be fine riding it."
Hong Yu-jeong gazed blankly at the tip of his finger, then climbed on without a word.
At first she had thought this meeting was pure imagination—oxygen deprivation or the shock of the emergency landing.
That was why she had spoken so freely, without much thought. But it no longer felt like imagination or a dream.
They had already been descending the slope for nearly ten minutes, and human imagination simply could not construct a dream or delusion this detailed and prolonged.
There were two classic ways to tell whether you were dreaming inside a dream.
If you studied your fingertips carefully, the boundary between the edges of your hands and the objects behind them would not be sharp.
And in a dream, if you checked a clock, looked away, then looked back, the time would be different from a moment before.
Imagination struggled to render details that fine.
She had tested both, and both only proved that the present situation was neither dream nor fantasy.
Haa... still, this man doesn't seem like a madman trapped living in the past either.
She still could not quite believe she was time-traveling into the past, yet the necklace of her mother's hanging around Hong Yu-jeong's neck was solid, undeniable reality.
When the usually combative Hong Yu-jeong climbed onto the bicycle without protest, Cha Su-hyeon tilted his head and began to pedal.
The bicycle carrying the two of them slowly cut through a country lane bordered on both sides by green rice paddies.
The grassy fields soon filled with the croaking of frogs.
Yeon-woo pedaled the silver bicycle, its frame already smudged with dirt.
Behind him sat Hong A-yun, legs carefully drawn to one side, lightly pinching only the fabric at Yeon-woo's waist.
Their figures themselves seemed to project Cha Su-hyeon and Hong Yu-jeong at twenty, like a faded page from an old photo album, wistful and soft.
And Director Lee Yong-su, watching the image the camera captured, felt his mind fill with pure admiration.
Damn... their visual chemistry is absolutely insane.
When it came to pulling beautiful frames, Lee Yong-su was confident he could outshoot any commercial film directors even if they all showed up together.
CFs and music videos, after all, had to snatch the eye in a matter of seconds.
He had shot countless short pieces over more than a decade as a commercial director, yet while filming this movie those two kept rewriting the personal best rankings in his heart with every take.
Roughly two months had passed since they finished the table read and cranked in.
Filming was now almost finished, and Lee Yong-su was itching to dive into the edit and weave the footage into something gorgeous right away.
Even as Director Lee Yong-su stared, entranced, at the monitor, the bicycle rolled forward.
A rail camera tracked alongside the pair as they rode slowly, locking their image onto the screen.
The moment they passed a pre-marked spot on the ground, Hong A-yun sank back into Hong Yu-jeong and began her lines.
"Hey... what's that?"
"What's what?"
"You can't see it? There's a huge blue wall-like thing right up ahead."
Cha Su-hyeon tilted his head at Hong Yu-jeong's words.
"You mean the wall of Yeongjin Super? It's not that big, though."
"No, no! The enormous wall next to it! It stretches all the way up to the sky!"
"...You're a really weird kid."
Watching Cha Su-hyeon keep pedaling with a puzzled look, Hong A-yun shook him from behind.
"S-stop! We're going to hit it!"
"Hey—hey! Shake it and we'll fall!"
The bicycle, wobbling from Hong Yu-jeong's shaking, was barely brought to a halt.
"That's dangerous!"
Cha Su-hyeon turned and shouted, but Hong Yu-jeong had already hopped off and was running forward.
Then she began stroking empty air—exactly as if a wall stood there.
Director Lee Yong-su's voice rang out.
"Okay! Cut! That was fantastic. Let's grab some separate bust shots of just the two of them talking."
Hong Yu-jeong, who had been miming the invisible wall, slipped back into Hong A-yun and walked over to Yeon-woo.
"Did the bike almost actually tip over?"
"Huh? No, I just gave the handlebars a little shake for the acting."
"Aha. I got a little scared. Thought it was really going down."
Hong A-yun grinned bashfully.
From the moment filming began they had dropped formal speech with each other, and by now they were genuinely close.
"These country bikes have a pretty low center of gravity, so they don't tip easily. It's a cargo bike originally, after all."
Hong A-yun nodded at Yeon-woo's words and looked around.
"Our shoot's almost finished too."
"Yeah. Two months here... doesn't it feel like we've gotten attached to this village?"
"Yeah. You're right. Completely attached."
Yeon-woo gazed at the empty air where the blue wall Hong Yu-jeong had stared at in the story would have stood.
In the film, the heroine Hong Yu-jeong could not travel beyond a fixed distance measured from the front yard of Cha Su-hyeon's mountain house where she had first been found—blocked by a barrier only she could see.
That was why, aside from a handful of set pieces, every scene had been shot in this rural village.
As with every movie, the shooting order followed logistical convenience rather than the script, so the scene they had just finished was, story-wise, only a few hours after Cha Su-hyeon and Hong Yu-jeong first met; in reality they had already filmed nearly everything through the ending.
All that remained were the individual shoots for Yeon-woo and Hong A-yun.
"How about it? Think you'll miss it a little?"
"Huh?"
Hong A-yun echoed the question.
Yeon-woo grinned.
"The solo scenes need to be packed with longing, right?"
"That's true. I will miss it."
Hong A-yun thought for a moment, then nodded with a soft smile.
"Will I ever get to shoot a romance with a guy this famous again? I'm sure I'll miss every bit of this."
Hearing her answer, Yeon-woo scratched his cheek.
"There'll probably be plenty more—filming with famous actors, I mean. You're under Saebyeol now."
He answered, then gave a small nod to himself.
Well, she's Saebyeol now, so free time is over. She'll have to grind through projects and climb to A-list fast.
Of course Yeon-woo intended to make sure of it.
She had lost years to Plus10 and started late; from here on her schedule would have to explode with work.
"Ah—why do I suddenly feel a chill?"
"Even in summer the night breeze can be cold."
The shooting pace of Moon had been far faster than anyone expected.
Perhaps because Yeon-woo and Hong A-yun's acting chemistry clicked so well, the plan had been to film as much as possible through the summer and leave the remaining or solo work until after Parabola; instead they wrapped the entire film before summer even ended.
As a result, Executive Director Tak Jeong-a of A-Pictures—now handling distribution—was burning her soul these days.
She had been living in the office for several days straight, eating and sleeping there, racing to pull the promotion schedule and release date forward.
"Hoo... even if it's rough, autumn is still the best window."
Romances always hit hardest in early autumn, when the air turned cool enough to make people feel lonely.
She had assumed lead actor Ryu Yeon-woo's packed schedule would push the release into early next year; finishing this quickly meant a frantic scramble for screens, but it was still better.
Meanwhile Yeon-woo, having finished even the solo shoots, was taking a short breather.
That did not mean lounging at home; every day he reported to the workroom Director Lee Yong-su had rented separately in Chungmuro.
When Yeon-woo opened the door, staff who looked little different from zombies turned hollow eyes toward him.
Kim Ju-hyeong was among them, of course.
"Ah, Su-hyeon's here."
"It's Ryu Yeon-woo."
"Right. This is reality."
Kim Ju-hyeong shook his head.
After staring at nothing but Cha Su-hyeon and Hong Yu-jeong on screens for twenty hours a day, the line between the movie and the real world had grown dangerously thin.
"Hmm... want me to grab some food? Anyone craving anything?"
"Energy drinks..."
"No. You're not going out, Yeon-woo. People will swarm and you'll get trapped inside the convenience store."
At Kim Ju-hyeong's firm stop, Yeon-woo had no choice but to sink back onto the sofa.
"...Fighting."
Cheering was all he could offer.
Editing had entered its final stretch, and Yeon-woo joined the rest of the cast for basketball practice in preparation for the next project, Parabola.
Everyone—including Dong-ha from Axis and Jin Yu-han—had cleared their schedules and gathered in one place.
They rented an indoor court and practiced almost every day until the actors began to wonder whether they were still actors or had somehow become basketball players.
Naturally Saebyeol's YouTube team captured every second of the process without missing a beat.
That footage alone looked ready to be cut into a variety show the moment the drama finished airing.
In the meantime the distributor A-Pictures poured everything into promotion timed to the rapidly approaching release, and even before opening day the response was already strong.
"You're saying you're ten years older than me? I'm twenty."
"Smartphone? What's that?"
"Ah, no! I mean the enormous wall next to it! It stretches all the way to the sky!"
"I'm going to get to know you from now on. My farewell flows in reverse, you see."
Inside the green-tinted footage that captured a fresh summer, Yeon-woo and Hong A-yun bickered one moment and gazed at each other with aching tenderness the next.
The moment the official trailer for Yeon-woo's next film dropped, movie fans who had been waiting with necks craned exploded with heat.
Carrying the full weight of the fans' expectations, the release day of the film Moon drew near.