The Association (1)
"......"
A DM out of nowhere, from the fixed-nick user I'd been quietly crushing on.
Under the guy's relentless pestering, I finally pretended to cave and sent a reply.
"Gahk..."
Getting disciplined the very second we met... this guy was a total corporate boomer.
And judging by that tragic naming sense, the person behind it was clearly a bald forty-something ahjussi.
"A total oldkek..."
Not that I said any of that to his face, obviously.
I mean — forty-something ahjussi, bald, and an Awakener?
That skin alone screams absolute cracked veteran.
Simply surviving in this world long enough for your hair to fall out is proof of strength in itself.
I had precisely zero desire to be torn apart alive by a veteran Awakener.
So, after that deeply logical and rational line of deduction, I sent Carbon a DM in the most courteous, obsequious register I could manage.
I have no idea which part of my impeccably polite apology looked like trolling, but Carbon somehow managed to convince himself all on his own.
"Didn't know that."
Cue the grand orchestral BGM.
Dun~ dudadun~
...Honestly, I'd never properly read the Awakening Gallery's pinned notices either, so who knows.
Turns out the bans weren't just mods flexing on a whim — there was an actual standard.
Pushed past his limit by my endless cluelessness, an enraged Carbon finally got to the point.
"...Eh."
Now that he mentioned it, there was such a thing as Awakener registration, wasn't there...?
It had slipped my mind entirely, what with all my scheming to raise hell in the Tower Gallery.
"Oh right. Once you awaken, registration comes first."
Say what you will about the Tower being one step removed from Hell itself, but even it had a bare minimum of laws.
And of those, Awakener registration was the most basic of the basics — foundational, load-bearing legislation.
Which made perfect sense.
Because if unregistered Awakeners were simply left to wander around, crime followed.
A world where the state doesn't function, where public authority and law don't exist, and where every random individual is handed the power to inflict mass casualties?
What is that? Just an ordinary American hood.
Non-San Andreas, Demon-Realm Incheon, the Sinan Cartel — places like that.
Except now with the minor design flaw of having no police and fully legalized firearms.
To put it in restaurant terms: picture a bat-swinging lunatic beating the customers half to death, except the owner's in the bathroom and the cops won't take the call.
And I had just become that bat-swinging lunatic.
Suffice to say, I was profoundly, catastrophically screwed.
"Oh craaaap!!"
Plunged into full panic, I hopped from foot to foot, performing the ancient ritual dance of what-do-I-do-what-do-I-do.
But the dance only lasted a moment before, following the instinct carved into my very bones, I attempted to defuse the situation with a brazen lie.
"And how wouldst thou know that, Carbon...?"
This ahjussi was with the Association?
He wasn't a forty-year-old freelance middle-aged Awakener?
"Why would an Association employee carry a fixed-nick on a gallery, of all decrepit places..."
Why on earth was a clean-living go-getter lurking around in a dump like that, fixed-nick and all?
Wasn't the Awakening Gallery supposed to be a cyber psychiatric ward where disillusioned young people whose lives had gone down the toilet gathered?
Should've never tried to bluff.
This is why habitual trolling is a disease, I swear...
"Phew... phewww..."
At Carbon's follow-up, I — who had been frozen solid under the assumption I'd committed an actual crime — let out a belated sigh of relief.
What the hell, man. I thought I was royally screwed.
Lead with that part next time.
"......"
Apparently, my trolling spree in the Tower Gallery had triggered a full-blown state of emergency at the Association.
Which, fair enough — the number of Awakeners who had ever challenged Lunatic could be counted on one hand.
It wasn't strange for the Awakener Association to have its eyes on little old me.
...For some reason, I felt genuinely sorry for the Association staff.
These people were pulling overtime because of one single me.
Carbon kept going.
"Huh, so that's what temporary registration is?"
For all that the Association was called the Tower's arm of law enforcement, its authority wasn't quite that absolute.
Awakeners were hardly going to docilely comply just because someone told them to register, after all.
So the Association had introduced the temporary registration system.
A crime-prevention measure — an attempt to at least get a rough fix on Awakeners' identities.
The strategy was two-pronged: use temporary registration to loosely identify people, then ply full registrants with every benefit imaginable to lure the rest in.
Of course, all of this only applied to Awakeners.
Non-Awakeners were governed the traditional way: with the whip.
That said, this was still the twenty-first century, so nothing as horrifying as outright deprivation of non-Awakeners' human rights had come to pass.
At worst, every individual was assigned an identification number, and all ten fingerprints on both hands were registered and kept on file for administrative purposes.
...Sounds like some hackneyed apocalypse worldbuilding, but it's literally just a basic resident registration system.
For the record, even that only existed in the Korean branch of Floor 0.
Korea really is the Hell Peninsula, I'm telling you.
Ah, my patriotic heart, swelling to bursting.
Flutter, flutter...
The DMs from Carbon just kept coming.
He wasn't making a show of it, but the tone had that pointed, hint-hint urgency to it.
I stared at Carbon's messages for a long moment before muttering with a sour look on my face.
"...I guess I have to go, huh?"
Skipping Awakener registration was illegal in the first place, after all.
Awakeners who'd pulled the old 'I hide my strength from the authorities!' move and lived to tell the tale were few and far between.
"Besides, if it's just temporary registration..."
There was no risk of my personal information getting dug up, and my schedule was empty anyway — outside of Tower climbing and gallery-posting, I had nothing to do.
Might as well honor the spirit of the law for the first time in a while. That much, I could grant.
My deliberation was brief, and I fired off a short reply to Carbon.
And thus, an IRL meetup was achieved.
The next day.
The Association lobby.
"Little kid...?"
"I am not a little kid."
For reasons beyond my comprehension, I found myself locked in a standoff with the woman at the counter.
"Where's your mommy?"
"Don't have one."
"Oh dear, did you lose your mom?"
"No. I don't have one."
"So what you're saying is, you've become a lost child at the Association?"
"I just don't have one."
"...But you did?"
"......"
...Yep. Called it.
Same thing happened at the convenience store — as if the Association would be any different.
No, look. However you slice it, teabagging someone's parents crosses the line.
Why does everyone keep trying to locate my mother, who does not exist?
What is this, a family reunion program?
"I'm an orphan."
"Oh my... I-I'm so sorry..."
The counter lady, who had been reduced to a squirming pile of human garbage the instant my orphan counter landed, flusteredly fumbled about and thrust a handful of candies at me.
"D-do you want some candy...?"
"...No, thank you."
For the record: mint candy, scorched-rice candy, and red ginseng drops.
Doing my level best to ignore the deeply, suspiciously middle-aged confectionery tastes of the counter lady, I fished a candy of my own out of my pocket — one I'd brought separately — and popped it into my mouth.
"Nomnomnom."
◈ Details: A candy condensing the caffeine of ten cans of commercial energy drinks (approx. 1,000mg) into a single piece. Stimulates the central nervous system to induce a temporary state of heightened wakefulness.
My special-batch Caffeine Candy.
Ten cans of energy drink, condensed into a single confection.
The one tiny piece of candy sitting on my tongue held a full 1,000mg of caffeine.
Three times the recommended daily caffeine limit for an adult male!
Ten cans' worth... of caffeine... in one candy...!!
Well... with my tolerance, it doesn't do much.
I just ate it for the vibe, honestly.
It even tastes roughly like an energy drink, so it's surprisingly palatable.
"......"
Meanwhile, having just witnessed her own candy suffer an NTR defeat right before her eyes, the counter lady hung her head with a wounded, sulking expression —
and before long, from somewhere across the lobby, a red-haired woman began making her way toward me.
Wobble!
"I knew you'd come around this time..."
Oh... oh my... whoa...
Um... how do I put this.
She was big.
Absurdly big.
Absolutely, overwhelmingly so.
If I had to put it into words: a bosom like a bountiful momma-canteen, and hips that begged to be yaarred — a figure that had yaarlleyarlehilly desire surging through every inch of me, let's say?
And yet on top of all that, a ratty lab coat thrown over office wear like something grabbed off the floor — an unexpected gap-moe strike straight to the heart.
So there I stood, mentally chanting ooh-tsa-tsa... tya-tya-tai... and basking in my thoroughly yaarful mood, when —
She spotted me standing at the counter and flinched, murmuring under her breath.
"...39.7?"
The familiar IP number followed.
At the sound of it, the color drained from my face, whiting out at alarming speed.
No. No way.
This red-haired,gravity-defying bombshell was...
"PocketSizeCarbon...?"
Carbon.
Was a woman?!