The Illustrator
Photo cards.
Goods about the size of a credit card, printed with the face of someone famous—an idol, a celebrity, that kind of person. They had run wild through Korea's idol scene, and by now they had seeped into everything else as well: baseball, subculture, every market they could reach.
I meant to carry that culture across the dimensions and turn it loose on another world.
Adult streaming sites lay so thick you could trip over them, and erotic fiction and adult comics were everywhere, but what man hasn't done it at least once? Flipped through a graduation album hunting for a classmate who caught his eye, or slipped onto the social media of a girl he had a crush on, pulled up a single photo, and let his fantasies run. These days, I'd even heard there were bastards using AI to paste those photos onto a camgirl's reaction videos.
Of course, prostitution was legal in this world. Rather than shut yourself in a cramped room for a shameful little session and the hollow clarity that followed, it might well be faster to buy a woman at a brothel. But a man's heart doesn't work that way. The farther a thing sits beyond his reach, the more he wants it. The hunger to pluck a flower growing on a cliff he could never hope to climb knows neither era nor dimension.
And these photo cards would feed that hunger.
My only grounds were a single thought that had surfaced in my head, and yet I was strangely certain the money would come. I was already picturing a future in which the gambling halls treated me as more than a VIP—a VVIP—when my exclusive artist spoke up in a frightened little voice.
"Um, uh... what's a photo card?"
Ah. Was I a complete moron?
Read enough Japanese isekai and you notice the protagonists all lose their minds in unison. Was my Intelligence stat dropping a rank at a time now too?
Just saying 'photo card' isn't going to mean a thing to him.
"Hmm... how am I supposed to explain this."
I worried over it for a moment, then held my open palm up in front of Willie's eyes.
"Here, look. Paper about this big. All you have to do is draw a person on it."
"You want me to draw someone?"
"Yeah. A portrait. Upper body, from the crown of the head down to the navel."
Willie tilted his head.
"That's all?"
"No."
If that were all, would I have come looking for him?
"The part that actually matters starts here."
The reason I had searched not for anyone else, but for Willie.
"I want you to lay your magic over it."
This guy's pictures weren't just a figure of speech. Like the headmaster's portrait I had seen in the first-floor lobby earlier, they truly lived and breathed. He wasn't simply good at drawing. I didn't know what it was, exactly, but he worked some original magic of his own and produced pieces closer to video than to paintings. That was why I had hung the acceptance necklace on him.
Those noble flowers who set our hot-blooded boys' hearts racing would draw slowly back inside the card's frame and reveal themselves in full. And if, on top of that, they showed a line of cleavage, gave a soft little sway of the tail, lifted their skirt hems just a touch, and struck a languid, seductive pose—then the next day every male student in the academy would be wearing dark circles down to his jaw, and the photo cards they had bought would reek of night blossoms.
Even the daydream stank of it already: that sweet, guilty reek of a night spent alone with a picture. No. It smelled like money. This wasn't some simple merchandise business. It was the beginning of a cultural revolution in another world.
"So... you want me to use my magic and draw pictures that move?"
"Yeah. Put simply, that's it."
Willie thought for a moment, then asked me.
"What do you want me to draw?"
The word commission seemed to settle him a little, so I called off the five names from the voting list, one after another.
"You know who they are?"
"O-of course I do! How could I not?"
Thank goodness. I'd wondered whether a guy who shut himself in this cramped room and did nothing but draw might not even know their faces, but he was a man after all. Of course he knew the academy's idols, at least that much.
"Drawing them isn't hard, so... all right."
Willie nodded more readily than I had expected and took the commission.
Did he get asked for this sort of thing often?
"Are there a lot of people besides me asking you to draw?"
It would be a problem if our exclusive artist already had other orders piled up.
"No, what are you talking about. Who would ask someone like me..."
Willie shook his head hard at the question, as if it were absurd.
Strange. He drew this well, and not a single person had asked?
"Why?"
"Who's going to commission a painting from someone like me?"
"When you draw that well?"
"Because my pictures are nothing like the style of the famous painters."
Ah. So that was it.
Willie's work was, how to put it, close to photorealism—a way of rendering the subject exactly as it was, as if he had taken a photograph. His pictures sat at a slight angle to the work that was in fashion in this world. Here and now, the prevailing taste was for paintings that stressed or exaggerated some particular part, the better to show off the artist's individuality. They say every field has its own fashion, and the art world, it seemed, was no exception: drawing well was not, by itself, enough to get you anywhere.
For me, though, that was all to the good. If I was his only client, that made me the highest-priority customer of all.
"All right. They're small, so five of them... I can probably finish in a week."
Maybe he was simply delighted that someone had asked him for a picture. A faint light began to stir in Willie's eyes, and he flung aside the landscape he had been working on a moment ago and pulled out a fresh canvas at once.
"Hold on."
I caught the impatient fool in a hurry.
"Why the rush?"
"Huh?"
"We haven't decided on the outfits yet."
Willie tilted his head.
"Wouldn't dresses be fine?"
"Dresses?"
Who puts them in clothes that dull and boring? A dress might be the finest thing in the world for showing off an elegant femininity, but could the sort of gown our classmates saw every other day in a banquet hall stir anyone's urge to buy? Since I had already made up my mind to do this, I was going to dose this other world with a proper poison.
"Here, look."
I picked up a pencil lying beside Willie and sketched the rough shape of the clothes on a fresh sheet as I explained.
"Shoulders bare, like this... and about this long."
Willie said nothing.
"And this part a little shorter."
Still nothing.
"Or we go all the way and emphasize the line of the waist, like this."
Underboob, off-the-shoulder, miniskirts, hot pants, bottoms gone entirely, see-through, backless. With my clumsy hand I drew out every Earth fashion that came to mind—styles the stuffy designers of this world could never have imagined.
He draws for a living. This much, and he can fill in the rest.
"A-are you insane?!"
I was deep in the explanation when Willie suddenly shouted. The decibels were hard to believe, coming from a boy who had only ever looked timid.
Had it been too much for him? But Willie's worry was something else.
"If I draw something like that, we might die!"
He wasn't wrong. The models I had chosen were no ordinary students: from the imperial princess to a duke's daughter, an elf princess, the disciple of an archmage. Every one of them a highborn daughter of a house that mattered. If they ever saw these pictures, they would make us pay dearly for the insult of toying with them.
But if you mean to handle real money, you have to accept a risk of that size, don't you?
"Willie."
I gave his shoulder a light pat.
"Don't worry. All you have to do is draw."
"That's the problem!"
Willie looked ready to cry.
"I'm the only one who can draw pictures like that!"
"...Ah."
He had a point. Damn it. My intelligence really had dropped.
A style close to photorealism, and magic on top of it that made the picture live and move. Anyone who knew Willie's work would name the artist on the spot.
...Damn it.
The business plan that had unfurled in rose-colored light inside my head scattered in an instant. Was this where my great plan ended?
"All right. Then we do it this way."
No. I couldn't let it end here. If a man draws his sword, he ought to cut something, even if it's only a radish.
"We'll compromise on the outfits at about this level, and we won't use the magic."
I kept the exposure to something like a line of cleavage or the curve of a shoulder and settled on a format close to an ordinary photo card: just a picture of the person. Willie still looked uneasy.
"That's dangerous too..."
"Don't worry, friend. Even if we get caught, at this level it'll pass for a thoughtless student's mistake."
"But..."
His face was still full of hesitation, as if he were drawing the worst possible future.
"Willie... the guys who buy these aren't idiots either, are they?"
I grinned, trying to wash the anxiety off him.
"If anyone found out they'd bought one, who knows what would happen. Who's going to brag about it out in the open?"
Willie was silent.
I had to keep the current moving. Like the serpent in Eden leading Eve toward the apple, I laid one more line on top.
"Willie, you're a commoner, aren't you?"
His work clothes and his shoes were enough to tell. This guy was a commoner, no question.
"Attending the academy and painting on top of that must cost a fair amount, doesn't it?"
A commoner who had made it into the academy and was painting besides—the money going out in every direction couldn't be small. To drag Willie down into the pit with me, I kept pouring out the honeyed words.
"I'll give you three-tenths of the sales. No—four-tenths. I'll give you forty percent."
I had originally meant to count him about ten percent as a fee for his trouble. Call it high now, renegotiate later.
"...How much are you selling one for?"
A reaction. The boy who had been listening to my spiel with his eyes on the floor lifted them just a little and looked at me as he asked. I brought my mouth to Willie's ear and quietly whispered the price I had already worked out in my head.
Willie's eyes went wide.
"Y-you're selling them for that much?"
"For now, sure. If they don't sell, we'll try lowering the price."
I shrugged, perfectly at ease.
"Then the money coming to me would be..."
Willie started calculating, fingers twitching.
"With this much I could buy new brushes... and paint, too..."
He muttered on. For a while he weighed, in his head, the money that would come in and the things that money could buy, and at some point gold coins rose in his eyes.
"I... I really won't get caught, right?"
"Of course. Just in case, let's take down the painting hanging on the first floor, too."
Hardly any student properly looked at the pictures in the lobby to begin with. Even so, better to put the painting away first and be ready for the one chance in a thousand.
"You really are giving me forty percent, right?"
"I said I am."
"For real?"
"Would a man say two things with one mouth?"
He was nearly there. A little more pressure, and he would put the forbidden apple already in his hand into his mouth.
"...All right."
Crunch.
At last Willie bit into the apple.
"I'm counting on you, friend."
I snatched his hand at once and clasped it hard. Today was the day one of the two people who would later be named among the core figures of the TCG industry fell into my hands.