The Art Director (2)
Here was yet another woman. Yoo Seol. Only two lines were etched into the résumé of her life: high school dropout. Main Art Director at the game company Blue Edge. A shabby background paired with a dazzling career. And now, both were nothing more than relics of the past.
At present, she had grown into an exemplary shut-in rice bug.
There is a saying that all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It was the maxim Leo Tolstoy placed at the opening of his novel Anna Karenina.
Yoo Seol’s life had gone spectacularly off the rails for reasons that could not be found in anyone else, and for reasons she could not tell anyone else.
The tiny spark that started it all had been a single message.
Back then, Blue Edge didn’t even have a proper art team, let alone an art director. The contact had come from a developer who spent his days bouncing between art cafes and commission channels.
A natural talent that could turn even the most garbage order into something perfect. A refined design sense that preserved originality. A work speed so insane it made people suspect she was running AI. She was quite literally a jewel rolling around in a trash bin.
Kim Ji-hyun, who had been the director of Blue Edge at the time, managed to kidnap this basement-dwelling game addict from her favorite RPG.
After countless bloody battles where he planted his flag and somehow scraped together a record of loss-loss-win-win-win, he succeeded in dragging her into the company.
Until then, Yoo Seol had been the very picture of a happy family life. Even when the company was on the verge of collapse, she had been reasonably happy.
At least they could still reach each other. Even if their hearts could not.
And there was only one reason she had become unhappy.
The director… is missing?
The “1” that indicated the messages had not been read refused to disappear. Sadly, her director, Kim Ji-hyun, had been an orphan, so there was no family she could contact. For a full month she wandered every corner of Korea. Even though she knew it was pointless.
After evolving in that darkness, she had arrived at the present. Having lost the purpose of her life. Having lost all her goals, she simply drifted along.
These days she spent her time playing the reboot server of the MMORPG that her old director had once helped develop, occasionally venting her frustration into her keyboard.
She kept her dusty drawing tablet shoved into a corner and stubbornly hammered away at her keyboard while everyone else climbed into their capsules.
And then, today.
The moment her long-lost first love and last love—the ex-boyfriend type—left that message, the clock that had stopped inside Yoo Seol began to tick once more.
Sadly, her beloved director was reluctant to reveal his overseas residence. Instead, he made a counter-offer. He asked her to participate in the development of a virtual reality game.
No matter how much it was a proposal from her director, Yoo Seol wasn’t particularly thrilled. Why did our company go under? Why did the director end up like that? Why can’t I see him? Why, why? All of those reasons had to do with virtual reality—and with capsules.
But… because it was so very like Kim Ji-hyun…
Even though she couldn’t even hear his voice, Yoo Seol didn’t want to let go of this tiny thread. If she let go of even this, it felt like the director would leave her side forever.
* * *
And now.
From the moment she arrived at the meeting place promised by Kim Ji-hyun, Yoo Seol could not hide her displeasure. She had been warned in advance, but… the person who showed up was not the director. It was some strange woman. Flowing black hair, eyes that shone such a vivid blue it made one question whether she was even Korean, and…
“Fucking huge.”
“…Pardon?”
“Nothing.”
To borrow a crude expression from the community, they were the size of mama dispensers on the verge of exploding. Yoo Seol suddenly looked down at her own flat chest.
Fuck. The world is so goddamn unfair.
If it were up to her, she would have grabbed the woman by the hair and screamed, Who the hell are you to be developing games with the director? If the woman hadn’t introduced herself as his cousin, she probably would have done exactly that.
She said she was his cousin, but did they actually resemble each other at all? There was one thing. Whether it was something cousins could share, she wasn’t sure, but it was a habit.
Kim Ji-hyun had a habit of scratching near his collarbone when he was troubled. It was rather sexy, so she had secretly taken photos and built a whole collection of them.
And the woman before her—Shin Se-rin—was also…
With a slightly awkward expression, she was instinctively scratching near her collarbone.
Chewing on that sense of déjà vu, Yoo Seol silently reviewed the contract Shin Se-rin had handed her. The conditions were quite good. But.
“The position isn’t Art Director, it’s Lead Artist? Don’t tell me… there’s another bitch… person?”
She shot a glare that clearly asked, Is it you? For a moment Shin Se-rin shook her head with a troubled look. The way her chest jiggled along with the motion made Yoo Seol’s mentality shake even harder. Crazy. Why do those things move when she shakes her head?
“It’s confidential so I can’t explain in too much detail, but… in virtual reality development, the original art is the most important part. Practically speaking, the one actually drawing the originals—Yoo Seol…-nim—is no different from the Main Art Director. We have no intention of hiring anyone else for that position.”
Yoo Seol was simple. Me! Only me! Yes! I am Kim Ji-hyun’s one and only Art Director! Therefore.
Signature completed.
Welcome to Team Galicia, Yoo Seol…-nim!
If there was one tiny complaint, it was this: why did she pause before saying “-nim” when calling her name? Was she trying to pick a fight right now? It was a question that would not be resolved anytime soon.
* * *
After watching the back of Yoo Seol as she strode out of the café like a haughty blade queen, Shin Se-rin… Se-rin quietly tore through space in the women’s restroom and returned to the Galicia Continent. She let out a long, deep sigh.
Yoo Seol, Yoo Seol-ah. You’re still such a psycho.
She had always been a crazy person who hated strangers, but even after being introduced as a cousin, she had shown this much hostility. It was worth celebrating that she had successfully evolved from a basement-dwelling Yeopo into a true Yeopo, but maybe it was time to stop living as a social misfit, don’t you think?
…Se-rin kept those thoughts strictly inside her head. If she nagged her through messenger, Yoo Seol would only snap back with something like, “Did that bitch rat me out? Ha, I’m really going to grab her by the hair.” Still, separate from her temper, Se-rin held Yoo Seol’s art in extremely high regard.
It wasn’t simply a matter of taste. Se-rin herself admitted that her aesthetic sense was lacking, and naturally the descriptions that came out of her mouth tended to be rather cryptic. But Yoo Seol’s greatest strength? That heavenly sense that could turn even the most garbage order into something perfect. In that regard, Yoo Seol was an irreplaceable asset to Se-rin.
Still, deceiving her in this form gave her a slight pang of guilt, so…
Se-rin made the vow in her heart. Only then could she escape this unnecessarily uncomfortable body and return to Kim Ji-hyun’s form. And once that happened, she would someday be able to explain to Yoo Seol exactly what kind of situation she had been in.
Well, even if that weren’t the case, there was still a way. The Galicia Continent was soon going to be reborn as an MMORPG. Players would not bring their real bodies; they would use avatars customized to their own tastes.
If Se-rin also customized an avatar modeled after the now-erased Kim Ji-hyun, at the very least she would be able to show her true appearance when she met Yoo Seol on the Galicia Continent.
What made that possible were golems. Although they looked more like mannequins than proper golems… by infusing a fragment of the soul, they could reproduce a shape suited to that person’s thoughts.
Had Se-rin come up with and implemented this idea alone? Not exactly. Surprisingly, it was a feature that had already existed in the now-shutdown Galicia Online!
“Looking at it that way, she seems pretty competent.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. It’s nothing.”
Although Elysia had practically abandoned the continent, simply giggling while watching whatever crap the players did and doing absolutely nothing, it seemed she had at least done what she was supposed to. Se-rin raised her evaluation of Elysia by one notch.
“Ah, customization? That’s a basic capsule function! It’s open source!”
“I see. Still, I should be able to switch my appearance to a different avatar for a little while, right?”
“Umm, but Se-rin is a goddess, right? A divine being’s dignity can’t be handled by a mere golem, so it won’t work!”
“Ugh.”
Elysia, re-evaluation. Plummeted straight to the bottom.
* * *
Team Galicia.
Total Producer: Elysia.
Main Director: Se-rin.
Sub-Director: Kim Ji-hyun.
Lead Artist (self-proclaimed Art Director): Yoo Seol.
Sound Director: Seo Han-ryang.
Aside from the minor issue that the Main Director and Sub-Director were the same person under different names, they had somehow formed a team that barely qualified as a business with five or fewer employees.
It was a ridiculous situation where there were almost no actual workers and an overabundance of PDs and directors—eerily similar to those happy-happy small-to-medium enterprises obsessed with fancy titles.
It was only natural for Yoo Seol to have doubts. In general, game development departments boasted extremely specialized organizational charts. Art design wasn’t the only kind of design.
There was balancing design, content design, action design, narrative design, quest design, level design… The elements that needed attention to make a game feel like a proper game were endless. Even if QA staff were a luxury, shouldn’t there at least be developers—programmers?
Since she couldn’t bind even her cherished former subordinate to a soul-slave contract, Se-rin did her best to soothe Yoo Seol and gloss things over. If even Yoo Seol—who would believe without question that Kim Ji-hyun could turn rice into gold—reacted like this, how would other people take it?
Until they could come up with a way for others to accept the process of developing a virtual reality game, it was right to keep the team as small as possible in order to maintain security.
“There’s a mountain of work to do.”
But Se-rin had plenty of time. Even if she had to grind like a dog by herself without burning through multiple developers, she could still bring the project up to a decent level.
On top of that, she had gained a colleague who would roll alongside her. And not just any colleague—one who could perfectly compensate for her own weakness… her lack of aesthetic sense.
A smile bloomed on Se-rin’s lips.
It was finally time to start making the game feel like an actual game.