I've Seen That Username Somewhere...
The message sitting on my screen left me staring into space.
I'd prayed for this, and it had actually come true. Was God real after all?
The dumb thought even crossed my mind — was Nyarlathotep, that great cosmic evil, seriously looking out for a nobody like me?
I only zoned out for a few seconds before snapping back to my senses and starting a reply. This was a new client. I needed to give them a proper, professional reception.
And then the other side went quiet. They were probably figuring out what to commission — hammering the backspace key over and over, if I had to guess.
As I sat there waiting for them to type, worry and anticipation tangled together in my chest.
Please let it be something normal.
That was the only way I was getting paid. The username "HopelessMe" alone told me nothing about what kind of tastes this person had. The world was overflowing with hopeless people, after all. Just look at LegalizeRape, who'd messaged me a few minutes ago — hopeless from a certain point of view. And I was pretty hopeless myself, sitting in my room drawing pictures and bleeding money out of chronic jerkoffs.
So in the end, that username wasn't much of a clue. Even so, I couldn't stop staring at it. I'd seen that name somewhere before.
No.
I'd definitely seen it somewhere...
I was sure of it. I didn't know where, but that username was lodged somewhere in my brain. I just couldn't pin it down — an itch I couldn't quite scratch.
Ah... where was it?
That almost-there feeling was driving me insane. It was definitely moving around on the border between my conscious and unconscious mind, but it refused to climb all the way up. Stubbornness kicked in, and I decided to track the name down. If I'd seen a username like that, it had to have been on some community site.
Was it BC?
So I went to BC — the gathering place of every type of human being imaginable, where people unleashed their sexual desires without a shred of shame behind the veil of anonymity. Come to think of it, most of the social media I used was BC anyway. If I'd seen it anywhere, it had to be here.
Man. I was going through the trouble of running a search just to remember a single username. What the hell was I doing with my life? A brief wave of existential exhaustion washed over me. But if something itches, you scratch it. The human brain evolved to solve problems and process information. In other words, doing a little background check to satisfy my curiosity was perfectly reasonable.
I typed the name into the search bar and hit enter. In that instant, like a jolt of electricity, I remembered where I'd seen it.
After falling into this world, I'd been browsing galleries to get a handle on the situation. There'd been a time when I'd nearly coughed up blood looking at a Paxiv drowning in futanari and checked the gallery's public sentiment. I remembered a user with that username making a post just to vent their sexual desires — pretty explicit, no filter whatsoever.
The title of the post I'd seen back then...
I want a guy to step on me... was that it?
The moment that thought clicked into place—
Whoosh!
Their posts came cascading down the screen. Everything HopelessMe had written with their own two hands. There were so many that a single page filled up instantly and spilled over onto the next. I couldn't help but be impressed by what I was reading.
"Whoa......"
Every single one was a post about their own desires or wishes. Looks like they'd been dumping out a craving-post once a day, or at worst once every two days, and the count was already approaching a hundred. Holy shit. One post every day or two, and they were already near a hundred? That meant they'd been at this for at least a hundred days.
At one point, while venting their desires, they'd apparently been struck by a sudden sense of injustice and posted this:
I set my phone down with a soft clack. My head felt a little dizzy.
At this point, there was no way I couldn't tell what kind of tastes they had. They were living up to that username, that was for sure.
"She really was a hopeless bitch..."
I muttered, rubbing between my eyebrows. Why was every single person who commissioned me like this...? Well, it was all my own karma. If I'd wanted to draw normal stuff, I shouldn't have started by drawing people with their arms and legs chopped off. Lee Se-won, you goddamn piece of shit.
It's not like I can just start drawing male character porn, though.
If you're gonna blame someone, blame the world, not me, Lee Se-won you son of a bitch!
I was in the middle of fighting with my inner self when—
Ding!
An alert finally came through. Naturally, it was from HopelessMe. They'd been silent for a while, but it looked like they'd finally finished writing out their request. I opened it worried about how long the wall of text would be, but it wasn't as long as I'd expected. They'd probably spent all that time deleting and rewriting. Of course, just because the text was shorter than expected didn't mean the intensity was any lower.
"Damn... look at that level of detail. What a piece of work......"
The incredibly specific request drew another round of admiration from me. At least LegalizeRape had been embarrassed about it at first. This one didn't even have that. They were requesting even the most minute details without a shred of hesitation. Maybe because they'd been venting their sexual desires on the gallery for so long, they had zero reservations about telling a complete stranger their kinks.
Hah. This was all the dark side of anonymity. The internet wrapped everyone in a thick mask, no matter who they were, so people just dumped out their desires without a second thought. This was exactly why we needed a partial real-name system.
"Still, at least it's something I can actually draw."
Well, I'd been talking shit, but it was well within what I could handle. Per the notice, it was a two-shot, one man and one woman, and while it was on the hard side, it wasn't like, insanely hard. Honestly, I'd drawn this kind of fetish stuff plenty in my previous life, so I was pretty confident. Commissions like this had come in often, and I could draw them without any resistance.
What surprised me was the intensity of their lust, not the fetish itself — that I could accommodate just fine. Hell, a masochist woman? I'd actually like to meet one...
This girl is popular in real life?
Sounded like bullshit to me. It was her own claim, so there was no credibility, and more than half the people on places like BC were liars anyway. So I didn't particularly believe it.
Another message popped up while I was still turning that over. I shoved those thoughts into a corner of my mind and quickly sent a reply — as brightly as possible. The customer always comes first when it comes to service.
This time it was prepaid. The other party could always take the money and ghost. Originally I should have taken a deposit from LegalizeRape too, but back then neither of us had any credibility. I'd gone with payment-after-delivery to build some trust. But now I'd fully completed a commission and delivered a solid result. I had more credit now. Which meant it was time to introduce a prepaid system.
They replied, and soon after an alert chimed that the money had come in. Another fifty thousand won in the bag. Just thinking about good old Shin Saimdang — that reliable lady on the fifty-thousand-won bill — landing in my account again made the corners of my mouth lift on their own.
It was late tonight, so if I started drawing tomorrow, I'd have it done in two or three days. With that, they ended the conversation. Business concluded, they'd vanished.
For a moment, a small emptiness wrapped around me.
I glanced at the top of my phone to check the time. It was already pointing at 2 AM. The weekend, which had felt like a dream, had already slipped away completely, and as a student I had to go back to school in the morning. Which meant I needed to get to sleep a little earlier from now on. My sleep schedule had already been thoroughly wrecked, but if I wanted a functional daily life, I had to fix it.
Honestly, 2 AM is still pretty late...
Whatever. It was still better than passing out at four or six in the morning. Luckily I'd woken up a bit earlier today, so even though it was earlier than usual, I was actually getting sleepy. I let the oncoming wave of sleep take me, and drifted off.