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I never thought I'd get shut down that hard!
No pretty words, no softening it — just a single consonant of pure will. It felt like a wall of winter squash: hard, dense, and utterly unbreakable.
Not that I could afford to give up.
Yeah. She wasn't going to fold that easily.
How was I supposed to talk her into this?
"...Huh?"
Hold on. Wasn't that a little too fast of a one-eighty?
It was like she'd been sitting there waiting for me to say exactly that. Getting her to listen was a good thing, obviously — so why did I feel like I'd just taken a loss?
A truly cool, ruthlessly concise conversation. Looking at the chat alone, it went past a one-sided notice and straight into orders.
Something rebellious boiled up from deep in my chest — but if you actually tallied who needed whom here, I was the one asking. I had no choice but to go along. For now.
That did not mean I was surrendering to her charisma.
Right. I'd meet her in person and stand my ground! I'd show her I wasn't some pushover she could just yank around!
Steeling myself for battle, I strode out of the house with my head held high.
"It's been a while."
"Hai!"
"What do you want to eat? My treat."
"Ehehe."
I folded.
But if a noona was buying me something this good, wasn't bowing my head the correct move? Fitting out the streaming gear had wrecked my budget, and living expenses were tight. I'd gotten some donations not long ago, but I couldn't turn those into cash yet, so for the moment they were useless. Meaning: if someone was offering to feed me, there was zero reason to refuse.
I fully intended to enjoy every last bite of the dessert and drinks she was buying.
"Ah! It's out! I'll grab it!"
I scampered over to the counter and came back with our order. An iced Americano, a mango smoothie, and a chocolate roll cake besides.
"Itadakimasu!"
I immediately sucked down a long pull of smoothie through the straw, then sliced off a piece of cake and popped it in my mouth.
Sweetness bloomed. This fantastical flavor! I was so glad to be alive!
I didn't bother hiding the smile that rose on its own. If anything, I closed my eyes and worked my tongue, determined to savor every bit of the sugar spreading through my mouth.
SAX noona watched me with open interest, sipping her Americano. Her real name was... Seo Yewon, right? So that made her Yewon noona. Though when I actually said it out loud, I'd have to call her unnie.
"You eat like you're the luckiest girl in the world."
"That's a compliment, right?"
"Of course it is. Enjoying your food is fine, but weren't we supposed to talk?"
Right. I'd gotten so drunk on the happiness of dessert that I'd completely forgotten. This was an important meeting. A business meeting, even.
On YouTube, thumbnails matter just as much as the edit. That is not an exaggeration. If anything, when it comes to grabbing a wandering eye with something punchy, nothing beats a thumbnail — especially with a stream like mine, where I still didn't show my face.
Which meant I needed Yewon noona's help. Absolutely.
The world wasn't down to a single illustrator, of course. If this conversation went nowhere, I could always hire someone else. But the moment I'd first received her art, I'd understood: only this drawing could express who I was right now, perfectly. Call it a fated pull.
"I'm planning to start YouTube for real this time. So..."
"You want me to do it."
"...Sou desu."
She didn't answer right away. She took another unhurried sip of coffee, and I couldn't read a thing from her eyes. How had she taken it?
The Seo Yewon I knew was not an ordinary person. Money barely interested her, and if a request didn't meet her own private standard, she simply would not draw. She'd liked me last time, luckily — but there was no law that said she would again.
And the biggest problem was something else entirely.
"You do understand what asking me to be your thumbnail artist actually means, right?"
She'd zeroed in on it too.
Thumbnails. The covers for every video uploaded to YouTube. Same as an editor: you had to keep working, steadily, without stopping. It wasn't like last time, when one illustration had been the end of it.
"What's your upload schedule?"
"...Nothing's set in stone yet, but the end goal is a video every day..."
"So you want a drawing every day."
That was not a workload you could shrug off. You couldn't expect museum-grade quality on a thumbnail anyway. Even the stream illustration she'd done for me must have taken a serious amount of time — doing that every single day was not a casual ask.
"Did I mention this? Drawing isn't my main job."
"...I think you might have."
"And if I'm drawing a thumbnail every day, I'd have to make that the main job, wouldn't I?"
There was simply too much work to squeeze into leftover hours as a side gig. Sure, some artists carved out the time and did it anyway — but I couldn't demand that of her. So I couldn't argue. I just nodded quietly.
"Never mind the rest of it. How much were you thinking per piece?"
So it came down to this after all.
However little she cared about money, this was still twenty-first-century Korea. You needed at least enough to survive. Asking her to do daily thumbnail work for free would have been insane. The real question was whether I could even meet the rate of someone as good as she was.
"...Watashi doesn't really know how this works, so... what's a normal rate, usually?"
I had to ask carefully. Putting that question on the other person wasn't exactly professional — but I couldn't just throw out a number when I knew nothing. If I'd seen this coming, I would have asked my manager first.
Anyway, I asked the way I used to in the free market of an old online game I'd once loved: let the other person name the price. And the answer that came back was uncomfortably familiar.
"You go first."
"...That's a reverse offer, though."
"Hm? What was that?"
"Nanimo nai."
The arrow had come right back at me. Like I'd already said, I was the one in the weaker position. I couldn't stall any longer. I agonized over the number for a long time before I finally opened my mouth.
"...A hundred thousand?"
I floated it carefully, watching her face. Nothing came back. I snuck a look at her expression, but her poker face was so complete I couldn't read a thing.
A hundred thousand won was expensive enough, wasn't it? A hundred thousand a day. Every day, that was seven hundred thousand a week. Three million a month. In a year, a full thirty million!
Once I ran the numbers that far, it was the kind of offer I would have snatched up instantly if I'd had the skill and someone had put it in front of me. I'd done enough part-time work to know that a fresh graduate getting paid thirty million a year to do the thing they actually wanted was not easy to come by.
Of course, the Seo Yewon sitting across from me was not a normal person, and there was a high chance she was rich enough to find thirty million hilarious.
She sat with her thoughts for a moment. Then she finally met my eyes and answered.
"Fine."
"...Eh? Hontoni?"
"There's one condition, though."
A condition. Just imagining what she might attach to this sent a wave of dread through me. I took a short breath to steady myself and decided to hear her out.
"Hoo-ah. Hoo-ah. All right. Let's hear it!"
Yewon stood still in the middle of the street, staring at one spot.
The receding back of a girl who'd said her goodbye and walked away. A Japanese girl who, lately, had been the one thing that actually interested her.
People lived with a fantasy of streamers. Most of them were nothing but shells built for the job of being on camera — and fans fell for the shell without ever caring what was inside it.
The girl she'd met was different. Yukino Hana was different. If anything, the version of her that showed up on stream felt like a fragment. The charm she actually had had a gravity that pulled people in.
So Yewon was curious. How much of that would come through on stream? Or was it the kind of thing that ended at the stream, and went no further?
If she watched from up close, she'd find out.
Having settled that, Yewon lifted her phone and made a call.
"Hello. Yes. You can come now."
Not long after the call ended, a luxury sedan rolled up. Yewon didn't so much as blink. She walked over to the car as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
"Miss. I've come to pick you up."
"Yes."
Once she was inside, she looked entirely at ease, like someone who had been treated this way for a very long time.
Then her phone buzzed.
The contact was saved under a rather pitiful name, but Yewon knew exactly who it was. The same person who had first spotted the potential in the Japanese girl she'd recently taken an interest in.
"Hello?"
"How'd it go?"
"How do you think? I accepted, obviously."
"Nice. What'd you settle on for the money?"
"She named a hundred thousand won herself. So I just said fine."
"A hundred thousand? That's not going to be easy for her to keep up..."
"Well, if it gets hard, she can always ask me to lower it herself."
They talked over the day's meeting a little longer. Then a flicker of curiosity made Yewon ask,
"Oh, right. You planning to meet her?"
"Huh? Hana-chan?"
"Yeah. She's a completely different vibe in person."
"Hmm... I mean, I do want to meet her, but..."
"Then meet her. What's the problem?"
"...Ah, I gotta go. I'll call you back later."
The call was already dead before Yewon could get another word in. She looked down at her phone, let out a sigh, and muttered under her breath.
"Aigoo. What a pathetic bastard..."