Aggro (Just Chatting)
"Haaaahm..."
It had been a long time since she'd woken to a morning that wasn't an alarm — stretching as the yawn left her, climbing up out of sleep on her own.
That couldn't be right. There was no way she hadn't set one.
"The battery's... dead."
The phone she usually left plugged into the charger had been flung into a corner of the bed. When she checked, it was at zero percent, powered off.
Why didn't I charge it? And why is my hair this much of a disaster?
The face in the vanity mirror was wildly disheveled. Even on a normal morning she didn't wake up looking like this.
"Mm... so, yesterday—"
She decided to walk the memory back, slowly. Yesterday had been the afterparty for the Kwitch exhibition team. She'd talked her father into letting her go, and with her mother's help she'd finished getting ready to leave the house. After that she'd ridden in Driver Kwon's car to somewhere near Wall-X Galbi, the place they'd agreed on, gotten out, and walked the rest of the way. Along the way she'd run into Han Seongun. Oh — right. That guy was Nebula.
"Ah."
Only then did she understand why her hair looked like this, and why the phone had ended up thrown over there.
She'd said it to draw a line, the moment he set that strange mood. Right afterward she couldn't stand the awkwardness and went home first. She made her excuses to her parents — she was tired, she'd come back early — went into her room, and tried to rest.
What she had been certain was a confession turned out to be something else entirely. The moment she understood that...
"Aaaah! Choi Eunha, you crazy bitch!"
She'd kicked the blankets, hard, before she even knew she was doing it. The phone lying over there, the wreck of her hair — both were probably from thrashing the covers all night and then falling asleep in the middle of it.
"Haha..."
It was a little late to explain herself, but at the time she really had thought he was confessing. Han Seongun was a guy, after all, and her face was at the level where a man falling for her at a glance wouldn't even be strange. It felt a bit much to say out loud, but she'd inherited her mother's genes. That much she could guarantee.
And what he'd actually meant to say had been nowhere near anything she'd expected.
"A pro debut..."
She'd wondered herself, all this time, why Nebula still hadn't debuted. Even after they became friends she simply hadn't asked, figuring he had his reasons, whatever they were. Whatever those reasons had been, Nebula had made up his mind to go pro now — and by a pretty adventurous route.
PCK CL. The league under PCK, Korea's first division for Project A. What people called the second division.
It was unexpected, the greatest prospect of all time choosing the second division. Think it through, though, and a few reasons held up.
First, Han Seongun was still seventeen. You had to be eighteen to be eligible for PCK, so at seventeen he couldn't play. She'd been caught by that same age rule herself — a year as a trainee, then a debut the moment she turned eighteen. He'd probably picked the second division to get into real matches as fast as he could.
Second, the SC he'd chosen was a team being rebuilt from the ground up. Most second-division teams, unlike the first-division ones, never got proper support from a sponsor. SC was different. A major corporation had latched onto it — and not as a sponsor at a distance, but by running the team itself.
SC was going to become an entirely different organization from what it had been. With a conglomerate behind it, the club's goal wouldn't be something as small as a second-division title. First-division promotion, and past that, too.
For the record, the conglomerate H that had acquired SC was her father's company. She hadn't known he'd bought a pro team.
Had watching the exhibition final she'd played in last week done it?
No. That couldn't be it. The final was a week ago, and the exhibition itself hadn't even been going on for a month. Her father, acquiring a team in that window? It didn't make sense. When it came to business he was always cold in his judgment, so the reasonable reading was that he'd already been watching the esports market.
The coaching staff wasn't bad, either. Coach Kim Sangho might not be S-tier among domestic coaches, but he was comfortably A-tier.
...Well. He still wouldn't measure up to Coach Yoo Seonho, from her days at KZ.
Looked at objectively, SC was an absurdly attractive team for a prospect. Attractive enough that you'd do whatever it took to get their attention and force your way onto the roster.
It just hadn't been an offer that tempted her.
"You really don't have a single regret left?"
She still didn't know whether she had any lingering attachment to pro play.
"What matters more are the things you gain while you walk toward a dream."
She didn't know what she'd gained from that life, either.
She hadn't wanted to refuse him that cleanly.
But the only answer she could give to the offer Han Seongun had held out was that one short word. Sorry.
If she wavered, she'd be a burden on him and on SC both. It was too late to challenge all of it again. She'd already been bent too many times.
"Eunha! Are you up?"
The housekeeper's voice came through the door. She must have come to wake her, since Eunha hadn't gotten up. On any ordinary day Eunha kept a routine so regular she'd never once slept in — weekends included.
"Yes!"
The door rattled.
"Aigoo, what happened to your hair? Wash up and come eat."
"Ahaha... what about the grown-ups?"
"You seemed tired, so everyone ate already. You hurry out and eat too."
They'd waited for her to wake, then gone ahead without her.
"Okaaay."
She got out of bed, washed, and came out to find it was already noon. Lunch. Considering she was usually up by nine at the latest, this was an enormous sleep-in. Still, she'd slept far more deeply than usual, and her body was bright with energy.
"Oh, spicy braised chicken today?"
She came down to the first-floor kitchen and sat at the table. The lunch the housekeeper set in front of her was spicy braised chicken stew. That dish, of all things — it brought the old days back.
"Our girl's up? It'll taste better while it's still hot..."
Her mother drifted over as if it were the most natural thing in the world and sat down across from her. Hadn't she already eaten?
"Mom, you didn't have lunch either?"
"I already ate. I just wanted to watch our girl eat."
Her mother, honestly. It wasn't on her father's level, but this was still a fairly advanced case of loving one's daughter. Eunha picked up a drumstick with her chopsticks.
Mmm. Smells good.
"Thanks for the meal!"
She took a drumstick that looked easy to eat and bit off a big mouthful.
"Mmph—!"
The salt and the heat were so serious she barely kept herself from spitting it back out. It wasn't inedible. It just didn't feel like the housekeeper's cooking. The meat was too tough, and the sauce tasted as if spice and salt had refused to find a balance and were each insisting on their own argument.
"Cough—! Cough—! Ugh..."
Just like that time.
"You okay? Want me to get you some water?"
Her mother, worried she'd choked. Looking at her, Eunha remembered. The first time her mother had taken a turn at cooking.
Usually buried in acting work, her mother had come home when a short break opened up after a schedule, and with the housekeeper suddenly away on leave, she'd taken over the housework. Her father had said they could just order in, but her mother had refused outright — she couldn't feed the children food like that. Eunha had thought, back then, that her father looked strangely desperate. Thinking about it now, that hadn't been her imagination.
Her mother's cooking could not, even as empty flattery, be called normal, and that day a portrait of hell had unfolded across the table.
She gulped down the water in the cup her mother handed her and swept the room with her eyes. The housekeeper, oddly unable to sit still. Her mother, worrying with perfect innocence. And, from a corner of the living room, her brother, carefully not meeting her gaze.
Dense as she was, she wasn't fool enough to see all of that and still not understand. Her mother had made this.
"Um... Mother, by any chance..."
"Hm? What?"
Her mother looked at her with eyes shining. Faced with that, there was no way she could say she couldn't eat it.
"N-no, it's nothing. Auntie! It's really— really good again today!"
"R-right. Eat plenty today, too..."
She hadn't been able to do this back when she was a guy. She'd managed it this time, so it was fair to count one stack of Filial Son... wasn't it?
"Cough—!"
"Eunha! Slowly, eat slowly!"
She ate less than usual, and lunch felt very long.
Ugh...
After that apocalyptic lunch she went back to her room and turned the stream on at once.
A Just Chatting stream, after so long. She'd said it before: her audience was split in two. Project A viewers who came to watch her play, and Just Chatting viewers who wanted her to talk.
She'd done nothing but Project A lately, so today it would be better to spend the time actually talking to them.
Streaming as a job. At the start she hadn't meant to take it this seriously...
In the beginning she'd chosen it as work and gone live to build a career, but the job fit her better than she'd expected. So unless something came up, she streamed all seven days of the week. On weekdays, when a high schooler had to go to school, she was serious enough to hit the button the moment she got home.
This week, of course, she hadn't managed it. Yesterday had been Saturday, the weekend, and she'd missed the broadcast for the afterparty. Her viewers knew how hard she streamed. A day or two off, they let slide without a fuss.
So this spam, at least, probably wasn't because she'd taken yesterday as a rest day.
She put on a song that wouldn't trip a copyright claim, stepped away to the bathroom, and came back to a viewer count that had climbed.
During the final she'd only just scraped past ten thousand. What was this number supposed to be?
"Um, could you ease up on the spam a little?"
In the end the spam got so bad she restricted chat to accounts that had followed for at least a month.
"Sigh..."
Now only viewers who'd followed her for over a month could type.
One restriction and the chat went spotless. Which meant most of the people watching right now were floaters who hadn't even been on her channel for a month.
Drive-by viewers only piled in like this when bait was circulating in the communities. So why?
Right after the exhibition, she would have understood. Back then she'd been finals MVP, and the showing she'd put up had been enormous. Now was different. A full week had passed, and most viewers should have lost interest. Some people wouldn't have, of course — but the jump was too big for that.
"Did some rumor about me start going around the communities?"
On the Project A gallery they called her Idol, a ridiculous nickname, because she checked the communities as often as she did. Her viewers knew that, too. Yesterday, though, she'd fallen asleep early — half from the fatigue of going out for the first time in a while, half from the mental exhaustion of the disaster her swollen self-consciousness had created — and she hadn't looked.
She hurried onto her phone and swept the places where talk of her might be moving: the internet-broadcast community, the Project A community. The conclusion she came to was this.
"It's really because of this...?"
People really would pull aggro over the most ridiculous things.