WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Potter
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈
Chapter 8: Demian04 and One More
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Most of us doomers are men, single men at that.
I had never seen a woman at one of John_nenon's meetups, nor had I ever read a community post where someone hinted that they were a woman.
The reason became obvious with a little thought.
Put another way, we doomers were people who prayed and held rites for the world to end.
If you were grateful to be living in the present world, you would pray for it to continue rather than prepare for its destruction.
What would have become of us if the monsters had suddenly vanished and war had never broken out?
In my case, Park Gyu, I would've been completely fucked...
Not merely ruined. I would've plunged straight into the abyss.
The proof remained intact on my phone, though it no longer had a signal.
[Web Message] (Shinheon Bank) Dear customer Park*gyu, notice of scheduled foreclosure auction for your secured loan.
[Web Message] (Sanwang Money) Park Gyu, notice of debt transfer regarding your overdue Ladies Loan.
[Web Message] This is Silla Credit Information. http://sinramoneytaker.co.kr/...
As if pouring cement and construction equipment into a patch of godforsaken land hadn't been enough, I'd run out of money near the end and taken out loans with no intention of paying them back.
It was hard to imagine a bright, flowerlike female user among such gloomy bastards.
Yet recently, a female user had appeared without warning.
It had been one year and seven months since the war began.
* * *
Anyone who spent more than a year living in a bunker faced the same problem.
A lack of entertainment.
I neither drank nor smoked.
I'd have a light drink somewhere safe, but drinking alone led to addiction, and addiction led to death.
Cigarettes were a modest pleasure, but they were also valuable barter goods, and they had a way of drawing people in.
I knew from experience that the sense of smell of someone forced to quit for a long time was no worse than a dog's.
But finding entertainment elsewhere was no easy task either.
There were no stations airing dramas on schedule, and nowhere to meet friends for a drink.
I couldn't play a physical sport like soccer because I had no team.
People who pursued group survivalism might be different, but people like me who pursued solo survival couldn't even play ping-pong.
I considered taking up fishing, but gave up because the radiation levels in the nearby reservoir wouldn't go down.
As more and more visitors came calling, I spent more time inside the bunker, and my hobbies naturally shifted to things I could do indoors.
Honestly, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the most entertaining pastime at present was our doomer community, Viva! Apocalypse!
It was a place where people who had gathered with the same mindset could talk about their similar circumstances.
There were strange users like IAmJesus, DongtanMom, and Human Hunter, but there were also plenty of exemplary users like me.
Now that more than a year and a half had passed since the war began, even I, once a perpetual lurker, was actively posting on the community.
The reasons were complicated.
I was bored, and it gave me a sense of communicating with others. But seeing my companions disappear one by one also made me unwilling to watch our precious community vanish.
The results were below.
SKELTON : (SKELTON Daily) Tonight's dinner lol
SKELTON : (SKELTON Story) Hot news I heard on a military frequency yesterday
SKELTON : (SKELTON Making) I tried making wool-felt dolls!
SKELTON : (SKELTON Video) SKELTON's Beatboxing (3)
For some reason, my community persona was coming to resemble my mentor, John_nenon.
But I wasn't simply copying John_nenon.
John_nenon only added the prefix (John_nenon), but I considered my readers by adding more specific subjects after it, like (SKELTON Video).
Unlike John_nenon, though, I had no popularity to speak of. My view counts always stayed in single digits, and I got neither likes nor comments.
Perhaps that was the limit of an ordinary guy with no skill with his hands, no gift for writing, and no knowledge worth teaching others.
When I looked at popular users like DragonC, a former webtoon artist who posted his daily life in a stylish art style, or anon118, who uploaded crude but varied homemade games, I felt as though I understood why John_nenon had been attacked so much.
Working near the bottom of the popularity caste naturally made friends similar to me stand out one by one.
There was the stubborn writer who kept uploading homemade novels even as their view counts drifted ever closer to binary, the freak who uploaded hideous nude photos of himself with baseless confidence, SeaMonkey Papa, who serialized a Sea-Monkey diary, and more.
SeaMonkey Papa might have been more popular if he had raised something else...
Among this lower group was a user named Demian04.
He habitually uploaded pen drawings of his own, and as for talent, there wasn't even the tiniest sprout of it.
His subject was always a woman with long straight hair, or so she appeared to be. It couldn't be helped that he drew so badly it looked like a ghost sketch, but he also drew her breasts absurdly large.
If they had merely been overly large, I wouldn't have said much. But Demian04 had strapped two rice sacks onto her.
Had he not eaten properly as a baby?
Demian04 mostly uploaded modern-art-like pictures and rarely posted his own thoughts or opinions.
His persistence in endlessly posting those grotesque breast monsters, drawn so unbelievably badly, might have been why I remembered him.
But at some point, this man suddenly became much more talkative.
* * *
(Search results: demian04, 4,553 results)
...
Demian04 : Yuri, you're so pretty~
Demian04 : I picked a flower for Yuri again today and took a picture.
Demian04 : The current state of Demian's food storage.jpg
Demian04 : (Demian04 Food) Tonight's dinner. Shame to eat alone~ lol
Demian04 : (Demian04 Art) Yuri fan art!!
Demian04 : (Demian04 Story) Just drove off some refugees...
“...Hm?”
Why was this person suddenly copying me?
That odd prefix was originally John_nenon's trademark, but I was the one who had inherited and stylishly improved it.
Demian was copying me, not John_nenon.
I could roughly guess why.
It wasn't to brag, but I had gained a little popularity recently.
SKELTON : (SKELTON Story) Memories of Chairman Je Pung-ho (1)
My serialized stories, where I spun my experiences with a chaebol into entertaining tales, had touched the hearts of Viva! Apocalypse!'s demanding Korean board users.
Part three, which could be called the double climax, had even made the popular posts.
It seemed Demian had read them.
But why had this guy suddenly become so chatty?
In an age of apocalypse like this, it wasn't particularly rare for someone to go insane overnight or begin doing things they had never done before.
There were endless things that could drive us mad: accumulated stress, truths we had avoided, outside threats, illness and radiation, drugs, anxiety over the future, and so on.
In Demian's case, though, he had clearly gone mad through a route different from the usual causes.
Demian04 : (Demian04) Yuri fan art!!
I clicked one of Demian's posts to inspect it.
As always, he had drawn his nymph, a woman with long straight hair.
It was still as horribly drawn as before, but one difference stood out to the eyes of Park Gyu, who had viewed every one of his pictures.
He had put effort into it.
A great deal of effort.
A question suddenly came to me.
Who was this Yuri person?
A real person? An imaginary girlfriend? I had never seen anyone like that on the community.
To begin with, this was a world where women didn't exist.
Unable to resolve my question, I asked the community for advice.
SKELTON : (SKELTON Question) Who on earth is Yuri?
Help came from an unexpected person.
Message from Defender: Looks like you blocked them. Turn on the setting to show posts from blocked users.
It was Human Hunter.
In real life, this guy was a psychopath who killed people indiscriminately. But inside the community, he was an excellent user who was a little prickly but said nothing except what was right.
A real-life bastard and an internet sage, you could say.
Wasn't it usually the other way around?
Anyway, I took Human Hunter's advice and turned on the Show Blocked Posts setting, and the hidden truth was revealed.
Yuri_need_man : Yuri's here~
Yuri_need_man : Put on makeup for the first time in ages and snapped a pic
Yuri_need_man : Depressed
Yuri_need_man : I wanna go to Starfucks...
“What is this?”
A woman.
A young, pretty woman at that.
Every post came with a photo of herself. None showed her entire face, but what I could make out looked unmistakably like the face of a beautiful woman in her early twenties.
Her figure was overflowing with sex appeal, and perhaps she knew it, because she enjoyed wearing revealing clothes.
As I recalled, she had quite a lot of tattoos.
The setting was a bunker, and these were current photos, not photos from the past.
But.
“Wait.”
For the first time in a while, my usually mild expression hardened.
This was a trap.
Why else would I have blocked an account called Yuri?
I hadn't blocked Yuri.
I had blocked the bastard using Yuri's account.
I checked.
Yuri_need_man's account information
Account ID: viva103472
Nickname: Yuri_need_man
Number of posts: 10,323
“Just as I thought.”
Viva! Apocalypse! board nicknames could be changed at any time, like group-chat nicknames, but account IDs were unique and couldn't be changed.
I searched the account ID to find the account's original nickname.
kurogod : My dad's assets are around 12 billion won.
kurogod : I miss caviar~ American prime steak can't satisfy my palate~
kurogod : The Bentley I used to drive before the war~
kurogod : Honestly, if I'd gone all in, I could've built a bunker way better than yours~
...
Kurogod. This guy was one of the four people I had blocked alongside Human Hunter.
He constantly wrote diary posts and spewed ridiculous lies.
Judging by the way he spoke, he seemed young, but I remembered that the skin texture of the hand in his verification photos looked older than mine.
The problem was that this guy had disappeared a year ago.
There was only one reason someone who wrote in their diary every single day would suddenly vanish.
Their bunker had been taken, and they had been murdered.
But the people who killed kurogod were playing a very interesting game.
Having looted every last one of kurogod's few assets, they must have discovered our community and put forward a young, beautiful woman as bait for my delightful companions.
Human Hunter had one thing to say.
Defender : No one's falling for this bullshit bait, right?
There was.
Demian04 : (Demian04) Yuri~ You're really beautiful today too~ (heart-eyes emoji)
It was Demian04.
He chased after every post Yuri made, hitting Like and praising her enthusiastically.
The more meddlesome users tried to talk him out of it.
In particular, the user named SUNBI[1] was the most active in trying to stop Demian04.
SUNBI : Now, now, this won't do for a young man. Master yourself. I'll send you a porno by DM, so give your dragon a good tug and enjoy some post-nut clarity~
That much was fine. Being obsessed with a pretty woman was proof that he was healthy as a man.
Besides, Yuri's real-time leggings photos were powerful enough that even I saved them.
But everything had to come to an end.
The raiders soon showed their true colors.
Yuri_need_man : I'm lonely and I need protection. Is there a man who could let me stay for just one night?
The raiders cast their fishing rod of death.
Along with a devastating picture of Yuri in lingerie.
One outcome flowed past before me like a prophecy.
Demian04 : H-here!
The prophecy came true.
Demian took the bait in less than a second.
“Wow... Fuck.”
More than a year and a half after the war began, the users of our community had formed a fairly tight bond, if not one like Ruppert Reich Palace. Everyone tried to talk him out of it as one.
Defender : Don't. I warned you.
Even the psychopath Human Hunter did.
Of course, Park Gyu added his own cry.
SKELTON : (SKELTON Advice) Demian. It's fine if you copy me, but please face reality.
The one who criticized this situation most fiercely was SUNBI.
SUNBI : Yuri. I warn you. If you lay a hand upon any member of our community, we shall never stand idly by!
As the community backlash grew fierce, the raiders changed tactics.
Yuri_need_man : So many people are jealous. Let's talk through DMs~
In other words, they would talk through direct messages, private notes only they could see.
Naturally, nobody saw Demian04 after that.
SUNBI, who had tried to set Demian04 straight, seemed disappointed by the matter and also vanished without a trace.
The most mysterious result of the incident was Yuri's disappearance.
Perhaps they only intended to make one score. The wolf wearing the skin of a community user never appeared on the board again.
* * *
A week passed.
For some reason, I suddenly became curious about Demian04's past.
What sort of person had he been before the war and immediately after it began?
He had first become active right after the war began.
Even then, he said little and only uploaded pictures.
At the time, his favorite subject was not women with absurdly huge breasts, but landscapes.
Unlike his crude portraits, his landscape paintings were very impressive.
In particular, Untitled 04, a landscape painting of a sunset sea and a lonely lighthouse island, was quite beautiful.
Beautiful enough that I printed out a copy and hung it in my bunker.
I thought that was the end of the Demian episode, but there was more to the story.
Defender : Yuri verification, a little late
Demian04 was not the only one to attend Yuri's murder meetup.
Our Human Hunter had attended as well. He mercilessly killed all the raiders and their front woman, then uploaded verification photos to the board.
The people he posted were not only the raiders.
He also documented our former comrades, with more respect than he showed the raiders. Their faces were covered.
Their naked, beaten-to-death corpses felt distinctly different from the raiders Human Hunter had killed.
But there were two of them, not one.
Demian04 had not been the only one who went there to die.
Defender : Want to know who the other one was?
Who could it be?
Defender : 1010?
Defender : SUNBI.
“Ah.”
Footnotes:
[1] SUNBI evokes seonbi, a traditional Korean scholar known for learning and moral principles. The user affects an old-fashioned, dignified manner of speech.
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