[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : You didn’t move somewhere,]
[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : you logged off, right?]
[Party/HaveANimbleDay : yeah]
[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : I mean, no matter how I look at it,]
[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : it’s him, so why say it isn’t?]
Tell me about it.
In-game nickname Dohaesal, real name Do Hae-in—the illustrious figure who shamelessly mashed his own name with dohwasal and uses it as his game nick—pouted and stretched.
Disguised as a freshly created newbie and lying in wait, he had confirmed that the Kiran character with the exact same appearance as the one he’d met a moment ago in the Florence Eastern Forest was Ignis, even if you watched him while doing a backward roll.
From the nickname tastes alone…
Ignis, then Signiel? Is the next character going to be something like Ramiel or Metatron. Hae-in briefly thought the taste was antique, then shook his head. To each his own.
Banishing such impious thoughts far away, he propped his chin on the back of his hand and sighed.
[Party/HaveANimbleDay : Did I look suspicious or something?]
[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : possibly]
[Party/HaveANimbleDay : your nick looks more suspicious]
At Hae-in’s jab, Beg_innerGenerator—whose main nick was “MidlifeHunter”—sprang up in place.
[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : What’s suspicious about my nick]
Hae-in squinted at the slightly broken font where there was a weird extra space between “beg” and “inner,” then looked away.
[Party/HaveANimbleDay : Your main nick and this one are six of one, half a dozen of the other]
[Party/HaveANimbleDay : Enough. Get back on your main.]
[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : my pride is wounded]
[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : hey, remove the ♡♡-demon from your eyes]
[Party/HaveANimbleDay : what are you saying]
[Party/HaveANimbleDay : You think I don’t know you made it on purpose?]
[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : n-no I didn’t]
[Party/Beg_innerGenerator : ugh, I swear, this is so unfair]
Su-yeong denied it, but he already had a long history. Real name Park Su-yeong. He and Hae-in had been bashing around together as guildmates for three years, but he hadn’t preferred such provocative nicknames from the start. The world had simply made him hard. He’d begun with a cutesy first nick like [AcornTart] and a small, cute Yana female avatar.
[Guild/AcornTart : You ♡♡ ♡♡♡-like ♡♡s]
[Guild/AcornTart : Every time we finish a raid, you message me like ♡, you ♡♡ punks]
[Guild/AcornTart : I’m the one who gave you the bus,]
[Guild/AcornTart : why are you acting like you cleared it for me, you ♡♡]
With his clean play manners and solid skill as a Crusader, what party wouldn’t want him? With superior control, and with a nickname and customization that suggested a particular gender, gnats swarmed him daily.
It would be one thing if those girl-crazy idiots just begged, please join our raid, our guild, our party, politely—but they kept spouting nonsense just because Su-yeong was a woman.
He’d only run a few raids because he liked the party composition, yet some guy would unilaterally act like they were flirting; or later claim he’d been strung along. After a few repeats, Su-yeong’s patience hit bottom.
How do I keep these lowlifes from sticking to me? As an extreme measure he even made his customization as ridiculous as possible, but the nickname was too cute and it did no good. Worse, lunatics appeared who thought that even the bad customization was “endearingly clumsy.”
I’m so fed up I just want to quit this game.
To fire-breathing Su-yeong, one guildmate proposed an extreme measure. At first everyone fretted—do we really need to go that far; what if you get a 100-day suspension—but in the end they adopted the plan. Su-yeong changed his nickname from “AcornTart” to “ProstateConqueror.”
He more or less succeeded at shaking off the riffraff who approached with impure motives… but a problem he hadn’t considered cropped up.
[Guild/ProstateConqueror : hey ♡♡;;]
[Guild/ProstateConqueror : I’m getting kicked from every party I join;;]
[Guild/ProstateConqueror : what do I do;;]
[Guild/Fang : can’t blame them;]
[Guild/Fang : I’d boot you too if I met you in a pug1;;]
[Guild/ProstateConqueror : ♡♡ what’s so wrong with a prostate]
[Guild/ProstateConqueror : you’ve got one too, ♡♡]
[Guild/Seol Hee-won : Saying that with that nick is pretty threatening, no?;]
[Guild/Seol Hee-won : If I met you today for the first time I’d report you;]
While the nickname didn’t quite merit official sanctions, it was off-putting enough that he kept getting kicked from pugs, which in turn severely interfered with play. So he compromised with himself, changing to something that looked suspicious but didn’t quite make people say “is this guy insane?” which was his current “MidlifeHunter.” Whether it meant a hunter in midlife or a hunter who hunts midlifers was left ambiguous.
After that, every time he made an alt he’d again pick some weird nick, insisting he didn’t see what was so off-putting about ProstateConqueror.
[Party/HaveANimbleDay : Enough; back on your main.]
[Party/HaveANimbleDay : You too, get on your main.]
Clicking his tongue lightly, Hae-in returned to the character select screen, gave a sidelong glance at the Kiran he’d created to tail what he suspected was Ignis’s new character, then clicked the one with [Dohaesal] over his head.
(Nacht) Dohaesal Lv 140 (Storm Haste)
Title: Ruler of Nacht
There were three total guilds per server that could own a castle. If you bore the “Ruler of the Server” title above your head as proof your guild had taken first in the regular three-way ranking war, most people would assume you had at least one or two alts… But Hae-in had only three characters to his name: the just-created “HaveANimbleDay,” the very first one he’d ever made—its creation date not far off the open beta—and his main, “Dohaesal.”
Naturally. The only thing that kept Hae-in from quitting Eraha Online—the force that kept him playing—was his goal to someday become Ignis’s buddy DPS. If it wasn’t StH, Flamer’s designated partner, he had neither reason nor desire to level it. Some rankers leveled other jobs to study PvP tactics and strategy, sure, but you could learn enough with the skillsets the class-change master NPCs let you trial.
The screen went dark and bright again, and the very first thing Hae-in checked upon logging back into the server as Dohaesal was the name he most admired—green for the first time in ten years.
[Online]
[- Ignis]
The person wearing that name over their avatar claimed they’d just picked up the nickname by chance and were merely a fan, but Hae-in could tell that was a lie.
[Whisper/Dohaesal : Then is a friend request okay?]
[Whisper/Ignis : Yes]
[Whisper/Ignis : A friend request is fine]
In Eraha Online, friend-adding didn’t require the other party’s approval by default. When both followed each other like a mutual subscription, an extra icon appeared to show you were mutual friends; that’s how you could tell mutuals from one-sided friends.
And the character before his eyes was someone he’d tracked down by receiving an online alert as a one-sided friend and then chasing the location shown next to the nickname, scouring the entire Florence Eastern Forest map to find him.
If it were true that someone had luckily picked up an abandoned nickname, then in Hae-in’s friend list the real Ignis account should have shown as .
Even so, there’s always a one-in-a-million. On the off chance, he prompted the other to add him back and a moment later, the line he’d dreamed of since starting Eraha popped up at the bottom.
[System : You and Ignis have become friends.]
It is him! Hae-in slammed his forehead down on the keyboard to calm a heart thundering as if it would explode.
Is this a dream? No, it hurts.
Even then, he still couldn’t collect himself and slapped his own cheek. Of course it hurt.
Clutching his tingling face, he stared bright-eyed at the monitor, where a Kiran male with prickly red eyes, draped in some yellowish sackcloth, swished his tail.
The person he’d feared he might never cross paths with again for nearly ten years—not only was he alive and moving before his eyes, he’d added him as a friend. He kept insisting he wasn’t Ignis, but that wasn’t the point right now.
Ignis-nim… that gear you’re wearing is exclusive and trade-locked, you know…
Even holding a non-tradable item could have some explanation, sure. A nickname can be swapped. Once you change to another nick, ownership can be lost and taken. But account-unique friend records did not follow a nickname. It had been over ten years since Hae-in one-sidedly friended Ignis. The account that had been online just now was clearly the real Ignis account.
Then why… keep insisting he isn’t himself?
And why did he abandon the Ignis account, create a new character, dabble in the very start of the tutorial, and quit? He couldn’t make sense of it at all.
- PUG Meaning. PUG stands for “Pick-Up Game” or sometimes “Pick-Up Group”. It’s all about jumping into a game with random players. ↩︎
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