Guess you must've found someone else to call?

Woe is me, unlucky by not checking my messages quick enough

I'm on the phone with Park Yoo-min & he's pitching me on Quasar

"Yeah, heck, both of you, that'd be aces. Though I'm sure we do do interguild partnerships, if needed."

Think he might include me in that?

I, uh

Let's have a three person phone call!!!! "Hello now this is a three person phone call!"

"Yo!"

"Good afternoon, Park Yoo-min-nim."

"...aw, mannnn, I'd just gotten used to not doing that. Yes, good afternoon, Kang Jaeha-nim."

"I'm going to just keep not doing that if that's okay with you guys. So tell us about Quasar, for me obviously the draw is that it's in Korea but presumably it has other features."

"It does! It's the best guild."

"Is it, now," he says, sounding dryly amused.

"Yeah! ...I don't know how to sell you guys on it, though, you kinda gotta be here to see it, any way I put it will sound either phony or sus."

He's not that much of a stickler for formal register but it is kind of jarring to hear this guy he's literally never met talk to him like that.

"'Phony or sus'."

"...ok like I'm gonna need you to promise that if the thing I say sounds weird then you will instead pretend I didn't say it rather than make you believe bad things about our people, it's probably me fucking up and I don't wanna do them a disservice by doing that."

"Sounds weird like you, what, accidentally implicate them in felonies?"

"What? No! It's just that, you know how Korean companies are—I guess you wouldn't. I think Japanese companies are the same? A lot of the—you know, bureaucracy and hierarchy and stuff? We don't do that. Except a lot of Korean companies say 'we don't do that' and what they actually mean is that you're meant to pretend your boss is your buddy while still licking their boots."

"I think I am maybe getting away with a lot by being Canadian. I've lived here since I was eight and yet."

"Is your guild not like that?"

Juno certainly is.

"I mean, I do call everybody -san. But they don't want me to quit and move to Canada and work with my agent there full time so they don't push me."

"Oh. Well. Most Korean guilds and Japanese guilds I've run into have a whole lotta hierarchy stuff, like, even with ranks? You gotta -nim people with ranks higher than yours, you always introduce yourself with your rank, you must've run into that when working with new espers, right? Anyway Quasar isn't like that. Prez—the guild president, I mean—wants to—see, this sounds kinda bad but he wants Quasar to kind of be like a family? Like, people who're there for you when you need them to be?"

He's right, that does sound sus.

"...ok, I've got it. I don't use -nim to talk to the guild president at all. People routinely yell at him when something's fucky. ...ok, not routinely because things aren't fucky that often, but like, it's explicitly a thing, here, that you're allowed to go yell at him if you need him to fix something. And we don't give a shit about people's ranks, no one can boss you around just 'cuz they're A-rank or Lee Tae-gun."

"You know, I'm skeptical of - deliberately manufacturing a familial atmosphere, that sounds like not a thing you can do on purpose, but I think the thing you might get instead by trying for that would probably be convenient for me personally given the givens?"

"So, like, yeah, that's why it's hard to explain because—people really do like each other here? And it's impossible to really believe it or not find it suspicious until you actually hang out with us. But it's true.

"And yeah, I think you in particular would like it."