A week flew by, and there was one week left before Arizona.

In that time, Suho had settled into Mark’s house completely. No—more than settled in. He’d changed the whole way the household ran.

Eight in the morning.

A week ago this had been a war zone, the floor shaking with shouting and footsteps. Now it was unbelievably calm.

“Jenny, you done in the bathroom? Tommy, you’re up.”

“Okay, Suho.”

With Suho directing traffic, Tommy grabbed a towel and went into the bathroom without a word of complaint.

“Lily, socks?”

“Here! I got them ready last night and put them on!”

“There you go. Good job. Okay, want me to do your hair now?”

With practiced hands, Suho brushed Lily’s hair and tied it up tight in a ponytail. It was a skill that had become second nature back at the orphanage, looking after dozens of younger kids.

What Suho had brought in was nothing fancy. He gave Jenny, touchy at her age, first dibs on the bathroom. He taught Tommy, a rowdy little brother, some order. And he gave Lily, the youngest, little missions to do by herself and praised her for them. Once those simple rules started turning together, the morning chaos became a peaceful routine.

Flipping things in a frying pan in the kitchen, Mark watched the scene and laughed in disbelief.

…Wow. He really is a magician.

In just a few days, Suho had gently brought order to a house Mark hadn’t been able to keep in line in over ten years. Thanks to him, Mark didn’t have to stand there yelling at the top of his lungs with a frying pan anymore.

“I’m off to school!”

“Bye, I’m going to kindergarten!”

The front door shut after the kids left, and in an instant, only a peaceful quiet was left in the house.

Mark sat down at the table, took a bite of freshly made toast and sighed happily.

“Suho. Seriously, thanks.”

“For what?”

“Things are so easy now thanks to you. I can’t even remember the last time I ate breakfast without breaking a sweat. It might be the first time ever.”

There wasn’t a trace of tiredness on Mark’s face. If anything, he was bursting with energy. With Suho clearing away all the little stresses he carried as the head of the family, his body and mind both felt lighter.

Suho drank his juice and huffed a laugh.

“Come on. I didn’t do anything. The kids just went along with it.”

He wasn’t just being modest. Mark’s family truly liked Suho and followed his lead.

The reason was simple. Suho didn’t treat them like strangers. He treated them like real family—strict sometimes, gentle other times, just like a son of the house. Mark had opened up to him because he thought of Suho as family, and Suho was only doing his best in return.

Faced with that sincerity and warmth, even kids who were wary of strangers opened right up.

“Still, it’s impressive. I thought you were only good at baseball, but you’re a pro at babysitting too.”

The two of them went on with breakfast, relaxed.

Then Suho, scrolling through his phone one-handed, stopped. His eyes lit up.

“Mark.”

“Hm? What? Baseball stuff again? I told you, I’m not interested right now. Let’s rest while we’re resting.”

Ever since he’d declared he was going to be a major leaguer, Suho had spent the whole week looking up anything and everything to do with baseball.

“You’ll definitely be interested in this one.”

Suho showed Mark his phone. On the screen was a job posting: motion-capture actors wanted for a new game in a famous baseball video game series.

Mark skimmed it and frowned.

“Motion capture? That… thing where you move around in a skintight bodysuit? Dude, that’s embarrassing. Why would we do that? It probably doesn’t even pay much.”

Mark tried to brush it off. But Suho shook his head and tapped the line at the bottom of the screen.

“A day’s wages: a thousand dollars. Paid in cash.”

“…!”

Mark almost dropped his bread.

A thousand dollars was a big chunk of money, close to a third of what a Low-A player made in a month—and it was being offered for a single day’s wages. On top of that, the season was over, so they weren’t getting paid by the club anymore.

Mark had to nod. He needed money right now. He had to grab this job, whatever it took.

“Yeah, well. So what if it’s embarrassing?”

All he could think about was putting the money toward his family’s living expenses.

But then Mark frowned.

“But I’m the one who needs the money. You’re not pushing yourself for nothing just because of me, are you?”

Knowing Suho, Mark figured he’d go do something he didn’t need to do just to help him out. After all, Suho wasn’t as strapped as Mark was.

“It’s a shoot, so it’ll wear you out in the end. I’ll go by myself. You stay home and rest.”

Suho shook his head.

“Nah. I want to go too.”

“No, why would you…”

“Well… I think there’s something in it for me.”

“Something in it for you? What… h-hold on. Let’s apply first. The shoot starts in four hours, so the spots might fill up fast!”

Mark grabbed his phone and called the number on the posting.

“Hello? I’m calling to apply as an actor! Yes. Yes. We’re minor leaguers. With the Dodgers right now. There’s two of us. Yes. Yes. Come right now? But it’s four hours from… Ah. Got it.”

Mark hung up.

“They say we have to come right now and go over the storyboard first! Let’s hurry and get ready!… Ah.”

Mark stopped mid-sentence. Looking Suho over, he saw Suho was already completely ready to go. And no wonder—Suho had gotten up at the crack of dawn again, worked up a sweat, and already showered and cleaned up.

“You’re all set, huh? You’re unreal, man. Anyway, I’ll shower real quick!”

Mark grabbed a towel and scrambled into the bathroom.

Bang.

With the door slamming shut, Suho was left alone in the living room.

He sat on the couch and looked at the words motion capture on his phone screen again.

“Hm. Never did get to tell him.”

When he’d told Mark there was something in it for him, he hadn’t just been saying it.

Motion capture.

Suho had heard about this technology. It wasn’t just taking someone’s movements and putting them on a character. Dozens of sensors went all over your body. Then dozens of infrared cameras tracked the movement of your joints, your range of rotation and your changes in speed, down to the hundredth of a second. It was cutting-edge stuff.

Biomechanics, they called it.

It was the very same technology major league clubs used to fix a player’s pitching delivery or batting stance. It showed you, in cold hard data, tiny breakdowns in balance and the places where power was leaking out—things the eye couldn’t see.

But the equipment ran hundreds of millions of won apiece. A poor Low-A minor league club obviously didn’t have it, and neither did High-A or Double-A. It was gear you’d only get to see in the majors, or at least at Triple-A, the top of the minors.

And I can use that equipment and get paid for it, instead of paying?

It was like getting paid to have the kind of precision checkup you’d normally pay for. It might tire him out a little, but no matter how he looked at it, the upside far outweighed the downside.

I want to find out before I head to Arizona.

How efficient he was right now, scientifically speaking. Whether he had any bad habits he needed to fix. The technology might tell him.

Suho had never been one to trust science blindly. But after Alex taught him mechanics, he’d changed his mind.

Arizona’s crawling with monsters.

He might have a hard time surviving on feel and experience alone, the way he had in Low-A. So if he could use this chance to break his own body down into objective data—

Suho’s eyes gleamed sharply.

I might even get data that’ll push my baseball to the next level.

And the money was a bonus. He was a minor leaguer too, so there was nothing wrong with earning every extra cent he could.

The place the two of them arrived at was a big studio near Hollywood.

When they opened the door of the huge warehouse-style building, a completely different world spread out in front of them. Dozens of infrared cameras packed the ceiling and walls. In the middle was a giant green screen, and along one wall stood rows of monitors running complicated graphs and 3D models in real time.

“Wow… Suho. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Mark looked around, his mouth hanging open.

“I heard American schools have cutting-edge stuff like this sometimes.”

“That’s the good, expensive schools. At my school, the computers barely even worked.”

“Ah…”

Suho let out a short sigh. Now that he thought about it, the scenery of Mark’s neighborhood came back to him.

Just then, a staffer with a clipboard came over to them.

“You’re the applicants, right? First, you’ll need to prove you’re pro players.”

The staffer’s tone was businesslike.

Without a word, Suho took out his phone and opened his photos. It was the championship picture from the ballpark in San Jose a few days ago: Suho in the front row holding the trophy, and Mark beside him with an arm around his shoulders.

“This is me. And that’s him.”

The staffer looked back and forth between the phone and their faces, and his eyes went round.

“Oh. That’s definitely you. Quakes uniforms and… great.”

He sighed with relief and went on.

“Honestly, a lot of people apply who aren’t ballplayers. Most of them are amateurs who can only imitate the form. Oh, of course, plenty of minor leaguers applied too.”

Which meant there were a lot of other applicants besides Suho and Mark.

It made sense. The reality of the minors—Low-A especially—was harsh. During the season they got paid about what a part-time job paid by the hour, and in the offseason even that stopped and the paychecks dried up completely. Things had supposedly gotten better lately, but they were still poor.

So an offseason side job wasn’t optional. It was a must. Uber driver, hitting coach giving baseball lessons, valet parking, manual labor. To make ends meet and pay for training, players who’d taken off their uniforms had to sweat through some kind of work.

No wonder, then, that applicants had flocked to a sweet side gig paying a thousand dollars for a day’s wages.

He glanced over at the other applicants gathered around the waiting area and said firmly:

“But I’m going to have to send the rest of them home.”

“Uh… all of them?”

“Yes. The two of you are plenty. Why? You’re champions, aren’t you?”

He smiled and added:

“From the photo, we’ve got starters from the championship team here. Why would we need anyone else? Quality’s guaranteed.”

It was a roundabout way of saying that no applicant was more professional than Suho and Mark.

Suho couldn’t help huffing a laugh. The players themselves didn’t care much about a minor league championship trophy. All they wanted was to move up. But from the outside, it looked completely different.

Well, sure. Ordinary people wouldn’t know the ins and outs of the minors.

To them, what mattered was the trust that came with the title of a championship-team player.

Suho looked at the gleaming high-tech equipment.

So this is what winning it all pays back?

What if they hadn’t won? What if they didn’t have that photo with the trophy? They might have had to mix in with all those applicants and take a test, or even gotten sent home. So this chance wasn’t dumb luck. It was a fair reward for the sweat he’d put in, and that made him glad.

“Okay, we don’t have much time, so let’s get right to it. This is the storyboard for today’s shoot.”

The staffer showed them a tablet and walked them through it: batting stances, fielding moves, slides, and a few special situations to act out. They listened closely to everything, down to how the rehearsals would work and what to watch out for so the sensors didn’t glitch.

“Now just go change and come on out.”

The two of them headed for the changing room.

A little later, they stood in the middle of the studio in black skintight bodysuits covered in sensors.

Mark was squirming, busy covering his privates, but Suho was different.

This is it.

He might look a little ridiculous, but his heart was pounding with anticipation. All those cameras were going to break his movements down to the hundredth of a second and analyze them. Data you could only see in the majors was about to be laid out in front of his eyes.

Suho bounced lightly in place to loosen up. He couldn’t wait to try it—to see how the baseball he’d changed since coming to America would hold up in the data.

The staff must have finished getting ready. The lights came on, and the red lights of the infrared cameras all turned on the two of them at once.

“Okay, rolling!”

End of Chapter 45