Storm Protocol

Chapter 7 – Storm Protocol

Rain arrived early, fat‑drop and decisive, the kind that makes Singapore walk faster without admitting it. Aleem stood under the HDB void deck eaves with a paper bag of buns and the day’s plans arranged like folders in his head. The first message came before the traffic light changed.

You seeing this? – Kai, with a link that wore its urgency like too much perfume.

He didn’t open it. Not yet. He crossed on green, let a bus’s warm breath wash past, and took the lift to his floor. Keys, door, the soft thud of a house keeping his temperature for him.

His mother looked up from her morning show, eyebrows asking the kind of question that doesn’t intrude. “Rain,” she observed.

“Rain,” he confirmed, placing buns on the table. He made coffee because hands know how to do that even when eyes are busy refusing.

Only then did he open the link.

A headline barged in wearing its most speculative adjectives. Blurred photos. Circles and arrows as if the world were a crime scene that needed graphics. The copy was the usual–maybe, could be, sources say. Aoi’s name rode the waves, a buoy the article clung to so it wouldn’t have to admit it didn’t know how to swim.

Aleem put the phone face down and let the cupboard door close all the way before he set his mug down. Words behave better when you refuse to drink them too hot.

Zara, exactly one minute behind Kai: We need to pin a note in the channel. No speculation, no trending. We go quiet + kind. You free?

He was. He always would be for this.

The Telegram channel greeted him like a room he had dusted yesterday. A handful of messages already–screenshots, worried punctuation, one long paragraph of detective work he would delete in thirty seconds.

He typed a new post and pinned it with the steadiness of a man hanging a sign that must not tilt.

STORM PROTOCOL (TEMP PIN):
1) No speculation. Do not share, analyze, or amplify rumor content.
2) Do not trend. Don’t hashtag names. Don’t “defend” by fueling.
3) Report doxxing/harassment. Screenshots → platform tools. Don’t repost.
4) Keep our practices: quiet bridge, crew thanks, recycling. Normal kindness is our message.
5) If you need to say something, say it to each other: “Rest is allowed.” “We wait.” “Quiet is a gift.”
6) No targeted signage. Keep it group‑level. Safety first.
7) Resources: If today is hard, Open Door Line: (hotline), SOS: (hotline).

We don’t fix storms. We refuse to become wind.

Zara added translations that felt like they’d been written by people who spoke to their grandparents: Malay, Tamil, Chinese. She slid the hotline numbers into a separate pinned resource so the main post could stay uncluttered and usable. Kai wrote, Mod team on. DM if you see messy stuff.

Aleem messaged Ms. Lin at Open Door Line before he posted the numbers publicly: We’d like to circulate your hotline today in our channels, light touch. Okay? Anything to add?

The reply arrived with the speed of someone whose phone was always on vibrate: Okay to share. Add “If lines are busy, we will call back. You matter.” And please remind: don’t perform other people’s pain online.

He edited the pin. He breathed.

The rumor kept trying to be a wave. People have to decide what they are when water gets loud. He decided to be shoreline.

At lunch, the office performed its own ritual of distance. Colleagues looked up from screens and then down again with the particular politeness of Singaporeans who have learned how to not make each other’s hobbies into meetings. Nadiah from finance, who once lent him her charger in a way that saved his week, said, “You okay?” without italics. He was. He said yes.

He ate rice with an egg on top and refused to open the app that would make him feel like a bucket under a leak. He answered two emails with paragraphs so clear they felt like clean floors. He stacked tasks in an order that let him look up at 5:30 and recognize the face of the day.

On the MRT home, the carriage was a classroom of screens. A teenager watched a reaction video of someone reacting to the rumor by crying very attractively. The woman next to him typed and deleted the same sentence six times before sending nothing, which made Aleem want to give her a medal for restraint.

His phone buzzed. From: Han Seung‑ah – Guidance re: social chatter. He opened it standing because the email’s subject promised balance.

Hi,

We’re aware of today’s rumor cycle. Thank you to SG community leads for not amplifying. Gentle requests:

– Please don’t create targeted slogans or signs; keep messaging group‑level.
– Avoid speculative “defense” threads; they increase risk.
– If you circulate mental health resources, keep them generic and local.

We appreciate your consistent respect for boundaries.

– H. Seung‑ah

He replied on the platform that keeps receipts: Understood. We’ve pinned a Storm Protocol: no speculation, no targeted signs, hotline resources generic. We’ll keep normal kindness and stay out of the wind.

Three dots appeared and paused like breath. Thank you came back, two words that weighed correctly.

The fan‑meet that weekend did not cancel. The company had practice at being a weather service; it knew the difference between storm and typhoon. The room wore daylight like armor. Staff faces looked like staff faces–busy, not brittle. The girls came out the way they always did, on time and together, and did their job with the professionalism of people who had trained hard and slept little.

He watched Aoi with the same settings he used for concerts: not hunting for signs, only monitoring the room’s kindness. If there was a new carefulness, it was small–how she checked the floor with her eyes before stepping down from the stool, how the mic stayed an inch closer to her mouth before she put it away. On the big screen, her smile chose polite over pearly. It was enough.

When the host, who is paid to be breezy, grazed near a question that would have made the day worse, his own instincts did something right–he laughed it away and pulled the conversation into a game about dialects and snacks. The room let itself be redirected like a river learning a kinder path.

During the final bow, the THANK YOU, CREW cards went up as always, white edges clean against the air. No extra words. Nothing performative. The message did its work because it had been trained to.

After, backstage corridors smelled like lemon cleaner and tired sneakers. At the collection point, a junior sound tech–barely out of school, hair clipped too short by someone trying to keep costs down–handed over a stack of cards with both hands as if returning library books. “These are good,” she said, English quick and precise. “My ears thank you for the bridge thing also.”

“We’re learning where to be quiet,” Aleem said, because that’s all it was.

On the way out, the security team had made a soft barrier with their bodies near a door that led nowhere anyone should wait. The cluster of fans who had not yet learned to love their own time stood with umbrellas and hope. He didn’t look twice. His eyes found the path to the MRT instead–as if good habits put reflective tape on the floor.

The toolkit traveled like weather. Kuala Lumpur’s crowd sang soft with capricious enthusiasm and then got it right on the second try. Manila nailed it in one go and produced a choir of aunties who could hold a third above the melody. Osaka didn’t need a graphic; the ushers simply told people what would happen and the room obeyed because that’s what rooms do there.

The first ripple came on a Tuesday, a note from a promoter’s office in Japan forwarded through Seung‑ah: Osaka crew appreciated the quieter bridge. Arigatou. Please continue to coordinate with local security; do not use large signs. – T. Ohno (Floor)

Aleem read it twice and imagined the floor manager writing it with a pen stolen from a catering table, because everyone in the world steals pens from catering tables.

A week later, a venue manager in Manila, copying the liaison, added: Your “sing soft” slide is elegant; thank you for keeping it off the jumbotrons and using handouts instead. Our decibel meter noticed the difference in the bridge. Crew went home with less ringing.

Zara printed the notes and stuck them, with permission, in their drive under a folder named Storm → Proof of Kindness. “Not to boast,” she said, “but to remind ourselves this works.”

Kai, who had been pretending to be unserious for years, wrote in the channel: Please show your grandchildren how respectful we were once.

On a heavy afternoon that tried to collapse into rain and thought better of it, Aleem met Ms. Lin for a tea that was not therapy and yet felt like getting the right answers without asking the right questions.

“We’ve seen an uptick in calls from young people,” she said, stirring without sweetening. “Rumor cycles do that. Your community’s posts have been gentle. Thank you for not making us into a campaign.”

“We try not to turn help into content,” he said.

She nodded, the way adults nod when someone says a thing that, if kept, will make their job lighter. “If you want one line to add in future storms, use this: Pause, breathe, ask if posting will help the person you think you’re helping.”

“I’ll steal it legally,” he said, and she smiled like someone who had been asked too rarely.

The next concert cycle brought the rumor’s afterlife with it–the way shadows stay shapes even when the object has moved on. A question during the ment circled close enough to count as reckless. The host set it down. Aoi’s eyes found the floor marks she trusts. The room’s volume decided to be wise. It looked like nothing. It was everything.

After the show, Aleem stood at the railing by the river where Kallang pretends to be ocean. He counted breath without the desperation of Tekong nights. Kai leaned beside him with a bag of kacang putih for style. Zara balanced on the rail like a gymnast hiding from coaches.

“We did not make the storm better,” Kai said, voice low enough to count as respectful of other people’s quiet. “We made ourselves not worse.”

“That’s adult,” Zara said. “Boring and heroic at the same time.”

“Boring is good,” Aleem said. “Boring means no one got hurt for our entertainment.”

He checked the channel once, saw the usual post‑show courtesy–thank you ushers, recycle done, someone returned a lost scarf to a volunteer–pinned a small note: Storm Protocol remains in effect for this week. If you see mess, DM mods; don’t perform cleanup in public. Then he closed the app.

A message from Seung‑ah two days later, the kind that arrives at 11:07 p.m. when people who work in backstage worlds finally sit down: Short appreciation. Your community’s “storm protocol” was shared internally as a model for non‑escalation. Thank you for emphasizing group‑level support instead of specific member targeting. Please continue to avoid airport/hotel/studio proximity messaging.

He replied with the sentence he had learned to mean: We’ll keep the rules. Approval, always.

A second email followed, forwarded through her office, anonymous by design: – “Thank you for the quiet parts.” – A. Nothing else. Black ink via pixels, from someone who had learned how to let a line be enough unless the song needed more.

He didn’t print it. He didn’t screenshot it. He told the wall by his desk the way you tell a secret to timber that won’t gossip. He put the kettle on and poured water into a mug chipped exactly where thumb meets ceramic.

At home, he opened the folder of small papers behind his locker door like a man consulting a prayer book he wrote himself.

Respect. Distance. Gratitude.
Keep the music intact.
Approval, always.

He added one more, cut from the corner of an old calendar that had retired from telling people what day it was. He wrote in the tidy hand he had earned on army forms and grocery lists: Don’t be the wind.

He stuck it at the hinge where the door swings–a place his hand touched daily without thinking. The paper rasped once against his knuckle and then became part of the geography.

The rain returned in the small hours, a patient drum that refused thunder. Aleem lay with his face to the wall and listened to water do its work. The rumor would tire. The internet would find a new topic to break and chew. Somewhere in Osaka a floor manager was labeling cases; somewhere in Manila a lyric card was being recycled without fuss; somewhere in Singapore an usher was telling a friend at supper that the fans had been kind again.

He breathed in two, held one, breathed out three. He did it again. He felt his chest choose to be a room people could sit in without having to talk loudly.

Quiet was still a gift. He kept giving it.

When sleep came, it did not announce itself. It walked in like rain and took the seat kept for it.