Reaction
Go brazen instead.
That was the stance I'd decided to take for the time being.
It was the product of serious thought after monitoring yesterday's stream. The broadcast itself had only run about fifty-three minutes — short by any measure — but I'd rewatched it several times over.
Starting with how I looked on camera, what kinds of chat messages tended to pop up, which of my movements made people lose their minds — all of it.
There were things you only noticed when you stopped being the person on screen and looked at it through a third party's eyes.
Abyss was the same way. There was a reason the high-rank players always said that if you wanted to climb, you couldn't just play the game — you had to watch the replays and review. This wasn't Abyss, it was a stream, but the principle was close enough. Shift your perspective and you start catching things you never saw before.
First takeaway: the more I showed how much the chat and the donations made me uncomfortable, the worse they got. Classic Twish-viewer contrarian energy kicking in.
In that sense, yesterday's stream had been a failure from the opening response. When something blows up, the initial reaction is everything — and I'd blown it.
But what was done was done. What mattered was now. It still wasn't too late. I'd only turned the cam on for the first time yesterday, which meant I was still very much in the early stage.
And so, starting today, I resolved to go as shameless as humanly possible.
Raising my voice right back at people calling me pretty was part of that "go brazen" strategy too.
I could feel my face heating up in real time. My skin even prickled, like someone was poking me with a finger over and over. Of course nothing of the sort was actually happening.
I stared into the black lens of the camera, swallowed hard, and opened my mouth again — forcing myself to feel out a sensation I still needed to get used to.
"H-hmph. You can call me pretty all you want, it doesn't do anything for me, okay? I was born pretty. Do you have any idea how many times I've heard that since I was a kid…."
Wait. Had I gone a little too far? Had I just floored the accelerator a bit too hard…?
This wasn't "going brazen." Well — it was brazen, and it was definitely annoying, but it was veering slightly off from the direction I'd intended.
Maybe I'd been too impatient. I only realized something was off after the words were already out. And the chat that followed confirmed my bad feeling had been right on the money.
"Ah, no… that's not what I— I mean I am pretty, but I'm not bragging, I just…."
I scrambled to walk it back. It did absolutely nothing.
"Please do that just now as a 30k reaction"
Watching the chat ignite even harder than before — like someone had tossed a match onto oil-soaked ground — I thought:
…Did I pick the wrong strategy?
Maybe going brazen had been a mistake. Maybe deadpan indifference would've been way better.
Regret, as always, arrived fashionably late.
Someone else was watching Kayak's stream that early morning too.
"…Is this even possible?"
His name was Yu Seongmin. Profession: game developer. Currently working at Ionix as a character designer.
Right now, Seongmin was staring at Kayak's stream with his mouth hanging open, blinking rapidly, slapping his own cheeks — running through every possible form of physical disbelief.
Because on that screen, Camilla was alive and breathing.
And not just alive and breathing. She was dropping lines so colorful and varied that no programmed AI could ever hope to imitate them — and she was streaming live.
Yes. Streaming. Camilla was streaming.
It went without saying: Seongmin had spent the last several years at Ionix designing and shipping multiple heroes, and one of the heroes he'd created was Camilla herself.
Her kit might lag behind in a lot of ways, but her design and skill composition were widely praised as distinctive and full of personality. Camilla was a hero who meant quite a bit even to Seongmin, who'd made so many others — because he'd poured several times more effort into her than he had into the rest.
Lately he'd been quietly glowing with pride watching her get buffed and even show up in competitive play. His beloved character, the one who'd never once made it into a tournament — that sore spot of a hero — finally performing on the league stage. That alone had been enough to make him soft.
Recently, everything about Camilla had been one surprise after another. Ionix announcing they'd make her a legendary-tier skin, the balance team buffing her, her showing up in pro play because of it…
He'd thought there was nothing left that could shock him.
Then a coworker had told him to go watch Kayak's stream — that she looked exactly like Camilla — which was such an absurd claim that he'd opened it up, and.
"She really looks exactly the same…."
Still reeling, Seongmin kept watching the streamer on screen wave her hands around and chat with her viewers with full commitment.
The truth was, he'd been aware of Kayak's existence for a long time.
Back when no one even knew if she was a guy or a girl, she'd already been a top-tier player who stayed in constant contact with Ionix. That was who Kayak was.
Hardly anyone at Ionix didn't know her. She'd stuck with them even through the game's darkest days.
Back when Abyss was a dead game, she'd kept sending feedback to Ionix. Fix this part of the game, do it this way and more people will care about Abyss — that kind of thing.
She spoke for the players and you could feel how much she genuinely loved the game. There'd even been a running joke that Kayak was an Ionix employee on remote assignment.
Plenty of people in the company already called themselves her fans, and Seongmin himself watched her streams semi-regularly — not every day, but often enough. Watching her play the Camilla he'd created in ways even her own creator had never imagined always left him quietly in awe.
She was someone he'd felt a quiet, personal fondness for.
Which made this all the more of a shock. It was like finding out the neighbor you'd known for years was secretly a CIA agent.
…Actually, this might be worse.
He'd never experienced the CIA thing either, but this felt like it would rank higher, not lower.
Because what Seongmin was feeling right now was the sensation of a character he had carved into existence climbing out into the real world.
Even he couldn't put the feeling into words.
"So that's why people have been blowing up my messages…."
The texts and missed calls that had been piling up since yesterday. He'd been out sick and hadn't answered any of them — and most of them had been about Kayak. A few had even asked if he'd designed Camilla using Kayak as a model.
Before, he could've said no with absolute certainty. Camilla had been an original character born entirely from his own head, carrying his own ego.
But now, after watching Kayak's stream, even he was starting to wonder.
Had he really made Camilla?
Maybe he'd passed Kayak on the street somewhere, her face had lodged itself in his subconscious, and he'd projected it straight onto the hero called Camilla without ever realizing it.
That was actually the more plausible explanation. Otherwise there was no way to account for Kayak looking this identical to Camilla.
"And Kayak kept playing and loving Camilla this much because she looked like her, right?"
Otherwise there was no reason to grind that hard on a dead game—
Seongmin muttered it to himself and decided he was satisfied with that logic.
Honestly, it was a relief Kayak hadn't come after him for likeness rights. He'd come this close to looking like someone who'd used a real person as a model without consent.
"I should reach out to her separately."
And then apologize. Somehow, without meaning to, it seemed he'd modeled Camilla after her — it hadn't been intentional, but he was truly sorry.
That was why Seongmin — a man who had never once donated to an internet stream in his entire life — dropped a cool 500,000 won on Kayak's broadcast without hesitation.
Yusungmin donated 500,000 won!
"Oh — five hundred thousand? And a no-message dono?"
Meanwhile, Kayak received Seongmin's donation and could only roll her eyes around in complete bewilderment.
While the chat, in perfect unison, started demanding she do that earlier reaction as payment for the 500k.