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“Still no one here yet….”
It was ten in the morning on a weekday, and the café was quiet because of the hour. Yu Sia pushed open the door, stepped inside, and claimed a seat with a clear view of the entrance. After that she kept lifting her head like a meerkat every time the door chimed, stealing glances toward whoever came in. She looked for all the world like someone waiting for company.
Then the door opened and a man walked in. He scanned the interior, spotted her, and headed straight over.
“You’re early. I thought I’d be the first one here….”
“No, I just got here myself.”
The face was already familiar. The man scratched his head as he sat down; he was one of the people Yu Sia had been waiting for. His name was Kim Jaejun, the other editor who handled Kayak’s Vtube channel alongside her.
Today’s gathering had been called to discuss the future of KayakTube. Once a week, without fail, Kayak and her two editors met to hold the meeting Kayak herself had christened KayakTube: Is This Okay?—or KITO for short. If getting everyone in the same room proved impossible, they simply held it over Discord. Vtube was that important.
But today’s meeting was not only about the channel. At least, that was how Yu Sia saw it.
“You know what to do once Kayak gets here, right?”
She gave the signal; Kim Jaejun nodded with a resolute look. She had already briefed him earlier.
Kayak had been drawing an almost overwhelming amount of attention lately—the natural fallout of revealing her real face. Yu Sia had always known a day like this would come, and she had expected the reaction to be heated. After all, she herself had been stunned the first time she met Kayak in person. Expecting it, however, did not make the reality any less significant.
Streamers lived on attention. Some deliberately stirred social controversy just to farm it, operating on the principle that hate comments beat no comments at all. People forgot scandals quickly; unless a crime was truly serious, most things simply blew over. “As long as it’s entertaining, any controversy is fine”—that was the unspoken rule that ran through the entire streaming scene.
Still, attention isn’t always a good thing.
For a streamer, attention was a double-edged sword. You needed it, you thrived on it, yet the more of it you attracted, the more risk you had to shoulder—a poisoned chalice. The Abyss Gallery was never just about the game. Just as Kayak herself had once been discussed there, the gallery talked about the streamers who played the game as much as the game itself. That tradition stretched all the way back to the days when Abyss was a dead game.
Having spent her time as an assistant manager of that gallery, Yu Sia had seen plenty of cautionary tales. Gallery-picked streamers—those who got coordinated attention from the gallery—often lost their own broadcasting style under the weight of excessive interest, or simply quit streaming altogether. That was why she worried. She feared Kayak might lose interest the same way, that the flood of attention after the face reveal would push her into a broadcasting slump.
Even in the recent stream, Kayak had swung her sword so hard alongside Kim Jaejun that the chat itself stayed relatively clean; still, the sheer number of people pouring in had to be draining her mental energy. Too much of anything was worse than nothing at all. And from what Yu Sia could tell, Kayak had never seemed especially hungry for broadcasting success in the first place.
If she’d wanted to grow the channel, she would have shown her face from day one….
Yu Sia had watched Kayak since the no-cam, no-mic days, so she was certain: Kayak was not the type to be bound by greed for money or fame. She had even shown a surprisingly ordinary, small-citizen side more than once. No matter how enviable something looked to others, if the person herself did not want it, it meant nothing—only pressure and burden.
So the two editors had conspired before today’s meeting. The conspiracy itself was nothing grand; if they had to give it a name, it was the Kayak Nadenade Plan. Their goal was simple: soothe the fatigue of someone who had just revealed her face to a massive audience and received far too much attention, and make sure she did not lose her interest in streaming. It was not so different from the way managers cared for their celebrities. Strictly speaking they were only editors, yet both of them were deep fans of Kayak, so they refused to overlook even these small details.
“I noticed last time she really liked the one with blueberries in it.”
“Almost everyone’s here already, so let’s order ahead. Something warm for the drink—she’s been using her voice a lot lately, so a hot tea would be good….”
Whenever the conversation turned to their shared common denominator—Kayak—the two of them fell into perfect sync. They were still deep in preparations, heating up their plans to care for her properly, when the little bell above the door chimed.
She’s here!
Kayak had finally arrived. Fully prepared, Yu Sia and Kim Jaejun exchanged a glance and watched her walk toward them.
Huh?
For some reason, Kayak looked nothing like what they had expected.
“Morning. You two got here first? Looks like I’m the last one.”
The corners of her mouth were tilted up ever so slightly, and she was humming under her breath. It was the complete opposite of the exhausted, attention-weary figure the two editors had imagined. They stared at each other, faces full of confusion.
“Um, Boss… are you okay?”
“About what?”
I answered while sipping the yuzu tea Yu Sia had ordered for my throat. Nice aroma. The warmth settling into my stomach even seemed to ease a little of the fatigue.
“Nothing. As long as you’re fine, that’s all that matters.”
“Right. Jaejun, nothing on your end either?”
“Yes, ma’am. All good.”
After checking in with Yu Sia the same way, we got down to the real meeting.
KayakTube: Is This Okay?—KITO for short. Today marked the twenty-sixth KITO meeting with the editors. The fact that so much time had already slipped by left me feeling oddly sentimental.
I had opened the Vtube channel and immediately run a two-barracks strategy—an all-in investment, a kind of last stand. Whether it was because I had chosen the right people or because my own star power was simply that strong, the bold gamble started paying off from the very first month. Right now the subscriber count had already blown past four hundred thousand and was eyeing half a million.
Somehow I had known I needed to hire exactly these two. Hiring only one would have felt incomplete.
Plenty of people had fretted over that decision at the time. All sorts of emails had come in—warnings that running a Vtube channel that way would ruin me, that I would never escape the red, messages that could have been concern or curses, I still wasn’t sure. But I had proven them wrong in the end. This much progress in a mere half year… even I was starting to scare myself a little.
Maybe I should have gone into business from the start. Instead of just living as a salaryman, I mean. The thought that I had almost let this foresight, this peculiar talent of mine, rot away unused was genuinely frightening.
“Heh heh heh….”
“...Boss?”
I had gotten a little too drunk on myself for a moment; from across the table Kim Jaejun was looking at me the way you look at someone who might be unwell. Right—we were in a meeting.
“Ahem. What were we talking about again?”
I cleared my throat and pretended nothing had happened. Fortunately Jaejun dropped the disloyal stare and continued.
“We’ve been getting a lot of ad offers. Three came to me alone, and Yu Sia said she got four.”
“Ads….”
Ads, huh. Come to think of it, I had only done one before. Back when I ran that sponsorship for Nvision, the game that had once rivaled Abyss. After that I had streamed without any ads for a long stretch.
“What kind of ads came in?”
I had set things up so that ad-related mail went to the editors’ inboxes instead of mine. That had been their own voluntary choice, not something I forced on them.
“Game ads are the majority… there’s a cosmetics one too. Pretty well-known brand. It actually fits Kayak’s image pretty well.”
“And what exactly is my image…?”
“Clean and pure… looks like they saw you the same way.”
Honestly, I hadn’t seen that coming. A cosmetics ad? I had only been thinking about game-related stuff, so it threw me a little. This, too, was probably fallout from the face reveal. Whether that was good or bad was hard to say; the one thing I was sure of was that it didn’t particularly appeal to me.
After that Yu Sia walked me through the rest in careful detail—which company had offered what, what conditions they wanted, what the pay looked like, and so on. In the end only the hardest part remained.
“From where I’m sitting they all look fine. Boss, just pick as many as you feel like doing.”
“I agree.”
“Hmm….”
Having too many options was its own kind of trouble. After a considerable stretch of serious thought, I settled on a single advertisement.