Christmas
It was winter.
Snow fell in thick, soft flurries. The days had grown short, the streets already thick with end-of-year cheer, and the trees had dressed themselves for the season in bright, multicolored ornaments.
Bright ornaments. Strings of multicolored lights wound around the trunks and branches, each bulb throwing out its own little color. They twinkled as people passed, and almost everyone glanced at them at least once on the way by.
Christmas trees, of course. The one day a year that was Christmas had arrived.
People celebrated the holiday in their own ways — quiet evenings with family, dates with partners, or grinding straight through for the holiday overtime pay…
And the internet streaming platform Twish was no different. Twish, too, was celebrating Christmas in its own particular fashion.
This was the Christmas culture that existed on Twish and every other internet streaming platform.
Any broadcaster who didn't go live on Christmas or Christmas Eve — and this applied mostly to women — was assumed to have a boyfriend, and got permanently archived in the community for it.
Unless the reason was genuinely serious, nobody cut them any slack. And even a serious reason had to be verified: the streamer had to attach proof to the notice so the viewers could authenticate it. Getting rushed to the ER with a sudden injury, for example. Or a parent collapsing.
Anything short of that, and you were stuck with the boyfriend label, which made every stream after that a mess.
The more paranoid types wouldn't even believe a serious reason when they saw one — they'd just call it a lie. That was the particular misery of being a female streamer who was effectively required to broadcast on Christmas.
Even the rising star of the moment — the king of Twish, the female streamer with the highest viewership of them all — couldn't escape their radar. Kayak was no exception.
Most of the viewers wanted Kayak to stream on both Christmas and Christmas Eve, and fully expected her to do it.
They had her track record to go on. Even as a female streamer with a dazzling face that looked just like Camilla, Kayak had always been bizarrely dry when it came to anything romantic.
There had even been a day when someone asked about a boyfriend in a donation and she'd made a face like she'd bitten into something rotten.
For a while after that, theories floated around that Kayak liked women — or that she was a narcissist who liked herself. No meaningful testimony ever came from the woman herself, so it all fizzled out as pure rumor.
That, plus how consistently she'd been streaming lately, was enough for them to believe without a shred of doubt that Kayak, unlike the other girl streamers, would go live on Christmas.
But as the saying goes: the axe you trust is the one that splits your foot.
Not long after, a post went up in the gallery, and most of the people who saw it started screaming.
I'll be off on the 24th and 25th. I made plans to hang out with my boyfriend those days hehe;
— Posted by Kayak
Someone's break notice. Bold as anything.
On a normal day, they would have taken it in stride. Comments like girl cams have no chill these days lmao would have piled up, her name would have gone into the kill list, and her fans would have been mercilessly roasted.
Right now, almost nobody could manage that — a few exceptions aside.
Most of them just sank into disbelief and grief.
Because the name at the bottom of the notice, and the site it had been posted on, and the source of the whole thing, were all painfully familiar.
It was Kayak's notice.
The Kayak they had trusted without question had, out of nowhere, declared a break for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The reason: to hang out with her boyfriend.
It was the usual chat window. The only difference from usual was that nobody was actually streaming.
Even in a broadcast chat that had lost its owner, Kayak's viewers lingered like ghosts, still hammering out messages.
It was a meaningless cry. A soundless uproar.
A lot of people in the same boat had gathered, but it didn't mean anything. There was no streamer running the broadcast, after all. They hadn't even gathered with any particular purpose. Deep down they were still denying reality, habitually logging into Kayak's stream and typing into chat.
The community was busy laughing at them for it. A few people suggested that Kayak was just messing around — that if she actually had a boyfriend, she wouldn't have any reason to post about it — but those takes got buried.
Even the ones whose brains weren't completely fried, the minority still clinging to the hope that she would go live, started wearing down as the waiting dragged on.
Roughly two hours passed after that. The hopeful ones were starting to fade, and even the rage-spam was dying down, when—
A miracle happened.
"What are you guys doing? I said I was off today. Why are you all still here?"
Kayak's stream went live.
Unlike the recent stretch where she'd been running cam every time, this was a throwback no-cam stream — voice only.
Even so, people couldn't hide their excitement. Some of them started cheering at the fact that she'd gone live at all, crowing that they'd been right, that Kayak had just been running a gae-mi-teol-gi with the notice to shake off the casuals.
As if she'd seen it, Kayak spoke in a voice with a little laugh in it.
"Ah, I wasn't lying. I am hanging out with my boyfriend today and tomorrow."
Chat erupted into a firestorm all over again. The crowd that had poured in was all talking over each other, each person saying only what they wanted to say.
And then, in the middle of it, a ten-thousand-won donation came in asking why she'd turned the stream on at all, then — if she was going to hang out with her boyfriend, why not just go?
There was the sound of a throat working as she swallowed. Kayak didn't answer right away. She hummed and hesitated, like she was nervous about something.
The angry crowd showed no sign of cooling off. The streamer herself had never cared much about managing chat to begin with.
What was she even trying to do? Kayak had ambushed them by going live and then done nothing. No content. No conversation. No explanation for the notice everyone kept bringing up.
The viewer count only climbed, and the people waiting for an answer were about to blow a fuse, when—
The black stream screen suddenly switched.
Kayak had turned on her cam. The woman who appeared out of nowhere looked strangely unfamiliar to her viewers.
Mostly because of the outfit. Soft red fabric with white trim in all the right places — what the world generally called a Santa costume.
Kayak, complete with a cute little Santa hat perched on her head, couldn't quite look straight into the camera. Cheeks faintly pink, eyes averted, she mumbled for a long moment before she finally opened her mouth.
"You guys are my boyfriend…."