You Can't Get Full on the First Sip
Ego-searching.
The act of typing your own name—or a nickname that might as well be your name—into SNS and every other corner of the internet just to see what comes up.
It's something public figures and celebrities do more often than not, though no one has ever pinned down exactly why. To get an objective read on themselves. To check their reputation. Or simply because they're bored. Everyone's reasons are different; we were all born different, after all.
But there was one person who knew precisely why she ego-searched.
A born attention-seeker who couldn't keep her exhibitionist streak in check. Someone who was secretly timid yet somehow always managed to make a huge mess. Methodical and sharp at the same time. All those labels stuck to her, and every so often she had the habit of searching the gallery for "CamillaIsWeak," "Kayack," "Camilla," and the like.
Yes—no point pretending. That someone was me.
"Hmm…"
It was a half-habitual routine. The day the shoot with Taker wrapped, I was having a quick meal and wondering if there was anything worth looking at when my fingers, almost without thinking, carried me to the Abyss Gallery.
In truth it had always felt like home. You might laugh that a mere community site could be anyone's hometown, but that was how I felt.
How I had felt, past tense. Not anymore.
Let me rewind a little.
The day I became the girl Mun-a who looked exactly like Camilla, the day the whole world flipped upside down, the very first place I logged into was the Abyss Gallery. I wasn't planning to post something like "Just turned into Camilla herself, absolute legend lmao." I was simply… anxious. I pretended I wasn't, but how could I not be? The world had turned over in a single morning.
When a natural disaster approaches, animals flee to shelter. When people go through something hard, they head home. For me, the only place that felt like emotional shelter was the Abyss Gallery. So the moment I realized I had become a woman for the first time in my life and that this wasn't a dream, I opened the gallery—and came face to face with a site that had transformed just as thoroughly as I had.
A sigh escaped me on its own. It was the feeling of a young person returning to their hometown after a long absence only to find it completely changed. That feeling was bleak and terrifying in equal measure, so I fled—closed the gallery as if running away—and never logged in again.
Until now. This was my first visit in a long time. I lurked for a while, peeking at the site I had entered without meaning to. This time I had no urge to run. Unlike that first chaotic day, I had more or less adapted to the changes.
The gallery I returned to hadn't changed in a bad way. It felt like a deserted backwater village that had suddenly been developed into a metropolis. Instead of the damp, nostalgic scent of home, what hit me was the grandeur of a progressive big city.
…And that wasn't so bad.
Back when a single post might appear once an hour if you were lucky, the place had felt desolate. Now the constant stream of new posts made it feel like a gallery where actual people lived. In the old days it had been bleak—same handful of regulars every day, the classic vibe of a dying community.
"Newbie tip post… still going, huh."
Finding old memories inside a changed hometown had its own quiet charm. I wondered if the post I had originally written had been revised and revised until it reached this version. I remembered touching it up as far as Ver. 2.0 myself. After that, someone else had kept the torch burning. That was a relief.
"Heh."
The newbie tip post sitting proudly in the announcements made me feel a little like a master craftsman who had passed a technique down through a single line of succession. Late-blooming glory, maybe. Back then all I had wanted was for the game not to die; I never dreamed it would flourish like this.
The fear that had once made me bolt from the unfamiliar community felt almost silly now. I was reading every post with deep, genuine enjoyment—newbie advice threads, completely pointless aggro, rank screenshots, even streamer gald-cup drama. Dopamine. Pure dopamine was flooding my brain…
I was so lost in the long-forgotten flavor of community life that I almost forgot why I had come.
"Ah."
Remembering my original purpose, I slowly moved the mouse to the search bar. I had logged in to search my own name, yet I had already sunk so deep I had forgotten. But I never did type "Kayack" or "CamillaIsWeak" into that bar. More precisely, I didn't need to.
Right there in front of my eyes was a post with my nickname in the title.
"I hit the guy, but I never thought he'd die."
No—that sounds way too much like a criminal. Whatever. Close enough. The nuance is what matters.
That was the feeling. I had planned things out to a degree, but I never expected the impact to be this big. Really.
I had read through the gallery posts one by one—starting from the recent concept posts and then carefully reading every single thread related to me. Of course it wasn't all praise. There were a few nasty comments here and there. There were… but—
"They're calling me gallery master… pfft…"
Most of the reactions were so positive that first I was shocked, then laughter slipped out. Calling me the gallery master, calling me the gallery itself—it was just funny. The fact that it wasn't even entirely wrong only made it funnier.
The posts people who liked me kept making all shared the same demand: go live. I had deliberately shown my face on Taker's stream, sure, but I never imagined this many people would remember me. At best I expected "Who's that Camilla? She's good," and later, when I finally went live, something like "Oh, so this is that person." I had no idea posts like these were already popping up without me knowing.
The over-the-top reactions were a little burdensome… and also made me happy. The people who still remembered my old clown-show days treating me like a founding legend, the ones urging me to stream already—all of it. Watching so many complete strangers want my stream, even though I didn't think of myself as particularly thin-skinned, I found my shoulders lifting with pride. The stream I had already planned to start suddenly got moved up.
I had been aiming for tomorrow evening, but starting a little earlier wouldn't hurt.
"Maybe I should leave a post at least."
It would be pretty sad if I went live and no one showed up. So I dusted off a slightly shady old trick. Normally I wouldn't, but promotion was a serious matter. And if you don't get caught, it never happened, right?
I fired up the stream I had already set up, then quickly dropped a post.
For a brief moment I became an overseas resident, then returned to Korea. Not my usual fixed nickname, but a floating anonymous ID. Anyone who spent enough time in the gallery knew the technique—the so-called floating clone jutsu.
"Why isn't anyone coming…"
I muttered the words out loud without meaning to, then startled myself into clamping my mouth shut. Ten minutes already. I had steeled myself and gone live, yet five minutes passed, then ten, and not a single viewer had entered.
Zero.
I just kept staring at that stubborn zero, blinking.
Well, of course things wouldn't go that smoothly. There was no lucky world where simply turning on a stream instantly pulled in dozens or hundreds of people. My fame was only half-baked to begin with—the short streams I had done before, running into the streamer Nikang in Abyss, appearing on Taker's shoot, and the buzz in the gallery. Wait, listing it out like that actually sounds like a decent amount. So why was no one showing up?
Even the criminal act I had risked in the gallery had produced zero results. I had taken a real risk with that bold move, and it had done nothing. Disappointing.
"Might as well play the game."
I muttered that and queued up. My original plan had been to chat a little first so I wouldn't be too focused to talk once people arrived mid-game, but life never follows the plan. I didn't have the pro-streamer skill of monologuing alone for ages, so all I could do was play.
If I just keep playing, someone will show up eventually. When they do, I'll start talking. And if no one comes… I can always try again tomorrow. If I keep streaming, people will come someday. Yeah. You can't get full on the first sip.
Yet for all of Mun-a's quiet resolve, it didn't take long at all for viewers to start pouring into her stream.
The anonymous post Mun-a had written had been spotted by someone who then immediately reported the news back to the gallery.
"Ah, so close. That was a free kill."
But Mun-a still had no idea. She never glanced at the chat window, just kept playing the game in silence—with the stream mic she had prepared carefully switched off.