Lightning Village
How was she supposed to go if nobody invited her?
Whether it was a wedding or a first-birthday party, the rule was the same: you only showed up if the host invited you first. An uninvited guest waltzing in with a cheerful I just wanted to join in! got nothing but the cold shoulder of a party crasher.
As far as Kayak was concerned, it was pure injustice. How many times had she heard the same question since going live? Viewers kept asking why she wasn't at Lightning Village, and the only answer she could give was that nobody had invited her, so she couldn't go.
A titan among titans. The number-one streamer Abyss Gallery viewers most wanted to watch for the rest of their lives.
The moment word got out that someone like Kayak hadn't been invited to the collab, people started moving fast.
News spread from room to room. Cuckoos flitted in and out. Posts started popping up across the communities.
The nastiest of the lot were the forced rumors — pure bait with zero basis in fact, spinning out of control.
The core audience that watched a lot of internet streams had a serious delusion problem.
Most of them were internet ghosts, community addicts. Their entire lives were cut off from the outside world. The only window connecting them to anything was the community.
Their social skills were so underdeveloped that they couldn't grasp normal human relationships. That was why posts like so-and-so seems to hate so-and-so, this person is better than that person, someone's keeping someone else in check flooded the boards at all hours of the day.
The result: once Taker grasped the situation, he scrambled into damage control. He invited Kayak, mobilized his managers and staff to flood the communities, and smothered the narrative.
Truth be told, the whole mess was pretty baffling for Taker too. He had zero reason not to invite Kayak. If anything, he'd been eyeing her rise for a while and itching to ride the Kayak coin himself.
Using his authority as planner and operator, Taker invited Kayak into the Lightning Village server.
It was something of an overreach. Ordinarily, the operator only invited the starting members and otherwise stuck to server management, keeping their hands off the village's composition.
But nobody pushed back or second-guessed Taker's call.
The content itself was openly designed for streamers to hang out and have fun together, and when the host who made the whole thing said he was doing it this way, complaining about it would have been the weird move.
Sure, if he'd freely invited someone controversial or unpopular, there might have been pushback — but Kayak was the opposite. Viewers had been practically screaming for her invitation.
People were more likely to applaud it as the right call than to step up and say something felt off. There simply weren't any viewers inclined to raise a fuss.
And so, two days after the server opened, Kayak arrived in Lightning Village.
"Guys, what on earth did you do."
She'd been joking around with her viewers, playfully airing her grievances about not getting invited to Lightning Village — and then, out of nowhere, a private Discord message from Taker arrived.
A lengthy explanation insisting it was absolutely nothing like that, plus a message with the server address attached.
For a moment she just stared at the message, thinking what is going on — and then the realization hit. Her viewers had done something.
"You can't just barge into random places and start wrecking things. That makes me look terrible."
She had wanted an invite to Lightning Village — that much was true. Content planning was a pain, and hitching a free ride on Taker's collab for an easy stream had definitely been appealing.
But she hadn't wanted to get invited through methods this aggressive. If she'd just waited a little, the invite would have come on its own. What was the point of pushing?
This kind of approach only made enemies and left a bad impression. She couldn't hold back the sigh that slipped out as she spoke.
"Ugh, don't do that next time. Got it?"
She'd said it herself, but even she didn't put much stock in the words. Was there really any guarantee these people wouldn't pull the same stunt next time?
Anyway, with things already like this, she couldn't keep moping around. She'd rein in the fans gradually, bit by bit.
She cranked her energy back up and raised her voice.
"Vtube friends, Vhi! Today we're heading into Taker's Lightning Village! I got the invite, so let's dive in. This is my first time with Minecraft, so I'm not sure how well I'll do."
The moment she delivered that opening line — the kind of intro that announced the start of content — she moved her character.
Her avatar strode forward with long, purposeful steps.
"The basic controls are pretty simple. Jump is spacebar? You can run too? Oh, like this."
"Go to Nikang and get the avatar? Got it. I'll walk around and check out the village first. Gotta get used to Minecraft a bit too."
Leaving her impatient viewers behind, she started sightseeing at a leisurely pace. From what she'd heard beforehand, this was supposed to be a chill collab where you hung out and socialized with other streamers.
There were jobs and hidden missions and titles and so on, but those were things she'd figure out gradually.
"Didn't they say the server only opened yesterday? But there's already so much stuff. What's that? A temple Tuna's building? Oh...."
"Hey, when did I smile sinisterly. I was just impressed. It doesn't mean anything. You guys always make me out to be some weirdo."
Some people were building. Some were farming. Even though the server had only been open a short while, it was already bustling with people — a reminder that big collabs really were big collabs.
As she wandered around taking in the sights, she spotted a familiar name inside one of the buildings.
"Hangang, what are you doing here?"
"Ah, damn, so close! Getting a ten here is pure rigged— oh, Kayak? You're here?"
"How about it, Kayak? Wanna play a round?"
"Hmm...."
Honestly, she didn't even need to ask what he was doing. One glance was enough to size up the whole situation.
"I'm not totally against it, but later. I haven't finished looking around yet."
"Sure thing. Come by later and we'll play a game. I'll lend you the money."
Hangang sank back into his gambling, and as Kayak left the casino behind and headed outside—
"Ka— Kayak?"
She turned toward the voice calling her name. A character stood there, jumping up and down nonstop.
"I— I'm a huge fan!"
Boing, boing.
Ten minutes after logging in, she'd already met a fan.