A Perfect Fifty-Fifty
I think I'll have to see it with my own eyes.
"Does this even make sense…?"
How was this possible?
For a moment I completely forgot I was live, muttering under my breath with a blank look on my face.
Fifty-fifty. An exact split down the middle. I couldn't hide my shock at the result staring back at me.
It was absurd. The kind of reality-defying nonsense that only ever happened in novels — and it was happening right in front of me.
Life throws all kinds of weird stuff at you, sure. But this? It almost felt like the entire chat had colluded to force a draw…
"Yeah… it's a real tie."
I said it flatly and shared the screen I'd been staring at — the poll results window with Option 1 and Option 20 each sitting at exactly 50%.
"Did the site get hacked or something? Or did you guys all conspire? An exact split… how many people is that? 1,523 of you pick Option 1, and the rest lock in Option 2?"
Thinking about it calmly, there was absolutely no way any of that was true — but the whole thing was so ridiculous that the nonsense just tumbled out of my mouth on its own.
And so I spent a good long while going back and forth with chat, marvelling at how something like this could even happen.
"What revote. We just go with it. A revote would come out different every single time. We go with the result we got."
I'd been thrown by the deadlock, but I decided to look on the bright side.
From the viewers' perspective, it must have been that close — neither option so clearly superior that one side could dominate.
Besides, the viewers' vote was only ever a reference point. Whatever the result, the final call was mine to make.
And now that it had landed like this, I almost felt relieved. If the results had skewed hard one way, it would've nagged at me when I made the decision.
Which meant we were back to square one.
Between the two of them, who should I pick? The gallery veteran Sia — or the fan channel operator who'd already been quietly racking up subscribers?
I'd heard something similar before. Decal, was it? My semifinal opponent. His editor had been creeping around other women streamers' channels, the whole thing blew up, and he got fired.
I'd also heard that Decal's Vtube had been dead for a full month because of it.
If I wanted to avoid that kind of mess, I had to pick the right person from the start. So as outlandish as a viewer's personality-test suggestion sounded, it wasn't entirely without merit.
A personality test. A personality test, huh…
But springing a test on the editor candidates out of nowhere would be incredibly awkward. This wasn't some corporate job interview at a major company. I couldn't exactly tell them to take a personality assessment and submit the results.
And those tests were unreliable anyway — if you just mixed in a few convenient lies instead of answering honestly, the results always came out looking fine. Not much credibility there.
In that case… wouldn't it be better to just meet them in person and decide for myself?
Sit face to face, talk it out, and you'd get a pretty solid read on what kind of person they were — whether they were the type to cause problems or not.
"Forget the personality test… meeting them once and deciding that way wouldn't be a bad idea either."
Was this what they meant by collective intelligence? A problem I'd only been able to think of as complicated suddenly felt like it had a handle on it. Definitely better than stewing over it alone.
Meet both of them in person, then pick whichever one I liked better. Simple as that.
I finished the thought, nodded to myself, and opened my mouth.
"Alright, that's it for today's stream. During the break I'll talk with the editor candidates, decide who I'm working with, and let you know next time. Talking it through with you guys really helped me sort my thoughts out — thank you."
Leaving the viewers clinging to me the same as always, I ended the stream.
"Wh-what? Meet? She's going to meet us in person?"
Meanwhile, the two editor candidates who'd been watching Kayak's stream found themselves in a minor state of emergency.
An unexpected meeting. Streamers didn't usually arrange face-to-face encounters just to hire an editor.
Personal safety concerns, the hassle, the sheer inconvenience — there were plenty of reasons not to.
Even when meetings did happen, it was usually after someone had already been hired, after enough time had passed for them to get reasonably comfortable with each other.
Before that, the relationship was strictly online — sharing work remotely, never meeting offline.
Wanting to meet candidates in person from the very first hiring stage was the kind of thing only massive corporations did.
The fact that Kayak was willing to put up with that kind of trouble just to pick someone said she was serious about her Vtube — that much was fair to assume.
Like Zhuge Liang submitting his memorial before the northern campaign, Kayak had, in her own way, declared her resolve.
A boss who was serious about her Vtube was, for the editor candidates, a good situation — but their thoughts didn't make it that far.
Kayak's bombshell about deciding face to face had set their feet on fire.
"What do I do. What do I do, what do I do…"
Yu Sia stamped her feet in place, caught in a tangle of conflicting feelings.
As a Kayak fan, meeting her in person was a good thing. If the circumstances had been different, she would have thrown both hands up in celebration. It wasn't all that different from a private fan meeting.
But this was an interview. An interview to hire an editor.
Between Yu Sia and the fan channel operator, one of them would be cut and only one would get to work alongside her.
Kayak hadn't used those exact words, but that didn't dull the meaning of it — and Yu Sia couldn't hide how nervous she was.
And she wasn't the only one. The other editor candidate — the man running the midday Kayak fan channel — felt the same way.
"Hoo…"
The man, Kim Jaejun, stood in front of the mirror with a tense face.
He swept his uncombed hair to the left, then to the right, studying his reflection over and over.
On his bed lay a formal shirt he'd dug out of the wardrobe for the first time in ages. Mid-sweep, he stopped fussing with his hair and started trying the shirt on and taking it off again, wearing the expression of a man deep in some private dilemma.
"Uncle, what are you doing?"
"Sihyeon, Uncle's busy. We'll play later."
"No, I asked what you're doing. You've been in front of the mirror forever."
His cute but lately rather cheeky niece puffed out her cheeks, and Kim Jaejun paused mid-hair-sweep to answer.
"Uncle has to go to an interview. That's why I'm trying things on."
"Hiek, Uncle got a job?"
"Not yet. But I hope so."
That was Kim Jaejun's honest feeling. Why else had he been running a fan channel so diligently in the first place? It was only possible because the fandom ran that deep.
Getting to work alongside someone he'd always liked — there wasn't much better than that.
Just like Sia, Kim Jaejun steeled his resolve to pass, nerves and all.
And so the two of them each waited for their meeting with Kayak as the days slipped by.
At last, the day of the decisive battle dawned.