Better Explain Herself
There's a term for it: parasocial romance.
It means falling for someone you'll never actually date — pouring affection into a fantasy relationship that exists only in your head. Zero chance of anything real. Not even a fraction of a percent. And yet you act like their partner anyway.
It thrives in the idol industry. Fans treat idols like lovers, and the moment a dating scandal drops, they feel betrayed — as if they themselves had been cheated on. The worst of them escalate into full-blown stalkers.
And that same parasocial rot had quietly seeped into the streaming world too. Not out in the open, but it was there.
Streaming was a male-dominated space, so the targets were almost always female broadcasters. Face-cam dancers who twirled on camera, sure — but even no-cam streamers weren't safe. Which was strange, if you thought about it. Just a voice. A person whose face you'd never seen, someone you'd never met in your life. What exactly were these people latching onto hard enough to dig through someone's private life?
The internet had no walls. People could gather without limit, and when enough of them piled up, the creeps always came crawling out of the woodwork.
So it was hardly surprising that the same types who'd dig through a streamer's personal life had started taking an interest in Kayak — currently the hottest name on Twish.
Kayak's team dinner had been scheduled later than the others. She'd already had one incident during the pre-dinner drinking stream over voice chat: a no-cam streamer accidentally flashing her chest. Most people assumed she wouldn't show up to the dinner after that. And yet word got out that Kayak had come after all.
Kayak pulled serious concurrent viewers. Her channel had ballooned in size, but almost nothing about her had been revealed — a streamer wrapped in mystery. Age, job, what she'd done before streaming — all unknown. All viewers knew was that she was a woman with a large chest who was absurdly good at Abyss.
This dinner, though, would crack that open — at least a little. Through the teammates who'd sat across the table from her.
That was why people were waiting for Kayak's team to fire up their post-dinner streams.
"Ugh…."
Late afternoon. Ririyang — Da-hee — dragged herself out of bed, clutching a skull that felt ready to split open.
Stomach churning, she rose looking half-zombie and downed a glass of warm water. She desperately wanted the honey water her mom used to make her, but that was a fantasy now. She'd moved out half a year ago for the sake of streaming.
Living alone wasn't all downside. No mom to make honey water — but also no mom to lecture her about how much she'd drunk.
Ririyang sank into the couch with a clear conscience and pulled out her phone.
It was routine by now. In the streaming world, anything could happen overnight. Checking whether some massive incident had blown up while she was asleep was a necessary first step.
It was a dangerous habit — the kind that could suck you into community drama — but she didn't have a choice. When the internet was your job, you couldn't just ignore the communities entirely.
First stop: the official board where people talked about her streams.
Nothing but cute posts begging her to go live, promising to hold their breath until she did.
No problems there.
She left a notice that she'd stream in a few hours and moved on.
Next: the Streamer Gallery — shady reputation, but the best place to check public opinion and whatever drama was currently on fire.
Someone's stream was being live-relayed.
A few posts were enough to paint the picture. Limetaq was streaming.
Ririyang hadn't exactly held back last night, but Limetaq had drunk at least as much as she had — if not more. And he was already live? The guy had ridiculous stamina.
She put on a pot of hangover ramen and hopped into his stream.
"Whoa…."
Stirring her ramen, Ririyang let out a small gasp. She'd already guessed from the eight thousand concurrent viewers — a number she never saw on Limetaq's usual streams — but the chat was absolutely feral.
Somehow it didn't feel like someone else's problem. Because it wasn't. In a few hours her own stream would look exactly like this. Her appetite dimmed a little, but she forced the broth down anyway.
The chaos in chat only settled after Limetaq locked it down to followers-only and then subscribers-only — the only people who could type were the ones who actually watched him regularly.
"Hey, just wait a second, okay? If you keep pushing like this, I'm gonna have to get tough. Full gangster mode, you hear me?"
"Don't bait them too hard, guys. Where was I… oh right, Kayak. So when Kayak showed up—"
Ririyang closed his stream around there and started cleaning up.
Her turn wasn't far off.
"Twish hi, Twish hi! Good to see you all. Late-afternoon stream… this is Ririyang!"
The post-dinner recap streams were running in relay format.
It had been agreed on from the start. As professional streamers, they'd known the dinner would draw attention.
Take turns going live, spin some stories, rake in a reasonable amount of donations. That had been the plan hashed out at the table last night.
"I wasn't the first one there — second. I thought I was early, but Hangang was already waiting. Oh, and Hangang was the one who reserved the restaurant. Did you all hear about that?"
Ririyang walked them through the restaurant, showing off the food photos she'd taken there.
The reactions weren't bad. But Ririyang could tell. What the viewers actually wanted to know was something else entirely. The chat she was seeing now was just the polite subset of subscribers who could type under the followers-only lock — same setup Limetaq had used.
"I went out dressed like this. Not bad, right? I agonized over it the day before. Doesn't look like I tried too hard, doesn't look like I didn't try at all. Effortlessly put-together. Yeah. You get it. Exactly that vibe?"
She started spinning stories at her own pace, carefully dancing around the core of what everyone wanted. She hadn't even meant to tease them, but the viewers were getting antsy all the same.
Ririyang felt it coming — but she didn't show a thing. She just kept talking with a perfectly calm face.
"Ah, Kayak? Hehe. Kayak's pretty, yeah. Did we talk a lot? Of course. We got super close. Like, best-friend close. We sat next to each other, talked a ton, she even fed me side dishes. I overdid it a bit last night and she was the one looking after me."
"Oh, age-wise, Teacher's actually younger than me. The whole vibe was so mature I thought she was my unnie, but turns out she's the little sister. Still, we just decided to be friends. The age gap isn't big, and I'm not the type to fuss over one or two years anyway. How many years? Kayak's two years younger than me."
Under the followers-only lock, chat barely reacted. A few "oh, okay" and "younger than I thought" type responses. So Ririyang didn't notice.
Kayak had never revealed her age on stream either. The people who'd been hunting for any scrap of information on her latched onto Ririyang's comment instantly.
And the new rumor that spun out of it was something Ririyang never saw coming either.
The snowball had started to roll.