See You Next Time
I had always figured a day like this would come eventually.
I just never expected that day would be today.
The original plan had been to flip the stream on and have my face appear with a dramatic flourish — but when I went live, the cam feed simply refused to show up. That left me crawling under the desk, grunting and fumbling around. Turns out a cable had gotten slightly tangled. Once I sorted that out, the problem fixed itself immediately.
Which brought me to right now. Cam restored, I had crawled out from under the desk and settled in front of the computer.
For some reason, the chat window that had been racing upward nonstop had gone completely still.
Viewer Count — 15.6K
People had piled in hard, drawn by the massive bait. For a second I wondered if the room had just crashed under the load.
"Is it working…? Can you see me right now?"
"Hmm."
Watching the chat snap back to full speed — no, somehow even faster than before — I swallowed slightly.
The chat had already descended into pure chaos. Cheap spam designed purely to farm attention, Camilla-related ASCII art, emotes flooding every line. A few people kept trying to ask me actual questions, but there was no way I could answer anything in this mess.
The viewers' reactions were, of course, far more intense than usual. I found myself briefly considering features I never used in my room — slow mode, follower-only chat, that sort of thing.
"Ah."
Catching that one message in the flood of chat, I finally realized I was biting my lip — my teeth lightly catching my lower lip. It was a habit I fell into whenever something was on my mind. One I hadn't even been aware of myself.
Only after reading that chat did it fully sink in that I had turned on the cam and shown my face. What I really felt, precisely, was how burdensome it was to have my appearance broadcast in real time.
Every little gesture was laid bare for the viewers. The expressions I made while gaming, the way I bit my lip when I was thinking, the way I swallowed mid-sentence — all those ordinary, everyday things got shared whether I wanted them to or not.
The distance felt close. Revealing my face had flipped public opinion a full hundred and eighty degrees into something overwhelmingly positive — but that didn't make it any less stressful.
I found myself thinking again that turning on a cam was no small thing. A quiet respect for the streamers around me who mostly ran their broadcasts with cameras on began to bloom.
This was a kind of pressure I'd never felt when streaming faceless. I'd genuinely thought it was no big deal — showing your face doesn't wear it out, so why not just go for it?
Sure, the reveal itself wasn't a big deal. Keeping the cam on afterward, though — that was a slightly different problem.
Still, it'd only been… what, five minutes since I turned it on? I couldn't just shut it off now.
"Chat is way too fast…."
Settling for the next best thing, I decided to lightly rein in the chat window overflowing with things too embarrassing to even look at.
Three-month follower chat. Plus subscriber-only chat.
That would leave only the people who'd been watching since the early days — and among them, only the loyal ones who'd actually subscribed — so the chat wouldn't fly by this fast.
But I had no choice but to abandon that plan almost immediately.
And then the flood of subscription alerts that came pouring in after that.
After a wave of subscriptions and donations from countless people, a brief lull settled in.
What followed was a short Q&A and status update to settle the viewers' curiosity.
"I helped the Fusion Gaming guys with practice, and they gave me seats as a thank-you. The kid who came with me — she's just a friend from the neighborhood."
Kayak chattered away as if nothing had happened, rattling off stories with easy energy. Every so often she'd glance at the chat, or turn her head aside in embarrassment — which only made things worse.
"Stop calling me cute. If you keep spamming that kind of — that kind of chat, I can't even do anything…."
But Kayak's wish was the kind that never came true. She still hadn't grasped how chat worked — or rather, she was so flustered she had temporarily forgotten what she already knew.
Viewers had always been the type to do something more the moment you told them not to. The most effective way to handle those little troublemakers was to stay deadpan and not react much at all.
"It's not that bad, it's not that — wait, what was I even trying to say."
Kayak said that and pressed a hand to her forehead again. Everyone who saw it immediately lost their minds calling her cute, and the vicious cycle rolled on.
She glanced at the chat, scrunched her face up hard, and pushed forward — determined to just say what she needed to say and end the stream already.
"So the Camilla cosplayer… yeah, that was me. Then, are all the things that came up in the gallery true too…. What exactly did they say in the gallery?"
Scanning the chat with her characteristically sharp dynamic vision, Kayak stuck to her denials and moved on to the next topic.
"And I don't really have any plans to go pro. I'm happy with how things are right now, for one. I'm a Camilla one-trick, and one-tricks usually struggle in pro play. Get banned and you're useless. Lee Jun-hyeok hyped me up way too much in that interview — I didn't even make that build, he modified it and used it."
The short Q&A continued after that. Staying carefully within bounds that didn't invade her privacy, she answered just about every question that came her way.
"This isn't a congressional hearing… you guys sure have a lot of questions. That's all the questions for today."
Kayak cut off the endless stream of questions at a reasonable point. The viewers were disappointed, but they backed off with a quiet understanding — they could feel it too. At this rate, it would never end.
With the Q&A over, the viewers started wondering what Kayak would do next.
Fire up Abyss like usual? Use the cam being on as an excuse to try some new content? Or get embarrassed and just turn the cam off?
But Kayak's choice was none of the things the viewers had predicted.
"Hmm, I think… I'll end the stream now. Honestly, today's broadcast was just meant to be a little chat and then off…."
Screaming. Total collapse.
If you had to sum up the chat's reaction in a single phrase, those would fit.
But Kayak only shook her head no matter how much the viewers begged.
"That's it for today… make hay while the sun shines, you say…? Hmm. Saying that won't change anything."
Whether the viewers cried or raged, Kayak said she'd see them next time and ruthlessly ended the stream.
Uptime: 53 minutes 24 seconds.
The viewer count had just crossed twenty thousand.