I Need to Keep Her Around
What does it mean to spend a day well?
Some people grind so hard they feel like they're truly living, while others feel perfectly fulfilled after lying around from morning to night. In the end, calling a day well spent comes down to how satisfied you were with what you did—how content you felt with those twenty-four hours.
So was I allowed to say I'd spent today well?
On a typical day I barely left the bed. Aside from meals and bathroom trips, I hardly moved at all. Even when I went out for a walk as exercise, it was thirty minutes of walking and that was it. The only real work I had was streaming, which I'd stumbled into by accident, so I'd never once felt like I'd spent a day that actually meant something.
Today, though, I'd gone out, and on top of that I'd even met the person who would become my editor. The channel I'd opened yesterday already had videos pulled from FanTube and uploaded. Factor in that I was going to stream as well, and I couldn't help thinking I'd packed the day pretty full.
The conversation we'd had over messenger came back to me all at once.
The talk had turned properly productive after that. Channel management was the main topic, of course—how to hold onto viewers in a stretch when subscribers were exploding, what direction to take going forward, the important things. Maybe it was because I'd found an editor, but a restless urgency had started to creep in. Something I'd only been thinking about in vague terms was beginning to take shape, and that meant I needed a concrete plan for growing the Newtube channel.
Which, in the end, meant I needed content.
Hmm.
The first thing that came to mind was the viewer Last of Quantum coaching stream Jump had recommended. The chat had definitely loved it when I taught Jump, and I'd even felt, teaching him, that I might have some knack for it.
The problem was obvious, though. I didn't have anyone to teach.
I could recruit viewers, sure, but my rank got in the way. A Diamond player offering to teach the game and a Bronze player offering to teach the game simply did not carry the same weight. I wasn't sure I had any business stepping up as an instructor while I was still Bronze.
It wasn't that I lacked confidence in my skill. I was sure I could win against anyone. But a name has value. People assume someone from a famous university is good at studying; rank, in the same way, is an indicator that the higher you sit, the more you've got at least a baseline of ability. The only name value a Bronze like me had was proof I was bad at the game.
Of course, I didn't think of myself as Bronze-level, and the viewers already had a pretty clear idea of what I could do. But not everyone in the world knew who I was. My current name recognition was barely a step above Hakko status. I didn't want to watch someone who'd learned from me get sneered at for taking lessons from a Bronze.
Rank didn't prove everyone's skill—but a basic perception still existed. If I was going to pin a teacher's nametag on myself, I ought to have the qualifications to match.
Even so, the fact remained that I had no other content ready to go. The only thing lined up for today's stream was the donation mission: fifty-five kills with the Kolibri.
Fifty-five kills with the smallest pistol in the world. No matter how I looked at it, that was not something a human being should attempt. And yet another thought followed on its heels: wasn't this exactly the kind of thing that made streaming fun?
How often, in a normal game, would you ever pick up a gun like the Kolibri? On top of that, I figured now was the right window for this kind of variety bit. The higher my rank climbed, the harder weapons like that would become to use. Once I hit around Platinum, I'd have to start running proper loadouts a lot more often. In a way, this was a kind of fun I could only have right now.
The world had all kinds of people, and all kinds of weapons to match. There were guns that made you wonder what on earth the designer had been thinking—and Last of Quantum was the kind of perverse game that had gone and implemented every last one of them.
Ding.
I was mentally cataloguing every trash weapon I could think of when a notification chimed from Discord, which had been quiet until then. The message was from my editor, Kang Ah-yoon. Figuring we'd be in touch a lot going forward, I'd already given her everything from my Discord to my phone number.
I opened it right away.
Thankfully, the Connector had an auto-record function. The Jump coaching footage from before I'd started streaming, the match against Bernie when I hadn't even had the stream on—none of it was hard to find. I downloaded the clips and sent them to Kang Ah-yoon's personal email.
When I'd asked how soon she could have them done, and she said she'd finish them today, I couldn't help being surprised. Was editing something that happened that fast? If I'd been the one doing it, I could have sat there all day and still not gotten the result I wanted. So that was why people hunted for someone with experience. The gap—in baseline skill, in the time it took—was enormous.
If I'd known it would be like this, I should have looked for an editor from the start. If I'd listened to Jump a little more carefully, I wouldn't have gone through any of that. In the end, my all-nighter of effort was, to someone else, a meaningless job that wrapped in a few hours.
Since it had already happened, I decided to look at it generously. In a way, that all-nighter was what had led me to an editor at all. Without those hours, I might never have understood how precious a good editor was—and I might never have met this one.
Ah. I should at least send Jump a recap.
He'd been fussing over me like I was a preschooler. For all I knew, he was still sitting there waiting for me to come back and tell him how it went. As proof, his Discord had been showing online since this morning. At this hour he was usually offline, probably asleep.
I sent him a message. The reply came instantly.
That last part seemed to do the trick. Jump's scolding—all that noise about signing a contract without thinking—eased off a little. I still didn't understand why he was this invested in someone else's editor. I'd met her myself, decided she was fine, and hired her. That was the whole story.
Setting aside the occasional remark I couldn't quite follow, Kang Ah-yoon was a decent person. Her editing was excellent, and she backed my opinions without hedging. On top of that, she'd volunteered to do things for my stream of her own accord. When I thought about how rare it was, this early in my streaming career, to find a fan willing to sacrifice that much—this was clearly a connection I needed to treasure.
Honestly, a sliver of unease was still there. Anyone could tell from the FanTube videos that Kang Ah-yoon's editing was on another level. I didn't know what a university curriculum looked like, but it wasn't hard to guess she'd been keeping top-tier grades on campus. And I had hired a person like that on nothing but a share of Newtube revenue that might never even materialize.
If Kang Ah-yoon woke up to reality later and said she was out, I wouldn't have a word to say back. I couldn't pay a salary she'd actually be happy with. Worse, I'd already seen her finished work. My standards had been ruined. An editor with merely decent skills would never satisfy me now—which meant I was the one who had to hold onto Kang Ah-yoon, no matter what. I had hired her, and somehow the power dynamic had flipped completely.
In the middle of that irony, I sent my editor a Discord message. I wanted to draw up the partnership contract we'd talked about today, and I asked when she'd have time.