Consulting
"Yaaawn..."
A yawn slipped out of me even though I had slept like a rock. That was how mentally exhausting yesterday's stream had been.
ShaShotShaShot — now my manager — and Alpha noona had gone at each other in a war of nerves, putting on a display of madness I still couldn't tell was real or fake.
I'd barely calmed them down and caught my breath when someone named WannaPlayABalanceGame? showed up, dropped three hundred thousand won, and kicked off a full-blown debate over "eating poop-flavored curry VS eating curry-flavored poop."
With that kind of money on the line I couldn't just ignore it and move on, and it was more fun than I'd expected, so things got a little heated on my end too.
Summarizing yesterday's broadcast like that, no wonder the fatigue hasn't gone anywhere.
I talked myself into accepting it, splashed my face with cold water until my head cleared, and sat down on the sofa.
The sofa had become my assigned seat at this point. Aside from eating, I handled everything from there.
"Nnngh...!"
I stretched my arms and legs out as far as they would go, savoring that long pull through my muscles, then let myself fall sideways across the cushions. A softness different from the bed welcomed me in.
"Ah, that's nice."
I stared blankly at the ceiling for a while, then sent a message to manager noona on Dearcode.
Dearcode wasn't just for calls — you could text each other too, and the features were robust enough that people who gamed as a hobby used it even more than Kketalk.
I don't game, so Kketalk is more comfortable for me.
I'd suggested we just use Kketalk at first, but noona wouldn't give me her full number, so we settled on Dearcode.
Honestly, I never thought it would be this much fun.
Among the jobs I could do from home, it just happened to fit my conditions the best, and it looked decent enough, so I picked it. Looking back now, it was a stroke of genuine genius.
Come to think of it, noona always puts a period at the end. Same thing when she donated yesterday.
It wasn't much, but it was distinctive enough to stick. Little things like that get branded into you later. Like, you'd see a period at the end of a sentence and think of her.
Manager noona let a small beat pass after my reply before sending anything. Then she asked me something else.
The cam, huh...
It was a problem I'd been turning over myself, steadily. And ever since I started streaming, I'd been thinking about it more often, and a lot harder.
I sat with it for a moment, then typed.
I told her the truth. In practice, not even showing my computer screen — just parking a black display up there and filling the hours with talk — had been pretty rough.
Showing my face would let the yanderes immerse themselves more than trying to play every emotion with my voice alone. And it would be a waste to just bury a face like this, wouldn't it?
The memory of the attempted rape still yanked at my ankle whenever I started to forget it, but after meeting Se-a noona yesterday, my heart felt a good deal lighter. Like some anxiety I hadn't even known I was carrying had quietly vanished.
"I don't know if I'm the weird one, or if noona is just special..."
For some reason, whenever I looked at her, I got the feeling that no matter what happened, she would protect me.
Maybe it was all that experience as a manager — she pointed out the parts that could become a problem on stream right away. That said, I'd lived through it myself, so I'd already been keeping this one in mind.
"I'm not enough of an idiot to make the same mistake twice."
That was what I'd figured — but it seemed noona had a different reason in mind when she said the stream wouldn't be able to continue.
The streaming structure she laid out for me was nothing like what I'd imagined.
What didn't change, either way, was that my laptop specs were garbage and it hadn't held up. However you sliced it, I was going to have to replace the thing.
But that left me with a question.
If the software was what it couldn't handle, shouldn't it have crashed yesterday too?
Contrary to that thought, yesterday it had run clean all the way to the end of the stream, without so much as a stutter.
Same principle as rust forming on a machine that hadn't been touched in a long time, then?
There weren't even any games installed on the laptop, so it had never had a reason to push itself — and in that state, a suddenly heavy program kicking on might well have been more than it could take. Yesterday going fine could have been because it had already run once, or it could have just been luck.
If I was going to replace it eventually, sooner was better. That was why I'd already reached out yesterday.
The person I'd reached out to, of course, was Se-a noona.
After that, the conversation cut out for a moment. Had we run out of things to say?
I was turning over whether I should toss her a new topic from my side when manager noona sent another message.
The read receipt popped up. No reply came.
"NewTube, huh..."
I had a few content ideas already lined up. But I figured it was a bit soon for someone who hadn't even finished putting his streaming setup together, so I'd been treating it as a later problem.
She wasn't the type who wouldn't know that. I was wondering what she was trying to say by bringing it up when a link arrived.
I tapped it. A NewTube video.
A black screen, with my words laid over it as subtitles. It looked like they'd clipped and edited the reactions from two days ago. The view count was already past two million.
I scrolled the comments. The response was generally favorable. No — past favorable. They were going wild for it, gushing with a heat that bordered on violent. Some of them looked like yanderes, but far more were people seeing me for the first time through NewTube.
In a way, that was obvious. NewTube was easy to stumble into even if you never watched lives.
They'd carved the fun parts out of a stream that ran for hours, so it was easier to watch, and a lot more entertaining. On top of that, male streamers already had a bad reputation, and for all sorts of reasons it was hard for a guy on stream to pull in new blood beyond his early fanbase. So of course there were more people on NewTube than on Twitch.
"I still didn't think the gap would be this big."
A stream sitting in the five-thousands — and that wasn't a small number — had cracked two million views on NewTube.
"Let's think positive! It means my stream isn't boring."
I held onto that and checked whether there were any other videos. Related content included clips telling people not to verify their unique ID number or send donations. There was even a video of me singing from yesterday.
Uploading it was one thing, but wasn't that a little fast?
FanTube, I supposed? And the ones who uploaded it to make money... wait.
This world overreacted to anything involving men often enough that it barely registered as news. The constitution of the Republic of Korea itself had been written with sections designed to favor men.
So people could just take work a man had made, walk off with it, and monetize it?
That was a completely different story from the streamer named Hae-myo I'd looked up when I was researching all this before.
So they'd used a hole in the law. Wherever you went, there were people whose brains ran in that direction.
Advice from manager noona that would become blood and flesh if I took it in. I turned the whole thing over again.
I'd been treating NewTube as nothing more than a tool — something you used to edit a live down so people who had a hard time sitting through one could actually watch it. It wasn't a problem I could afford to think about that lightly.
She looked impressive all over again.
But even though she'd clearly read the message I sent, no reply came. I was just starting to wonder if I should send something else from my side when an answer finally arrived.
Hmm. She spent close to thirty seconds thinking just to send that one sentence? Yeah, no.
Then something came up on her end? She would have said so. She would have told me to drop Dearcode, or that something had come up.
If it was neither of those, there was only one thing I could think of.
She got embarrassed. I had no idea which part had done it, but she'd looked at the message I sent and gotten embarrassed.
Oh, there's another one here who's fun to tease?
I couldn't stop the smile from spreading across my mouth.
Who exactly was out here working "a little hard" and producing streamers with millions of subscribers? One of them even had over ten million.
I'd nearly fallen out of my chair last night, looking it up after I ended the stream.
Which meant the message I was about to send was a hundred percent sincere. There was absolutely no teasing involved. None.
That's a shame. I hadn't sent it with that in mind at all.
However. I, Yoon Dan-woo, was not the sort of wicked little brother who picked fights with his noona's words.
She warned me again. Truly, I could not help but feel wronged.
...If I could not help but feel wronged, did that mean I was not? I was not... not... not feel...
Yeah. I feel wronged.
Rather than sit here conjugating my own grievances, I should send a message first.
I waited, looking forward to whatever she would send back. Nothing came. I gave it about a minute. Still nothing.
The read receipt attached itself the moment I nudged her. She hadn't left the Dearcode room, at least.
"Wow... she actually got mad."
Watching her leave the room for real, I closed Dearcode myself. I checked the time and bolted up off the sofa.
"It's already this late?"
It was pushing eleven before I knew it. I showered in a hurry and went up to the loft in nothing but pants.
"Should send a text."
Standing in front of the closet, I messaged Se-a noona that she could come over now. A got-it came back immediately.
"How should I tease her today?"
What could I do to close the distance fast — and, while I was at it, get to see her get embarrassed too?
After I'd parted with Se-a noona yesterday, I'd turned it over carefully and arrived at a conclusion: teasing with a lot of skinship.
"Holding hands is a given, but how far should I go?"
The important thing was that today was only day two. I had to tease her while still aiming for the right amount of distance.
Turning over what would work, I changed into the clothes I'd picked out ahead of time yesterday.
We weren't going for a walk today, so a plain black long-sleeve, dark jeans, and over that a corduroy jacket lined with wool.
I went downstairs and waited. The intercom rang.
I opened the door without even checking, and there was Se-a noona, looking at the open doorway in an awkward stance.
"Hey, Dan-woo?"
She waved, hesitant. She was as pretty as an angel today too.
I'd told her in advance we were heading downtown, and it showed — jeans, a black turtleneck, a brown long coat over the top.
"Hey, noona. You look pretty today too."
I was fairly sure I would go my whole life without getting tired of making noona embarrassed.
How could I get tired of it, when she blushed that freshly, that shyly?
"Oh, we're heading downtown today, right? To buy a computer."
"Yeah. There's somewhere I want to stop first, though. I heard there's a great ramen place near the shop you recommended?"
"Ramen?"
Se-a noona tilted her head, like that was unexpected.
"What's wrong?"
"No, it's nothing. I just thought guys usually like pasta or tteokbokki."
Had even food cravings been swapped between men and women? I still hadn't pinned down the finer details like that.
"I don't hate those, but I like ramen more than pasta."
"I see."
I held my hand out toward Se-a noona, who was wearing a look like she found that genuinely interesting.
"What is it?"
"Aren't you holding my hand today?"
"Huh? Oh, today too?"
She asked it back with a face caught between flustered and quietly hopeful. Looking at her like that made me want to mess with her.
"If you don't want to, you don't have to..."
"Ah, no! I want to!"
She grabbed on in a hurry the moment she saw me start to pull my hand back. Her hand was warmer than yesterday.
"Shall we go?"
"Y-yeah."
Squeeze. Squeeze. Enjoying the feel of her hand, we stepped out of the building.