A Collab Offer
It was dark. As if a veil of ink-black cloud had been drawn across the world, I couldn't see so much as an inch ahead.
Where... is this...?
I couldn't remember. What I'd been doing a moment ago, why I was here — even where here was.
I tried to swing an arm, but all I managed was a twitch against a heavy, unyielding resistance.
An unknown place, and I didn't even have freedom of my own body. It ought to have been terrifying. And yet my heart was still.
Why...
With things like this, I felt more fear at the calm of my own heart than at the vague dread coming off the unknown.
I tried to look around, but my neck wouldn't move. I truly couldn't budge an inch.
I stayed like that for a long while. Were my feet even touching the ground? Or was I floating in midair?
...Huh? This feeling...
Something about it was familiar.
In a darkness so complete my senses themselves seemed about to go numb, a faint current brushed my skin. Closer to a flow of water than of air.
This is... the dream I had when I first came to this world?
It was similar to that situation — dream or otherwise, I still wasn't sure.
In that instant, a beautiful and mysterious voice reached me. My unmoving body turned around of its own accord.
There, beneath the ink-dark clouds, stood a black goddess — darker than the night sky, and more radiant than the stars.
"Hah! Hah... hah..."
I bolted upright in bed.
I scanned my surroundings, gasping as if I'd been chased through a dream. Thankfully, it was my own house.
I pressed a hand to my throbbing head and let out a long sigh.
"I think I had a dream... what was it about?"
I couldn't remember. It felt like I'd had a really important conversation. I didn't even know who'd shown up.
"Well. It was just a dream, right?"
I sat there with my hand against my head, and the headache faded almost at once. With a clearer mind, I dismissed the whole thing and got out of bed.
My clothes clung unpleasantly to my sweat-soaked body, and I wanted to get clean as soon as humanly possible.
...Maybe I should have sat there a little longer and thought it through.
If I had, I might at least have noticed the yellow light coming off my own hand.
Warm water ran down my body, rinsing away the clammy sweat.
When I exhaled, steam fogged the already hazy mirror. I wiped it with my palm, and my reflection looked back.
I should have been used to it by now. I'd even gotten used to the height. But those green eyes showed no sign of becoming familiar.
"Jealousy is the green-eyed monster... was that how it went?"
A line from Shakespeare's Othello.
The me from old Earth and the original owner of this body had nothing to do with each other. And yet, paradoxically, my eyes now seemed to stand in for the old me — as if telling me never to forget the time when I, who had nothing, envied everyone who did.
When I looked into those large, clear green eyes, it felt like the monster called jealousy lurking inside them might swallow me whole.
"Enough. That's already in the past. I got over it."
I said it as I pushed my head under the stream pouring over my body.
Must have been getting sentimental because the world had changed. It had been almost two weeks already — pretty funny to be doing this now, of all times.
I finished showering and dried off. One upside of a smaller body: you dried off faster.
It was winter, so I worked lotion in carefully so my skin wouldn't crack, then sat down on the sofa.
"Hm? Manager-noona?"
I didn't have any plans to go out today. Nothing major except Seah-noona coming by in the afternoon, and I'd already picked out a spot for the desk.
I picked up my phone to kill time until then, and there was a message waiting from Manager-noona.
Had something happened?
The reply landed the instant I hit send, accompanied by a number I couldn't make sense of.
Collab and ad offers... addressed to me? That was hard to believe.
Not that I doubted Manager-noona. But come on. What exactly was anyone seeing in a day-five nobody streamer who didn't even run a cam?
That was her answer to the question I hadn't even asked.
Novelty. The single biggest peculiarity — and selling point — my stream had going for it.
Being a guy. Being nice. Chat being relatively free, with nobody forcing a tone. All of it boiled down to one word: new.
They were saying I didn't even need to turn the cam on. I'd already proven I was a man, and I was holding five thousand average viewers with no camera at all. That was more than enough to justify a collab offer or an ad deal.
Collabs were a great way to widen your audience and get your name out there. They almost never failed, and some pairings were so good people called them cheat-code duos — pulling several times the numbers of a solo stream.
Pick the wrong time or the wrong person, though, and the same thing turned into poison. A double-edged sword, through and through.
If I collabed with someone — and that someone outclassed me in popularity and viewership in every way that counted — people would say I was sticking a straw in them and drinking. Guaranteed. A hundred percent.
It might even blow up big enough to stain the stream's image. That was how wrecked the reputation of male streamers already was.
Right. It didn't have to be now. Turn the cam on, grow the stream, settle into a stable orbit — then collab. That wouldn't be too late.
Five thousand average viewers on day five wasn't exactly the name of somebody's dog. And if you set aside the people who mindlessly dunked on me just for being a guy, the reputation was pretty decent.
There was a way? A minute ago she'd said it couldn't be helped.
There was a streamer like that? Someone a nobody like me could collab with and not get torn apart...
Was there something wrong with them? Some kind of controversy?
Would noona really recommend someone like that?
I didn't think so.
Oh. I'd never seen her put an ellipsis on the end of a sentence before. So she did use punctuation other than periods and question marks.
No, that wasn't the point. Crazy about men?
"That sounds familiar... where have I heard that?"
I was still turning it over — I was sure I'd heard it recently — when noona handed me the answer on a platter.
"Ah, Hae-myo! The man-crazy one!"
That was it. A big-name streamer with a one-of-a-kind character built entirely around being obsessed with guys, pulling twenty-five to thirty thousand average viewers.
If it was her, yeah — I'd probably catch a lot less heat. If anything, people would dunk on her for going after another guy. And she'd turn even that into banter with chat and make it entertaining.
"She really nailed that concept."
As a streamer, I had to admire it.
What was that? Had they fought or something? For someone talking like that, she'd been the one to float the idea, and she didn't actually sound like she thought badly of her.
Along with the message, she sent a screenshot of the collab offer Hae-myo had mailed in.
That was it. She wanted to collab. No outline, no nothing.
Fine, you could settle the schedule once the other side said yes — but couldn't she at least write down what content she wanted to do together?
This... is a big-name streamer?
Whatever I'd imagined a big-name operation looked like...
That was the conclusion I came to. Man-crazy or not, a day-five nobody wasn't getting a free pass from chat. Better to stream for at least a month first, then collab. I needed to stop trying to rush everything.
If someone asked whether turning them all down felt like a waste, the answer was obviously yes. In this world, it was a good chance to widen my network and actually meet people.
Still. Opportunities like this would come around again.
There was a short pause before the reply came in.
"Look at you, getting shy."
I could picture the embarrassed look on her face perfectly. Not that I actually knew what she looked like.
"I've still got a lot of time."
The Discord with Manager-noona had wrapped up fast, and I still had hours before stream. Since I didn't game, my options for killing time were limited. E-books weren't my thing, so reading was out too.
Maybe I should hit a bookstore with Seah-noona next time? And while we were out, grab a meal somewhere good. Going wherever she wanted to go sounded fun too. She'd refuse, obviously — but if I pushed a little, she'd tell me, right?
"Does noona even play games?"
It was a reversed world. Maybe that kind of thing had flipped too. Her tastes in food had already changed — it'd be weirder if this hadn't.
"Come to think of it, I can actually game now."
Back then the laptop couldn't handle it. Now, if I wanted to, I could. I'd just never thought of it because it wasn't a hobby.
If noona played a lot, or even just now and then, playing together would be nice. I'd heard that on old Earth, guys used to romanticize taking their girlfriends to a PC cafe. Going to a PC cafe would be fun too.
"I keep thinking about Seah-noona the second I have a spare second, lately."
And I didn't even mind. Exhibit A: the corners of my mouth refused to come back down.
"Whether we game together or go on a PC cafe date — I should probably be able to play first, right?"
There were supposedly three games streamers mainly played. Might as well try them while I was at it.
A quick search turned up the big three right away.
FPS: Unknown Combat
AOS: Field of Glory
RPG: Forgotten Tale
Unknown Combat was a game I'd heard of even on old Earth. You could do team modes or fight monsters, but the main draw had been the battle royale, as I recalled.
Field of Glory rang a bell too — same genre, similar name to something I remembered. Forgotten Tale I was hearing for the first time.
I signed up for each one and started the downloads.
Forgotten Tale had the biggest file size, probably because of the graphics. It was an open world, and people said the main story wasn't anything special, but the side stories were actually good. On top of that, it had the best graphics currently out there, and constant updates that kept adding things to do — which was how it stayed popular.
An RPG you could play from scratch on stream no problem. FPS and AOS, though — you'd want at least a basic foundation if you wanted the stream to run smoothly.
So I started with Field of Glory.