Four Days Off Stream
Their first impressions of each other were about as bad as first impressions got. Each of them found the other thoroughly unpleasant.
The streamer called Lethe, as far as he could tell, hated him because she'd decided he was a delinquent. As for him, he wasn't exactly fond of people who took one video donation and used it to pass judgment on a stranger.
And right now, the important thing—the thing that actually needed handling—was the culprit behind this entire mess.
"Alright... first, you're getting a ten-minute timeout. You went way too far."
"Impressive."
The viewer left those dying words behind and vanished. For ten minutes, anyway.
"You only survived because you donated yesterday and today, so from now on, send me the money you'd waste on videos instead. At least a hundred bucks a month."
By rights he should have perma-banned the guy already. But he had to make money too, so he was giving him one chance.
The broadcast overlay put the current viewer count at around a hundred and ten. Another influx from NewTube had pushed him back over a hundred.
It was starting to feel a little unfair to still slap the Minor Streamer label on himself—but no matter how hard he streamed, most of these people were going to leave eventually. All he could do was hold onto as many as possible.
Honestly, the odds that he'd slip right back under fifty viewers and into Minor Streamer territory were still very high. So no getting his hopes up. No setting himself up for disappointment later. Same as last stream: he just had to keep broadcasting.
Either way, the chat that had been flying by at a clip had visibly slowed the moment that video donation went out. Today especially, with the fight clip playing, the viewers had been more wound up than usual, which only made the sudden drop in energy stand out more.
If he couldn't even ride out a moment like this, becoming a Top-Tier Enterprise Streamer would stay a pipe dream.
And the best way to break a mood like this?
...Sell Lethe out again. She shouldn't have hated him, then. Call it shameless if you wanted. He didn't care.
"Man... Lethe..."
An extremely old, cheap line. And even that wasn't enough. He ran his tongue over his lips, bit down on them, and let a nasty little smile curl across his face.
"Heheheh... even that look of contempt is so pretty."
"Shit, I can't take it. I'm gonna go get some food."
A well-timed line. Or, well, a slightly poorly timed one. Either way, he dropped it and stepped off camera.
The reason he'd bailed right as the energy was climbing was simple enough. Keep poking a Top-Tier Enterprise Streamer on Lethe's level and it would stop being good for him. He needed to cut it off at a reasonable point.
If someone asked whether he hadn't already blown past "reasonable," they wouldn't be wrong. Then again, neither had Lethe. This was enough.
Also, he'd poured himself into the game today, and he was hungry.
He dumped the gukbap he'd bought ahead of time from a shop near the apartment into a pot and set it to reheat. It was the kind of job that took a few minutes, so he drifted back on camera in between and kept talking.
"She's a stranger. You gotta know when to drop a bit like that. You think I'd keep going?"
Judging by the chat, he'd cut the bit at the right time. Even without anyone keeping the Lethe material going, the chat speed was picking back up. It was such a clean recovery that a smile tugged at his mouth on its own as he watched the chat and finished the food.
"I look scary?"
Yuhan's Studio Apartment was as small as the rent suggested, which meant that even from the kitchen he could see every last thing in his room—clothes, computer, monitors, all of it. And with his eyesight as good as it was now, he could even read what the chat on the monitor was saying.
Right in the middle of the back-and-forth about how handsome his smile was and how scary his face looked, he came bursting into the webcam frame with the pot of gukbap in his hands.
The viewer who'd called his face scary started pumping out apology messages at an unholy speed.
"Heheh. What're you so scared of, punk."
"Today I've prepared a delicious gukbap."
He didn't usually buy food. When you were scraping by on part-time wages day after day, cooking at home was far cheaper.
Even gukbap, famous for being a good deal, had been creeping up in price lately. So why had he gone out of his way to buy it?
Image. He was building one.
He stirred perilla powder, salted shrimp, and chili paste into the pork gukbap. From the chat, it looked like they were watching a perfectly ordinary mukbang.
Then he took the kkakdugi—the cubed radish kimchi the shop had given him with the soup—and dumped the entire thing in.
"This is gonna slap."
"What are you taste-blind people even talking about. I'm always right. I get to do whatever I want."
He ate the gukbap he'd made like a man. No—like a woman. Like a woman, and without overdoing it, he even mixed in the kind of eating noises middle-aged men... no, middle-aged women would make.
"Why do I eat so well...? You people don't even know natural selection?"
"What's more attractive to you—a guy eating a five-buck bowl of gukbap, or a guy eating twelve-buck tteokbokki?"
"Exactly."
"You go around hunting for spicy tteokbokki with cheese like a bunch of cowards, and you become a washed-up guy. Then you run into one Geum Taeyang with a wide food spectrum, like me, and it's over. The superior genes that crave gukbap are the ones that survive."
Last time, he'd been the domestic guy who cooked well. This time, he was the cool guy who ate the food women liked.
It was an image he'd cooked up while planning stream content, and he'd had a feeling it would land. The actual reaction was pretty solid. And it wasn't just an image—he genuinely liked the food, too.
The truth was, the viewer count had dipped a little while he was getting the gukbap ready. People who'd come for a fight video and found him setting the table instead had filtered out.
Even so, a considerable number had stayed, which he took as proof that he'd successfully driven in the idea that he was a pretty compelling character. This was how you grew.
Strange things had exploded two days in a row, but his broadcast schedule hadn't changed. Three hours of Just Chatting, then four hours of games.
Not completely quiet. Not too spicy, either.
He closed the night at a hundred and thirty-one viewers.
A considerable result.
Midnight. Twelve o'clock. The hour when everything began to sink into sleep, and seven thousand viewers lost their place to go.
It was time for Lethe's stream to end.
"Anyway, just so you know, I'm off this Sunday."
The stream being over did not mean Lethe's day was over.
She traded thank-yous with her managers and flagged the segments she thought were today's highlights for the NewTube editors.
Then, at twelve-thirty—the hour when everything was finally winding down—a message arrived from her manager.
[link]
That guy. The Minor Streamer she'd only learned about yesterday. It wasn't the first or second time a video donation related to Geum Taeyang had frozen the mood solid.
Yesterday, the Grand Bow clip had wrecked her expression management and left the atmosphere awkward. Today, banning the viewer who'd sent the fight video had made everything weird.
And if that had been all, she might have called herself lucky. Even a stream with a reputation as clean as hers had its trolls, and more than a few donations related to Geum Taeyang had come in just to get a rise out of her. She'd banned every last one of them, of course.
And in the link her manager had just sent over Dascord...
What kind of forced, bizarre line even was that.
She couldn't think of a word for what she was feeling. All of it, she decided, had been her own misjudgment.
There was a saying, wasn't there? You don't avoid shit because you're scared of it. You avoid it because it's filthy. Reacting to a guy like this in the first place had been the mistake.
Had there ever been a day in her life that piled on stress like this?
The mood had been off since morning.
The Lethe's Volunteer Work series she'd uploaded to NewTube. A few of the videos had pulled decent view counts, and some people had even posted proof of donations after watching. She hadn't been aiming for it, but her public image had shot up too.
She'd wanted even a few people to donate or volunteer after seeing her videos, and that had actually happened.
Except it wasn't as if only good things came of it.
Lee Junhyuk. Her boyfriend, and her childhood friend, had hated the content.
Why go looking for extra work? What was it even going to change? When she'd first come up with the idea and asked him to come volunteer with her, his reaction had been thoroughly negative.
She knew perfectly well that not everyone liked volunteer work, so she hadn't pushed him on it. And Junhyuk, even with that sour look on his face, had respected her decision, so she'd thought there wouldn't be a problem...
This morning, it had finally blown up.
The Orphanage she'd asked for filming permission not long ago had gotten in touch to say this Sunday would work.
She'd passed that along to Junhyuk, and they had a huge fight.
Junhyuk had gotten angry that she couldn't even spend the weekend with him. She'd gotten angry right back—it was just an extension of her job, so what was the problem?
Every couple had places where they didn't line up. They had those places too, and they'd stacked and stacked until something finally gave.
She'd gone through all of that first thing in the morning, barely dragged herself through the stream, and now it was Geum Taeyang. Nothing about the day had gone right.
The stress she'd been holding in burst.
By the time she came back to herself, she had already typed out a notice on her phone that she'd be off stream until Sunday.
Normally she would never take a sudden break for a reason like this...
But her head was already past capacity. Rational judgment wouldn't come.
I don't even know.
She hit post.