24-Hour Stream
"Haaahhh..."
"What time is it...?"
I reached for my phone without sitting up.
4 PM.
Yesterday I'd been helping Mom with work, so I hadn't gone live until nearly midnight. I must have passed out around five or six in the morning.
Still, that was close to ten hours. I'd slept plenty, at least.
"Ah... did she already stream?"
A notification for Miren's broadcast was waiting in my alert tray. She usually only streamed for an hour at a time, which meant this one was almost certainly over.
Her time slots had been creeping earlier and earlier lately. Had she just gone ahead and locked in mornings?
Disappointed, I pulled down the notification shade.
And the title that greeted me made disappointment the last thing on my mind.
What? What happened?
I wrung my brain out as fast as I could. Nothing came up. Had there been any signs? Or had something happened while I was asleep?
I tapped the notification at once.
It had come in around ten. The stream would already be over, but please, at least let there be a VOD...!
"I really have to pick from these? For real?"
...Huh?
"There's nothing here that's even remotely for me. Haah... well, I lost, so I don't have a choice. I'll put it to a vote."
I checked how long she'd been live.
Nearly six hours, and the title had changed.
Outside of collabs, I had never once seen her stay live for six hours.
And more important than the runtime — the current title and what was actually happening on stream had nothing to do with the notification that had come in.
Confession lines, cheesy shoujo-manga lines, degradation lines, dirty lines — every variation you could think of, all written out, and she was taking a vote.
Whatever this was, it did not look like an "important announcement."
And from the way she said she'd lost, it sounded like she'd made a bet with her viewers.
Did she already do the announcement? What did it even say?
And these lines — is she going to read them herself?
I sat there knowing absolutely nothing, turning it over and over, until my thoughts collapsed into a single, inevitable conclusion.
Yeah. The degradation line is definitely the one.
"...Donations don't count toward the tally. Type it in chat, please."
"I won't read it if you write out the line. Type a number. A number."
Haah... where had it all gone wrong?
Right. It had started with me browsing a game-recommendation board.
That was where I met it. The root of all evil. That gambling game.
A roguelike welded onto a gambling sim. I'd only meant to play for about an hour as my first session. Five hours later, it was the only thing I'd touched.
One more round, I'd told myself, and then I'd close it — and I'd missed a jackpot by a hair. Then I'd actually hit a jackpot and still wanted to try a different build, so I ran it back. And again. And again.
Chat had started getting tired.
I'd ignored them and kept gambling anyway, and as the complaints swelled I'd decided to introduce them to the dopamine too. Hence the bet.
"Let's do it like this. If I hit the target this round, I keep going as long as I want. If I don't, I'll grant you one request."
The target the game had set was already easy to beat. I just wanted to watch my viewers get hooked on the dopamine, muttering just one more round to themselves.
"No way...."
And that was how I taught them the dangers of gambling.
Damn it. How does a clover not come up there? The odds were over eighty percent!
A bet was a bet, though, so I told chat to name what they wanted.
Aside from the ones that required turning on the camera, the requests were mostly lines of one kind or another.
I gathered them up, put them to a vote, and promised to deliver whatever came in first.
"What do you want for number one?"
A status ailment hit me on the spot.
They actually like this stuff?
After that the poll filled with every strange thing under the sun, and that was how we'd arrived at the present disaster.
If you sorted the lines by type, the biggest pile was the painfully cheesy ones that sounded like they'd been lifted out of a shoujo manga. Things like this one's my type and don't cry, my little kitten.
Second place, to my genuine alarm, was the kind of dialogue you'd only find in an 18+ doujinshi from my old world. The "get on all fours and bark, a dog should act like a dog" that had just shown up in chat. Or "if you want it, say it yourself, you maso—" ...yeah, no. And those were only the ones I'd heavily filtered before letting them onto the board. The ones I'd thrown out were so much worse they were practically carpeting the floor. How does a person even come up with a deranged line like trash like you should just get pregnant for the future?
On top of that, they were picking lines that assumed I was a man, to a degree that for a second I genuinely wondered if I'd been found out. And why were they so obsessed with uteruses and cocks and defeat?
The last big category was confession lines. Ordinary ones like I love you, go out with me. Yandere ones like if you talk to anyone but me I'll kill you. And you can use me as a living dildo, just love me, which... now that I thought about it, did that even count as a confession?
Anyway. Those were the options.
And the most popular, by a clear margin, were the adult-doujinshi lines.
Probably because those packed the most raw dopamine. They also happened to match the vibe of our chat.
Even then, the vote had split in two: number three, the purely, unhingedly filthy line, and number two, the get-on-all-fours-and-bark one.
I didn't want to do either. Number two was still better. Number three was so unhinged I couldn't believe I'd let it onto the board in the first place.
The one mercy was that while two and three were locked in a vicious fight, Elmil landed a single decisive blow and the momentum tipped toward two in an instant.
Ah, please.
Despair settled over me.
I have to actually say that?
I gave serious thought to just scrapping the whole thing and salting the earth.
........I had no idea why Seoul had entered the chat, but hang in there out there!
If I were being truly serious I would have pulled number three, but I didn't want to kill the mood.
Fortunately, the momentum swung back to number two.
Better wrap the vote before another weird campaigner showed up.
"All right, let's close this out."
I tallied the results. Number two, as expected, won in a landslide.
A relief... was it?
Was I even allowed to call this a relief?
"Haah... I'm really doing this?"
The sigh only made chat burn hotter.
Wow.
That was a better reaction than I'd imagined.
"There~ Happy? We're done, right? I'm not doing any more."
"Then....... I can go back to gambling now, right?"
"Aren't you being a little too hard on me? Honestly, I did that line, so I should get something out of this too."
"Kh...!"