The Collaboration Stream (1)

"Hello~ Miren, go ahead and introduce yourself!"

"Ah. Right. I'm Miren, and I've been streaming for about two weeks."

"No, I'm not a man. Just a regular woman."

"When I first saw you I genuinely thought you were a guy. I was so surprised when I heard you were a girl."

She carried the stream along as if she'd been born in front of a camera, sliding straight into the rest of my introduction.

So this was what they meant by veteran presence.

I flicked a glance sideways at the chat.

I pressed a hand to my skull.

The reason I'd ended up on this collab was relatively simple. A few days earlier, a message had landed in my inbox.

I sat with that message for a long time. If growing the channel had been the point, I would have accepted without even thinking about it. My actual goal, though, was simply to keep streaming. Inflate the channel too far and I'd only be buying myself problems — that much was obvious.

Yo-ona's channel wasn't that big yet either; she still seemed to be finding her footing. And with no way of knowing how my missions might shift, having a connection like this in my pocket didn't seem like a bad idea. So I took the offer.

"Hello!"

"Ah. Yes."

The moment I joined the Discord channel she'd sent, she was already there to greet me. We traded a light hello, and then she launched into the schedule and the finer points of the content.

"So after a quick hello and intro, we're planning a quiz show and then ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠some games. I'm estimating about five to six hours. Do you have a window that works?"

"I don't really have any time constraints. No fixed schedule or anything."

"I see...."

She clattered at the keyboard, tidying the conversation we'd just had into something usable. The channel I'd scoped out beforehand — Yo-ona — put on a slightly spacey, 4D act on stream, and the woman in this call was nothing like that. So that had been a bit too, then.

"Alright, I think we've got everything wrapped. So four days from now, 6 PM, right?"

"Yes. That should work."

She struck the Enter key hard, as if declaring the matter closed.

"Whew! There we go. Done..."

"Thanks for putting it together."

A short silence settled between us.

"Um.... this is just personal curiosity, but........."

"Yes?"

"Do you usually keep the voice changer on the whole time?"

I froze for a beat. She wasn't wrong — running a voice changer even in a private call like this did look a little strange.

"Yeah.... well. I just don't feel like messing with the settings."

"Ah..... yeah, to get quality like that you'd have to tweak more than one or two things."

Of course I could have switched it off with a single click even now. But if turning it off only made me sound more like a guy, that would become a headache I didn't need, so I let it go.

"Anyway. See you on collab day."

"Yes. Thank you."

.....And that was how I'd ended up here.

"Ah, Miren made a splash in the community as a guy-like female streamer. Are you aware yourself that you come off as masculine?"

Of course I am. I'm a guy.

"Yes. I got a sense of it from the viewers' chat, to some extent."

"Ehh~ then shall we talk about those viewer chats?"

"All those incredibly explicit messages — what do you make of them?"

The chat, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, was busy denying everything it had just done. I didn't even need to go looking — one flick of the scroll wheel on this very window would have laid the whole crime scene out in the open.

"Well. At the end of the day those are chats the viewers typed out for me, so I'm grateful for every one of them."

Instead of dropping the blunt truth, I went with the answer we'd already framed. Yo-ona had roughly sketched this part out in advance. Give a weird answer on something like this and you'd have an incident on your hands.

The comments that answer produced, though, were a problem I was going to have to live with.

"As expected. People who make it have a different mindset."

"Then shall we head into the quiz?"

She screen-shared over Discord and pulled up the PowerPoint she'd prepared. It had a strangely distinctive design — another piece of that 4D concept, maybe.

"Welcome, everyone, to Yo-ona's Quiz Show!"

"Yo-ona's Quiz Show — rule explanation!"

The slide flipped, and lettering in the same slightly offbeat style filled the screen.

"Alright — let's begin!"

She flipped the slide, and the questions bloomed across the screen.

"Question one! What was the date of Miren's first stream? Miren, this one's yours!"

Beneath the first question, with almost excessive kindness, sat a multiple-choice list.

"Ah.... what was it again?"

I played along, pretending I couldn't quite remember. I'd fired up a stream the very day I arrived in this world. As if I wouldn't remember. But if I nailed everything too fast we wouldn't fill the runtime, so I'd been asked to miss a few on purpose.

"Number 1?"

"Ah, so close! The answer was number 2!"

After we knocked out about four questions of a similar type, the grand finale arrived.

"Already the last one! Can we get this final question right?! Drumroll....."

"Tada!"

The last question was just an event bit — they'd take viewer shitposts and turn them into questions. We'd agreed beforehand that something like this would come up, but seeing it in the flesh was a little unhinged.

"Excuse me? Disqualified as a female...."

"Ah~ you still have to pick one of the two. What's it going to be?"

I laughed in disbelief, then picked number 1 on a shrug.

And just like that, the chat caught fire. Well. That was the scripted sequence.

"Then shall we bring out one of the viewer questions first?"

"The first one is.... this!"

"Do you all love Miren's stream! 1. Yes! 2. No!"

A few jokes aside, most of the chat was some version of I love you. It was a very different kind of love from the usual sexual harassment, and it left me with a strange, hard-to-name feeling. This was pretty nice, in its own way.

"Looks like a lot of number 1s? Number 1! That's correct!"

"Then question 2! If you love her, you'll donate every single day, right?"

"People are asking who wrote this, and that's a secret? I might have written it, or Miren might have!"

For the record, I hadn't written a thing.

Anyway, the short quiz show wrapped up after about thirty minutes.

"Alright — now comes the highlight. Game time!"

"And the game you all voted for Miren to play is, in fact......"

This had been locked in by a private vote ever since the collab was first scheduled. I stretched, briefly. From here on, things were about to get considerably more painful.

"Ba-dum! It was King Fit!"

I pulled out the ring Yo-ona had mailed me. Even if people barely used these things anymore, sending one to someone you'd never even met.... Guess I was in for a brutal workout for the first time in a while. I stretched lightly, working the stiffness out of my body.

"The rules are simple! Base playtime is one hour, plus one extra minute for every 10,000 won!"

How much extra would that even be..... Donations usually came in under 100,000 won a day, so even factoring in the current hype, we wouldn't be adding more than another thirty to sixty minutes....

A fanfare blared.

Huh?

I doubted my own eyes. Not even a minute in, and someone had dropped a million won?

I felt it in my gut.

Didn't you people say you were broke?