Collab!
"Nngh...!"
A strange, ticklish sensation dragged a low cry from my throat and hauled me out of deep sleep. Morning sunlight poured through the window and spilled across my face.
"Nom nom."
The culprit was none other than Yuyeon. Still half-asleep, she was suckling on the soft white animal ears that stuck up from the top of my head, making little smacking sounds with her mouth. The hot, wet sensation made every hair on my body stand on end.
I flailed my cotton-ball-soft body, thrashing desperately to escape her plush embrace.
"Nom!"
"Eeeeeek!"
Animal ears, as it turned out, were far more sensitive and fragile than anyone would imagine. Just as some humans had ears that doubled as an especially weak erogenous zone, my hybrid form had the same fatal weak spot right there on top of my head.
I could grit my teeth and tolerate her gently fiddling with them using her fingers — that much fell within the bounds of my generous patience. But clamping down with her mouth while I was completely defenseless? There was no way I could endure that.
"Get off!"
"Uwehk!"
Only after shoving her blank, sleepy face away with both hands did I finally manage to scramble free of her arms. I leapt down onto the bed and gasped for air, trying to calm the wild hammering of my heart.
"Hah... hah..."
I carefully lifted a hand and prodded the tip of my ear. Whether it was because her front teeth had gotten a proper grip on it, the whole side of my head still burned with a lingering, tingling ache.
"Hiiing... that felt so good, Nabi..."
Yuyeon still hadn't fully climbed out of dreamland. She rolled around on the bed, mumbling in a voice thick with sleep. I glared at her with pure spite and snapped,
"Touching them, fine — I'll give you that a hundred times over. But please stop biting them!"
"But it feels too good, Nabi... what am I supposed to do..."
"Still don't do it!"
"Oh yeah? Then I should do it even more!"
"Waaah!"
And so, first thing in the morning, I had no choice but to wrestle her in a childish tussle right there on top of the blankets. Of course, for all her teasing, Yuyeon never actually bit my ears again or tried to torment me further. That earlier ambush had been pure sleep-talking — a hundred percent unconscious.
I knew she meant no real harm, so even as I grumbled, I quietly let it slide without making a bigger fuss.
"Aigoo, my back..."
Yuyeon had dragged herself out to work all day yesterday too. The aftermath seemed to be catching up with her now; she sat up in bed with a genuine groan of pain, clutching her lower back.
"What did you do, Yuyeon?"
"Bent over all day picking up trash with the neighborhood uncles..."
I'd heard that the public jobs the government funded usually weren't all that demanding. They were more of a welfare measure — small bits of work handed out to elderly people with limited mobility or folks in tough financial situations.
Whether her luck of the draw had just been rotten, though, Yuyeon seemed to have landed one of the more backbreaking assignments: environmental cleanup.
"Be careful, Yuyeon. Ruin your back while you're still young and you're signing up for a lifetime of misery."
"Nabi... why do you sound exactly like a neighborhood uncle when you talk?"
"Ehk..."
Because I am one... I couldn't think of a single comeback.
"Anyway, our broadcast went really well — I wonder if anything happened overnight?"
As if the pain had never existed, Yuyeon beamed and plopped down in the chair in front of the computer. With practiced ease, she pressed the power button on the tower.
Whiiirrr—!
She fired up the internet and logged into YouTube.
"Me too, me too! I wanna see!"
I scooted over beside her, practically bouncing on my rear. My heart felt ready to burst from curiosity over how many subscribers we might have gained overnight. After all, that public broadcast had been free advertising for our YouTube channel — indirect, but hard-earned.
In truth, terrestrial TV came with all kinds of advertising laws and review boards, so openly plugging a channel name was heavily restricted. We hadn't been able to shout "Please subscribe!" at the camera. But life's rough roads always had a detour that skirted the edges of the law.
Dropping subtle hints that let people figure out the channel on their own was perfectly allowed. So when we'd filmed for the famous animal variety show Animal Farm, of course we'd slipped in little breadcrumbs pointing toward our personal channel. Promoting it had been the whole reason we'd gone on that goldmine of a program in the first place!
"Ooooh, Nabi...!"
"How many? Hurry, show me!"
I craned my neck and stared holes into the monitor. A red number burned itself into my eyes.
"It really went up a ton! Two thousand!"
"Oh...!"
Barely two days ago, this had been a pathetic little Hako channel with fewer than a hundred subscribers, scraped together from a handful of people hitting the button out of pity. But the reach of a major network show like Animal Farm defied imagination. In a single night, a full army of two thousand people had flooded into our channel.
"We can apply for monetization now, Nabi!!! I can't believe it... with this — with this, we can actually make money?"
Under YouTube's system, once you hit a thousand subscribers and the required watch hours, ads started running on your videos and real monetization kicked in. From this point on, just showing off a cat's antics from the corner of a room could put dollars in the bank account.
"We don't even have that many videos yet... at this rate, you could call it a success!"
"Hehehe..."
I nodded hard in agreement with Yuyeon's excitement-flooded assessment.
But settling for just this much would never put us on the throne!
Among YouTubers, the saying went that a hundred thousand subscribers was where things really started — the playing field was that massive.
Getting drunk on a mere two thousand and coasting was not an option. That level of views and revenue couldn't keep two people fed. To support even a single household, we had to plant our flag on the Silver Play Button summit of a hundred thousand.
Still, our channel had one major advantage: me.
A genius cat this smart, this cute, and this stacked with content-planning talent? You could comb the entire vast YouTube ecosystem and you still wouldn't find another one!
"We've only uploaded about ten videos so far... but when the tide comes in, you row. What if we start uploading one video a day?"
"Uploading every day might be rough on you physically, Yuyeon. You're still going out to work, too."
"Yeah, but... watching money get made right in front of my eyes, I don't even feel tired. It's just fun."
All the actual video editing fell on Yuyeon, who'd taught herself the whole craft. In the YouTube ecosystem, it was common knowledge that editing was several times more grueling and bone-grinding than filming. Filming was just turning on a camera and getting the shot in one take.
Editing was a different beast entirely.
You had to scrub through hours of dull, mumbled raw footage from start to finish, over and over, then surgically snip out the killing points and highlights viewers would love — down to the second.
People always asked why you couldn't just upload the full uncut video...
Drop a long raw cut like that and modern audiences hit the back button without mercy.
This was the age of short, sharp stimulation — short-form and snack culture engineered to dump dopamine in a single second.
Unless you were sitting in a movie theater with a massive screen, there wasn't a single angelic subscriber on earth who would lie in bed and patiently watch a one- or two-hour YouTube video on their phone all the way through.
Factoring in the average person's attention span, a YouTube video between ten and twenty minutes was the golden length — not boring, and packed with just the right amount of substance.
"Hm? Yuyeon. Something came into the message inbox."
"Oh, you're right!"
Yuyeon opened the inbox.
It was packed with emails from fans.
"Eek! Do we have to read them one by one?"
"There's so many...!"
There were a few too many to go through individually, so we ended up skipping past them.
But midway through, something familiar caught my eye — a username I was sure I'd seen on a YouTube channel before.
"Yuyeon, wait!"
"Ack, Nabi, what is it?"
"I think I just saw someone I know!"
I snatched the mouse from her. She handed it over without a fight. I guided the cursor and opened one of the emails.
"This person...! It's a YouTube channel with a million subscribers!"
It was a channel I watched regularly.
Mostly cat-themed content. Honestly, pretty much every channel I knew was that kind of channel.
I watched gaming and variety channels too, of course, but...
"What...! You're right, Nabi?"
Yuyeon looked just as stunned once she saw who'd sent it. And of course she was. A big-name YouTuber like this almost never reached out to a Hako channel like ours.
Honestly, you could say it never happened at all.
Sure, the truly massive channels sometimes ran events to discover small-time creators... but that still didn't mean they'd come knocking on a channel like ours.
Our channel had been a complete nothing, after all.
But now that the message was here, ignoring it wasn't an option.
"Open it, open it, Yuyeon!"
"Okay!"
We opened the email.
The content was simple.
They wanted to do a collab with their channel.
They wanted to see once and for all whether Nabi was truly that intelligent!
There was no way we were letting an opportunity like this slip by.
Of course we said yes.