Hey Kids, Jia Has Something to Say!!

The moment Pino dropped a million clouds, the entire server chat exploded.

The chat window was already in chaos the instant the ten-million-won donation hit. Most of the messages were businesslike ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠congratulations, but a few familiar names stood out.

The chat was losing its mind, of course.

Maru paused the donations for a moment and turned on her mic to prepare a proper reaction. During Wicker Town Season 1 and other API-linked collabs, the unspoken rule was to save big-donation reactions for the very end of the stream. But since Pino was technically an outsider, it felt wrong to put it off.

Before long, Pino’s messages flew in.

Seeing that rock-solid conviction, Maru immediately turned her mic back off.

“Ah, yes! If that’s all right with you, I’ll do that, Pino-nim. Thank you so, so much for the donation!”

The viewers didn’t complain. They respected the stream’s unwritten rules and appreciated the consideration for the streamer actually enjoying the game. Right now, Pino was simply the hero of Maru’s broadcast.

She was already a starting member who needed to invite others, and with the added anticipation surrounding Mazia’s participation, the pressure to pull a special invitation ticket was higher than ever. If the viewers’ donations alone couldn’t produce one, things would have gotten painful. A tiny handful of extremists might have even maxed out their cards to help. The boss had threatened to crack my skull if I touched my savings, but apparently there were more people like me than expected. When Oshi wanted to invite someone, fans wanted to chip in so they could watch the two of them play together happily. And if someone wanted to invite Oshi, of course fans would help with that too.

…Well, in Pino’s case the person being invited wasn’t a VTuber, which was a problem, but since today’s donation was necessary for Maru, we decided not to overthink it.

Before long Maru had converted all her coins into gacha boxes. She spoke in a tense voice.

“Then let’s start spinning the coin gacha right away!”

Thanks to the ten-million-won donation, she had a thousand coins and a thousand gacha boxes. The special invitation ticket drop rate was 0.1%. Everyone watched with bated breath as Maru began opening the boxes ten at a time, praying that at least one ticket would appear.

Two hundred boxes.

Five ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hundred boxes.

Nine hundred boxes.

And then… somehow they reached nine hundred and seventy. Maru’s voice was gradually losing strength.

“Wow, we’re screwed……”

But Maru refused to give up hope.

“No. We still don’t know. There are thirty left.”

Pino and the viewers hadn’t given up either.

And I hadn’t given up either. The ten million won I’d withdrawn from my savings was still on standby. Even if the desired item didn’t appear in these thousand boxes, I could just put in another thousand. Come on, special invite ticket!

The instant she saw the two items at the very bottom of the list, Maru screamed.

“Kyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”

I couldn’t even hear what Maru said after that. The volume was so loud I immediately ripped my headset off.

* At the exact same time, Do-hee was also spinning coin gacha. She had logged in thirty minutes earlier than Maru and was already on her two-thousandth pull. Yet the results were so shocking that even Momo, a sixth-year streamer, forgot to fill the audio.

“……….”

No special invitation ticket. After two million won worth of gacha.

Mazia hadn’t prepared ten million won for nothing. After watching Do-hee’s horrific luck for six years, how could she not know? Because “no cuckoos” was in effect, there were almost no chats comparing her to Maru, but the atmosphere in the room was basically a funeral.

It was the complete opposite of Maru’s side, where the sound effects were exploding with excitement.

That was when Maru, completely oblivious, approached the boss who was still in the tutorial zone.

“Boss! I pulled two tickets!!”

Do-hee quickly pulled her emotions together, but…

“What? Two? How many coins did you use?”

“A thousand! Amazing, right? It was all thanks to Pino-nim’s donation.”

The moment she heard the bragging, her heart sank. Still, she had enough experience to ad-lib naturally.

“Ha. So my ticket went to you.”

But after reflexively answering, she realized something in the sentence was off. Pino? Why was that guy donating in Maru’s stream?

“Pino-nim? Pino-nim sent a donation?”

“Yes, he gave me a thousand Wicker Coins. That’s what got me the two tickets.”

“A thousand?!! And he didn’t write anything in the message?”

“He just sent it randomly. Told me to hurry up with the gacha…”

If it had been a donation from Mazia’s fandom, the Donggulis, it would have been natural to call the first-generation members first. But Pino was a famous dark-madness whale—the very icon of misfortune who had burned through Mazia coins. Even if he called the other two members first, he wouldn’t hold it against the company… but why would Pino send such a mindless donation?

Because the chance for Mazia to descend upon the server had appeared, and he had invested without hesitation to create that opportunity himself. Most Parallel fans knew Pino’s madness. The lunatic who gave life to Mazia’s model and, the moment Mazia appeared, immediately dropped a donation. Therefore the idea of using the special invitation ticket that came thanks to Pino to invite Mazia was already an accepted fact among the viewers.

Just looking at the chat in Momo’s room—which had been called the Parallel Headquarters control room—everyone was treating Mazia’s participation as a given. They were already assuming Mazia as the default and debating who to call with the remaining ticket.

Thanks to that, the burden surrounding Maru’s special invitation ticket vanished in one go. It had probably just been a donation because he wanted to see Mazia, but regardless of intent, Pino had saved Maru. Nice.

Do-hee, whose mood had improved, spoke to Maru.

“Call Jia with one ticket and ask around to see who among the others can log in right now. We’ll invite them with the other one.”

“Yes.”

Up until that point, Do-hee hadn’t thought much of it. If she had to describe it, she had tilted slightly toward the happy side of the line between happiness and sadness. Maru had nearly tripped herself up because of the leak, and Do-hee had wanted to help somehow. On top of that, the fact that no special tickets were appearing had been raising her irritation. So of course she felt good when two tickets suddenly landed on Maru’s side.

Of course, that happiness didn’t last long.

In servers run on an invitation system like this, invited ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠players usually role-play by treating the person who invited them as their parent. In other words, Mazia—who had followed Do-hee absolutely until now—would for the first time be following Maru around like a baby bird, chirping and trailing after her instead.

“Stolen? It’s just temporary lending within the server.”

Oh? Throwing shade? Momo frowned and shouted.

“What are you saying?! Can you shut up? Isn’t it because you guys didn’t pray hard enough when you donated that the tickets didn’t come?!”

The usual WWE match had begun.

The special invitation ticket created by Pino’s donation and Maru’s incredible luck. Since I had been ready to log in from the beginning, I was able to join the Wicker server less than ten minutes after the ticket appeared. At the same time, I started the broadcast.

I had wondered whether it was really necessary to run this on the official channel when I was just going to be grinding and doing promotion, but the boss had given me a special mission, so I turned it on without complaint. The goal was exactly what I had written in the title: control room duty.

During Season 1 the members kept turning off their streams to play more 64 Cubics while cutting sleep, so the boss had to hunt them down one by one and force them to sleep. The special measure she came up with was to have me stay awake as usual and monitor whether the members were sleeping or not. It sounded difficult, but once you logged into the server you could check the connected users in real time. So after the members went to bed, I would stay on the server for a few hours and again a few hours before they woke up. In a way, it was actually quite simple.

At the same time, it served to keep bored Parallel fans waiting on the official channel and then direct them to each member once they logged in. Of course I also had to keep playing on the server. Did that mean I had to make an effort to communicate with the viewers and play with them?

「Don’t force yourself to hang out with the viewers. Just do what you need to do. That’s what control room duty is for anyway.」

Exactly. Since it was the boss’s order, I could just calmly do my job without overthinking it. Whether it was grinding or promotion.

Anyway, I entered the tutorial zone. I was looking around for Maru, who had invited me, when the person next to me spoke up first.

“Mazia-nim, hello!”

It was Wicker, whose distinctive mirror ball on his head and white “Operator” title were instantly recognizable. I quickly adjusted my mic settings and answered.

“Ah. Can you hear me?”

“Whoa. You already finished all the sound settings? A lot of people struggle with it, so I was about to help the staff do it myself.”

“Ah, yes. I usually end up helping the members when they have trouble with it.”

Even back when we gathered the members on Parallel’s now half-forgotten 64 Cubics server, I had done all their sound settings myself. I won’t name names, but there were people who couldn’t understand no matter how many times I explained, so I had even gone to their houses to set it up for them directly.

So even if the viewers and Wicker were impressed, it was only natural. …Though there were some people openly comparing the kids to me. I’d have to tell Seung-yeon later and give them a ten-minute ban as a warning.

After that I temporarily opened donations on the official channel. Official channel streams usually had a formal feel, so donations were normally blocked to avoid interrupting the flow. But donations that came in during control room duty couldn’t be ignored, and since they could be used to spin more gacha, the boss had temporarily lifted the restriction.

While the game server side worked on the API integration, Wicker sent me a DM with an image that had a transparent background.

“This is a chart showing what effects you get besides coins depending on the donation amount. You can display it on stream. Feel free to customize it as long as the content stays the same.”

In short, it was a system where the server gave corresponding gifts based on the amount donated. The special invitation ticket that the boss and Maru wanted so badly was also obtained by pulling it with Wicker Coins from this system. Ten thousand won gave ten pieces of Wicker Bread (server-exclusive food) and one coin. Twenty thousand restored all hunger and thirst and gave two coins. Thirty thousand restored all stamina and gave three coins. Fifty thousand gave various random buffs and five coins. One hundred thousand and five hundred thousand would summon monster packs that dropped valuable items when defeated, along with the corresponding coins… And finally, one million.

As we had seen with Maru earlier, the entire server would be notified of the donation, the donor would be launched into the sky, and they would die from fall damage without fail. If you had obtained inventory protection from the gacha it might be different, but without it you would simply drop all your items and die. Still, because it announced to the whole server, it was one of the few chances for smaller streamers to get their name out, so streamers with around five hundred regular viewers often used it as a boost. If Oshi was somehow showing off her presence among other streamers? Just drop a one-million-won donation and notify the entire server. Look at our streamer!

“Once the integration is done I’ll whisper you, so please check the tutorial and enjoy the server! Thank you for coming, Mazia-nim!”

“No, thank you for welcoming me. See you again.”

After parting with Wicker and walking down some stairs, I found a long avenue lined with huge billboards on both sides. It was the server tutorial. It explained what jobs there were, how to earn money, how to level up. It was essentially a brochure suggesting that over the two weeks the server would run, you should choose what you wanted to do.

I read through them one by one, but there were a lot of difficult concepts. Having learned everything by cramming, I figured miner really was my aptitude. After passing a few billboards, Maru—who had spotted me—came running over, spinning circles around me and jumping excitedly.

“Waaaaah it’s Jia!!! Mazia! Mazia! Mazia!”

“You’re being a nuisance.”

“Ehehe. Sorry.”

There were still many people in the tutorial zone waiting for acquaintances to log in. Thanks to Maru expressing the emotion of happiness in such an excited voice, several people slowly drifted over after hearing her. They were all familiar faces. MoovGun spoke first.

“Hello, Manager-nim. It’s been a while.”

“Ah, yes. It has been a while, MoovGun-nim.”

“So. When exactly are you coming to Master tier?”

“I’m raising it slowly, but there are too many crazy people. I still have two more tiers to go.”

Next was Ronze.

“Jia-nim! I watched the travel teaser video. When is the full episode coming out?”

“Hello, Ronze-nim. Teasers usually drop one to two weeks before the full episode, so I’d guess sometime next week or on the weekend. I haven’t received the exact date yet either.”

And finally Serena was cautiously approaching, trying to find the right moment to speak to me… when a whisper arrived faster.

The moment I finished reading the whisper, fireworks went off and my body shot high into the sky.

I shot through the clouds and flew upward, then as I fell I wondered which crazy person had dropped a million won on the official channel. Then I saw it.