First Broadcast: ON

Lee Suho was seated on the far side of the monitor. Watching, through a portable screen, the exact same feed I was seeing, he had agreed to handle the overall operation of the stream, while I would be the one to begin the apology and the reader communication.

A large ⑤ appeared on the screen.

"Noona, I'll play the intro first. When it's time to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠turn your cam on, I'll put a message up on the screen for you."

"Mm-hm."

The number sitting inside that deep-gray circle — the kind you only ever saw in the countdown leader of an old film reel — finally flipped to a 1, and an intro screen began to play, one I had no idea when he'd even made. The covers of all twenty-nine novels I had ever written were arranged above and below it, and in the center, in letters far from small, stood my five pen names. 'Seeing them laid out like this... there really are a lot... and I'm supposed to bring every last one of these to a proper ending... right...?' My stomach clenched up as if I'd come down with a sudden case of indigestion.

While I was admiring the covers one by one, an unidentifiable alert chimed through the earphone plugged into my left ear.

—Ding! —Ding!!

'What is that sound...?' One glance at the right-hand sub-monitor and I had a pretty good guess: people were entering the broadcast. Since it was my first stream, the entry alerts had never been configured, so they simply kept ringing.

The endlessly climbing wall of text looked like something out of a hacker scene in a movie. 'Not that I find screens like that anything short of absurd...' Curious how long it would keep scrolling without end, I tipped my head down a little — and there it was, the current viewer count.

'...Fifteen thousand people?' Only now did I regret having assumed that, on a weekend evening, I'd be lucky to pull a hundred viewers — a thousand at the absolute most. 'In front of more than ten thousand people... I'm supposed to do... that?'

I snatched up the keyboard in a panic and typed into the text window Suho would be watching.

"Ack!" At his merciless announcement that the cam was going on, I hurriedly arranged myself exactly as promised, palm turned toward the camera.

"There. The stream's live, so shall we ease into it?"

The line we had agreed he would deliver once the cam was confirmed to be coming through properly.

"...Yes... yes..."

It resembled the Lee Suho voice I knew, and yet it didn't. Hearing, with my eyes covered, not his usual light tone but the slightly lower voice of a grown man sent a faint chill of fear through me.

"Now. Look into the camera and give us your name, along with the number of works you've published to date."

"I'm... Song Gaon, and there are twenty-nine..."

My eyes were still covered, but the alerts reaching my ears no longer sounded like entry notifications. The slightly different chime rattled on without pause — a measure of just how fast the chat was climbing — and I took a small, discreet deep breath so it wouldn't show on camera.

"And how many times have you suspended serialization to date?"

"One... one hundred and fifty-eight times."

In truth, I had never once counted. Suho had done the counting for me. 'Hearing the actual figure, I couldn't help wondering how he'd even tallied it...' How he'd counted didn't much matter. However I looked at it, the record was genuinely vile.

"No wonder you got dragged here. First time doing something like this?"

"Yes..."

I am never writing a scene like this again.'Being on the receiving end is terrifying, that's why...' A prickly chill ran through me, and I very nearly shuddered on the spot.

"Now. Will you tell them what you'll be doing from here on?"

—Gulp.

"The... the returned menace of a serial-dropper will read her formal apology before the camera and communicate her upcoming schedule—th!"

'Ack! I bit my tongue!' Slurring my words with a strange noise, I had apparently made the atmosphere even stranger. And in the midst of my flustered fumbling, the light beaming beside my palm went dark.

Wondering whether the cam had been cut, I stole a glance at the monitor — the pre-prepared apology video was already playing. He'd told me to record myself scrolling through and reading the apology as well, just in case, and I had. I simply never imagined it would be deployed like this.

"Your mic is muted right now, so you can talk. Watch the chat reactions for a bit beforehand."

Had I read the apology live, I might well have bolted halfway through, unable to contain the way my heart was pounding at this very moment.

The chat was rising too fast to read as it scrolled, so I froze it and worked my way down at my own pace — and just as Suho had said, the focus was different. Not blanket attacks on me, but half-doubt. The spotlight was trained less on the works than on who I was, and oddly enough, that felt like less of a burden right now.

Just as I was drowning in the chaos of it all, Suho rapped lightly on the desk.

"It's almost over now, so when you're ready, hit the cam button and the mic button to go live."

"Okay."

There was no reading the ever-growing chat in full anyway. 'At least it beats the time the comments scared me half to death.' Back then, someone had left comments filling the thousand-character maximum — the limit allowed — on every single chapter up to the twentieth of one of my works. It began with why start a second novel when you couldn't even finish your first, and went on from there to aggressive screeds that had nothing to do with the story, who knew whether the person had even read it... Those attacks, striking without warning straight at my most tender spots, had frightened me badly.

'But as long as I take my medication... it'll be fine.' There was no need to be afraid of the face I wore now. Nobody knew what I had originally looked like.

"Ahem."

I pressed the cam input button, then the mic button. The light came on, a red glow lit up on the microphone, and I began my greeting.

"...H-hello? This is author Song Gaon."

To Lee Suho, it was fascinating to watch Gaon carry the conversation more smoothly than he had anticipated. She was laying out, with perfect clarity, what the problems had been, what reasons had driven her behavior, and what measures she intended to take going forward. Speaking in a tone far gentler than the one she used when scolding herself, keeping pace with the chat bit by bit as she talked — Suho, thinking his noona might just have outdone the plan, simply stood back and observed.

"...Uh... Thank you, Super Yellow Hound, for the five hundred thousand won. I'll... I'll do my best?"

To anyone watching, the apology segment was obviously pre-recorded. But the chat had been mostly consumed with who the woman who first appeared even was, and once she returned and named herself Song Gaon, the readers who realized she matched the real name long deduced from her old pen names began trading information among themselves.

"Well, it's true that I wrote them, but... showing strangers my writing as text and hearing a voice donation in person — those are two completely different feelings..."

She hadn't even been able to leave a comment before. Song Gaon, communicating with ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠readers for the very first time in her life, laid out her feelings in a calm, level voice. She succeeded in recapping the apology's main points as well, and though the donation had visibly flustered her, she handled it well.

"So... now I have to go back and reread all twenty-nine of them, so... for today... I'll end the stream here, and starting with my next writing session, I'll keep the stream on so you can watch how much I'm actually getting written."

Watching the flood of chat, Song Gaon abruptly rose to her feet.

"Well then — please take care of me from here on out!"

Suho stole a glance at Gaon folding herself into a rigid ninety-degree bow, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, and ended the broadcast for her.

"Noona, the stream's off."

At his words, Song Gaon flopped back into her chair and heaved a long, deep sigh.

"Whew... that was brutal."

"Still, that's the brightest I've ever seen you."

It wasn't a stock line of encouragement — he was saying exactly what he felt. Song Gaon was withdrawn enough that you could fairly have called it social anxiety, and yet she had kept up with even the lightning-fast chat and genuinely communicated with them.

"Huh. Turns out I can do it if I try."

"See? So — will you actually read your own novels now?"

"Nope. I'm just going to bed early tonight. I'm wiped."

She couldn't shake the feeling that the camera was still trained on her. The thought of more than ten thousand people looking at her all at once made her want to vomit — the one mercy was that she wasn't actually on a video call with any of them.

"Then go wash up, Noona. I'll take care of the cleanup."

"Mm."

Gaon rose from her chair and was trudging toward the door when she turned around and came back to Suho. Suho, abruptly cast in shadow, had been staring holes through the monitor; when he looked up at her, Song Gaon reached out and ruffled his hair.

"Thanks. You gave me a brand-new experience."

"The way you pay me back is by serializing diligently. Stop patting my head and get going, Noona."

Suho said it flatly, brushing his wrecked hair back into shape.

"Yeah."

Pouting at his reaction, Song Gaon murmured her reply and slipped out the door again. Watching her head off toward the bathroom from the corner of his eye, Suho saved the chat log. He had meant to make her post the apology under each of her novels, but even by his own estimate the turnout had been considerable — the thing would spread through the communities on its own. And sure enough, in the community he ducked into for a quick reconnaissance, most of the most-upvoted posts were already about Song Gaon.

Still, if Song Gaon came face-to-face with content like this right now, the shock might genuinely land — so Suho quietly closed the window and murmured under his breath with a small sigh.