Listen Carefully! And! Don't Tell Anyone!
—Snnnnooore… snnooore… snnooore… snnooore…
The snoring kept going, and using it as ASMR while I ran solo queue after solo queue, before I knew it the clock had hit four in the morning.
The chat was slowing down too — looked like only the real ones were left.
Honestly, by two a.m. it's usually just the hardcore crowd, but today people had hung on longer than usual.
"Chat, seems like a lot of you just left the stream on and went to sleep. Thoughts?"
"Nah, I'm not particularly tired."
"Are you people insane?"
Why the hell would I get freaky with her.
"Don't talk like our team's ADC right now."
You're better than a 0/8/0 ADC?
"This guy would drop twenty kills solo if he were in your tier, so no disrespect."
"Best any of you are hitting is low Emerald, and the average is Gold-Plat."
Bantering with chat helped keep me awake a little, though it still didn't quite feel like a collab stream. Part of that was Lee Yebin snoring behind me instead of sitting next to me, and part of it was that all of Bini's viewers had already dipped.
That was when one viewer dropped a pretty solid idea.
They wanted story time.
What stories did I even have?
"Chat, I've got a ton of stories, what do I do? Which one first?"
"No, there's genuinely too many. Like, way too many, I can't even. Remember that quiz show we did before? This isn't even comparable."
Honestly, Lee Yebin reading a map upside down and me copying a spinning kick from a webtoon were the mild ones. The real ones were something else entirely.
First meeting, first meeting…
"I don't know, you idiots."
I genuinely don't know that.
"What Dense Dodo? There's an actual answer. Hey, hey, hold on. Let me finish this teamfight."
The game had hit the teamfight phase, so I focused for a second and then checked chat again.
"You see that teamfight carry just now? That's the level I'm at~"
Normally there would've been praise, or a mix of praise and roasting. And that play just now — Riven's ultimate four-man billiards combo — should've been ninety percent praise.
But my viewers, instead of gushing over my play, had shoved the admiration aside and were just talking among themselves.
They were just going on about when Lee Yebin and I first met.
Come on. I already said there was an answer.
"Yeah, we met before either of us could remember. I moved to this neighborhood at two, and Bini showed up two months after I did, so yeah — we've known each other since before we could form memories."
"Both of us are going by Korean age, yeah."
They just started spamming endgame couple jokes out of nowhere, and I was speechless.
"Doesn't everyone have at least one friend like that? A friends-since-we-were-in-diapers friend."
"Get out of here, you girl-chaser. Chat's half-empty and you're already saying weird crap."
I slapped a one-minute ban on the guy who'd just gone full girl-chaser, then picked the story back up.
"Alright, want me to pull out the oldest memory I have of being with Bini?"
How is it different? It's going to be a lot different from what you're expecting.
"It's really nothing special. Like, genuinely nothing special…"
"I'm a September baby and she's a January baby, right? So that little pig goes, 'I ate five extra bowls of rice cake soup, so I'm the older sister now, and you have to listen to me.'"
The very first memory I can clearly recall. In my memory, I'd only just turned five not long before.
On New Year's, after scarfing down a mountain of rice cake soup, Lee Yebin had declared, "I ate three bowls so I'm eight now! That means Do Gyeong has to listen to me!"
"She's an early birthday. Born January first — total family-tree wrecker."
Cute? Sure, if you stop there it's cute. But what comes next is the real part.
"She tells me to listen to her and then wants to play house. In house, I almost ended up as her dog."
"She straight-up tried to turn me into a mutt, so we fought. And I won. I won, okay."
For the record, that was also the first fight I could remember having with Lee Yebin.
The result of that fight was that I hit her until she cried and got scolded by the teacher.
Come to think of it, maybe the reason she hits me now is because I beat her up so thoroughly back then.
If that's true, I really wish she'd stop. Back then I got hit too while fighting her, but now I just take unilateral beatings.
Me hitting back at Lee Yebin? That's the bare minimum resistance for survival. Absolutely. No question.
"Other stories? What other stories are there — you guys dig one up. I'm basically a warehouse. You have to search for stuff to pull it out."
Chat seemed to put up a little resistance at that, but then someone came through with a pretty decent idea.
Grades talk.
Fine in theory, but the problem was that one was a story that put me at a disadvantage.
"Ask Bini later. Passing."
If Lee Yebin were sitting next to me I could at least try to troll her a bit, but trolling a sleeping person is just boring. No reaction means no fun.
"Elementary school? There's a summer break story, but… eugh… passing on that one too. I'll tell it when we're both on."
Everything else that came up looked fun in theory but would fall flat if I told it alone, so I passed on all of it.
Maybe that was why chat started saying things like "at least do a late-night stream together next time."
A late-night stream, huh.
A late-night stream like this might not be half bad.
With that thought rolling around, I kept queuing games, and before I knew it it was six in the morning.
Wake her with a butt smack — that was a pretty good idea. Except I didn't want to die.
I needed to wake her as gently as possible. You don't wake a sleeping dog.
I walked over next to Lee Yebin and woke her up in a voice loud enough for chat to hear.
"RISE AND SHIIIIIIIIINE!!!"
"Eekyaaaaaaah!?"
Lee Yebin's reaction — that reaction was genuinely satisfying to watch.
The problem, however…
"Gyeong-do you crazy bastaaaaard!! Why the hell would you wake me up like thaaaaat!?"
…was that the word "Gyeong-do" had come out of her mouth.
I quickly checked the chat…
These viewers had just heard my name.
A brief silence.
And at the end of that silence—
—Thudthudthudthud!
—Screeech! Click!
Lee Yebin had fled into Yeon-i's room.
I quickly swung the mic on my computer around so it would pick up the conversation, then bolted after her.
"Excuse me~ Miss Biniiii!? You've won a special prize! Open this door right now you crazy bi—"
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! Please forgive me!!"
"I'll forgive you!"
"Really?"
"Psych."
"I'm soooorryyyyyy!"
"Pay with your life, Biniiiiii!!!"
For the record, I really wanted to say her actual name too, but I couldn't stoop to her level, so I stuck with that the whole way.
Also for the record, I threw in a little bit for the audience during all this. Specifically for the viewers.
"You crazy bastard I said I was soooorryyyyy!!!"
Such a shame. I really wanted to coolly declare it manga-style — "Lee Yebiiiiin!"
Really a shame. Really, truly a shame.