Yeah, the Host Is Lying
The moment she saw Mina come back into the practice room, Loe lobbed a question at her.
"You failed, didn't you?"
No—that wasn't a question. It was nothing but the little ritual of savoring her own victory all over again. The voice was far too bright to belong to anything that actually wanted an answer, and that brightness was the proof.
Mina shook her head the way you do at someone who simply cannot be stopped, and then she opened her mouth.
"Yeah. I failed. She turned me down before she'd even heard the terms. After what you told me, I expected it, up to a point, but..."
A raw gem of that caliber, and the people in this industry still hadn't found her? How likely was that? Stack coincidence on coincidence and she still should have caught someone's eye at least once. And yet, if no one had dug her up even now, it meant the person herself had probably refused every offer that ever reached her.
Right. Listening to Loe, Mina had managed to reason that far, and she'd gone in expecting Hari was likely to say no. She'd expected it, and still...
"Shame, though."
The disappointment wouldn't leave her alone. It had been a long time since she'd found Loe—the first raw stone in ages whose finished shape she was genuinely curious to see, curious in a way that had nothing to do with Loe at all.
Hearing that, Loe started bobbing her head from side to side, plainly delighted.
"Ehehe. Guess I ought to hang a mission on tomorrow's stream."
Was there a decent mission lying around? She muttered it to herself, then stopped the bobbing and turned her head toward Mina.
"...So? What happened with the MCN thing?"
"She said she'd think about it."
Unlike the debut offer, though, Hari had heard the whole thing out. Nothing in her tone or her face had read as a no. So Mina figured there was a real chance.
Could an entertainment agency like AY Entertainment actually do the work of an MCN? Of course it could. That wasn't a hypothesis. It was a certainty. Why? Because AY Entertainment already owned an MCN subsidiary.
Successful as it was, AY Entertainment had never been willing to fall behind the times, and it had taken all sorts of swings even when that meant swallowing a loss. The MCN subsidiary had been one of those swings. And the MCN subsidiary had gone under. Not because AY Entertainment had fumbled it. MCN companies simply didn't make money—there were news articles saying as much—and the business itself was a shape that didn't produce profit, so it died.
But the leftovers from those days were still sitting inside AY Entertainment. Scrape them together, and AY Entertainment could play MCN for a broadcaster named Märchen just fine.
The question was whether AY Entertainment had any reason to pour that much effort into an internet streamer called Märchen.
Of course it does.
She was the only person alive who had been handed a song by Loe, genius singer-songwriter, and actually sung it. That was a signboard. If she walked under some other MCN's roof still carrying that sign, AY would have done all the cooking just to set the porridge in front of a dog. AY Entertainment was not incompetent enough to feed the dog.
And yes, she said she had no interest in the entertainment world right now, but a person's heart is a reed in the wind. Who knew when it would swing the other way? A raw gem like Hari was worth staking a heavy claim on in advance, just in case. More than that, Märchen streaming for a long, long time meant Loe—the chaos addict who lived to stir community boards—would stay out of trouble and quietly watch nothing but Märchen's stream for a long, long time.
So even just to protect Loe, the cash cow who stamped out hit after hit, it would sit far easier with AY Entertainment to look after Märchen themselves and make sure she didn't suddenly quit.
Then why had they tried to debut her? ...Because that had looked like the bigger win for AY Entertainment!
And last of all, there was the simple fact that this internet broadcaster called Märchen had been growing, these past three months, in a way that wasn't normal. Märchen's Newtube pulling views wildly out of proportion to her subscriber count was part of that same reason.
...It really is fast.
Hadn't the one hundred thousand celebration stream been only four days ago? She'd hit a hundred thousand, and the climb on Märchen's Newtube still showed no sign of slowing. No. It had gotten faster.
Märchen's current Newtube subscribers———
That was the count I checked on the way home.
The hundred-thousand celebration stream had been a mere four days ago. Which meant twenty-five thousand new subscribers in four days.
...It had taken me something like fifty-six days to climb from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand. And I'd just covered half of that in four days?
I mean, I'd hung a hundred-and-fifty-thousand pledge out there, so I had figured it would come in fast. After the stream ended I went to sleep, and when I woke up Eunha had already sent a draft of the pledge video. There was nothing worth touching, so the video hit Newtube before a full day had passed since the broadcast, which only made me more certain.
Fifty days from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand, so maybe a month from a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty. That was my guess. Honestly, even that was me being generous.
...A month, my ass. No joke—at this rate I was going to hit a hundred and fifty thousand next week.
This was... human madness?
A chill raked straight up my arms. It was obviously summer, and yet I felt strangely, creepingly cold.
I got on a shopping site and bought bunny pajamas on the spot. Then I stuffed wireless earbuds in my ears and started playing a bunny nursery rhyme.
The option of leisurely preparing a hundred-and-fifty-thousand celebration had been scrapped a long time ago.
And a day passed.
Today was Friday. Eleven days until Raider launched. And my Newtube subscriber count, as of right now—
Right. The subscribers were climbing even faster.
...Next week, my ass. Keep this up and I'd hit a hundred and fifty thousand this week.
"This is... the power of a pledge...?!"
I said it while watching the live subscriber count shoot straight up in real time.
Together with the viewers, that is.
I came up with it myself, and damn, I came up with it well. If there was a perfect title for the present moment, this was it.
"Anyway, the bunny pajamas I ordered showed up today, okay? So I'm not about to go, oh, I'm not ready, let's push it back a few days—nothing like that—so you don't have to worry!"
...Huh? Was it?
Some unconscious part of me I don't even know about, yearning to be a bunny—my ass! I almost actually believed it for a second!
"Wow.... When somebody who's good at it does the rabble-rousing and the fabrication, it is genuinely terrifying, you know? Mix in a pinch of truth and for a second even I went, 'Huh? Is that right?' All of that is fabricated, everyone! It's a lie!"
"Ah."
Right fist clenched, I brought the flat of my left hand down in a light chop. Exactly the way a judge taps the gavel once.
I remembered.
I had definitely said something like that.
"...All right, now that we've warmed the room up with that little chat, shall we actually get part one of the content underway?"
For today's first half, I meant to run a test broadcast of something I wanted to try down the line. I usually skip test streams so the real thing can land as a surprise, but this was an object I was touching for the first time in my life, and I figured I needed to rack up a little experience.
"I told you earlier I ordered bunny pajamas, right? ...Do you really think bunny pajamas were the only thing I ordered?"
I let that hang, and then I brought out the star of the day.
"Ta-da! A VR headset! Which means I, too, finally get to taste the fruits of ultra-high technology!"
Why had I suddenly bought one? Ages ago—back when I was a guy—I'd watched a Newtube video of somebody playing a dating sim in VR. Watching it, I'd thought, hey, I should try that someday. And then I'd forgotten it completely, until some recent coincidence dragged the thought back up, and in the spirit of striking while the iron is hot I just bought the headset on the spot.
"For today I'm thinking a driving simulator with good reviews. People kept saying it's seriously realistic, if you bought VR this is the one you have to play first, and I got tempted, you know? ...And hey, if I'm doing it, I might as well commit, and maybe it'll even help my cursed driving, so I bought a racing wheel too!"
I said it while hauling the racing wheel I'd hidden out into the open, piece by piece.
And the viewers' reaction to these fruits of ultra-high technology was...
They were locked on the act of me driving more than on the gear itself. Well, it was exactly the reaction I'd expected, so I wasn't especially surpris——
Drive for 33 Minutes Without Causing an Accident
⏱ Time Remaining: 11 hours 59 minutes
🎁 Prize: $750
"...A big one just landed?!"
I was surprised.
Clear that mission and I'd at least earn back what the gear cost.... Could I, architect of the three-three-three miracle, actually walk away with seven hundred and fifty dollars?
Smack. I slapped my own cheek, hard, to drive the weakness out and get a grip.
Who am I? Märchen—the ultra-pretty girl, the ultra-knows-how-to-stream, the ultra-Gemjalseu! Reality's one thing, but if it's a game, something might actually be different!!!
"...All right. I'm doing this! I can do it! I'm turning those boos into cheers!!!!"
I stared blankly at the reality of an overturned car, then let the words fall out like a mutter.
"...Just watch me drive in real life."
For the record, I somehow, barely, cleared the mission right before I ended the stream.
...I couldn't take it anymore and played on the keyboard without the racing wheel, and as if the whole thing had been a lie, the screwjob that had been piling onto me vanished without a trace and I cleared the mission on the spot.
If I'd known it would go like this, I never would have bought the racing wheel...!