Half Water, Half Ice
Most of the viewers—anyone who could say, with a straight face, that they'd seen a fair amount of Marchen's streams—had more or less the same thought the instant they heard she was stepping out for a bit.
Ah. There she goes again. She's about to do something weird.
It wasn't exactly a surprise. Filling a basin with water and soaking her feet in it, or squatting down until her hips were damp through, all while playing a VR game—the whole routine was already a considerable distance from normal.
A few of them even managed to guess, roughly, what she had in mind. Up until a moment ago she'd been using that basin without a single complaint. The second her feet went back in, her face pinched; she sat there frowning, turning something over, and then suddenly walked outside. Which meant there was a good chance she was about to do something special to the basin. What that something special actually was, of course, was where everyone's predictions parted ways.
And so Marchen left, and some stretch of time went by. It still hadn't outlasted the absence she'd taken to shower, so the mood in chat stayed more or less quiet.
The calm did not last. The Marchen video she'd left playing on YouTube to fill her empty seat suddenly stopped—a playback that hadn't even paused when she'd stepped away to shower.
That was the signal flare. Just as the viewers, steeped in madness, were about to set the chat on fire—
"Wait! Just a little longer! Stop the spam!!"
Marchen flicked the cam back on, appeared on screen, and hauled the giant basin out of the booth, grunting the whole way.
And then more time passed. Once again she came back into the room, dragging the giant basin and groaning. Whatever she'd gone outside to do, this was the moment it came to light.
No ice left in the freezer? Then you buy some. An idea of devastating simplicity—and one Marchen, unused to the notion of going out and purchasing ice, had failed to land on right away. The moment it did hit her, she sprinted to the store and packed a shopping cart to the brim.
It was the instant an ice proletarian class-changed, in a single breath, into an ice bourgeois.
"This ought to hold out until the beach special's over, right?"
Having inspected the fruit of her labor, Marchen put on a triumphant face and, without a moment's hesitation, plunged both feet into the basin—
That day, her viewers learned a new fact: the human throat was capable of producing a sound like that. As for what kind of sound, the description that fit best was this—one so extreme that even the squeal of a pig having its throat cut would have to concede a point.
The season when people get just a little stupider than usual. Summer.
I'd felt it while playing horror games, too, but it seemed I was exceptionally good at screaming. For one thing, the screams were loud—loud enough that I started to worry about the health of my throat. Volume alone, though, wasn't quite enough to earn a reputation like that. Screaming loudly was hardly my exclusive patent.
So what had raised my score? The variety.
Sometimes I screamed plain and ordinary. Sometimes I screamed as if I were wringing the force up from the pit of my stomach. Every so often I screamed like the death throes of a beast. That range was what let people evaluate me as someone exceptionally good at screaming.
Screams meant Marchen. Marchen meant screams. This latest incident had probably set that image a little more firmly in stone. Unfortunately, I was not especially pleased about it.
How to put it... a national-treasure-class pretty girl producing the squeal of a slaughtered pig is not a pleasant picture, is it? If a national treasure is going to scream, shouldn't it be cute—like a nightingale? Of course I knew that, purely as streaming entertainment, a national-treasure pretty girl falling apart while squealing like a pig at the slaughter was the funnier option.
But every time I saw chats like that, a contrary impulse rose up in me. Was this the complicated inner life of a national-treasure-class pretty girl...?
Thinking that, I wiggled the toes I'd submerged in the ice water.
"...I'm getting used to it."
I nodded with a satisfied smile, then carefully squatted and dipped my hips into the ice water.
"Eee—heeheeheek!!"
My whole body shuddered. Yeah. With this, I could probably overcome something on the order of a tropical night's curse. In this particular moment, I did not miss the air conditioner at all.
Turn the AC on on top of this, though, and a cold was guaranteed. And I absolutely could not catch a cold right now—not even if I died and woke up again. The day after tomorrow I had to go back to Seoul. Music-video shoots and the schedules around them were already booked.
If I said I'd caught a cold, they might postpone. Unless the reason was the absurd one in which nobody had asked me to, and I'd dunked my lower half in ice water on stream while enthusiastically taking the air conditioner's breeze.
If that actually happened, my manager could bury me in curses and still walk away with a not-guilty verdict. Right. Turning the AC on was not the move.
The instant I reached that conclusion, a thousand-won punch came flying in.
"And lukewarm seawater makes sense?"
Don't you dare try to take my ice. I'd surrendered the air conditioner without a fight, but this I absolutely would not yield. If you had any conscience as a human being, you were not allowed to take this too.
Anyway. I'd received the blessing of the ice water, and I'd shut down any attempt to steal it before it could start, so I put the VR headset back on. This time the game had you become a mermaid at the seashore and hunt, in turn, the humans who poached mermaids. The moment I saw her, I nodded and opened my mouth.
"The humans are in the wrong here."
The criterion, of course, was the mermaid's looks. A mermaid that pretty, in an outfit that could go toe to toe with a bikini—how could she possibly be at fault? Obviously not. She'd thrown the first punch? There was surely a reason.
"Isn't the mermaid, who had no choice but to hunt, sadder than the humans who got hunted? ...So die!!! You bastaaards!!!"
With that spirited battle cry, the game began.
"...I'm starting to get tired."
Thirty minutes in, I took the VR headset off. The reason was stamina. Every game I'd prepared happened to demand violent movement, and on top of that I'd been scrambling all over the place setting up special effects. I'd even run, just to get the ice here a little faster. Before the stream, I'd also walked forty minutes round trip because I wanted to see a movie. It would have been stranger if I weren't wiped out.
"I know it in my head, okay? No—knowing something and actually doing it are different problems! Knowing, back in your school days, that you have to study like your life depends on it, and actually doing it, are clearly not the same thing! Putting in effort is a talent too. A talent! And I just didn't have the talent for putting effort into exercise! My body doesn't take to it! I can't help it! I was born this way!"
The moment that all-out speech ended, another donation came in.
...It did sting a little. I let out a long sigh and tipped my head back to look at the ceiling.
"If reality were a god-tier game like Raider, I could've just leaned on the EXP-share system and managed my health without exercising.... Hasn't everyone thought that at least once?"
I'd been trying to change the subject.
I shouldn't have said anything!!!