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Long, long ago.
Which is to say, the stretch after my parents died, when I spent the first semester of my freshman year half out of my mind, then slammed down a leave of absence the moment I realized that at this rate I wouldn't only be wasting time—I'd be wasting tuition on top of it.
A stretch when I had no particular dream I wanted to chase, and, having turned into someone who would never have to worry about money for the rest of my life, I was seriously wondering whether I even needed to earn that scrap of paper called a diploma.
A stretch when I heard Maternal Uncle out—his encouragement, his advice that anything was fine, so why not just do what I liked—and properly started up again the otaku life I'd more or less let go of.
The me of those days couldn't settle into any one game for long. As if the games themselves were speaking for a mind worn down to rags.
There are viewers now who call the present me a genius of quitting, a god of abandonment, but honestly the title of true quitting genius fit the me of back then far better than it fits me now.
Of course, that quitting habit got perfectly fixed at the moment I met Knight Rise. Why did I have to succeed at fixing it.... I shouldn't have succeeded....
Anyway, the habit was completely cured only after I started Knight Rise.
It hadn't been cured all of a sudden. The warning signs had been showing for a while. Games I used to delete before they survived a single day started lasting two days, then four, then a week, then two weeks....
And the game I'd been on right before Knight Rise held out for a full two months without getting deleted. If I hadn't started Knight Rise, wouldn't it have lasted at least another month?
Anyway, thanks to a blonde, tanned thug named Knight Rise barging in, I met again the game I'd broken up with by my own one-sided notice of farewell.
...As an ad deal.
Something was off.
The instant Märchen's stream flicked on, every viewer who had come to watch arrived at the same thought. First of all, the song spilling out of the broadcast was off. It wasn't an anime song. It wasn't a game opening, and it wasn't an insert track. What was playing was a Korean pop song famous—extremely famous—as a breakup ballad.
...Which meant the song those viewers were hearing had not a single point of contact with otaku culture that anyone could find.
Märchen, the Märchen who went around proudly announcing a ten-year otaku career, had picked that? Not some other person—that Märchen? For no reason at all? It would have been far more convincing to hear that the sky had split in two.
So every viewer with even a little experience of a Märchen broadcast made the exact same prediction. Ah. This one's about to pull something again. Märchen is about to Märchen again.
And that prediction landed dead on.
Of course, whether the prediction hit or missed, the result would have been the same: Märchen farming the viewers' hooks. So what, then, was the MVP that had distinguished itself in the hook harvest?
A picture.
Sitting in the space the cam was supposed to occupy was a picture of a man and a woman clasping hands tight. It was not an ordinary picture. The image filling the broadcast had one peculiar feature—the faces of the couple holding hands. Where the man's face should have been, the app icon of a game called Emerald Tablet had been pasted in, and where the woman's face should have been, a photo of Märchen's face.
Right. It could become the MVP of the hook harvest because it wasn't an ordinary picture. It was a photoshop meme.
Right as the viewers started pouring their impressions of the low-quality photoshop into chat and donation messages, Märchen, who had kept her mouth shut until then, finally spoke.
"...Long, long ago. Roughly a year and six months back. Emerald Tablet and Lee Hari met by chance, and little by little they were getting to know each other."
The picture changed. A fairly large man had wedged himself between the man and woman who had been holding hands. His face, of course, was nothing ordinary either. The big man's face had been replaced with the app icon of Knight Rise. Once Märchen confirmed the swap, she carried the line straight on.
"But that lasted only a moment. A blonde, tanned thug by the name of Knight Rise cut in between the two of them."
At a twist nobody had seen coming, the chat's firepower started climbing hard. Märchen, for her part, couldn't have cared less. She swapped in the next picture and went right on with what she had to say.
"In the end, the two of them broke up a mere two months after they met."
At that instant, the highlight of the breakup song she'd left running began to pour out. Impeccable timing. And a thoroughly calculated result.
The viewers did not spare their awe for that impeccable timing. This was the moment the rehearsals—practiced again and again beforehand—paid her back. Märchen smiled, put feeling into her voice, and kept reading the lines she'd prepared.
"A sudden breakup is bound to leave lingering feelings. The man and the woman both still carried a torch, so there were a few attempts to get back together.... In the end they deleted each other's contacts, and with that, the two of them thought their story was over."
Yes. It was reasonable enough to think so. But life is a thing where you can't see an inch ahead, and the Märchen still delivering her lines was living proof of it. She had gone to sleep and woken up a woman, and lived through being thrown back a year into the past. Could anyone have predicted that? No. Unless you were a god, absolutely not. Set beside that, meeting again—by some chance accident—a person you were sure you'd never see again? That was the sort of thing that could perfectly well happen, the sort of thing you might even see coming once, wasn't it?
Which is to say.
"But the world turned out to be a smaller place than you'd think."
"And so the two of them met once again. ...By way of work."
A story about two people who had deleted each other's contacts and broken up when a blonde, tanned thug named Knight Rise barged in... only to run into each other again? It wasn't all that shocking.
"The two of them, face to face again after a year and four months. What will become of them...?! The sponsored special broadcast! Starting now!!"
The moment Märchen finished, huge white letters rose over the picture. The words Presented by, and beneath them the name of Emerald Tablet's publisher...?
In that instant, everyone who had seen a decent amount of Japanese anime caught on to what Märchen was about to do. She was going for the line that drops the moment a Japanese anime opening ends—the iron rule of anime openings.
"This program is brought to you by the sponsors you see."
She said it. She really went and said it. The iron-rule line.
And at the same time, the stream title changed.
(Ad Broadcast) Long time no see.... Have you been well...?
Only then did the viewers watching the stream succeed in grasping the entire situation.
And so Märchen's third sponsored broadcast began amid the viewers' blazing reactions.