What Even Is My Image
"Oh…."
"Oh. Ohh…."
"Oof, this is a little— oof."
She read the gifted doujinshi all the way through. The moment she closed it, she shook her head, slow and helpless.
"Whew…. The whole time I was reading, I kept thinking, am I really allowed to look at something like this on stream? That kind of work."
For one thing, it was lewd. Extremely lewd. An R-18 sticker had been slapped on the cover, so of course it was—but still. Lewd. Lewd enough that Water Gun Melt Down, the game where you shoot water guns in the nude, felt like a children's pastime by comparison.
"The content's pretty hardcore…. Still, the limbs make it to the end in one piece! The limbs!"
"It is hardcore, I'll give it that…. But the art style is cute, so it kind of covers for it? And somehow that just makes the taboo of it hit harder?"
So the conclusion was this.
"Yes, I got extremely horny. Thank you! Whoever sent this—any time I want to look at something lewd from now on, I'll pull it out for another read!"
She said it, and bowed deep, and meant it.
"The impact right out of the gate was way too strong, though. I should've saved something like this and shown it later."
One year and four months into her career as a pro streamer, and she was still making a rookie's mistake. Honestly, though, she hadn't had a choice. The second she saw the R-18 sticker, her hand had moved on its own. Forget the Korean species trait—this was human instinct.
I mean, how are you supposed to resist an R-18 doujinshi?
Having talked herself into it, she dragged her eyes off the chat and back to the box.
"Anyway, shall we take out the next gift?"
She'd been so possessed by the R-18 that she hadn't properly looked at what else was in the package. What was even in there? If she counted doujinshi as a kind of merch, then pulling merch twice in a row was probably something to avoid….
"See! I told you this was in here!"
With that she pulled the moving bunny-ear hat out of the box and put it on. She did not, however, move the ears.
She'd already unlocked the maid outfit. A drinking stream was on the board as a conditional unlock. She'd even worn bunny pajamas, sung a bunny nursery rhyme, and danced the choreography. Even so, wiggling the bunny ears still felt like the one line she absolutely could not cross. She was sorry to the viewer who'd sent it, but she hoped they'd be satisfied with a national-treasure-class beauty simply wearing the hat.
And how was chat taking it? Were they about to riot because she hadn't performed the sacred national rite of the moving bunny ears?
She checked the chat with that thought in mind.
It was somehow not what she'd been expecting.
"Excuse me, I am still a fresh-faced twenty-two… minus five, so seventeen, okay? If a seventeen-year-old gets called a boomer, then what percentage of the entire population of this country is a boomer!"
And besides, she hadn't even bought the hat. Catching a boomer accusation over this was a miscarriage of justice.
"Anyway, thank you for the hat! I'll wear it in the winter…. I honestly can't imagine having much reason to go out in this, but if I do, I'll put it on and leave a proof photo on the fan cafe."
Vitamin D?
A pity for them, but vitamin D was no longer any kind of problem for her. Because she remembered her supplements? No.
"I get plenty of sun on my morning jogs, so vitamin D isn't an issue at all, right?"
Ten or twenty minutes of sunlight a day was supposedly enough, and her jog ran a full hour including breaks. A shortage of sun? Not a chance.
And her viewers' reaction to that was—
—pure horror.
"Did I not mention this on stream?"
She was pretty sure she had. She scratched her head and went on.
"I've been jogging for a bit now. Two weeks, maybe?"
The reviews of her daily routine felt somehow… off. A part of her did feel a little called out, so she didn't bother arguing with chat. She just changed the subject.
"…Then, the next gift! How about I pull something from a little lower this time?"
She said it while rummaging through the delivery box and closing her hand around whatever happened to be near the bottom—and then.
"Did you all compare notes behind my back?"
Out came the doujinshi that had been lining the bottom of the box. Once again, it wore an R-18 sticker.
Wasn't a gift worthy of the Eroge Master an eroge package, not an R-18 doujinshi? The thought occurred to her, but she didn't say it out loud. A bigger question had just surfaced.
"Don't tell me there's more besides this one."
She dug through the box under the weight of that perfectly reasonable suspicion. Whether the result was unfortunate or fortunate, she couldn't say—but there were no more R-18 doujinshi.
"…I'm pretty sure I barely talked about doujinshi on stream, though."
There were, however, R-15 doujinshi. Not one volume. Something like three.
This really feels like one person sent all of them…?
For the record, when she called her manager the next morning and asked, every single one had come from a different person.
…Is this what you get when Marchen viewers have kids?
In the end she added the three newly excavated volumes to the pile and finished a grand reading of four doujinshi in total, then held the remaining gifts up to the camera one by one.
"Vitamin C? Vitamins don't really spoil if you leave them at room temperature, so they do make a good gift to ship. I'll keep this in the streaming booth and take it over time. Thank you for the vitamins!"
"This is…. You know, the thing? Ankle weights? But why would I…. Oh, I get it! You wanted the bit where I'm gaming with the weights on, and the moment I start to lose I unstrap them and unleash full power! Whoever sent this knows a thing or two. Okay! Booking that bit for later!"
One by one the contents of the box disappeared, until a single gift remained.
…Time to crack open the suspicious object she'd saved for the final highlight?
The highlight gift she'd held until the very end was nothing less than—
packaged so you couldn't tell what was inside, and!!
wrapped in bubble wrap for shock absorption on top of that!!!
This thing was clearly engineered to be opened last!!!!
She could roughly guess what it was. Bubble wrap meant it was fragile. So glass, then? Or else….
"It's a figure?! No way. I genuinely didn't think I'd actually receive one of these…."
…The quality on this is good.
Judged with the seasoned eye of a ten-year otaku, the figure a viewer had sent her looked like the kind of piece that didn't come for less than twenty of those green ten-thousand-won bills. If her eye was right, it was easily the most expensive gift she'd received all day.
"Hold on? There's a note stuck to it. Let's see…."
It's a cast-off figure, so you can take the clothes off! You've got this, Eroge Master Marchen!
She read the sentence on the note aloud, then looked up at the ceiling. And murmured, low.
"…What is my image even supposed to be."
She let out a long sigh, then fixed her eyes on the figure again.
Right. If you're going to do it, do it.
Let's see….
"White!"
That day, Marchen ran another eyecatch merch ad on stream and announced the goods would go on sale on September 8.
Judging by the trajectory of Marchen's YouTube, the odds of hitting five hundred thousand subscribers on September 8 were extremely high.
And the day after Marchen unboxed the gifts on stream—Wednesday, September 6, at eleven in the morning—a notice went up on Raider's official cafe.