Lua and Lulu
Lua… no, Lulu hummed a little tune as she brought over a game in the most excitedly cheerful voice imaginable.
“The game we’re playing today~ is this right here! Shooting Field!”
Shooting Field was the kind of game where it was easiest to think of it as an FPS: a hundred players dropped onto a map and shot at each other until only one remained.
“Obviously today! If I play alone I obviously can’t win!”
“I’m heeere~ Aha-aha~”
Lulu introduced Aris with shameless, matter-of-fact confidence, and Aris, as if long used to it, offered no protest and simply greeted the viewers.
“Lulu, you can do well today, right?”
“Yep! I’ll be your personal pack mule!”
“That’s not what I wanted…”
Lulu had so brazenly put on the “I’m hopping on the bus! Carry me!” attitude that Aris could only shake her head in disbelief.
And I was shaking my head right along with her.
On any other day I would have been laughing—finding Lulu cute, finding her shamelessness so ridiculous it was funny. But now that I knew exactly who was behind that cute, shameless voice, I couldn’t laugh so freely.
I had been trying to keep them separate in my head—Lua is Lua, Lulu is Lulu—but it wasn’t easy.
The person called Lua Im who lived inside me was genuinely incredible. I wasn’t sure if the word was a perfect fit, but “someone I look up to” would have been fair. She was great at sports, great at studying, had a beautiful voice, and a good personality. That was exactly why, even as her friend, I admired her.
And Lulu? Clumsy game skill, shameless personality—she carried every element that felt like the complete opposite of Lua. On top of that, if Lua was elegant and a little cool while still warm and playful… mature yet approachable… then Lulu had the charm of a full-on mesugaki: openly annoying, yet so cute you couldn’t hate her.
The dissonance born from that gap was far beyond anything I had expected.
“Wow… how… am I even supposed to put this into words…?”
I could only tilt my head and let out a hollow laugh.
Whether I was having a crisis or not, the stream had started, and Lulu and Aris were playing together. The other viewers—who had no idea about any of my agony—were busy looking for the person who wasn’t there.
The two of them answered as if they had been waiting for exactly that.
“Mei unnie has something important today, so she’s taking the day off~”
“If she were free we would’ve called her. Mei unnie is better than Lulu, so she’s a huge help.”
“I help too!”
“What help?”
“Uh… I can be your personal pack mule! And I can pull aggro!”
“Sure, sure. Our Lulu is so amazing.”
“Heh!”
The way Lulu said “Heh!” so proudly was adorable. But the moment I pictured Lua behind that voice, I couldn’t just take it as pure cuteness anymore.
Why had I let Lua take my hand and pull me into that room? Why had I opened a Pandora’s box that should never have been revealed to the world? My head hurt so badly and I felt so tormented I just wanted to thrash around on the floor.
Even so, one thing was certain…
…now that I knew Lulu was Lua, Lua felt a little closer.
It might sound strange to say, but aside from the times she teased me, I still found Lua a bit difficult to deal with. I desperately hid that fact and treated her like a close friend, but underneath it all there was still an awkward version of me who felt distant from her.
And now that very same Lua was acting this shamelessly and playfully, so of course she started feeling approachable.
“Should I be grateful for this… or not…”
I left a little grumble of resentment toward Lua in a place she would never hear.
As an aside, even while saying all that, I was still precisely catching every clip-worthy moment and noting down the timestamps. Work was work.
Just because I was feeling this dissonance didn’t mean I was revoking my status as Lulu’s fan. If anything, I wanted to support her even more. Because the person inside Lulu was Lua—my irreplaceable, precious friend. Because the way Lua performed a VTuber named “Kuroa Lulu” who was nothing like herself felt so incredibly impressive.
And at the same time, I still found watching Lulu’s streams fun and exciting. All of it tangled together, and my fan feelings had only grown stronger than before.
If I could just somehow resolve the dissonance coming from the difference between Lua and Lulu, I felt like I could fangirl even harder.
While I was thinking that, the game had already begun…
“Lulu?”
“Mm?”
“Where are you going…?”
“Uh, uhhh? Where am I going!?”
Lulu was already causing an accident the moment the match started. The second I saw her mess up, my heart settled completely.
Right. There’s no way Lua would make a mistake like that. That’s Lulu. Thinking that made me feel at ease.
My method of resolving the dissonance between the two of them had gotten a little weird, but maybe this was just a new form of being a fan?
Or not.
Lulu had become Aris’s ball and chain, which essentially meant Aris had to deal with every enemy herself. But even Aris couldn’t handle absolutely everything.
“Aaaaaaagh! Luluuuuuu…!”
“I’m soooorryyyyy!”
Lulu apologized, and Aris’s irritation flared up hard.
“If you shoot from there our position gets completely exposed!”
“B-but…! He was just standing still aiming! I could’ve killed him if I shot!”
“And after you kill him, then what? We all die! The gunshots give us away! At least put a suppressor on before you shoot!”
“I gave you the suppressor so I didn’t have one!”
They bickered back and forth, but right now it was clearly Lulu who was in the wrong. If things had gone according to Aris’s plan they might have even snuck into a win, but Lulu had ruined everything.
“Tsk…! I can do well too!”
The Lulu who had shamelessly demanded a carry before the game was gone; in her place appeared a Lulu burning with competitive fire. That was the Lulu we found charming—somewhere shameless, somewhere clumsy, overflowing with airheaded energy, yet still challenging everything until the end. The unfair moments along the way and the achievement she finally grabbed at the finish were the pure concentrate of Lulu’s entire appeal.
Maybe because she understood that, Aris stopped blaming her any further.
“Then at least follow the callouts properly. I’ll help you win.”
Instead she offered to help Lulu, showing off her tsundere charm. Aris knew perfectly well that if she kept scolding her any longer, Lulu would either sink into a grumbling, complaining mode or turn into a completely deflated, confidence-shattered shrimp. So of course she switched approaches.
Anyway, the two of them started the next match like that…
“Ah… Aris, can I shoot that guy…?”
The Lulu who had confidently declared she could do well now started asking Aris for permission for everything. To be fair, it was an important moment—they were in a final standoff on open ground, both sides peeking around cover and reading each other.
Looking at that timid Lulu, Aris let out a long sigh, and then that cool side of her that only Aris had came out.
“Do whatever you want. Unnie will carry this round.”
—Bang!!
The instant those words reached her, Lulu just opened fire, like she had been waiting for exactly that.
A perfect one-shot kill from Lulu, and she immediately screamed.
“I got hiiiiim!”
“Nice, Lulu~!”
That gunshot shattered the stalemate, and a chaotic free-for-all broke out afterward. In the middle of the mess Aris went completely feral and started deleting people left and right, but even Aris had her limits.
—Tatatatang!
Aris got taken out by an enemy from a blind spot. But because she had wiped almost everyone, Lulu only had to win a 1v1.
“Lulu! Last one! Last one!! By the rocks!”
“I seeeeeee him!!”
—Tudadadadadadadadada!
Lulu just unloaded her entire magazine toward the rocks, toward the enemy hiding there. And on those bullets, you could clearly see the enemy’s head get hit clean.
“Kyaaaaaaaaa!”
“Niiiice Luluuuuu! You finally did iiiit!!”
“This is Lulu for you! Lulu caaaarryyyyyy!”
Lulu screamed with pure joy as she soaked in the victory, and afterward she and Aris kept having fun playing more games, spending a happy stretch of time together.
And then……
I had finally figured out how to truly enjoy this stream.
Trolling after the broadcast ends—this is fun.
For the record, the next day I got smacked once by Lulu, and that particular prank ended as a one-time thing.
…But this Mangjjonku doesn’t forgive that easily? This is clip material.