What Can You Even Do?
"I told you, you were acting weird."
As I said that, I shoved the lie detector off to the side. It was supposed to be a joke, so he didn’t need to take it so seriously.
Look at that. Even the viewers were reacting like...
Hmm. We were doomed. It seemed everyone had forgotten the lie detector was nothing more than a cheap toy.
"All right, I’m ending the stream here today."
"You gave me permission? Fine. Special last questions get their price waived."
Seeing the donation, I dragged the lie detector over from the corner and set it back in front of me. Honestly, how many times had I reset this thing today?
I placed my hand on the detector and pressed the reset button. Right as I was praying for at least a normal question from the donations, a prompt came in.
"You sick freaks...."
By then, the viewer count had long since passed 100,000. I couldn’t believe all those people were fake-marriage sickos who wanted to ship Xia and me together.
Once the reset was done, I took a breath while watching the chat fly by in an instant.
"Should I just not answer?"
I said that and pressed the button. After a moment, with the low hum of the machine, nothing hurt in my hand.
Beep!
"I said I’d do the lie detector. I never said I’d answer."
"All right, everyone, thanks for all your hard work today. I’ll see you in the next stream!"
Leaving the viewers to grumble behind me, I hit the end-stream button. Even after the broadcast ended, chat wouldn’t stop, so I switched it to slow mode with a five-minute limit.
The problem was, maybe I had underestimated what a hundred thousand viewers could do. Even with slow mode on, the chat kept exploding, so I changed it to thirty minutes instead.
Only then did the messages gradually start slowing down, until they finally stopped altogether. Looking at that, I had to admit the slow-chat function was really well made. As far as I knew, the reason it had first been added was because of some crazy incident where people rushed into a stream after it had already ended. Either way, it worked.
Anyway, when I glanced to the side, I saw Xia still with her head pressed against the wall. Her ears were even redder than before, and every so often I could hear her muttering to herself.
"Haaah... what am I supposed to do, seriously?"
"What’s the matter?"
"Eek! You startled me!"
She’d been mumbling something the whole time, so I leaned in and whispered near her ear, and Xia jumped in surprise.
"Hey! Don’t just suddenly whisper like that!"
"You were so out of it you didn’t even realize the stream had ended."
At that, Xia finally looked at the computer. On the screen were only Xia’s channel, now ended, and the chat window, finally emptied of viewers.
"...When did you turn it off?"
"Just now. You weren’t in your right mind, so I turned it off for you."
"Thanks...."
With that, Xia went back to wrapping up the broadcast. She shut down the programs and reset all the settings back to their original state.
"I’ll send the donation money separately later."
"Got it."
That was the end of it. We parted without another word.
When I got home, washed my face, and looked in the mirror, my own expression was just like Xia’s had been then.
*
Yoon Red was an ordinary game streamer. You probably couldn’t call a former pro ordinary in any game at all, but that was how he liked to describe himself.
Red actually said he was far happier now, working as a streamer, than he had been when he was a pro. Back then, he’d been crushed under the pressure of having to perform up to his salary and the burden of fans’ expectations. Now, though, he only had to turn on the stream and play games, and the viewers were happy just watching him do that.
So one day, after opening his stream as usual, a video donation came in.
"Thanks for the ten-thousand-won donation! What is it?"
When he played the video, a strangely fluttery song began. From the mood of it, it didn’t seem like anything too weird, so Red decided to keep watching.
"Why? What is this?"
The viewers seemed to know what the video was. Curious, Red kept watching, and then, at the familiar voice that came through the speakers, he shifted his gaze from the chat to the screen.
"Carry."
"Huh? That’s Hazy’s voice."
For a moment, he saw the game footage from that collab stream they’d done together, and then the screen changed to Xia’s face during that event broadcast.
Paired with the song, Xia’s startled expression as she looked up at the screen made her look like some girl who’d just fallen in love at first sight.
"Hey, but the song is seriously cheating. Put something this sugary over a scene like that, and the genre changes from comedy to romance."
Then the screen changed again. This time, the voice belonged to Xia, and her camera appeared alongside it.
"Actually, I was going to talk about that today anyway."
"I thought it would be fine, you know? Right, Hazy?"
"What? Did these two actually have something going on and it wasn’t fake marriage?"
Red jerked to his feet in surprise at Xia’s permission to speak casually, and the viewers burst into laughter and comments.
"Hazy."
"See you later?"
"Hazy? Wait, didn’t they first meet during that event match the day before?"
As the hot clips rolled on, the video kept showing one reaction after another from people asking what kind of relationship the two of them had, and it was already past the middle.
And then came the next scene, one Red had already seen before.
"You said you wanted fake marriage. You’re the one who told me to do it."
"Am I really that handsome?"
"Ah, this is—"
"I did throw in a little bit of a broadcast joke."
"But it’s not like I had zero personal feelings in it."
"What do I do, what do I do!!"
The viewers burst out laughing at Red’s tiny little pounding on the desk. It wasn’t unheard of for him to act like this, but it was still rare enough to count on one hand.
"Do these two seriously have something going on? No, but I haven’t heard anything like that."
Yoon Red was also under Element Agency. If the two of them were really dating, rumors would have spread like wildfire among the managers, and he would’ve heard it through his own manager.
The fact that he hadn’t heard anything meant they still weren’t dating.
"So this is really fake-marriage chemistry?"
"No, wait, so that wasn’t scripted at all? It was just chemistry? That?"
How...?
Red’s words vanished without a trace in the fan blowing across the room. Whether he knew it or not, the video kept racing toward its end.
After a few more scenes passed, the video reached its closing stretch.
"I’m opening the chamber of truth just once."
Red was genuinely surprised when he heard that someone had edited and uploaded a video only an hour after the stream ended.
There was no way someone with that kind of editing skill would waste their talent on making a mere fan video. There were only two possibilities. Either it was a viral clip prepared by Element Agency, or it was a true, extreme fake-marriage sicko. Of course, the latter was overwhelmingly more likely.
"You think this is some staged act where even the phone call was scripted? If you’re that suspicious, why would you believe those rumors in the first place?"
"Are you an idiot? If this is fake, then at least my entire broadcasting career is on the line. But that was just some baseless post with no evidence. Which one’s more believable?"
"Hey, that’s the one, right?"
"Whoa, he goes that far?"
At this point, it wasn’t even content anymore.
Content is something you do so both sides gain something. Usually, if a situation comes up that seems likely to hurt one party, they end the content by mutual agreement. But at least in this video, Hazy acted as though the backlash that might crash down on him after helping Xia was none of his concern.
Damn, that guy really was a man’s man. Just as Red was thinking that, the next clip came in.
"Come on, be serious. If Xia does fake marriage with me, I’m the one who benefits, not Xia, right?"
"Honestly, even if I’ve just barely gotten bigger, what, am I even making it into Watch’s top ten? If I’m going to use somebody, I’m the one doing the using, not her, right?"
"And besides, if I’m fine with it, what business is it of yours?"
"If I like it, what can you even do about it!"
"...That’s basically a confession, isn’t it?"
Just as Red thought the video was over and the screen darkened, it suddenly flashed bright again and a cookie scene appeared.
On screen, someone was asking Hazy a question as a donation came through. The moment Hazy heard it, he immediately pressed the lie detector’s button.
"Should I just not answer?"
After saying that, he stayed perfectly still without saying another word, and the lie detector gave off the sound of being judged truthful.
"I said I’d do the lie detector. I never said I’d answer."
That was how the video ended, with Hazy’s words closing it out. Red sank back into his chair and let out a low murmur.
"Somebody just tell those two to get married already."
---