Strange Currents
The day after the party, I finally dragged myself up too late, just barely awake enough to turn on the stream.
As soon as viewers entered, they started typing at once.
"Hello."
That was clearly what everyone was most curious about, because the chat was already full of requests for a full report. I thought for a moment about where to start, then decided to begin right from the beginning.
From the boss arriving by car, to seeing Yura, to going to the party and meeting all those streamers there.
They had seen some of it on stream, of course, but they didn’t know the story leading up to it, so I filled in the gaps as best I could.
"That was pretty much all there was to it."
"How were they supposed to talk when Si-a was on close protection duty?"
After tossing out that joke, I talked about a few other things. Streamers I hadn’t been able to speak to up close but had seen from a distance, what the party food had been like, and so on.
We were in the middle of that when a Discord call came in from Si-a.
"Now you just assume it’s Si-a whenever a Discord call comes in."
I said it, but after thinking about it slowly, I realized there really wasn’t anyone besides Si-a who would call me on Discord like that in the first place.
I ignored the chat, where everyone was yelling that if it wasn’t Si-a then who the hell was it, and answered the call.
"Hello?"
"Yes!"
"I’m not your honey."
"Then can I call you darling?"
"Call me that today."
"Okay!"
By now, the back-and-forth between Si-a and me was so natural that it just flowed.
At first, both of us had often gotten embarrassed or flustered in situations like this, but maybe we’d gotten used to it, because now it didn’t bother us at all.
"So what’s up?"
"Huh?"
"You called first. Something wrong?"
"Can you watch Yura’s stream right now?"
Watch Yura’s stream all of a sudden? I had no idea what was going on, but I said okay and opened the internet. When I entered Yura’s stream, it was still on the waiting screen.
"Why? Is something wrong?"
"I don’t know. She just told me to watch the stream now."
"Now?"
"Yeah. She just texted me."
She’d looked fine yesterday. Had something happened?
I started thinking through all the possibilities that could fit the situation, and some of them got pretty extreme, but I shook them off before they could settle in my head.
"What is it?"
"Doesn’t seem like bad news."
Since Si-a said that if something bad had happened, they’d probably have cancelled the stream, I decided to take it positively.
"The title says it’s a major announcement."
"Oh, it does."
The waiting screen disappeared, and Yura’s cam appeared. Someone else was sitting beside her.
"Huh?"
"Why is he there?"
While both Si-a and I were still staring at the screen in surprise, Yura spoke.
Yura’s pronunciation was slow, and unlike her usual broadcasts, she wasn’t slurring her words at all. It felt strange.
"What are those two doing?"
"...Yeah, seriously?"
Watching them bicker with expressions unlike their usual ones made the whole thing feel strange.
The viewers seemed to sense it too, because the chat was filling up with messages asking if this was what they thought it was.
"No way."
"Si-a. You knew?"
"No, not at all."
I was stunned by the bombshell, or rather the major announcement, that had just dropped out of nowhere. Judging by Si-a’s reaction, she hadn’t heard any of it from Yura separately either.
The viewers were just as dumbfounded as Si-a and I were. Some of them were outright denying reality.
And to be fair, a lot of people thought those two were complete opposites, the kind of pair who would be at each other’s throats on stream and off it too.
From the games they liked to pick, to their personalities, to their opinions, even to the choices they made in their one-heart-one-body games, there wasn’t a single thing that seemed to line up.
"Wow."
"Saengsam had that side to him?"
Everyone, including me, was left speechless.
If it had been the usual Saengsam, he would have complained about why he should have to count such a thing, then fought with Yura while they went at it in a messy back-and-forth.
But now that sweet line had come out of nowhere, everyone was so shocked they couldn’t say a thing.
In fact, the chat on Yura’s stream had already become a storm of question marks, with almost nobody saying anything else.
"S-sorry... what? What did he just say?"
"Did I hear that wrong?"
There are a handful of priceless sights on stream. The first is Si-a doing aegyo. The second is Red swearing. And the third is Saengsam apologizing.
Today, one of those rare sights was unfolding right in front of me. All because Yura told him to apologize.
With that, Saengsam quietly closed his eyes and seemed to enjoy Yura’s touch, and I could almost see a tail swishing behind him. With that blond hair, he really did look like a golden retriever from this angle.
"Is this some kind of AI video?"
"Doesn’t look like it."
- I saw that.
- It’s really live?
- And he’s being controlled by Yura? That’s valuable stuff right there...
No matter what words or expressions of surprise I used, none of them were enough to capture what was happening.
I was seeing with my own eyes how much a person could change once they fell in love.
After saying that, Saengsam grabbed Yura’s hand. He held it, then fidgeted for a moment before lacing their fingers together.
Or I wouldn’t do this kind of thing.
At that, Yura lowered her head deeply, as if embarrassed. She even covered part of her face with her hand, but she still couldn’t hide the faint redness at the tips of her ears.
Apparently finding that adorable, Saengsam started flexing and releasing their interlocked hands while slowly engaging with the viewers.
While Saengsam bought her time like that, Yura finally recovered enough to lift her head.
Her face was still red, not completely cooled down, but I could tell she had calmed a little.
"Wow."
"Maybe that’s what we look like when people watch our WGM."
"Probably."
I began to understand why people got so overly invested in it.
Come to think of it, wasn’t my relationship with Si-a not all that different from those two?
After starting WGM with me, Si-a had done aegyo she’d probably never have done otherwise, and judging from her reactions during our broadcasts, she was just as prone to embarrassment as Yura.
Sometimes, it was me who got put through that instead, and little by little, those WGM moments piled up until the viewers had started taking them far too seriously.
"But why do they look so good together? They seem like complete opposites."
"Magnetic poles attract, right? Maybe they stick because they’re too different."
"I guess."
"What?"
"Huh?"
Call us?
Now?
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