A Surprising Fact
"And now, the highlight of today's performance! Please welcome with applause and cheers the pride of Lethal Company — President Elsa herself, as she makes her way to the stage."
"Waaaaah!"
Clap, clap, clap—!
The applause was only the beginning.
At my signal, Mayo and Han A-yeon, who had been standing ready on either side of the stage, quickly set off the fireworks.
Bang, bang — beautiful sparks burst into the air, lavishly dressing Elsa's entrance.
What's more, the entire front row of the audience was occupied by our company members.
Their enthusiastic cheering was impossible to miss.
Sure enough, Kim Hak-do, who was hosting, smiled with genuine satisfaction as he mentioned us.
"Wow, the folks from V-Live Company are really bringing the energy. If there were a cheer award, I'd hand it right over. Come to think of it, the whole company turned out today, right? When V-Live Company puts on a show like this, make sure you let me know. I won't forget — I'll be there."
"Ah! Every streamer and viewer here just heard that. No take-backs, President Kim Hak-do."
"Yeah, yeah. I'm the type who keeps his word. Hit me up."
Damn! That was a genuinely nice opportunity.
I'd always figured hard work would eventually pay off, but a stroke of luck like this was beyond anything I'd expected.
Either way, it was good news.
No matter what content we ran, having a major corporate streamer show up would be a huge boost — starting with the sheer buzz it would generate.
Finally, my mood's lifting a little.
I watched Elsa's stage with a contented smile — Elsa, president of Lethal Company.
I'd come here to heal, only to run into Blueby, and up until just a moment ago my spirits had been thoroughly dampened. That much was unavoidable.
To me, Blueby was like a thorn buried under a fingernail.
As long as she stayed out of sight, I could more or less pretend she didn't exist — but face-to-face like this, the trauma from before my regression came roaring back.
That voice of Blueby's, casually ordering Lucy around like a handmaiden...
The truth is, the world rarely divides cleanly into "good" and "evil."
People's feelings and definitions of each other simply shift according to their own interests.
Before the regression, Blueby had clearly been a successful streamer.
She'd put the virtual crew V-melody on the map, and more than that, her own tier ranked among the top ten virtual streamers on all of Pangea TV.
But that was exactly why I'd come to hate her even more.
Most of her fellow crew members were stuck below two hundred viewers — so how was it possible that she alone achieved that kind of success?
Anyone who'd spent time watching internet broadcasts would understand to some degree.
In principle, a crew means revolving-door collabs on live streams and frequent joint broadcasts, with a certain amount of viewer sharing.
But the reality?
Viewers knew it tacitly too.
Blueby's relationship with the other crew members wasn't so much "colleagues" as a business arrangement with a clear hierarchy.
So there was no real reason to bother watching anyone else's streams.
She freely used her crew members for her own success.
I'd come to understand that through several experiences.
An unexpected win at a major singing competition.
When Lucy froze up, overwhelmed by the sudden flood of casual viewers, it was Blueby who stepped in for her.
She barged into Discord out of nowhere and talked about Lucy's victory as if it were her own achievement.
Then, with cunning persuasion, she got Lucy to end the stream first.
Lucy, already rattled by the first real flood of casuals in her entire streaming career, naively believed Blueby was handling the cleanup for her, thanked her, and signed off.
And the one who absorbed even a fraction of those casual viewers? Blueby.
In a way, that was a truly remarkable talent in itself.
Not even the person involved — just a fellow crew member showing up and snatching the aggro whole.
The problem was that these incidents weren't one-off coincidences. Similar things had happened to the other crew members as well.
That was why, before the regression, I'd regarded Blueby as practically the axis of evil and despised her.
What made it even more infuriating was that Blueby was such a genius at image-making that outsiders had no idea of that underhanded side at all.
Every time I wrote a post on Pan-beo-gal, I felt like the only idiot in the room.
Truthfully, Blueby's fans made up the majority on Pan-beo-gal too, so even if they knew the "truth," the odds were high they simply wouldn't agree.
After all, crew members or not, what mattered most to them was Blueby doing well — just like now.
Is there any way to strip that mask off? Or maybe uncover a hidden identity...
If that were possible, it would feel as exhilarating as a blast of cold soda clearing a throat clogged with sweet potato.
As the performance slowly wound down, I let my mind wander and fretted over it.
When it comes to digging up information, acquaintances are always best.
So who, exactly, had been close to Blueby?
"Ah! That person."
"Huh? Who?"
"Uh... never mind. Just a second."
I brushed off Mayo beside me as she tilted her head, and inwardly I clapped my hands hard.
I felt like a complete fool for not having thought of that person sooner.
Right. There was always someone stuck to her like gum on a shoe.
The streamer who, before the regression, had been called Blueby's right hand in V-melody.
Shall I tell you one truly surprising fact?
The virtual crew V-melody had a total of five members.
Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap pondered carefully.
How much Candy should he donate at tomorrow's Landmark construction funding to stay on the appropriate "line"?
It had already been eight years since he'd started watching internet broadcasts.
In that time, he'd seen more streamers than he could count.
Everyone was great at first. But money changes people.
The longer you watch a stream, the more naturally you grow close to the streamer.
And with that friendly feeling, you start donating more and more Candy.
The problem is that once "money" gets involved, the original relationship warps in one direction or another.
And that direction is almost always negative.
Private contact behind the scenes is a ridiculously common case.
The first time he'd experienced it, he'd been genuinely shocked.
The image she projected on stream was pure and demure, and she was so strict about romance-related chat jokes that you could see her deliberately ignoring them.
But it turned out she was a streamer who secretly passed her KakaoTalk ID to hardcore fans and "managed" them.
In fairness, given Pangea TV's culture, a KakaoTalk ID wasn't that big a deal.
In female cam streams, they often listed KakaoTalk IDs as donation rewards in the first place.
And honestly, that kind of thing happened on most platforms whenever female cam streamers were involved.
The problem was that this particular broadcaster maintained an image of not being that kind of person on the surface while doing exactly that behind the scenes.
That was when Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap confirmed that the double-faced nature of people he'd felt in real life existed in the streaming world too.
So this place is no different. No — maybe I was the fool for holding out hope that it might be?
Offers of private contact were the mild version.
Over eight years bouncing around the streaming scene, Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap had been through a lot.
There was the streamer who'd started as a cool character, gotten addicted to Candy donations, and after he'd taken just a few weeks off, chased him with DMs, channel board posts, and even other people's streams, clinging and begging him to come back.
Hard as it was to believe, there had even been a streamer who turned into an outright stalker.
On the female cam side, some went beyond private contact and started talking about "entertaining" him.
Watching streamers transform the moment donation totals piled up — as if they'd made a pact to change — was nothing short of a vicious dilemma for Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap.
As a stream's president, he had a reputation to maintain; he couldn't simply stop donating.
But if he kept donating, the streamer would thrash about, drowning in the magic of "money," and lose the person they'd been at the start. It was maddening.
Of course, Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap understood.
In a capitalist society, no one could stay completely unmoved with money sitting in front of them.
Maybe that kind of change was only natural.
But at some point, the attitude of treating donations as something owed had left Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap with a profound sense of disappointment.
Donations were supposed to be a crossing of fan devotion toward the streamer and gratitude from the streamer toward the fans.
That pure joy at even a hundred Candy would vanish at some point, replaced by a mechanical word of thanks even for a thousand.
In the end, won't Seo-a end up the same?
That suspicion was what made him agonize over tomorrow's Landmark construction funding.
If she made a lot of money this month, would she get distracted by overseas travel — one of those racial traits of women — and go on a long hiatus?
Maybe a hundred Candy had already become so common that her gratitude toward donors was growing dull.
Or she might sink so deep into the sweet taste of capitalism at a relatively young age that her streams would devolve into a "gimme money!" style of content.
Patterns Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap had lived through countless times over the past eight years.
And yet a sliver of hopeful expectation remained.
If it was Seo-a, who'd shown such an unusual path from her debut — maybe she would be different?
It was a day of deepening worry.