The RP the Viewers Made! Jangsan-beom, Part 1
"Ah—! Hello, welcome, welcome."
"There are, um... so many more of you here than I ever imagined that my brain just shut off for a second."
The viewer count climbed even while I was talking. It had already broken 380.
Was I dreaming?
Dazed as I was, I carried the broadcast forward exactly the way I'd prepared it. Yesterday's first stream had taught me one thing, and one thing only: choose the menu carefully. Fried rice finished far too fast, and twenty minutes after I went live the content had slid from cooking into idle chatter. So today I'd prepared dumplings. Make a generous batch, tuck them in the freezer, and I could keep eating them for a long while after—that was a perk, too.
"Today I'm going to make dumplings. First, I'll get the dough ready."
I worked up a hot-water dough and kneaded it hard, putting real strength into it.
"Thank you, thank you. The dough isn't actually that hot."
"And I buy frozen dumplings too, when they're on sale. Which brand is everyone's favorite? The quality of frozen dumplings these days is honestly insane."
I tore my eyes off the viewer count by force and fixed them on the chat alone. The tension seemed to loosen, if only a little. Chat messages and donations were piling up faster than I could chase them, which was a bit of a problem... even so, I did my best not to miss a single person.
"Dough's done. I'll let this rest for a bit... now, shall we make the filling?"
"Do you all like meat dumplings, or kimchi dumplings? Team Meat, type 1! Team Kimchi, type 2. A light little vote in the chat, please."
"Mmm— meat, meat. Meat. Kimchi. Meat. Kimchi. So it really is meat? Number 1 is winning by a landslide."
I laid the ingredients out in a neat row where the camera could catch them. Ground meat. Tofu. Shiitake. Onion. Garlic chives. Scallions. Garlic. Ginger. Perilla oil. Sesame. Soy sauce. Salt. Pepper. Rice wine. Gathered in one place, they made a picture.
"Pretty colors, right? The onion, the garlic chives, and the scallions—I grew those myself."
"Ah... there's this tiny little plot nearby. About yea big. Honestly, it's embarrassing to even call it a garden."
"I grow vegetables there and eat them. Lettuce, basil, things like that."
I didn't know about other places, but the old public-housing complex where I lived rented out garden plots. The management office, the senior center, and the daycare were all crammed into one building, and they loaned out the scrap of land stuck to the back of it. Small as it was, tending a garden had a pleasure of its own.
A few firm pats of paper towel took the blood off the meat. I packed the tofu into a cloth pouch and squeezed the water out of that, too.
"You have to get as much moisture out as you can at this stage. Like this. Like... this!"
"Oh? Thank you for the donation! My strength... I'm not really sure? Maybe it's because I grew up in the countryside."
I'm a succubus, actually. Dream demons are past human in the physical department, turns out. A two-thousand-kilo total on the big three? Probably doable.
...I couldn't exactly say that out loud, so I fudged my way around it.
The knife tapped a light, satisfying rhythm against the rubber board—tok, tok, tok, tok—and I prepped every ingredient and mixed them all together. I pressed the blended filling tight, then tighter, driving the air out of it, cut the rested dough into workable pieces, rolled them with a pin, and got down to folding dumplings in earnest.
"Is there a dumpling shape anyone prefers? I like them rolled up round."
"Wow. Even one dumpling splits people this many ways... and yet?! I understand every single one of them."
"Instead of flour... oh! I've seen that. That series you can't see anywhere except in those videos! I've seen it, I've seen it."
Cooking something I loved, talking with people who cared about the same things—it was fun. Joy stamped the nervousness flat, and I could settle into the stream a little more comfortably.
"If I get some breathing room later, I'll give it a try myself."
"There are so many things I really want to do. I want to cook dishes I've never tried, and I want to play an instrument..."
"Singing, and games! Once I buy a computer, I want to try streaming games too."
"What games do you all like? Anyone here who likes Arcadia Fall? I've been dying to play that one."
The words came smoothly. They practically poured out of me. Ah... I had been this starved for other people's attention, for any kind of connection at all. Back when I lived in resignation, I hadn't known it. Like forgetting hunger until one bite of food makes you feel, all at once, how long you've been starving—the thirst hit me late. I felt as if I'd turned into a black hole that couldn't tell it was full, no matter how much it ate.
I wanted more attention. I wanted to be praised more. So, folding the dumplings as prettily as I could, I brought out my finishing move: vocal mimicry.
"Why do I want to try Arcadia Fall, you ask? Mmm— it's famous for being a god-tier game."
"The story's good, every character is beautiful or handsome, and more than anything, a voice actress I love is in it."
"The new character who just came out! The voice actress for Sarah Vale, the Last Combat Medic of Shelter 04."
I stacked the buildup piece by piece, because I wanted to show off. My heart felt ready to burst, but it was a good kind of pounding. I called on the power of transformation and altered, just a little, my vocal cords, my lungs, my nasal cavity, my tongue and mouth, and the rest of it. The voice I'd found last night, testing and testing again. One hundred percent identical to the voice actress's.
"You're going there to scout it? That's insane!"
"How was that? I tried mimicking a scene from the trailer."
I even stopped folding for a moment and watched the chat. Like a puppy waiting to be praised... The succubus tail I'd hidden so carefully inside my pants swayed on its own, without my noticing.
A short delay passed. Then the reaction detonated—just as I'd hoped. No. Beyond what I'd hoped.
"Yes, that was me. I practiced a lot. How was it? Pretty close, right? Right??"
Cheers, gasps, donations—everything burst out at once. My spirits soared. I felt as if the whole world were mine. So I copied several other lines the same way. I even did lines from other characters. Other voice actors.
"All that's happened is that my turn came. Someday, yours will too."
Was it the elation, rising without limit or end? All at once, my Synesthesia manifested—and at a level that couldn't even be compared to before.
"Ah..."
Beautiful. This had to be the waveform of sound. I could see sound with my eyes. It had color. Texture, of course—and a scent, and a taste. Spellbound, I reached out before I knew what I was doing and touched the wave.
Was it the Jeonggi Energy Lilith had spoken of? Or the synesthesia, driven to its limit? The sound could be touched. And somehow I felt I could command this waveform without ever laying a hand on it. So I tried.
"Ah. Aah."
?!??
The moment I laid Jeonggi Energy into the wave, it surged outward, and the sound surged with it. This... I was going to have to test it in every direction later. I had the feeling I could pull off something tremendous.
Lavish praise, from Lilith! I forced the feeling back down—I'd been so keyed up the nape of my neck had gone stiff—and focused on the cooking stream.
But.
From the moment the viewers passed a thousand, I couldn't hold on to my mind at all. I'd never been given this much attention. I was so grateful that everyone liked me that my heart swelled up, uneven and aching.
"Thank you. I r-really..... mm! Ahem! Ahem!! I'll do a really good job. I'll work hard!"
"You want to know how the dumplings taste? They're good... ugh."
My feelings bucked so wildly I couldn't control them, and I had to eat a steamed dumpling on the verge of tears. Only after I ended the stream did I sit there thinking why did I do that, drumming my fingers on the table. Tap, tap, tap.
I'd hoped it wouldn't happen. Of course(?), that unsightly moment of mine was cut into clips and Shorts and left to wander all over the internet. There were plenty of comments howling with laughter, and plenty calling me cute. None of them took the shame away.
Arcadia Fall was the hottest game going. Cha Hye-rin, twenty-nine, was the voice actress who played Sarah Vale, a flagship character of the game's version 2.5.
She taught classes at a voice-acting academy, went around to other game companies for auditions, and came home from a full day to shower before anything else. She dried her wet hair, then gathered up the chicken that had been delivered while she was in the shower and a beer from the fridge, and settled comfortably on the living-room floor. A drumstick in one hand. Her phone in the other.
"Mm! Take the price out of it, and chicken really is a perfect food, isn't it? Delicious no matter when you eat it."
Cha Hye-rin enjoyed her chicken and beer and, out of habit, searched her own name. The character she'd finished recording months ago had only just been implemented; she ought to go see how people were reacting.
Reactions like that rinsed the fatigue clean off her. This was why she was a voice actress.
Smiling, satisfied, Cha Hye-rin kept searching. And then... she found it.
"Huh? An impression of me?"
Curiosity made her tap it. She watched. She listened. A voice and a performance one hundred percent identical to her own.
The drumstick slipped from her fingers with a soft thud. Cha Hye-rin stared blankly at her phone—at a Shorts clip looping without end.
"What is this? Uh, uh... huh? What?"
At first she assumed the video was fake. Someone had pulled the audio out on its own and pasted it on, surely. The comment section was full of guesses just like that. But there were just as many people saying it was real.
Who is this person? No—is this real, or what?
She searched this way and that until she found a VOD still sitting on the streaming platform. She watched it straight through. The shock only got bigger.
"This is possible? How is this possible??"
A monster who folded dumplings with both hands and, on the spot, fired off impressions of three or four characters. A sync rate of one hundred percent, no less. An existence that had, quite literally, left common sense somewhere far behind. For Cha Hye-rin—a working voice actress who had built up her knowledge of the voice and trained for it professionally—Sehyeon was difficult to accept.
That donation message, in particular, wouldn't leave her eyes. Jangsan-beom. An imaginary monster, said to mimic a human voice so perfectly you couldn't tell them apart. It was real. A real Jangsan-beom had appeared.
"......"
I need to meet this person. I'm going to confirm it myself!
Too shocked to steady her shaking hands, Cha Hye-rin sent an email.