Chuseok Fruit-Set Scam Info? Hatube!

"Bwahahaha!"

She'd lost it.

The last time she looked, there had been fifty-four viewers. More people than every friend she'd known in her whole life.

"And I prepared so hard..."

And then a one-second red pill?

Fuck.

The laugh went cold. She dropped into a crouch, knees drawn together, face buried in her hands.

"Did I really have to stake my life on a stream?"

Change the nickname and start over as a VTuber, and she still wouldn't be any different from the people who began the ordinary way. No—maybe this was on her from the start, for sniffing after virality and every other shortcut.

"Phew."

She stuck a cigarette between her lips.

"Still. Smoking in Doona's room... that's not it."

She knew where the line was. Then she clenched her fist in a flare of anger, and the cigarette ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠snapped. Shreds of fresh tobacco spilled across the floor like dust.

"Damn it."

She came out into the living room. Dark on every side. She sat on the sofa, turned her phone on, and turned it off again. Turn it on to do what.

"..."

She went into Doona's room and looked through the things she'd carried in earlier. There was a photo of the two of them. She took it out and held it for a long time.

"This photo... why did you keep it?"

You must have had hard days too. Even in memories snarled together like trash, a few stayed behind like splinters. Somewhere in between them.

"Maybe you found some courage in it. You must have had so many hard days."

In the photo they'd taken together, maybe Doona had looked at this and drawn strength from it. Hana got to her feet, held the picture a while longer, and set it down beside the monitor.

"It's not like I'm completely fucked yet."

This time it was her turn. So.

"If it's come to this, we're going camgirl, yeah?"

She chose to charge straight through. Do it by the book. Her personal information wasn't fully exposed yet. She still had a chance. A life that was fucked anyway—what couldn't she pull off?

She booted the computer, put on the mask and the gloves, opened the broadcast software, and adjusted the camera angle. She even set the focus, confirmed that she came through all right on the screen, and then—

"Let's go."

Twenty-seven years of a life with nothing scarier than debt. First broadcast, starting now.

She'd slap an apology-stream concept on the title and charge.

"...Mm."

That was the plan.

Two hundred Blue already. Twenty thousand won, just like that—and eighty-seven followers, with the viewer count climbing past a hundred and ten. Was this even real? Either way, she had a job to do.

"Hello... hello. This is Hananyan. Yes, the one-second VTuber. I'm not a VTuber anymore."

"Nya-hello...? Hi."

Some truly strange people seemed to have latched on. It didn't feel all that bad, though. Maybe because the money was coming in. Oh, right. A thank-you was in order.

"NovelsDontSwing, thank you for the two hundred Blue. Feels like I bombed it from the very first broadcast, but, well..."

It was nothing like an ordinary Pazizik chat. Probably because Novel Gallery was where the influx had started. Still, introducing yourself was a streamer's duty.

"To introduce myself again, I'm Hananyan, and I'm seventeen."

"Year of the Tiger."

"Thank you for saying I'm cute. I hear that a lot."

There was no shortage of things to talk about. Of all of them, the one that seemed to matter most was whether she really was that main nick. Verifying it was simple enough.

"One moment. My phone theme is something you all hate."

The phone theme was a cat. Nothing special. It was still somehow embarrassing, so she'd already switched it to the default.

"I don't even know where this stream is going anyway. Let's just verify fast and move on."

The stiffness drained out of her voice, and it started to fill in. They were all gallery people anyway, weren't they? She figured at least ten of them in here had thrown down with her on a guest nick at some point.

"Here it is."

She showed them the pitiful screen where her main nick had been blocked. The part with her IP showing, of course, she kept covered. In that instant the chat detonated.

One line in the chat looked familiar. So the moment she'd braced for had arrived. Becoming a beloved main nick meant getting cut out of the gallery. Why? Because you'd been turned into an idol.

She went back into the site. The three-day ban had stretched into a permanent one.

Yeah. The mod had lost it too, writing a reason like that. What was she supposed to do? The die was cast.

Goodbye, Novel Gallery. I'll VPN my way back in later.

"I was prepared. It is what it is."

For the record, she had something to say about the mask too.

"I can't take the mask off, because of the content I'm going to do."

"I got famous for blowing the whistle— not whistleblowing. For talking about plagiarism scams. That's why you all found me."

"So here's the thing. The content for now is going to be the reality of shady companies. It's day one, but I did prepare."

There was something she absolutely had to say here.

"Everyone, that's why I'm not showing my face."

She was absolutely not running a callout stream.

And so Lee Hana—no. Hananyan.

"It's the Chuseok holiday. Is everyone out traveling?"

"Ah. The thank-you... followers are up to ninety. Thank you for the follows, NovelsDontSwing and eighty-nine others."

First day of the Chuseok holiday, and she'd decided to spend the debut broadcast on actual content. Before that—

Collect a little first.

"WhiteSockKimchi, thank you for the two hundred Blue. And thank you for the follow. Yes."

There'd been a brief commotion. In that short stretch she'd collected a bit: eight hundred Blue. About eighty thousand won, stacked up. She couldn't let herself get comfortable thinking this was sweeter than a part-time job. She'd lost the model, and she wasn't showing her face either, so she had to win with content. Tomorrow was Chuseok itself.

"All right. I'll get into the content."

"It's Chuseok, so everyone's sending a lot of fruit gift sets, right?"

"I'll explain from here. Please listen carefully."

Today's content.

"I looked into information on Chuseok fruit sets. I'm going to tell you about it."

She let out a breath. Her heart was pounding. She'd prepared pretty hard, in her own way. Trusting they'd listen—

"I'll switch the screen."

She switched it.

A roughly thrown-together project slide was laid bare for the viewers. Crude, sure, but she'd even put real effort into the drawing...

...It was a drawing, though. She'd leave the drawings out next time. Anyway!

"I looked into every holiday fruit seller lately. Reviews, the businesses, and... the places that distribute them, plus the farms. About seven hundred places."

I'm unemployed? I've got nothing but time?

So she did content that was hers alone. The explanation started now.

Say there was a distributor—call it Company A. A company like that didn't deal with just one seller. Usually a single distributor contracted with dozens, hundreds of sellers, and moved product through all of them. Next, the sellers. They weren't so different from the distributors. Some held an exclusive contract with a single farm. Others swept up goods from a pile of farms and sold the whole mess off together. That, in itself, wasn't the problem.

"Not every farm harvests everything on the same day."

Harvest time shifted with the climate and the season. No matter how well the fruit was stored, once a seller started pulling from farms scattered all over, keeping the quality consistent got hard. Of course some companies had a conscience, sorted out the bottom grade, and sold the rest.

"If they did, there wouldn't be a controversy, would there?"

The problem didn't end there.

"These days you buy a lot of it by delivery, right? So it's hard to see with your own eyes what state the fruit on the inside is in."

These days, people didn't go in person for Chuseok. Those warm (?) fruit sets, delivered to your parents, never passed under the buyer's eyes. They only passed under the eyes of the distributor, the seller, and the farm.

"Have a look at one photo."

She put up a picture scraped from a certain company's reviews. Rotten apples, and apples that were seriously tiny, packed the frame.

People make mistakes. That was the point, and it wasn't a bad one. But what if it had been repeated on purpose?

"The callout— no. Statement of facts, starting now. Again, not every company is like this. Only within what I actually looked into..."

She let that sit.

"Let me talk a little about business registration numbers."

Every seller had one. Easiest to think of it as a resident registration number issued to a business. Any citizen could look the number up. Even the trade name. And the reason you could look it up?

"You want to know whether the other party is actually operating like a normal business, right?"

Which was why, even if they changed the trade name, the business registration number wasn't easy to change.

"The place you really need to check carefully this holiday is..."

She switched the project screen.

"This place."

She had definitely mosaicked it. She had absolutely not dragged that place out of malice, or anything of the sort. You could call it peekaboo with her eyes covered, maybe. If she got rich later she'd take the mosaic down. Whatever.

"Ahem. Anyway, I'll tell you about this place's previous history."

What could you actually confirm through ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a business registration number? Whether they'd suspended operations, whether they'd shut down, the trade name. That was about it. But if a company had, for some reason, changed only the trade name? The registration number stayed the same. And she was bringing it up because—

"This company keeps changing its trade name. For some reason."

There had to be more than one person in the world furious over a scam. Which was why she—an unemployed nobody with far too much time—had turned every portal site inside out.

She'd dug through every related post and review. Illuraloo Fruit, Yallariral Fruit, Bellbellbella Wave. Those three had been dragged for fruit scams on a one-year cycle. And what did the three of them have to do with Manihana Wave? Angry bloggers and reviewers had left captures of the old sites scattered all over the internet. Sales-page design, the representative's name, the address, the business registration number—all of it matched Manihana Wave as it stood now. Everything was identical. So.

"Ahem. I didn't disclose the business registration number, but... you all seem to know it anyway? It looks like they change the trade name every year, for reasons that are genuinely impossible to understand... and there's a part you really need to check."

"First. If you look the business registration number up and nothing comes up at all, you can trust that and write them off. They aren't a real business. They're a scammer. Second. You got scammed, or the place has a problem?"

"Make sure you remember the business registration number, and search it later. If they shut down, there's nothing you can do, but it'll help to some degree."

And so!

"I can't exactly say it outright, but let me give you the conclusion."

She'd decided to walk them through the last project window. The conclusion.

"From what I confirmed, there's a chance the problem is the seller. The other sellers and distributors that the connected farms harvest for and ship to didn't particularly have problems. Of course I really don't know who the selling company is, but..."

She didn't know anyone like that. The one patent attorney she'd had...

"I work alone. For now."

Because that person wasn't in this world anymore.

"Debut broadcast, first piece of content: be careful of fruit scams in Chuseok season. Please buy only from places that have actually been verified."

Time for the closing line.

"For now, this is the kind of content I'm thinking of making. The reason I work with a mask on... I think you'll understand."

"Hey, Seoyeon. There's somebody hilarious up on Pazizik."

"Streamer talk again?"

"Yeah. Somebody called Hananyan."

Baek Seoyeon and her friend were at a tent bar again today. The Chuseok holiday had started, but going down to their family homes was a hassle, so the two of them were still in Seoul, hiding behind work.

"Switched from VTuber to camgirl in one second."

"...Camgirl? From a VTuber?"

Her slapdash Live2D model had sold just recently. At the words one-second VTuber, Baek Seoyeon's eyes lit.

Was this the person who'd been about to use my model?

But coincidences rarely stacked that neatly.

Probably not.

Baek Seoyeon cooled off at once. She looked down at her friend's phone.

"Huh?"

Someone who felt strangely familiar was broadcasting in a mask. Wearing a headset with cat ears, even.

"Because of her, the scammer who was selling Chuseok gifts is getting review-bombed right now. I got a refund out of it."

"...What?"

None other than the girl she'd met yesterday. She looked like Lee Hana.

"They even just made a Hananyan gallery."

"That's impossible."

"What's with you? You drunk?"

An earthquake went through Baek Seoyeon's pupils.