Donation (1)

"Minna ohayou! Irasshaimase!"

I fired up the stream the same way I always did. The starting viewer count was a whopping sixty-four. I could actually feel the numbers climbing, day by day.

I smiled at the chat. That was right. SAX-unnie's character illustration was finally finished.

I had literally shrieked with joy when the file landed in my inbox yesterday. The noise was loud enough that Master came over to check whether something terrible had happened, and I spent the rest of the visit bowing and apologizing. At this rate, I was going to need soundproofing if I wanted to keep streaming.

Anyway, I had hung ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠yesterday's illustration on the main stream overlay, and the viewers had clocked it immediately. I didn't even try to hide how happy I was.

"Fufu. The art watashi commissioned is finally done! Well? Isn't it pretty?!"

The piece used the exact same composition as the first sketch I had shown them: a little character packed with all my features, beaming with bliss as she tucked into a plate of sushi.

The reactions ran the gamut, but most of them were kind. A few people thought it looked a little plain, and even they agreed it suited me perfectly.

"Anyway, to celebrate the new art, I thought I'd peel a little gwamegi today!"

"Eh? Not gwamegi—nogari! We're going to sit here and peel some nogari!"

I checked in with my manager, Lucia, on a regular basis for advice about the stream. This particular tip had come right before I went live.

On Twitch they usually called it Just Chatting. In plainer terms, it was time set aside to shoot the breeze—to "peel nogari," as the old slang went.

The way I had been running things, I booted the stream and played games until I shut it down. Lucia's advice was that I needed to carve out a much bigger slice of the broadcast for talking.

At a glance, you might think more gaming was always better. The job title was "game streamer," after all. The catch was that people had a limited supply of stamina. Playing a game and performing for a camera at the same time meant splitting your focus two ways, and the drain added up fast. The longer a session ran, the more the entertainment value fell off a cliff.

And it wasn't only a streamer problem. Viewers hit a wall too. If a match dragged, they got tired, and the stream stopped being fun. Anyone who wandered in mid-game had no idea what was going on, which made it even harder to stay locked in.

Sure, titles like League or StarCraft—where a single round was short—were a little more forgiving. That still didn't make an all-game stream a magic fix.

Huh. Fair enough.

I hadn't been paying close attention before, but once I actually thought about it, almost every streamer—minus a handful of exceptions—had a dedicated nogari block built into the show.

I found myself nodding along to my manager's smooth, rapid-fire explanation. She had a point. When I watched YouTube versus when I watched a livestream, I was looking for slightly different things.

Which brought me to the present: I was about to attempt Just Chatting for the first time, exactly the way my manager had laid it out.

The second I actually tried, a small problem presented itself.

I had no idea what to talk about.

When I was in-game, I could just ramble about the match. How cute Teemo was. How rotten our jungler was being. How incredible my own mechanics were. Easy. But with nothing on screen except a character portrait and a chat window, what was I supposed to say?

I sat there in silence for about thirty seconds, and chat started to stir. I couldn't just keep sitting there, so I opened my mouth as naturally as I could.

"S-sorry! I was talking with the mic off by accident."

"Anyway, I said we were going to peel some nogari, right? So, um… what should we talk about?"

I couldn't find an answer on my own, so I had no choice but to throw the question to the viewers.

"Nogari versus gwamegi? Hmm… honestly, I'm not crazy about either. I don't actually like seafood that much."

"But I like sushi, and squid, and webfoot octopus, and sashimi, and octopus, and shrimp!"

"Eh… ramyeon?"

"Anyway, I like most Korean food! I like kimuchi too!"

Thankfully, once the dam broke, the conversation didn't stop. Bit by bit, I started to get a feel for how a streamer kept topics flowing without ever running dry.

The basic move was to keep one eye on chat at all times. If something decent popped up, I read it out loud and spun a new thread from there. It was like that old kids' song where a red monkey's butt led to apples, which led to the sea—one subject tumbling naturally into the next.

Of course, that process sometimes veered into territory that was uncomfortably personal. Whenever it did, I let my sentences trail off and slid us onto the next topic as smoothly as I could.

Even so, there were moments when I had no choice but to offer up a piece of my private life. When those arrived, I tried as hard as I could not to mix in any lies. If I started fabricating things I could just as easily have told the truth about, there was no telling how that would come back to bite me later. Unless a lie was truly necessary, I either told the truth or blurred the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠details and moved on.

Doing that, I looked up and realized a full hour had already passed since I went live. An entire hour of stream, and I hadn't touched a single game—just nogari, start to finish.

"It's already been an hour! Then I guess it's about time…"

"I'm ending the stream! Minna sayonara!"

"I was kidding. I was going to play League."

A successful Just Chat block, followed by a successful League stream. "Successful" was a generous word, considering how many losses I racked up.

"…Watashi wasn't the problem. Our jungler just sucked."

I enjoyed about two hours of League, and before I wrapped for the night I slipped back into Just Chatting for a bit. After that string of losses I was running on fumes, so my energy was a notch lower than it had been in the first talk segment.

"Doesn't watashi need to pick up a new champion? Teemo is cute, but his limits are way too obvious… Does anyone have a champion they'd recommend?"

"Sonna! Stop teasing me!"

The people in my chat were fine, really. They were just a little too mean. I was pretty good with Teemo, at least. It felt unfair. A lonely, pitiful feeling, like nobody in the world was on my side.

"Deh?"

What was this all of a sudden? I was still blinking at the unexpected quests, trying to make sense of them, when—

"…Eh. Huh?"

Was I seeing that wrong?

A quest-complete window had popped up. This was no hallucination. And the reward, which scaled with the donation amount, was a full ten days of duration—by far the most outrageous payout I had ever gotten from a Sub-Quest.

I put a finger to the monitor and started counting the zeros, one by one.

One, two, three…

Six of them. So that was 1,000,000 won.

The first donation of my life… and it was a million won!

For some reason, a quest I hadn't even clicked shimmered into being in midair—as if it were ordering me to react.