The First Live Broadcast
Bora kept scrolling through NewTube on the computer. Before long she muttered that the time had come, and came over to me.
I was parked beside her, sucking away at a grape candy. I could eat proper food if I wanted to, but sunlight and water alone were enough to keep me alive, which was precisely why junk like this had started to sound irresistible.
I sat in the chair swinging my legs, wondering when her work would ever end, until Bora looked at me and spoke.
"Hana, you can do it just like you've been doing all this time, right?"
The look in her eyes told me the moment had arrived. Recorded videos were no longer enough. It was time for a live broadcast, and with the subscriber count already pulled up to a decent level, we needed a different way to gather viewers.
"I'll do my best!"
I wasn't confident, but I couldn't disappoint her, so I put force into the words. Bora took in the sight of me, smiled, and nodded.
"See? I knew I could count on you, Hana."
With that she stroked my head, and it felt, somehow, not bad at all. Nice, even. I wasn't a dog. I had no idea why having my head petted should feel this good.
The setup was more or less finished. The hoodie and shorts I used to live in had vanished long ago under Bora's strange little witchcraft. In their place I wore a brightly shining outfit smothered in lace.
Her hands were something else. In less than an hour she had turned my rumpled self into an entirely different person, and the magic of it was so dazzling I could hardly look away.
Faced with a reflection that different, all I could do was fidget. I simply couldn't get used to it. It was absolutely not because I had been changed and dressed up like some doll.
Bora studied me with clear satisfaction, nodded, and switched the camera on. Once the setup was complete she turned the laptop toward me.
"Hana, just do it like usual, all right? You got that?"
"Yeah."
I nodded as I answered. Just like usual. That was all I had to do. The self-hypnosis took, and I planted myself in front of the camera in a getup nothing like my everyday self, grim with resolve.
"Don't clench up too hard~"
"Hweh..."
I must have been forcing it. The moment I let the tension out of muscles drawn tight as wire, a weird little sound escaped me on its own.
Bora ran through one last check before going live. Today they had agreed to keep it simple: a bit of conversation, a little time in the sun, and done.
Once that was settled, she started the livestream without a moment's hesitation.
The Starlight Research Lab channel already had a fair number of subscribers, and people poured in the instant the broadcast went up.
Barely a few minutes in, dozens of subscribers had already entered the channel. Maybe it was the chat window glowing on the laptop, but the nerves I had just shaken off came creeping back. In other words, I got nervous. I felt my mind go pure white and simply stood there, stock-still.
There still weren't so many people that I couldn't follow the chat as it climbed. In front of me, behind the camera, Bora was flailing her hands and feet, demanding I do something. What was it she told me to do...
"Ah... hello. I'm Hana, and I live at the Starlight Research Lab. I'm ten years old."
I ducked my head in a deep bow from the waist. Today's broadcast was supposed to be short, just an introduction and then done, so a greeting like this ought to be enough, right?
Fortunately, the greeting loosened me up. I answered the questions Bora followed with in a calm voice, and the first broadcast came to a perfectly uneventful close.
However expensive the green tea became, the factories of Starlight Food kept turning. Stockpiling the tea to dump it later, once the price went up, would have cost more than breaking the supply contracts already in place, so the company—regretful though it was—continued feeding the market at three thousand won a box.
The factories themselves ran on in relative peace. The market did not.
Consumers who first heard rumors of a price hike for Starlight Green Tea only half believed them.
"Come on. They're really going to take a three-hundred-won green tea and jack it up to five thousand?"
"I'll grant you the stuff works, but isn't that jump ridiculous? A hike like that would make the Guinness Book."
"If I keep drinking it the way I do now, that's thirty or forty thousand won a day. No way Starlight Food actually raises it that high."
"No! Waking up and starting the day with a cup of Starlight Green Tea is the one joy of my life!"
Then the articles hit, and an official notice went up on Starlight Food's website, and doubt hardened into fact. The market split in two.
"Does the president of Starlight Food even have a brain? Raise the price like that and how are ordinary people supposed to buy it!"
One side tore into the company without mercy.
"That price is perfectly reasonable. Drinking it this cheap never made sense in the first place. Ah, at least I won't have to stand in line anymore."
The other was simply glad that buying Starlight Green Tea would no longer mean fighting the crowd for it.
But set those two aside, and there was one place where the reaction ran hottest of all.
The stores, all across the country, that sold Starlight Green Tea. Shortages had already been ugly. Now they worsened until people found themselves missing the old days.
The moment a shipment landed in a store anywhere in the nation, it was gone. Word that a three-hundred-won tea was about to become a five-thousand-won tea raced ahead of the trucks and pulled in even the housewives who had been staying home.
"Oh my, Giyeong's mom. Didn't you say you don't drink green tea because of your allergies?"
"Allergies, whatever—is that really the issue right now? Buy it and your money duplicates!"
"Fair point."
Even people who had never cared were swept into the hoarding frenzy. It looked as if nine out of ten people in the country had joined the rush on Starlight Green Tea.
Students in school uniforms lining up at the mart became a common, uncanny sight. They were aiming for the eight a.m. delivery, before the nine o'clock bell called them to class. From their point of view, their money was about to copy itself into something close to fifty thousand won, and there was no reason not to. Kids who couldn't legally work a part-time job would have been fools to pass up a chance like that.
Even distributors who had sat out the last buying frenzy were setting stock aside this time. A conscientious few still delivered Starlight Green Tea to the stores named in their contracts. But others sprang up everywhere, tearing up those contracts, swallowing the penalties, inventing one excuse after another, and squirreling the tea away for themselves. They would never be trusted to move Starlight Green Tea again. The profit sitting right in front of them was simply too large, and so they did it anyway.
It was the same as cutting open the goose that laid the golden eggs, and they did not seem to care. With a lump of gold under their very noses, plenty of people were not wise enough to think any further than that.
The closer the price hike crept, day by day, the more the people working the shop floors felt like they were dying. Nightmare customers came without end. More than a few of them caught themselves thinking that the company should have announced the increase the day before, instead of leaving everyone enough time to swarm.
From Starlight Green Tea's side, though, it was a windfall no one had planned for. Without a single television spot or newspaper ad, one price increase alone had burned the name into every person in the country. The tea's reputation had already been spreading by word of mouth, but no one had imagined it would explode like this. And anyone who drank it once could feel the effect in their own body, which meant that, without spending another won on advertising, they had effectively put a cup in every consumer's hand.
The executives who knew that something went into the tea, however, carried one fatal weakness they found difficult to say out loud.
"What do we do if this hair stops coming in?"
No one had ever promised that the magical ingredient would be supplied forever. If the source suddenly refused and told them to deal with it, Starlight Food would have no answer at all. The subject was far too sensitive to raise, so the executives only watched one another's faces and said nothing.