Episode 123: Post-Shoot Recap Stream (Just Chatting)
I'd left the stream idling on its warm-up screen and gone downstairs for the tumbler I'd forgotten and walked off without. What waited in the kitchen was Mom, already settled in her chair—and on the table in front of her, the very tumbler I'd left behind.
"Oh—good morning. I forgot my tumbler again."
"We already said good morning. Here."
She held it out as if she'd been waiting for me to come down.
"Thank you."
I bowed to her and was about to head straight back up to the second floor when—
"Will you be all right?"
Still in her chair, she asked me that. All right?
"Sorry? About what?"
All right—had something happened to me lately? Even if it had, the only recent thing was the Newbie Guide shoot.
As if that guess were exactly right, she answered at once.
"Your stream. Everyone knows your face now. Isn't that a burden?"
"Mm... the stream..."
She was right. I'd shown my face on the Newbie Guide. From here on, people would know what I looked like.
A flood of new viewers would come with that, and with them no end of demands that would wreck the order my stream already had. As if she'd known I would answer this way, Mom let out a short sigh.
"Right... I thought you'd say something like that."
"Haha..."
"It's a decision you made after thinking it through, so I ought to trust you and leave it with you. Still—if anything happens, you tell Mom or Dad. You understand?"
Showing my face was a double-edged sword in the end. My looks weren't ordinary looks, so the stream stood to gain a great deal—but the drawbacks were just as real.
The moment a face goes public, that choice can't be undone. There is no going back to before the reveal. Even if some circumstance later forced me to quit, I could never become an ordinary private person again. Not with my face already known. Quitting would make a new job harder to find, and if someone recognized me out in the world, the useless attention would wear me thin.
"Yes. I will. I promise."
That, though, was the ordinary case. I wasn't like them.
Three years as a pro gamer had already made life as a public figure familiar, and I hardly went out, so I had no need to collect stray attention. The stream had grown past enough and into too much, and I had no particular thought of stopping. If it collapsed, yes, that would become a problem, but...
I did have a contingency on that side. A second job I could choose, and actually count on. Not that I knew whether I'd truly go back to being a pro gamer if the stream died.
"Good. Then hurry on up. You left the stream running when you came down, didn't you?"
"Ah. Right."
Now that she mentioned it, I had left the warm-up going. It usually finished in under five minutes, and even a rough guess said I'd already blown well past that. This was a stream coming back after a three-day rest stream. I couldn't leave my precious viewers sitting there.
"Then—I'll head up!"
Tumbler in hand, I hurried for the second floor.
"Don't run, walk! You'll fall!"
"I'm fi—"
Thud!
"Agh!"
"I told you to be careful...!"
"Uuugh... I think I did this on this exact spot last time, and here I go again..."
And so, nursing my stubbed toe, I made my slow way up to the second floor.
My toe...
"What is this."
I'd come back with the admirable intention of not wasting my precious viewers' precious time, enduring even a stubbed toe to do it, and what met me was...
Considerably... that is... mm.
"What in the world is this..."
The chat window was a complete mess.
Spam surging in like a tide, messages that had long since crossed the line—the mods were clearing them as they came, but a mere dozen or so of them was nowhere near enough to hold that kind of malice back. And even granting the spam, the speed was absurd.
My usual audience sat around ten thousand. Even counting everyone who'd come in after the showmatch, it never broke twenty. Back then the chat was hard to read, but I could at least salvage a few lines—catch a word or two and infer the rest. Now it was scrolling so fast I couldn't catch a single word.
"Whoa."
The reason was obvious. Somewhere around forty-five thousand viewers. Three or four times what I'd had before the Newbie Guide video went up.
No wonder the mods couldn't keep up with the spam. People who'd been holding ten thousand viewers in line were suddenly supposed to hold more than forty thousand.
I was late—considerably late—but for the viewers waiting on me and for the mods, I decided to do something about it.
"Let's see... chat restriction... followed for at least a month..."
A month ought to be enough, right?
With the restriction in place, the chat was far easier to read. It still moved fast, but the walls of copy-paste spam had stopped coming. The air had more or less cleared, and the warm-up was overflowing by now, so—
"Ah. Hello..."
How to put it. It was awkward. I meant to greet them the way I always did, but knowing these people knew my face made me strangely shy.
Maybe they'd caught my mood. Chats saying I wasn't my usual self were already pouring in.
"It's... the feeling's strange. Thinking everyone came because they watched that video..."
"I'm glad you say it's all right. Honestly, I prepared a lot so I'd look good."
Being confident in my face was one thing. Wanting people to see me at my best was another, and I had worked for it. If I hadn't, there would have been no reason to spend two dull, irritating days changing clothes.
And then there was the cam. Even with the one-month follow lock, people were still spamming and eating the ban hammer all over the chat. They wanted a face cam too, and they were holding back only because I seemed not to. I wasn't against doing one. The only reason the camera was off was that I wasn't ready.
"The cam... I'll turn it on when I get the chance. I'm not ready to jump straight into a face-cam stream."
The housekeeper had laid out clothes and accessories, and I'd put on light makeup—a full setup—before I showed my face. If people said I looked worse than that, it would sting. My annoying temperament got uncomfortable the moment I failed to meet an expectation, and I wanted to show them only my best.
"Yes, yes. I'll definitely do a cam stream later, so bear with me for today. All right?"
I meant to get at least a proper camera setup before I did it. Looking into it, you needed lights, and quite a lot besides.
"Mm..."
A stream after three days off. My viewers split into two camps—the Just Chatting side and the Project A side—and the split was nearly even.
Or maybe the Just Chatting side was heavier now. Plenty of them would have come in from the Newbie Guide video. I'd already declared there would be no cam today, and with chat locked to followers of a month or more, some of the new arrivals had already left. Even so, it was a little startling that thirty-some thousand were still watching.
"Let's keep it light with Just Chatting today. I promised a story stream in the notice, and it's still preseason."
Even if I played Project A, I'd already taken server rank one, and this was the rest of preseason. Nearly three weeks remained before the new season. New agents were coming in that time, and a new map too, so there was no need to rush into playing.
"Then shall we watch the Newbie Guide video together and talk? I haven't seen the finished cut either."
"...Don't ask."
Had I... really done that? The fact that it was sitting there in the video meant I definitely had, but still.
If I could go back, I would grab the version of me who'd suggested we watch the Newbie Guide together and talk her out of it. Why had I done that? No—further back than that. I would stop the me who had looked straight into the camera and winked out of nowhere. Seriously, why?
"Don't ask about the wink. I don't even know why I did it."
I couldn't take back the offer to watch it now, and I didn't have the nerve to explain myself, so I hammered the skip-ahead-five-seconds until we landed in the lecture portion. As I remembered it, I hadn't done anything strange around then. Safe enough.
"So, right here, I—"
I was about to keep the story stream going when—
A donation I couldn't just let slide.
Talk of my father, and of my family. Something I had never once made public.
"...What?"
The community? H Group? What was any of that supposed to mean?
No—before that. How had they even found out?