New Homework (Just Chatting)
The day right after streamer Eunha's unfortunate incident, people were already arguing over whether she would come back or vanish for good. She had killed the broadcast without a single word and disappeared, and not a scrap of news had followed her out.
When ten in the morning arrived and her stream was still dark, the communities that usually ran hot with talk of Eunha collapsed into pure chaos.
The stream even going live was already a disaster, and she already did the face reveal, so it's fine—what are you even saying? You actually want to spread that?
Eunha has never once been late, and she still hasn't turned the stream on. You bastards. If she quits, it's your fault.
The regulars who watched her often, and liked her, were tearing into the users plastering the boards with her leaked photos. The ones catching that criticism held a shameless line. What, exactly, had they done that was so wrong?
Users who sat in neither camp thought everyone was making far too much of a fuss. If it was Eunha, who had always thrown herself into streaming more diligently than anyone, she would be back before long. They weren't treating the incident like a crisis.
It might have been different for some other Durahan, one who had never shown a face at all. Eunha had only just become the single biggest topic around by revealing hers on the Newbie Guide.
Of course, the face that leaked this time was not the fully styled Newbie Guide video. It was Eunha as she looked on an ordinary day, and there was a real chance the leak would land a blow on her stream...
Turns out that was all on me...
Even the leaked, unstyled face was overwhelming enough to flatten an ordinary celebrity without trying, so the accident produced no one ready to say they were disappointed in her. Ironically, it became one more chance to advertise just how far her looks sat above everyone else's, and her fanbase only grew.
So the community kept at it. Would she go live, or wouldn't she, and if she did, when? A three-sided war with no end in sight was settled by a single alert.
"Haha... Hello?"
The broadcast they had been aching for had just switched on.
The stream they rushed into was pandemonium. The photos of Eunha that had slipped quietly through the community carried a ridiculous reach, and people had already been hungry for her face. Chat swelled into a mob, every line demanding a cam room, until she cut the trolls out in one clean stroke and dragged the mood back down.
The influx who hadn't been banned yet, and who still hadn't shown their real colors, were a little disappointed. They had thought today, of all days, they would finally see her on cam. Her face did come up if you simply searched "Newbie Guide Eunha" on K-tube, of course...
A video of fifteen or twenty minutes was nowhere near enough. It was a guide, and by design her face didn't even fill half the runtime.
But she kept talking with the viewers, and the whole thing slid off in a direction nobody had called.
"Ah..."
Having memories of before, it wasn't some wild stretch to think these people might be cruel to her. She still hadn't imagined they would like her this much. As she was now, she wasn't perfect.
"I—I'm really okay? Not empty words. For real..."
"I don't even have makeup on right now—"
Her mouth was lining up to say the same thing all over again, but—
As if someone had read her mind, a donation landed right on cue and shut her mouth.
"M-my mouth? Uweh—!"
Ah, damn it. It really was stuck there...!
"Ah, I mean—this isn't—I'm not usually this messy...!"
Even now, the worry clung to her. Was this really all right?
If these people thought it was, then maybe the compulsion to be perfect was something she could set down. Just a little.
"Good thing the cam looks okay. I haven't even turned the lights on yet... I'll just leave it like this."
Once she let herself think that, her chest felt noticeably lighter.
"...Pardon?"
"Ah, I don't dance!"
M-me? Dance? As if.
That first cam broadcast, which had doubled as her explanation, left her more wrung out than a stream usually did. Ending one always came with a hard, sharp tiredness. Today it cut deeper. A normal broadcast was only her voice and a hand cam. This time, for every second she was live, she had felt the camera taking all of her in, and it had eaten straight through her nerves.
Fretting that she might slip was the baseline. There was also a perfectly real chance her private life could be ripped open. She had denied, with her own mouth, any tie to H or to her father. If that came to light it would be a problem for her, because it would mean she had lied to her viewers.
"Haaahm..."
She was sprawled flat on the bed, the same way she always was after closing a stream, when something a viewer had said came back to her.
"Dance, huh..."
When the donation came in she hadn't expected a request like that at all, so she had refused it a little stiffly, and the viewers had respected her. She had only turned the cam on that day because she lost to how badly they wanted it. Most of them must have been satisfied just to have it on.
"Maybe I'll just look. Only a little."
She really, truly had no intention of dancing on stream. She only meant to see what kind of dancing people even did on a broadcast. The clip she pulled up was the 02 Dance—out of fashion now, but once a very big deal.
Tiriring—ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding—tiriring~♬
A camgirl streamer popped onto the screen with that bright rhythm and went straight into the dance. Both hands laced behind her head, hips popping in time...
"Haa... haa."
"Wh-what is this...!"
No way. The 02 Dance was this vulgar??
A chill prickled over her at the thought that she had, for even a second, pictured doing a dance this crude where tens of thousands of people could see it. If she had actually gone through with it, her father might have shut the stream down himself.
"I—I could never dance that... no. I won't!"
No matter how the viewers begged, she was not dancing this. She wasn't a camgirl streamer to begin with. As a broadcaster, her identity stopped at Project A—a specialist, and a skilled one. So there was no need to turn a cam on and dance, or anything of the sort—
"Mm... like this?"
There wasn't a need. She decided to try it once anyway.
She had absolutely no plan to do it on stream. She had simply gotten curious how she would look on a screen if she danced.
It was a little crude, yes, but the woman dancing on the phone was strikingly beautiful—beautiful enough to catch anyone's eye, man or woman. It might look like too much self-regard, but on the visual side she thought she had the camgirl on the screen beaten, and a plain little question followed. If I danced, what would that even look like?
"Ugh, this pose is hard..."
"Here, you do it like..."
"Mm..."
The question answered itself at once.
The girl dancing in the mirror did not look beautiful the way the woman on the phone did, and she didn't feel sensual, either. What was the word for it... She looked a little pathetic.
"Yeah. I should drop the dancing..."
A changed body and four years younger, and still a gamer was a gamer. The moves hadn't looked that hard on video. The moment she tried them herself, everything creaked.
"I'm really this terrible at dancing..."
Giving up did not take long. Dance on stream with skill like this and she would only hand the viewers something to laugh at. That much was obvious.
"Dancing... I should give it up."
Eunha had no idea, but someone was watching her throw herself into the dance.
"Uh... so... mm."
That someone was none other than Yoon Hayeon. Her daughter had been shut in the room to stream, so Hayeon had come up to the second floor with a light dessert in the staff's place—a little small talk with her, and a look at her daughter working while she was at it.
"I'll just... leave this out here."
If she opened that door and stepped inside now, she didn't need to guess how her daughter would react. She loved the girl. She had no wish to put her on the spot.
"Though... was being an idol Eunha's dream?"
She had, of course, tucked away one very small misunderstanding.