Episode 41 — New Content (Just Chatting)
"Today's menu is a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a mint-choco shake from Me*."
"Aww, you guys are being way too harsh. Fine, I'll put it away."
They were so genuinely offended that I slid the shake off to the side, out of the frame. That obviously didn't mean I wasn't going to drink it. It just had to stay off the screen, right? People with no palate, honestly.
For the streamer Eunha, eating on broadcast was a first. For Choi Eunha the person, it wasn't. There had been the vlogs KZ filmed back in my pro days, and the delivery food we ate when practice broke for a rest. Those, of course, had been cams with my whole face on display. This was only a hand cam: hands, and food.
"Mm..."
The point was, I did have a little experience at this.
Huh. This is better than I expected.
My palate had always been fussy. I'd grown up on the housekeeper's cooking—she was a master of proper home-style meals—and other restaurants never quite let me enjoy a flavor all the way through. Delivery was all right in its way, chicken and pizza and the rest, but I never got as far as an honest this is incredible. The only food that fully satisfied me was hers.
"This is pretty good, actually?"
So when I called something okay, that was already high praise. For a sandwich from a franchise café, it wasn't bad.
Was it enough. For a high schooler still growing, my portions really were on the small side. Sex might account for some of it, but when I was seventeen a single sandwich like this wouldn't even have checked in. And back when I was a guy, I would have taken one enormous bite and finished the thing inside a minute. Now it refused to shrink, no matter how much time passed.
"Yeah. I used to eat quite a lot, but these days the amount's dropped a lot."
"A diet? If I dieted the way I am now, I'd be down to the bone."
The housekeeper already scolded me to put on a little weight every time I sat down to eat. A diet, on top of that? I'd actually die of malnutrition.
I worked through the sandwich with a small mouth, talking with the viewers as I went, and the historic first mukbang came to an end just like that. I let the modest meal settle and kept Just Chatting going by answering the donations they sent in, until a rather interesting one arrived.
"A roulette?"
What's that?
A roulette. The proper name was slot machine. It was one of the features Kwitch offered, the same as donations: the streamer set the items and the odds the way you would on a slot machine, and a viewer paid a set amount to spin it. Depending on the items, genuinely funny situations broke out all the time, so a lot of streamers were already using the thing as broadcast content.
My viewers wanted it too.
"Hmm... it doesn't sound bad?"
I thanked Speedwagon, who had explained the slot machine properly, and thought about whether it would actually suit my broadcast.
"Should I try adding one?"
I wasn't much of a talker. Just Chatting, in practice, lived off whatever topics the viewers tossed me. If I only left the slot machine on during Just Chatting, it might make for pretty decent content.
"O-kay, no spamming."
I liked the energy. The problem was—
"But how do I make one of these?"
How does any of this work?
"Nice."
Thanks to a kind viewer, I got my hands on a pretty well-made guide video. Thank you, Speedwagon.
After a few attempts I finally reached the window where you set the slot machine up.
Set the items, the odds, and the price, and my broadcast could use slot-machine content too. Getting this far had been a little rough, though.
"Ahaha... sorry."
In my pro days all I had to do was play the game, so I never noticed. Turns out I'm more computer-illiterate than I thought.
Anyway. To make a slot machine, the items had to go in first. If the streamer was the one selling it, the viewers were the ones buying. Which meant the prizes that came out of it had to be things the viewers actually wanted. I still didn't really know what the people watching me wanted, or what they wanted from me, and rather than stuff the machine with prizes that didn't even appeal to me, it seemed better to ask them outright.
"So... anything worth putting in as an item?"
As I said it, a flicker of worry went through me—what if nobody recommended anything?—and died a single second after I finished the sentence.
The firepower was on par with my Immortal promotion, back when three thousand viewers had piled in. The chat was, in a word, rioting.
"Aah! Stop spamming! Talk a little slower...!"
The chat refused to settle, so I switched it so only people who had followed for at least three months could talk, and that shut it up. I hadn't even been streaming for three months yet.
"From now on, anyone who spams gets a thirty-minute chat ban. Understood?"
Nobody answered, but I figured they'd gotten the message, and I lifted the restriction.
It still climbed like a tide, hard to read line by line, but at least it wasn't rioting the way it had a minute ago.
They started sending their item ideas through donations. Yeah. This was easier.
"Hmm... a horror game?"
A horror game. Honestly, I'm a bigger coward than I like to admit. I fell for superstitions all the time, and as a child I couldn't sleep at night unless the cat-shaped mood lamp was on. In middle school, whenever the class put on a horror movie, I would lie face-down and pretend to sleep with my ears covered. My hearing was ridiculously sharp, so I heard every bit of it anyway. My friends asked why I kept having seizures in my sleep, and I had to sweat through an explanation. I'd only been startled by the sound.
Anyway. With no tolerance for horror, I wanted to refuse that suggestion, but—
In a chat that felt like this, I did not have the nerve to say I don't want that.
"...I'll put the horror game in."
I opened a notepad and wrote it down. 1. Horror game.
Nothing else for it.
In exchange, I was going to make the odds downright vicious.
"Then what else should we put in?"
"Hmm... a half-cam?"
A half-cam is the most camera a streamer who won't show her face can offer. People usually just call it a Durahan cam: a shot that cuts off at the neck. If the face stayed out of it, did it even matter? By coincidence, the limit my father had allowed me was exactly from the neck down. So it would be fine.
"All right, I'll add that too."
…What?
Downfall or whatever. I hate aegyo. I am never doing it.
"This is pretty much done."
I really, truly had not wanted to put aegyo in. But the moment the viewers saw something I hated that much, they staged a protest insisting it had to be included. After dozens of minutes of argument, we found a compromise: add one item. Use Cat Speech.
Awful people. I hate doing it that much, and they still—honestly, too far.
Even so, I don't Just Chat all that often, and 0.8 percent is hardly a generous chance. Nothing would come of it.
…Right?