Song? Aegyo? (Just Chatting)

Strike while the iron is hot.

If you've decided to do a thing, don't hesitate—move. It's a fairly famous proverb, and one I've always rather liked.

"Then shall we put it to use right now?"

The viewers and I had already built the roulette together. While the iron was still hot, I decided to turn it on.

If I stopped to think about the penalties that might land—a horror game, Cat Speech, having to call someone oppa—it was basically a devil's roulette.

"I still don't know how the odds will actually feel, so I'll only run it for one hour."

On the other hand, the very high chance of pocketing free money while doing absolutely nothing was tempting enough to make my mouth water. Home took care of everything, so I wasn't exactly hurting for cash, but gun skins and every little private indulgence came out of money I'd earned on stream.

In the Kwitch settings I flipped the slot machine's on/off key to on. From this moment, anyone watching could spin the roulette we had built together today.

Not even five seconds after I'd turned it on, the first customer appeared.

The wheel started to turn with a rattling clatter, and every time the words horror game or Cat Speech flashed past, my whole body flinched.

Please don't come up. Please. Please.

Fortunately, that trustworthy seventy percent did not betray me.

"Whew..."

The viewers groaned over the bust. Their feelings were not my problem. Still, this was... more than I'd expected.

"Wow. This is way more thrilling than I thought."

A horror game at 0.099 percent. Cat Speech at 0.8. Call it almost a 0.9 percent chance of getting completely screwed, and suddenly I was watching all the way to the end with sweat in my palms.

On other channels, donating past a certain amount raised the odds of an item dropping. Mine did not work that way.

And a roulette is an independent trial. Spin it a hundred times and no single result changes the odds of the next. I could sing nothing through several hundred spins, or land a horror game on the very first one.

That was exactly what made it so frightening. And so thrilling.

"Pfft— ah, sorry."

The word bust itself, and the way chat collapsed every time it landed, was so funny I laughed before I could stop myself.

Chat flared up at my laugh. And what exactly were they going to do about it? I'd been a little scared at the start, but bust after bust had put the confidence back in me. Odds like these, I could trust.

Seventy percent bust. Add Sing a Song and the back-clap, neither of which could really hurt me, and I was safe 93.2 percent of the time. For me, this roulette was an absurdly stable little income stream.

Viewers burning a dollar-fifty a spin, hunting a 6.8 percent. It felt like watching people addicted to gambling.

"Eh."

For the first time, something other than a bust had landed. That was the fifth spin, maybe the sixth, and with Sing a Song sitting at 10.2 percent, it had come up remarkably fast. It still wasn't a penalty I'd been trying to dodge, so I didn't rattle.

"Um... XX? Your Kwitch name looks like it's set to private, so I'll open a private chat for you."

The Sing a Song item let the winner choose the song themselves. Within the songs I actually knew, of course. If I didn't know it, then unfortunately I wouldn't be able to sing it. Still, I'd been called a karaoke demon back in middle school. I knew almost anything ordinary. It would be fine.

I left the private window up on the broadcast so everyone else could see it, and talked with the winner there.

No matter how much I hated a song, this was an item that had come off the roulette. The roulette was content the viewers and I had made together, and an item a viewer had paid to win deserved to have its value honored. For someone dreaming of being a full-time streamer, that was simply the answer I was supposed to give.

"...What?"

Ah.

I'd walked right into it.

"...Could I take back what I just said?"

"Please..."

The winner didn't even answer me. They just fled. I invited them back into the private chat, and they wouldn't accept.

I couldn't exactly call them out by name, either. Revealing a nickname they'd set to private, on my own say-so, would have been awkward. In the end, I had fallen all the way into the trap.

"Um, could it maybe be a different song...?"

I held out a little hope that chat might let it slide.

Of course it didn't take. Not even a little.

But this is actually unfair...!

"No— this is no different from the Do Aegyo penalty...!"

You all agreed with me back then that Cat Speech would be the only aegyo item!

"No...! That's not what I meant..."

Rock and a hard place. I couldn't see a single way out. In the end, the only choice left was to swallow my tears and put on the Cutie Song instrumental.

A... helpful viewer saved me the time of looking it up myself.

"...Thanks."

"...Haa. It's over."

Two minutes that had felt like two hours finally ended, and I closed the Ktube window I'd left running the instrumental. Every time the screen flooded with lol while I was singing, the post-performance crash hit harder. I mean—I used to be a guy, and I had just done aegyo in front of fifteen hundred people. Not getting that crash would have been the abnormal part.

The hand cam on the broadcast showed both of my hands, red as if someone had held them over a fire.

"...I'm extremely embarrassed right now, so please don't tease me."

My face was probably just as red as my hands. Yeah. This was going to need an adjustment.

"Honestly, I'm going to tweak Sing a Song. Songs with aegyo in them, like the one just now, are off the table."

Thankfully, the viewers were perfectly happy to let me adjust the wheel. It was true that we'd promised the only aegyo item would be Cat Speech, so me singing ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the Cutie Song... we'd just call that broadcast entertainment and move on.

Ugh. This mouth. It's always this mouth.

Once the promised hour had passed, I switched the roulette off and told the viewers I was ending the stream.

"All right, everyone, that's it for today's broadcast."

Even accounting for the entrance ceremony, it had been a much shorter stream than usual, but the viewers all seemed satisfied with it.

"Right? I definitely need to adjust the odds. And leaving it on for a full hour is a bit much, too. Ugh, my throat hurts..."

The probabilities were one problem. How long I left the wheel running was another. No matter how safely it sat at 6.8 percent, there was nothing to be done against an overwhelming number of trials. A dollar-fifty was cheap enough that the roulette never stopped spinning for that whole hour, and the result was more than ten songs, plus back-claps I felt like I'd been doing all day. Still, aside from Say Oppa coming up once, none of the other nasty items had appeared even a single time. That much, I could call lucky.

"Anyway, I'm glad if today's stream was fun. I'll get going now. Eun-bye~"

As broadcast content, the roulette had done pretty well. Used properly, it could even become a regular segment. It clearly needed tuning, but that could be fixed as I went.

After I hit the end-stream button, any other day I would have dived straight into bed. Today I didn't.

Because of a single personal message from a manager at Kwitch, the platform I streamed on. The email listed on my Kwitch account was, in practice, an address I never used. I'd only filled it in because making the account required one. Still, if they'd gone so far as to message me directly, it had to be something fairly important, so I decided to look. Maybe they'd sent something that mattered.

The inbox had more than three hundred messages piled up, most of them the result of clicking Agree to All whenever a terms box appeared. I sorted by newest and went looking for whatever Kwitch had sent.