Nebula, in Real Life
To borrow my father's way of putting it, a high school student is old enough to answer, at least in some measure, for their own actions. Old enough, he said, to step out from under a parent's shade and find a way to live.
Of course he had opposed me fiercely when I announced I was going to be a pro gamer. That was only because I had tried to sign a contract on my own, without a word to the family. At the time he was convinced I had been taken in by sweet talk from someone at KZ, and it was only when the coach came in person and persuaded him that I had talent competitive enough for the pro scene that Father, after a long deliberation, finally gave his permission. Even then, only once he had gone over the contract line by line.
Kuuul...
Anyway. My point is this. Sleeping through class, the way this Han Seongun was doing right now with his face planted on the desk beside me, means accepting for yourself that your attitude marks are going to take a hit.
"Girl next to him — would you wake the one who's sleeping?"
"Heh heh. Worn out from the very first day, I see. Student beside him, wake him up, please."
So the nuisance spilled onto me, stuck in the next seat. Annoying, yes, but I decided to let it pass. I had spent my own middle-school days sprawled asleep at school from morning to night, and telling him the teachers kept making me wake him so he ought to just stop sleeping felt a little much besides.
In a few days they would stop caring anyway. Most teachers ran class by taking only the students they could take with them, and given time they would give up on him. Better to abandon a boy with no will of his own and look after the rest than to drag him along by force. That was the reality of a public high school.
Not that I was so different from Han Seongun. I kept half an eye on the teacher and worked my phone in secret. Looked at one way, they had quarantined the boy who slept from day one and the girl secretly on her phone in the very last row. Maybe that was even to the class's benefit.
I was watching him sleep at his ease and turning over old middle-school memories when the front door rattled open and the math teacher for third period came in.
"All right, all right. Everyone, take your seats."
He scanned the room for empty desks, and his eyes stopped on Han Seongun's.
"Haha. First day really does take it out of you, doesn't it?"
Caught, as always. Well — sprawled out that blatantly, of course he was caught. I wanted to get through school while dodging other people's attention as much as I could, so Han Seongun soaking up every nearby glance, and sitting right beside me, was actually quite welcome.
"You there, the girl. Wake the boy next to you, would you~"
Never mind. Cancel that. I want to be sitting as far from this guy as I can, and soon. They keep dumping every annoying job on me...
"Ugh, I'm starving."
"What's for lunch today?"
"How should I know? They haven't even handed out the menu."
Before I knew it, the clock had run out on fourth period. The bell rang, and the kids hurried down to the first-floor cafeteria. Most of the class emptied out until the room was quiet enough that not a single voice carried, leaving only me, Han Seongun, and a handful of others — most of them the ones who had come in earlier than I had, the so-called model-student crowd. Even at lunch they sat staring into workbooks spread across their desks. Careful not to disturb them, I eased a container out of my bag.
It was a cylindrical insulated lunch tin, something I had specially asked the housekeeper for so I could eat something other than the school meal. At first I had meant to eat cafeteria food. My tastes ran picky, but Seoyun High's lunches had a reputation for being good. The cafeteria, though, was a place where people packed in shoulder to shoulder, and I had accidentally drawn far too much attention at the entrance ceremony. For the time being, the housekeeper's lunch would do.
Today's menu was inari — fried tofu pouches of rice, cut small enough that even my little mouth could take one in a single bite.
"Mmm."
It was a simple lunch, and it had been made a good while ago, but the housekeeper's cooking was still something else. I was having a quietly happy meal, scrolling a community board with one hand and popping inari into my mouth with the other, when—
"Urgh..."
The zombie beside me — no, Han Seongun — woke up. He looked around, caught sight of the clock on the back wall, then shot to his feet and ran out of the classroom.
What was that about? I checked the time on my phone. Twelve-forty. Twenty minutes left before lunch ended. He had probably gone to eat. He was my desk partner, but we weren't close; no need to worry past that. What actually had my attention was a post that had gone up on the boards.
Nebula.
Nebula was one of the famous amateur solo-queue warriors on the Project A scene, a dedicated Project A streamer now broadcasting on Kwitch. He was good enough to have touched Asia server rank 1, if only briefly, and — rumor, but persistent rumor — a prospect fielding love calls from more than one pro organization.
Solo-queue warriors were usually the type whose aim stood out. Nebula was the opposite. Back when I was a man, in the days I was KZ's Galaxy, I had run into him a few times in ranked, and he favored a distinctly smart style of play: skills dropped in exactly the right place to pull information, then that information used to read the opponent's next move. He enjoyed the mind game. If you asked whether his leading was good enough to stand beside pro-level IGLs, I would have to put a question mark on it. Even so, there was a running joke that if Nebula was on your team in competitive, you could empty your brain, do nothing but listen to him, and still be halfway to a win. In solo queue, his standing was not something you could dismiss.
Viewers were not exactly warm about Nebula entering the exhibition. Of course they weren't. As a streamer, he had never made it.
He used his mic only when the team needed a call, and otherwise he didn't talk at all — that quiet. And where other streamers put on flashy, reckless play, his in-game style stayed still. A pro coach, given equal skill, would take the latter over the former. Viewers want the flashier, more stimulating thing. So Nebula, for all that he carried the title of the best amateur alive, held an audience that was frankly shabby.
From where those viewers sat, every streamer they had actually wanted had declared they weren't coming, and some hundred-viewer nobody they had never heard of was showing up in their place. They could hardly look at it as anything but a downgrade. Even the Project A fans who knew Nebula well weren't expecting much. A player who had never once experienced a team game, they figured, would not show his real level at the exhibition.
I didn't think so.
"One thing's for sure. You don't know until you see it."
Join the Platform Exhibition, or don't. The weight that had been tipping back and forth in my head had just come down on one side.
"I'm home."
"Eunha, you're back? Was lunch all right?"
"Yes. It was really good."
School let out after sixth period. I had spent nearly six hours staring into space, so I wasn't particularly tired — less tired, at any rate, than Han Seongun, who had slept through all six of them. Driver Kwon had kindly agreed to wait in the car, as I'd asked, and I was able to start home drawing less attention than yesterday.
I changed out of the uniform, washed my face, and put on the frilled pajama dress I liked to sleep in. Then I pressed the power button on the tower.
"Oh. Right."
Before that, I ought to send an email.
I put on music the way I always did, warmed up, then switched the mic on and greeted the chat in a bright voice.
"Ah— ah. Hello, everyone~"
On stream my voice sat quite a bit higher than usual. My ordinary voice could be uncomfortable to listen to — cold and sharp, like Father's, or my older brother's.
A good share of my viewers wanted just chatting, so I had meant to split the stream evenly between Project A and talk. I changed my mind.
"I was going to climb slowly, but I changed my mind."
The Platform Exhibition was at the end of March. I intended to hit Chaser by the middle of the month at the latest.
Kwitch, written off because every starter had dropped out — and a rookie streamer who shows up at the moment of crisis and carries them to a title.
This is a full-blown blowup waiting to happen, isn't it?