Friend (Just Chatting)
"Late! You're laaate! Some grand entrance—what were you doing that took this long?"
A chime, and the latecomer popped in. If the meetup was set for two-thirty, that made him a full five minutes late.
"Ah, sorry, sorry. Something came up."
Thinking of the forty or fifty minutes I'd already spent talking to chat by myself because of him, I was still annoyed. Behold, I have arrived? Today I was going to give him a piece of my—
"I don't know if this counts as making it up to you, but I sent a gift card as a late fee. Dessert, from that place you like."
"Ahem. Well. People run late sometimes."
Now that I thought about it, for someone living with his days and nights flipped, two-thirty in the afternoon was prime sleeping time. Even granting that it was the weekend, I'd booked him in the middle of his sleep. So maybe I'd let fifty minutes slide. Absolutely not because of one gift card. No sir.
Lately the housekeeper had been refusing to buy me sweets no matter how I asked, scolding that I skipped meals and ate nothing but dessert.
If I used the excuse that a friend had given it to me, she couldn't very well say much.
"Trained? Please. A friend can be late to a meetup, so I forgave him with a heart as wide as the sea, and you all are being way too much. Isn't that right?"
"Right, right. Thanks for understanding, Eunha."
"Everyone, stop teasing. Nebula's here, so let's just watch the broadcast."
Mm. What happened, they ask.
"Nothing much. We just played together... and made small talk while we queued?"
Really, it hadn't been anything special.
Nebula, the one they call the greatest prospect of all time. His broadcasts never took off because his play was too static, and because he barely used his mic.
But there was a reason bigger than either of those, and it was the decisive one: he streamed in the dead of night.
Game broadcasts draw teenagers, college kids, or people just starting work. What they all share is that by around nine in the morning, every one of them has to be at school or at a job. Nebula went live around ten at night and signed off around seven in the morning—about the worst window imaginable if you actually wanted an audience.
Why he insisted on playing only at dawn, nobody knew. The most persuasive theory on offer was that Nebula was, in fact, a vampire.
That was also why I'd turned down his first duo request. Unlike him, I had school the next day.
After the nightmare of team luck pinning my win rate in the fifties, his invite had tasted nothing but sweet. Still, I'd promised Dad I would at least come away with a high school diploma, so my attendance had to be solid.
The housekeeper was the one who woke me, so I wasn't worried about absences or being late. Even so, there was nothing to gain from breaking a regular schedule.
But if it was a Friday?
I didn't have school on the weekend. Stay up gaming until dawn the night before and I still wouldn't need to get up early. No problem at all.
Early to bed and early to rise was a rule in our house, but I figured I could eat breakfast and take a nap. So, Fridays only, I decided to accept Nebula's duo request.
I went to school telling myself it would be a day no different from the one before, came home, washed up the moment I got in, changed clothes, rested a little, and went live.
Normally I would have jumped straight into Project A, but I was planning to grind it with Nebula from ten at night until dawn, so I opened on Just Chatting first.
Just Chatting from six until nine-thirty, and then, to start the collab for real, I dropped into a Discord channel.
A Discord full of Project A streamers—if you had any kind of name, you were probably invited. The so-called Proj Room.
Naturally Nebula, the greatest prospect in history, had an invite too. I grabbed a channel and started a call.
The line rang.
"Hello."
"Hello."
"Um... should we just start the game?"
"Yeah."
The only time we'd played together was yesterday's Ice Room. From my side it went back further than that, but we hadn't been close then either, so this—right now—was painfully awkward for both of us.
"Um... have you had dinner?"
"Ah, yeah. A little while ago."
I tried an icebreaker to fix the awkwardness. It was a wasted attempt.
In the end, without anything you could call a conversation, Nebula and I held an awkward silence until the game matched.
Friend. By the dictionary, someone you've stayed close to for a long time—a casual, familiar word for a person your own age, or younger.
And the way I thought of a friend was someone who made doing a thing together feel better than doing it alone.
Humans are social animals. A person doesn't exist as an independent unit; the human animal exists by endlessly tying itself to other people.
Because we get lonely on our own, whether the number is large or small, the bond deep or thin, people make friends and live inside those friendships.
If someone asked me how you make a friend, I'd answer like this: share a hobby with them.
Of course that's only one of countless ways to build a relationship, not a complete answer. But at least that was how I'd stacked my friendships as I lived.
Which is why, when friends talk, you so often hear, Wait, how did we even get close?
Share a hobby long enough and you look up one day and you're friends.
In elementary school I made friends playing games with kids I met at the PC bang. In middle school I joined the basketball team and made friends sweating alongside them.
In high school I made my closest friend while we looked toward the same dream. Advice from a life, in its way.
It was the same even now. Nebula and I were sharing the hobby called games, so in a sense this was the process of becoming friends.
"Eunha, can you push A main from here?"
"I can, but I might be a little late."
Once the match started, briefs and calls took the place of awkward small talk, and the air loosened a lot.
With the awkwardness eased, talking to each other felt easier, too.
"Whew. That was filthy just now."
"Facts. Thanks for the carry."
On top of that, we were dragging out hard-fought wins against team luck that felt personally cursed, so trust and fondness had nowhere to go but up.
"You're seventeen, right? Want to drop the formalities?"
"Sure. That's easier for me too."
We happened to both be seventeen, so we agreed to speak casually.
Of course I'd originally been twenty-one, but I was seventeen now. Hearing casual speech from a brat four years younger rubbed me the wrong way, but I decided to let it go.
"You asking if I have friends? No, I don't."
"Wait—you neither?"
Same age, same tastes. Nebula and I crept closer to something you could call friends.
"Mint chocolate? You actually know what's good, huh?"
"You like it too? Look at you, a person of taste."
From where I sat, a kid four years younger was friending me and talking down to me, which I didn't love all that mu—
"A gift card? Where'd this come from?"
"A girl I know. I'm not really into sweet stuff, though."
"Wow. Insufferable."
"I've got a few more. Want some?"
"Thank you, hyung."
I loved it. What's age between friends?
In truth, even back when I was a guy we hadn't been that close, and I wasn't the twenty-one-year-old man Choi Eunha anymore. I was the seventeen-year-old girl Choi Eunha, so Nebula becoming my friend and speaking casually wasn't all that strange.
Two weeks. Within those two weeks, Friday evenings and Saturday dawns—ten hours apiece, twenty hours in all.
No matter how cleanly our tastes and hobbies lined up, in only twenty hours Nebula and I had become each other's only friend.
"So how far into it are they?"
"Ah."
I'd drifted off into old thoughts in the middle of answering chat.
Today's stream plan was to relay the roster announcement for the platform exhibition Kwitch was running. This guy Nebula had shown up twenty-three minutes after the reveal started, so the NPT squad and the KKT squad were already fully introduced.
"NPT and KKT are done, but they haven't done Kwitch or AFS yet, so it's fine."
The two teams that actually mattered hadn't been announced, so it wasn't really a problem.
The Platform Exhibition—born to settle which of the four big platforms was the best—was a tournament with some history, around since the days when Legend of League ruled esports.
And from back when the event was still Legend of League all the way until it became Project A, every champion had been either AFS or Kwitch. They got lumped in with the four major platforms, but in practice the streaming world was completely owned by Kwitch and AFS, treated as the two great peaks.
In practice this exhibition was a fight between Kwitch and AFS. The rest might as well have been extras.
If you asked whether that meant you could take the NPT and KKT teams lightly—well, no. But still...