The Roster Reveal (Just Chatting)
It was Kwitch's own broadcast, so the room was mostly people there to cheer for Kwitch. A handful of trolls had still wandered in.
They didn't last. The moderator's hammer of justice — a ban — came down on them soon enough.
AFS and Kwitch viewers were old enemies. Put the two platforms in an open fight like this, and that bad blood only showed more.
"They're talking about us, right?"
"I think so," Nebula said.
"We're getting an absurd amount of attention before we've even started."
I can run a little heavy on self-consciousness, I'll admit that. Even so, the line was pointing straight at me and Nebula.
Mighty Pebble, Zzangdol. A Chaser-rank streamer who mainly played Controller agents, and one who had been broadcasting Project A steadily for a long time. Like Geonmo-oppa, he was a broadcaster who had blown up in the slipstream when Project A suddenly became a phenomenon — not a major corporation of a channel, but a respectable mid-sized company all the same.
Viewers knew him as a rarity in the scene: a streamer whose pool was Controllers.
"Is he good?"
"Mm... from what I remember, he wasn't bad."
Nebula was ruthless when he sized people up. If that was his review, it meant a decent teammate. A Controller — the one role every team absolutely needed — being his main was a real plus, especially when most Project A streamers lived on duelist agents to feed what their viewers wanted. We had a Controller more practiced than the other teams'. At Chaser you could cover most roles, but there was always a gap between your main and everything else.
"Whoa. His thirties..."
Oldboy. The oldest dedicated Project A streamer, a broadcaster with a gravelly gift of gab and painfully corny jokes, stuck with the nickname ahjussi. People said his aim didn't even reach the Chaser average, and that his reaction speed had slipped with age. He was the type who preferred to solve a game through teamwide ability combos — excellent utility, real game sense — rather than winning it on raw individual skill. If he were actually bad, he couldn't hold Chaser in the first place. That top rank was a seat only someone qualified could keep.
Pola?
Hmm. This time it was a name even I hadn't heard.
"Do you know him?"
"No. First time I'm hearing it too."
Reading the chat, he hadn't been on Project A for long. Getting picked for the Exhibition anyway meant he had real talent for it. People liked to say every FPS was the same FPS, but Project A sat a little apart from the games already out there.
"But doesn't that describe Nebula too?"
The streamer everyone was watching. The one people were waiting on. If anything, that line belonged to Nebula — the greatest prospect the game had ever called — more than it belonged to me.
Contrary to what I'd expected, Seongjunjwa put my name in his mouth, not Nebula's. I knew I was getting plenty of attention, plenty of expectation. I just hadn't thought it would outrun his.
The moment my name hit, the official channel's chat became pure pandemonium, plastering it across the screen as if the room had lost its mind.
Mm. This is a little embarrassing.
"...But what's with that character picture?"
Everyone else had their own profile photo up. Streamers who played on cam showed their faces. Streamers who didn't showed their characters.
"Isn't that your character?" Nebula asked.
I had never set a profile picture, so mine should have been the default. What was on the broadcast was a character I had never seen: long, straight black hair, black eyes, a white oversized hoodie, and a fashion sense that had simply forgotten the pants.
Ah. So that was it.
I hadn't opened my mail since I confirmed the Exhibition invitation, so I hadn't known. I definitely hadn't known I even had a fan cafe. I'd have to look later. Faceless, no-cam streamers — the so-called Durahans — usually put an original character out front and broadcast behind it. The strange part was that I still hadn't made one.
"It's pretty. Thank you, Cafe President."
I thanked the fan-cafe president who had gone so far as to pay for that expensive commission in a lazy streamer's place. I genuinely liked the character. My face wasn't public, and still the likeness was close enough to match me. Of course, unlike the bright little figure on screen, my actual face ran cold. On stream I worked to keep my voice as bright as I could, so a lively character like that probably suited me better anyway.
Only the last name on Kwitch's representative team was left.
Everyone already knew who that was.
Everything before it might as well have been a joke. The moment Nebula's name was spoken, chat surged upward in a flood and went completely berserk.
See? The one drawing the most eyes wasn't me. It was Nebula.
"Ah, this is pulling way too much aggro."
The attention pouring in seemed to sit a little heavy on him, and he bristled at it.
Anyway. What is that?
"But what's that character? Did you commission one too?"
Nebula hadn't shown his face yet either. If he debuted as a pro someday, he would have to. There was no need to do it now. On the broadcast, in place of a face he still hadn't revealed, his profile was a boy in a black hoodie.
"No. I drew it."
Strictly speaking he was a Durahan-type streamer too, so I'd assumed he'd at least paid someone. He drew that himself?
"You drew it? You can draw?"
"Yeah. I studied it for a bit, way back."
It was a step below the character the cafe president had commissioned for me, but the quality was still high enough that I'd taken it for outsourced work. And he'd drawn it himself.
"You unfairly perfect bastard."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
With every player announced, all that remained for Kwitch was the guest coach's name.
"Guest coach? There's a coach too?"
Nebula had come in halfway through, so he still didn't really know.
"I heard they brought in active pro IGLs as Exhibition coaches this time. A few of them are names I've heard."
The guest coaches already named for NPT and KKT were players in the domestic first division — players I had faced back when I was Galaxy on KZ. Maybe ours would be someone I knew as well. I didn't know who was coming out, but I hoped it would be someone I hadn't been close with. People from my past were genuinely hard to face. Even the collab with Geonmo-oppa had left me tense the whole time, afraid I'd slip. From my side we were somewhat close — had been close. From his side, he was meeting me for the first time.
"Huh?"
"Whoa... Spax? This is huge."
"I'm sorry — who the fuck?"
I had wanted someone I wasn't close to. The name Seongjunjwa called was my best friend — the one who, back then, had run toward the same dream with me.