The Negotiation Table (Just Chatting)
Probability is a cruel thing. No matter how high the odds, it will not raise its hand for the unlucky—and no matter how low, it will raise that hand for the lucky.
Just like now.
How... no, how could something that refused to come up through a solid hour of nonstop spins land on the very first try?
Ha... fine. I'll admit it. This time I was careless.
The day I first added a roulette to my stream, I left it running for a full hour, and not a single item at or above Call Me Oppa—a 5.1 percent shot—ever came up. So I assumed this time would be the same. Ten minutes, that was all. Nothing was going to happen.
And the price of that assumption... a horror game.
As a man—no, as a former man—I ought to take the result cleanly and—
"C-c-could you... c-could you really just let me off this once?"
Cleanly, my ass. I would rather die than play a horror game.
I could feel my hands shaking. Hands that had barely trembled even in the finals. Because—
"I-I'm telling you, h-horror games r-really scare me...!"
Because they scare the absolute shit out of me.
I hate horror games. No—I hate horror itself, the whole genre. Back in middle school, once finals were over and the classroom was just killing time until break, the kids put horror movies on all the time, and every time I laid my head on the desk and pretended to sleep.
Anyway. A person is this scared. Couldn't they let it go just once? I'd been sick, too. I'd even opened a roulette I never meant to open, because the odds needed adjusting.
The viewers did not take my side.
Don't even think about dodging it. You chose this. Faced with a chat that might as well have been saying exactly that—
"O... okay..."
In the end, all I could do was lower my head.
God, I really am scared...
"Uh... well..."
When I'd built the roulette and slotted in the Horror Game item, the rule I'd set was clear enough.
"It's supposed to be whatever horror game the viewer who wins it picks..."
I sent a private-chat request to our wretched viewer, the one who had actually managed to pull a horror game, but...
"...Anon?"
They didn't pick up.
They'd only just spun the roulette, and now—if this was how it was going—
"I think Anon's gone AFK?"
Wait. Could I... maybe slip out of this naturally?
Hmph. Say whatever you want. A horror game is still nothing but a roulette item.
"If Anon's AFK, then the horror game..."
Ownership belonged to the viewer who pulled the item. And if that viewer was AFK, there was nowhere, not one reason, for me to play a horror—
"Ah."
"Anon? Can we talk for a sec..."
Ah.
Nothing ever actually works out.
"....Yes."
No matter how I turned it over, a horror game was too scary and I hated it too much, so I asked the viewers to negotiate.
The chat turned ugly in a flash. Still—if I died of fright in the middle of a horror game, these people wouldn't be able to watch my stream either. So right now, this was for the viewers... wasn't it?
"N-no, that's not it! I'm not saying I just won't do it! I meant, what if we swapped the item for something else..."
Of course I had no intention of weaseling out like a cheat. I meant to hand them a prize every bit as big as the horror game.
Chat, which had been sprinting straight for the abyss, went quiet before I knew it. They were more interested now in whatever this other item of mine actually was.
"Yes! How about a half-cam stream instead of the horror game?"
The mood flipped to pure bliss in a second. Fair enough.
Back when I'd set that roulette, the viewers had wanted half-cam more than a horror game. The only reason the horror game's odds sat lower was that I hated the thought of doing it. A half-cam stream didn't particularly bother me anyway—it wasn't as if my face would be on it—and back in my pro-gamer days I'd streamed with my face out to begin with.
But the viewer who had pulled the horror game was more immovable than I'd thought.
"Ah."
No matter how much the rest of chat preferred half-cam, the owner of this item was still exactly one person: the viewer who had pulled it off the roulette.
If I couldn't persuade that one viewer, it meant I was stuck playing a horror game. No way out.
"Um... Anon? Private chat, one more time..."
"Ugh..."
I knew perfectly well how pathetic this was. But what was I supposed to do? I was scared! They'd understand if they were the one feeling it...
"Then—Anon...! Is there anything else on the roulette that pulls you more than the horror game?"
A viewer who wanted the horror game and would not bend. Was there really no way out of this?
No. It was too early to give up.
"Ugh... then—!"
This was where I decided to play my trump card.
"I'll throw in one more item from the roulette on top of the half-cam! How about that?"
The flat refusal had shifted. From the look of it, the trump card had landed at least partway—
"Eh."
Ugh... I didn't want that either.
A horror game against half-cam in Cat Speech. Half-cam alone wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest, but Cat Speech—sticking a nya on the end of every sentence—was another item I'd hoped would show up about as often as the horror game.
"Th... that's right. It's possible..."
But it was still far better than a horror game.
At last the negotiation landed, and the horror game was off the table. I still couldn't smile.
"Haa..."
Half-cam aegyo, just to dodge a single horror game. And not even ordinary aegyo—Cat Speech, a nya tacked onto the end of every line. It felt like I'd dodged a lion only to walk straight into a bear.
"Ten minutes are up, right? I'm ending the stream."
No.
This one thing, I was doing my way.
"Then I'll see you all next time. Eun-bye~"
I ignored the viewers begging me not to go and hit End Stream on the spot.
"Aigoo... what kind of fate is this..."
Blaming the blameless viewer who had pulled the horror game, I dove onto the bed the way I always did after ending a stream. Only today, with a little of the strength gone out of it.
Maybe it was everything that had happened across forty minutes of Just Chatting, or maybe it was the cold that still hadn't fully left me. Either way, my throat was drier than usual.
The tumbler of honey water I kept on the desk, for whenever I got thirsty, had run dry. I was on my way to the kitchen to fill it when—
"What's with you? Why the long face?"
I ran into Eunseo.
"Oh. Oppa."
I'd ended early, so it was only around six in the evening. Today was a weekend, though—gold to anyone with a job—so neither Eunseo nor Dad had gone in. Both of them were home.
Why the long face, he asked.
"It's... ugh, it's nothing..."
A horror-game penalty had landed on stream, and dodging it meant I was about to do aegyo in front of a few thousand people, and that was why I looked depressed. Ugh. Even I thought that was pretty embarrassing.
"Th-that aside, why are you so dressed up? You going out?"
I didn't want that humiliating story coming out of my own mouth, so I yanked the subject somewhere else.
"...The housekeeper didn't tell you anything?"
"Huh? About what?"
"Today's the family dinner out."
The housekeeper? She... hadn't said a word. Now that I thought about it, it was nearly time for dinner and she still hadn't called me. On a normal day she would have told me to get ready to eat. She must have forgotten—and since we were eating out, that also explained why she was nowhere in sight. She'd probably already clocked out for the day.
"Oh, right. Mom's coming today too. I heard she's flying back once the shoot wraps."
...Huh?
Mom was coming?
"For real?"