Half-Cam Stream, and Cat Speech (Just Chatting)
The roulette had landed on a horror game, and to get myself out of it I opened negotiations with the winner.
What we settled on was one hour a day of half-cam—me, on camera, from the neck down—and Cat Speech, a penalty that stuck a nya on the end of every sentence.
It was supposed to be a punishment I served after the exhibition ended, but a sudden accident on day two had left me with an unplanned day off. Strike while the iron was hot, I figured, and just do it today.
"Then, um... should I turn it on?"
I could have stretched Just Chatting a little longer before I flipped the camera on. That, though, was a long way from what this many viewers wanted. Most of them had almost certainly come for the half-cam.
Streamers like me, the ones who never show their faces—the crowd calls us Durahans—hardly ever go on cam at all. A Durahan's cam room is content so bankable people call it a cheat code.
"O-okay... just a second. Let me breathe."
I'd shown my face plenty of times back in my pro days, so I wasn't really nervous...
Seeing a reaction that hot made me nervous anyway. Could I really live up to what all these people were expecting?
I was sick of being crushed under expectations I couldn't meet, and then getting torn apart for it. So I was afraid, too. If these people were disappointed in me, would I even be able to take it?
I felt the hand on my mouse shaking, and I turned the camera on. My eyes squeezed shut before I knew it. I counted three seconds in my head... and looked at chat.
The viewers' reaction was...
The reaction was...
Contrary to everything I'd been afraid of, the viewers were satisfied. I'd given them what they came for. Thank god. Thank god.
I let out a breath of relief and held a hand out toward the camera.
"You can see me all right? Hello."
The shake was gone from my voice. These people—the viewers—I had the feeling they were just going to like me for me. Not like when I was the pro they called Galaxy, and they only ever looked at me through the title of Korea's best Project A player. These people didn't need a single epithet. They were simply fans of the streamer Eunha. That's what it felt like.
"Starting the stream!"
I'd felt awful when I sat down. Now I felt like I could float clean off the ground.
Never mind. These people are not my fans.
If they were really my fans, there's no way they'd enjoy tormenting me. No. Absolutely not.
The mood that had bobbed up off the ground a second ago sank again all at once.
"H-hang on a second. I've got a segment I prepared. I'll start it then."
Woman or not, I had lived twenty-one years as a man...
...and they wanted me to act all cutesy in front of this many people. I needed a moment to brace—
—but their howling was too loud for bracing.
"O-okay, nya..."
Cat Speech being what it was, I had no choice but to drop the polite speech I'd been clinging to.
"The segment is, um..."
I really didn't want to do it, but Cat Speech only lands as a penalty if you talk a lot. Chatting with the viewers, or reading something, or reviewing something, looked like the profitable way to run it. As for just talking—I'm not exactly gifted at running my mouth, and the conversation on my stream mostly lives off whatever topics the viewers drag in. Reviewing something myself seemed better.
So the segment I'd prepared was this.
"We're touring my fan cafe!"
"...We're touring the fan cafe... nya."
Would it kill them to let one line slide. So picky.
Anyway, the bit I'd prepared was looking around the fan cafe. I'd originally thought of reading my article on Namuwiki, the big public wiki, but I'd only been streaming a few months, so there probably wasn't much there, and I scrapped the idea. Truthfully, I'd only learned the fan cafe existed fairly recently. The day the exhibition roster was announced, the god-handed artist who had drawn a 2D version of me I didn't even know about turned out to be the cafe's president. That evening I joined, got verified, and even walked away with mod privileges.
"Then I'll start the tour right away... no. Starting now, nya."
From the moment the cam came on, chat had been a parade of questions. With more than four thousand people watching, I couldn't answer every single one.
The second I tried to read one question, another climbed on top of it, and chat stacked itself into a mountain. I wanted to answer all of them, but...
...replying to donations was the best I could do.
"Oh, this?"
I was in the middle of the half-cam: sitting in the chair, everything from the neck down caught on camera.
I pinched the collar lightly near my neck as I answered. For the record, what I had on was the frilled pajama dress I often wear to sleep.
"It's something I wear at home a lot. I couldn't tell what I was supposed to put on, so I just wore this. I mean— wore this, nya."
A nightgown that, just as chat said, looked like something a princess out of a comic would wear. I can't tell you how shocked I was the first time I saw myself in it. I'm used to it now, but back then the self-loathing hit pretty hard.
"D-does it... suit me, nya?"
The reaction looked fine, but just in case, I asked them.
Thankfully, the response was kind. Whew. I don't know the first thing about women's clothes. If I picked an outfit myself and committed a fashion crime, I'd never hear the end of it.
Next time I streamed like this, maybe I should ask Mom to style me. She's spent half her life in the industry. She has to know her way around fashion.
Hmm. Not a bad idea.
Every one of those clothes in the closet must have been howling to be worn, and now, finally, they were going to see the light.
"All right. Starting the tour, nya."
I shrank the half-cam, which had filled the screen, down into the lower right and sent my monitor out instead.
A few of them poured out complaints the second the cam got small. Come on. I still have a segment to run.
"No, nya."
I did my best to ignore them and opened the fan cafe. The site was dressed up pretty nicely. Across the top was a drawing of me in the outfit of Jett, the agent I play most in Project A.
"The fan cafe president drew that one too, nya?"
On roster-announcement day, Kwitch had mailed me asking for an image to use as a profile, since I don't cam—but I never got around to checking it. So Kwitch used the 2D character the fan cafe president had drawn. After that, my character image was locked to that one: long straight black hair, black eyes, an oversized white hoodie.
There was apparently a fair amount of fan art of me on the cafe, too. Might as well look while I was here.