Meeting the Maestro
For Curry, this preseason was a double-edged sword.
The massive item overhaul rolling out with the new season had handed him fresh content to work with — but that was temporary at best. Curry's real bread and butter had always been solo queue streams.
And in preseason, grinding solo queue for LP and rank barely meant anything. Everything was going to reset the moment the new season kicked off. All you really walked away with was a modest bump to your MMR.
The Item Lab content won't last long either.
No matter how seismic the patch was billed to be, obsessive Korean players would crack the optimal builds in no time, and the meta would calcify overnight.
I need something that can carry me through until the Platform War in December.
Item Lab alone — solo queue research on the new items — couldn't stretch across a full month. He needed at least one more content pillar to hold until the Platform War officially opened in December.
Sure, he could take a break. Go on a trip, even. But for a born workaholic like Curry, even a short rest was pure luxury.
After turning the problem over and over in his head, Curry logged onto Teu-ichi — the platform he streamed on — partly just to clear his mind. He often found content inspiration by browsing other people's streams, and today was no different.
He set the category to Leori, sorted by viewer count, and checked the stream sitting at the very top.
"Hmm?"
The broadcast at the head of the list snagged his attention. No title. No famous streamer name or account. And yet roughly eighty-six hundred people were watching it.
Given that it was morning, that number was nearly impossible. Curiosity pulled him in.
The first thing that caught his eye was a handcam — a woman's hands on screen. A woman playing Leori wasn't particularly unusual. What was unusual was the chat: no manager, no moderation bot, and yet the room was spotless.
Normally, with this many viewers and zero chat restrictions, the place would be a dumpster fire. Instead, every single person was carefully staying on the right side of the line.
The unfamiliar sight was so fascinating he watched for a while, and the question kept growing. How was this even possible?
Curiosity fully hooked, Curry sat through zxcv1234's stream. In less than an hour, he had the picture.
The streamer was the famous Mysterious Yone Master. The Yone Master known as Barcode was a woman. And above all — the voice that occasionally slipped through was devastatingly charming.
When he checked the Leori communities he hadn't visited in ages, the viewer count made instant sense. Every post was plastered with Barcode discourse. With that much heat, of course the numbers were high.
Curry read the most upvoted thread — Full Breakdown of the Nangin Geomgaek vs. Barcode Bet — and pieced together the whole story. And then an old, abandoned content idea floated back into his mind.
Meeting with the Master.
Invite a high-elo specialist of a specific champion, play together, and mine them for tips. He'd run it before and eventually shelved it — scheduling conflicts, people declining to appear, a dozen small reasons. But if he could book Nangin Geomgaek and Barcode, the two names currently dominating every Leori conversation…
This content could take flight all over again.
It's preseason, so if I frame it around the new item builds the masters have been theorycrafting…
An item patch that had effectively wiped the slate clean. Content where masters walked through the new builds they'd personally researched? With everyone already lost on what to buy, the timing couldn't be better.
But it still required booking people willing to appear on his stream.
She's live right now, so…
Nothing in this industry was more of a nuisance than interrupting someone else's broadcast. Curry decided to wait until she went offline — and in the meantime, he moved to recruit Nangin Geomgaek first.
Curry's sudden collab request. He didn't seem to have figured out my real identity, but it still wasn't a situation I particularly welcomed.
I couldn't tell whether he meant an in-person meetup or just a game collab. If it was the real-life kind, I planned to shut it down cold as I typed my reply.
"Hnn…"
I made a small sound at the urgency bleeding through Curry's messages. Meeting with the Master — I knew that series. The reception had been solid, but for one reason or another it was one of the projects he'd eventually dropped.
I weighed collabing with Curry against turning him down. Purely on the fun metric, doing the collab sounded more entertaining. What worried me was the risk of someone digging up the fact that I'd been NayeonQueen — the sniper who'd hunted Curry like a maniac.
While I was still turning it over, Curry's next message arrived, dripping with dejection. Just reading it, I could picture the exact face he was making — and I couldn't help smiling.
I'd already stepped into streaming once. There was no real reason I couldn't do it a second time.
I'd get to roast him completely legally, wouldn't I?
More than anything, this was a chance to mess with Curry not as a sniper, but as a streamer sitting across from him in a collab. Preseason sniping had been getting dull — his reactions had gone flat, and the fun had drained out of it. Just as I'd started feeling myself slide back toward that old, burned-out version of me, Curry dropped this entertaining little proposal in my lap.
I followed the Discord link Curry sent and joined the server. Not long after, a long message arrived from him with the full collab schedule laid out.
This is gonna be fun.
What I needed to prep was simple: Yone's new item builds, plus a handful of tips most people wouldn't know. Pre-collab preparation was basically nonexistent.
I went back to solo queue, already looking forward to the stream with Curry — and then a hotfix patch note on live servers snagged my attention.
A nerf to Guinsoo's Rageblade, which had been performing at an absurd level. The price went up by two hundred gold, and the bonus damage per critical strike chance dropped from forty-five to forty.
"A little awkward."
I bought Guinsoo's immediately and summoned practice dummies to hit them. Honestly, the damage nerf barely registered. Pure math said it was only a ten-point cut, so the lack of feel made sense — but the real hit was the price increase. To actually feel that, I'd need to run Guinsoo's in real games a few times.
Item price nerfs never made sense on paper. You had to live them in-game before the weight of the change settled in.
So I left practice mode and queued solo rank, researching the build tree I'd bring to the collab with Curry.
"Hmm… was the stream that bad?"
While waiting in queue, Nangin Geomgaek muttered to himself, staring at Barcode's Teu-ichi account — still offline, same as every other day.
He'd made that bet because he wanted to show Barcode how fun streaming could be, and he'd even won. But she — not he — had streamed for exactly one day per the terms of the bet, and then never turned the broadcast on again.
"Ahem. It was nothing. Just some stray thoughts…"
He quieted the chat's playful pushback with his usual serious tone and looked elsewhere. Even so, the question of why Barcode wouldn't stream kept filling his head.
Why was he like this? Because the player who'd beaten him turned out to be a woman?
He shook his head. Interest that shallow was absolutely not what this was.
When Barcode first used a woman's voice, he'd been startled. When she confirmed she was a woman, it had felt novel. Beyond that, no other feelings had stirred — none at all.
So why was he still hung up on why she wouldn't go live?
Is it a sense of responsibility?
Barcode had ended up revealing her gender because of streaming, and she'd started streaming because of the bet with him. What if, from her side, she'd wanted to keep her gender private — and the bet had forced her hand?
The curiosity finally seemed to resolve, only for guilt to rush into the empty space. He'd thrown out that bet without knowing any of the real context. Of course he felt bad.
He made a firm resolution to apologize to Barcode properly later — and then an alert popped up in the top-right corner of the Teu-ichi window he still had open. His mouth fell open.
"…It was all just me overthinking."
Nangin Geomgaek wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear. But this was important stream time — he had an audience to talk to. As if nothing had happened, he smoothly carried on with his broadcast.
News of the Curry–Barcode collab spread everywhere. The hype and anticipation pouring into Curry's stream rivaled — maybe even surpassed — the frenzy around Nangin Geomgaek and Barcode's first broadcasts.
Curry's stream was still on a waiting screen, and a serious crowd had already gathered. Ten thousand people before the thing had even properly started — at this rate, twenty thousand was a lock.
Watching it all, Curry forced the rising tension down as best he could and loosened up his voice. When everything was finally ready, he moved his mouse and cleared the waiting screen.
"Hello, everyone. Cu-hi, Cu-hi~"
Curry waved at the camera in greeting, then settled into his seat and rested both hands on the desk.
"As I announced ahead of time… today I've brought on the person who's been setting every community on fire!"
"Hey, hey, people. Are we really going to show our worst selves to someone who clearly comes from the light side of the internet? We need to act like gentlemen here!"
"If you spam, the stream gets paused. And if today's stream gets paused, your patience is officially in shambles, right?"
Having seized full control of the chat's mood and the room's goodwill, Curry moved his mouse again and said quietly:
"Well then — no more stalling!"
"Let's get her on the line right now."
A few rings cut through the stream's silence. Then came the distinctive click of a call connecting.
Curry delivered the line he'd prepared in advance. A small laugh came through, and then a woman's voice.
Alluring, threaded with laughter and something quietly sexy — a voice so captivating it felt like it could erase fatigue just by existing.
The moment it hit the stream, Curry's chat erupted into the most catastrophic meltdown in its history.