Joint Broadcast (2)
"……that I can't. Remember thiiiis!"
Ice-cold. A blade came flying out of nowhere and buried itself in my chest. I was afraid to even look at the chat—but if the broadcast was going to keep moving, I had to watch the viewers' reactions almost in real time. A careful glance, from the corner of my eye.
"Oh, come on, people are allowed to be bad at singing! You don't blacklist somebody for that!"
Mia put on a show of getting angry, trying to wrench the mood somewhere else. It was a losing fight.
Things hadn't been bad at first. A viewer had kicked the whole thing off with a song, and the second contestant had cut and spliced the three Miracle voices into a funny little skit video. The trouble started with the third. Some half-baked poseur, all cheap swagger and nothing underneath, decided he was going to do hip-hop and burned the atmosphere to the ground. And the bad luck didn't stop there. The fourth contestant, locking up at the sight of a chat gone feral, cracked wide open on the high note. Power through to the end and we might have spun it into a laugh—but their nerve snapped on the spot, and they pulled a runaway ninja straight out of the stream.
Total rock bottom.
If we were going to turn this around, it would take a heavy card. We decided to send in one of the guests. Of the three, who could actually step up and save the broadcast?
A short exchange settled it. Between Clemoomoo's hard push and Lac's agreement, Vintz would go in first. The feeling was that I—not even a month on air, still green—didn't have the depth to muscle through a mood this grim. The same went for Myamya, the all-around gaming streamer. She had a solid track record, but in a hole like this a gaming broadcaster was the wrong tool; someone in Bora's vein, or Vintz, whose stock-in-trade was outdoor streams, would land far better. It didn't much matter to me who went first. I just nodded along in silence.
"All right, viewers, let's settle down. I've got something killer ready for you."
What Vintz had prepared was a video, and the scale of it was no joke. Calling it the sound of the mountain, he cut quickly through a climb up Mount Bukhan and a yahoo! bellowed from the summit. Next, the sound of the sea: ocean waves under footage of him swimming the Han River. The sound of a challenge had him actually jumping off a bungee platform and treating us to a scream of incredible decibels, and the sound of a day beginning was a comic edit of him at Jeongdongjin, crouched on the shore in full melodramatic misery, waiting for the sun to come up. Last came the sound of the heart, a bonus reel in which an interview he'd done with Lac and Clemoomoo had been edited with open malice—and that one finally pulled a laugh out of the viewers. A subtitle tacked on at the end noted that Mia had been left out, on account of he didn't want to get sued.
The mood turned pleasant. Whether or not he'd spent real money on it, the scale was big and the edit was clean, and it was a pleasure to watch the whole way through. The viewers were, by and large, satisfied. An atmosphere that had looked ready to flip the table at any second finally settled.
But it's weak. A regular viewer would've gotten a round of applause for this. He's a BJ with some name to him—you can see the effort, and it still isn't anything to gasp over.
Miracle's scores said the same. Mia allowed that it had been decently nice to watch. Lac praised the planning and the passion it took to pull every bit of it off inside a single week. And Clemoomoo, deciding the mood had been patched up at least a little, even clapped and handed over bonus points on top. Vintz walked away with 256 out of 300, and all he could do was step down consoling himself that, for the moment, it still left him in first.
"All right, next contestant—oh! A viewer from our own room. Now I'm really looking forward to this. I trust you'll show us something splendid, worthy of my reputation."
Two viewer turns slipped past without much fuss, and then it was time for another of the guests.
"I-I'll go first!"
The last slot must have felt like a lot of weight. Myamya's hand shot up before anyone else could move.
What she'd prepared was a song paired with a video—and she'd been bold with the song, picking a track from a girl group once adored for its innocent, cute concept. The video she'd made in advance began to roll, and there inside it was Myamya, dancing with embarrassment written all over her face. The song started over that backdrop. Nerves put a slight tremble in her voice, but a shy attitude like that is exactly what gets to a man's heart. The viewers answered hot, and the judges' comments were kind. What she walked away with was a towering 276.
First place changed hands. Vintz, playful about it, protested that the judging was rigged, and the mood climbed higher still.
"Two viewer entries left, and then our guest, Hani. Everyone having a good time?"
"I told you from the start. Everyone else is way too good today, so I'm just gonna coast."
"I already gave you a bus ride in Legend of League. If you pull this in real life too, we've got a problem."
"……And where did you leave your conscience today?"
Mia's self-own rolled straight into chatter with the guests—a stretch of airtime for how everyone's broadcasts had been going, and what they hoped to do from here.
"Hani, you're heading down the gaming path too, right?"
"Mm. I've been playing a lot lately, so I can see why it comes off that way. But I want to leave the future pretty open."
"Wait, games aren't your main thing?"
"I can't say it with full confidence yet, but I've got a few things in the works. There's a lot I want to do besides games. When my turn comes around, I think you'll understand a little better."
"Oh…… is that confidence I'm hearing? Hahaha. Myamya, you might want to start sweating."
Clemoomoo tossed it off like a joke, but the truth was, I wanted first. Every Water Balloon I took in, I converted straight to points just to get by, and living expenses were still a worry. Win here, and the prize was five hundred thousand won—close to four hundred dollars. Far too much money to wave off.
Mia and Vintz kept bickering, and Lac stepped in to mediate between them. Once the air felt a little fresher, Clemoomoo rolled out a line and called the next viewer.
This time it was rap. Not the kind that had iced the room at the start, weird curses mixed through the bars—this was a popular, familiar track, and a few people in chat actually rode along with it.
The contestant after that sang. And this one could really sing. Lac puffed up with pride and bragged that the viewer was famous in his room, the sort who turned up without fail whenever there was singing content on. The score landed high enough to slot them into second, right behind Myamya.
As it stood: Myamya in first with 276, a contestant from Lac's room in second with 271, and Vintz in third with 256.
Now for the moment everyone had been waiting on. Clemoomoo tossed the viewers a line telling them to expect the world, and laid a grand swell of background music underneath.
Finally. My turn.
Nearly a week had passed since Mia first proposed it. I hadn't wasted a single second. All of it—heart, will, every last ounce—had gone into this one moment and nothing else.
Here we go.
First piece. I sent the cue through Discord, and the opening video, sequenced ahead of time and handed off to Clemoomoo, filled the dead center of the broadcast. At the same time a familiar song brushed past my ear, one nobody in their twenties or thirties could possibly fail to know: the main theme of Great Detective Gonan, the kind that swells up in your chest. Every eye and every ear locked on. And meanwhile, plain bewilderment spilled straight into the chat.
Right as the viewers' confusion hit its peak, the music in the video cut out. A sudden hush. The screen flickered in and out—and there he was, small-bodied Gonan.
And I opened my mouth.
"……!"
"Whoa! It's a perfect match."
"Shh, shh! It's not over yet."
Was it lip-sync? That's what they'd be wondering. The other BJs hadn't known what I was preparing any more than the viewers had, and the Discord chat shot upward in a rush of excitement and shock. The viewers were no different.
Time to lay all that confusion to rest.
"……!"
"This is huge! Actually huge!"
"A voice actor? You're a former voice actor?"
Even the other BJs, who ought to have known better than to talk over someone else's stage, couldn't hide their shock, and their voices climbed.
It wasn't a perfect hundred percent. A man's voice and a woman's are, unmistakably, different in tone. But I had matched that tone as closely as it could be matched, and copied the diction—and even the tiny habits—so completely that anyone who knew Great Detective Gonan had no choice but to be stunned.
And that wasn't the end.
At the height of the mood, the screen shifted once more. Against a dark background, a single cherry-blossom petal drifted slowly down. Where it touched the water, a blue ring opened, then another. A moment later, quiet music began to spread through the room.
"Th-this—don't tell me!"
"No way!"
A masterpiece every bit the equal of Great Detective Gonan—no. With the age group just above that one, it had been even bigger. And it wasn't only the girls who loved it. The boys had been too embarrassed to say so, but in secret, not one of them had ever missed it.
Quietly, I opened my mouth and sang the first line.
I can't meet you. I want to meet you—
and this feeling is so sad.
The chat went feral. Water Balloons of every color packed every inch of the screen except the center, where the video kept playing.
Calmly, I carried the lyric on, pressing at the inner child still living in everyone watching—the sweet memories of a time that had been happy, and could never be gone back to.
And in this moment, for every one of them, I shone. I had become the hero from a childhood memory, and the light was blinding.