Going Live
"Don't rush me, and don't butt in. I know this side of things a whole lot better than you do."
Dawn broke. The only disappointment was that the thing greeting me so cheerfully, first thing in the morning, was a stiff little chat window.
It's the model everybody recommended as the best mic for a beginner, so it ought to be fine. A few hundred dollars is hardly the bargain bin.
Sitting on the toilet, taking care of nature's business, I turned the broadcast over in my head. Even without the System Helper nagging, I'd already meant to go live today. I was in no position to do otherwise—I had to clear missions somehow and start stacking points. All the same, flipping the stream on blind the way I had yesterday was absolutely out of the question.
The first step matters, no matter what you're doing. I need some kind of preparation.
Somewhere along the way, personal broadcasting had become a phrase that no longer sounded strange. Which was to say this was no longer a blue ocean. It was a red one. Start sloppy, and I might get branded a flop from the very first stream.
A strength that's actually mine, something I can show on a broadcast... what do I even have?
I ran back through the streams I'd watched, one by one. Gaming broadcasts, to start. Singing and chat streams that lived off a good voice. Cam streams that lived off a dazzling face. Outdoor streams that ran from travel outward, each with its own angle, and on and on...
A gaming stream? With Legend of League skills that barely scraped Platinum I, what am I supposed to do with that... Maybe once I've got regulars. Not for a first broadcast. No impact. A nice voice and some singing? I can barely get used to myself as it is. Singing can freeze and die.
The options got crossed off one by one. With this face, a cam stream wouldn't just fail to land a fan-club signup—scraping together ten viewers would be a struggle. Outdoor streams were basically cam streams done outside, so those passed themselves over without my help.
My own edge. A selling point you won't find on any other female BJ... do I even have something like that?
Looking back over my life, there wasn't a single talent worth bragging about. An ordinary school career, college, the military, and then a job. That was the whole of it.
"Huh?"
It really had been ordinary. The life story most men in their twenties in this country had already lived through. But not anymore.
"I-it's not ordinary, is it?"
I wasn't a man in his twenties anymore. I was a woman in her twenties. Not twenty-eight, either. The years I'd spent in the army and at a job had been erased, leaving me twenty-four—not exactly a beauty, question mark very much included, but a woman in her early twenties all the same.
I wasn't the rarest prize in personal broadcasting, the fabled veteran high-school-girl-chan, and I was a touch older even than a veteran college girl. Still. This was a kind of special you would not easily find anywhere.
Let's build on this and squeeze out a few more ideas. Think up some funny episodes ahead of time and get them in order. If I use this as the base, tuck it just a little out of sight, and mix that story in...
"......"
The damned chat window killed the mood, but I kept my focus. This first broadcast would decide the future ahead of me. I was going to make it succeed. No matter what.
I spent the whole morning roughing out a scenario for the broadcast I meant to run today. I had my doubts about how much any of that prep would matter in a personal stream that moved in real time, but each small step of getting ready handed me a little more confidence and pulled my focus tighter, so the hours were more than worth it.
"Thank you! Take care!"
Around noon, with the sun high overhead, the microphone arrived without a hitch. The moment I sent the delivery driver off, I set the mic up and switched on a test broadcast. At the same time I logged into an alt account on my phone, got through the password I'd already set on the test stream, and landed safely inside.
"Ah—ah, oo, uh, ee!"
Checking, ahead of time, how a voice through the mic actually reached viewers was basic. I kept fiddling with the settings, chasing a sound that was even a little easier on the ear.
"Hello, MostlyClear! Today's my first broadcast. Please be kind to me!"
I pushed the energy up and lightly ran the stream through a handful of imagined situations. Songs are mandatory. It's a first broadcast—there's definitely going to be a lot of dead air. The background... yeah, it has to be that one. I need to bait people for real.
I threw myself into the prep until my head spun, and the time shot past. Before I knew it, five in the afternoon was right in front of me. I brushed a hand lightly over my hammering heart and, this time, clicked Start Broadcast without hesitating.
"Isabi said her stream starts at seven, so... nothing worth watching until then?"
Flow—the screen name of a kid who, under the excuse of preparing for the civil service exam, was living alone in a one-room in Noryangjin, that famous cram-school neighborhood—had, as usual today, come straight back to his room the moment academy let out and logged onto Shindaeryuk TV.
If I don't pass this year, they're telling me to go do the army first. Damn it...
He was the type who'd gone straight into civil-service studying after high school, and he'd already postponed enlistment once.
The army, the army, the damn army! I'm gonna lose my mind.
Among the exam crowd he was on the young side, so most of them were older brothers and sisters, and the majority had already served. Whenever army talk came up over a meal or some idle chatter, he was forced to shut his mouth. He hated it. So of course the stream baiting as hard as it could with military content was the one that caught Flow's eye.
"What is this, are you insane... hehe."
Even the standby screen, the one you could see without entering the broadcast, was enough to pull a laugh out of him. The background laid a salt-stung old barracks bare around a division insignia, grimy as a memory. His eyes drifted back to the stream title on their own.
Did they slap a concept on this half-assed? Or... trans? Discharged from the army and then got the surgery?
Without actually watching, all he could do was guess. Which only made the curiosity boil harder. Flow didn't hesitate. He entered the stream.
"Oh, we've got someone new. Pilseung! Welcome, Flow."
The moment he stepped in, a salute call with a properly sharp edge to it hit him, and the chat caught fire.
There were only about twenty viewers, but the chat's firepower was anything but ordinary. Which meant the broadcast was going well. The first thing Flow locked onto was BJ Hani's voice.
Huh? That's way too natural.
Anyone listening would have called it an ordinary woman's voice. A man's voice after surgery still carried some uncanny, awkward edge no matter how hard he worked it, but this one was so natural that if a hundred people heard it, all hundred would raise a hand for woman.
No way... someone who's just really good at modulating their voice?
There weren't many, but some people built a whole broadcast's content on impressions, or on being men who could mimic a woman's voice frighteningly well.
"Someone else already explained it nicely, but our division's salute call is Pilseung—to victory. Every so often the guys attached from other units would shout Chungseong, loyalty, and it would throw me, sure. That was back when I was a private, though."
swer
An—
swer
"I mean, obviously the K2. I'll have you know I'm someone who shot a perfect score at basic training and got to call my parents right then on the instructor's phone. Underestimate me and you're getting scolded."
"When I enlisted it was the old barracks, and partway through, once they started building the new ones, I lived in a container billet for a while. I mean... that's not what you wanted to know. Obviously I slept on a military mattress under a wool blanket. When summer got hot I'd sometimes use just the podan, the thin issue comforter."
Male viewers who weren't still waiting on their draft basically loved army talk to death, because it was a shared subject every one of them could step into, a common topic where nobody got left out. Stocks? Celebrities? Anime? Material only a certain crowd could follow might blaze up bright and still die back down in a moment. Army stories were different.
They bragged about the slave-leashes of their service years and launched into full speeches about just how brutal their time had been. And the one cast in the role of listening to all of it was, of all people, a woman. The kind of woman who could chat along happily right up until army talk or soccer talk came up, and then couldn't hide how bored she was. Here was that woman, listening to army stories, empathizing, and even rolling out fresh little episodes the viewers themselves could enjoy. Naturally, the broadcast had no choice but to catch fire.
"N-no way. The seniority tiger. The cat grew up big as a tiger and... hehe."
The cheerful mood caught fast, pulling in even viewers like Flow—interested in the military, but not people who actually knew it. When he'd come in there had been about twenty. He'd already thought that was a lot for a first broadcast that hadn't even turned a cam on. Somehow the number had climbed to fifty.
For a first broadcast, she talks well. And it's got sense, dropping a song in whenever the talk breaks or starts to drag.
Flow, who had never served, only learned from the other viewers' chat that the songs hitting his chest in that strange way were military marches. For something calling itself a first broadcast, the concept was prepared far too well! He hesitated a moment, then clicked the gift button and checked how many Water Balloons he had left. Water Balloons, the currency of Shindaeryuk TV, were nominally worth about ten cents apiece once you stripped away the fees and the tangle of taxes.
"Ah! Th-thank you so much for joining the fan club. I'll keep working hard on the broadcast. Please look after me."
Before he knew it, it was seven. An alert popped up saying the BJ he watched most faithfully had gone live.
Soothing a little regret, he moved the screen over to the broadcast he always watched. BJ Hani's stream had been fun, sure, but the one he already followed had all the history and affection built up over time...
Still, dropping in now and then when I've got time should be fine.
As a civil-service examinee, spare time was supposed to mean studying... but today, too, was slipping past just like this.