Chapter 45: An Unexpected Turn in the Q&A and a Surprise at the Bus Stop.

In South Korea, there’s a common joke that you shouldn’t trust the Korea Meteorological Administration’s weather forecasts.

There are even people who use the derogatory nickname “Liar Agency” for the weather service, implying that they are habitual liars since they never get the weather right.

However, the Meteorological Administration’s misreporting doesn’t stem from a lack of ability on the part of the people who work there.

Of course, if you dig deep enough, you can find one or two problems with the abilities of humans and computers.

But, in the end, the biggest reason why misreporting happens is that predicting the weather is just a f*cking difficult task to begin with.

Predicting how much interest a Q&A event will generate also falls into the category of phenomena that are just damn difficult to predict, like the weather.

Therefore, I shouldn’t have been shocked even if the number of comments written two days after the announcement was different from what I had expected.

I already knew to some extent that my predictions wouldn’t be perfectly accurate, so there was no reason to be surprised.

‘Hmm…?’

But, I was now receiving a shock from the sight of the comment section I had just witnessed, to the point where I felt momentarily dazed.

A mountain made of text was piled up in the comment section.

Of course, I hadn’t thought that the number of questions would be small to begin with.

The future where I wouldn’t be able to gather a sufficient number of questions to proceed with the content wasn’t in my predictions.

Yu Sieun was, first of all, a streamer whose average viewership played out in the four-digit range, and a YouTuber with 100,000 subscribers. And she was a rising star on Treech who had accomplished that in just a few months.

Considering that not much time had passed since Yu Sieun started broadcasting, there was even the characteristic that there were no stories that had been released [TL Note: poollyeo-it-da] at all.

On top of that, she was saying that she would use a suspicious editor as a guest, so I had predicted that there would be more interest than when a streamer of the same scale said they would be proceeding with a Q&A.

But, the mountain of comments was high enough to break through all those defenses of my predictions and send a shock through me.

If it was a mountain where healthy and fresh vegetation was growing, I would have applauded and liked it instead of being shocked, but what I was seeing now was a mountain where all sorts of bizarre lifeforms were growing among the green trees.

The proportion of comments that seemed to have been written with the mischievousness that only brats would have, rather than pure curiosity, was quite high.

‘Ah.’

On top of that, perhaps because it had caught the trend, hundreds of bot account comments that looked like advertisements for illegal sites, which were occupying the comment section, were spread out as well.

A messy mountain of comments, but with ad bots.

It was me, and no one else in this world, who had to manage the comment section that could be described with the sentences to that extent.

After scrolling down a few times and looking around the mountain of comments, I just closed the browser window and put Discord on the monitor, and started writing a message to send to Yu Sieun.

The original plan had been to have a broadcast where we would put the comment section of the announcement post as is and read and answer the questions in a small way, but now there was a need to change the method.

I had already modified the method of proceeding with and the content of the 100,000 subscriber commemorative Q&A content to match the situation through the reunion with Yu Sieun a few days ago.

The items decided in the reunion were as follows.

Ending the reception of questions through comments earlier than planned.

Having Yu Sieun pick out a few good questions or witty playful comments from among the comments that were there now, and proceeding with the broadcast with those.

Turning the announcement post comments to private, and writing an announcement that would tell people about the change in schedule.

The change in schedule here was a way to bring forward the progress of the content to an earlier point in time.

Since they were ending the solicitation of questions early, there was no need to drag out the period for a long time. As such, it wouldn’t be bad to proceed on the weekend, when there would be many viewers, since it was drawing in a lot of interest.

The schedule that had been brought forward in that way was this Sunday.

In other words, today.

Now that I had gotten out of bed, I could feel a premonition washing over my body that today would be a day where I would spend the day in a different way than usual.

Now that I think about it, not only today, but most of this week had been different from my usual life.

There had been quite a few days where I hadn’t edited videos because it overlapped with my break.

Above all, I was setting a record of going outside three times in a week. And in one of those cases, I even stayed out overnight.

If I thought about the fact that there was one person involved in all three of those experiences, I wondered if Yu Sieun was the one committing the crime of making me go out. If I followed the saying that the person who is always at the scene of the crime is the criminal, that is.

As the word ‘crime’ suggests, I had the thought that the current flow had something of a dangerous attribute.

It had the enjoyment and addictiveness that were the signs of a dangerous thing, after all.

‘…Is this going to be good?’

But I, who had come out of the bathroom now, naturally had one of the sets of clothes that Yu Sieun had picked out in my hand.

Whatever it is, you won’t have any regrets if you do it when the opportunity is given.

I didn’t want to create a situation where I regretted it, thinking ‘I should have seen them at least one more time back then’.

I was only worried that the pleasure threshold might be raised since I was seeing Yu Sieun too much in one week.

After getting all dressed up, I started inspecting my appearance using the phone camera.

It seemed I should buy at least a small mirror since I was checking my own appearance so much recently.

I also wondered if it would be good to add a few more items from the list that the internet had told me to do, even if I was too lazy to do anything else, to at least wash and apply.

If I recalled the memories of Yu Sieun smiling brightly and praising me for being pretty, it seemed that even girls naturally liked it when their friends were pretty.

No matter how much of a genius you are, if you trust in your talent and don’t put in the effort, you’re likely to go to ruin.

As such, I thought I should gradually put in more effort too.

So that I could hear that I was naturally pretty in everyday life, not only when I was wearing the clothes she had picked out.

After finishing the inspection, I grabbed my bag and opened the door.

After going outside, I put the address of Yu Sieun’s house that I had gotten yesterday into the public transit route search application.

If it was summer, I might have tried taking a taxi with the strength of the balance in my bank account, which had been swelling to an extent where it didn’t feel real recently, but Yu Sieun’s house was in a pretty good location to travel to by bus, so I wasn’t planning on splurging.

I sent Yu Sieun a message saying that I was now leaving and that I was planning to go by bus, so it would probably take about 20 minutes, then put the phone into my bag.

I had remembered the name of the stop I had to get off at.

I started listening carefully to the Announcement [TL Note: announcement] when about 10 minutes had passed after getting on the bus.

Fortunately, I was able to get off the bus without passing the stop or anything like that.

I took the phone that I had put into my bag again after getting off.

I didn’t know how to get from the stop where I was now to Yu Sieun’s house, so I had to look at my phone and move.

As I was checking the way with my phone, I realized that someone had tapped me on the shoulder right behind me.

All sorts of thoughts flashed through my head in an instant.

It was a more chilling feeling because it was a short time after I had confirmed once again the fact that there are all sorts of strange people in the world, which I had known from the start, through a part of the Q&A announcement post comment section.

Startled, I turned around, and what came into my eyes was Yu Sieun, not some crazy guy touching a woman he had never met before.

Looking just as surprised as I was.

“U-, Unni. You startled me…!”

“Sorry. You were looking at your phone with so much focus that… I didn’t think you’d be this surprised. Are you okay?”

Perhaps it was because my reaction had been more intense than she had thought, Yu Sieun apologized to me, looking quite flustered. She was keeping a little distance.

“But why are you out here? It’s a bus stop…?”

I threw one question at Yu Sieun for now. It was to ask why she wasn’t at home, but at the bus stop that was a few minutes away.

As if she had confirmed that I was alright, Yu Sieun came closer to me again and gave a simple answer to my question.

“I have to walk a little to get home from here, so I thought it would be nice to wait and go together, so I came out.”

“How did you know I was getting off here…?”

“Because I know the address of Eunsol’s house? And you said you were coming by bus… So there’s nowhere to get off but here, right? And I can roughly know the time too.”

Was it normal to remember what buses went where to begin with, or was I the weird one?

It was an amazing ability.