Pieces Of A Dream

Kim Minjeong has been in line for forty-seven minutes, and she’s absolutely going to throw up.

Not metaphorically. She can feel it, that sour twist under her ribs telling her this was a mistake. She should be home, under her comforter, watching Karina’s VODs on a second monitor while harvesting parsnips in Stardew Valley like a normal person. Instead, she’s here at GEEKcon 2026, packed into a convention hall with hundreds of sweaty nerds, wearing her faded Evangelion Unit-01 shirt and a black pleated skirt she bought just for today because Ning told her she looked cute in it over FaceTime. Her legs are uncovered, and she keeps fussing with the hem, dragging it down again and again as if it’s plotting to ride up the second she stops paying attention.

She's here for one reason. One single, solitary, earth-shattering reason.

Karina.

If you don’t know who Karina is, Minjeong genuinely can’t figure out what you’re even doing on the internet. Yu Jimin, known universally as Karina, is — and Minjeong will die on this hill with a sword in her hand — the greatest content creator of her generation. Streamer. Cosplayer. Professional beautiful person. She started on Twitch six years ago doing Genshin Impact and League of Legends streams with a facecam that made people forget the game entirely, and then the cosplay photos started dropping, and then the TikToks, and then the sponsorship deals, and then the world collectively lost its mind. Eight million followers on Instagram. Twelve million on TikTok. Her Dva cosplay crashed a hosting service. Her Makima cosplay was trending on Twitter — or X, whatever it's called now, Minjeong still calls it Twitter and she will until she dies — for three consecutive days. She once did a hot tub stream as a joke, a parody of the whole meta, and it got two million concurrent viewers because she wore a bikini top that was doing impossible levels of support containing her chest, and the internet simply could not handle it.

There is no dignity left in Minjeong when it comes to Karina’s face. None. She stares at the monitor through every live stream like she’s trying to burn the image of Karina into the back of her eyes, like she hasn’t already probably ruined her retinas doing exactly that. And it’s never just the face. It’s the black hair, smooth and flowing past her shoulders like something out of a shampoo ad, except real. The pale skin. The body Minjeong has studied on her phone so often she could draw it from memory.

She has, actually, more than once, in a sketchbook that stays hidden.

And Minjeong. Well... Minjeong is Minjeong.

She's twenty-five, 5′3″ on a generous day, built like a pencil with a pixie cut. Short black hair that she trims herself with kitchen scissors because salons make her nervous. Small hands, small shoulders, small chest. Small everything. She owns six Karina t-shirts, two Karina hoodies, a Karina mousepad, and a complete set of Logitech peripherals: the G Pro X headset, the G502 mouse, the G915 keyboard, all from Karina's limited edition collaboration line, white and pink with Karina's logo on them. Beautiful gear. Top-tier equipment. Minjeong uses them exclusively to play Stardew Valley and browse Reddit.

One thousand, five hundred and forty-seven dollars. That's the running total. Three hundred and eighty-four on merchandise. Two hundred and seventy-six on donations — bits, subs, superchats across platforms. The rest on the limited-edition Logitech drop. She could have bought a PS5. She could have bought three PS5s. She bought a keyboard with Karina's signature etched into the spacebar instead, and she doesn't regret a single cent.

With Minjeong, it’s honestly simple: she is deeply, spectacularly down for this woman. Online, everyone knows her as WinterWraith. Just Winter, to anyone who's been in the community long enough. She runs KarinaVault, the first fan account ever dedicated to Karina, started it when Karina had fewer than eight hundred followers, back when the streams were scuffed and the mic quality was terrible and Karina used to rage-quit ranked games on camera. Minjeong was there from the beginning. She's been there for every milestone, every viral moment, every thirst trap that melted the timeline. She makes edits and posts them on every platform. She quote-tweets Karina's selfies with comments like "ma'am this is a Wendy's please stop making me feel things" and "she could ruin my life and I would write her a thank you card." She has notifications turned on. All of them. Every platform.

And there was that time Minjeong asked Karina to wish her a happy birthday. Nothing big. Just a tweet. Just a quick “@WinterWraith happy birthday!” That was it. She sent it in during a livestream, dropped twenty dollars with the message, and Karina read it out loud, smiled, said “aw, happy birthday Winter!” and then actually tweeted it. A full tweet. Cake emoji and all. Minjeong cried. Full-on tears, alone in her apartment at 1 a.m., gripping her phone with both hands. She took a screenshot. It’s still her lock screen.

WinterWraith. That's the username across every platform — Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Tumblr, the fan Discord server she moderates. Everyone in Karina's community knows Winter. She's the archivist, the historian, the one who has clips organized by date and tagged by mood. A folkloric figure within Karina’s community. Winter runs the fan page. Winter makes the best edits. Winter is always in the chat. Winter has never, not once, shown her face.

Until today. Maybe.

She’s clutching a poster tube. Inside, a limited print from Karina’s Nier: Automata 2B shoot, still sealed, and in her other hand, a letter. Handwritten. Three pages. She rewrote it four times because her hands wouldn’t steady, and the last version still has a faint smudge on page two where the ink dragged under her palm. It says everything she can’t say out loud, because her voice tends to fail around pretty girls, and Karina is the prettiest girl she’s ever seen, so by the time Minjeong reaches the front, she’s expecting total shutdown.

She pulls out her phone. Opens Twitter. Her fingers are trembling slightly and she mistypes twice before she gets the tweet out.

@WinterWraith: im literally in line to meet karina right now. this is not a drill. i am shaking. if i don't tweet again in 30 minutes assume i have passed away and archive my account with honor

She hits send. Fourteen likes in the first minute, which is normal for her account. A reply from someone: THIS IS YOUR SHOT!!! Another one: omg don't die. She shoves her phone back in her skirt pocket, then immediately pulls it out again because the Discord notification sound just went off and her hands apparently operate independently from her brain now.

It's the group chat. The holy trinity. Three perpetually online women who found each other in Karina's fan server two years ago and have been inseparable since. The group chat is called "3 baddies (derogatory)" because Giselle named it during a manic episode at 4 AM and nobody's changed it.

catning: YOURE THERE????? RIGHT NOW?????

giginothadid: PICS OR IT DIDNT HAPPEN

WinterWraith: i can't take pics my hands are literally vibrating

WinterWraith: im going to spontaneously combust when I see her

WinterWraith: they're going to have to hose down what's left of me

catning: dramatic

giginothadid: winter you've been simping for this woman for six years. you're going to walk up there and you're going to be normal about it

WinterWraith:i have never been normal about anything in my entire life

giginothadid: fair point

catning: just breathe!! she's just a person!! a really hot person but still a person!!

WinterWraith: she is NOT just a person she is the sun and I am icarus

giginothadid: babe that story ends with icarus dying

WinterWraith: EXACTLY

She clicks her phone off, draws a steady breath. The line shuffles. Five ahead. Then four. Now she can see it: the booth at the far end, logo backdrop, harsh studio lights, a table dressed in black. A cameraman. A staffer with a tablet guiding people along. And the banner: Karina in Raiden Shogun, blown up to six feet of purple and gloss. Minjeong knows that image by heart, but at this scale it hits different.

And then she hears her. Not on a stream, not through her Logitech headset, not compressed through Twitch's audio codec. Her actual, physical, real-life laugh, carrying across the convention floor. Karina is talking to a fan at the table, and she laughs at something the guy says, and the sound is warm and full and Minjeong's knees actually go a little soft.

Three people ahead. Minjeong watches Karina interact with each fan. She's good at this. She signs things with a flourish, makes eye contact, smiles like she means it. She's wearing a fitted black top, sleeveless, just a hint of collarbone visible, and her hair is down, slightly wavy, like she curled the ends. Minimal makeup, but on a face like that, minimal is more than enough. Even at a distance, her figure hits hard. That top is trying, but Karina’s chest pushes back, too much to really contain. Narrow waist, then hips and thighs that make the whole silhouette feel unreal. Minjeong looks down, just to reset her eyes.

Two people. One person.

The line moves, the person in front steps off, and the woman with the tablet motions her forward. Minjeong’s legs move on autopilot, shaky and useless, and next thing she knows she’s right there, barely two feet away, and Karina glances up with a smile.

"Hi! Welcome," Karina says. "What's your name?"

"M—" she starts. Stops. Every single sentence she rehearsed in the shower, on the bus, in line for the past forty-seven minutes, all of it has evaporated from her brain like water on a hot skillet. As expected. "I'm— my name is— Min— Minjeong. Kim Minjeong."

Her brain just blanks at the worst moment, and it shows. Hiding inside the poster tube feels like the only option right now.

But Karina doesn't blink, doesn't smirk, doesn't give her any indication that she just witnessed the most pathetic introduction in human history. She just keeps smiling, warm and easy. "Minjeong! That's pretty. What did you bring for me?"

Minjeong places the poster tube on the table with hands that are absolutely not steady. "It's— the 2B print. From last year's drop. I—I got it during the pre-sale." She pulls the letter out of her skirt pocket, slightly crumpled now because she was gripping it so hard. "And this. It's, um. A letter. For you. You don't have to read it now or— or ever, honestly, it's just—"

"A letter?" Karina picks it up, turns it over in her hands. "Handwritten? Oh my god, that's so sweet. I'm definitely reading this." She sets it aside carefully, then reaches for the poster tube, sliding out the print. "I remember this shoot. The wig was a nightmare, it kept sliding off." She uncaps a silver marker. “Kim Minjeong, right?”

"Could you make it out to WinterWraith, i-instead? That's my, um." She swallows, nerves spiking. “I run your fan page. I made the first one. Like, the original fan page, back when you were still on Twitch, before you hit— before the cosplay stuff blew up. I've been running KarinaVault since you had, like, six thousand followers."

The marker halts mid-stroke in Karina’s hand. She raises her gaze. "Wait. Winter? WinterWraith Winter? The edit account? The creator of KarinaVault?!"

"Y-yeah. That's me."

Karina drops the marker, leans back, and looks at Minjeong like she’s just now registering who’s in front of her. "Oh my god. You're Winter? I've seen your posts for— You've been around forever. Your edits are insane, the one you did for my million follower milestone? I saved that. I literally sent it to my mom."

Minjeong might actually die. Right here. Right now. Cause of death: Karina sent her edit to her mom. "You— you sent it to your mom?"

“Yes! She loved it!” Karina pushes up from her chair, fully standing behind the table, and the height difference hits all at once. It’s only a few centimeters, but the boots Karina is wearing aren't helping, and Minjeong has to tilt her chin up at the most beautiful face she’s ever seen. Before her brain can catch up, Karina is already stepping around the table and pulling her into a hug.

A hug.