After the stream ends, Caro starts working on the typos left behind by the infernal typing pace of the stream's final minutes. Sitting at around 47,000 words, she realizes that typos scaled with her writing speed.

She starts to question herself before going to sleep. Is 100%ing NaNo worth the typos? Is it worth wearing my wrists down? What kind of reward awaits me at the end of the road? But knowing that wrist pain could hurt her sleep, she applies some Bengay as she fixes some typos in her manuscript.

Once she falls asleep, it seems like her sleep is disturbed by ghosts of people who supported her at various steps of the way, when she was so close to winning NaNo:

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Here, unlike previous nightmares Caro endured over NaNo, she found herself in a harem not unlike the one in Legnica's book. In the Abkhazia Eyalet of all places. The sanjak-bey, the male lead of Legnica's book, approached the section of the palace dedicated to his harem. Only, in this nightmare, they all wore Turkish clothes that were revealing.

"What did I get myself into?" Legnica cried in the presence of the other ladies in the harem. "Why did I pick Abkhazia as a setting?"

"It seemed that, for a while now, the sanjak-bey was trying to play us against one another!" Glitter warned the other ladies. "I warned him that it the harem would cease to function it he didn't clean up his act!"

"Crisse! Why are we even in Abkhazia to begin with?" a distraught, oneiric Marie-France asked the other five ladies trapped in there.

"It seems like we are trapped in a bad harem romance!" Duri deadpanned the other five.

"How are we to get out of this bad harem romance?" Lagado whined.

"I have an idea: we're going to be the sanjak-bey's waitresses, then we're going to serve his guests some special drinks, courtesy of House Bagration! When the guests have drunk enough of these... special drinks, the sanjak-bey, or the beylerbey, will banish us from the harem!"

"Caro, this plan sounds far too much like the Trojan Horse, which the Greeks could deploy only because the Hittites were powerless by this point of the Trojan War!" Legnica pointed out.

"Come again?" Glitter gasped. "The Trojans were Hittites?"

"How will you ensure that the drinks, entrusted to us by House Bagration, will not kill the guests? If any of the guests die, it won't be us being banished from the harem, or the sanjak, but decapitated or impaled, if we don't get to Tbilisi on the double!" Lagado exposed the consequences to them.

"I know just how much of these drinks to give for each guest for them to fall ill but not kill them outright" Caro then told the other five how much of these drinks to give to whom.

Whose idea was it anyway for me to even write a harem romance set in Abkhazia? I could have written about a Hittite aristocrat, who, to curry favor with the king, Suppiluliuma II, leads one of the Hittite attempts to relieve the siege of Troy, in a last-ditch attempt to save the kingdom from the Ahhiyawa, but my lack of experience in the military aspect of historical fiction made me not want to write that! Legnica's mind was spinning from all these considerations any story about a Hittite attempt to relieve the siege of Troy surfacing. About how clueless she really was about the Hittite military.

"Do you have any idea of the logistical nightmare it would represent to a failing Hittite kingdom to even attempt relieving the siege of Troy?" Caro questioned Legnica to distract the incoming guards.

"No?" Legnica rolled her eyes.

"By the time the Trojan War began, the Hittites were too weak at sea to fight the Greeks, so they were forced to go overland, and Troy was weeks away from Hittite lands!"

"Why are you going so hard at the whole 100% of NaNo schtick?" Lagado questioned her in turn.

"Caro, stop aiming for the 100% NaNo! This is an unhealthy pursuit!" Glitter implored her.

"Vous passez toutes du coq à l'âne! À quoi ça vous sert?" (You're all jumping from pillar to post! What purpose does that serve you?) Marie-France yelled at the other ladies, which caused Caro to awaken.

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Even as Caro still reels in from this nightmare in Abkhazia, her resolve to keep writing Player Masher hasn't wavered. However, she feels the need to recover her sleep since she knows that she can't write worth two beans the following day if she doesn't get sufficient sleep.

Speaking of the following day, Caro seems to be wondering what Gus would do with Emma during what precious little time they would have online, together, before game 1 of the playoffs, played on the road in Winnipeg.

Which makes her long for the couple to do something different from previous online dates. For this purpose, she goes around and research what is done then. Right now, I have unlocked 13/16 achievements. I will unlock the fourteenth achievement tomorrow, but this is no excuse to slack off today! Yet I used more Bengay than I have any right to, or at least more than I should, in this relentless pursuit of the 100%!

As she looks around on her own server, some of the newcomers who were drawn to her because of her writing journey, who mostly kept quiet in her chat when on air, she notices that a lot of them realized they weren't going to make it to the 50k words. Regardless of which server they are on. She DMs Capitolium about it.

Caroline: I am tempted to assume people's outside lives got in the way of writing 50k words

Capitolium: You understand it's not the only reason why loss of motivation occurs, right?

Caroline: I know, just because it's feasible for me doesn't mean it's feasible for others

Often, people who keep writing well past the point where they realize they can't make it to 50k words will instead turn their project into a novella, or a short story even, depending on how early they lost their motivation, and how far along they were. While Caro showed a remarkable ability to remain motivated, thick and thin, others might not, Capitolium takes a while to digest Caro's statement.

Capitolium: Your ability to remain motivated is nothing short of extraordinary

So while, on Friday night, she decided not to stream so that she can keep her energy towards writing, on Saturday morning, she goes to the grocery store to buy other stuff she plans on using on air to celebrate what she perceives as a certainty.

But that's quick for her: the ingredients to make poutine. Cheese curds, gravy, since the family still has frozen fries on hand. And she finalizes the online date chapter before she turns to the preparation of the poutine, and later on, play the game she streams.

"Welcome to tonight's stream, where, hopefully, we can hit the fifty thousand words mark. Because I am confident that I will hit it, I am eating poutine on air!"

I am just a few words away from it, I finished last night at 48,702, now that I finished the online date chapter, I am up to 49,990. But I don't want to update the word count on the system just as soon as I hit 50k: that would be a buzz kill, the streamer starts feeling a little nervous about whether she should update her word count immediately after hitting the milestone. She then shows the poutine as she had the bibimbap in an earlier stream.

"You mentioned poutine several times in your book, I found it hard to believe that a Latvian player would have readily eaten a Russian dish, much less his teammates with whom he ate it, none of which were Russian!" Sampoong is left wondering about the real origins of poutine.

"Yeah, you portrayed Latvia as a country that could somehow produce NHL players!" Glitter adds.

"I played against Latvia at the Pee-Wee Worlds, and Latvia does produce NHL players. Silovs, Merzlikins, Girgensons and Bluegers being the ones currently in the NHL. Also, Sampoong, poutine isn't a Russian dish! It's a Québécois one..." Caro's face turns red.

"Sampoong, it also seems like the only thing you know about Latvia outside of hockey is Latvia having tensions with Russia!" Marie-France borders on yelling at him in a Quebec accent. "Then again, I don't know much more than you about Latvia, they play basketball too, and, of course, Riga being its capital!"

For how little I heard about Latvian hockey culture, it seems like a lot of Latvian players dream of making the national team. If I make the Gunners lose to Winnipeg in a game 7, Gus will be on Latvia's top pair for sure, Caro starts thinking about how the hockey plot will change depending on how far Dallas goes in the playoffs.

The viewers watch, amused, the core viewers quarrelling about poutine, while Caro eats it on air. And interspersed with the bites of poutine are some additional words about game number 7; Gus apparently scored 1 goal and 2 assists in the first six games.

"It seems like you would have a better idea of how to write a character on your intellectual level. Or at least how your teenage self would have been. A beta reader on your Discord server told me that my FMC feels like her intelligence is fake. Her non-intellectual traits are done well, though" Capitolium asks for help.

"The core thing that people do wrong is just giving them markers without having them use their knowledge or skills consistently with someone at their stated levels. What I feel would work for me is showing their thought process. When you are as smart as even my teenage self was, you just don't think the same as a normal person" Caro tries to advise him.

Sometimes people are late bloomers, but I can kind of feel like Caro was a gifted girl not unlike the FMC. The kind of high achiever who can learn very quickly and seamlessly. Not always instantly, mind you. However, she feels a bit more patient than some other gifted people, Capitolium starts wondering how to integrate his FMC's thought processes in the writing without overshadowing her other traits.

But then, new viewers, participants in NaNo or its alternatives, are eagerly awaiting the update of the word count. Which is shrouded in mystery since Caro feels like any sprint would kill any anticipation, while, at the same time, starting the stream 10 words shy of the magical mark could potentially make the event anticlimactic.

"What do you mean, you don't think the same as a normal person?" Marie-France asks her coworker.

"There are times where I seem to think of multiple levels of implications, and multiple implications at once, as well as see assumptions others might miss, but I remain mostly logical about these" Caro answers while she feels her headaches take over.

Now I have a better idea of how Caro's mind works, I guess... Sampoong sighs, while he feels like Caro is well past the 50k word mark as she keeps writing the chapter about game 7.

But when the so-called game 7, played in Winnipeg, gets to overtime, Caro reprises her role as a voice actress as she reads the start of overtime being written, from the point of view of the play-by-play commentator working that game:

"Welcome back to Winnipeg, where this playoff series is on the line. A game seven going in overtime, what more could a hockey fan possibly ask for, other than a Stanley Cup Final going into overtime in a game seven?" Caro appears to sound more like color commentary, as opposed to primarily play-by-play in past game day passages. "Face-off won by Winnipeg..."

"You got over ten words in this passage, Caro!" Jacques points out to her.

"Tabarnak! I have no choice by now!" Caro, feeling her hand forced by reading the play-by-play commentary, now updates her word count into NaNo's system.

By doing so, her total word count is, as Sampoong suspected, well over 50,000, and her daily word count is in the mid-2000s. And she also shows the purple badge associated with the achievement.

And then comes the goodies, such as discount codes for word processing software designed specifically for creative writing, along with access to the winners' circle. A seal and a fillable certificate; the former for social media use, the latter she downloads for personal use.

"Even though I just got to the fifty-thousand-word threshold, I know the journey is not yet over. I updated my word count earlier than I would have liked, but there's nothing preventing me from writing more words, and updating multiple times per day" Caro harangues the audience while she isn't in her best mood because of Jacques forcing her hand into a premature word count update.

I have one more week to go, but I already have the offer sheet arc planned, good for about 4-5k words. However, 7 days at ca. 1700 words per day is almost 12k words, so I still have 7-8k words to write, since I want to save my wrists from excessively intense writing, Caro feels a little uneasy, even when she keeps writing the overtime period.

"And I henceforth donate five hundred dollars to her, as a second installment in the rewards I promised her for the challenge!" Capitolium announces on air.