Plans Have a Way of Falling Apart
Trisch had its permanent residents: the unemployed faithful who never logged off. People called them Trsu — the platform's resident ghosts.
Most of them still gravitated toward the streamers they already loved, but not every streamer ran a twenty-four-hour broadcast. Hopping from room to room and lurking was simply how the day got filled.
The user who went by Soft Tangerine was one of them.
His favorite hour was early morning, when the rest of the world was still asleep. Almost nobody went live then, and the ones who did were almost always Hakko — micro-streamers talking to empty rooms.
The nickname sounded cute. The hobby did not. Soft Tangerine liked to slip into those empty rooms and start trouble.
Not just any room, of course. He only targeted the green, clumsy streamers whose broadcasts were riddled with obvious holes. In his own mind, what he did was not trolling. It was feedback.
Someone else might have called it verbal abuse. To him, there was nothing strange about it at all. What was so wrong about pointing out the weak spots? Telling an inexperienced streamer what they were missing was how you opened a door for them to improve.
Green streamers froze when the situation shifted. They flailed. A well-timed piece of advice in a moment like that could be the difference between growing and dying on the vine.
Today, while he was hunting for prey, something snagged his eye.
Last of Quantum Newbie Unknown's First Live Broadcast
A man who took his "feedback" seriously had to know Last of Quantum. Soft Tangerine didn't just know the game — he played it well. Well enough to have climbed to Diamond, the bracket people called a wailing wall.
To a man like that, the word newbie was bait he could not ignore. A rookie streamer who was also a Last of Quantum newbie? The list of things he could "correct" would overflow. It looked delicious.
Last of Quantum newbies were rare these days, and here was a Hakko streaming to nobody at the crack of dawn. The important part was that last word: Hakko. Big-name streamers banned you the second a chat message rubbed them the wrong way. In a room where every single viewer mattered, that risk was almost zero.
What a juicy target.
Soft Tangerine clicked in without a second thought.
A streamer who'd just gone live usually made a fuss over even one viewer joining. He waited. And waited. Nothing. Had she not even noticed him?
It happened with first-timers. When you were looking at the world in first person and moving hard, the floating broadcast overlay was easy to miss. So he announced himself in chat.
Start polite. That was the trick. Come in swinging and they wouldn't listen even if you said something useful. He needed to look like a perfectly well-mannered regular if he wanted his feedback taken seriously.
He expected the streamer to light up at the first greeting. Instead — nothing again. On screen she just kept fighting, silent and focused.
The odd part was the loadout: a pistol and a single knife. That was it. Sure, you started broke and couldn't buy much, but the game still handed you default gear. Even the trash starter weapons had to be better than a sidearm and a blade.
While he was thinking that, the streamer charged.
The enemy was reloading, wide open — but the rush was still reckless. At that distance the reload would finish first. She was about to eat a full magazine.
Bang!
The other player finished reloading and opened up, spraying without mercy. Soft Tangerine waited for the screen to go black and white.
What he saw instead made his jaw drop.
The bullets slid past her. Once could have been luck. Luck that kept happening was not luck. She moved like she could read the rounds in the air, slipping each one with the smallest possible motion — then drove the knife into the exposed enemy's vital point without a flicker of hesitation.
For a second he thought he'd clicked into a ranker's stream by mistake. He checked the title again. Last of Quantum newbie. Still there.
What kind of newbie dodges bullets and kills people?
He typed again.
There was a little genuine feeling in it. And for a brand-new streamer, praise like that was impossible to ignore.
Her answer was a fountain of blood bursting from the throat of an enemy who'd been walking past, completely unguarded.
...Does this asshole even know chat exists?
Even as the thought crossed his mind, curiosity about the streamer called Unknown was already taking root. He pulled up a tracker site just in case. The account was brand new — a genuine newbie. The gameplay made that impossible to believe.
He was still wondering what the hell this person even was when the streamer spoke for the first time.
"Ah... I didn't realize a viewer had come in. Nice to meet you too."
The unexpected voice sent a shiver down Soft Tangerine's spine.
Last of Quantum's design meant female players were almost nonexistent. Not zero — but rare enough that you almost never saw one. Every so often a woman streamer would start the game without knowing what she was getting into. Watching those same streamers quit after a single session was practically an annual tradition.
And the voice he'd just heard...
It was quiet and soft, like someone whispering right against his ear. A high, clear tone, settled by a calm cadence into something almost uncomfortably soothing.
He'd known the character was female, but everything in the game could be customized. You couldn't judge gender from the avatar alone. The voice was different. Voice changers existed, sure. The voice he'd just heard was not something a filter could produce.
Maybe I've stumbled onto an uncut gem.
A little affection started to grow for this tiny streamer he'd found by accident. She might be a Hakko now, but she was going to be huge. Watching someone grow from zero viewers could be fun in its own way. And later, when the room filled up, being the very first viewer — the one everyone envied — wouldn't be so bad either.
He was still entertaining that little fantasy when a mysterious mob stormed the chat that had, until then, been his alone.
She had been his little streamer. How did these people even know to come here? And the way they typed, they already knew her.
Soft Tangerine felt, somehow, betrayed. Deep in his chest, the sleeping troll stirred and stretched.
We all live with dreams and plans. Then something sudden — or something accidental — renders the whole design useless.
We know the danger of living without a plan, the laziness of it, and yet life never actually goes according to plan. That is why the road ahead is always hard to see. The fact that the future is decided not by reason or will, but often by chance, feels genuinely absurd.
If that is how it works, what is the point of working hard, of mapping out a future at all?
According to my plan, nobody was supposed to show up. I had never told anyone I was streaming, and it was morning, when people were not watching. I was going to treat it as a short test broadcast and shut it down.
So what the hell happened?
Watching the viewer count jump toward a hundred in a single breath, I felt like I had become a clown. Viewers leave if you do not give them what they want — the same way a clown does tricks to make people laugh.
And the only thing I can show them is the game...