A Newtube Channel?
The instant I tried to sit up, a groan slipped out of me.
"Ah..."
My body didn't feel like mine. It was heavy, steeped in a dense, clinging fatigue. Even dragging myself out of the Connector, my arms and legs felt like they were made of lead.
...This body really never gets used to it.
Talking with the viewers had been fun. Streaming while I played had been fun, too. Putting a little extra flair into my movement just for the performance of it, acting with one eye on chat, then tossing lines back and forth once the reactions rolled in exactly as I'd expected—that was all surprisingly entertaining. Entertaining enough that I was starting to think I'd rather just turn on a stream than play games alone.
But I could feel my body hitting its limit. Not a vague sense of being tired, or of pushing myself too hard. A concrete, specific feeling: if I kept going like this, something was actually going to go wrong. Which meant that no matter how long I wanted to stream, I couldn't. If I'd stayed in Last of Quantum any longer, a forced disconnect wouldn't have surprised me in the least.
Playing Last of Quantum on stream meant there was too much to keep track of at once. I had to think about every word I said. My character looked exactly like me, so every movement was on display for the viewers—I had to watch all of it. Every time I went live, my little sister sent messages telling me to be careful with what I did and said, so I'd been keeping that in the back of my mind more than I wanted to admit. On top of that, dodging attacks and countering burned through a serious amount of focus. All of it piled up, one thing on another, and the end result was that this garbage body of mine got wrung out even harder.
"I'm... gonna stretch for a sec."
I said it into the mic like a one-way announcement. I wasn't planning to end the stream yet. Considering when I'd gone live, the runtime was ridiculously short. I'd already broken a promise a little, so I'd intended to go a bit longer today.
The chat that had been burning white-hot a second ago flipped on a dime at a single sentence from me, and a laugh puffed out of my chest. And here they were, after spamming Narak about me taking the mission money and running. Now they were worrying about my body?
Watching the messages keep stacking up at speed, I started to stretch. This kind of thing you wanted to shake out right away, or it came back to bite you. If you sat or lay down without loosening up just because you were tired, the fatigue settled into the body and stayed there.
Crack.
Pop.
I opened my upper body, reached my arms out, straightened my legs—nothing dramatic, just light stretching to work the stiffness loose. A clean, cooling relief ran through me, accompanied by a whole chorus of joint noise.
I'd started working out recently, trying to build up some stamina, but a body that hadn't been moving tended to complain even louder once you finally put it to work. My whole body felt locked up, even though I'd played less than usual. In the long run, though, it was something I was going to have to accept, so I just had to live with it.
"You guys should stretch too. Sit too long and you'll get tech neck."
I tossed the line in so the audio wouldn't go dead, keeping one eye on chat the whole time.
Even throwaway lines made chat climb at a clip. I glanced at the viewer count while I watched it roll. It had dropped since earlier; I was holding a little over a thousand now. That tracked. Most of them had come to watch Unknown in Last of Quantum, so of course the numbers were sliding. And the feed right now was a featureless space backdrop—bland even to my own eyes. No cam, either. Just a mic, and me tossing out a sentence every so often. From the viewers' side, it had to feel pretty stifling.
Crack.
Pop.
"Dinner... no, late-night snack recs, please. We're gonna talk while I eat."
I finished stretching in a rough sort of way and sat back down in the chair as I said it. My body felt noticeably better for it. If I left Last of Quantum here and ran a Just Chatting stream like this, I had a feeling I could stay live a lot longer than I'd expected.
"I'm not drinking. Last time I did a drinking stream, my little sister tore into me."
Watching chat climb, I opened the delivery app on my phone and started scanning the menus the viewers had thrown out. There were a lot more suggestions than I'd expected. Most of them were fried chicken, sure, but a few of the others were genuinely tempting.
Something easy on the stomach, though.
I was tired enough that I just wanted food that wouldn't fight me. Anything greasy or aggressive felt like it wouldn't go down. Then pho popped into my head. Unlike wheat noodles, rice noodles sat light; I figured I could actually digest them. Pho was the kind of thing that tasted decent no matter which shop you ordered from, and it was perfect for getting food here fast.
And just like that, the late-night menu was decided—with absolutely no relationship to chat.
"As per your requests, I'll be having pho."
Tonight's late-night snack: pho.
Once the menu was settled, actually placing the order didn't take long at all.
At the chime of the delivery-complete text, I stood up and leaned into the mic.
"Ah—food's here. I'll be right back."
I stepped away, grabbed the packaged pho waiting at the door, and came back to the computer.
Even with me gone, the viewers had kept talking among themselves and were doing just fine. A few of the messages were definitely irritating, but the whole scene was somehow funny, and comfortable. Maybe it would have been different if I were a small streamer, but whether it was luck or connections, I'd had a decent crowd from day one. Having that many people was convenient in itself. I didn't even have to talk much; it felt like the stream ran on the viewers. In a category like Just Chatting, I could just ride along—react to chat, and the time melted away.
"I'm back."
I'd barely sat down before the donation message landed.
"A Newtube channel? Uh. Hmm. I haven't really thought about it. Do you want me to make one?"
Up to now I'd only been thinking of myself as a Trisch streamer, so it wasn't a subject I'd given any real thought.
Newtube.
Honestly, the first thing that came to mind was money. Jump had donations, sure, but he'd said with his own mouth that the revenue he pulled from Newtube was substantial too. Everything I'd glimpsed on community boards and websites about Newtubers pointed the same way. The ones they called big corps—Newtubers with over a million subscribers—had serious influence just by existing. At that scale, you weren't really a Newtuber so much as a celebrity.
Streamers had some overlap with Newtubers, if you looked at it closely, but it still felt like they didn't quite reach Newtuber money. Then again, you could do both, so maybe they were the same kind of thing. Thinking of them as completely separate was probably the weird part.
And if I started Newtube, there would clearly be a lot of upsides—and not just the money. Watching other people's livestreams, it wasn't hard to find viewers saying they'd come over after seeing someone on Newtube.
Making a channel wasn't hard. I could go on Newtube right now, hit create, and it'd be done. I just wasn't sure this was the kind of thing I should decide that easily. Like chat was already pointing out, from editing to uploading there would be more than one or two things to worry about.
"Newtube, huh..."
A thought hit me out of nowhere: why was I sitting here thinking about this alone? There was someone who knew streaming inside and out, and who was basically in big-corp territory on Newtube besides.
I clicked straight over to Jump's stream on Trisch.