Waiting for the Fire to Die Down
After wrapping up Discord with the editor, I put in a request to register a community board on Trisch. My viewers had, for reasons I still didn't fully understand, piled onto Jump's board and turned it into a circus, and I needed a place of my own to talk to them. I could leave stream announcements there, too.
Approval didn't take nearly as long as I'd expected. I applied in the afternoon and the board was live by evening—a matter of hours. The admins must actually work for a living.
It was my board. I was set as the administrator. And yet the first post wasn't mine. First, second, third—none of them were. They'd timed the opening with supernatural precision, then set the whole thing ablaze. Felt like I'd tossed them a pile of kindling.
Couldn't they at least give me time to pin an announcement?
I'll admit what needs admitting. Somewhere along the way, I'd gotten a taste for ending the stream out of nowhere. Watching chat erupt over something that simple was a kind of pleasure. In a way, it was the most practical form of emotional domination I could actually pull off. One left-click of the mouse, and I could yank the heartstrings of hundreds of viewers.
That rush.
Not that I'd killed the stream for no reason other than their reactions. If I was being honest, Jump had said something that maybe didn't belong on a broadcast...
About eighty percent of it, though, had been ending the stream for the thrill.
But karma comes back around. Everyone knows that.
I'd gotten so hooked on lighting fires that I'd failed to notice my brand-new house was about to become a roaring campfire. If I'd so much as glanced at Jump's Trisch board, I should have seen this ending coming. Call it complacency—I never imagined a board I'd just created would burn like this.
I considered sweeping the posts with admin tools, then stopped. I'd brought this on myself. Poke it clumsily and it would only spread. The longer I watched, the more oddly fond of it I grew. If they were going this hard, it meant they were paying attention, didn't it? Once I framed it that way, even the spam didn't look so bad.
And it wasn't only trolls showing up. Once the fire died down, productive posts about my stream and Last of Quantum would start appearing, one after another. A quiet pride would bloom in my chest then, like spotting a tiny flower pushing up through asphalt.
My thoughts drifted toward streaming on their own. Before I knew it, the weight of going live had eased, little by little.
I liked the mood in chat. Leaving it alone and waiting for it to burn itself out really had been the right call.
Chat was packed now with talk about the newly opened Newtube channel and the Trisch board. How natural. How beautiful. A stream, after all, ought to be full of the streamer.
...Granted, a flaming chat was still, ultimately, about me. The toxic messages hadn't gone away, either. Still, they felt like they'd dropped off compared to before.
I didn't particularly care myself. But knowing my little sister might be watching... I couldn't just leave that stuff sitting there. Sometimes when I went live, she'd text me asking to hand over the mod tools.
Please. I wished she'd just not watch.
Give her admin and there would definitely be problems. She'd probably ban people the instant a message so much as rubbed her the wrong way. She was the last person I should hand power to. Especially on my stream.
"As some of you already know, Unknown Newtube and the Trisch board are now live. Please give them some love."
The FanTube clips had high view counts, so a fair number of people recognized them. I'd taken the videos the editor had posted and uploaded them as-is, so it was only natural.
Before long, chat had split like the Red Sea into two warring camps. Some said they were my videos anyway, so who cared. Others said you couldn't just take someone else's edited work and reupload it.
They say watching a fight is the most entertaining thing there is. But if the place on fire is your own house, you put it out. You don't sit and watch.
"Just so everyone's clear, I hired the person who ran the FanTube as my editor. And I got permission for every video I uploaded."
Come to think of it, I wasn't sure whether the editor was even watching. Asking for mod privileges suggested they meant to keep up with the stream, but with footage that needed editing right now, I doubted they had the time. As long as I got the edited videos on schedule, it wasn't really my problem.
"Today's content—I'm going to work through the mission that got queued last time."
Wondering just what kind of image I had in my viewers' heads, I logged into Last of Quantum. True to its nickname as the smallest pistol in the world, the Kolibri was tiny. Maybe that was why it was so cheap in the shop.
If it had been expensive, I could have used the price as an excuse to skip it. A gun you couldn't even get in real life—one that should have gone for whatever the seller asked—was selling in-game for less than the shield I'd bought last time. Then again, games tended to value performance over rarity.
While I waited for a match, I equipped the Kolibri at the LOT Training Grounds. It was even smaller than I'd imagined. So small I could barely hold it, let alone fire. I could just about pinch the grip and trigger between my fingers to get a shot off.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The test shots produced a sound too pathetic to even call a gunshot. I genuinely wondered whether you could actually kill a person with this thing. The power felt like you could dump every round into a weak point like the eye and they still wouldn't drop.
And the problems didn't stop at shooting. Proper aiming was already impossible, and the real nightmare was reloading. Magazine and rounds alike were so tiny that swapping an empty mag was a whole ordeal. It was this hard standing still. Thinking about reloading in actual combat... my head already hurt.
"This might take longer than I thought."
A single line packed with implication: the mission was way harder than expected. It might take a long time. Doing the same thing over and over on stream wouldn't be fun, would it? And with a weapon like this, there was no guarantee I could go on a rampage the way I used to.
I'd said it hoping for a little mercy.
Why were the viewers even happier about this?
If they were going to play it that way, I had methods of my own. Meet malice with malice, loopholes with loopholes. They'd snuck this mission in on their own in the first place. I just had to complete it my own way.
Fifty-five kills. Looked like a lot at a glance, but it really wasn't. Considering I dropped around twenty a game, that was a number I could hit in about three matches.
The weapon being what it was, actually killing people with it would be a struggle. But what mattered in the end was which weapon you finished them with. Putting a Kolibri round into an enemy one hit from death still counted as a Kolibri kill.
I could already see the viewers screaming that that didn't count.
So what.
Shouldn't have donated, then. Who told them to sneak it in? Nobody held a knife to their throats. It was their own choice. They should have seen something like this coming.
Life never goes the way you expect.
I wanted to smash their fantasy of a long stream into pieces.