I Do Plan to Pay It Back
It started without warning.
Ten o'clock on a weekday evening—the hour when people who'd finished their day's work drifted home one by one. The sweet rest that followed once the day's fatigue had been melted away. Work thrown aside, leisure begun: the hour the day died.
It was also, conversely, the hour when viewership on internet streams began to swell.
Unknown went live then.
She had always been a streamer who treated her schedule like a suggestion. Some nights she started at dawn, others in the evening; once in a while she even flipped the stream on in the morning. From the very first broadcast, it had been that way—as if she were simply announcing that this was who she was.
Plenty of viewers had complained, of course. Waiting on a stream that might or might not appear was exhausting in its own right.
And even when she did go live without warning, the stream rarely lasted. She'd announce a long session and then kill it on a whim. It happened all the time.
Viewer frustration had piled up as high as it could go.
In a way, the current state of the community board was Unknown's own karma. She didn't stream on a schedule. She didn't stream for long. For someone who'd drawn so much attention in so little time, she was astonishingly indifferent. She barely communicated with her audience, and the board she'd created might as well have been abandoned.
An empty house was more than enough to become a den for the worst of them.
Bizarre rumors, controversies that made no sense—they kept cropping up. Other fans stamped them out quickly enough, but shutting down every pointless firestorm in real time was, practically speaking, impossible.
Which left things as they were now. Everyone had apparently dropped the plot and started talking nonsense. Some people were analyzing how she'd built her "concept." Others were spouting the absurd claim that the person in Just Chatting and the person in-game were two different people. What was astonishing was that viewers piled on in agreement even on posts like that.
As the garbage piled up and the conversation drifted all the way back to the day Unknown had first gone live, a notice appeared.
A notice posted from an admin account that had never existed until now.
The board erupted at the sudden notice. It amounted to a declaration that someone was finally going to manage a board that had been, for all practical purposes, left to rot.
From the viewers' perspective, it was a good sign. Plenty of them had been sitting on a low-grade panic. Unknown was not, after all, a streamer with years of experience. If she decided she couldn't handle it, she could vanish overnight—and there would be no way to find her.
For people like that, word that the board was going to be managed was nothing short of welcome news. At the very least, it meant she wasn't giving up yet.
At last, there were signs that the circus of a board might actually get cleaned up. Viewers who regularly watched Unknown's streams started cheering. No more having to wade through meaningless garbage and off-topic rambling—life on the board was about to become livable.
They were still cheering at the controversy-bait posts vanishing one after another when another notice went up.
This one wasn't written from the admin account.
The timestamp was 10:42. Three minutes before she went live. Fast work, if nothing else.
A dark waiting screen. Not the space backdrop Unknown usually used for Just Chatting—just a plain black frame, the kind a person going live for the first time might leave untouched.
Chat was scrolling at a terrifying speed. Every time the live viewer count refreshed, the number exploded upward. Maybe someone had dropped the raid link in other communities; it was climbing faster than it ever did on a normal stream.
If Unknown noticed, she didn't show it. She'd just gone live, and she hadn't said a word.
A flash—and the dark background lit up all at once, dumping a familiar sight onto the broadcast. The one thing an Unknown stream was never without: the game screen of Last of Quantum.
She'd switched over at the LOT Training Grounds, by the look of it. Human-shaped targets stood in the distance. A counter ticking up at the bottom of the screen made it clear she already had a match queued.
"Ah—ah. Can you hear me?"
Regulars who'd piled in the instant she went live and newcomers flooding in after them packed the chat to bursting. Questions about what she was doing today mixed with the occasional copypasta stuffed full of pointless controversy, all of it putting the chat window into overdrive. It was already a riot—the feed hitching and freezing because it was moving too fast. A one-line message was barely readable.
That was when Unknown pulled out a gun she had never used on stream.
A long rifle with a telescopic sight mounted on top. A sniper rifle—a weapon built first and foremost to kill from range.
Considering that the only firearm she ever used was a pistol, the thing looked completely alien in her hands.
Chat roared even louder at the sniper's sudden appearance. Unknown paid it no mind, fiddling with a hologram floating at the edge of her vision. She was changing the stream title.
A bright little click. The streamer tapped the title field and moved straight to the virtual keyboard hanging in the air. The clatter of keys on the hologram came through the broadcast with perfect clarity.
Unknown: Sniping to Diamond
The typing stopped, and silence took its place—the overloaded chat window had briefly given up and frozen.
The reaction came a moment later.
To Diamond.
It was a common enough bit on internet streams: set a condition and keep going until you hit it. In Last of Quantum, plenty of people played with self-imposed penalties on their weapons or traits. They volunteered for suffering for the sake of the broadcast. Some of them even ran it as a no-end stream until the goal was met—eating, sleeping, all of it going out live. In a way, it might have been one of the best methods there was for building a bond with the audience.
Unknown had never declared a no-end stream, of course. But she was going to Diamond. That title alone was more than enough to set chat on fire.
One of Last of Quantum's massive events was closing in. LOT wasn't far off. There was no denying that a huge number of viewers wanted Unknown in it.
Realistically, though, most of them had already given up. There was a minimum cutoff for the tournament. Gifted as Unknown was, if she didn't hit that line, she couldn't enter. And since she'd never shown any particular interest in climbing the ranks, it was easy enough for viewers to conclude she had no intention of playing in LOT at all.
And then she'd gone and declared she was going to Diamond.
Fuel enough to put a flame back under kindling that had been a breath from going out.
Chat started scrolling so fast it looked ready to explode. At one point the window simply locked up, unable to process the volume of incoming messages.
Whether she didn't notice the chat had frozen, or noticed and simply didn't care, Unknown went on in that same indifferent voice, idly turning the brand-new sniper rifle over in her hands.
"I saw some posts recently claiming I can't shoot."
Most of the play she'd shown on stream had been close-range fights that leaned on raw Physical, so the controversy had probably grown out of that. Even if pistol shooting was hard, almost nobody was going to miss an enemy standing right in their face. The idea that she closed the distance while dodging bullets because she lacked confidence in her aim was a controversy so stupid it barely qualified as one. Someone had even wrapped up the equally ridiculous claim that this was why she almost never used an M16 and made it sound halfway plausible.
There was no need to bother with an excuse. If anything, laying out a defense would only give them more room to scream that she was being defensive because she had something to hide.
All she had to do was show them. With a sniper rifle you couldn't even use unless you could actually shoot. This is how you fire a gun.
"Oh, and for the record, I borrowed the money for this gun from Jump. I'm broke."
"When am I gonna pay him back? As long as I do it before I die, that's fine, right?"