How Did You All Get In Here?
"How did you get in here?"
Deoen was a game that had amassed a massive fanbase of rankers, pros, and even celebrities.
Because it was a VR game, appearances and voices that felt even more real than reality itself became constant topics of conversation, and the famous names among them — the so-called "named" players — often appeared in commercials and on broadcast programs.
What was more, they weren't just simple celebrities; they possessed genuine skill that delighted the eyes like gladiators in an arena. Famous figures who could show off superb technique beyond mere variety-show entertainment. Even with only a short three-year history, it had been only natural for their status to skyrocket.
And then there were those who trailed after such people, collecting information. These so-called toxic paparazzi tracked every move of rankers and famous figures on a daily basis and posted it all to the community forums. Which village so-and-so visited today, which hunting ground they farmed monsters in, where they logged off. It was stalking, plain and simple — but it was rooted in fandom to a degree, and as long as they didn't approach directly and cause actual harm, the game company left them alone.
I'd only turned the stream on intending to keep it live for a brief moment. The title was suitably simple — I'd just written "Streaming Because I'm Bored," because, well, I was.
Word had it that streaming properly required all manner of setup, camera rigs, and the like, but Deoen came with a built-in streaming system. Working in partnership with Twiitch, it let you go live directly from inside the game with no external equipment whatsoever. And since the broadcast system was embedded in the capsule itself, there was virtually no lag and almost nothing to crash. What was more, the capsule I'd bought was the newest model on the market — a 3rd Generation unit designed around this very 'streaming' above convenience or looks.
"What do I even do with all of this?"
I had managed to turn it on, only to be greeted by a swarm of holographic windows. I'd briefly shared the chat window from Yena's stream once before, but that was just the chat — nothing else. Camera settings, special overlays, the whole constellation of features: I knew none of it. After a long bout of fiddling, I decided to start with the thing most familiar to me. The chat.
Nobody's typing yet, right?
It had been about twenty minutes since I went live, but I hadn't told Yena or anyone else, and I'd given no hint that I was Lily, either. I'd never watched many streams even back in the day, and I'd heard the scene was a red ocean so saturated with small-time streamers you'd trip over them with every step. With a carefree heart, I reached for the chat display — the window in the upper left marked ▶Chat. The instant I clicked it and it flipped to ▼Chat, an avalanche of messages came pouring down.
"...?"
The chat was far noisier than Yena's had ever been. The viewer count had to be much lower, and yet the chat was twice as loud. How many people were actually in here?
"How did you all get in here?"
"Ah, the sound? One moment."
I dug through the settings cluttering my field of view, found the window marked with the mic icon, cranked the volume from 1 up to 7, and checked the chat again.
"Can you hear me now?"
"Everyone, please calm down."
What a madhouse.
"All right, everyone's calm now, right?"
After roughly thirty minutes of back-and-forth, the settings were more or less complete. The chat was practically dying to walk me through every function I didn't understand, so I simply configured things roughly along the lines of their instructions — and at last my field of view looked clean.
"Can you see me all right?"
Then, using the most important setting of all — the camera — I positioned a small black circle so it looked at me, just like Yena's did. A compact window sat beside the chat in the upper left of the screen. On the broadcast feed going out through Twiitch, Lily — blue hair, pure-white holy maiden's robes, a beautiful face — gazed back at the screen.
"No, I just turned it on by myself. Like the title says — I was bored."
I raised my index finger toward the top of my view. Judging by the broadcast feed, the title was probably written right about there.
"Donations."
That ▶Donations window, piling up so fast it was practically catching fire, had been gnawing at my attention all along. The bell icon beside it had been trembling away without a moment's rest. I hesitated briefly over whether to turn it on, then grabbed the window pinned to the bottom of my view and shut it.
"I'll go through them after the stream."
I'd turned this thing on out of boredom, not to perform donation reactions. Well, they'd understand this much, surely? I was hardly a famous streamer like Yena — sure, I'd gotten fairly well known, but this was my first broadcast, so I doubted all that many people would wander in. A hundred, maybe two hundred at most?