Where Are My Congratulations?

A moment ago Marchen had been in bed. Now, somehow, she was in the kitchen, spooning misutgaru—roasted multigrain powder—into a water jug and shaking it loose.

The scene had cut.

"This is my breakfast. Anyone who saw the birthday stream already knows, but unless it's a special occasion, breakfast for me is mostly misutgaru. ...Better to get something in you than skip the morning entirely just because you can't be bothered, right?"

Whatever the viewers had to say about it, the Marchen on screen stubbornly settled breakfast with misutgaru.

All right. Breakfast eaten—how, exactly, would Marchen begin her day?!

The answer ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was—!!!

"All right, breakfast's done, so now.... I'm going back to bed."

"I'm sure the people watching this right about now are already piling on about me getting up only to crawl straight back into bed. There is a reason I go back to bed."

Still resting a hand on the back of a dining chair, Marchen went on.

"They say sitting for a long time is really bad for you. I want to live a long life, so I lie down on purpose."

To be fair, the claim itself was factual. Search it and the same warning came up immediately.

Even so, anyone listening could hear an excuse. If sitting too long was bad for you, then the solution was simply not to sit too long—get up and stretch for a bit, then sit back down, or lie down just long enough to rest and return to the chair.

The very person making the claim could hardly have been unaware of that. Which was precisely why Marchen tacked on another excuse.

"And if you stay under gravity all the time, you can actually get shorter, right? There. That should be explanation enough for why I'm about to lie down, so I'm going to go do exactly that."

The added excuse, of course, had a persuasive power of zero.

At any rate, having stacked excuse upon excuse with great sincerity, Marchen went straight back to her room and collapsed into bed. Then she clamped the tablet into its mount.

"Even lying in bed I can plan content, sign off on videos, manage NewTube, run the fan cafe, and keep up my hobbies, you know? Technology advances, and the world really does get better."

Call it a relief, maybe. She did not, in fact, spend the entire vlog horizontal.

There she was practicing wotagei for the hundred-thousand-subscriber celebration stream; boiling ramen for lunch for the first time in ages; holding a remote Medongbu meeting; stretching; going live. Small, ordinary pieces of a day, and the video held them.

That she still spent a considerable amount of that day lying in bed was, of course, impossible to deny.

"It's about time I wrap this up."

With that, Marchen sat on the edge of the bed.

"Honestly, even while I was filming, I kept wondering if this was right. Is this actually fun? Will our viewers like it? Audiences have needs—can this really meet them?"

It was, without question, content that didn't suit the usual image of Marchen. Set beside what she showed on a normal stream, the vlog's mood was far too quiet.

Even so, she had decided to play the video on the eve of the hundred-thousand-subscriber celebration.

"But still.... Ah, I said this on stream once, a long time ago, didn't I? Has my body turned into something that just can't be satisfied anymore? It felt like the same kind of thought. Like, I have to keep from falling into a rut. So I used hitting a hundred thousand as the excuse to try something genuinely different."

That was exactly why.

"If the me from a year ago was streaming because I want to make Knight Rise a hit!—if that was the goal—then the me right now is streaming because I want to become a streamer who keeps developing and growing! That's the goal, isn't it! That's what I think! ...Not that I would ever lose sight of being an otaku game streamer. That original aim? Absolutely not?!"

Having said all of that, Marchen sat in silence for a moment, then scratched her head.

"...Yeah, I should tell them to edit this part out. It's way too cringe."

In that instant, every viewer understood the situation.

"One hundred thousand subscribers! Thank you in advance! I'll keep working hard!!"

The vlog ended, and the screen sank into black again.

This time, though, the viewers weren't left hanging. The camera came on at once.

And a good number of them failed, for a second, to recognize the person sitting in the chair.

Which was fair. The person in the chair had on a T-shirt printed with an anime character and a happi coat printed with an anime character, pixel-dot sunglasses, a headband of the sort sold at amusement parks, and no fewer than two promotional sashes draped over her shoulders.

For the record, that was what the sashes said.

It was a fashion crime of historic proportions, the kind that had never once appeared on Marchen's stream.

"Yes.... Hello.... This is HackBossMarchen, freshly assassinated by her editor."

And the perpetrator of that fashion crime introduced herself.

Under any other circumstances the viewers would have gone to town on Marchen for suffering that little act of editorial treason—but—

Faced with an outfit so catastrophic that a custom-ordered T-shirt paired with track shorts suddenly looked like an excellent combination, the viewers forgot the editor's assassination and everything else along with it.

Marchen, for her part, spoke as if she couldn't imagine what the problem was, face and voice equally calm.

"The concept of the stream right now is an eve party, right? And an eve party is still a festival, right? And festivals belong to the popular kids, right? So I tried on an outfit that really sells that festival-insider feeling. Well? Don't I look like a social butterfly who's about to have a great time?"

"Oh, right. I should make some money. One second."

With that, Marchen opened the donations she had kept shut. As if they had been waiting for nothing else, the viewers opened their wallets.

"...Huh? Where are my congratulations? Where are the donations like great wotagei show, loved the vlog—where are those?"

For a little while, the price of that brief stretch of radio silence was a collective beating, with the viewers' wallets leading the charge.

How long did the mobbing go on? The machine-gun donations were finally starting to taper off.

"...When I was a kid and saw that anime scene where somebody gets slapped with a brick of cash, I thought I wanted to get hit with money at least once. Getting hit with money isn't actually all that romantic either. ...Maybe because it wasn't literal bills?"

Pointedly ignoring the requests climbing the chat, Marchen got the broadcast properly underway.

"All right! So the content we're actually doing on stream until I hit a hundred thousand is, specifically—"