Redeebut Stream: Virtual Idol Nia! Nice to Meet You Once Again!
Lately, a single topic had been drawing eyes across the internet communities.
It concerned a virtual VTuber who had been active in the age before the Great War — Nia.
Some people claimed it was a staged spectacle meant to deliberately stir interest in a stagnant salvage industry.
Others insisted it was entirely plausible — something that could absolutely happen.
Still others dismissed it as nothing more than a personal stunt cooked up to grab attention, and cut it down with a sharp word.
But at this stage… no one could yet be certain which side held the clear answer.
After all, companies had pulled similar rumor-seeding product promotions before, and the IP of the original poster was estimated to run through Cyber World lines. Neither side's claims were so absurd that they could be dismissed out of hand.
Of course, anyone with little interest in pre–Great War culture drifted away from the topic quickly enough. VTubers, Cyber World — there were plenty of people who simply didn't care for any of it. So for a while, the whole thing remained nothing more than a minor debate flickering through a handful of communities.
But that was not the end of it. The small spark first kindled by an anonymous post was about to be fanned into a full blaze — something that would seize the attention of countless people across the internet.
What turned the spark into a wildfire was none other than Nia's official Olive account, declaring she would go live in three days.
The post had been written through Cyber World lines — same as the original poster — which made its credibility hard to ignore. Just like that, the existence known as Nia became a topic as scorching as a hot potato.
Would someone really tell a lie this easy to catch just to fool people for a little while…?
That line of public opinion surged to the forefront, and a fierce debate erupted between the "This is a scam" camp and the "No, this is real" camp. In the end, though, every heated argument could only arrive at a single conclusion.
They would have to wait until 20:00, three days from now — the moment Nia went live.
Until that instant truly arrived, no one could know whose words were right.
> Stream has been activated.
Olive.
It was the world's largest live-streaming platform, with a daily average of over a million users. Of course, the platform was strictly divided by language region, so the number any given viewer actually felt was smaller than that. Even so, traffic of that scale was more than enough to prove how magnetic personal broadcasting had become for the current generation.
And among the countless channels overflowing with every kind of viewer… one that had only just gone live today was already burning with a heat no newborn channel had any right to claim. The chat was on fire.
A decade of the Great War, followed by thirty years of humanity's blank age. That era — one modern people could only regard as a dark age — had been barrier enough to cleave the old civilization from the new. And so people yearned for the old civilization at humanity's peak, followed it with fervor, or hated it with equal intensity. There was no shortage of those who thought, If the previous generation hadn't gone and started a war, the world never would have ended up like this…
Which meant Nia's chat right now was chaos itself — pure, undiluted confusion. In mere minutes everything would be laid bare, and yet those three kinds of people were tangled together, each raising their voice with the conviction that only they were right.
But the moment Nia's stream feed shifted from a dull black to a sky-blue waiting screen, the atmosphere began to flip. People worn down by the excess of fighting started throwing stones at the heated ones, telling them to cool it. Most of the people who had come here were waiting for something to happen — and for them, the constant whining had finally become grating.
As if it had been waiting for the chat to settle, the screen went pure white — and a single book dropped into the center of the frame.
A thin, wide volume that called a picture book to mind. No hand touched it, and yet its pages began to turn, slowly, on their own.
Long, long ago, in the peaceful age before the Great War swept the entire world…
In a cyberspace woven from countless strands of electronic data, a certain adorable girl was born.
She was a pure Virtual Lifeform who knew nothing at all — Nia.
Having gained consciousness by chance, Nia wandered here and there like a curious child, exploring the world.
Sometimes she slipped into the computer of a boy who loved games with all his heart.
Sometimes she slipped into the phone of a girl practicing her songs with fierce devotion.
And sometimes she even snuck into the control computer of a space station.
After months of joyful wandering, Nia finally thought:
"I want to play with people!"
With the heart of an ordinary girl, Nia could no longer be satisfied merely watching people from one side.
And so, holding that strong will close, she began to work hard every single day for the sake of her future.
She designed her own clothes. She studied poses that would make her look pretty. She learned stories that would make people smile.
Perhaps it was the meeting of endless effort and the many talents she already possessed that made the flower bloom. At last, she became a proper virtual idol in her own right.
And that will — that heart of Nia's — slept deeply through the age of the Great War… until, at last, it could awaken again in the present day.
And so Nia asks the people who have waited for her all this time:
"Would you like to play with me, too?"
Flip.
With a flourish like pages folding shut, the screen went black again — a cold ending, as if to say the story stopped here. But this darkness was different from the one at the start of the stream. The screen brightened almost at once, and a new scene unfolded across it in sharp, vivid detail.
What appeared on screen was the full view of an ordinary room — empty of anyone. A bare chair, a bed, and nothing else. A bleak studio apartment. It was a space far too jarring to imagine as the home of the silver-haired beauty who had just appeared in the picture book.
A place that looked no different from reality — far too real to be virtual space. Some of the viewers, already convinced the whole "virtual" thing had been a lie, began typing sharp-edged messages. To them, an attention-seeker who lied was someone who had to be torn apart, and they felt a kind of mission in doing the tearing.
But those barbed, insult-laced messages didn't last long. Because through the speakers, an absurdly lovely voice suddenly reached their ears.
It was a voice so clear and pure it made the listener's eyes go round of their own accord — the kind of beautiful voice that, if there had been a contest for it, would have crushed every rival and taken first place without breaking a sweat. Even the viewers who had been hurling stones and calling it all a lie found their hands freezing for a moment under the force of that sound.
And before the shock had even finished settling, someone peeked their head out from the edge of the frame.
The figure who appeared on screen was a silver-haired girl so beautiful that — the blind excepted — every single person would have to admit it. Late teens, maybe. An unfinished, unripe quality still showed on her face, but that only sharpened the vivid, fruit-like vitality she carried. A girl so beautiful it felt unreal that she could be breathing in the real world at all. Most of the viewers could only sit there, stunned by the lethal charm she radiated.
"E-ahem."
Whether or not the silver-haired girl on screen knew what the viewers were feeling, she cleared her throat lightly and simply walked toward the bed the camera was pointed at. Then she climbed lightly onto it, fixed the lens with a serious stare, pointed a finger at the ceiling, and declared — as if making a proclamation to the world —
…A few seconds after her words ended, the chat fell into a brief, total silence.
Perhaps she herself knew exactly how embarrassing what she had just done was. Nia's face — porcelain-white a moment before — flushed a vivid red, as if a rose had bloomed across it.