If Possible, Better to Seize Everything You Can
Anniversary.
The meaning behind that word was almost painfully straightforward. It was a day for celebrating something.
And celebrations, more often than not, fell into one of two broad categories.
The first was celebrating the passage of time.
A hundred days since something happened. A full year. Any milestone measured by a recurring cycle of days or months. You could think of the usual suspects: the anniversary of becoming a couple, a company's founding day, a birthday celebrating the simple fact of having been born.
The second was celebrating the achievement of a goal.
Unlike the first, this kind didn't come with any built-in periodicity. You only got to celebrate it in the single moment you actually reached the target. Passing a brutal exam. Landing a job. That sort of thing. No need to hit an exact date on the calendar — just a brief, one-day burst of congratulations, and that was that.
In my case… yeah. Hitting a hundred thousand subscribers would fit the bill.
"A hundred-thousand-subscriber celebration, and a Plus Streamer contract celebration. That should cover it."
In practice, those two were almost the same phrase said twice. Among people who streamed seriously on Olive, the number who hit a hundred thousand subscribers and then didn't apply for Plus Streamer status was vanishingly small. After grinding it out as a regular streamer and finally cracking six figures, the idea of not sailing out into a wider, more promising ocean was almost impossible to imagine.
"Done! What do you think, Noise? Kind of has a party-room vibe, right?"
I'd burned through a decent chunk of CP making balloons and packing them into every corner until the room felt properly full, then turned to Noise with the question.
She was leaning quietly against the wall with a comic book open in her hands. She glanced around once, tilted her head, and answered.
"…What's a party room?"
Ah. Starting from there, were we. I looked at Noise's thoroughly blank expression, a little grin tugging at my mouth, then shrugged lightly.
"I'll show you what it feels like later."
"Okay. Looking forward to it."
Someday I'd salvage a piece of media that actually contained the party room I was picturing. Once that happened, Noise would understand the expression just fine. And it didn't feel like that day was all that far off.
Is this enough decorating? In the heat of the moment I almost hung a disco ball from the ceiling, but that… might have been overkill.
I looked up at the banner stretched above the bed, right where the camera would catch it — 100K Subscriber Celebration & Plus Streamer Contract Celebration — and nodded to myself with quiet satisfaction. Once the rush of inspiration cooled and I looked at it again, balloons, glitter, and a banner felt like exactly the right amount for a stream.
A month ago, I never would have guessed it'd turn out like this.
Thinking about it again left me genuinely moved. Me — an independent streamer with a hundred thousand subscribers.
The world had changed, the platform had changed, but the weight of a hundred thousand subscribers still carried roughly the same meaning here. Put another way, it was a kind of certification: you were no longer a small-time streamer, no longer what people used to call a hakko.
If you say "that streamer is really fun and gets a lot of buzz," people don't quite feel it. But if you say "that streamer has a hundred thousand subscribers," they go, "oh, so they're actually someone with name recognition."
According to the Little Prince, adults loved numbers more than anything else. And Olive, for its part, funneled more traffic and more benefits toward accounts with higher subscriber counts, so the difference was real and measurable. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer — the higher your numbers, the more chances you got to push those numbers even higher. From the perspective of the regular streamers stuck down below, it was a thoroughly unfair system. Now that I was on this side of it, though, I couldn't have asked for anything better. Olive Corp, you're the best.
Not that my conscience is entirely clean about it.
Anyway. A hundred thousand subscribers.
Maybe it had been somewhat inevitable, given that I'd been freely scattering Ooparts — artifacts treated almost like gold in this world — without any real restrictions. But the part that made me genuinely happy wasn't just the number itself. It was that I'd reached a hundred thousand while carefully protecting the two things I'd been fretting over ever since I started streaming as Nia. And that this momentum felt solid enough to aim even higher. Those were the facts that left me feeling so thoroughly positive.
"Alright, then… hm? Got an email."
I was still smiling as I started prepping for the content scheduled a few hours out when a notification popped up at the bottom of the computer screen I'd left open. Not just any mail, either — a yellow company-flagged message that looked like it had come from someone on the corporate side.
Huh. It's from Visk. Something wrong with the contract I sent yesterday? …Doesn't seem like it. The Plus Streamer badge is sitting on my account just fine.
The sender's name was Visk — the woman who had recently introduced herself as the management team lead for the 21st District branch. The subject line alone told me nothing, so I had no choice but to click it open and actually read what was inside. Once I did, I finally understood why she'd written.
"…She wants to talk about the future direction of my streams?"
Did team leads usually get involved in the internal creative side of a broadcast like this?
I didn't really know how an internet streaming company operated, but a department head had to have plenty on her plate already. And she was reaching out to an independent streamer who had only just cracked a hundred thousand?
I had no idea. Honestly, there was no way I could properly understand it. I wasn't some seasoned industry insider — I was basically an amateur who'd borrowed Nia's name and started streaming for the first time. Knowing how any of this worked would have been the stranger outcome. Until recently, I'd just been a regular viewer.
…Well. At least it's not bad news for me. There were a few things I wanted advice on anyway.
From my perspective, this wasn't a problem. A management team lead who'd handled countless independent streamers was offering a direct consultation. That was pure upside — almost nothing about it could turn into a downside.
So I closed my eyes for a moment, as if carefully weighing the decision… and then decided to go along with her intention. I was curious, too. How exactly did someone on the company side see my streams?
I sent a reply agreeing to the talk, then dug up the same contact ID we'd used for the contract discussion before. A remark from that first conversation floated back into my head — since we couldn't meet in person, it would be better to handle work-related matters over video call. Whether she was trying to protect my roleplay as a Virtual Lifeform living inside the digital world, or something else entirely, I kept getting preferential treatment even in little details like this.
Of course, it wasn't a concept. I genuinely couldn't leave this place. Video call was the only option I had.
That aside — how did Visk actually see my streams?
I steeled myself so that nothing she said would rattle me, and waited for her reply.
And as if she'd been sitting there waiting for nothing but my answer, contact came through in a little over ten minutes. Reaching someone that fast… the twenty-second century really was something else. The thought drifted hazily through my head.
Phoenix. It wasn't just a phone app — it was an excellent messenger that supported high-quality real-time video calls as well. Outstanding call quality, almost no delay, and a security record that had never once allowed a successful hack. On the strength of those advantages, it had recently crushed its competitors and claimed the undisputed top spot in the industry.
It didn't even require a paid subscription. Free to use, with a full range of plans for anyone who wanted smoother, more advanced features. Casual users installed it, and so did countless companies that needed it for actual work.
"From a professional standpoint, it's a mess."
And on one of Phoenix's lines, a woman was delivering that ice-cold assessment to an absurdly beautiful girl on the other side of the screen.
"I honestly can't tell what concept you're supposed to be centering your streams around. And looking at your categories — you're mostly using ones so obscure and unfamiliar that new viewers barely have a chance to stick."
It was the kind of remark that could easily have been taken as pure venom. Pointing out someone's flaws so bluntly and dragging them into the open was a style of speech that naturally bred resentment in the listener.
And yet, remarkably, the girl listening to Visk's frank assessment still had a bright little smile sitting on her lips, as if she'd expected every word of it.
"To be honest, the fact that you've been pulling in several thousand concurrent viewers this whole time is less a miracle and more… a series of foolish decisions that kept holding you back. If you'd properly carved out a single clear path, your channel would have grown to at least twice its current size."
"I see."
"Haa…. You can't just leave it at 'I see.' Are you planning to keep streaming like this even after becoming a Plus Streamer?"
Silver hair like finely spun cotton candy. Violet eyes that shone like gemstones from every angle. The girl — Nia — looked at Visk, who seemed to be waiting for an answer, and replied without hesitation.
"Of course."
Faced with that confident answer, Visk's expression twisted into something troubled. She let out a sigh small enough that it wouldn't carry through the mic.
Why, exactly, were these two having this conversation?
To understand that properly, you had to rewind a few minutes — back to the moment Nia and Visk first began talking.