Even the Unfamiliar Can Become Ordinary Once You Adapt
There was a line in that world-famous novel, Demian.
The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world of the bird. Whoever would be born must destroy a world, and the god’s name is Abraxas, and so on and so forth…
But if you asked me personally, I never thought the egg surrounding the bird was some cumbersome cage it had to smash and escape. If anything, it felt closer to a sanctuary — a place that let the bird survive the most fragile stretch of its life unharmed.
Without the egg, there would be no protection, no nourishment. In the end, wasn’t the bird indebted to the egg from the very moment of its birth?
Of course, plenty of things in this world could crack an egg open, so it was only the barest minimum of protection. But even bare minimum was better than nothing.
…Looking back on it now, maybe I was lucky I never streamed as my real self from the start.
Like a fragile bird sheltered inside a thick shell, I had spent my early streams with my true self locked tightly away, wearing Nia’s mask the whole time. Looking at it one way, it was a foolish, stubborn thing to do — chaining my own arms and legs, building a heavy ceiling over my own head.
But thinking about it again now, that process might have been exactly what I needed.
Back then I was barely half a streamer — someone who’d almost never actually broadcast before.
Even now I wouldn’t claim my streaming experience ran all that deep… but the technical gap between the me who had just started and the me who had run dozens of streams was exponential. If I had to put a number on it, it was the difference between a green boy-soldier who didn’t even know how to swing a weapon and a seasoned fighter who at least knew how to kill.
Thanks to drafting scripts off all kinds of references and putting myself through real practice again and again, I had picked up data that actually mattered for running a stream: how much space to leave between sentences, how to dodge phrasing that would set people off, where to deliberately break the timing so the audience stayed hooked.
If I had tried to center a stream on my raw self without understanding any of that… I probably would have just disappointed people on freshness and fun.
So yeah — it was a stupid thing to do. But for me, it was also kind of necessary. That about covers it.
Even a coward’s way of thinking could be useful sometimes. A crooked tree still guards the ancestral mountain, as they say — even the little things you dismiss can turn out to help in the long run.
I muttered that faintly self-deprecating thought to myself, then turned my head without much purpose and looked at the monitor nearby.
Where my eyes landed, the stream had just ended and the chat had flipped over to emoticon-only mode. Whether they were still riding the afterglow of the guerrilla broadcast or not, the window was packed with suspicious people still dropping emotes.
I posted a single bright Nia emoticon waving goodbye — a gentle hint that the people still hanging around should go rest — then moved the mouse and opened the dashboard that showed the stream’s data.
All kinds of numbers from the stream I’d just closed floated up in the center of the screen, and the one that snagged my eye was the figure written off to one side: 10:07:31.
…I didn’t think I’d stream for ten hours. Maybe I’m actually cut out for this?
That number meant nearly ten hours had passed between the moment I hit Start and the moment I hit End. In other words, I had streamed continuously for a full ten hours today.
It was genuinely surprising. Until now, even my longest streams had stayed under four hours — and suddenly I’d more than doubled that record. One of the most vivid parts I still remembered was how, the longer the stream ran, the more people started asking in chat why I’d gone live without any notice.
It was way more fun than I expected. Once a week… no, maybe twice would be fine? Too many people at once gets stressful, so maybe keep doing it without announcements…
Of course, flipping a stream on with zero notice could leave a lot of viewers annoyed. But honestly, if more than ten thousand people were watching an improvised, content-free stream, that would be its own kind of pressure. The kind of pressure that makes you feel like you have to satisfy every last one of them.
By the time the ten-hour stream was wrapping up, word had apparently spread — peak concurrent viewers hit fifteen thousand. So it wasn’t just paranoid daydreaming about something that would never happen. …Right?
“Aaaah, I just want to stream without worrying about anything~ Ughgh… haaang…. nngh!”
I stretched my arms toward the ceiling, carefully avoiding any muscle that still hurt, and worked out the stiffness. A strange little sound slipped out between my lips on its own.
Maybe it was the structure of the vocal cords. The moan hit my ears like it had been driven straight into them, and my face went red before I could stop it. I awkwardly pulled my posture back to normal.
Obviously, I knew with my head that the sound was just ordinary living noise — the body reacting to a stimulus without conscious input. But if knowing something intellectually were enough to rewrite your body’s reflexes, there wouldn’t be a single lazy person left in the world.
So blushing at the sound of my own voice wasn’t that weird. I still wasn’t used to this biologically female body, either. Maybe I just had zero resistance to this kind of thing. I could not get used to it.
“Sheesh, I’m not some teenage boy…. Anyway — rest for today. Tomorrow I’ll start prepping for the stream.”
I fiddled with my ears, which felt hot enough that steam might as well have been rising off them, and quietly stood up from the chair. There was nothing left to do at the computer, and tomorrow was a cooking stream for the first time in a while, so I figured I’d go back over the recipes I’d found earlier.
I could use CP to just materialize finished dishes, sure — but the process of cooking the ingredients yourself was the kind of stream viewers loved.
The moment I got up, though, Noise — who had been sitting nearby tapping away at her laptop — suddenly turned her head and looked at me. Her face was the same dry, expressionless mask she always wore… and yet somehow I could tell she had something she wanted to say.
“Got something on your mind?”
When I opened first like that, her eyes widened just a fraction, as if she’d been caught off guard, and then she gave a slow nod of affirmation. She stood up with the laptop still in her hands, toddled over to me, and held it out.
The whole motion carried the air of just look at this, no long explanation needed.
“What’s th— huh? Mail?”
What filled the laptop screen she handed me was the inbox of my Olive account, and right in the middle of it an email sat wide open, its contents on full display. Wondering if Olive itself had sent something, I checked the sender before reading a word of the body… and the nickname written there was not one I particularly recognized.
Menchi.
Menchi, huh. Sounded vaguely familiar… and also not. But if I thought about it carefully, I had definitely heard that name not too long ago. Right… during the hundred-thousand-subscriber event…
“Ah! The big-name streamer who dumped viewers on me back then!”
It clicked. The culprit who had pushed my hundred-thousand-subscriber event up to twenty thousand concurrent viewers… well, “culprit” might be a little harsh. Either way, she’d clearly been a help. At a time when even ten thousand felt tight, she’d poured a lot of people into the event — and some of them had stuck around as my viewers.
But the questions rose immediately. Why had she emailed me?
No — fine, people send emails. Why had Noise shoved this particular email in my face the second I finished streaming?
The way to find out was simple: read the email. And because the solution was as easy as sliding my eyes a little, I skimmed the contents without much thought…
The moment I understood what Menchi’s email was actually saying, I could only mutter in a daze.
“…She wants to collab?”
That was it. The email was a collab offer from Menchi — a genuine industry giant — addressed straight to me.
A collab, out of nowhere. I stared blankly at the laptop, blinking like an idiot for a long time, the whole thing still not quite landing.