A Change That Seems Small Might Be a Great Step Forward

Not long ago, Nia had switched on her stream without a single announcement and barreled through a twelve-hour broadcast. In the wake of that incident, a quiet but unmistakable shift began to take hold in a channel that had once seemed locked into its own unchanging rhythm.

The change was this: she had started adjusting the format of her streams.

The carefully timed, content-focused broadcasts she had always run were reclassified as her regular streams. Alongside them, she began scheduling separate guerrilla streams built around nothing more than chatting and hanging out with her viewers. The net effect was that her total airtime swelled by roughly half again, and the community had no shortage of opinions about it.

The regulars who lived on those boards began ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to suspect that the turning point for all of this might have been that unexpected day off.

A same-day cancellation announcement — something that had never happened before — followed by a stream that switched on as if the notice had been a lie, and Nia pushing through the broadcast with a body covered in wounds without so much as a word about them. To people who had no way of knowing the full story, it was a genuine mystery, and all they could do was invent explanations.

Some insisted it was friction with a salvager company she was carefully avoiding mentioning. Others, citing the dangers of the virtual world, speculated that she might have come close to dying. Remarkably, that second theory was uncomfortably close to the truth — but viewers who had never heard of Predator Species in the Abyss never gave it much traction, and the idea sank without a trace.

Still, the mere fact that a shift in her broadcast schedule was enough to set the community buzzing was proof that her profile had risen considerably. And then, into a community that usually thrived on idle chatter, a piece of genuinely explosive material dropped out of nowhere.

It was the sudden collab announcement from Menchi — a solo streamer with eight hundred thousand subscribers and a name people actually recognized.

Back when she first started streaming, Menchi had thrown herself into every collab she could find, pulling genuine entertainment out of countless people and building a real name for herself in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the process. For her fans — the Croquette Squad — the return of a collab after so long was equal parts thrilling and terrifying.

For nearly half a year she had cut back on collabs with other streamers and poured herself into solo broadcasts chatting with her viewers. The fear that this long-awaited collab might somehow shatter the stream's atmosphere by accident was hard to shake.

Even as they fretted over Menchi, the Croquette Squad couldn't help but wonder. Who on earth had managed to draw out this ice princess who, for months, had sealed herself away like something locked in a glacier, refusing to take anyone's hand?

They ran through the candidates — old close friends from her streaming days, streamers who had already quit, rising stars whose numbers had exploded recently — until a chance sighting brought them closer to the answer than anything else.

The real reason she had gone to District 21 was to cut latency as much as possible for the collab Nia had planned. Stack the word "collab" on top of that circumstantial evidence, and you could almost arrive at the conclusion that Menchi and Nia were collabing together.

But the people on that thread knew nothing about the relationship between Nia and Menchi — and Nia herself had carefully avoided spoiling the ultra-rare event of inviting an outside streamer into her Abyss. So of course, nobody reached that conclusion.

And then, remarkably, the spark that had jumped over to Nia's name caught fire in a completely different direction, violently twisting the whole conversation.

By the common sense of the twenty-second century, that argument was almost reasonable.

As the old saying went, free goodwill only goes as far as the pork — anything beyond love that claims to ask for nothing in return is almost always a fantasy. Kindness comes with a matching price. So a girl scattering Ooparts of absurd value without taking a single credit in return must, by that logic, be up to something shady.

For someone timid and addicted to conspiracy theories, judging her that way wasn't even an awkward leap.

What those people could never have predicted was that the version of herself Nia showed on stream — setting aside the effort of polishing her strengths and hiding her flaws to look cool — was entirely real. Outside, Ooparts might trade for hundreds of thousands or millions of credits. Inside the virtual world where Nia lived and breathed, credits meant nothing at all. Handing out Ooparts freely cost her zero psychological friction.

Two people looking in completely different directions could never understand each other, and so the argument simply ended there.

Then, just as Menchi's collab date drew near — while Nia's threads hummed with chatter about her and Menchi's threads fretted over whether she would be all right — something the size of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs slammed into both communities at once.

Nia and Menchi collabing. An underdog outcome people had rated at maybe one percent — and it had just hit.

The absurd news sent both fandoms into simultaneous panic. The Parang-dan reeled at the idea that Nia's monumental first collab was with Menchi, a streamer widely considered past her prime. The Croquette Squad erupted in fury that she was collabing with some weird no-name who called herself a "virtual idol" — whatever that was supposed to mean.

The emotional fallout was loud enough that passersby got curious and drifted into the threads, turning it into a genuine spectacle. But none of that fury or confusion ever reached the two people at the center of it. The reason was simple.

"Hic… huuh… hnnngh…."

"Ah — um… p-please don't cry. Is it that upsetting?"

"No, Nia-chan. These aren't sad tears…. The fact that I get to see the real Nia with my own two eyes…. I'm just so happy…."

"Ah… ahaha…."

The two of them were far too busy setting up for the stream. They had neither the time nor the need to deal with any of it.

And because neither of them lifted a finger to address the chaos in the community, the confusion and anger soon boiled over into a full-blown fandom war. On the day of Nia and Menchi's collab, that neglect came home to roost in the most ridiculous way imaginable.

"…What are these people doing in the chat?"

It was a resistance protest — staged by the notoriously extreme Croquette Squad, Menchi's own fanbase.