I'll Be Lying Low for Two Weeks
"Haha...."
A hollow laugh scraped out of her, thin enough to split her throat. Call it reaping what she had sown and she had nothing to say for herself — but knowing that did nothing to keep her mind from going blank. Every VTuber community in the world was on fire because of her. Of course her head wasn't working.
She had started that gaming stream because she wanted to tear off the disgrace of being a specialist in Calamity, and all she had done was make the disgrace pick up speed. Or was it not a disgrace at all? She didn't know.
"Figures. I really don't have any talent for streaming, do I?"
The useless question scattered into the empty air and vanished.
"Haaah."
Yesterday's TLQ ten-win streak stream had died on the very first match. She had been sniped, she had lost, and when she learned her opponent had been on an alt she had cursed and shrieked — and every bit of it had gone straight out through the broadcast mic. Needless to say, it was a Calamity.
And then there was her opponent. Love's Flame. No — Affection's Flame had even posted on Nater, apologizing that the fault was theirs and trying to smother the fire. It hadn't worked in the slightest. The Calamity had only accelerated, and the decision she and her manager reached at the end of their talk was a public declaration: two weeks of lying low. Thanks to which, naturally, the Calamity accelerated one more time.
"...Maybe I'm being punished."
Well. The motive had been rotten from the start. She had never once thought about becoming a VTuber. Her mother had told her to give it a try, and that was how the paperwork had ended up in her hands; worse, she had applied because she needed someone to talk to. Stars Flow's second generation numbered five, including her, and from what she had overheard, the applicants had come to something like five hundred. A one-percent chance, barely scraped through — and the person who came out the other side wasn't someone who had dreamed of this, but a shut-in loser like her. Being punished for that wasn't strange at all.
"Hnn..."
Shut-in losers tended to have low self-esteem, and a great deal of self-loathing. Which meant she, the ultimate shut-in loser, felt lower and loathed herself more than anyone. If she was honest about how she felt right now, she could call her manager this instant and beg to be graduated....
Ding!
"...Huh?"
A chime sounded from the computer. She looked, and a DM was waiting on Misscode. And the person who had sent it—
...Becoming a VTuber was the right call!
"You seem to be in a good mood."
"Hehe...."
It was her first meal with her mother in a while, but she couldn't hear a word of what was being said. Nacchan had sent her a personal message of encouragement, and her brain was in a full runaway spiral. Self-esteem? Self-loathing? None of that mattered. Nacchan had reached out first, on Misscode, with a private message. That was the most important thing in the world. She understood it now: one word of praise hit harder than a hundred curses.
...She should print the message Nacchan sent, frame it, and hang it in her room.
"I heard you had your debut stream the day before yesterday. How was it? Did it go all right?"
"Ah, um. It was... pretty fun, I think."
She had gotten a personal message from Nacchan, of all people! Well — it hadn't turned into an actual conversation. All she had managed to answer that gentle sentence with was Thank you. If she started chatting while she was this worked up, Nacchan would get sick of her, and she herself might pass out from the excitement. More than anything, someone like her had no business casually speaking to Nacchan. People like her belonged crumpled in a corner, content to be grateful now and then for whatever warmth Nacchan chose to send. Admiration, after all, was beautiful precisely because you could not reach it....
"Heheh."
"...I'm glad you look like you're enjoying yourself."
What was she supposed to do while she lay low? Practice TLQ?
"Mei-chan?"
"Ah. Miss Izumi?"
The people on her screen were her genmates. On the left was Akabane Yukari, who had held her debut stream immediately before Izumi's own: a long red side-tail that looked as if its RGB values really were 255, 0, 0, gray eyes, and the full concept of a chuunibyou brat. On the right was Utsumi Ayaka, the first of Stars Flow's second generation to debut — short golden hair, sky-blue eyes, and the concept of a cozy big sister. A week had barely passed since their debuts, and the two of them had already produced the pairing fans called Ayakari. For some reason, their collab had turned into a conversation about her.
"Keh heh. Did this body not declare it at the very beginning? That one is the strongest among us...."
"Indeed. The moment this body first met that one and exchanged words, I understood. Among us, the one who would bring the greatest storm was her."
Fortunately, the verdict on her was not especially harsh. The reason was simple. Most of the communities had decided she was a complete beginner at streaming, someone with no past life at all — and they were, in fact, correct. In the industry as it stood, an agency VTuber with no past life whatsoever must have been a rarity even to the viewers. So they had reached a provisional conclusion: everything she had shown in the two days since debut was a novice's mistake. There were still, of course, people tearing the place apart in search of that past life.
"...Hmph."
Let them search for the rest of their lives. Terrified of manufacturing some dark history, she had signed up for Nater and never written a single post — a shut-in loser beyond all imagining. What information could possibly come out of someone like that? The Kaino Izumi account was the first thing she had ever done on Nater in this life. The only sites where a person like her could write anything were the ones that didn't require a fixed ID.
"Well, obviously we've met, and we've talked."
"We're genmates, after all."
True enough: she had met both of them — all of her second-generation genmates, to be precise. Twice in total, once when the roster was finalized and once five days before the debut streams. They had also all spoken on Misscode right before Miss Utsumi's debut. The sum of what she herself had said was hello and goodbye. Whether that could be called a conversation was an open question. Her genmates were staggeringly energetic socialites, and she had been unable to keep up. They had been genuinely, dazzlingly pretty, too. Why were people like that doing VTubing, the final form of otaku content...? She was an incredible pretty girl herself, of course, but communication disorder meant she couldn't talk to people, so she was the exception. She was qualified.
"Uh, um. An incredibly quiet, pure-type pretty girl?"
"Hey."
"Ah! Th-that's not it. Obviously she's the most energetic atmosphere maker out of all of us!"
The moment Miss Utsumi came within a breath of shattering her RP, Miss Akabane stepped in and stopped her. Whether that would actually do any good, Izumi had no idea.
"Haha."
This was going to be another Calamity. Still — she had a connection to Nacchan now. A Calamity of this size wasn't going to shake her!
"Anyway, Miss Izumi is working very hard too, so please cheer her on, everyone!"
"She certainly has talent. This body guarantees it!"
A genmate she had never properly spoken with, cheering for her like that. Honestly, it tugged at her chest. Receive encouragement like that, and you couldn't just sit still. She would have to try harder. The goal: a VTuber who could say, without flinching, that she belonged to Stars Flow's second generation.
That said, they had done it the first time they met, too — already calling her by name as if it were nothing.
Socialites are terrifying....