Maintenance
Two more days had passed since Lunari's music-show appearance.
Four of us had gathered in the Discord room: me, Yu Nari, Han So-yeong, and Kurogami Yui.
We'd each originally had our own business to discuss, but the topics kept overlapping until we landed on the obvious conclusion—ah, just talk it out all together.
And just like that, it became something resembling the First Muse Family Staff Meeting.
Having bolted over the second her stream ended, Yu Nari was in thoroughly rough shape.
Yeah. Fair enough.
I'd expected the music-show fallout to bring a flood of new people into Lunari's broadcasts. After everything we'd already ridden out—the voice reveal, the agency announcement, the concert, the new-song charting—I'd figured this would land somewhere similar.
Instead:
A massive wave of chat that was feminine and thick with that younger-sister energy left Lunari grinding her gears. It was a completely different texture from the reactions of her existing stream audience—not the usual "Unnie I'm a girl too (clumsy wink)" bits, but genuine girls'-community vibes flooding in.
If they'd just gone uhehe, ohehoheho, she could've at least gotten openly annoyed.
Whoops.
Maybe I'm being a little too rough.
The thought that pure-hearted new viewers were watching made a filter slam down on her without her even meaning to.
The old regulars kept poking Lunari's reverse scale, trying to crack the mask—and the more they did, the sturdier her shield became.
Her sentences were getting polite on pure reflex. There was that saying—kind words in, kind words out. Faced with newcomers who carefully attached honorifics to every quiet little question, Lunari simply couldn't bring herself to say, That tone is so cringy, could you please stop?
And more than anything, the sheer absolute number of people who'd shown up was staggering.
Before the music-show appearance, her average viewership during personal hangout streams—not content streams—had been in the low thousands.
Right now, even mid-hangout stream, it was 2,800.
And that was two full days after the post-M Count recap stream, when the aggro had been at its absolute peak.
People taking interest and settling into the broadcast was something to be deeply grateful for.
But I'm uncomfortable!!!
I offered some comfort to the Yu Nari who was almost certainly screaming that on the inside.
"You've been working hard."
"From a viewer's seat it's still pretty entertaining, but……"
Eventually her true nature would win out under its own weight, and then the newcomers would either leave in shock or stay. Streaming had its own culture—the memes, the bits, the nicknames, the donation etiquette. To people coming in from outside, it was a foreign country.
In the end, the ones who stayed would stay, and the ones who left would leave.
Yui spoke up to the worry-heavy Yu Nari.
Coming from a seasoned VTuber, the advice carried real weight.
What broadcast could possibly satisfy everyone? Streamers ran things in their own style, and the people who liked that flavor stuck around. Try to catch two rabbits and you lost both.
"Still, don't go full throttle and scare off the ants. Since people are already piled up, how about running content that lets you go, hey, this is the kind of person I am~?"
"First thing that matters is what kind of image you want to leave."
A little pffft of Yui's laughter came through.
"Engh?"
Yu Nari and I answered almost at the same time.
Wasn't staying a friend-like streamer exactly how you kept the yuksu from getting too thick?
Uh. Really?
I'd left school unfinished, so I wouldn't know.
Yui kept going.
Huh. Was that how it worked?
My school memories barely covered elementary and up through second year of middle school, so it was fuzzy—but the principle made sense.
"But isn't that most streamers? Isn't it better than the rooms that do fake dating out in the open?"
Soft-what? Did I mishear……
Twenty-four years old and completely unbothered. So this was what experience looked like.
That was exactly me. I watched because it was fun—I didn't go into rooms where the streamer was going babe, honey.
I left the two of them bickering and tilted my head.
I couldn't just go oh, I see out of nowhere—there was a part that didn't add up.
Lunari had clearly been streaming like a friend, following my advice, and I'd never really gotten the sense that thick yuksu was increasing. So it didn't always track that cleanly, did it?
I carefully put the question to Yui, and my confusion cleared right up.
"The line?"
"Yeah."
Steamrolling right over Yu Nari's protests, Teacher Yui continued the lecture.
"And that makes the yuksu brew less?"
Man, this was complicated.
Thanks to Yui, my streaming knowledge had leveled up. My own experience was from the cam-streamer point of view, so applying it to Lunari had been a little off. Even for a cam-less VTuber, managing parasocial romance feelings wasn't easy.
I'd been telling Lunari to stream with a friendly, buddy-like vibe specifically so she wouldn't brew yuksu—and it had almost been a disaster.
Not intentional, but the results had turned out fine, so thank god for that.
Ah, right.
We'd been mid-brainstorm on Lunari stream content.
At the sniper shot of a line, Yui pushed back.
I left them to fight and thought on my own.
Putting Yui's advice together with the flow of Yu Nari's streams so far—over-the-top but fun was the way. Put a bet on how hard she'd go. Lean into not being afraid of looking ridiculous. Then the faint-hearted among the new fans would leave, and those overly girly chats Yu Nari didn't prefer would normalize.
What was there.
Make her do a face-plant tonkatsu mukbang?
Helium karaoke?
"……"
After mainlining this much industry red pill today, I probably wouldn't be able to enjoy streams for a while anyway.
So that was the secret hidden inside Yui's friendliness.
As one viewer, I was sad.
Had I been brewing a little myself, deep down?
I'd been meaning to buy merch now that money was coming in… somehow I didn't feel like it anymore…
Right as I was getting gloomy, Han So-yeong's voice cut in.
"Yeah. Let's……"
I needed a different subject.
Yeah, of course they would be.
The view count on Lunari's M Count stage video had blown past 500,000 in twenty-four hours. The average for artists who'd performed the same day hadn't even cleared 100,000.
The comments were a whole spectacle.
Genuine culture shock from the core music-show audience. People who'd heard Hey! A VTuber's on M Town! bouncing around every community and come to rubberneck. Plus the curiosity of everyone who hadn't known the original artist behind Blackout Cat.
It had pulled interest from every direction imaginable.
Whether she wanted to do it or not.
She was right. Before she was a singer, Yu Nari was a streamer. Broadcasting was the main job; music was an extension of it.
Last week she'd spent the entire week grinding just to stand on stage once—and now, prepare every week? Her streams would inevitably suffer.
Yu Nari hesitated for a long while, then:
Just like when she'd first decided to appear on a music show, Yu Nari asked for my opinion.
Back then I'd told her to do it if she wanted to.
"Hmm."
This time, I wanted to oppose it.
I didn't want to dump extra worry on her with pointless objections—but I had a little stake in this too, so I decided to be honest.
"……I'm against doing the Blackout Cat stage again. Honestly, I think it'd be better not to do it at all."
"The quality was lacking. We threw it together in a rush. This time we should leave a good first impression as a taste and then walk away."
That was what had bothered me most. Everyone had said it was a great stage, but from our side it was basically something we'd shoved up there without proper prep. Showing that stage over and over would sting the conscience—and it just wasn't satisfying.
I sat fretting alone in the stretching silence until Han So-yeong spoke first.
Yu Nari agreed without a fight.
Whew. We were all on the same page.
I was just relaxing when Yui cut in.
Instantly two-to-one.
Seeing the odds turn against her, Yui retreated just as fast.
Moments like this made it clear she was a born attention magnet. Completely unfazed by secondhand embarrassment, and hungry for the stage.
"……Maybe Eumnya should've gone to Yui."
Watching Yu Nari stream normally, she didn't seem particularly shy—and yet somehow this one song made her bashful.
I'd muttered it without thinking, and the reaction that came back was intense.
"Whoa, I was talking to myself."
Maybe she was just someone who was constitutionally bad at acting cute.
Yu Nari went full launch.
"Huh? You did?"
Yu Nari's singing burst through the phone.
Much softer than what I'd heard before. Lazy and gentle at once. All the stiffness had melted completely out of it.
What the—she's good.
The silence that had settled over the four-person Discord room after Yu Nari's rampage broke under Yui's laughter.
Without accompaniment it could sound that way, but once the official version dropped it probably wouldn't feel like an aegyo song at all.
There was a tremor in Yu Nari's voice.
Whether it was embarrassment or rage, I honestly couldn't tell.