Jayden: friend, roommate, mentor, leech

Jayden has been my friend for a while now, and with a while I mean since we were children, though I don’t remember that, it was a long time ago after all. Point is he’s been with me my entire life, went to the same school as me, and he’s actually the reason I am where I am today, being a bit of a nerd, but you wouldn’t guess that from the way he looks, almost a full floor tall, fit, and a tad intimidating, even. Currently he’s my roomie because he’s kind of broke, going to college and all, which is also why he only pays a fourth of the rent, but also why I think he can help me here, he is majoring in IT, so maybe he’ll finally be useful.

I get fully dressed and go into the kitchen, where I find him asleep at the table, again. I tap him on the shoulder “Yo, wake up” He always does this, starts working on something, thinking he can do it quickly but then goes off track and just has to do it perfectly, a trait that you could live with but now that he’s going to college and doing homework late at night, it’s damn annoying because stuff like this keeps happening.

“Wha? Oh, did I fall asleep again?” He says, clearly in a bit of a daze from waking up, something I can relate to. His face is always so funny when he wakes up though, at least I think it is. He looks almost like a turtle, you know one of those really cute ones with a boop snoot. He acts a bit like one too.

“Yup. You know at this point you should just do your homework before your classes, you always have more time in the morning.” He nods in agreement but doesn’t actually say anything as we both get our standard bowls of cereal, he always makes the sacrifice of putting his milk in first to be more time-efficient, one of the rituals we’ve started doing that has basically turned us into a well-oiled machine when it comes to waking up.

That’s also what brings me to remember what I wanted to ask Jayden about, so I bring it up as soon as we sit down on the table “So I have this thing I might need some tech-y help with?” I say to Jayden in a sort of question-like voice that I subconsciously use when I’m not really sure of something, Jayden’s eyes swiftly look up at me for a second before he also turns the rest of his head with them.

“What… is it?” He takes a break in the middle of his sentence to take a bite from his cereal, spilling a bit on his shirt in the process.

“So basically there’s this app on my Phone that downloaded itself and it gives me special features for Twitch but they’re… on the weird side, so I think it may have been some kind of virus? I was hoping you could check into it” I decide he doesn’t need to know all the details right now. We’re close, but not to the point where we just casually talk about sex, or anything even remotely horny.

“Sure I can check it out, but have you even tried looking it up yet?” I now realise that that was certainly a logical step I skipped over, so without saying anything I very casually take out my phone and look it up as quickly as I can. None of the results look promising, though.

“Obviously, do you think I’m really that stupid?” He looks at me with almost a smirk and a single slightly raised eyebrow, so I continue “Point is, it had no results that looked like the thing. Nothing about an app, Twitch, or even a virus”

Jayden leans back a bit “Alright, just checking. Send it over and I’ll look into it”

“Aight” I finish my cereal and put the bowl in the sink, or the mountain of dishes as we call it, it’s on the cleaner side right now though. Afterwards I retreat to my room to check if I feel like streaming anything now, but, almost as if it knows, my phone pings at that exact moment, it’s Gem Ladies again.

I take a look at the notification, it’s telling me to play or be automatically punished, and if I’m right with the hacker/virus theory, that could be bad news. So, even though I feel like I’m walking into a trap, I boot up the game, considering I don’t think I have a choice.

The level looked generally similar, with the gems all being the same kind and the HUD looking the same. Only difference was the level background, which looks like a moving wallpaper. Last time it was pink and filled with hearts, and while it’s still filled with hearts, they and the background are red this time around. Even the board’s the exact same, I just have less time from what I can tell.

I’m able to complete the level with only a few seconds to spare, and afterwards I’m brought back to the career branch on the skill tree, from which I can now choose 2 options:

**Viewer Support** - If streaming while playing Gem Ladies, viewers may help the User with stream tokens to drop in extra gems at the sides of the board

**Channel Attraction** - Anyone the User has ever had sex with will follow all their social media

hello again! If you have anything you'd like to share like criticism, suggestions advice or anything like that I'd love to see it in the comments!

Telaviv: I think that could be a very interesting path for the story to take, I'll keep my mind open on it!