Yuria’s debut stream.

I knew Fernanda was sidestepping the question she really wanted to ask when she said it had been a while since my last song upload, but she was right nevertheless. When I got home, I ate dinner with the family and then went up to my room with Cake and Isabelle. We sort of had plans. The puppies seemed to enjoy watching TV with mom just like Cake did, so that was a big weight off my shoulders.

I sat down on my bed with my guitar on my lap and Cake at my side while Isabelle sat at my desk chair and began to type on my computer. After all, it was Wednesday night, meaning Yuria’s debut stream under her new agency. Of course we were gonna watch.

“It still hasn’t started,” Isabelle said. The stream was live, but it was on a ‘Stream will start soon’ screen.

“You think she’s nervous?” I asked her.

“Duh. Before she only had to answer to herself. Now she has an agency. I bet she feels she has to do better.” Isabelle sighed. “Do you know if they told her not to do anything specific?”

“Yeah, actually. She asked and they told her to avoid getting too political since they don’t want the brand to be associated with anything radical. But it’s not like Noelle talks about politics anyway, so she’s practically free to do her own thing, like always.”

“So… I’ve been editing some compilation videos for other V-Tubers, and I have to say, many of them are pretty unhinged, like they have no filter. It’s pretty funny, to be honest, but… Do you think people will expect that of Noelle?”

“We’ll see. She’s gonna have new sets of eyes on her, at least a couple of hundred more.”

I was praying nothing weird happened, but much like the coffee shop was my battlefield, this was Noelle’s. I had to believe in her to be able to handle things on her own.

“Hello? Is this thing on? Am I all alone? Is anyone there? I need a bigger… keyboard. This one’s cute but it’s getting annoying how small it is. Hello everyone. Welcome to the stream.”

Noelle’s avatar, the V-Tuber Yuria rose from the bottom right of the screen. It was still weird to hear Noelle’s voice through that filter that altered the pitch of her voice.

“Oliver, she hasn’t even started properly yet and she’s already at 1K viewers…” Isabelle said.

“So this is the power of advertising…”

Beyond acknowledging that this was her debut stream under AniLove, Noelle, or Yuria, continued her stream as she always did. She was going to play a really popular game that released some time ago but that she hadn’t touched yet. We kept an eye on her chat and there was a lot of excitement about it.

“I see this game a lot in clips,” Isabelle said. “Isn’t it, like, really hard?”

“Depends on how you play,” I told her. “It can be really easy or really hard.”

“You’ve played it?”

“Yeah.”

We watched Yuria complete the tutorial, start getting the hang of how the game functioned and step out into the open world. She then got killed by a dude in armor riding a horse in the first two minutes.

“WHAT! Who puts an enemy like that right out of the tutorial!?”

Isabelle laughed, I chuckled.

As we watched I was mostly playing the guitar while Isabelle actually paid proper attention and read the chat. It seemed like they were behaving for the most part, with a few weird comments that Yuria wisely ignored.

“Not much happens in these things, huh?” Isabelle commented. “Sometimes I get sent a VOD with timestamps for the moments the person wants in the compilation, but other times I have to find them myself and I have to watch 4 hour videos just to see if something happened.”

“Yep, that’s streaming,” I told her. “It’s why I don’t really watch them. Usually just have them as background noise.”

At one point, Yuria entered a dark cave and she could barely see anything. Of course, viewers couldn’t see anything, either.

“I should find a torch around here, right?” Yuria asked. “That’s usually how it works.”

She had a rule on no backseating in her chat, so no one was telling her where to find one.

“Do you know?” Isabelle asked me.

“Yeah.”

“Send her a text, then. People are getting a little annoyed.”

I sighed, grabbed my phone and sent her a text.

-Oliver: The merchant back in the first church should sell a torch. Equip it on your left hand as a weapon.

Yuria stopped playing and talking for a moment, her avatar seemingly looking down.

“Um… So, chat, don’t ask how I know this, but we’re going back to the merchant,” Yuria said.

“Saved,” Isabelle said.

“Hm? Is Mr. Boyfriend backseating?” Yuria read a chat comment out loud. “N-No. He’s… looking out for the quality of the stream, okay?” She laughed it off.

Isabelle laughed as she also read the chat. “People are thanking you for telling her what to do.”

“Wait, you have a boyfriend?” Yuria read another message. “Yeah, I do. He watches the stream sometimes and I’m gonna **** him to play XIV.” She then read another message. “Make a video out of it?” Yuria gasped. “Oh, maybe I should! I don’t know if people would like it, though.”

“It seems people want to see it,” Isabelle told me, grinning at me. “What’re you gonna do?”

I groaned. “If it helps her… I don’t want to talk or be on camera, though. I don’t want our channels to be connected.”

As time passed and the game continued, Isabelle noticed the chat messages getting a little weirder. “Okay, here it is. People are asking about you.”

“What?”

“It’s actually like… Yeah, only six chat members, but they’re asking what you’re like and stuff.”

“So, I’m not gonna talk about my boyfriend because it seems like you’re trying to goad me into saying something specific,” Yuria said. “And believe me, with how jealous some people get over this subject, you don’t want me talking about him. Look, chat, all I’m willing to say is… If you get yourself someone who makes you believe heaven on earth exists, keep them.”

“Okay, I’m clipping that,” Isabelle said excitedly.

My face was burning, but Noelle’s debut stream went… unsurprisingly well, actually. About 2.1K viewers throughout the 4 hours. We dug in a bit and that was like the fifth highest viewership from AniLove streamers, and the gap wasn’t really all that massive, with the highest viewership being around 5K.

Considering the scale of things, Noelle could proudly claim that her debut stream was a success. Isabelle and I sent her a congratulatory text.

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