More audible gulps came as I, Yuki, downed that one too. It was too bad that I had to be so proper and ladylike all day at work.
“Awesome! Time to tune in to my fellow third-genners, woohoo!” It didn’t take long before I started feeling good, and since today’s stream from Hikari Matsuriya—a streamer in the same generation as me—had been archived, I started watching that.
I still hadn’t ever actually met Hikari-chan, but she’d been super nice to me ever since our debut, even though my lame streams were nothing to write home about. Seriously, she was such a good girl. An angel. I wuv her.
Her character was an energetic sixteen-year-old, fairly short, and had this unique, full-face smile that always made me want to laugh along with her. Plus, her streams were always these explosions of brilliance, every bit as joyful as her appearance—and fitting for the matsuri part of her name, which meant festival. She got a ton of comments too, and the way she laudably committed herself to the VTuber life earned her plenty of fan adoration. At this point, she was like the beating heart of the third gen.
I’d done a few collab streams with her, but... How should I put this? She was like purity and innocence personified, and I’d totally ended up feeling like I was her mother. My face and tone grew super serious as I said aloud, “Yes, I will be her mommy!”
I apparently had a habit of talking to myself more than usual while drunk. Or rather, the words in my brain just ignored all filters and came out of my mouth as is. I was normally shy in front of strangers, and I very seldom drank with anyone else, so while it hadn’t caused me any problems yet, it did make things dicey.
Not that I could stop drinking StroZero even if I tried! I really just can’t do it—seriously!
“Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha!” I watched the stream, laughing uproariously throughout, without a shred of class.
Hikari was playing a video game for this stream called Wiener Legend, fittingly subtitled Sexken Densetsu. In the game, you fought other players using wieners stuck on forks as swords. It really gave you a sense for how crazy the developer must be. And, well, the theme of the game being what it was, most of the players had these awful dirty jokes and puns for usernames.
“Holy crap, ‘Cooterjuice’ kills me LMAOOOO that doesn’t even have anything to do with wieners LOL!” I was riding that chu-high, baby, meaning even the stupidest, most vulgar jokes were hysterical to me.
Oh, and the craziest part of this stream was that Hikari-chan was so pure that she’d just say all of them out loud, since she didn’t know dirty jokes at all, except for the super obvious ones. She’s catnip for the kind of pervert who thinks of himself as a gentleman.
“The hell? Why am I so hard?” I laughed. “I’m supposed to be your mommy here, but I’m so hard watching your stream!”
I finished up watching the video, laughing my ass off the entire time. Man, her streams were godlike! And she was just...amazing. I could see why she’d gotten popular. No reason she wouldn’t have.
Compared to her, I’m just...
“It’s getting late, so maybe I’ll just watch Chami-chan’s stream and go to bed.” Reality can really make you sad at two in the morning.
I started up another archived stream from one of the other gen-three streamers, named Chami Yanagase. Chami-chan went in a different direction with her content than other VTubers, mainly focusing on a variety of ASMR streams. And coming from that lady with such a voluptuous, attention-grabbing body and that short blonde hair and those blue eyes, it was amazing.
She kept her soft voice mostly emotionless, which really made me sleepy. I doubted any VTuber could compete with her when it came to putting people to sleep. She’d apparently done one of her ear-cleaning streams today. With how drunk I was, that was definitely gonna knock me right out.
“Ah, crap. This stream is just as addictive as StroZero is...” A powerful drowsiness washed over me almost immediately, and I was fast asleep within moments.
And there I was, snoring loudly, completely unaware that my smartphone was ringing off the hook...
As the scorching sunlight of a clear morning shone on my eyes, I awakened.
“Urgh, urf...” Oh, crap. I think I’m gonna barf. StroZero is fun when you’re drinking, but the hangovers are the worst. I wished they’d do something about that.
Not that I’d ever stop drinking. This was what I woke up to every day at this point. My morning hellscapes had become routine. Changing it up now would be worse for me anyway. Yeah.
If I said something like that on stream, all the comments would be like, “Huh?” That would never happen, though. I put too much emphasis on being seiso—clean and pure—during my streams. I never drank on them.
“Hrr?” Just as I finally convinced myself to stand up and get some water or something, I heard my smartphone ringtone going off. This early?
Apparently it was from my manager, Suzuki-san. She was one of the younger managers at Live-On, going on twenty-four this year. Her straightforward attitude of always tackling everything head-on, no matter how troublesome, was what had landed her that managerial position. Rumor had it she was first in line for moving up even further in Live-On too; she had it where it counted.
She always fussed over my personal life so that I could focus on my streaming; I owed a lot to her at this point. In fact, she had specifically requested to be my manager, according to her. When I’d asked why, her reply had been this:
“Well, I just felt like I’d be the only one who could possibly keep up with you, Yuki-san.”
It was incomprehensible to me. She both looked and acted like an athletic, outdoorsy type of person. Was there something my indoor nature was blinding me to?
“Hullo...”
“Oh! Yuki-san! Thank goodness you picked up!”
Huh? Wonder what’s wrong, I thought. In contrast to my listless grunt, Suzuki-san’s voice was audibly panicked. I asked, “Umm, what’s going o—?”
“Shh! Don’t talk! We can’t have any personal information of yours getting out, so I need you to say as little as possible. And I need you to listen to what I’m about to say as calmly as you can.”
“Huh?” Whatever it was, it had made Suzuki-san cut me off mid-sentence. And if I’d been half asleep before, the danger in the term “personal information” solved that problem quite handily. Wait... Have I done something awful without realizing it?
“Listen to me calmly, all right?” She paused, then finally said, “Turn off your stream.”
Turn off your stream.
Turn off your stream.
Turn off your stream.
The words looped endlessly in my mind.
Forgetting to turn off your stream, at worst, could reveal personal information. It was one of the things VTubers had to be very careful about. But that problem actually hid another, more devilish one. And—for better or worse, since I’d spent way too much time watching VTuber streams—I knew exactly what it was.
You guessed it. Whether or not any potentially harmful personal information gets out, usually when someone forgets to end their stream, the viewers get to hear them out of character. VTubers role-play as their own characters—their avatars—so the audience pretty much never gets to witness how they actually speak or act. Such a rare exposure of my true self could only mean...
...that the viewers would start bullying me and attacking me relentlessly.
An electrifying dread shot through me. Immediately, the problems my PC had been having when I’d tried to end the stream yesterday flashed through my mind. I opened the streaming window on my computer as I broke out in a cold sweat all over. And there, I saw...
: Morning! are you watching?
: Loved your STRONK drinking stream!
: It was so different from how you usually are that it went way past regular gap moe into something totally new
: light snow more like a blizzard lololol
: Great! It's finally time for you and I to be Hikari-chan's mommy and get hard for her together!
: The Girl Who Compared StroZero to Her Genmate's ASMR Streams
: I have witnessed a legend.
: "This stream would later leave its mark in VTuber history."
: why do so many of the self-professed pure and wholesome vtubers end up being like this
: my sides were literally in orbit. you were just acting so genuine I can't bring myself to hate you LMAO
: ^ this! Now I want to drink StroZero with you
“What the—noooooooooo!” The scream came out involuntarily.
Despite the early morning hour, the comment section was scrolling so fast I couldn’t keep up with it. More importantly, my viewer count was way higher than my average right now. In fact, when I looked more closely, my subscriber count was in line with the others in the third gen—actually, with the rate it was increasing, it would soon exceed those.
Ah, crap. This was giving me a headache.
: Congrats on #1 trending worldwide!
: The Girl Who Took Over the World Just by Drinking StroZero at Her Computer
“Number one worldwide?!”
Frantically, I checked the trending rankings on Cheeper, the most-used social media site in Japan. I couldn’t believe my eyes, but there it was: the name Awayuki Kokorone at first place in the world, not even just Japan. With the hashtag #AccidentallyLive a little below that.
Ahh... Well, oh, huh...
“I’ve got to hand it to you, Yuki-san,” continued my manager. “Ever since seeing your interview, I’d always been prepared for when you finally snapped—but I never thought it would be you forgetting to turn off your stream. I should have expected a curveball from you. I’ll redouble my efforts to support you from now on!”
Too much was happening. Suzuki-san’s words didn’t reach my mind.
Ugh, actually, the hangover combined with my head not processing anything was making me feel pretty sick.
“Ugh, urgh...”
Oh, this is bad...!
☆This noise was too dirty to express in writing.☆
Finally, while vomiting, I managed to push the “stop streaming” button.
The stream became a legend, both because I’d forgotten to turn it off and because of the way I had turned it off—it would go down in history as The Stream That Ended with a Barf.