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Section 1
### Chapter 1: Volume I 1 What The Hell Is Obs
If you’ve never tried to set up a VTuber stream at two in the morning while ugly-crying into your keyboard and frantically googling “what is a bitrate”, I don’t recommend it. There are gentler, less emotionally damaging ways to rebuild your life. Like interpretive dance. Or taxidermy. Or interpretive taxidermy, if you're feeling particularly unhinged. I had no idea what I was doing. None. Zilch. Nada. I'd watched six tutorials in a row, the kind where the voiceover is suspiciously chipper and phrases like “it’s super easy!” are thrown around like confetti. Then I opened OBS and immediately panicked. Sliders. Menus. Scenes. What the hell was a scene? I closed the program. Breathed. Reopened it. Panicked again. Rinse and repeat, like a sad little time loop powered entirely by caffeine and existential dread. My VTuber avatar, Ketsusaki, demon queen of mild inconvenience—was, to put it kindly, not ready for prime time. I’d slapped her together in a free character creator in about ten minutes, mostly while stress-eating pudding. She looked like someone’s edgy OC who’d been rejected from a mobile gacha game. Her bangs clipped through her eyes like her hair was trying to blind her out of mercy. Her mouth didn’t move so much as vibrate. And her rig had this charming little bug where her left eye would occasionally wander off like it was on a soul-searching journey of self-discovery. In other words: perfect. On brand. I stared at the “Start Streaming” button. It stared back. I hesitated. I hovered. I swallowed the lump in my throat and clicked before I could think twice. And just like that, I was live. I immediately regretted everything. “Testing... one, two... oh god, is this thing working?” I muttered, tapping the mic like it owed me child support. My voice cracked. I sounded like a teen boy in a coming-of-age movie about puberty and skateboards. There were no viewers. Thank the pixelated gods. I hadn’t promoted it. Hadn’t tweeted. Hadn’t told a single soul. The stream title still read New Streamer Please Be Nice. Honestly, it sounded like something you'd carve into a tree while lost in the forest, but hey—accuracy. “Ketsusaki here,” I said, trying to channel confidence and landing somewhere closer to “nervous substitute teacher on their first day.” “Demon queen. Harbinger of inconvenience. I come bearing chaos, caffeine breath, and crippling debt.” Still no viewers. I let out a long breath. The kind that could power a windmill in a sad anime village. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. “…Cool.” To fill the silence, I booted up that goose game everyone used to rave about. It felt spiritually appropriate. The goose was everything I aspired to be. Petty, chaotic, unapologetic, and constantly stealing things it didn’t need just because it could. Five minutes in, just as I honked at an old man’s ankles with the full weight of my repressed rage, someone joined chat. [User12345]: honk honk!! My soul left my body. In my panic, I accidentally launched the goose into a pond and paused the game with the kind of reflexes you only develop through years of social anxiety. “Ah! Uh, hi! Welcome to... this. Whatever this is.” I tried to sound normal. My voice cracked like an antique mirror dropped in a haunted house. [User12345]: lol this is chaotic I love it “Thanks,” I replied, staring blankly into my monitor. “It’s just me...” Then another message popped up. [SaltyShrimp69]: is your mouth tracking okay or are you possessed Cool. Roasted live, on stream, by someone with a shrimp pun username. Truly, I had arrived. “I prefer the term spiritually unique,” I said, voice dry. I tried to smirk but my avatar glitched again, her head twisted a few degrees too far left. I looked like a cursed Funko Pop someone had left too close to a microwave. And yet... five more people joined. Five. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but for me? It might as well have been a stadium. So I kept going. I honked. I stole sandwiches. I gave mildly unhinged commentary about the psychological profile of the goose. I started ranting about how the goose should have its own noir spin-off series as a grizzled detective solving bread-related crimes. “They said it was just a loaf,” I murmured in a bad gravelly voice. “But I knew it was personal.” To my surprise, people laughed. Or well, they typed “lmao.” In Twitch chat, that’s practically a standing ovation. And weirdly… for the first time in weeks, I wasn’t thinking about the empty silence in my apartment. Or how my therapist had very gently suggested I “consider redirecting [my] spiraling thoughts into a structured creative outlet.” Well. This was structured. Ish. Halfway through the stream, someone donated five bucks. [MidnightSoba]: ur like if a toaster had anxiety and started a Twitch channel. subbed. I don’t care what anyone says. That was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me. I laughed until I wheezed, voice peaking so hard my mic cut out. Ketsusaki, demon queen of mild inconvenience, bent over in pixelated hysteria as her left eye slowly rotated out of frame. Two hours flew by. When I finally ended the stream, I was sweaty, jittery, and emotionally wrung out. I had ten followers, three donations, and one deeply concerning parasocial bond forming with someone named EggsInMyWiFi. Progress. Then I checked the time. 5:17 a.m. My unemployed, freshly-divorced self had just spent the entire night yelling into a mic in anime voice. I had no savings. No plans. And somewhere inside me, half a tub of chocolate pudding was still doing laps in my stomach like a confused swimmer. But weirdly... I felt okay. Not fixed. Not healed. Not whole. Just okay. And that was more than I’d felt in a long, long time. I dragged myself to bed, collapsed face-first into my pillow, and mumbled into the darkness: “Ketsusaki will return…” Then I passed out for twelve hours, still in my hoodie, tangled hair, and a faint smile ghosting my face. Somewhere in the digital void, ten strangers now knew the name of the demon queen of mild inconvenience.
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