Prologue

Jake smiled into his webcam. "Alright, thanks for coming to today's stream Chat, I hope you enjoyed it!" he said.

The view counter, sitting on his second screen and right under the loading screen for an old single-player FPS, went from 4 to 3.

One of those was him. So that meant... he had a whole two viewers.

Jake's eyes glazed over the first line from chat. That same spam bot has been repeating the same message for hours. He thought of banning it, but it meant one more viewer, and viewers attracted more viewers.

Also, it was something to make fun of if he ran out of jokes. Which was always.

The second message was... sus as fuck.

"Okay, well bye," he said. He clicked the orange Steam End button, and returned to Twinge's homepage. Dozens of little rectangles, with live footage of games being played and of Vtubers... vtubing, were filling the page. Each with view counters that registered in the hundreds of thousands. One or two hit the low millions, even though it was only just noon.

Jake leaned back into his cool, and very unergonomic chair, and pressed his palms into his eyes. They always burned when he looked at his screens for too long.

He was eighteen, living with his mom, and unemployed. College was... not an option. Work was a pipe dream. He didn't have what more boring people would call 'marketable skills' and the job market was shit besides.

So he pursued a dream, of becoming a zit-faced internet gaming celebrity.

So far, his record was 22 viewers on one stream. Not at the same time, just 22 unique people over the course of a six-hour Ring: Combat Involved marathon.

He opened his eyes, then froze.

The box floated there, slightly fuzzy on the edges and hovering in the way a magic text box probably shouldn't.

Jake shook his head. Too much Blue Bull?

The box was still there when he opened his eyes again it was still there. "What?" he asked. The box flickered and reappeared.

His mouth worked. "Uh," he said. "Like, what kind of conditions can I put?" he questioned his senility, but if anyone heard... well, he had been live-streaming a moment ago. "Can it be live streamed?" he muttered.

A portal opened next to him. A blazing hole in the universe, at once paper-thin and with a depth that, on gazing within, had Jake's heart pounding.

Should he? It was stupid, probably a pipe-dream. This kind of stuff only happened in the trashy sort of anime he'd been mocked for watching once. But if it was real... adventure and heroism, an escape from all the crap that was going on. Actual success!

He swallowed. Big tiddied elf girls!

His hand shook as he reached out towards the portal.

The door knocked. "Sweetie, are you talking to your friends online?" his mom asked.

"Mom, I'm, uh, I'm," he stuttered.

The door opened. "If you're not busy," she said from behind a head-high pile of clothes. "I've cleaned all of your undies. I even folded them for you."

"Mom!" he called out.

She stepped in, and then, as if in slow motion, he watched her foot catch on a pair of jeans, one that he'd tossed aside so it wouldn't be visible on his webcam.

His mom squeaked. The clothes she held went flying, and the woman stumbled forwards.

Jake saw her eyes widen a moment before her flailing arm reached out and touched the portal.

There was a 'slorp' kind of sound.

"Mom?"

Jake stepped over to where the portal had been. Now, there was only a pile of folded socks and tighty-whities.

"Oh, shit," he muttered. Something on the edge of his vision moved, and he stared at his main monitor where his Twinge had... changed. There was a stream going on now, live, of a forest. In the centre of it was his mother, kneeling over and breathing hard.

Jake blinked.

"Mom?!"

***

Anne stared at the prompt in front of her, then at the floating box next to that. It looked strangely familiar, at least compared to all the rest of the stuff in the endless void she found herself in.

That box wasn't terribly helpful.