BethOfTheWild

Hopefully this isn't accidentally too similar to any existing vtuber character design. I couldn't find anything similar at least.

“Seriously, dude, you could make so much money! Just think about it, okay?”

Taylor rubbed the back of his neck and avoided Ben’s gaze, feeling embarrassed by what had just been implied about his voice. 

“I don’t sound that much like a girl,” he muttered. “My voice just hasn’t dropped yet but it’s gonna soon.”

“Sure, dude,” Ben said, “although I feel like that should have already happened given that you’re, like, 19.”

“Not for another month,” Taylor pointed out. “Bennn, you always forget when my birthday is.”

“I have it written down at home!” Ben protested. “It’s in a .TXT on my desktop, with all the important dates in there.”

“You’re so weird,” Taylor said. “You know Google Calendar is a thing, right?”

“I like my way more!” Ben said. “Anyway. Dude, you could totally do it. Hey, if your voice bothers you that much, you might as well get one positive thing out of it, right? Just do it for a few months or a year until your voice drops and then you can cash out. It’s all anonymous and stuff so you can just vanish from the internet when you’re done.”

“Fine, maybe I’ll make a test video just to see how the software works,” Taylor said. “Also, seriously, you didn’t need to buy this for me.”

Ben shrugged. “I don’t have much else to spend money on except mechanical keyboards and CRT monitors,” he said. “Might as well spend it on friends.”

“Aw. That’s kinda nice,” Taylor said. “But, yeah, I… people at my high school weren’t very nice about my voice so I guess I’m a little touchy about the subject.”

“That sucks,” Ben said. “You know, people used to make fun of me for sounding like a nerd.”

“And they stopped?” Taylor asked skeptically. Ben’s voice was pretty stereotypically geeky, with a monotone and over-enunciated consonants.

“No, I just stopped having to spend time around people who aren’t nerds,” Ben said. “Probably one of the significant positives of working in tech.”

“Alright, ya nerd, you better watch out or I might bully you,” Taylor joked.

“Joke’s on you, I’m into that,” Ben countered.

Taylor failed to suppress his laughter and a giggle bubbled out of him.

“At least we know you won’t give yourself away laughing!” Ben said.

Taylor threw a pillow at him. “Hey, I didn’t fully agree yet,” he said. “The riskiest part is doing it live. I’d be less worried if I was just doing VA commissions on Fiverr or reading out horny anime memes on YouTube.”

“Oh, maybe you could try those things as a low-risk way of testing if you can convince people online! If they’re all fooled then you know you’re pretty safe.”

Taylor decided not to mention that he had already done both those things. The YouTube videos had a disappointingly small number of views, and he was pretty sure at least one of the guys on Fiverr just wanted some audio to jack off to.

“I’ll let you know if and when I get around to making a test,” Taylor said. “I’d send it to you on Discord but I don’t wanna pay for Nitro and it’s for sure over the file limit.”

“Oh, I can pay for your Nitro,” Ben said.

“Nah, man. It’s fine. I can just send a Google Drive link or something. Oh, or just upload it to YouTube unlisted.” Adam would have felt bad if let Ben spend any more money on him today, beyond the motion tracking software he bought for him.

“Anyway, not directly related, but can I ask you to say something in the ‘anime little sister’ voice?”

Taylor sighed. “As long as it’s not anything weird.”

“I just wanted ‘I love you, onii-chan’.”

Taylor took a moment to clear his throat and get into the mental space of the character. “I wuv you, onii-chan” he said in an unreasonably high voice.

Ben laughed and clapped in response. “You’re so good at that!”

Taylor shrugged. “It’s not that hard. It’s kind of like falsetto but you also change a few other things.”

“Well, I can’t do it,” Ben said. “Or I’d already be a vtuber myself. Speaking of which…”

“Yes?” Taylor asked, feeling a vague sense of foreboding.

“I, uh–” Ben looked down at his lap, “I may have already commissioned a rigged avatar for you. I tried to make sure you’d like it!”

Ben clicked to wake his computer up and then opened a detailed image of a cute anime girl wearing a short pleated skirt the color of matcha, with a matching ribbon tie. Her hair was a subdued teal, with a single large hairpin that looked like a snail shell holding her bangs out of her face, and her face looked simultaneously innocent and mischievous.

Taylor immediately fell in love with her.

***