She did all she could to make sure the news reached the most people possible. Media outlets latched on the CNBC interview and spun their own defamatory pieces full of lies and speculation, while Cat bombarded social media with calls to her followers. She negotiated with the six websites Theresa used and got sign-in offers from another three. She scheduled her stream to start four in the afternoon and go for as long as she could hold it. She needed to earn tokens and needed them now.
All the other models of the studio gave up on streaming that day because, in their words, they would be subjected to “unfair competition”. Plus they were dying to know what Cat would do, a few of them hoping she would fall on her face, figuratively. A few others hoped she would succeed so they had something they could copy. They crowded the lobby, with all the TV screens ready to tune into her feed. Cat would either rise to be the queen or fail miserably.
She had free reign of the studio and could pick any of the two dozen rooms they offered. From a pink and innocent girl room to a literal sex dungeon with fake torture devices, passing through medieval princess bedrooms and Egyptian tombs, the studio could double as a sex theme park. She didn’t pick any of these. Instead, she selected the green screen room where she could add her own background.
“Okay, Catherine. Your laptop feed will go through the image processor. It’ll replace the chroma key canvas. Enable the secondary video output on your computer,” Tara, the studio IT technician girl (no men allowed on the premises, ever!) said.
Theresa helped Tara with the final touches, including hooking her laptop to the room’s computer so it could replace the green canvas with the laptop video feed. Cat tested it with a My Little Pony clip.
[Get your own butt to plug anything in, dead girl,] Cat playfully rejected (for the umpteenth time) the idea to indulge in the ghost’s fetishes. [This one is mine and it’s a one-way exit.]
Theresa approached her, “Are you sure you don’t want to sync your Bluetooth Egg Vibrator with the computer? You might miss the tips from users that want to ‘give you extra pleasure’,” the veteran webcam model mocked with air quotes. Cat bought the ubiquitous toy with a pink antenna months ago during a naughty shopping spree but never used it. It was still mint in the box and she only brought it to the studio because Theresa insisted.
“No, thank you. I don’t think I’ll do anything naughty on the first stream,” she rejected as she swapped laptops, replacing the prancing ponies spreading magical friendship with the green canvas in the video preview.
“I’ve never seen this laptop brand,” a curious Theresa remarked, ogling the strange computer. “Why does it have colored keys?”
Cat gently ran a finger over the brand name and got the Wirehair on her lap, “Oh, this one is a dedicated machine, this logo is actually the software manufacturer. It’s not an all-purpose PC like the others where you can play games, browse the web, and do your homework. It only makes one thing.”
“What is it?” Theresa was already grinning, motivated by the good mood Cat was radiating.
Cat wiggled her eyebrows and hid her face behind Mr. Mouser, “Meow-ney. Lots and lots of money. I hope.”
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One of the deals she made with the studio and a few websites was that they would deposit her token tips in her checking account in real-time in lots of a hundred dollars, instead of at the end of the week like it was for everyone else. It was a one-time deal but one crucial to her plan.
During the week she was officially hired by the studio, she prepared a lot of things. Not only her social media accounts became magically unlocked (the way they were locked was also magical, diabolically so) but she also managed to revive her FINRA certifications. She’d easily reobtained the FINRA Series 6, 7, and 66 (which combined the 63 and 65) certifications in a single day, but she needed to borrow three thousand dollars from Theresa, putting her in the red.
But with these three certifications, she could reactivate her trader accounts and qualify as a Licensed Financial Advisor. She couldn’t work at an investment firm because she didn’t have a bachelor’s degree (which absolutely all of them required) but she could act independently or open her own LLC. She didn’t open one because she didn’t want to pay the fees.
“Log in the sites and set your chatroom status to “break”, Theresa said. “The users will see it and start to join the chat.”
“I want to block the leeches,” Cat said. A “leech” was a user who had not even inserted credit details and was almost worthless to spend time on. Some top models went ahead to even block users with no tokens in their wallets from chatting if the site allowed. “And limit whispers only to users who’d already tipped. I suspect we’ll have a lot of trolls in the chatroom today.”
“Yeah. Your name and ‘camgirl’ are trending on Twitter. I hope the site doesn’t crash.”
“Uh, I haven’t checked,” Cat blushed and launched the app.
Mr. Mouser headbutted Cat.
“Hey, no time to get anxious!” Theresa snapped her fingers.
Tara cheered, “Focus, girl. You’re going live in five.”
Cat opened the Bloomberg dedicated financial laptop and booted it up. On the studio computer that did the image processing, the financial data appeared in place of the green canvas. She also added another watermark on the corner opposite the studio's own. It was a text-only disclaimer and read, “For entertainment purposes only. Not financial advice.”
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
With the video settings the way she wanted, she checked her wardrobe. She dressed provocatively, with a skin tone pantyhose, black latex shorts that had a band to appear like a miniskirt but showed no underwear, and a lace crop top that exposed her stomach, arms, shoulders, and a bit of her modest cleavage. She donned the redhead wig Theresa gave her and put on a “bad girl” makeup with painted freckles. She completed her look with fingerless leather gloves and no shoes as she would stay on the bed for most of the stream.
The only “kinky” stuff she was willing to do (at least until she lost her mind during the stream) do was to show her feet, a very, very common request patron had. It would cost 100 tokens, though.
“Break a leg!” She shouted to vent her tension, making Theresa chortle.
“I’ve never seen a girl shout that, but hey, if it works for you, baby, break it ‘till you make it! Your stream is already going through the splitter! It’s go-time!”
Cat took the wireless keyboard and mouse and started to log in to the streaming websites. Her heart pounded like crazy and Catherine was squealing in her head nonstop. The chatrooms came alive and she told the window manager to tile them, making it very hard to read all of them.
Then all of the chat windows froze. Even the outbound stream quality meter dropped to zero.
“Fuck! What happened?” Cat shouted.
Tara checked the video processing computer and was dismayed, “We are under cyber attack, the studio’s connection is flooded by requests! It’s a DDOS!”
Cat sent a message on Twitter bemoaning the situation. Several black-hat hackers were trying to invade the studio network. She took her laptops offline and unplugged them from the other computers. Dione entered the room, “The internet is dead, what’s going on, Tara?”
“Our computers caught DDOS,” Theresa replied. “I think it’s how internet AIDS is called.”
Cat dropped her phone and glared at the prankster veteran. “Not funny. Almost true, but not funny.”
Theresa had an idea and snapped her fingers, “Get that phone and start shooting a selfie video. We can at least upload it to Youtube and get some ad revenue.”
“You do it!” Cat bounced the idea back. “My hands are shaking!”
Theresa took her phone and filmed it, adding her own narration. “We’re here at PixCamStudios, where Catherine was about to have her camgirl premiere. There she is on the bed with her brave guardian Mr. Mouser, all ready to stream but some assholes are trying to break into our network and gave us internet AIDS.”
“DDOS!” Tara protested loudly. “And they won’t break through our firewall, it’s just annoying. They’re eating all our bandwidth.”
The tanned model turned the phone around and stared at the camera, “Hey you internet AIDS assholes, let the girl work! Go mine some Bitcoins or something and scram!”
“Tara, how long will it take to get our internet back?” Dione asked.
“The attackers are dropping,” the young technician replied, “I think we can go live in a few minutes. Catherine, it is safe to put your computer back on the LAN.”
Cat was taking deep breaths with her eyes closed to keep her cool. She opened and closed her hands to pump the blood and fight the cold seeping into her fingers.
“Dione, plug her machine. The Bloomberg one.”
The studio CEO stared at the laptop, “Now I understand why you picked that screen name.”
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“Catriel the Stonks Girl” chatrooms came back online and she started streaming. She was sitting on the bed with Mr. Mouser on her lap. The video stream had the proper watermarks in their places and the signature retro screen of the Bloomberg Terminal software behind her. However, she didn’t move, staring at the webcam like a doe stares at headlights at night. The chat windows burst with messages and a few tips already started to come her way.
Behind the webcam, Tara, Dione, and Theresa watched.
“Say something!” Theresa shouted, unable to watch the tragedy unfold. “Damn we forgot the music!”
“Shh!” Dione covered Theresa’s mouth with her hand.
“Hello, guys! Oh, the messages are going so fast I can’t read them, I’m amazed! Thank you to everyone that already tipped me. I’m Catriel, the Stonks Girl, and welcome to my chat room. Please forgive my noob-ness, I forgot to put some music. So, the first tip of five hundred tokens with a song name gets to pick the first dance with me and I’ll let Spotify build a playlist based on that.”
She got five at the same time on three different websites. She found one and latched on it
“BrooklynInstagram453 is the winner, thank you so much for your tip! Hey, have we met before? Maybe? Anyway, you picked ‘Gurenge’ by LiSA… Do we have that song?” She asked while staring at Terry.
Catherine started to laugh.
Theresa got the song playing. It was a J-pop song with a soprano lead. The chat windows burst with messages saying “Demon Slayer!”
“Right! It’s an anime opening!” Cat said. “I see what you did there, guys! Well played, I guess,” she let out a nervous giggle. “The title of the anime is Demon Slayer. Right.”
More tips flooded the room. The request came. “Show your feet!”
She felt exposed and awkward but the attention she was getting was mesmerizing. “Do you guys want to see my feet?” She asked while blushing. A wall of “Yes”, “Feet!”, and “show your tits” exploded. She glanced up at Dione, who gave her two thumbs up and a fourteen-teeth-grin. “Okay, feet are fifty tokens each!”
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Twenty minutes into the stream she was starting to loosen up. She’d set a few tip categories, like “flash feet” fifty tokens, “Say I love you
By popular suggestion “Say ‘Hasta la Vista, baby’” entered the menu because someone took a clip from the movie Terminator where a certain Californian governor said the famous line, posted her face over the Austrian-American actor and former bodybuilder, and uploaded it to youtube.
Her phone buzzed with a message and she looked at it. The sites had sent her the first money transfer, and she finally had some cash in her checking account.
“Okay, guys. Two new categories are entering the menu! We have ‘buy Stonks’ for sixty-nine tokens, and ‘sell Stonks’ for ninety-six tokens! Every time someone tips that, I’m going to use my terminal here to actually buy or sell some stonks! It’s real and it’s connected to the NYSE! Here, with Catriel, we all love our Stonks! We live and die by our GREED! This is America and the free market rules! You’ll see which Stonks I’m buying or selling, and I’ll tell you guys why. This is not financial advice, though. If you want to follow me, that’s on you! Read the watermark at the lower-left corner of the screen! We are going to day trade live here in this chat room every weekday from now on! And if I make ten thousand dollars before the floor closes in an hour and a half, the bra comes off!”
The chat room went wild.
“However, I need your tips, guys! This heiress here is dead broke as you all know, and I can’t do Stonks without your tips! Damn, who doesn’t want to see some wild topless capitalist heiress girl go crazy with her Stonks?! GTFO if you do. These graphs you see behind me? They’re all real and I’ve kept an eye on them since the stream started."
She leaned forward and closed in the webcam, "I'm all ready to roll on the trading floor with you, baby," She purred with a sultry voice before returning to the middle of the bed. "And this stream is not sponsored by Bloomberg but I’m open for business, dammit!”
Theresa helped her adjust the topic on the chatrooms using a wired keyboard.
Cat had lost all the reticence and bashfulness. She found herself dancing on the bed to some tune that changed every few minutes because Tara found a way to automate the process using the interactive tip plugin the sites offered the streamers. It was usually only for sex toys, but the girl hacked it.
She shouted to the crowd like an auctioneer, “So, guys! Let’s do it! Let the money printer go BRRRRRRRRR!”