The way to keep murder at a PG rating was to keep the rough stuff off screen. Sound effects came in handy. Glenda had set up in the garage and was doing her thing. See? Your imagination filled in the details without me saying much else. I had spent some time in the sound studio messing around with combining some of our new sound effects to create even more.
“Why would you put the dumpster being emptied sound with a toaster popping?” the Sound Studio AI asked me.
“Look, you speed up the toaster popping,” I replied, toying with the levers and slides of the sound board. “Now that moment when the toast goes down sounds like a gun being cocked and the pop sounds like it fired. If you put the growl of the dumpster being emptied behind it and slow it down it almost sounds like a car driving by. Now,” and I played the final effect, “we have a drive-by shooting.”
The 1,001 sound effects package had been strictly G-rated. I’d been incredibly disappointed as we needed stuff that was grittier if we were going to be vigilantes on the run. The AIs had tried to do combos to make new sounds, but they were limited to algorithms that just weren’t creative enough. I’d also changed the pitch of the toaster to make it deep enough for a shot. The sound board was incredible as it could speed up and slow down specific spots of each sound effect, giving me an amazing amount of control of the sounds.
I’d doubled our sound effects to include the moans and whimpers of Thelma as Glenda did her thing, and we kept our PG rating because the camera watched Tami, Jean, and I playing DnD while floating in the diving pool. The sounds coming from the garage area were enough for our audience to get the picture without graphic violence or sexual themes that would have been censored out. I’d trained the Sound Studio AI on how to do the combinations, but Nick’s work wasn’t as good as what I could do. I had a knack for it. It was worth the two hours in the sound studio that was posted on the stream, but not the episode.
Viewers – 511,188
“You’re in a cave and there’s the smell of smoke coming from further north,” Jean was telling us as our DM (dungeon master). It must have been good stuff because our viewers were going up. We were trending on social media under so many niche groups that it was hard to track. Tyrone was worth his xp drain. The Producer and World AIs chipped in for more upgrades for him. I had summaries and stats from so many places that I almost felt like a producer myself. 500,000 viewers was nothing to sneeze at and so far my ratings were okay. They liked the tutorials of the behind-the-scenes stuff like sound combinations and that was trending on Cord servers of young filmmakers, and they were begging for me to put out my own version of a sound effects package. I was still resisting because I didn’t own anything yet. Any money I made now would be syphoned right into prison pockets, and I’d be damned if I was going to work for my torturer.
“I send Kodo to sneak ahead to see what we’re walking into,” Tami moved Kodo’s figurine forward in the 3d cave system on the game table. Kodo was nodding as he sat at the side of the pool to watch the game. DnD seemed to be the one thing that could get Kodo to sit still for hours. We’d knocked the legs off of gaming table and floated it in the middle of the pool, pushing it back and forth between us on a flamingo float. Don’t worry, we’d disabled the electrical conductivity of the water of the pool. In any case, Tami, Jean and I in swimsuits (tasteful as they were) was trending in a teenage crowd.
“Kodo sees the cave branching with the smoke coming from the righthand passage,” Jean said, materializing the cave system where Kodo’s figurine was now located.
Even with all our horse-trading, I hadn’t been yanked out of VR again, and I hadn’t seen or heard from Dr. Psychomisery. It made me a little nervous. I hated that I was watching over my shoulder all the time. Whatever he was going to do, he’d better get on it or I was looking at getting out of this place free and clear by the end of another week. It had only taken us a week of daily episodes to get to 500,000, and our growth trend (thank you, Tyrone) showed we’d hit my release goal by the end of the week.
“We’ll take the right branch,” Tami said, moving all our figures up to where Kodo’s figure was. Kodo chittered and Tami translated for the audience. Kodo could do the same thing as Hex with scrolling text, but we’d chosen to make it seem like Kodo could only talk to Tami. “Kodo wants to scout ahead again,” Tami said, moving Kodo’s figurine down the cave branch.
Last week with the gaslighting episode, we’d gotten about 50,000 viewers per episode, but the views of our offscreen time was netting us at least 100,000 per day. I was almost constantly dribbling free stat points into stats, and Tyrone was in charge of the horse trading that made sure we used up all my running xp as it came rolling in. The stat boosts made me feel superhuman. It was like every other thing I said became Clickbait so we were spacing them out carefully.
“Remember to look up,” I quipped, and a spider took it. I didn’t think it was a marvelous one-liner but the spiders were much more reactive to me due to my higher Trend Adhesion, which had combined with the Clickbait to make it so that only the spiders from pertinent social media caught the line. This one was headed to a DnD channel commercial banner. It was accompanied by a picture of me in my suit on the floating lounge chair, the finger of my left hand dragging in the pool water and my other hand pointing up.
Exp +100 (Click-bait pick-up!)
Viewers – 551,336
My leveling should have slowed down, what with needing more xp to level, but our viewer count was battling the growth curve and winning hands down. At first, I’d been struggling to get the 1,000 points necessary for levels 1-10. At level 10, back in Palm Beach, I’d thought it would take forever to get 5,000 for that next level, but when I’d hit 25 in the gaslighting episodes and all their retakes, it had doubled again. The World AI had kind of cheated for me on that one, but he said he was just being lazy about making new quests. He’d given me another viewer quest that gave me 10,000 xp for every 10,000 viewers, making it so that I now netted two xp for everyone who clicked into the stream to watch either episodes or backstage stuff.
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“Good call,” Jean grinned like a maniac and manifested a darkmantle that lunged for poor Kodo, who chittered emphatically. A darkmantle was shaped like a stalactite on its head with a great skirt of smothering, tentacle-laced rubbery substance that tries to grab onto you and smother you to death. “A dark shadow falls from the ceiling and tries to envelope Kodo. Thanks to Janet, it didn’t get a surprise attack. Roll for initiative!”
We all hit buttons that tossed the dice in the focal wall. We’d reprogrammed it for a very complex cat tree playground where Podo and Hex were practically comatose from their previous frantic play session. Those play sessions were trending in leading cat videos, a very competitive market. It had a huge exercise wheel, animated mice, tiny fluffy bunny balls, and little kitty hammocks full of Podo and Hex at the moment. The fluffy bunny balls doubled as our dice as they rolled around the complex, completely ignored by the sleeping pets. The animations were fun as Tami’s dice flamed, Kodo’s super-bounced, and mine scampered around on legs at every corner of the die. We called out our numbers and Jean popped our flags up in line for actions with the darkmantle after Tami but before me.
“Kodo wants to backstab it,” Tami tried, but Jean shot her down with a look. Darkmantles had eyes all around their squid-like appearance so there wasn’t a real back to them. “Fine,” Tami amended. “He’ll use his dagger. I’m going to shoot it with my bow from back here, trying not to hit Kodo.”
Level 50 had screwed me up again as I now had to get 25,000 xp between all my levels until level 75. The World AI had thrown random quests up here and there to mitigate the curve, but we all felt like they were more distracting than helpful, so Tyrone was filtering them out of my visual display while we were on air. Even this DnD game had been tailored to reach another introvert-laced crowd that had turned out to be my best demographic. I didn’t mind. I liked the game, but my gaming group had split up, you guessed it, after college which was when I’d also grown up enough to quit Pokémon. Why had I wanted to be a grown up? This was so much better.
Viewers – 599,360
“The darkmantle tries to envelop Kodo,” Jean rolled her dice and prompted Kodo to do the same, “and fails this attempt, but you still take six points of damage.”
The viewers seemed to agree that this was the life. Almost 100,000 in the last hour alone? Our growth was outpacing even our most optimistic projections. That was two more levels, and I dribbled the stat points in, feeling so smart and capable with every drop of progress.
“I’m casting magic missile so that I don’t hit Kodo with any friendly fire,” I proclaimed, rolling for damage, which Jean scowlingly applied to the darkmantle who then died a horrible death with a Wilhelm scream courtesy of our Sound Studio’s new sense of humor.
“Roll Perception Check!” Jean called out unexpectedly. “And you are all thrown into inky darkness that is filled with dripping tentacles.”
The next hour was chaos, a waterfall of darkmantles raining down on our characters and viewers flowing like water into our stream. We used close-ups of our game board, which was a high def, mini VR itself that viewers could click into to feel like they were a pet sitting on our shoulders as characters fought. I dispelled the darkness quickly so it wouldn’t get boring for the viewers, even if it did cost me a few health points. It was glorious. Who knew that people tuned in to watch celebrities play DnD? Was I a celebrity now? I was certainly getting there. Maybe down on the E or F list? The idea was a little heady and I fought the urge to feel important. I reminded myself that just because our views were high didn’t mean it was only my success. The Special Effects department had worked with the World AI to upgrade that gaming table as a mini VR clickthrough experience that usually had a pay component, but that we were running free.
Viewers – 749,640
“Sorry to interrupt, but this looked important and time sensitive,” Tyrone’s lovely baritone chimed in my ear even as I shrugged off the last of the darkmantles. “It’s in your email.”
“Summary,” I thought back to him.
Tyrone forwarded an email to me from the NOOB network, even as he explained the summary of a three-page email and the 10-page attachment. My eyes got a little wider, causing the cameras to shift their angles to feature Tami and Jean. I even flubbed a simple one-liner about darkmantles being bad comedians because their jokes leave people in the dark.
I’d been turning down contracts from agents and channels alike, but the NOOB network wasn’t used to this kind of traffic. It appeared that nobody stayed on the NOOB channel for this level of traffic. They weren’t built for it and before they splurged for an expensive upgrade of their network, they were going to make sure I wasn’t disappearing anytime soon so that their investment paid off.
“We need a meeting,” I alerted my costars and the crews. Our DnD session had only really earned me half an episode of scenes and about 30 minutes of off air time, but we were past me and my crew bickering over taking a break when I called for it.
That floored me. How far had we come! Within minutes and without complaint, Jean paused our DnD game with a cliffhanger of a gnoll chieftain fight just past the darkmantle ambush. We broke for “lunch.” It was all chit chat, pats on the back for Jean’s DMing, and chuckles as Glenda and Thelma exited the garage and we all headed to the red door.
“Hey Tami,” Jean said, draping an arm over Tami’s shoulder. “Why did the darkmantle get kicked out of the comedy club?”
“I don’t know,” Tami pressed her lips together and gave Jean a sideways look.
“Because all it could deliver was dark humor!” Jean answered, dodging Tami’s elbow jab.
“That’s terrible!” Glenda professed, with eye roll and groan. The ferrets wound in and out of our footsteps as they almost slithered, in a cute way, for the opening door.
“At least she didn’t flub the timing,” I bantered with them holding the door open for everyone as they filed into our new and improved dressing room.
“I could have done better timing and I’m just a guest star,” Thelma grinned.
“It could have been worse,” Tami quipped, working on her own timing. Yeah, it was a skill. Mine was too low for my taste, but I’d only trained with Grace on it for three points. There was just so much to do all the time. Luckily Grace could train everyone at once and while the AIs could only get points in real time (not their fast forwards between seconds), they weren’t much better than I was yet. “She could have dropped that one liner in the dark!”
“Like that one?” I teased Tami, who gave me the eye roll I was looking for.
Viewers – 815, 852