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. The imagination fills in the rest. Joe had spent some time in the sound studio messing around with combining some of their 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 him.
“Look, you speed up the toaster popping,” Joe 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 he played the final effect, “we have a drive-by shooting.”
The 1001 sound effects package had been strictly G-rated. Joe had been incredibly disappointed as the show needed stuff that was grittier if they 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. Joe had 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 him an amazing amount of control of the sounds.
Joe had doubled their sound effects to include the moans and whimpers of Thelma as Glenda did her thing in the garage, and they kept their PG rating because the camera watched Tami, Jean, and him playing DnD while floating in the diving pool. The sounds coming from the garage area were enough for their audience to get the picture without graphic violence or sexual themes that would have been censored out. Joe had trained the Sound Studio AI on how to do the combinations, but their work wasn’t as good as what he could do. Joe 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 them as their DM (dungeon master). It must have been good stuff because their viewers were going up. They were trending on social media under so many niche groups that it was hard to track. Mandy was worth her xp drain. The Producer and World AIs chipped in for more upgrades for her. Joe had summaries and stats from so many places that he almost felt like a producer himself. Half a million viewers was nothing to sneeze at and so far his ratings were okay. Viewers 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 him to put out his own version of a sound effects package. Joe was still resisting because he didn’t own anything yet. Any money he made now would be siphoned right into prison pockets, and he’d be damned if he was going to work for his 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. The AIs had disabled the electrical conductivity of the water of the pool. In any case, Tami, Jean and Joe in swimsuits (tasteful as they were) was trending in a teenage crowd. Joe had felt a little cheap at reading that stat, but every viewer put him one step closer to freedom, so he endured.
“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 their horse-trading, Joe hadn’t been yanked out of VR again, and he hadn’t seen or heard from Dr. Psychomisery. It made him a little nervous. Joe hated that the psycho was watching over his shoulder all the time. Whatever he was going to do, he’d better get on it or Joe was looking at getting out of this place free and clear by the end of another week. It had only taken them a week of daily episodes to get to half a million, and their growth trend, another Mandy stat, showed they’d hit his release goal by the end of the week.
“We’ll take the right branch,” Tami said, moving all their 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.
In the past week with the gaslighting episode, they’d gotten about 50k viewers per episode, but the views of their offscreen time was netting us at least 100k per day. Joe was almost constantly dribbling free stat points into stats, and Mandy was in charge of the horse trading that made sure they used up all Joe's running xp as it came rolling in. The stat boosts made Joe feel superhuman. It was like every other thing he said became clickbait, so they were spacing them out carefully.
“Remember to look up,” Joe quipped, and a spider took it. Joe didn’t think it was a marvelous one-liner, but the spiders were much more reactive to him due to his 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 Joe in his suit on the floating lounge chair, the finger of his left hand dragging in the pool water and his other hand pointing up.
Exp +100 (Click-bait pick-up!)
Viewers – 551,336
Joe's leveling should have slowed down, what with needing more xp to level, but their viewer count was battling the growth curve and winning hands down. At first, Joe had been struggling to get the thousand points necessary for levels 1-10. At level 10, back in Palm Beach, Joe had thought it would take forever to get five thousand for that next level, but when he’d hit 25 in the gaslighting episodes and all their retakes, it had doubled again. The World AI had kind of cheated for Joe on that one, but he said he was just being lazy about making new quests. He’d given Joe another viewer quest that gave him 10k xp for every 10k viewers, making it so that Joe 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 tried to grab onto Kodo and smother him to death. “A dark shadow falls from the ceiling and tries to envelope Kodo. Thanks to Joe, it didn’t get a surprise attack. Roll for initiative!”
They 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 their 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 Joe's scampered around on legs at every corner of the die. They called out their numbers and Jean popped their flags up in line for actions with the darkmantle after Tami but before Joe.
“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 Joe up again as he now had to get 25k xp between all his levels until level 75. The World AI had thrown random quests up here and there to mitigate the curve, but they all felt like they were more distracting than helpful, so Mandy was filtering them out of Joe's visual display while they were on air. Even this DnD game had been tailored to reach another introvert-laced crowd that had turned out to be Joe's best demographic. Joe didn’t mind. He liked the game, but his gaming group had split up, you guessed it, after college which was when he’d also grown up enough to quit Pokémon. Why had Joe wanted to be a grown up? This was so much better.
Viewers – 599,360
“The darkmantle tries to envelope Kodo,” Jean rolled her dice and prompted Kodo to do the same, “and fails this attempt, but you still take 12 points of damage.”
The viewers seemed to agree that this was the life. Almost 100k in the last hour alone? Their growth was outpacing even their most optimistic projections. That was two more levels, and Joe 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,” Joe proclaimed, rolling for damage, which Jean scowlingly applied to the darkmantle who then died a horrible death with a Wilhelm scream courtesy of their 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 their dnd party while viewers flowed like water into their NOOB stream. They used close-ups of their game board, which was a high def, mini VR itself that viewers could click into to feel like they were a pet sitting on their shoulders as characters fought. Joe dispelled the darkness quickly so it wouldn’t get boring for the viewers, even if it did cost him a few health points. It was glorious. Who knew that people tuned in to watch celebrities play DnD? Was Joe a celebrity now? He was certainly getting there. Maybe down on the E or F list? The idea was a little heady and Joe fought the urge to feel important. He reminded himself that just because their views were high didn’t mean it was only his 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 they were running free.
Viewers – 749,640
“Sorry to interrupt, but this looked important and time sensitive,” Mandy’s lovely voice chimed in Joe's ear even as he shrugged off the last of the darkmantles. “It’s in your email.”
“Summary,” Joe thought back to her.
Mandy forwarded an email to Joe from the NOOB network, even as he explained the summary of a three-page email and the 10-page attachment. Joe's eyes got a little wider, causing the cameras to shift their angles to feature Tami and Jean. He even flubbed a simple one-liner about darkmantles being bad comedians because their jokes leave people in the dark.
Joe had 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 Joe wasn’t disappearing anytime soon so that their investment paid off.
“We need a meeting,” Joe alerted his costars and the crews. Their DnD session had only really earned Joe half an episode of scenes and about thirty minutes of off air time, but they were past Joe and his crew bickering over taking a break when he called for it.
That floored Joe. How far they had come! Within minutes and without complaint, Jean paused their DnD game with a cliffhanger of a gnoll chieftain fight just past the darkmantle ambush. They 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 they 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 an eye roll and groan. The ferrets wound in and out of their footsteps as they almost slithered, in a cute way, for the opening door.
“At least she didn’t flub the timing,” Joe bantered with them holding the door open for everyone as they filed into their new and improved dressing room.
“I could have done better timing than your flub 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. Joe's was too low for his taste, but he’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 Joe was yet. “She could have dropped that one liner in the dark!”
“Like that one?” Joe teased Tami, who gave him the eye roll he was looking for.
Viewers – 815, 852