Joe got the contract he wanted with NOOB, with the stipulation that they play DnD at least once a week to provide a good enough revenue source for them to afford the upgrade. With the contract, NOOB were able to get the funding for their upgrade. It took offering them a year instead of six months, but that was balanced by the clause that gave NOOB 100% of the click-app revenue as long as Joe was on the NOOB network with an option for Joe or his new network to buy out of the deal if he moved to another network. In the meantime, they were buying bandwidth from the Supernatural Channel for the option of SNC picking up Joe’s show when all this was through. All that meant was that Joe was contractually bound to read through their contracts before any other network offers and have a negotiation meeting with them. Thanks to the SNC, NOOB wouldn’t even be going dark for the two days that the upgrade would need. Like all good negotiations, everyone was happy; not as happy as they wanted to be, but happy enough to not have hard feelings. Joe didn’t want bad feelings with SNC or NOOB. The latter held his life in their mainframes and the other was the most probable of places he’d go when he got released from prison.
Viewers – 1,394,709
That was Joe's biggest issue and why he was now stuck watching prison channels. Mandy had given him a list of shows and he’d logged in to them. Joe wouldn’t say that they were totally awful, but their feeds were practically dead. All he could think was that he’d gotten so lucky to not be right there with them. Joe gave a shudder of dread that he’d be side by side with these poor schmucks if he wasn’t careful about how he dealt with Dr. Psychoshithead.
“Have I hit a nerve?” Mandy asked, her hands pausing in the deep tissue massage she was giving Joe.
“No,” Joe told her. Mandy’s last upgrade had allowed her to have corporeal form even on the set and they were using the hell out of that by setting up an episode in a spa setting. Between takes, Joe could have a massage while he watched shows on his display. “It’s this show I’m watching. It makes me feel lucky, but almost painfully.”
“I don’t believe that your success is purely luck,” Mandy argued mildly, dribbling oil on Joe's legs before digging in. Joe didn’t know how this felt so good here when his real muscles in the pod were not affected in the slightest, but he’d take it. “You’ve worked very hard. Don’t you think hard work should be rewarded?”
“That hasn’t been my experience in real life,” Joe mumbled, but Mandy had a point, so Joe shifted perspective and went back to trying to find some loophole somewhere that would let him deal with these 0.5 star rating bombs. “Mandy, can we trade advertising with these shows?”
“What do you mean?” Mandy asked. “I can bring advertising into our conversation if you’d like.”
“Sure,” Joe blew out a breath and repeated his question. It wasn’t one of those necessary things since they were always processing all that was going on in the front of Joe's mind and what came out of his mouth. Joe’d learned that from a late-night confession by a slightly loopy Tami. The reason they had Joe repeat it was for aesthetics because they were supposed to be mimicking a real-world atmosphere for rehabilitation purposes. They forgot a lot. Joe liked it better when they forgot.
“Outside of the prison system, many independent shows do what they call ‘shout outs,’ where one show will reference another in their feed,” Advertising AI answered Joe. “Desperate ones do review swaps, but you’d have to watch a bit of their show to give a real review instead of just a quick rating. The larger cable networks do crossovers to spread their viewers across many shows.”
“And we can’t do those?” Joe asked around a moan from Mandy’s magic fingers.
“There are restrictions due to prison rules,” Advertising AI hedged. “It isn’t clear why more of them aren’t done, but we are limited by the way we can interact with other prisoners. They can’t physically come into our live feed, but we can have a PiP with them.”
“PiP stands for a picture in picture,” Mandy preempted Joe's question. “But why would you want to give them some of your screen time? They are killing your ratings.”
“But would they be doing that if I was helping them?” Joe proposed.
These are criminals, the World AI put in his two cents. They are unlikely to help you out of the kindness of their hearts.
Viewers – 1,495,723
----------------------------------------
“So am I, and I’m not unkind,” Joe countered, sharing his screen with them. “I mean look at this guy. Sure, he was one of the rate-bombers but he’s in a kid’s show about a skunk that can’t get any friends. Is he really a bad guy or did he just do a favor for Dr. Psychofungus to get some perk? I mean, what could the guy offer him? Probably anything, right?”
“You’re going to court fifteen prisoners a day to try to bribe them with advertising swaps to try to get them to reverse their rating bombs?” Mandy didn’t sound convinced.
“Supposedly, we can’t meet, but we can highlight their live feed,” Advertising nodded their heads. “It could lose some viewers.”
“We already know they don’t like more advertisements,” Grace was also listening in. Hell, who wasn’t listening in when Joe started putting out ideas? It upped their creativity to get involved, so Joe expected all his AIs were tuned in.
“Views aren’t doing any good for me right now without a rating above 4.0,” Joe complained, wishing he’d picked another venue for this conversation. It was impossible to relax for the massage when he was all tensed up with thinking. Joe sat up and let Mandy wrap him in a fluffy bathrobe. “It didn’t even matter when I hit a million views. My ratings are at 2.3. If I can’t fix that, I’m sunk.”
“At least the real viewers don’t pay any attention to the star rating,” Grace pointed out, but it was no use to Joe. He wasn’t demoralized by having a low star rating and it wouldn’t have mattered at all if it didn’t tank his release. He’d gotten Grace to post the star rating in his display so he could keep track of it, but it really was making him crazy again.
“Can you guys get me a PiP with this guy?” Joe asked. “The worst that can happen is that he says no, right?”
His crew didn’t look or sound convinced, but they made it happen. Joe read through the summary of the rules for prisoner-to-prisoner conversations, and they were seriously censored. If Joe mentioned any of a dozen things, the communication would be immediately terminated. He stared at his naked toes and wished he’d dressed for it, then again this guy played a talking skunk in a Bambi scenario, so maybe it wasn’t so bad.
“Hey!” came a voice of another human being and Joe nearly lost his tongue. Luckily, he had his stats to lean on, so he just gulped and plunged.
Viewers – 1,597,380
“Hi, I’m Joe, a fellow prisoner here,” he stated carefully.
“Yeah,” and the other guy had the temerity to look a bit abashed. “I’ve heard of your show.”
“I’ve been watching yours too,” Joe tried to sound bright. He couldn’t talk about the ratings specifically because it could be interpreted as combative or conspiratorial and Joe was pretty sure that once Dr. Psychoslime found out he was doing this, he’d be hovering there with his finger on some button. Joe had some leeway because they were having this conversation at 4am, which was when skunk-boy’s show started running for the early morning kiddos.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Really?” and his whiskers twitched oddly, reminding Joe of Hex’s expressions.
“Yeah, and I was wondering if maybe you wanted to do some advertising swaps?” Joe plunged into the pitch.
“With me?” his little skunk-nose scrunched up like he’d gotten a whiff of himself.
“It’s an I-scratch-your-back and you-scratch-mine kind of thing,” Joe offered.
“Is this about – ” he started, but Joe cut him off quickly. Joe was ready to cut them off because he was almost sure no one else had spent an hour sifting through the document on what they could and couldn’t talk about with each other.
“We can’t really talk about anything that might be considered combative, so I’m just here to offer a nudge of viewers to fellow performers in a similar situation to mine,” Joe warned him, hoping he wasn’t an idiot.
The skunk took a moment to think, as his round blue pupils probed the animated clouds above his little forest. “I couldn’t promise anything on my side, but I wouldn’t turn down free advertising.”
“How about some free advice?” Joe offered, then could have bit his tongue when the other guy frowned. “I mean, free tips? Like, did you know that your World AI can be upgraded?”
“Like I have that kind of xp to throw around,” his nose scrunched up again and Joe wondered if his animation could get stuck in that lopsided frown. Even his frown was cute.
“But if you upgrade the AIs, they can upgrade you back for cheaper than you might think,” Joe rushed to say, wondering if he was pushing his luck with a conspiracy angle. “It was cheaper than stats for me.”
He got a thoughtful look on his little skunk face, and Joe used his Emotional Resonance to the max and left it to simmer for him.
“Think about it and if you want to do a mass cooperative advertising trade, I’ll have my assistant send you some clips you can show on your show,” Joe dangled, and Mandy gave him a nod to show he’d already done it. “I’m contacting others to do the same. Maybe be ready to tune in to my channel at say, tomorrow at 1pm?”
Viewers – 1,699,367
Joe didn’t wait for a reply. They had a strict time limit on how long of a segment they could do with a PiP and Joe had more fellow prisoners to contact. Supposedly some prison rebellions had been done through these communications and so they were highly supervised by censor AIs. Joe had one hour to get all his interviews in before he was out of minutes.
“What?” came a grit-filled growl from a guy stuck in a volley of bullets on a Wild West set.
Joe gave his speech and left it dangling again.
“You want to do a shout out with me?” a mobster guy quirked an eyebrow.
“Why not?” Joe pressed.
Another speech. Another dangled opportunity.
“I’m a romance,” a drop-dead gorgeous woman protested from a hot tub. “What do our shows have in common?”
“I think my viewers are eclectic enough to like all sorts of things,” Joe raised an eyebrow at her and pointed his chin down to his fluffy robe and the bikini-clad Mandy in masseuse-form behind him pointedly.
She was going to think about it.
“No,” a guy on a raft in the middle of the ocean just closed the window. Joe had a few like that, but not as many as he thought there would be. Joe barely resisted rate bombing them for it. That would make him as bad as them, but it was very very very tempting.
Joe used up his hour’s worth of PiP time and set his AIs looking for some way to upgrade their systems for more. Joe had done eight. It wasn’t enough to counter Dr. Psychopissant’s efforts, but it was a start. Joe knew he needed to do more, but he didn’t know what. He’d have to wait 17 hours to contact any more, and he had to save about fifteen minutes for the broadcast part of it. Joe had only reversed two bombs so far, and their rating popped up to 3.1 with just two revisions. Mandy was tracking them for Joe so he knew exactly who it was, but that would have been totally impossible on his own because he would have had to be watching incoming urls and matching them with rating changes and then narrowing them down and finding the pattern. Yeah, Mandy was worth the running xp and all her upgrades. Joe was starting to think that if they upgraded her much more she’d be a person… or would that be a downgrade?
----------------------------------------
“Hey viewers!” Joe broke the fourth wall like a pro, thanks to his stats. They were televising out of the living room of the white apartment. Joe sat on the white couch like Shermon and his flag podcast. Joe felt just as stiff. “I’m here for a shout out for my fellow NOOBers!”
AIs scrambled to pop all eight of the prisoner live feeds up in PiPs around Joe's head. He was a little surprised that the spiders picked up that last line as a one-liner until he took a glance at where it was going. At least one of those 20k current viewers was Dr. Poopypants. There were other spiders, but they went to Podcasts, and surprisingly, his DnD viewer boards that were really trending now.
Viewers – 1,801,708
“I’ve got some buddies here across a great span of genres for everyone’s taste,” Joe announced, his acting skill making his obvious plug sound less fake-smiled and more genuine newscaster. Wait. Was there a difference? “Friendless Skunk is one of my favorite kid’s shows and it’ll help your kids learn how to make friends when maybe that’s super hard, right Flower?” Skunk-man’s PiP grew to take over the left-hand side of Joe's feed.
“That’s right!” Joe's prison-buddy’s skunk gave a perfect arm and fist move for the let’s-do-this-together emote. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what we’re doing wrong that make friends run away!”
“I can so understand that, Flower,” Joe nodded emphatically. “I’m such an introvert myself that I’m often the one running!”
That got a one-liner? Seriously, Joe's stats were ridiculous.
“Click on Flower’s feed on my screen here to go see Flower deal with his own friend-repellant issues!” And another one-liner flew off the shelf.
“Thanks Joe!” Flower smiled with a stream of scent wafting off his tail.
“And that brings us to my next friend, Cowboy Magnum,” Joe gave a quick laugh and then ducked at the sound of gunshots. “Are you in a place you can talk?”
“Not without getting shot, pardner,” Magnum shook his head.
“You don’t want to miss this gunfight,” Joe urged his audience with a laugh. “Go click on it! I won’t mind. Just be sure to come back to me someday…”
This was a great way to get some spiders. Joe had just gotten a new genre on his list of spiders, so all this promotion stuff wasn’t as one-way as it looked.
“Thanks to you on that, pardner,” and he tipped his hat to Joe with a winning smile Joe knew he must have upgraded to get.
Joe minimized the cowboy’s screen just as his hat got shot off his head. Joe was thinking there wasn’t a time to tune into his show that there wasn’t a gunfight going on. These shout-outs were actually increasing his audience even more. It wasn’t helping with the troll-bombs as much as he wanted it to, but spiders Joe'd never seen before were suddenly all over his live feed.
Viewers – 1,904,326
“So, I’d tune you into my friend Gargo’s feed, but it looks like he just lost that round of trivia and is set to lose another arm!” Joe squeaked and flinched away from that visage. “Luckily, he’s a regenerating octopus, so he’ll be back soon. Eww!” Blood and ink rushed over his screen, and they minimized it, so it was back next to Flower’s feed.
“I’ll be back,” echoed out of that feed in a way that gave Joe the creeps.
“If you like the bloody stuff, don’t miss Carmen’s Ghost,” Joe motioned as another screen got big on the other side of him. “Every episode is a haunting combination of bleeding houses and something that lives under the stairs.”
That screen pulled a classic ghost stretching the fabric over the wall scene with some lightning and trees scratching at windows. It was not going to make it. That bit was way overdone, in Joe's opinion. Still, Joe smiled and let the ghost do a final jump scare before the screen minimized again.
“Then there’s my friend Shelby, the super bunny in another universe,” Joe called out, bringing up one of his favorites that was highly undersold for her content. “She’s got so many alts, she doesn’t know what to do in that caught-in-the-video-game you’ve been missing in your life kind of way.”
Shelby gave Joe a bunny thumbs up and rushed to go fight another Nudibranchia (sea bunnies). Joe let her fight scene play out before going on to his next favorite. They were both his favorites. They were just too cute.
“And if you’re interested in romance that isn’t romance because it’s from the side-kick’s point of view, you should tune into ‘More to Love’ with Ahoge! You’ll never be so glad to set up your best friend with one of the top five magic-users at the magic school of your dreams!”
“Hey all you NOOBies out there,” Annie, the main character who wasn’t the main character waved shyly at the audience and canned applause almost made Joe want to smack the sound studio until he realized it was coming from her feed and not his.
“How are those magic matches going?” Joe asked her, actually interested in seeing her next episode.
“I’m working my way up that ladder, Joe,” she sounded so plucky and optimistic. “I just need to grind a few more stat points and I’ll be able to take on Levi and his snarky smile.”
“I’m rooting for you and so are my viewers, right viewers? Click away!”
Joe got through all the rest of his introductions before he started to feel the familiar burble of choking.
Viewers – 2,007,260