The announcement was three lines long, and he rewrote it over and over.
SABLE JOINS THE MODERN AGE
New series. Live, not drawn.
Top two tiers get the test stream first.
Then he sat with his thumb over the button for a few minutes, running the numbers again, because running numbers is what he did instead of panicking.
Then he posted it and went to bed.
He woke up in the early afternoon to the second-biggest day of tier upgrades the account had ever had.
wait LIVE live? like an actual person live?
is he doing 3d now. did this guy learn 3d
SABLE. HE'S DOING SABLE
"modern age" oh my god she's getting a phone. she's going to get a phone and I'm going to watch it happen six years I have waited to hear that girl's voice and I did not know I was waiting
He read the thread for an hour and a half. It kept going up, the way his numbers had been going up all month.
The name took him a few seconds. You don't launch a new thing under a new name. You launch it under the one people already have a feeling about, and after six years and sixteen hundred chapters the thing his audience had the most feeling about, by an enormous margin, was Sable. It was the single most obvious business decision he had ever made. He typed it into the account setup and moved on.
✦ ✦ ✦
The rig went in against the far wall, about six feet from his desk, which was as far apart as the apartment got.
Camera on a tripod. Two lights on stands, angled the way the internet told him to angle them. Microphone on an arm. The second machine underneath it, running warm and quiet and doing everything at once that his own machine would have caught fire attempting. He'd put a strip of masking tape on the floor to mark the edge of frame, because he'd worked out on day one that the alternative was her asking am I in it forty times a night.
He sat outside the tape, in the wrong-height chair from the corner of the bedroom, which had now been sat in twice in its entire life.
And he had his sentence ready.
He'd built it in advance and tested it against every bad scenario he could think of: if anything weird happens on camera, that's the CGI glitching out. It held up against all of them. The whole business rested on that one sentence.
The private stream had been live on Discord for thirty-one minutes. The server had two members: him and her.
SABLE · LIVE 0:31:12
Watching: 0 / 50
Server members: 2
Luna was in frame, in the good chair, and she looked incredible, and she was doing absolutely nothing.
The invite link was sitting in a draft message to fifty people and had been for thirty-one minutes, because she'd said she would give the signal, and she had not given the signal.
✦ ✦ ✦
She was being normal.
Not stiff; that came later. Normal, the way she was normal in public: at a register, in a hallway, standing behind him at a counter. Pleasant and unremarkable. Six years of drawing had taught him to spot a body doing nothing, and she was doing nothing with real commitment.
(Luna:She had a version of herself for being around people. She'd had it a very long time, and it worked, and the whole point of it was this: nothing about her should be worth describing afterward.
And now she was wearing it at a camera.)
And Josh was sitting behind the lights with his phone face-down on his knee, not sending the link.
Because it had occurred to him, somewhere around minute twelve, that every person in his audience had spent six years looking at a drawing. None of them had met the real thing. He had, and he'd taken it fine, and ever since that night at three in the morning he'd been assuming they would too.
Then again. They were fans. His fans. People who had paid money in advance for the privilege of looking at this.
It would be fine.
He didn't send the link.
Thirty-one minutes, and fifty of the highest-paying people in his life sitting on a Sunday evening with nothing happening.
Neither of them said anything about it, which was the actual problem, and neither of them said anything about that either.
✦ ✦ ✦
Finally, from inside the frame:
"Yeah?"
"Do we really have to do this?" Luna's hands were in her lap and had been for half an hour. "I don't, I mean, I- I don't really shapeshift in public. Won't I get into trouble?"
"Not really," Josh said. "Not this time. All of this is happening behind a screen. And people know it isn't real."
"But still." She shifted. "Why don't we start slow? Why don't we leave the shapeshifting for later?"
"Just start already." It came out harder than he meant it. "I'm not waiting around anymore."
"Wait. Just wait." She turned toward him, and the lights did something unflattering to the side of her face, and he logged it for later out of pure reflex. "Let's not rush this. This is a serious matter."
Josh picked up his phone.
He'd had the argument loaded for about a week and hadn't needed it yet, and it took him no time at all to find, and then he leaned over the tape and held the screen out to her.
"Here. Look at this."
A girl in a kitchen, mid-sentence, turning into a wolf. Not a cut. A good one, where the jaw goes long while she's still talking and the counter behind her stays exactly where it is. Four hundred thousand likes. Then the next one: a guy's face becoming a different guy's face over eleven seconds while he explains a recipe. Then a girl with six arms folding laundry, two million views, comment section arguing about which tool made it.
"See? There's already videos like this. There's thousands of them. So yours won't be that big of a deal."
He was still hesitating himself. But he could smell money, and that was louder than his doubts.
She watched the six arms twice.
Then she looked past his phone at the preview monitor, where there was a girl sitting in a chair in a small room, lit slightly too evenly, edges slightly too clean: a girl who looked completely real and didn't, quite, look like she was in the world.
"Fine," Luna said. "Let others join."
✦ ✦ ✦
He sent the link. They came in all at once, and the comments flooded.
SABLE · LIVE 0:33:40
Watching: 50 / 50
Server members: 52
OH
OH SHE'S REAL
THE COSPLAY. THE COSPLAY IS INSANE that's not cosplay that's a casting call. where did he FIND her she's so pretty I'm actually unwell the height??? she's got the height???
that is Sable. I'm not being dramatic. that's the face, that's the shoulders, that's 1600 chapters sitting in a chair ok whats with the filter tho yeah the filter is doing something weird to my eyes six years and he finally shows us a girl and he's put her behind a windscreen
Fifty people, the most Discord lets watch one stream. All week he'd thought of fifty as small. Fifty people typing at once was not small. He couldn't read it fast enough.
He looked away from it, at the room, at the real girl six feet away.
And Luna had gone completely rigid.
Not nervous. Not fidgeting. Locked. Both hands in her lap, spine at an angle no spine has ever willingly chosen, chin level, eyes on the lens: a girl doing an impression of a girl, holding a position for an audience, absolutely motionless.
She looked like a shoe in a display case.
Stage fright? For her? The girl who had abducted him from his own apartment and picked him up off the floor by his face, one-handed, at the end of an arm that went across a room.
It was, he thought, kind of cute.
He wanted to help. He couldn't open his mouth, because the mic would take it and fifty people would hear a guy in the room.
So he went into the chat.
LEBU:Come on. Talk. Do something.
✦ ✦ ✦
The chat stopped for a full second.
mothbite: Lebu. Don't speak.
mothbite: Let her do her thing. Don't interfere. The source of this chapter is g.com.
LEBU:The fuck? I made all this possible. Why are you stopping me?
mothbite: yeah great job. now fuck off pagefour: also remove the filters, they're an eyesore
Josh stared at his own screen.
His own fans were defending his own creation, Sable, from him.
And Luna, watching all of it scroll past on the monitor just off-lens, laughed.
Out loud. One short one, entirely by accident, and the lock came off her shoulders on the way out of it.
"Hey," she said, to fifty strangers, in the first sentence she had said to anybody but him in a month. "Don't gang up on J—"
She stopped.
"I mean, Lebu. He is the one who set this up."
ch1287: and he did a terrible job
bigcatt: HEY SHUT UP SHE JUST TALKED mothbite: you shut up. I know she can talk bigcatt: you don't appreciate her voice. mod ban this guy
"Hey. Hey." Luna put a hand up. "Chill down. I can talk, alright."
fourdollarsamonth: yes queen. your words are my command
LEBU:Isn't it "your wish is my command"?
bigcatt: mod ban this guy too ch1287: he isn't even doing his job. FIX THE FILTERS
LEBU:I AM THE MOD
LEBU:I am also the admin and the owner. You are all extremely lucky I'm not banning you mothbite: so broke he can't afford a mod pagefour: I'll be your mod. I'll work for free krill: same. I've got the time krill: I have SO much time
Josh sat in the wrong-height chair, in his own apartment, on hardware he had bought, on an account in his name, being run out of his own chat by people who were at that moment paying him money.
"Guys," Luna said. "Let's not focus on that. Lebu is good enough."
LEBU:good enough
"Let's talk about something else. Come on, pick a topic."
✦ ✦ ✦ what are you gonna do here? like what's the show what's the streaming schedule
I wanna see you shapeshift
^^^ shapeshift can she even do that? is that a thing this can do that's Sable, no? she should be able to
SHAPESHIFT
Luna read it.
Then she said, "Alright. Alright. I am doing it."
And she brought her hand up into frame.