Hello everyone, it's me, Nagito Komaeda on the Nintendo DS

[Pippi]

“Yo! What’s up everyone? It’s me, Keke Fortuna, everyone’s favourite globetrotting chinchilla girl, and I’m here today with a ton of super exciting news about everything that’s coming up this month! First, though, we’ve got a few messages from our sponsors for today’s video. Guys, we’ve all been there; it’s late, you just got home from school, or, like, work, or trekking through the rainforest, whatever you’ve been doing. And you’re starving, but you don’t wanna go through the process of finding something to eat, and making sure you’ve got all the ingredients in the house - you just wanna rip open a bag of Doritos or order a pizza, I’ve been there, like, so many times, and-”

Out of the corner of her eye, Gabby saw her sister shaking her head, cutting her hand across her throat in the universally-agreed sign for ‘Please stop, you sound like a twat.’ Frowning, she took her headphones off, and rested them on the desk next to the keyboard, backlit in a bright neon rainbow pattern, before swiveling her chair around to the left.

“Ugghhhh, what is it now?” Gabby groused, folding her arms, well-practiced pout firmly affixed to her face. “I was, like, totally getting into the groove, there, Izzy! Plus I wanted to get all the sponsorship crap outta the way as fast as possible, that stuff’s so boring and forced and-”

“You’re out of character.”

“What?”

The pout very quickly turned into a deep frown and look of righteous indignation.

“Whaddya mean, I’m, like, totally in character!” Gabby continued. “I couldn’t be more in character, did you not hear me? I’d, like, even picked up on that kinda accent thing you’d started doing recently!”

“Oh, um, no, sorry, I mean… obviously you’re still killing it with the actual, um, voice and personality and stuff it’s just… uh, just… Keke doesn’t like pizza… is all.”

“... Huh?”

Izzy pulled a face and chewed her lip, before flipping backwards through the thick A4 WHSmith notebook that was sitting in her lap, front and back covered in dozens of stickers. From where Gabby was sitting, she could see that nearly every single page had been filled from top to bottom with tiny, meticulously neat handwriting, so small it almost looked like solid black lines - as if her sister had just decided one day to start collecting bar codes for fun.

Which, y’know, Gabby couldn’t really make fun of too much. Stamp collecting and all.

“There.”

Izzy suddenly stopped, and tapped her finger down onto the center of a page near the beginning of the notebook. It looked pretty much the same as all the others, as far as Gabby could see, and even had a couple of post-its sticking out the top and side, each themselves emblazoned with the same teeny tiny text. Jeez. Gabby didn’t think there was a single bit of homework she’d taken this many notes for in her life.

“Part Three of the, uh, ‘Spiderman 2’ Let’s Play,” Izzy carried on. “At two hours and fifteen minutes in, Keke says that she doesn’t eat pizza, she doesn’t like it cause it’s too greasy and impossible to clean out of her fur.”

She looked up from her book, peering over the rim of her glasses.

“Then some stuff about needing a ton of dust baths to get it all out.”

“Come off it. You, like, can’t be serious, Izz.”

“Check her wiki page, if you like.”

Frown still on her face, Gabby swung back around - with a little difficulty, Izzy’s SecretLab chair was still too big for her even after being adjusted, and her feet didn’t quite touch the floor - to face the monitor, clacking intently away at the keys.

“Like, even if it is there,” she muttered, still looking at the screen, eyes scanning down the page. “Does it totally matter too much? It’s one line in one single episode. People aren’t gonna, like, grab their pitchforks and torches if you say you’re craving Dominoes all of a sudden.”

“You’d be surprised. Trivia section. Not sure how far down you’ll have to scroll to find-”

Izzy was cut off by a sudden, high-pitched noise of shock and bewilderment, erupting from Gabby’s mouth.

“Holy crap, Izzy, excuse me?!”

“Told you,” Izzy muttered. “Said you’d be surprised.”

“How much information is in this- jeez, this is longer than most novels! And some of the stuff here… ‘Keke once fell asleep in a McDonalds ball pit, and took two hours to be found because of how small she is,’ ‘On two separate occasions, Keke has accidentally pulled the fire alarm in a shopping mall bathroom because she thought it was the lightswitch-’”

“Only once so far. But every story needs a little, um, embellishment. And there’s always time for it to happen again.”

“- and there’s, hold on. ‘CONTINUITY ERROR: In Episode 7 of her ‘Spelunky 2’ Let’s Play, Keke claims that she knows which way around stalactites and stalagmites are ‘easy peasy’. However, in Part 2 of her later released ‘Uncharted 2: Among Thieves’ livestreams, she incorrectly refers to them both by the wrong name.’ Like… what?!”

“Yep. People get, uh, people get real meticulous over everything I say. Oh, hey, there’s the section on Keke’s food preferences and stuff.”

Gabby leaned in a little closer, squinting at the screen.

“Yep. Yeah, it sure is. And it says here, her favourite food is… Oh, Izzy, no, what?!”

She scrunched her nose up and made a noise of disgust, spinning back around again to glare at her sister.

“What’s wrong?”

“Raisins? Seriously? Her favourite food’s raisins?”

“They’re a good snack. For chinchillas, I mean, I looked it up.”

“Izz, I hate raisins. They, like, totally make me feel like I’m gonna vom! What if there’s, like, a promo we need to cut at some point and I gotta eat those gross things?”

There was silence for a moment.

“Oops,” was all Izzy said.

Another heavy pause.

“Maybe we’ll need to get some, uh, exposure therapy scheduled, then.”

Gabby stuck her tongue out, then resumed her previous pose of arm-folded poutiness.

“Jeez, and you keep track of all this in, like, that one book?”

“There’s another one on the table behind me, but, yeah.”

“Man, you’re totally on top of all this stuff, Izz, can’t you record this one instead?”

Gabby knew, even before the sentence had fully slipped out of her mouth, what the answer to that would be. Izzy’s face turned downcast, and her previously composed and calm poise was immediately replaced with fidgeting and shifting, fingers tugging at the hem of her shirt and adjusting her glasses, repositioning in her chair as if the seat had suddenly sprouted rows of tiny spikes.

“I mean… well, um, I guess I could, uh, try to do it, sure… I mean, like you said, I’ve got, um, a lot of it memorised, and I guess I can, uh, um, check my notes and… um, read from them. I guess.”

“Hey, hey, no, it’s okay. It’s okay,” Gabby said, voice perhaps as soft and tender as it had ever been. “Sorry, Izz. I know you don’t like this whole scripted, pre-planned stuff. Doesn’t come natural to you, does it? I can do it, no problem. You can, like, totally count on me!”

A brief glimmer of a smile flashed across Izzy’s face, before she looked down at her now-closed notebook, and chewed at the same spot on her lip, enough now to leave a red, raw spot.

“... I know. But, um, you don’t have to do it, y’know? Not if you don’t want to, not if it feels like you’re forcing yourself into doing it. I can probably, uh, find some other way around it, put out some kinda… discrete casting call, or scouting, or whatever - y’know, there’s a number of folks who do a pretty decent imitation of Keke’s voice online - or, worst case scenario, I can, um… do it. Myself…”

“C’mon, Izz.”

Gabby snapped her fingers twice, an act that seemed to break her sister out from her melancholic reverie. She folded her arms again, let out an audible sigh, gave a little shake of the head, all actions that seemed at odds with the genuine smile on her face.

“If I didn’t wanna, like, pitch in and help with this, with all of this, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

Few truer words had ever been spoken, at least not by Gabby McLeod. The moment she lost interest in something, it was gone, out of her life, never to be picked up again and afforded only the briefest and most awkward of glances out of the corner of her eye. It happened time and time and time and time and time again. It was… an effort, nowadays, even trying to pick up anything new, knowing that the moment her mind wandered, it would be nothing more than wasted time and now-painful memories.

She would do pretty much anything to make sure Keke Fortuna didn’t turn out the same way.

“You’ve got something really, really special going on here,” she continued. “I mean it! Like, look at all of this!”

She swept her hand back, gesturing towards the next great American novel that made up Keke Fortuna’s wiki page.

“This is, like, totally insane! In a good way! People really care about all this stuff! And it’s fun! It’s really fun! I wanna keep being Keke Fortuna for as long as possible - y’know, outside of the actual streaming part, you’ve totally got that all covered. I just guess, like, I wasn’t expecting there to be… so much.”

“It could be worse. Trust me. You don’t wanna know some of the info that’s on some of the other vtubers’ wiki pages.”

“Ew? Like, their - actually, no, you’re right, I really don’t wanna know!”

They both laughed at that, Izzy covering her mouth with her hand as she did so. It was her that spoke up again first, once the giggling had died down.

“Thanks, though. Um, like, really really thanks. This helps out so, so much, Gab, you don’t even know.”

“Be rude not to help out my little sister, wouldn’t it? C’mon, let’s totally smash this thing! No talk about pizza this time. And if I ever, like, totally go off-piste again, just prod me or whatever, make sure I don’t, like, get Keke’s favourite prime number wrong.”

“It’s 677. Just for the record.”

Gabby rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out at Izzy once again, before swinging back around to face the mic, big cheerful grin on her face once more.

“Yo! What’s up everyone? It’s me, Keke Fortuna…”