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Static Plea (5) - With Halloween just around the corner, television stations and streaming services are constantly playing various spooky themed movies and episodes of your favorite shows. When you sit down to watch something in particular, the screen goes static. You try to change the channel or pick a different show but every one of them is static. If you continue to watch (or attempt to fix the television), an eerie voice comes across the speakers begging for help and warns you that they're coming. No matter what you do or say, they only repeat the same phrases. When you turn off the television and turn it back on again, everything has turned to its regularly scheduled programming.
As part of being a content creator, Tochi was always looking to get on top of the latest trends in video games that vtubers were playing… even if that meant playing games that she wasn’t very good at.
For the month of October, aka, ‘the spooky month’, Tochi had made plans to play horror-themed video games, or co-op games with friends of that genre, and had made posts to all her social media accounts fielding game ideas from her community, back at the start of the month. Usually, her regular streaming content a vtuber was more along the lines of gacha role-playing or rhythm games, or some combination thereof, as well as her much anticipated karaoke streams. On occasion, as Tochi had been working on improving her art and sewing skills over the years, she did either drawing streams in which she did either vtuber assets or drew fanart of her model; sometimes, she would do random vtuber concepts as well- it wasn’t a realistic dream perhaps, but lately Tochi did have fleeting dreams of being an art ‘mama’ with her own vtuber ‘daughters’ one day. Either one of the above, or she also on occasion did handcam streams where she would show off whatever irl craft project she was working on at the moment.
Horror games weren’t really something she was good at, to be honest- Tochi wasn’t very good with jumpscares, surprisingly- but what better kind of games to play for the countdown to Halloween than horror games? Combined with letting her viewers donate to play random spooky alerts to add to the thrills, Tochi felt like this sounded like a solid plan. Glancing at the comments to her community post on YouTube, Tochi had found a lot of good suggestions for games that would ensure she wouldn’t be having to scramble around for things to play… provided everything worked nicely with her streaming computer of course, but it was pretty rare for her to have issues that weren’t of the internet kind!
Something she had also fielded ideas for was movie ideas. Aside from scary horror games, there was also the option to do watchalongs for some classic movies that she could find on streaming services for cheap. Ultimately, Tochi had put up a poll and left it up to her community to vote- did they want a horror game today, or a scary movie?
Among the games on her schedule for the week was that one game everyone was playing right now, that new Chilla’s Art game about a streamer who had her identity leaked and who was being stalked. Tochi had been careful to avoid spoilers when she could, but curiosity had gotten the best of her earlier and she had watched some clips from a couple of her favorite vtubers. As much as she wanted to play that one today though, ‘scary Halloween movie’ had looked to be the winner of the poll, and thus she had posted a waiting room for her viewers while she worked on getting things set up.
Only… the moment she was ready to start, something strange happened. Although everything had seemed okay just a second ago, suddenly the TV that she had been planning to stream the movie from was starting to act up, static filling the screen instead of what she had been planning on playing. Frowning, Tochi wondered if she had it on the wrong channel, or if she had done something wrong in her setting up of things? She wasn’t a big expert on television sets and how to fix them, so if her TV broke, she was going to be in a bit of a sticky situation, what with her plans and all… Trying a couple different things, Tochi tried to get the movie to show up on the screen, to no luck so far, only getting more static for her efforts.
Well, this sucks, Tochi thought to herself, pouting; she’d have to delay her stream if she couldn’t get this sorted out soon! Just then, an unknown, eerie voice came out from the speakers, which the young woman was pretty certain didn’t come from the movie!
“Help me…” the voice pleaded, though Tochi didn’t know who needed help or why, “They’re coming this way! Please… help me…”
“Wha? Huh? Who is this?” Tochi asked, as if she thought she could be heard by the voice, but it only continued to repeat the same sentence over and over again. Confused and just ever so slightly unnerved, Tochi shut off the TV, and turned it back on again, because, well, that was what you were supposed to do when you have tech troubles right? Strangest thing was, when she turned the tv back on and booted things back up… the menu for her movie was back on the screen. How strange, and also, more than a little creepy!
Maybe she should just play Parasocial instead of doing a watchalong.
