Naofumi's POV

I was a bit excited. I eagerly opened up my backpack and took out all my old recording stuff which I had been going to throw out. Because of the way I was going to set things up, I would have to set up another computer so that it was away from my actual gaming computer. Which meant that I had to use an old crappy laptop which I had been using in high school, but whatever. It would work for now.

So, what I did was set up my usual recording setup for Raphtalia to use.

I set my microphone and my gaming computer. Then I connected a wireless keyboard to it so that I could play it while Raphtalia was in front of the camera. I kept a dummy keyboard under the computer so it could look like Raphtalia was using it if the camera ever drifted down to show it.

I then set up my phone to sit in front of her, just right behind the camera so that she could look at it and read out her lines whenever I typed them in

And so with this, my setup was complete.

"Um, are you ready?" I asked her.

She said, "Sure."

I loaded up Eryuentiu Online. I didn't want to use my old account- no, I couldn't use my old account anymore.

Anyway, I wanted Raphtalia to show off her skills so I made a new account. Now, I knew that most of the streaming action, or at least what people wanted to watch was in PvP. So I loaded up PVP mode.

Raphtalia did not have a custom character, but that was fine. It wasn't until you got to the Gold Rank or higher that that would really matter. She would have to start off at Bronze Rank for now anymore. So, I felt like I could carry her through the game, if only temporarily.

I had Raphtalia read out what I had typed for her.

"Well, hello everyone!' she said in a slightly muted tone of voice. I probably needed to give her better direction so that she seemed more eager to play and also a bit more genuine. "Uh, my name is... Rafu? And I will be playing Eryentiu Online today."

I had made up the name 'Rafu' for her. Yeah, it wasn't very original but what can I say- I was not too good with names anyway.

No one was watching our stream right now but I was sure that would change. "So what I'm going to do right now is start playing a ranked game. And let's see how we do," she said, "I'll be using a pre-made character rather than my own custom one. Because I haven't really made a custom one yet."

The character I chose for her was called Tankpanzer. It was actually a fusion of the English word 'tank' and the German word 'panzer', both referring to a tank. Of course, this meant that the character was a tank- someone suited for taking hits. And also the kind of character that I liked to play normally.

"All right, so let's get started," Raphtalia said.

And then the match began.

We could have decided to do team 5v5 matches rather than 1v1, but things could go south depending on what kind of team I would get. A 1v1 would give me far more control over the outcome.

There were various playing formats though the most popular one was 'Capture The Throne' in which you had to do two things. You had to take your opponent's health down to zero and you had to capture their base. You had to do both of those things very close to each other otherwise you wouldn't be able to win. If you simply killed your opponent, they would respawn after a few minutes. And if you just took out the base, they could still attack you (though they would get a stat penalty for having their base destroyed) and their base could also gradually regenerate after some time. But I won't go too much into the details of the game.

"Let's try starting Eryuentiu Online now. Let's just- I'm going to the multiplayer option," Raphtalia said. Over the next two and a half hours, Raphtalia continued to stream and I continued to give her pointers. It all went relatively well and she even ended up getting a 500 Yen tip, which was way larger than anything either gotten in my first week of streaming, let alone the first day. I shook my head- clearly people were thirsty whenever they saw even a moderately attractive girl online. Whatever. We had also gained three subs. So, it was a rather successful first day.

"All right, everyone, thank you all for watching and if you like my content don't forget to like, subscribe and share the video!" Raphtalia said it was a bit too monotonous, but whatever, again, I needed to work on her direction. And secondly, it was something which would, even though quite cliche probably help the numbers anyway.

With that, we ended the stream. "So how was it?" I asked Raphtalia.

"That was fine," she said. "I feel like if I understood what the game was about, I might be able to react a bit better though."

"That's okay," I said. "You'll learn as time goes on."

"So how much money did we make?" she asked.

"500 yen," I said.

Her face fell. Split between the two of us that was just 250 each and for what? Around three and a half hours of work. That was way below minimum wage.

"But don't feel too disappointed," I reassured her. "After all our channel can only grow from here. You're already doing well for your first day and as we keep doing this stuff, we'll get more donations. And anyway, donations aren't where you can get the most money. It's actually from the subs."

"Subs?" she asked.

"Yeah on TwitchTube you can sub to a streamer, kind of like how you can pay for a Netflix subscription," I try to explain to her. "And so, what that means is that they pay 300 Yen each month to subscribe to you. We have three of them which means we make 900 Yen a month. Of course, that means we have to keep making videos. Otherwise, they won't subscribe to us, but it's a good amount of money. And as we get more subs, we'll also be able to monetize ads they put in our streams and we'll get some extra revenue from there too."

"Oh," Raphtalia said. "I see."

She then paused for a moment. "If you don't mind me asking," she said. "If you're this good and you know this much about this stuff, why don't you just do it yourself? Why do you want me to be the face of this?"

My expression darkened and I think she could tell that she had asked something uncomfortable. "Let's just say," I said. "I'm not technically allowed on TwitchTube anymore. My account got banned for... a reason. I wasn't at fault, but what can I say? They still took me down and I can't do anything about it. No other streaming platform is as big as TwitchTube and I wouldn't be able to make even a tenth of the money I could on it, let alone enough to make it worthwhile."

"Oh," she said. "I was wondering why you had all this stuff lying around if it never did anything."

"Yeah, I was streaming for quite a while," I said, with emphasis on the 'was.'