Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Mystical_Songstress_61 was one of the most popular VTubers on Twitch. She had started out as a normal Youtuber with song covers. The songs never showed her face, and usually featured artsy shots of landscapes or architecture, occasionally having commissioned animations once she grew more popular, especially once she started producing original songs.

When VTubers had become popular, she had taken her Internet brand to the next level. Now her videos often had full-rigged animations of her avatar. “Mystic” was a pink-haired girl in a fancy red dress, adorned with thorn and rose themed lace, both as fishnets under the dress and embroidered into the dress itself. Tucked behind one ear was what had become her signature red rose, a symbol that had long been her watermark and profile picture on Youtube.

With the advent of the avatar, she had taken up Twitch streaming. Her persona seemed to match her usual personality, but with the anonymity of not having to show her face, something that appealed to a lot of her fans. Instead of feeling like they were watching a character, it was just a way for them to get to know the elusive Mytstical_Songstress_61 after she had spent years with no social media presence beyond her singing voice on Youtube and her original songs on Spotify.

All that could be gathered was that she was now some kind of graduate student, since her streaming schedule shifted each semester depending on class times, and always had to revolve around her exam schedules towards the end of the semester.

Her Twitch streams were more varied than her Youtube content, involving everything from playing video games to karaoke to live Q&As with her audience.

She was beloved by nerds and even Taylor Swift fans thanks to covering all sorts of popular songs, from anime, video games, and the Top 100 Pop lists alike. Having such a varied audience allowed her to keep up view count and appeal regardless of the content she produced, letting her continue to post more artistic and experimental content despite her usual cheerful, flirty, and occasionally ditzy personality.

EdelgardPoliticalEssays was a Youtube channel that was exactly as described. The on the nose name was courtesy of the sole person who appeared on the channel, a straightforward woman named Edelgard. She had been curating the channel since her freshman year of college, posting videos with titles following the same bluntly descriptive pattern of naming on a variety of political and philosophical topics, with the concept of utopia being chief among them.

She was open about her background and her name, citing the reason for that as being her desire to pursue a career as a politician in the future. She wanted to be completely open with the people. She was busy pursuing her PhD at a prestigious university, but her uploads were on a really rigid schedule. 

You pull your hands back from the keyboard and shake out the tingles. You had been pretty dang scared when your English teacher had assigned a “comparative” “essay,” but she had left the topic up to the student to choose! What a loophole! Why not use your two favorite Youtubers? They had things in common. And they had things not in common. That’s all you needed for a “comparative” “essay,” easy as pie, not so scary after all.

Heh, it also meant that when your mom walked in on you watching Mystic’s stream you could tell her it was for homework, and you wouldn’t even be lying this time. 

Speaking of, Mystic was going to go live soon. That was enough for homework for one night.

You open the stream eagerly. It was going to be gaming tonight, which was one of your favorite things to watch. Even better, it was a dating sim. Mystic’s commentary featuring innocently snide comments about the love interests was always a treat.

You wish you had enough free time to be one of her moderators. What a dream it must be… to get to chat with Mystic herself directly… Your mom refused to let you spend your allowance on anything other than a Twitch subscription, but the highlight of your teenage life had been saving up enough channel points to buy a shout-out message that got read aloud to Mystic during one of her streams.

There were five minutes left before Mystic would start, so you sprint upstairs to grab some soda and snacks.

“Your homework better be done!” Your mom calls as you descend the stairs. 

“I’m already halfway done with my paper!” You yell back before slamming the door behind you. It muffles the noise of her next annoyed comment.

Thirty minutes into the stream, disaster strikes.

There’s some sort of background noise. Mystic’s avatar turns around, long pink hair bouncing off her clothes. Then Mystic clips off-screen briefly, then back again.

“I’ll be right back my sweet flowers~” She chirps before taking off her headset and disappearing from the screen completely.

You strain your ears, wondering what could have interrupted Mystic. She usually allows no distractions!

“...cold…” “...feverish…” “can you…”

You and the rest of the Twitch viewers are furiously typing away in the chat.

Sylveon5: is Mystic-chan sick?!? *aghast emote*

DizzyHeist: don’t feel like you have to stream if you’re sick Mystic-sama!! *cry emote*

JustAnotherTeen: I don’t think that’s Mystic’s voice…

KibbleMax: she obviously has a filter on when on mic, of course she sounds different idiot

DizzyHeist: MODS! BAN MAX FOR LYING!

GhostlyPresence: you don’t know fucking anything you’re just jealous that you’re voice will never be as good as hers

KibbleMax: *your lol. Keyboard warrior much?

JustAnotherTeen: It’s actually easily provable that she’s not using a filter. She’s mentioned her exact setup, headset model, and microphone model in multiple videos and none are compatible with the filters you accuse her of.

JustAnotherTeen: Furthermore no filter on anyone else in their “Mystic Fake Theory” videos has ever actually emulated what Mystic sounds like, so it’s clear that you are talking nonsense.

KibbleMax: of course she’s got a stupid teenager fooled. You mad bro?

DizzeyHeist: MODS!!1!11!1!!!

You’re in the middle of linking a few videos of your own and typing out a couple more paragraphs. You’re a rabid hobby-ist debunker of people trying to debunk videos of Mystic’s. It’s not an unusual accusation, since all her haters point to her not showing her face as proof that she’s faking her voice. But your crusade is interrupted by Mystic’s return.

“I’m so sorry, my dear fans!” She cries into the mic, voice distraught. “Something really important just came up. I have to go take care of it.” She sounded genuinely sorry, and also worried. Of course she was! There was nothing she hated more than disappointing her fans.

“Let’s go raid Bloomed_Note’s stream, okay? I promise I’ll schedule a bonus stream to make up for this!!”

You close the window, heart sinking. It’s a Friday night, so you were hoping to stay up for hours more watching her… Miraculously, you had figured out that you happened to live in the same time zone as her, and high school hours were pretty similar to college hours. Luckily you weren’t in any extracurriculars, since those could get in the way of Mystic’s streaming times.

But… You checked your mental calendar. It was the second Friday of the month, which meant Edelgard would be posting her latest video soon!

You open your email and Twitter to surf your favorite tags before it’s time. But something heartbreaking awaits you.

A tweet from Edelgard...

Despair!

Though something about that catches your interest. You know Edelgard has a small circle of people she frequently credits. Most of them she credits for fact-checking and assisting in research, though. Sometimes she credits the background music’s composer. But you’ve never seen her credit any editor other than herself. 

You open up the text file you have where you scraped all of the descriptions from every one of Edelgard’s videos and execute a quick Ctrl+F. No alternative editor mentioned.

You pull up the spreadsheet where you track Edelgard’s frequently mentioned allies. None have ever been referred to as a “partner.”

Normally it would go without saying that a Youtuber hires an editing team and has behind the scenes channel partners. But Edelgard has always been 100% transparent about what goes into her video essays.

Something pricks at your brain. Hadn’t the other voice Mystic was speaking with mentioned something about being sick? Just like how Edelgard was sick?

Your mind spirals. 

You open up a new Jupyter project and throw together some code to scrape tweets and timestamps from Edelgard. You already have a rough timeline of Mystic’s life, but Edelgard is a newer interest of yours.

What you find sets you off on a journey that spirals for so long that you completely miss Edelgard’s new video that night. And when you finally do watch it, you feel vindicated.