King of Demons [EXCERPT]

Chapter One

Rosalyn collapsed into her high-backed office chair with a flourish, spinning around once before facing her triple computer screen setup. She typed in her password to wake up the machine and neon lights flickered to life inside the transparent shell.

"Good evening, Bessie," Rosalyn quipped as what felt like ten thousand windows all opened at once. She always had too many browser tabs going, but today had been an extra doozy researching the game she'd found.

She minimized anything she might need for reference and closed the rest that she didn't need. As she booted up her streaming software, she sat up straight in her chair, readying herself to check the camera angle.

The beauty of this job was that she could work in comfy pj pants and fuzzy slippers and only have to worry about her top half. She adjusted the main camera on top of the left monitor to make sure she got the best cleavage angle. Weekend night streams usually brought out the rowdier fans, and the drunker they were the better they tipped, especially if she was looking cute.

And with her push-up bra and bouncy blonde curls tucked behind kitten-ear headphones, Rosalyn was good at looking plenty cute. She leaned towards the camera, batting her eyelashes to make sure she hadn't accidentally smudged her eye makeup, and then swiped a thin layer of sparkly lip gloss across her pouty lips.

KC always teased her that she played the hot girl angle to her advantage, saying it was way harder for dudes to make it in online game streaming. It was all in good fun, though. The way Rosalyn saw it, women had a hard enough time getting taken seriously in circles like this, so if fans wanted to toss her extra money for her tits then she might as well make the mad cash.

She set up the second webcam on the right, this one at eye level. When she cut together the edited videos later, that was the one she liked to talk right into, as if she were addressing the audience. Stoking the parasocial relationships was key to retaining a fanbase.

She watched the stream lobby, watching the audience numbers tick up and up. There were already over four thousand people online, waiting to watch. She usually hit five or six thousand on the weekends, but people seemed really keen on finding out what her secret surprise was. She'd been teasing it since that morning.

Maybe I should do secret surprises more often, she thought as the viewers went up over forty-five hundred.

Her phone buzzed, the sound extra loud against the hard wood of her desk, and she glanced over at it before flicking it to silent. It was KC, wishing her luck and saying he couldn't wait to see what she'd gotten her hands on.

Maybe it was mean, but she hadn't even told her best friend what she'd found. She wanted it to be a surprise for him, as well, and was glad he was going to be on stream. Her audience loved interacting with him in the chat, and he was always a good sport about the shippers.

She quickly typed back a thank you and a heart emoji, and then moved her phone to the side, getting the middle screen ready for screen sharing as the last few seconds counted down to stream time.

"Showtime," she whispered, giving herself one more whirl in her office chair just before the counter hit zero.

"STREAMING IN SESSION," the robotic voice from the software declared, and Rosalyn shot her trademark thousand-watt grin at the camera.

"What's up party people, it's RosieRainbow, streaming live from somewhere in Canada, it is fuckin' Friday night and I'm cracking a beer, how are you all doing tonight?" The words came out with the confidence of a sports announcer, rolling off of her tongue as she worked the persona of her online alter-ego. It wasn't that far off from her personality, really, but she definitely hammed it up with a little showmanship.