Garyung was where Kaldalis expected to find him. Where they all always expected to find him.

The bhogad was hanging out around the crafting area. He made conversation with the players that were milling around waiting for crafters - either the Adventurer’s League NPCs or the players grinding their skills - to finish making things.

Kaldalis broke the news to the charismatic tank. Garyung grimaced at being reminded that he had to go approach Onirioago, and Kaldalis left him to figure out that particular problem alone.

Instead, Kaldalis made his way to the mess tent to look for his lunch.

Halfway there, however, he was interrupted.

There with a plaintive pinging sound in his head.

He recognized the sound. It was the in-game messaging system that Nakala had used to contact him earlier.

At first, Kaldalis considered ignoring it and continuing on his way towards a meal. But the pinging sound rang out again.

And again.

And again.

With a grimace, Kaldalis his back on the mess tent and headed towards home.

Or, well, the tent he was currently calling home.

If Nakala was spamming him with messages it must have been an emergency. And while he could pop the menu open anywhere, he wanted to handle it somewhere privately in case it was something super important.

Kaldalis opened the menu with a subvocated command of message as soon as his tent flap closed behind him.

It wasn’t a handful of notes from Nakala.

Instead, he had a few dozen notifications attributed to someone called “Torrential” that he soon assumed was a system rather than a person. Kaldalis opened up the first one and was surprised to find that there was an item attached.

Torrential: Supporter Funding

For each Supporter contributing to your Torrential stream channel, you receive an amount of in-game currency. Please find attached your total for the current month.

At the bottom of the message was an icon that looked like the crescent-shaped coinage in this world, with a number overlaid over it.

Five hundred and twenty-eight crescents. Considering he only had about ninety left in his pouch - automatically deposited a few at a time by quest rewards - he felt pretty good about this significant windfall.

With an inspired quickness, he moved on to the others.

Torrential: Supporter Donation

Torrential user SeventyEight purchased the attached item package for you. This purchase included the following message:

“Get his ass!”

Attached to the message was a lesser ire potion.

Considering this was his first message, he decided that the donator probably believed that the message and donation would be received more expediently.

He wondered who they were talking about. Was it one of the dungeon bosses during that first run a few days ago? Was it the first fight against the four-fingered syncoresi before that? Was it the giant nautilobster that attacked the boat?

The message didn’t even have a date or time attached to it.

What got his attention, however, was the username. SeventyEight was the name that had been used by an esports prodigy when Dylan had been in college. He’d been a fan of her unconventional tactics and bold strategies in Splintered Crater, Monsoon’s old RTS. She dropped out of the scene abruptly about eight years ago, much to the disappointment of her fans.

Kaldalis wondered if Monsoon had tapped the real SeventyEight to participate in the new streaming service in order to bring back those old fans and draw them to the new product.

Then again, it wasn’t the most original name. It might have been a copycat, or even someone who had randomly named themselves that. The actual SeventyEight had named herself the atomic number of Platinum to represent her rank goal when she first started playing, but the number could have different significance for any number of other people.

Unable to hypothesize beyond that, he turned his attention to the other messages.

Some of them referred to more specific events.

A handful of them were positive: people praising his heroism and commending his bravery. Some people were negative: talking shit about how chaotic their first run through the dungeon had been.

There were even some of them who got him a little choked up in response to what he had said to Myrin a few days ago about building a community.

There were also a lot of questions asking about the system, asking him to look at menus and mentally “hover over” different options to help them fill out an unofficial wiki that was being built, and he was more than happy to comply with their requests, looking at item descriptions whenever he still had the item in question, and reading them aloud quickly, in case the stream didn’t fully capture his UI.

There were also other names he recognized besides just SeventyEight, too.

The first was a donation from Aaron Stevenson, the project director for Rundan that he’d met during the screening test. Some were from a few other familiar Monsoon games content creators, like Larvay, OceanTern, and Asto, which was more than a little terrifying. At the very least, most of their messages were pretty generic. He hoped they had just been incentivised by Monsoon to support him to generate media hype instead of actually watching him derp his way through this game.

Less terrifying were the names of a few of his raid team members from Colossus. His longtime friends hit him with some of those classic in-jokes that reminded him that it wasn’t just strangers watching him. He had friends out there as well.

Kaldalis took his time reviewing everything and answering questions.

By the end of it, he had a pile of consumable potions and food items, as well as a pretty hefty purse of crescents.

He also had a pretty good feeling in his gut, both from the outpouring of support from the community he was building, and from having taken the time to respond to all of the messages. He hoped there was some sort of recording so that people who weren’t watching right then could receive their responses.

Kaldalis left his tent with a spring in his step. He wanted to take more time to say a few heartfelt words to his viewers to thank them for their support, but his internal clock was telling him that it had been several centuries since breakfast, and if he didn’t get lunch he was going to collapse.

As soon as he got enough food from the camp cooks to sate the hunger of ten thousand years, he looked to find a place to sit down and spotted Balrim and Myrin. He beelined right for them.

A billion years ago, he’d promised he’d tell them when the stream rewards came in, and he wasn’t going to go back on that. As long as they didn’t get between him and his food.

“Stream rewards came in,” he said, managing to get the words out before he shoved the first bite of sandwich into his mouth. “You guys do okay?”

“We did great,” Balrim said with a big toothy smile.

“And thank you for that,” Myrin added. “A few people mentioned that time in the dungeon where I literally rubbed elbows with you. Some amount of our success is because of your support.”

“I just wish I wasn’t a healer,” Balrim said, “we’re a lot less flashy than you lot. But I still got a lot more than I expected. I’m not sure what sort of audience earns you three hundred crescents, but considering I was living on pocket change to try and support leveling up my crafting, this is pretty huge.”

“I only got three-fifty,” Myrin said with a laugh, “don’t act like you’re being overlooked.”

Kaldalis considered briefly bragging that he had significantly more, but decided not to rain on their parade. The last thing he needed was to piss them off.

And the first thing he needed was to get the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, which was not going to be conducive to conversation.

“Oh, by the way,” Balrim said abruptly, “how did your dungeon run go? I heard you had a few friendly faces in there.”

“Heluna and Bangen were mrfling,” Kaldalis said around a mouthful of bread. He took a moment to finish chewing and swallowed. “Sorry, I mean they were fine. As far as NPCs go, they did good. But Sardol was not cut out for that life.”

“Which one is he?” Myrin asked. “Is he the sailor with the really bad fake limp?”

“No,” Balrim cut in, “that’s Karvem. I had him in my first run this morning.”

“Sardol is the human from the expedition leader’s inner circle,” Kaldalis said, “the one with the glasses.”

“Oh, that guy. He’s a prick.” Myrin nodded at her own statement. “Not surprised he’s bad in a fight. Most of the NPCs seem like their value in combat maps pretty directly to how far away from them I would sit at a bar.”

“As long as you aren’t applying that expectation to the real people,” Balrim said. “Bitat is a worthless piece of slime as a person, but put him in front of a pack of mobs and he’s ruthlessly efficient.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Myrin waved dismissively. “I know. Skill and personality aren’t correlated in real life. But it doesn’t seem entirely out of line when applied to the League personnel.”

“That reminds me,” Kaldalis said. “We owe Garyung a fruit basket or something. He’s the one taking Onirioago into the dungeon in about an hour. If being an intolerable person makes you worse in combat...”

Balrim and Myrin both made the exact same grimace at that. All three burst out laughing immediately.

“Speaking of the dungeon,” Balrim said, “I should get moving. My last group is the final few crafters, and if I don’t start trying to get their attention now, I’ll never drag them away from their anvils and workbenches before Garyung’s done with his group.”

“We’re still on for tomorrow though, right?” Kaldalis asked. “You two don’t have your heads swelled too much from the stream rewards to hang out with me, right?”

“Nah,” Myrin said. “Not yet, anyway,” she added, after a pause.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get together for the morning quest train just like usual,” Balrim said, giving a wave on his way off to the crafting area.

“So,” Myrin said, turning on Kaldalis. “How much did you get from your payout?”

Kaldalis hesitated, and then shoved the last half of his sandwich into his mouth all at once. He made some mumbling sounds. When she questioned him again, he pointed at his mouth and shook his head.

Myrin glared.

Kaldalis almost laughed, which would have resulted in him choking on his smooth exit from her question.

But he got out of answering for now.

And also didn’t die.

Bonus.