Today, their topic was a bit different.
All about Midnight.
Or more precisely, how Midnight had become more aggressive and annoying towards other players in the past few weeks.
Mono's tone was half-serious when she opened the topic:
"Okay, my gaming-addict night owls. Today we're talking about our mysterious waifu, or husbando gyatt rizzler of this game. Meh, what ever they are, it's Midnight! Who's been getting more and more... ugh. So fucking toxic! What happened, guys?"
Delta chimed in, his eyes narrowed, or his animation did: "Is this character development? Or... is the so-called Midnight character no longer controlled by the original player? Hehe. Just a joke! Or maybe not."
I chuckled softly.
This was typical of them — interactive, mischievous, and always provoking comments.
The comments immediately flooded in:
Xmas123: [He's possessed by a yandere]
LBoZo69: [He probably snapped again after ghosting his girls]
Mid_X2: [Not the same Midnight anymore, bro just changed personality like changing in-gam skin]
LBoZo69: [Also, didn't he just flirt with that Level 20 noob girl yesterday?! The pdfile behavior was insane!]
But the chuckle I used to have while enjoying all of these didn't last.
At least, no more than a few minutes.
Because... for some reason, something was off.
Mono's movements. The way she laughed. Even the timing when Delta replied to a joke. Everything felt... hollow.
They might be clever, for ordinary people.
But the matter of fact is I wasn't an ordinary viewer.
I started to rewind. Then I opened last week's live archive — which I kept neatly on my local HDD. My posture shifted from relaxed to upright on the sofa. My eyes scrutinized every frame, my fingers moving automatically on the remote's shortcuts.
In the live stream's comment section, some fans started to notice the oddity.
VelVice26: [I feel like something's different?]
May0_Zzz: [Agreed, the vibes are a bit off, or is it just me?]
However, those comments were immediately dismissed by others:
Pro_Yapperz: [Dude, you must be sleep-deprived! Come on, they stream really late, like fucking 1 AM! Kids are asleep, so the topic has to be adult and uncensored, that's why you're shocked like hell!]
GGvur4h: [Yeah, it's just your imagination, they're always stable!]
But I knew it wasn't just a feeling or lack of sleep. I turned on two screens. One for Mono & Delta's live broadcast tonight. The other for my personal archive of their stream from last week — a 4K lossless version I kept in an encrypted folder with the code: /Vault/FavoriteDuet//NeuraStream.
Of course, because I'm Kyouya Kanzaki, I wasn't watching just for the sake of nostalgia.
Well, maybe I did but honestly, I was analyzing. If you think this is just obsession... well, that's kinda the half-truth. But the other half? This is just the professional competence as the mod of NeuraStream_Conspiracy on Reddit.
I know... if the same person performs the same action twice, their spontaneous gestures will almost always be identical. Especially nonverbal involuntary ticks — small movements the brain recognizes as default behavior.
And what about Mono & Delta's habits? Well, I had them cataloged.
My analytical mind, usually a dispassionate instrument, began to build a meticulous internal dossier on what I was seeing—all meticulously transcribed onto a secure note app on my device.
This wasn't just a mere idle observation; it was a forensic examination of simulated behavior. I had categorized their quirks, their involuntary tells, the subtle digital echoes of their human operators. This was my expertise.
[Mono's usual behaviors when trolling]
[- Her tells were just as distinct, if more subtly human. When she was building up to a particularly mischievous joke, or when genuinely nervous or excited, she simply couldn't stay still.
- Her virtual chair would gently sway left-right, a barely noticeable oscillation that was actually an idle-state animation triggering without any direct manual input from her operator. It was a digital ghost of a restless human habit.
- I'd also noticed she'd often blink twice consecutively before changing topics—a small, rapid double-blink. At first, I dismissed it as coincidence, a random quirk of the animation engine, but my data revealed it was startlingly consistent in the last 17 episodes. It was her subconscious cue, scanned and replicated.
- And her laugh—her signature, booming, unrestrained laugh—it always had a delay of about 0.3 seconds. Why? Because, as my deep-dive analysis into their AI resonance filters had uncovered, she often held her breath first, then laughed loudly in real life.
This physiological habit was so ingrained, so primal, that its effect was meticulously scanned into her avatar model via an AI resonance filter, creating that fraction-of-a-second lag before her mirth erupted.]
[Delta's characteristic movements when joking]
[I had studied them down to the nanosecond. He wasn't just 'programmed' with a generic "humor" subroutine. There were specific, almost ritualistic tics he performed:
- He'd consistently nudge right with his digital elbow, a quick, almost imperceptible jab, then shrug his left shoulder in a move that seemed to convey mock innocence or a playful "gotcha." This was invariably accompanied by a flicker of light animation in his right pupil—a tell-tale spark, almost like a neural impulse manifesting digitally.
- When he delivered a punchline, especially one he was particularly proud of, his head would tilt about 15 degrees to the side, a subtle, almost endearing gesture of intellectual superiority. Even his laughter was coded with a signature.
- When genuinely amused, his initial "heh" sound wasn't a clean, crisp chuckle. It was always followed by a low tone resembling a decompression valve sound—a deliberate artifact, a result of his soundbank utilizing an older, custom-built analog AI model that added a layer of simulated mechanical warmth to his otherwise synthetic voice.]
These weren't random. They were patterns. They were him.
These were their fingerprints, their unique signatures in a sea of digital conformity.
Now... tonight?
The live stream flickered on my 4K screen, pristine yet utterly wrong.
Unlike what was written previously, Delta spoke too humorously. He delivered a punchline that should have elicited his signature movements.
But there was no nudge.
His shoulders were still. His pupils remained static, devoid of that tell-tale flicker.
It was like watching a puppet whose strings had been partially cut.
And Mono—she laughed. But her laugh was without delay.
Her virtual chair remained utterly still, without that familiar, nervous sway. And she laughed without that tell-tale double-blink.
It was a laugh, yes, but it was clean. Too clean.
No. This wasn't a feeling.
It wasn't my imagination running wild after a grim crime scene either.
This was quantifiable.
An anomaly level 3 behavioral desync according to my notebook.
A complete disconnect between the established pattern and the current output. It meant only one thing: the familiar, living operators were not behind those avatars.
Someone else was pulling the strings. Someone who knew the scripts, who had access to the models and soundbanks, but couldn't perfectly replicate the unconscious, human essence.
And I couldn't help but wonder—who might that be?