Concurrent

Concurrent

A J-horror novella about a late-night VTuber, the red streak that shouldn't be in her stream footage, and the green dot beside one handle in her chat.

what it is

Thirteen chapters. Novella-length. First-person present-tense, tight observational prose. Slow-burn psychological horror — atmospheric, screen-mediated, attentive to small wrongnesses.

Tsumugi has been streaming for two years. Eight hundred concurrent at peak, rent due in seven days, a chorus of regulars she has never met. At 2:47 every night a viewer named ksk_0247 sends one line and goes silent for the rest of the stream. He has been doing this for two hundred nights. He is the closest thing she has to a relationship.

One night in the post-stream edit she finds a red streak in the rig's backdrop. It moves wrong. It tracks wrong. The standard debug stack runs against it and finds nothing — because the framework is at the wrong scale.

why it exists

I wanted to write the loneliness of streaming as horror. The way a chat room becomes a room. The way a green dot beside a handle can mean more than a person. The architecture of being watched at three in the morning.

The horror is in the surfaces — mirrors, phones, kitchen windows, the chair she sits in. The novella is about what happens when those surfaces start agreeing about something.

content information

Mature (17+). Psychological horror. Dissociation. Depression-adjacent isolation. Self-neglect — the protagonist stops eating, stops leaving the apartment. Mild body horror. No explicit sexual content. No graphic violence.

If you want jump scares or splatter, this isn't that. If you want the kind of horror that sits in the room with you after you close the book, this is.

also available on

Wattpad — https://www.wattpad.com/story/411197905-concurrent

Inkitt — https://www.inkitt.com/stories/1743437