36 Research

Kaja Lando: February 21st,20XX

The car was still as Aaron drove, and he had an unreadable expression on his face. I tried to signal for Archer to tell us what he was thinking, but the younger kid stubbornly refused to open his eyes and faked sleep the whole time.

Well, he had fallen asleep earlier, and it had been a deep enough sleep to give him nightmares, so maybe he’d fallen asleep for real. Tillo had fallen asleep as well after Aaron had promised that he was taking us somewhere fun.

Right now only Eva, Aaron and I were awake and neither of the other two seemed up for casual conversation.

It was a heavy silence but Eva looked comfortable enough watching something on her phone and Aaron was so focused on the road that it felt criminal to interrupt him. Earlier had been fine since he would smile and laugh along with my annoyances, but I couldn’t so much as crack a joke without being ruthlessly ignored.

I finally cracked and put the radio on. It was an unfamiliar car, so I ended up messing with a few of the other functions, like the heat and the back seat door locks, but I eventually figured it out and switched it to a channel I was comfortable with.

It was a generic pop music station that had been around for longer than my parents, but it was a beneficiary of the renaissance of radio that we’d learned about in school.

Once I got on things we’d learned at school, I wondered if Joyce would make us return to school or if she would pull us out altogether.

I didn’t know about any superhero school precedent, but then again; I had heard little about super-heroes at all. Tillo had always been into superheroes, but he usually kept it to himself, and I’d never been interested enough to ask.

Then again, I’d never been that interested in anything. In school, I studied dance, but I wasn’t talented enough to stand out and wasn’t interested in practicing enough to try. I’d taken a few audio engineering classes in the past that I liked, but I didn’t see myself doing it as a career. The sudden emergence of superpowers had only heightened my disinterest in the mundane.

Tillo and I were to host a channel on ‘Squire’ but I did not know what we could do. It also scared me that people would catch on to the fact that we were beneficiaries of an unfair selection system and would criticize us for it.

I’d taken part in criticizing others on the internet in the past and had thought little of it, but that now the possibility of such words being directed at us got closer to a guarantee, I became worried. I wasn’t much worried for myself, but Tillo took such things pretty harshly, and I didn’t think I could keep my composure if any of those idiots dared insult my younger brother.

What could we do?

I sent one more look at Aaron to make sure he wasn’t in the mood to talk before bringing out my phone and taking a few looks at what was already on Squire.

A few c-list and B-list celebrities had already made their accounts. Even before I’d met Joyce, I’d thought that she had paid the celebrities to make accounts and to make a few posts before they lost interest and focused on their actual jobs.

It was a common sight on new video streaming websites, so I’d felt comfortable knowing that we wouldn’t have to compete directly against celebrities with established fan bases. Joyce had all but assured us that was what would happen too, so it shocked me when I scrolled through the large video catalogues that these celebrities had already uploaded to the site.

The sinking feeling formed a knot in my stomach as I realized those celebrities were taking the site pretty seriously... I mean, not that I blamed them. One only had to look at their past following and their current ones to see how beneficial regularly releasing content was to them.

The pressure on my neck increased, and I felt my breath quicken.

I scrolled to the top of the popular list and tried to see what the most popular people were doing. Number one on the chart was of course Aaron. He wasn’t the most popular person in the world, but he was the most popular person on Squire. Since it was the site that he was most active on, it was also the site that held most of his dedicated fanbase; myself included.

There was a very late reaction as I realized I was currently in a car with Aaron Cyrus. Someone I’d been following for the past three years.

I wasn’t a hard fan and only kept up with a few of his activities, but I was still a fan.

There would be time to fangirl later, but for now, I needed to focus on finding things for Tillo and myself to do on a channel. Joyce had said she would take care of it, but I also didn’t want Joyce to force us into anything we didn’t want to do.

Should we open a dance channel and upload a new dance every week? No, there are too many people doing that, and we aren’t that great.

Maybe a makeup channel? With our abilities, we’d be able to get a lot better results than others would.

I shook off the terrible ideas and after looking at Aaron to make sure he wasn’t paying me any attention, tilted my phone away from him and plugged my headphones into my phone. I double-checked to make sure he couldn’t see what was on my screen and then clicked into his profile and into the video section.

There were only three videos up, and he’d uploaded them all within the last few days with the latest being yesterday. I wondered when he’d had the time to record, but eventually bit the bullet and watched the videos.

This is research… yeah. I just need to know what others who are successful are doing!

The first was a basic introduction video where he said his name and a few of his hobbies. He declared his intentions in making the channel which was to interact more with his fans and to support his girlfriend in her new business endeavour. It surprised me that he’d come right out and said it, but then again, that was one of many reasons he was so popular.

The next video was just a basic vlog of him going about his day. He introduced some of his staff and verbally went over his somewhat empty schedule for the day. It was all pretty standard until he glossed over one particular entry on his schedule. Was he scheduled to star on another variety show?

He rarely did them, but whenever he did, the ratings always went up and they were always extremely funny. I zoomed into the calendar he’d barely showed on camera and struggled to make out a few characters on the screen.

It felt surreal to be engaging in fangirl activity while I was right beside the person I was fangirling over, but it wasn’t a bad feeling.

It was a movie name, one that was coming out in a few months. Was he a cameo member? Or was he just planning to watch the movie on the day it was out? I tried my best to sus out what was going on and eventually logged in to an alternate account and see what my fellow fans thought.

Yes, I could just ask him, but where would the fun be in that?

If I couldn’t find out enough to come up with a reasonable theory, then I didn’t deserve to call my account a theory account.