Epilogue: Streaming to the Stars!

Finally, I was free!

Free to follow my passion and explore the night sky without dad breathing down my neck. No more rushing back by six, because I got to stay out with Hade till seven!

Alright, that extra hour might not sound like much, but I had to get home eventually, you know? And who said the fun had to stop there? I had a window and balcony I could look out of and all. And now that dad was letting me do my thing, I could keep my telescope at home.

We had an issue though. I didn’t realize just how messy my room was until I tried to find space for the telescope....HA HA HA. GET IT? FIND ‘SPACE’ FOR THE TELESCOPE? I should be a comedian.

You know what wasn’t as great as my dry sense of humor? Nobody at school would leave me alone long enough to enjoy my time!

If it wasn’t people crowding around me at school or in public restrooms, it was never ending text messages and emails from fans who I’m pretty sure got my number through illegal means.

Hade always had that celebrity status treatment. People would literally line up in the halls and follow him around everywhere. Now that they were doing that for me, I realized just how much I didn’t want such a direct spotlight.

The whiplash from zero to one hundred had me tweaking out. I mean, I didn’t hate getting some attention and all…It’s just, Hade had a way of dealing with crowds that I didn’t, which was typical of anti-social people.

On a nicer note, it was kinda' cool to have people to sit with at lunch. I ate sparsely like there was a 19th century famine going on, because if I didn’t worry I’d get pretty chunky. Hade says that my eyesight is better to compensate for me being deaf, but I think it was my tastebuds. Thankfully the other girls filled my plate up with their bento fluff, usually octopus hotdogs and sushi decorated like little cats. Each piece of food was a work of art I was happy to consume and forget about until I weighed myself later on.

A small price to pay was those few extra kilos and those same girls were really chatty. Sometimes it was fun to answer their questions about space, especially when it was something I didn’t know and had to look up, because that was a challenge. But when social protocol demanded I ask them about their hobbies in order to reciprocate the budding friendship, I couldn’t have cared less.

Don’t get me wrong. Talking about K-pop and beauty routines was great, and helpful to my complexion, but there wasn’t anything stimulating in that. Sadly I had to force myself through conversation I didn’t care about. Is this what popular people have to do every day? How tiresome to someone with negative social experience.

There I go again, getting all cynical. Hade says I have to stop doing that to myself. But why would I stop when self-depreciation was my fuel to improve?

You know, there was one girl I didn’t mind. Mimi-san was one I actually enjoyed spending time with, no strings attached. She was a childhood friend of Hade’s, so the two of them were like brother and sister. And hopefully that was it, because I really didn’t feel like competing with her for him. That girl was gorgeous and intelligent! Did I even have one of those checkboxes filled?

Her perspective of things was refreshing. She was a lot like him in that she wanted to encourage people to be their best, but deep down I could tell she was a little cynical too. My kinda’ girl.

Like, why are people so darn happy all the time when the world sucks? She understood that!

You know what didn't suck at all though? Getting money for making NooTube livestreams. All those idiots/content creators who are like “I’m sorry guys, recording myself playing video games for a living is so hard! I can’t possibly continue and am taking a break so I can get an 9-9 job as a minimum wage barista in a failing coffee house chain.”

Like, shush up! It’s amazing to make videos for a living, what were those fools talking about?

Maybe I should explain that little tangent a bit before people think I’m losing my already downtrodden mind… Let me start from the beginning.

Tragically I never got that job application from NASA that Hade said I would. Not like I actually expected it, but you can’t blame a girl for holding her breath just a little bit after the attention we got.

But they weren’t radio silent. I did get a message from people that worked at the good old space agency, a few actually. Some of them there were deaf, like me! They were happy to see I was joining the field and told me a little about their experiences rising the ranks to get where they were.

I almost couldn’t believe that someone with the same pair of broken ears as me got that far, and It made me feel really good, like I could do it too if I tried. I felt especially good when they said they hoped to work with me some day.

But for now, I had school to focus on.

Ever heard of JAXA? That’s the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. You know they're trendy because ‘Exploration’ was abbreviated to an X before 2020.

Well, some of the people who got in touch with me from NASA recommended I try to get some internships with JAXA while I’m in Japan. Definitely something to look into, especially when deciding what schools I wanted to attend in the future.

That reminds me… Hade was crying about that, saying ‘If you go to a different school then me, we won’t see each other ever again!’

Like, dude, what’s with that? I wasn’t just going to dump him like old bath water the moment I became a fully educated woman. He was acting like this was an anime rom-drama or something where people say sayonara forever after high school.

And even if we did get separated by schools, the two of us were hard at work on building our online presence. Remember when I mentioned all that stuff about NooTube? I had a channel there now and was uploading videos of the night sky, explaining different parts of it to the audience...VPN secured and in assumedly anonymous locations, of course.

Hade was a regular guest star there and usually did the narration for me. But we had a few livestreams too where we’d go to places across Japan to get a good view of the dark skies, and I would chat with people about what we were seeing.

I wasn’t making much money doing that, but what little I was went right into my savings for college. Dad wanted to pay for that, but I told him that I wanted to earn my own way through life. That proud smile on his face told me I was making the right move.

‘Just hold onto that cash for the wedding,’ I teased.

‘W-wedding!?’ Both he and Hade signed in shock.

Those two were so silly.

So, discovering a comet with the old telescope was like winning the lottery. I don’t know why Hade was so sure I’d make another big discovery, but he kept saying ‘it’s written in the stars!’ as if just looking out there was the answer. Does he know how unscientific that sounds?

I try not to give him any credit for his predictions, but that darn himbo was actually right. I made another discovery one cold night while we were out live streaming the sky…

‘What did you see?’ Hade signed as he leaned up from peeking into my brand new, high powered telescope. ‘It’s just Mars.’

I held up my phone, showing Hade the telescope stream I had going.

A few seconds on rewind and…

‘Aha!’ I pointed to a quick flash on the screen.

‘What?’ his brow arched. ‘Did something happen?’

Did he not see it? How could he have missed that flash of light!

‘Watch there closely…’ I pointed to the dark side of the equator on Mars. A bright flash appeared on the screen seconds later. ‘See that?’

‘Was that a glitch in the stream?’ he suggested.

‘No. That may have been a meteor hitting Mars!’ I assumed, needing to verify it with somebody smarter than me. ‘We got to record it live...’

God save any Martians that may have been living in that crater, because the force of that impact was like a nuke going off if we could see it from here.

The chat blew up with people talking about what we saw. It got so crazy that we were trending again and people were flooding in from all corners of the internet. Normally the streams didn’t have more than a cozy few dozen people I could keep track of, but I guess this was one of those moments where something exciting would get some major attention.

The last time this happened, Hade changed his shirt in front of the camera that I forgot to shut off. We were using his phone and he took it into the school locker room with him…

That got us a two week ban by the way, but we got a heck of a lot of new subscribers that night!

Anyways, I got right to work documenting the collision in my notebook ⁿᵉˣᵗ ᵗᵒ ᵐʸ ˢʰᶦʳᵗˡᵉˢˢ ˢᵏᵉᵗᶜʰ ᵒᶠ ᴴᵃᵈᵉ. Not that I knew much of the science behind what I was seeing yet, but part of the fun was getting to chat with people who knew a lot about what we did see.

While I was jotting things down, I realized every few seconds I would glance at Hade. The only reason I noticed was because he held his fingers to his chin and smugly grinned, like he was posing for a photo shoot. Clearly he picked up on my looking.

‘I know I’m so interesting, but you really should be focused on your work there,’ he signed.

‘Shush up, maka-san,’ I signed back, smirking all silly, happy he cared enough to stay by me this whole time.

I have to wonder if I would have ever discovered Baka's Comet without his help. Oh, that's the name of the comet I found, by the way! Hade said I should name it after him, so I did! Tee hee hee!

-Fin-