The room held nothing but a cluster of screens in various sizes, scattered snack wrappers, and an assortment of gaming consoles and peripherals.
And one figure curled up in an oversized gaming chair.
Sirin, wearing a baggy hoodie printed with a character from some obscure game.
Barefoot, practically swallowed by the chair.
She had just wrapped up a late-night stream (late night by the rest of the world's standards; morning by hers).
A brutal, high-difficulty speedrun challenge of a hardcore game.
Now she sat with that familiar post-stream mix of exhaustion and hollow restlessness.
Out of habit, she scrolled through social media and her usual forums, grazing on digital junk food.
Then she saw it: an unread message from "Tuna (Big Sis)."
"Tch."
Sirin clicked her tongue without bothering to hide it. Her relationship with Kiana, calling it a love-hate dynamic would be generous. Most of the time it was just mutual irritation.
Kiana thought she was a shut-in, a passive-aggressive waste of space who couldn't hold a real job (streaming counted as a job, thank you very much).
Sirin thought Kiana was a spoiled princess with a one-track mind who loved playing the concerned older sister card. Insufferable.
Their usual exchanges were either Kiana blundering into some mess and needing Sirin's "technical assistance," or Sirin deliberately sending her grotesque gaming clips just to watch her squirm.
So Kiana voluntarily sending her something to "check out" and asking for "professional feedback"? Since when did pigs fly?
Sirin curled her lip and tapped the link with all the enthusiasm of someone opening a utility bill.
The page loaded.
The first thing she saw was the title and description. "Honkai Impact 3rd?" Never heard of it.
"Fighting for all that is beautiful in this world?" What a cliché.
She had already mentally filed it under "probably some generic shonen hot-blooded nonsense" before the page finished loading.
Then she saw the publisher: "Under the Stellar Sky Studio."
Kiana's half-dead little studio?
Sirin raised an eyebrow.
From what she vaguely remembered, that studio had put out a few forgettable, underperforming games, maybe one or two outright disasters. Kiana would mention it occasionally, always in the tone of someone either nagging or giving up entirely.
And now they were making comics?
Desperate times, desperate measures.
With the idle curiosity of someone settling in to watch a trainwreck, Sirin opened the first page.
Panel one. Dynamic composition, sharp contrast. Sirin sat up slightly. Huh.
The art was noticeably better than she'd expected. Not some slapped-together cash grab.
Panel two. The edge of a rooftop. A speech bubble from below: "Hey! You up there! What are you standing around for? Run!"
Sirin stared. That expression. Those eyes. That exact tone of voice.
Why did this feel so familiar? Why was it simultaneously annoying and, somehow...
She kept scrolling.
Kiana threw herself off the ledge, launching toward the purple-haired girl (Raiden Mei). The movement was fluid. Battered but refusing to quit, she fought back against the monster while yelling, "I can't fall here!" and "To protect the people I care about..."
Sirin watched this figure hurling herself through chaos and danger, spouting the most dramatic lines imaginable, yet somehow managing to feel completely reliable in spite of it all.
Her expression shifted from detached to focused, and then into something far more complicated.
She looked exactly like her. Not physically (it was anime-style, obviously), but in that specific cocktail of recklessness and passion, arrogance laced with a kind of guileless sincerity.
That core trait of being utterly infuriating right up until the moment everything was on the line, and then erupting into this unstoppable, almost luminous force of responsibility.
It was the spitting image of Kiana. The real one. The one Sirin found exhausting, and couldn't quite bring herself to stop watching.
Even the little mannerisms and pet phrases lined up in ways that were hard to dismiss.
Without quite realizing it, Sirin's thumb kept moving. Page after page.
She watched the Kiana on screen and Mei lean on each other through the halls of Senba Academy. Watched Bronya (Project Bunny) crash into the story with an air of cold, calculated mystery. Watched the plot cut off at its peak, leaving a yawning cliffhanger behind.
The pacing was tight. The character work was surprisingly layered. And most importantly, the protagonist, "Kiana Kaslana," felt alive in a way that made it hard to look away.
Sirin didn't even notice herself scrolling back to the beginning and starting over.
This time she went slower, catching things she'd missed: the background details, the distinctive warped designs of the monsters, the flickers of something unspoken in Mei's eyes, the cold and formidable energy radiating from Bronya's entrance.
This wasn't throwaway content. It had the bones of a real world, deliberate character design, and genuine narrative ambition.
And the protagonist was named "Kiana."
Sirin closed the page and sat motionless in her chair for a long moment.
Her feelings were, to put it plainly, complicated.
On one hand, she couldn't deny that the comic was better than it had any right to be. Better than expected.
Kind of good, actually. Especially that "Kiana," who was just as exhausting as her real-world counterpart, but somehow became magnetic inside the story. The kind of character you couldn't help wanting to follow.
On the other hand, Kiana had made this. That loud, chaotic, perpetually unreliable older sister of hers had apparently helped create something like this.
And "Under the Stellar Sky Studio," the one she'd mentally written off entirely, might actually be pulling itself back from the edge.
She picked up her phone and opened their chat.
Her finger hovered over the keyboard for a long time.
She typed a few lines. Deleted them.
In the end, she sent exactly two characters:
"?"
Then she closed the chat, reopened the comic link, and hit share.
Her caption read: "@VoidArchive check this out. Art's decent, the worldbuilding has something to it. Main character's a lovable idiot (the real-life inspiration is even worse). First chapter has good momentum, worth following to see where it goes. Creator: @UnderTheStellarSkyStudio"
"VoidArchive" was someone from one of her smaller circles, known for having brutal taste and a sharper tongue than most. A gaming content creator with a modest but respected following.
Sirin's post, casual on the surface but carrying the faintest undercurrent of real endorsement (plus one reflexive dig at Kiana), was like a pebble dropped into a still pond. Too small to make waves yet. But in the right circles, it might start something.
After that, she tossed her phone aside and folded herself back into the chair.
She looked at the paused frame on her screen: the comic's Kiana mid-leap, frozen in the air. Sirin curled her lip and muttered under her breath:
"Fighting for all that is beautiful in this world. What a dork."
But the corner of her mouth, just barely, curved upward.
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~ Push the story forward with your Power Stones