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Jesper clicked the buttons on his mouse nervously, focused entirely on the screen in front of him. Click, click, click. The enemies before him fell down and hit the floor. The words ‘GAME OVER’ flashed in front of his eyes.
“So I guess that’s over,” he said to the microphone, his eyes drifting to the chat window in the lower right corner of his screen. His viewers were going crazy over his skilful plays and lively commentary. He smiled. “Thank you so much for the support, guys. I think I’m done for the night.”
Jesper turned off his stream and took off his headphones. He then walked over to the next room and pushed ajar the already slightly open door.
“Hey,” he said, feeling as if he was speaking into the void. There was a boy sitting on the chair, his legs pulled up to his chest. His pale skin was illuminated by the light from the computer in front of him. He had black headphones on his head. “Hey, Kaz!” Jesper repeated louder.
Kaz suddenly turned around, taking off his headphones. “You’re done?” he asked.
“How come you haven’t noticed?” Jesper shot a question right at him and look at Kaz’s computer screen. Discord, yet again. Kaz’s multitasking skills were unmatched, unless he neglected Jesper’s stream chat in favor of whatever else was occupying him now. “Go to sleep, everyone is probably wondering what drugs you’re doing to be up all the time.”
Kaz turned away and looked at his computer again. “I’m not tired.”
Jesper rolled his eyes and walked over to his brother. He then turned his desk chair around and moved him in the direction of his bed. “You’re old enough to do the rest on your own,” he said and then walked back to the computer to turn it off. In the Discord client, he briefly looked at the servers Kaz was in. He was surprised he was in any other ones except Jesper’s, but he didn’t feel like asking about that right now. Instead, he simply clicked the ‘shut down’ option on Kaz’s device. The room suddenly went very dark, except from the faint light coming from the hallway.
“Good night, Kaz,” Jesper said, leaving his brother alone. Somehow he knew he wouldn’t turn on his devices again.
Jesper’s life for a while hadn’t been completely normal. He didn’t like school, but he liked video games, specifically ones where he could shoot at things unapologetically. Hence, the idea to start a Twitch channel was born. He knew he was good at the games he played, so it wasn’t a surprise that with a quick influx of new watchers, came a huge group of people asking for a Discord server.
The thing was, Jesper had no idea how to really use Discord. He had an account, mostly to join calls with League of Legends teammates if they asked for it, but he never thought about making a server. He never thought it would serve any real purpose, but now people were asking, and who was Jesper to deny them a place to talk?
Jesper truly didn’t know anything about moderating a Discord server, but he knew Kaz spent half of his life on that damn app, so he went to him for help.
“Kaz, my dear darling brother,” he said, walking into Kaz’s room one evening. The boy could always be found in roughly the same position; sitting in his desk chair, his legs always on it in some way. His back posture was also quite terrible, which Jesper knew was from all the hours he devoted to pretending to be a shrimp.
“What do you want?” Kaz asked, not even looking up from his computer. He was playing some kind of game which required him to solve math problems in a limited time. Jesper scrunched his nose; was that what Kaz was doing instead of socializing?
“You know, you would benefit much more from getting friends or a girlfriend than from doing this,” Jesper said and pointed at the monitor. Kaz turned around to face him, his face blank.
“Is that what you wanted to say?”
Jesper suddenly remembered why he had come here at all, probably because Kaz was already on the verge of throwing him out. “No! I actually came to ask you for help.”
Kaz sighed and looked away again. “I won’t do your math homework again, Jesper.”
“That’s not it!” Jesper said. “Though I do have a test coming up-“
“Get to the point.”
“Fine, fine!” Jesper exhaled. “I… I have been streaming for a while and I’ve gathered some fans. They wanted me to make a Discord server, so I did, but I have no idea how to make it… civilised.”
He felt a bit better after he said it. Admitting to his own incompetence in front of Kaz was a bit embarrassing, but it could also prove very beneficial. What he didn’t expect was Kaz to start laughing at him. Kaz never laughed.
“What do you want me to do about that?” he asked, clearly finding this very funny.
“Oh, you know what? Just forget it!” Jesper said and was on his way to the door when he heard Kaz speak again.
“Fine, I’ll do it.”
“You’ll do what?” Jesper asked, not entirely sure what Kaz meant.
“I’ll moderate your Discord server for you, you moron,” Kaz explained. “It shouldn’t be hard to police a group of gamers, I’ve dealt with worse.”
“Thank you!” Jesper exclaimed.
And that was how it began.
Kaz came to Jesper’s room the next day and after clicking a few buttons in his Discord client, he returned to his own desk. Jesper helplessly followed him, not sure of what else he should do.
“I just needed you to make me an admin of the server, but I knew you wouldn’t be able to do that yourself,” Kaz explained and allowed Jesper to sit at the edge of his bed so that he could observe what he was doing. His plan was simple: make the server make some kind of sense. He could see the surprise from people in chat when they saw new channels appear and change order, along with new roles and a new person online on the right side of the screen. Brekker was the name Kaz went by online; it sounded much more threatening than his actual last name and it was a way to remain anonymous. Sometimes, he dealt with people he didn’t want to be able to link him to the seventeen year old Kaz Rietveld who was always late to class, but somehow still got the best math scores. That Kaz was embarrassing, though still threatening in some weird way. Meanwhile Brekker had nothing to be embarrassed about, except the moments when he would fail at banning some troublemaker in mere seconds… except he had never failed before.
Jesper eyed him very carefully. “What exactly are you doing?”
“I’m making the server into a place people will want to spend time in,” Kaz said. “Ideally, this would be done before you sent out the link, but better late than never.”
He added a few channel categories and saw people choose the roles he added. How did Jesper already gather two thousand people in here?
“I’ll get a friend to help me later,” he said. “You need a moderation bot in here, he knows how to make them and will probably agree to write one for you.”
Jesper nodded, though he wasn’t sure he understood anything of what Kaz had just told him.
Nevertheless, his effort had definitely paid off. Previously, some people came on the server just to troll, but after Kaz’s rise to power, they didn’t have a chance at extending their stay to cause more chaos.
Jesper streamed more often due to his rise in popularity and he got Kaz to moderate his stream chat too. He was somehow so good at it that he didn’t need to pay too much attention to the task, so he could do it at the same time as his math homework.
One day when walking to school, they were both tripping over their own feet.
“We should have gone to sleep earlier,” Jesper said, pulling on the skin on his face as if that would wake him up. His bag seemed impossibly heavy.
“I wish that worked,” Kaz answered, looking at the school building with empty eyes as they approached. “You need to start paying me, moderating those idiots in your server is like a full time job.”
“I can do your share of chores,” Jesper suggested, as all the money he got from his dad he spent on new games. This offer seemed to satisfy Kaz however.
“Fine,” he said and sped up a bit without further explanation. Jesper looked at the watch on his wrist and picked up his pace as well; they only had five minutes before classes started. Kaz couldn’t afford to be late again, most of his teachers were already after his ass for not being on time. The excuse of taking longer to walk to class due to issues with his leg no longer worked on most teachers. ‘You just have to leave earlier, Mr Rietveld,’ they’d say. Jesper shook his head.
In the classes he shared with Kaz, he frequently saw him be very distracted. At some point he realized he probably only saw it because he couldn’t pay attention to save his life either. When in math class, he thought about the next LoL match he’d play. In history, he wondered whether he should spend some money and commission an artist to draw a profile picture for his Twitch profile. In Zemeni literature class, he started considering asking Kaz where he learned how to operate Discord so well. Sleep deprivation was a real struggle.
When they returned home, Jesper knew their new routine would repeat. They’d do homework, Kaz would hop on his server and check up on the state of things.
“We need more people on board,” he said when they were walking up the stairs to their rooms.
“What do you mean?” Jesper asked. He didn’t see Kaz’s face as he spoke; he always took the stairs after him, in case Kaz would trip and begin falling.
“When we’re at school, someone else needs to keep your viewers in check,” Kaz clarified. “Don’t worry though, that’s probably mostly sorted.”
“Mostly?” he questioned as they reached the door to Kaz’s bedroom.“Give me an hour,” Kaz simply replied, went inside the room and shut the door.
Jesper stopped himself from going on the server for the next hour. He considered whatever Kaz was preparing this big surprise that his brother was making just for him. Of course he couldn’t spoil it for himself! He was so impatient he even set up a timer.
Just as soon as the time on the timer ran out, Jesper opened Discord. At first, he failed to notice a significant change. Then he heard someone enter his room. He didn’t even need to look back to see who it was; Kaz never knocked.
“What do you think?” he asked as he sat down on Jesper’s bed.
“About what exactly?” Jesper asked with some degree of shame. He could see Kaz mentally facepalm as he got up, leaning on his cane, and walked over to Jesper to show him.
“Two things,” he said as he grabbed Jesper’s mouse and clicked a new channel called “log-bot”. “This is where the bot tracks edits and deleted messages.” He then clicked another channel, called “warning-messages”. “Here, it notifies you about messages that contain words from the server filter list. I’ve added some common ones like slurs and stuff.”
Jesper tried to understand was Kaz was saying but really, this was some dark magic of the next level.
“The bot is called ‘Gunman’,” Kaz said, clearly very proud of the name.
“That’s very good,” Jesper admitted out loud.
“I know. The second thing though,” Kaz moved his mouse again, this time clicking on a chat called “mod-offtopic”. In the channel, two people were chatting. One of them was called ‘Wraith’ and the other ‘WLN’. “Say hi to your two new mods, Jesper. Oh, Wylan also made the bot.”
“Who are these people?” Jesper asked.
“Friends,” Kaz stated, as if it was really quite obvious.
“You have friends?” Jesper questioned again. “Are you sure you didn’t mistake the word for something else? You still somehow struggle with the language.”
“Oh, shut up and take the free labor, Jes.”
“Fine, fine.”