Work Text:
“This is stupid.”
Marius shot the forum thread supposedly ‘exposing’ him a derisive glare, kicked the desk leg for good measure. Vyn did not react, instead focused on the monitor of his computer where he had collated the most widespread reactions to the controversy.
“It’s content. I thought you were the one who said any kind of press can be good press if you only know what to make of it. An apology is making something of it.”
His eyes were sharp when he trained them on Marius’ face, their intensity multiplied by the lenses of his glasses.
“No one buys YouTuber apologies!”
“Then make a proper one. A Marius one, not a YouTuber one.”
Not sure how to react, Marius huffed. He remained standing for a moment in his last attempt at spiting his colleague, then he caved, pulling over Luke’s office chair — Luke was out filming, he wouldn’t need it until tomorrow anyway — and moved into Vyn’s space.
“Okay, fine. Whatever. So, what’s our game plan?”
— 🎥 —
It all began with the special live broadcast on the Janus case.
Vyn landed the gig by way of his biweekly pop psychology column, Artem was soon added to the line-up not only because of his position as an in-house legal commentator but also because he was the in-house legal commentator with by far the most knowledge of Quantum Sea: Star Rail, the hit television show that heartthrob actor Janus had been starring in up until he became a prime suspect in a murder, and Josie joined last minute after her friend and original castmate Kiki fell ill on the day of.
They spent an additional three hours after the end of the first day of the televised trial answering comments only to conclude that they could implossibly address everyone and when Josie clocked in the next morning, she found editor in chief of the Stellis Herald, Celestine Taylor, leaning against her desk with two cups of coffee from the shop across the street.
“Have you checked your socials this morning, dear?” Celestine opened in place of a formal greeting. She motioned for Josie to pick a cup. “Left’s a double espresso, right is a macchiato. Wasn’t sure where on the spectrum you’d fall.”
Immediately, Josie felt ice cold dread trickle down the back of her spine. With slow, mechanical movements she went for the cup careening closer to the edge of her desk.
“Did something happen with the trial!?” Her hands started searching for her phone in her bag before she could properly finish her sentence.
Celestine’s eyes grew wide before she broke out in a full-chested cackle. Josephine startled, then gave her a puzzled stare.
“Oh, don’t worry. Last I checked things were just the way they’d been yesterday evening after court had been adjourned,” the editor in chief reassured her.
“No, I meant the Stellis Herald Twitter account. Or TikTok. Your broadcast seems to be making the rounds.”
True to Celestine’s word it only took a little bit of scrolling on Josie’s For You Page to invite in a slew of clips from the trial livestream. She spent far more time than she should before work sipping her coffee (strong and very much devoid of milk) going through reactions to the broadcast. The responses varied from comments on how hot Artem and Vyn were (Josie even came across one or two thirst posts about herself, which she hurriedly swiped past with heated cheeks), input on the trial itself, a dash of hate comments and, by far the largest in proportion, a healthy helping of people praising their vibe, so to say.
“I love how easily they all bounce thoughts off of each other,” one user said, “their chemistry is sooo good!” the next. One TikTok featured a young adult seemingly ready to sell a kidney to have the three of them watch season one of Quantum Sea: Star Rail together. Josie itched to comment and ask them to please keep their kidneys.
It was a notification for a new email that broke her social media spiral and reminded Josie that she had, in fact, work to get to. Hurriedly, she pulled her inbox up, where a message from Celestine was already waiting for her.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Live Broadcast
Josephine,
Please join me in my office at 11:45, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you!
No need to fret, your job’s not on the line.
Have fun working,
Celestine
Tapping out of her mail app, Josie downed the remainder of her coffee and flipped her laptop open. She had work to do, might as well get to that before she got drowned in speculations as to what exactly her boss wanted to talk about.
— 🎥 —
Josie arrived at 11:42, which she’d deemed plenty polite and punctual. Celestine waved her into the office where Artem Wing and Vyn Richter had already taken a seat across from the editor in chief, both looking up when Josephine entered the room and closed the door.
“Miss Wong, excellent. That makes all of us!” Celestine clapped. “I won’t beat around the bush, The Powers That Be have been campaigning for the Stellis Herald to build a stronger online presence to appeal to an audience between 18 and 36. Yesterday’s live broadcast was part of a test run and I think it’s safe to say you outdid everyone’s expectations by a long shot.”
She smiled in a mildly foreboding way that made Josie hesitant to show much enthusiasm.
“Right now, it’s too early to draw solid conclusions from last afternoon’s success, but I’d love to offer you the chance to test out content in short- and longform video format for our YouTube channel to see if the spark will translate. What exactly that will entail is still up for discussion, take lunch break to think about it and we’ll sit down together in the afternoon to look at our options, yes?”
With the bulk of the information seemingly on the table life finally seemed to return to the other side of Celestine’s desk.
“Are we going to be confined to what we already report on, just in video?” Artem asked. Josie didn’t know him well enough to judge but if she did, she might’ve suspected he sounded a little hesitant. Celestine raised an eyebrow, shot him a challenging smirk.
“That’s up to how far you’re willing to challenge yourself. If you can come up with something appropriate for your audience that falls outside of legal commentary, pitch it! See what the others say. Maybe you’re onto something.”
Next to Josie, Vyn shifted in his chair.
“I assume we’ll be working with a production team? I don’t know about Mister Wing or Miss Wong, but I’m not adept at camera work or editing.”
“Great point!” Celestine agreed, her demeanour continuing to be unflappably positive. “You see, we have just the right people to round out the team…”
— 🎥 —
And so the Heralds After Dark channel came to be.
After that first meeting, Artem, Vyn and Josie were assigned Luke Pearce from the Herald’s online news division as their video producer and fresh-faced intern Marius von Hagen to take care of their graphics and editing.
Their team was small and, as the speed at which its members started butting heads, somewhat mismatched but the endeavour soon enough resulted in a growing, dedicated online community invested in their output.
Vyn’s column Dear Doctor was easy enough to adapt into a new medium and provided the channel with excellent fodder for Shorts. Between Artem’s and Josie’s previous focus on law and politics they found a quick news type of format, but true to his word Artem also pitched a film and TV commentary segment that he operated with great diligence.
Where exactly he found the time and energy for said diligence, Josie wasn’t sure. Working for the Stellis Herald had never been easy work, but being part of a new, experimental department meant putting in a lot of extra leg work to prove themselves. Neil Hume, the current chief of marketing, was forthcoming and supportive of their project but naturally demanded quality and so the first few months of Heralds After Dark soon turned into working overtime more often than not, and a lot of monitoring socials even when no longer in the office.
The hard work paid off, however. Luke soon conquered more screen time for himself after a behind the scenes cut he featured in garnered attention and Marius’ witty commentary all over the editing amassed his own little fanbase that clamoured for him to shine more in front of the camera.
Vyn and Marius eventually settled their disputes on how many memes made a video on a channel for a serious news publication tacky, Luke’s ADHD-fuelled and Artem’s meticulous workflows started to adapt to each other, Josie got used to Vyn’s roundabout way of saying things and learnt how to decipher when Artem was making a joke.
The channel’s growing numbers did nothing to slow down the hunger for more content, but it also justified relocating helping hands onto the project and soon their team also included Kiki Bennett, now healthy and rearing to put her entertainment journalist chops to good use and Vincent Kim, who took on some of now-permanently hired Marius’ work behind the camera.
The channel schedule grew to encompass vlogs documenting Marius’ visits to cultural events all over Stellis, a podcast that challenged Vyn’s and Artem’s total of three PhDs by applying academics to everyday life, a longer series about Luke and his service dog Benji, a virtual book club hosted by Josie and, yes, a group viewing of the first season of Quantum Sea: Star Rail to celebrate their 50k subscriber milestone.
It would’ve been ridiculous to think, however, that their growing popularity wouldn’t eventually attract controversy in one way or another, which brings us back to…
— 🎥 —
“So I didn’t word my review of that Terry Irvin exhibition well, boo hoo!” Marius huffed. “I wasn’t going to lie and say that it was great! It wasn’t! It’s not my fault her fans’ first reaction to honest critique was to go and dig up my every vaguely edgy post since I’ve made my first account on the internet. I don’t even use half of these accounts anymore…”
Vyn hid his amused smile in his Heralds After Dark merch prototype mug and took a slow sip, just to make Marius squirm a little.
“But we agree that using inflammatory language for shock value is not great, yes?”
Marius rolled his eyes.
“Duh. I’m not thirteen anymore.”
Vyn’s mug made a soft clacking sound as he set it down on its cat-shaped coaster.
“See, then the video really shouldn’t be a big deal. You state what you did wrong, why it was wrong and what you’ve been doing to change your behaviour since. Easy.”
He pushed the keyboard over to Marius’ side of the desk wearing an expression that could both be interpreted as smugness or empathy.
Marius was pretty convinced it was the former. Vyn Richter wasn’t the jerk he’d thought him to be when they’d first started working together, but he sure did enjoy teasing his colleagues a little more than what was probably societally acceptable.
“Fine. Whatever,” he huffed. “The script you wrote is shit, though. No one even talks like that anymore.”
“I talk like that,” Vyn pointed out. He sounded genuinely a little miffed. Marius puffed up in vindication. Good.
“If it’s going to be a Marius apology it better sound like me, no?”
— 🎥 —
Luke was visibly amused with the bustle on set.
“Just because it’s an apology video, doesn’t mean my surroundings have to look bad,” Marius had argued when he’d pitched his video. To the uninitiated, the differences between their regular podcast set and one where Marius pedantically micro-managed the position of every single object in frame were practically non-existent, but Luke knew his colleague’s tells and anything that would quell the nervousness of having to be vulnerable and admit fault to an audience that might (and had every right to) react with rejection to what he knew was earnest and hard work was worth it right now.
“Are we good to go?” he asked from behind his camera set-up. “We still should do a sound check real quick, and we have that cooking video with Artem we need to shoot today.”
“I’m working on it, okay?”
Marius’ expression was pinched. Luke had to fight the urge to laugh. It wasn’t as much the apology that was funny as it was seeing how the other man wrestled with it. Endearing, perhaps, one might say, a reminder of how young and human Marius was despite his collected, cocky demeanour and the startling intergenerational wealth backing his every step.
Perhaps staying silent would’ve been better. But he also can, to his own surprise, name examples to underline the growth between the teenaged internet dickbag Marius whose ghost haunts the internet and the person he’s working with today, and he hopes that the people who need this video the most will get to see it, regardless of whether they choose to continue supporting their YouTube ventures or not.
“I’ll leave my share of whatever we make with Artem to you if you stop asking me to push that pillow in the back around,” he offered. Addressing the issue directly would probably result in Marius lashing out right now, but perhaps this olive branch would just do the trick.
For a deceptively long moment, Marius’ purple eyes scanned Luke’s face. His expression was unreadable. Then, he nodded.
“Fine. Okay. Sound check, you said.”
“Sound check,” Luke repeats with a smile.
— 🎥 —
They all crowded around Kiki’s laptop when the apology video went live. Marius even received the honour of pressing the “Publish” button, and the smell of the apple crumble bake Artem made with his and Luke’s help (“proof that anyone can cook if Artem is there to help,” Vyn had teased) filling the studio chased away whatever remnants of a bad day that might’ve snuck its way into the studio.
Vincent offered to monitor socials for a bit, and Kiki took on the first round of moderating comments and so the four stars of Heralds After Dark found themselves around the studio kitchen counter, digging into apple crumble with vanilla ice cream like they had something to celebrate.
And maybe they did.
As Josephine watched the stress finally melting off of Marius’ tall frame and Vyn needle him and Luke for producing something edible and Artem munching on the fruit of his labour with a face so soft and open she might have never imagined on her first day at work, she figured that what they had was, perhaps, worth celebrating.