"Okay, Syd. Mic check. Say something for me." Kaitlyn kept her eyes on the equalizer bars on her streaming software, leaning closer to her monitor. The red panda brushed a forelock of her brown hair away, wearing just a casual t-shirt and jeans since she didn't have her camera going today.

"Huh?" The cinnamon ferret sitting in another swivel chair next to Kaitlyn's looked over, quickly putting down the paper coffee cup she'd been holding. She was dressed even more casually in a tie-die shirt and jean shorts for the late summer weather. Putting a hand on the side of her wireless headset – or at least, the one she was borrowing from Kaitlyn – she spoke, "Oh, uh. Hi, I'm Sydney, aka InSydious, blah blah blah words words words..."

Kaitlyn chuckled and flashed a thumbs-up to her friend, straightening up a bit. She was wearing her backup wireless headset, having elected to give Sydney the nice one for their special co-op stream. "Looks good. Okay, you ready for this?"

"Ready!" Sydney told Kaitlyn with a grin. "I've been looking forward to this!"

"Awesome. Okay, we're both muted for now. We're live in three... two... one..."

Kaitlyn clicked on the 'Start streaming' button, then swiveled in her seat to face towards the TV where the game they were going to play was idling on the title screen. Normally when she streamed with Sydney her best friend was either playing remotely or doing co-commentary, but today they were doing a local co-op game.

She let the stream sit on a 'starting soon' page for a couple of minutes while people trickled in and chatted with Sydney before starting the stream proper, unmuting both of them. "Heeeeeeeey, everyone! It's me, SyndiKate," she called out cheerfully to start her introduction. "Hope you're all doing great." Glancing at the chat, she said hi to her other mods and a few of her regulars who had already posted greetings, and thanked a couple of people who had renewed their subscriptions to her channel during the introduction. All part of the usual routine, but it was a nice way to ease into things.

"So today we've got a special stream! I've been teasing it for a while, but you all know my head mod InSydious."

"Hiiii!" Sydney intoned brightly.

"Yep! She's here with me at my place! Syn & Syd are together in person!" Kaitlyn informed her stream, chuckling a little when – after a few seconds of stream delay – various happy and excited emotes started filling the chat. "Yeah, I'm excited too! We're gonna be playing together here today, I've got a few games lined up. It's going to be a great time, so strap yourselves in. We're going to be starting with Resthorraunt."

"Ooo, spoooooooky!" Sydney joked before giggling.

Kaitlyn gave a small laugh. "Naw, don't worry, it's about as scary as a kids' cartoon. It's got the same art style! But it's got good reviews, so let's take a look at it..."

After running through her introduction and giving a quick run-down of the game they were playing, Kaitlyn got them both started. There was no shortage of hectic co-op games set in a restaurant, but this one had set itself apart from the others by taking on a light horror theme, so all the customers were cartoony monsters of some description. It was perhaps a couple months too early to be playing spooky games, but neither of them was sure what Sydney's schedule would be like once she started her classes at the community college.

Despite its simple premise, the two of them had a great time with the game, laughing and joking as their characters ran back and forth serving cartoonish plates of body parts and glasses of blood to zombies, were-creatures, vampires and so on. Between levels, Kaitlyn glanced over at the chat to answer questions, sipping from the big sports water bottle full of water on her desk – not that she was on any sports teams these days, but she'd learned the hard way a while back that it was better to have a bottle that wouldn't spill if it got knocked over.

"Oh no, I don't think we're gonna make it past this one," Kaitlyn groaned as she saw all the flashing patience meters.

"Wait, I'm out of plates!" Sydney called out.

"Oh, crud, sorry," Kaitlyn replied. She rushed to return empty plates back to the kitchen, but the delay was too much, and Sydney couldn't get the next order ready in time. Kaitlyn didn't mind, though; both of them gave an "Awwww" in unison, laughing in good spirits afterwards.

"I know, chat, I know," Kaitlyn said as she glanced over and saw a wall of crying emotes plus "GG"s filling up the window. "Look though, we got to number 140 on the leaderboards. That seems pretty good to me!"

"That was fun!" Sydney said cheerfully. "We've gotta play this again some time with the others. I bet it's even better with more players!"

"Oh yeah, definitely," Kaitlyn agreed. "I think that's it for now though. But don't fret, we're not done!" She set down her controller and turned her chair towards her computer to start getting set up. "I'm just going to take a quick 5-minute break, refill my water, and then we'll be right back with another game. Go do the same, guys! Stay hydrated!"

"Leave me on, I want to talk about the game," Sydney told her.

"Gotcha." Kaitlyn muted only the first headset, then stood up, leaving the room without taking hers off, listening to the catchy title screen music. She set her now-empty water bottle down on the kitchen counter and continued on to her bathroom, pushing open the door and flicking on the light. It was as modest as it was clean: just a shower, toilet, and sink, plus a medicine cabinet mirror over the sink and a rack she'd assembled from a flatpack when she'd moved in for holding stuff. The tiled walls were all an impeccable white just like the rest of the fixtures.

Closing the door behind her, Kaitlyn raised her arms over her head, letting out an "Nnnnnh" as she stretched. She was eager to get back to it; she had a mix of old favorites and new games like the one they'd just been playing lined up. Unbuttoning and unzipping her jeans, she pushed them and her panties down as she took a seat on her toilet, sitting close to the front while leaning forward a bit so that her tail wouldn't brush against the lid. She wasn't quite desperate but she was definitely feeling the need, so it was just as well that they'd stopped when they did.

Inhaling and letting it out as a relieved groan, Kaitlyn relaxed, unleashing a stream of very pale urine into the bowl below her that broke up partway down into a spray. The hissing of her pee leaving her was very quickly drowned out by wet splashing sounds as the torrent of red panda urine struck the surface of the water; it was a noisy affair, but the bathroom door was closed, so she didn't have to worry about it being picked up on-stream. A few memories of the camping trip with her friends came back to her, where she had started to forego the actual toilets to take the much easier, quieter, and cleaner option of peeing outside on the grass each morning. Since coming back home she had done nothing of the sort, since she could always rely on her own bathroom to be clean...

"Mmm..." she hummed softly from the pleasant relief of her full bladder draining, raining down heavily into the toilet bowl under her. That was the only problem of staying hydrated: having to take more bathroom breaks, but it wasn't a big-

Suddenly she heard Sydney pounding on the bathroom door. "Just a minute, Syd!" she called back. "I really had to go!"

"No!" Sydney called back, sounding panicked. "It's your headset!"

"It's fine, I'm muted," Kaitlyn replied, raising her voice a little over the sound of her splashing piss, growing a little higher in pitch as her stream started to weaken.

"No! You muted ME!" Sydney told her. "You're still live!"

"What-" Kaitlyn began, and realization hit her. She'd muted her headset – but that was the one she'd leant to Sydney. Her backup headset was unmuted! Her eyes widened and she abruptly clenched her muscles to cut off her stream, closing her legs in reflex even though being visible wasn't part of the problem. "Oh, you have to be kidding me!"

"I'm not! Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry-"

Kaitlyn reached up and fumbled for the mute switch on the headset, but her backup didn't have an inline mute, one of the reasons she'd gotten a nicer one at the first opportunity. "Uuuuugh," she groaned in frustration, then realized that that would have gone on-stream as well. Screwing her eyes shut, she thought to herself for a moment. She burned with shame and embarrassment, and wanted to just cut stream and go hide under the bedcovers for a while. But if she made a big deal out of it, it would just make things worse, and that was the last thing she needed. So, she'd have to tough it out and downplay it – however much it was bothering her in reality.

"Okay, I know you all heard that," she said in a disapproving tone. She wasn't quite done, so she shuffled forward on the toilet seat as much as she reasonably could in the hopes that she would hit the edge of the bowl instead of the water directly. She tried to relax again to let the rest of her pee out, speaking up to talk over any noise it might have made. "Very funny, you perverts," she said over the mercifully quieter ringing of her spray against the porcelain. "That was not intentional, accidents happen. Everyone's gotta go to the bathroom sometimes, get over it. Remember that sim game from a couple weeks ago where if you didn't have enough bathrooms people just started making puddles on the floor? That was way worse than this, trust me."

What remained of her stream trickled off, and she began clenching her muscles to get the last few spurts out. "Also, sorry to my mods, I'm sure you're having a real field day right now," she apologized to cover the sound of her last few sprays. Reaching out, she tore off a couple squares of toilet paper to dry herself with, giving herself some hasty but still thorough wipes, and dropped them in the toilet before standing up. Of course, she'd have to make more noise, but there was no getting around that...

"Um," Sydney spoke up from just outside, "Do you want me to take your headset?"

Kaitlyn silently cursed herself. That would have been the much better option from the beginning. "Yeah, okay, here, take it," she said, opening the door just a crack and pulling the headset off of her head, passing it back out to Sydney, who seemed just as embarrassed and flustered as Kaitlyn was. No longer having to worry about being heard, she turned around and flushed the toilet before washing her hands, sighing and heading back out to the kitchen, thinking about how she was going to handle things as she refilled her water bottle from the jug in the fridge.

It was worse than she expected when she returned to her seat. Sydney was standing over by her computer, doing her best to keep up with deleting messages from the chat; between her and the other mods it was a wall of "<message deleted>" but new messages were constantly scrolling up at the same time. Her headset rested on the desk, and Kaitlyn picked it back up with one hand as she set down her water bottle. "Thanks, Syd, I'll take it from here," Kaitlyn told her, taking a deep breath and steeling herself as she returned her headset to her ears.

She felt hot and flushed and not in a good way, her heart racing. Would she ever live this down? Definitely not if she made a scene out of it. Sydney returned to her chair, still looking embarrassed, and Kaitlyn sat down. "Okay, so, I'm going to drop the stream for a moment after that... unfortunate audio issue," she asserted as she turned to her computer, "But we'll be riiiiiiight back in just a couple minutes for another game, so don't go anywhere."

She hit the 'Stop streaming' button, and then let out a loud, frustrated groan. Sydney put a hand on her shoulder reassuringly. "I'm so sorry, Kaitlyn," she apologized as Kaitlyn got to work deleting the VOD from her channel, then purging all the clips people had just made. "I didn't realize at first because of the stream delay, then I looked over at the chat and..."

"It's fine," Kaitlyn said dismissively, then sighed again. "Okay, well, it's really not fine, but it's not your fault, is what I mean."

"Are you sure you want to keep going?" Sydney offered.

"Yeah, don't feed the trolls and all that," Kaitlyn grumbled, refreshing the page and deleting another set of clips that had been published. "I've just got to play it cool and act like nothing happened. Otherwise they'll just keep at it."

"If you're sure..."

"Besides," Kaitlyn said, trying to act cheerful, "You managed to survive what happened in Junior High, right?"

"Oh, come on!" Sydney protested, raising her hands in exasperation. "That was way worse!"

"Exactly! This'll be nothing in comparison," Kaitlyn told her, looking back over her shoulder. "So I can do it. ...but thanks, Syd. I appreciate your concern."

Sydney gave her a little smile. "Of course. That's what friends are for, yeah?"

"Yeah," Kaitlyn agreed, unmuting the headsets and setting the stream layout up again. "That, and co-op games. Speaking of, ready to get back into it?"

Sydney nodded. "Let's do this."

"That's the spirit," Kaitlyn said, turning around again. "Okay, three, two, one..."

Kaitlyn gave it a few moments for the stream to go live fully. "Heeeeey, it's us, SyndiKate and InSydious, we're back," she announced in the friendliest tone she could muster. "Sooo, I know a thing just happened that I can see you still going on about in chat, but like, let's all just move on, please."

"We've got more games to play!" Sydney called out helpfully.

"Yep. Also, mods, you can chill a little. You guys want to joke around, fine, but no creepy or outright NSFW stuff please, yeah? Keep it classy, chat." Kaitlyn instructed.

She glanced over at some of the messages going by, snorting in amusement at one of them. "No, I did NOT skip hand washing, I'm not a speedrunner," she joked back at them. "We do 100% hand wash strats here. Warm water and soap, nothing less."

Sydney giggled a little bit next to her. "Never do the hand wash skip!"

"Exactly!" Kaitlyn agreed, reading some more messages. There were a few supportive ones mixed in there from her mods, at least, but she scowled a little at some others. "I did not forget to flush! You just didn't hear it because I passed off my headset!"

"Yeah! I heard it-"

"Okay Syd that's not one you should back me up on," Kaitlyn grumbled hastily, then took a deep breath. "You all need to stop projecting your bad habits onto me, chat. My bathroom is super clean and I always keep it that way!" She rolled her eyes as more messages came in. "Gosh, you lot are perverts. This is a cozy, comfy, wholesome and chill stream! We play fun games and hand out valuable life advice, like, always double check that you're actually muted!"

Sydney let out another laugh. "Oh, you remembered to unmute me, yeah?"

"Now I'm going to be paranoid about that, too," Kaitlyn muttered, glancing over at her monitor. "Yeah, you're live. Anyway, next game. Shall we?"

"Yep!" Sydney agreed. "Let's move on."
