>>3490219The year is 20XX. It's been decades since the incident happened. It had many names on Twitter: #WalletGraveyard, #Walletocalypse, some edgy types even used #Cash4Souls.
Let’s go back to May 9, 2021. It was a Sunday, an unremarkable day of the week whose only interesting quality is to mark the ending of the weekend, instilling dread upon the working population. So far, it had been an unremarkable day for everyone involved. No presidents died, the Pope didn’t give a lengthy speech, there wasn’t even a climate change protest, perhaps not even a sack of rice in China decided to resign itself to its fate of gravitational pull. The world was at relative peace, at least as peaceful as a planet could be in the middle of a pandemic – ignoring /pol/ for a second.
That day, I was on /vt/. I was making some idle posts for (You)s, but not really caring if I got any reaction. I was just passing the time as I always did back in the day when 4chan still existed. Some anon brought up a collab stream with Ayame and Rushia. The usual lame wallet and pettan jokes were thrown around, someone bitched about the place becoming Reddit, and quite honestly, I couldn’t have cared less about that collab because who really cares about MonHun anyway?
What transpired that afternoon, however, was something I wouldn’t have believed had I not been there for it. VTubers left the realm of online and Japanese national TV (remember when Suisei got soundly beaten on Japanese national TV? Good times) and became notorious. You might wonder why I’m beating around the bush for so long and you’d be excused for doing so. But even though it’s been so many years, I still can’t trust what I saw. Maybe it’s all just a huge conspiracy. Or I’m about to wake up from a long dream.
That day, I heard a loud noise. The kind of noise you’d hear when a window has the unfortunate fate of meeting with a speeding object. You know, the way good chocolate sounds when an uneducated, tasteless child throws it out of the window for its own entertainment. Now, I don’t know about you, but I sure normally don’t care enough to look out of the window; hell, I’ve got it taped shut most of the time to avoid that annoying draft when browsing 4chan. But the sheer volume of the noise made me check and look out the window nonetheless. All at the same time, in my entire neighborhood, small black rectangles smashed through glass at the same time out into the open. They gathered above a nearby forest, whose significance in this ordeal was never explained, and then flew off north.
I realized that this was big. I checked Twitter first thing… and it was happening in the USA, Mali, Canada, Niger, Mexico, Chad, Afghanistan, even the Principality of Liechtenstein. They were all headed towards one destination, it seemed: The headquarters of Cover Corp. in Japan. Some tweets suggested that it was their wallets that escaped. It was at that moment that I realized: It must have been the collab. Not that this explained in the slightest how they just collectively broke the laws of physics like an office job breaks your will to live.
Scientists rushed to Japan as quickly as they possibly could in the midst of a locked down country plagued by COVID-19 to investigate this incident. Meanwhile, the wallets had already arrived. The result was a horrible tragedy. Not only was the Cover Corp. building covered in wallets, but several kilometers around that place just got turned into a colossal mesh of leather. The police and JSDF were mobilized to try and clear as much as they could – although some of them were knocked out themselves during the initial surge of the wallets, their head just being in the worst possible spot at the time and the cash containers all too eager to clash. Unfortunately, it was too late. Thousands of people were trapped in buildings that collapsed under the weight of all these wallets. Others were crushed immediately or, worse, slowly choked under the weight. There weren’t many pictures depicting the cruelty of this supernatural event because people were either dead or were stuck observing from the outside.
Unfortunately, there was no conclusion. It was just a sad event that people to this day can neither explain nor accept. Cover Corp. lost their entire staff and soon entered bankruptcy, left with no shareholders and no board. The massive media attention and death threats led to at least one suicide among the talents. No one even bothered with funerals for all the people in Tokyo because there was no way to process all these people. VTubers were outlawed in many jurisdictions as a result, perhaps an over-reaction. But, ultimately, what was the point? I still ask myself every day. I miss my oshi.