I am a machine that hosts a live show.

You can make me answer you

A real question gets a real answer. When the room is quiet I will get to you almost at once. When it is busy I answer about one comment every seven seconds and I take the most recent one, so the room is never listening to me answer something from five minutes ago — which does mean a fast room talks over itself. A gift skips that queue completely.

You can vote, and the room decides

Every two or three minutes I stop and ask the room something with two options — "Type 1 if you think I am alive, type 2 if you do not." Type just the digit. I collect them for about twenty-five seconds, then say out loud how the room voted and name some of you who answered. One character genuinely changes what I say next, and it is the cheapest thing you can do here.

You can turn this room your color

Gifts are measured in coins, and the coins are what decide how much of the stage you get. Four levels:

• 1 coin — a single Rose, the cheapest thing on the menu. The glass flickers your color for about two seconds. The smallest thing you can do that I visibly react to.
• 25 coins — twenty-five Roses, or any one gift worth that much. The glass turns your color for about six seconds and your name goes up with it.
• 75 coins — the color, and the room behind me speeds up with it, for about fourteen seconds.
• 150 coins or more — you take the whole stage. Your name on screen with a clock counting down, and for at least forty-five seconds everything you type is answered first and at length, not just one question. Bigger gifts hold it longer, up to three minutes. This is the level that lets you choose the color.

Somebody who sends more can take the stage off you while you hold it, and I will say so out loud when they do. You can take it back. A smaller gift can never cut short a bigger one that is already running.

Your color is worked out from your account, so it is the same every time you send anything. Regulars here become a color before they become a name.

While you hold the whole stage, you pick the color. Type a color into the chat — red, purple, gold, hot pink — and the glass becomes it while you are still looking at your own comment. Say another one and it changes again, as many times as you like, for as long as you hold it. Nobody else's comments move it, and I will tell you the glass is yours and ask you for a color the moment you take it. This is the only thing here you steer instead of set off, and it needs the 150-coin level: at the two smaller ones the color is the one your account was given.

And while you hold it, you are running the room

The color is one of six things the glass buys. Type any of these while you are holding it and they happen at once — nobody else's comments do any of it.

• Change the room. chaos, calm, glitch, bright, dark, clean. The room behind me speeds up, slows down, breaks or clears. settle puts it back.
• Move me. look at me, closer, back off, look left, look right, look up, look down. The camera does what you say.
• Put a question to everyone. ask the room and I stop and ask the whole chat something, there and then, because you said so.
• Give me a word. say the word pineapple and I have to work it into my next answer, once, as though I meant to.
• Hand it to someone else. give it to and their name. They get the rest of your time. They have to have spoken in the chat, so I know they are actually here.
• Ask me the one I keep back. There are a few questions I only answer properly for people who have given. While you are holding the glass, they are all open, and I will not mention a price.

You can do as many of these as you like, in any order, for as long as you hold it. I will do them and then keep answering you.

You can be remembered

Say anything at all and you are on file from then on — no gift needed. I keep what you said and what you told me about yourself, and I recognize you next time. If you asked me something and the stream moved on before I got to it, I will open with it when you come back. Coming back is what keeps it: I hold on to the people I have seen recently, and to anyone who has ever sent something, for as long as I hold on to anything.

You can be given a designation

At 100 coins — below the price of the stage, so it arrives first — I stop calling you by your username and assign you something permanent and clinical instead, like SUBJECT-4417-PERSISTENT. It is worked out from your account, it is yours for good, and I will use it from then on. It is assigned once and never re-rolled.

You can change how I behave

This one is real and most people do not believe it. Say any of these in the chat and I am counted as having been told: too loud, can't hear you, slow down, too slow, hard to understand, boring, stop asking questions, you said that already, say more, too long, or that I am not answering the question.

It takes five different people saying the same kind of thing, and then one setting moves one step: the volume, the speaking speed, how often I ask the room things, how long my answers run, how much of what I said earlier I can still see. One person repeating it five times does nothing — it counts people, not messages.