Unexpected

"What?"

A dull ringing filled my skull.

A netnabe?

As far as I knew, a netnabe was a woman who pretended to be a man on the internet. But he—no, she? Wait. No. Elmil was a woman?

Ding!

She sent me a screenshot. A notepad file? Had she been jotting this down in the middle of a stream? I clicked the image.

For something written in the middle of a broadcast, it was a surprisingly tidy summary. I skimmed the whole thing, and a fair number of the points actually landed. If this weren't a world where nobody knew what a man was really like, I would have strongly suspected she was a woman myself.

But that was as far as it went.

She went quiet for a moment, as if the same doubt was chewing on her too.

Ding!

"......."

What a pain.

I sent Yo-ona a message.

Asking if I was free, of all moments? Ordinarily I wouldn't have thought twice about it, but now that the netnabe suspicion was sitting in my head, the timing felt incredibly fishy.

My hands froze over the keyboard. Lying still sat wrong with me, even now. But I could hardly send, We're currently suspecting you of being a netnabe.

...Doesn't something about this feel off?

A fan, huh. Well, the fan act was certainly convincing. Not that the suspicion had ever been about the fandom. It had always been about the gender.

...That's way too much like a fan.

This bastard is definitely a woman.

I overlaid the image of her against the women I'd met—brief encounters, but ones that had burned themselves into my memory. Elmil didn't send another message after that. Had... she gotten flustered too?

I messaged Yo-ona.

I screenshotted the conversation with Elmil and sent it over.

She seemed to agree.

Out of nowhere?

An aunt, huh... Something about that combination of words reeked of a con.

Wow. That sounded incredibly shady. A flicker of doubt crossed my mind about whether this was actually a good idea, but there was nothing I could do about it now, so I decided to just trust her.

She sent me a string of unfamiliar usernames.

.........

I seriously reconsidered this whole thing. Maybe I should just walk away...?

.......

No reply.

It actually is illegal?

She ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠doesn't even sound sure!

I frowned slightly and scanned the list of IDs.

"....... EroMire?"

It looked like a registered community username.

EroMire..... Elmil.....

Ah?

...Yeah. I have to do this.

Now that I knew this, I couldn't just leave Elmil alone. EroMire was already an outrageous nickname, and shortening that into a streaming handle was.....

"Sheesh."

I decided not to think too hard about it.

SNS accounts vastly outnumbered community posts, but community boards were a pain to search, so it was a reasonable split.

I headed straight into the Streamer Gallery. This seemed to be the only ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠place people talked about me. She'd be here, right? What if she isn't?

A pointless worry, as it turned out.

It was right there.

Well, she'd just been talking to me. Dumping those leftover feelings onto a community board wasn't exactly strange. The contents were completely worthless—just honest, slightly perverted rambling that lived up to the title. Honestly, it looked a little unhinged.

I clicked on the account. Does this person have no shame? The posts weren't even set to private. I scrolled down through them.

"The first post is less than two weeks old? Maybe they just don't know how to set things to private."

I scrolled back up and started going through them one by one.

"........"

And honestly, I was a little shocked.

Would you believe me if I said this was one of the tamer ones?

Almost ninety-nine percent of it was about me. The remaining one percent was streaming-related questions. And every single post about me was completely unhinged. If you bundled everything Elmil had written into one document, you'd have an explicit novel tagged confinement, kidnapping, training, gore, and... pure love?

And the most irritating part? Not a single post had anything I could use as proof she was a woman. Which meant I had just spent a solid chunk of time diligently reading about how someone wanted to kidnap, imprison, and train me. There wasn't a single post about Elmil herself. It was as if she'd started the community account solely for my sake.

I pressed my fingers to my temple.

She sent me screenshots. Stuff about periods being rough, wanting to meet a man at least once—the kind of content you could use to infer she was a woman.

Except....

...Now what.

I hummed and scrolled through her posts one more time. Every last one of them was completely unhinged, just as before.

Could we use this?

I invited Elmil to a server Yo-ona and I had just created.

Yo-ona and I had come up with one method, given how thin our evidence was. We were going to fluster Elmil.

The plan went like this. The evidence we had wasn't enough for a finishing blow, so we'd make her deliver that finishing blow herself. In other words, we were going to bait her into presenting fake proof.

Ding!

"Check what we just sent you."

"Huh? What do you...."

Screenshots of SNS posts suggesting she was a woman appeared in the server we'd created. And, for no real purpose other than to remind her of the information gap and rattle her, the delusional rambling posts as well.

"I'll get straight to the point. Elmil, you're a woman, aren't you?"

"......."

She was silent for a moment.

"Th-there's no proof this is even my account...."

"It shares an email with your streaming account. We already confirmed that much before saying any of this."

That was Yo-ona for you. Good to have her on our side. While she pressed, I quietly watched it unfold. My job was basically done the moment I'd gotten her to show up.

"I-I'm really a guy! My voice is a guy's voice!"

"You cough a lot, and your voice is a little hoarse. That's the kind of thing that happens when you force your voice lower than it naturally sits."

"Th-that's....."

"If you can't present something like an ID, we'll have no choice but to take this public."

"W-wait! I'll get it!"

Got her.

If she brought us forged evidence now, we'd have her in a position she truly couldn't talk her way out of. After a short wait, a click sounded and her passport appeared.

A photo on a passport, and a gender field stamped unmistakably male. Looking at that alone, there was no room left to doubt he was a man.

.....But something was off.

I pulled out my wallet and checked my own ID.

"No, I don't think that'll be necessary."

Well, I didn't know if that was actually her real name.

Apparently, that wasn't common knowledge in this world.