See You Next Time (2)
When the conference room door opened, what greeted them was not Mio's scolding, but a TTS voice of the kind you heard all the time on streams and Shorts.
—Excel stream on Jijijik?
"Huh?"
Kokoling tilted her head mid-opening and closed the door again to check the plaque by the entrance.
Main Conference Room
She opened the door once more, and the TTS voice continued.
—Normally, a title like this means the stacked big sisters you're all imagining are about to appear.
—But ta-da! It was a VTuber~!
"What's wrong?"
Hestia asked from behind her, and Kokoling made a face that said she was thoroughly unimpressed.
"I mean, I thought someone was running Happy Hour in the conference room. An Excel stream, of all things…"
"It's not Happy Hour, it's lecture time, so get in here already, latecomer."
At Seika's snide voice, Kokoling flared up and flung the door wide open.
"Ah, seriously! I came all the way up from Busan—cut me some slack already, Unnie!"
Kokoling shuffled into the conference room muttering under her breath, and Tia gently ruffled her hair and nudged her forward with a soft push between the shoulder blades.
The moment Hestia and Kokoling stepped inside, they froze at the Shorts playing from the beam projector.
Tia's hand, as if trying to hide her fluster, rode a little wave across Kokoling's shoulder from pinky to index finger, like typing or playing a piano.
"W-what is this?"
Excel stream.
A phrase with absolutely nothing to do with VTubers.
On the Shorts currently playing, the praise for an extraordinary rookie VTuber never stopped coming.
At the bizarre combination, a helpless laugh burst out of Kokoling. She didn't even think of sitting down—just stood there staring blankly at the screen, pressing hard at her temples.
A rookie who slapped "Excel stream" into the title and then actually opened Excel.
That level of pure innocence was the kind of new toy deep-sea exploration YouTubers would kill to get their hands on.
A pure-white VTuber so green you had to wonder if she'd ever watched a single stream in her life.
A rare specimen you almost never saw these days.
When an utterly absurd cost-calculation sheet for jeyuk-deopbap appeared on screen, Kokoling spat out the straw she'd been chewing on and muttered,
"…Didn't think there was another person on earth who ran numbers like that."
A weird, brazen calculation that just… dropped labor costs entirely.
A sense of déjà vu hit her hard enough that Kokoling couldn't close her mouth.
She lowered the hand that had been pressing her temple and lightly covered her lips.
Normally Mio would have already unloaded a vicious lecture about "learning to sit properly like a lady," so Kokoling shot her a sidelong glance and looked back and forth between Mio and the projector screen.
Fortunately, Mio was hammering away at her laptop without a moment's rest and had zero bandwidth left to scold anyone.
After a long stretch of mouse-clicking, Mio glanced over at Seika.
"Seika. Can you run the meeting for me?"
Seika, arms crossed and reclining comfortably against the backrest, had been making a low "hmm" of suffering. At Mio's call she startled and answered,
"Uh—y-yeah, Unnie. …Today's agenda is this VTuber."
"She's weird, sure, but… hmm…"
Hestia let the end of her sentence trail off.
The other three had felt it too.
There was no way two people like that could exist in the same world.
Looking at Hestia, who had taken a seat and propped her chin on her hand, Mio lifted her hands from the keyboard and spoke calmly.
"Tia Unnie. This time, don't just listen to what she's saying—watch the avatar's facial expressions and the way the hands move, carefully."
Only then did Kokoling and Hestia focus on the smiling face of the avatar.
It wasn't Hestia—still glaring as she dissected this new eccentric—who answered first, but Kokoling.
"She's scared out of her mind, isn't she?"
Still half-distracted by her iced Americano, Kokoling gave it a casual once-over and said exactly what she saw.
"You don't even need to stare. She's just a classic first-stream VTuber, right?"
Slurp.
As if she'd expected that answer, Seika let out a sigh, raised the laser pointer, and circled the avatar in the lower-right corner of the Shorts.
"Of course you're nervous on your first stream. But look—see the cheek tremor? The way the corner of her eye is twitching like this?"
"…And that's a problem because— …Ah!?"
It had been so natural she hadn't even noticed!
Realizing that the tense expression, even the faint flutter at the eye, was all being reflected on the avatar, Kokoling let out something close to a scream.
Being nervous on a first stream was one thing. This was something else entirely.
All four of them had worn that avatar model at least once, so they knew better than anyone.
Things that technically should not have been possible were happening with unnatural smoothness.
—I'll save today's file here. Everyone save and go to sleep.
"Uh…"
The instant a soft flush bloomed across the avatar's cheeks, Kokoling's pupils blew wide.
"…Free distribution files don't do that, do they?"
"…They don't. That's a feature I begged and begged Link-nim to put in for me."
…Unnie was the first one who asked for that?
Kokoling pictured a flushed Mio for half a second, then froze solid with her coffee still held at an awkward angle.
"I opened the old files Link-nim worked on for us—the ones Tia Unnie got and mine too. None of them had fine-control features like that."
Seika backed Mio up.
"…And a lot of the features weren't even on our models. Really unusual stuff."
"Plus it's definitely not something that was in the free distribution version."
Mio went back to wrestling with her laptop as she continued.
"At first I wondered if someone took Link-nim's free release and added a separate blush function themselves, then just pressed a button… but her hands are on her face. It has to be motion capture recognition."
"You're right."
To press a button, the avatar's hands on screen would have to drop downward.
Unless she had some way of floating a keyboard and mouse in midair.
"Outwardly it's a free model, but functionally, every feature from the avatars we use is in there."
"No. It's definitely better than ours, Mio Unnie."
Seika lifted the beam projector remote, paused the screen, and went on.
"See that? Her hand comes right up to her face and not a single strand of hair clips through. Elbows don't twist, and the sleeve follows completely naturally. Moving that fast… if any of us moved at that speed, our hair would clip all over the place."
"…Maybe she had another rigger modify it, or bought a modified version?"
As if she'd anticipated Tia's reaction, Mio unpaused the projector and switched the display.
"Want to look at these? These are all emails our company's riggers sent to the work inbox recently…"
The subjects filling the mailbox on screen mostly carried a bloodthirsty atmosphere.
Even in the previews, the fury directed at Link—and at a newly appeared rigger named Rion—was plain.
There were emails from other major agencies via their official channels, and a flood of inquiries from countless freelancers who took private commissions.
The almost universal claim: someone had been trying to unauthorizedly modify and sell Link-nim's free distribution version—and they had circumstantial evidence to go with it.
"I tried opening the Y-address attached to the emails, but it wouldn't load. Already deleted, maybe."
Link was not a member of Team Lilac.
But these four had left an enormous mark on Link's rigger career.
In the early days, when getting an avatar was nearly impossible, Link's help had carried them from debut all the way to the corporate powerhouse they were now.
How Link felt about the four of them had never been publicly known—but among people in the streaming industry, there was not a single person who didn't know that these four VTubers treasured Link with all their hearts. So of course everyone had been flooding Team Lilac's official inquiry mail.
As she skimmed through the messages that had Link's personal email address in CC, Kokoling muttered as if entranced.
"Rion?"
Remembering the tags listed on the Shorts, Kokoling's expression darkened.
"That's the same as that rookie VTuber's nickname…?"
"The free distribution model's outward design that Link-nim released… the classic Link-nim model parameters… …If the riggers are sending this to our official mail, we can pretty much assume most of the verification is already done, right…?"
Tia pressed her lips with her fingers as she reached her conclusion.
"So a thief was bold enough to just… go live?"
"There's also the possibility it's the real person, so I'm stuck on what to do."
Mio crossed her arms and glared at her laptop screen as she spoke.
"Sh-she's been completely radio silent until now."
Kokoling's voice shook as she went on, as if she couldn't believe it.
"…There's no reason for Link-nim to make a brand-new rigger account, right? And if she was planning to stream, wouldn't she have contacted us first?"
Hestia asked Kokoling—who was hard at work escaping reality—in a voice a full tone lower than usual.
"…Koko. Do you really think Link-nim is the kind of person who would ask for that?"
No. She wasn't.
All three of them shook their heads at almost the same time.
"If she were, she would have joined the company ages ago when we offered."
Mio lowered her head, trying to hide the gloom on her face.
"Then should I try contacting her? She said she was going to stream again, right?"
"…No, Koko. Don't do anything for now."
"We don't have a good answer either way. If it's her, that's a problem. If it isn't her, that's also a problem."
"…"
The moment the real core of the issue surfaced, the conference room went quiet.
In the sudden silence, Kokoling slumped face-down on the desk, staring blankly at the screen as she muttered,
"…So that's why you told us to come into the office instead of holding the meeting on Discord like usual."
Online was full of watchtowers—any way you cut it, a record would remain.
Kokoling, who had seriously considered mutiny when Mio dragged her all the way from Busan to Seoul for what she assumed was nothing, just pouted and let out a small sigh.
In the quiet that followed, Seika chewed her lip, then spoke slowly.
"Want me to try?"
"…Try what?"
"Infiltration?"
Mio looked at Seika on pure reflex, then shook her head hard.
"Too dangerous."
Seika nodded as if she'd expected that.
"I'll make a throwaway account or go in as a guest. I won't give away that it's our team or that it's me. No donations, no talk about rigging."
"Then what are you going to do?"
Tia asked carefully, already half-convinced.
"Excel questions."
Kokoling lifted her face from the desk.
"Excel?"
"Yeah. On the surface, that stream is an Excel tutorial broadcast, right?"
Seika looked at Rion, frozen on the paused screen.
"We just need to see how she answers ordinary questions. The speed of her explanations. The way she talks to people who don't know anything. That kind of thing."
Seika started speaking a little more leisurely, as if she already thought she had the upper hand.
"Mio Unnie's going to be swamped with company work. Koko would get made in under a minute. Hestia Unnie would get soft-hearted and practically drip 'please notice me' hints. Which leaves exactly one person—me."
"…Isn't one minute a little short?"
Whether Kokoling complained or not, Tia and Mio were already asking Seika a few more questions, and with how smoothly she answered, they had no choice but to nod along.
"For the first chat, something like this should work, right?"
The second Kokoling saw that sentence, she shook her head.
"Doesn't that sound super suspicious?"
"Why?"
"Who even says 'first time here, is it okay if I ask a question'? It's only her second stream to begin with. That reads like someone who showed up just to start trouble…"
"Then what?"
Kokoling mimicked a tone she'd seen so many times in chat windows that it was burned into her brain.
"Streamer, can I ask a question?"
"Doesn't that sound even more like a troll?"
Tia said carefully.
"Nah. It'll be fine. If this Rion person really is Link-nim, she won't care that much."
"There are already similar messages in the Shorts chat, so it should be okay. It's also blowing up on the VTuber boards. …Alright."
Clap.
Mio nodded as she spoke, then gave a small clap to pull their attention back.
"Seika. Don't just decide it's Link-nim and go looking for confirmation. If that side turns out to be a thief, we have to stop them."
"Yeah. I'll jump into the next stream."
"Then shall we call it here? Koko still has to get home…"
With the decision more or less settled, Mio moved to wrap up the meeting.
"Can I sleep over at Tia Unnie's place tonight?"
"Our place?"
"Mm. I don't have the confidence to go all the way back down to Busan today."
"Sure. It's been a while—let's have a sleepover, Koko."
Hestia smiled softly and pulled Kokoling into a hug.
"Isn't my place closer?"
"Mio Unnie is scary. And… I heard Tia Unnie bought wine recently, so I want to check it out."
"…Ugh. You're not just going to 'check it out.'"
"When Tia Unnie has a glass… I just help out a little from the side? Hehe."
Once the three of them had finished their quiet chatter, Seika stood up, face set with resolve, and spoke as she left the conference room.
"I'll head out first. See you next time. Unnies, Koko."
The next evening.
"Finally started."
Seika connected to the suspicious VTuber's stream on her computer.