The Gaze of a Once-Great Salvager
And so, while Nia worked toward the perfect execution of her plan to make contact with an active salvager — all without anyone knowing — one salvager in particular had already been squarely caught in her sights.
TinaTina. Real name: Kristina. And right now, she was exhibiting some extremely strange symptoms.
Like an ant whose sense of direction had completely shorted out, she paced the living room in tight circles, biting the tip of her finger.
Ugh… what do I do…
There was a reason she looked so dizzying that anyone watching might start to feel lightheaded themselves.
She had never, not even for a second, imagined that a fan meeting with Nia — something she had only ever dared to dream about in fantasies and daydreams — would suddenly become real under circumstances this abrupt!
Of course, it wasn't an actual in-person meeting. It was just a phone-date segment where they'd talk over a call. But even so — how could she not be overjoyed at the chance to hear that voice, however it came?
If the right to do a phone date could be bought with money, Kristina was certain she would have boldly paid hundreds of thousands — no, millions — of credits without a second thought.
But she was also discovering, with painful clarity, that having a long-cherished dream come true was not an entirely good thing.
Separate from the pure joy her rational mind was feeling… her emotions were pouring out of her like a faucet with a broken hose, flooding her with sensations she couldn't begin to handle!
"What do I do…! I'm shaking so much!"
Thump-thump-thump-thump.
Her heart was hammering as if a tiny dwarf had crawled into her chest and was beating on it with drumsticks for all he was worth. For a girl who could face a Virtual Beast that might snatch her life away the moment she let her guard down and still keep a calm expression — this was a sensation so foreign it barely felt real.
"Anju… I—what do I do? I—I really didn't think this would actually happen…"
"What do you mean, what do you do? Are you going to go out there, say you're too nervous to talk, and leave?"
"Absolutely not!!"
"Then you do it. What else is there?"
"Ugh. Anju just doesn't understand how people feel…"
Kristina shot a sulky look at Anju, who sat on the sofa delivering merciless answers to her whining. Then she planted herself in the middle of the living room and took a deep breath, trying to settle her scattered heart.
"Hee, hee, hoooo…. Hee, hee, hooooo…."
It was the Lamaze breathing technique — something Nia had mentioned in passing once on stream. A method used by expectant mothers to calm their minds and bodies as labor approached…
And remarkably, Kristina could feel her nerves gradually settling through that very method of deep breathing.
As expected, the thing Nia taught is the absolute best for lowering tension…
Of course, the real reason it worked so well was almost certainly a placebo effect — amplified by the fact that she was a devoted believer in Nia. But Kristina, blissfully unaware of such technicalities, only found her respect and affection for Nia growing even stronger.
"Haa… how nerve-wracking can a phone call possibly be for her to get this worked up…"
From Anju's perspective, though, watching Kristina fuss and flail this hard over a call with some independent streamer was simply absurd.
She would grant that Nia wasn't an ordinary streamer — that she was an irregular with considerable buzz and real influence. But unlike Kristina, who was free to run her own course under Anju's protection, Anju herself was deeply embedded in the salvager industry. The various social ripple effects of Nia's existence made her head spin enough that she simply couldn't pour her heart into the girl the way Kristina did.
I hear the entire salvager industry is fretting over that one girl these days.
Ooparts — the radiant cultural artifacts of the pre-war era — and the salvagers who brought them into the world. The two were inseparable.
The only difference between a primitive human carving a spear from stone and a civilized person stamping out guns in a factory was the knowledge humanity had accumulated over long ages. For the people of the twenty-second century, who had lost everything they once built, the only path back to civilization was to rely on Ooparts — the stand-in for that lost knowledge!
Ooparts-supremacism, huh. Most Ooparts aren't even that impressive, if I'm being honest. Anything that's pre-war data gets labeled an Oopart these days.
But as Anju saw it, people lately had become far too obsessed with the word itself. Slap "Oopart" on even the dullest cheap commercial film and its value would jump several times over. There were even people writing their own material and selling it under a false Oopart label. That said enough.
In the end, real Ooparts were rare treasures found only in the virtual world — the crystallized beauty of culture cultivated over hundreds, even thousands of years, blooming like a flower bud at the tip of a stem.
And the people who risked their lives to bring those precious, beautiful treasures into the world were salvagers. Their status and value rising as a natural consequence of that structure was only inevitable.
But that was the old story. Lately, the salvager's prestige — which had been soaring into the clouds — was plummeting earthward like a skydiver with a parachute.
All because of a single independent streamer!
Haa…. A year's worth of Ooparts that should have been released to the public gradually… dumped onto the market in a single month? Does that even make sense? What the hell is she doing…
The virtual world is dangerous. That was common sense among active salvagers.
If you took damage severe enough to endanger your life while jacked into the virtual world, you simply couldn't come back out. Risking your life wasn't a metaphor.
So salvagers had been conquering the virtual world at a carefully measured pace — slowly enough not to put their lives at risk, maybe even a little leisurely. Ooparts were expensive, after all. Putter around, pull out one big score every so often, and you could loaf around for the rest of your life.
But that paradise for salvagers had started changing drastically a few months ago. And the beginning of it all… could be traced to the appearance of a beautiful silver-haired girl who called herself a virtual lifeform.
Do you know the law of supply and demand? When supply is constant and demand rises, market price rises; when demand is constant and supply rises, market price falls.
So what happens when a silver-haired, purple-eyed super-beauty freely scatters Ooparts without any restraint, flooding the market enough to cause major upheaval?
Obviously, the market price of Ooparts would plummet at breakneck speed.
I've heard the salvagers are trying every which way to erase that girl. But looking at how she's been streaming without a hitch this whole time, her backers must be no ordinary faction. All those people have managed so far is controlling public opinion so Nia doesn't get too famous.
Naturally, a salvager industry that had wielded absurd influence with a scarce supply of Ooparts was never going to leave her alone. Her mere existence was costing them continuously. Whether by co-opting her, eliminating her, or applying pressure — they had to do something.
But their harvest so far: zero. No one had recruited her, no one had eliminated her, no one had even successfully interfered. The only sabotage they could manage was scrubbing posts online so Nia wouldn't spread.
Haa. As her guardian, I really hope Kristina stays as uninvolved as possible…
And so, influenced by the rumors circulating in the shadows, Anju hoped that Kristina — whose talent had yet to fully bloom — wouldn't get tangled up in any of it. In the virtual world, Kristina could bring down buildings with a spear, but in reality she was just an ordinary blonde beauty.
Whether Anju watched her with a faintly troubled expression or not, though, Kristina had by now plopped herself onto the living room floor like a cat toasting bread, staring at her PDA with eyes full of ferocious concentration.
"Aaaah! I want that too!"
"Tina!"
"Ah— s-sorry…"
Startled by Kristina's sudden shout, Anju raised her own voice right back at her. A sigh slipped out between her lips of its own accord.
When she liked someone this passionately, what was Anju supposed to do? She could only press a hand to her forehead and hope that this Nia person wasn't connected to any shady factions.
"W-woah…! Th-that's me…"
Gulp.
With a face so tense it was obvious even from a distance, Kristina swallowed hard, then left a message through her PDA confirming she was watching the stream and ready for the call room.
Realizing her turn had truly arrived, she stood up with a look of steely resolve and turned to Anju.
"A-Anju! I'm going!"
"…Do your best. Just go enjoy it."
"Okay!"
Perhaps talking with her one-and-only guardian had eased some of the tension. With a somewhat more relaxed expression, Kristina toddled off and slipped into her room.
Watching the back of a girl whose head looked ready to explode from nerves and anticipation, Anju sincerely prayed that when she came out of that room after the call, her face would be full of nothing but happiness.