There's No Way I Can Do a Collab—No Way, No Way! (※It Wasn't Impossible?!)
My past life.
A sturdy twenty-five-year-old man from South Korea. The me of now, though, is a sixteen-year-old Japanese high school girl, and there is no confusion in my memories or in who I am. After those memories returned at ten, I spent nearly a year turning them over and putting them in order. A past life or not, the person I am now is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl anyway, and I feel no particular resistance to living as a girl. Before the memories came back, I had spent ten years as an ordinary—well, ordinary?—girl, after all.
Even so, the memories are still there, and throwing them away completely never seemed possible. So the conclusion was simple: I would do whatever I felt like. I am the sort of person who would much rather spend the time I'd waste fretting over this on one more episode of anime and one more match. And above all, however I look at it, I am a friendless outsider and a hopeless loser. That part does not change.
An unchanging truth. Fate itself.
"Haa."
What I had open in front of me was one of the many VTuber communities.
Kaino Izumi ＜＜＜ if this bastard applied to Stars Flow just to feed her own desires, smash that rec lol
I'll start. lol
That made four places I'd gone ego-surfing today. And the general consensus was that my line—I like cute girls—hadn't been a VTuber performance at all, but the honest truth. Fortunately, most of the reaction was friendly. No. A great many people liked it enormously.
Well, the industry treats VTubers as idols to begin with. You only have to watch pairings like Black Star and Ayakari take off to see it: around here, yuri fanservice is, if anything, encouraged. There were reactions like the post I'd just read, of course, but this was less another Calamity and closer to simply catching people's eyes.
Anyway. What I mean is that, as I am now, gender doesn't jerk me around all that much. My sense of self as a man is far stronger, and yet I have no trouble at all acting like a girl.
But.
There is exactly one thing. One thing I can never, ever yield on. No—more precisely, it isn't a question of yielding. There is something that is physiologically impossible.
Seeing men as someone I could love.
Even in the ten years before I remembered my past life, there had never been anyone I liked, and once the memories returned it became, quite literally, a bodily impossibility. I mean, it's common sense, isn't it? Big, sweaty guys, versus small, cute girls—obviously the girls win, right? Or not. Whatever.
Not that I look at women as romantic prospects, exactly. I wasn't especially interested in dating in that life, either. Still, if I had to choose an ideal to fall for, a girl would be the better option.
Naturally, I had never told any of this to anyone, Mom included. There hadn't been anyone to tell. But as of today's stream, the secret had spread rather widely. I don't mind. And yet, somehow, I'm embarrassed. Above all, Mom is probably going to watch my streams too. If she asks, what am I even supposed to say?
"I don't know."
It had already happened. Deleting the video wouldn't matter; countless clips were already making the rounds. If Mom asked, I would deal with it then. For now, I needed to think about tomorrow's stream.
"Maybe I really should just do TLQ again."
Even if it wasn't TLQ, a gaming stream would be better. Today had taught me, thoroughly, that a chatting stream does not suit a friendless loser with garbage social skills. Not even a little. I was turning that over, just about to settle on a game for tomorrow, when a bright little ding chimed from my phone.
...What?
Stars Flow is a bad company.
I could say it as many times as I liked.
Stars Flow is a bad company!
Working me through Golden Week, demanding some absurd concept out of a person like me, and now ordering a collab stream with a peer. If Stars Flow is not the axis of evil, then this tyranny has no explanation. None.
Think about it. It was bizarre, wasn't it? My peers already had close to three weeks of streaming behind them. No—in the community they were seasoned pros whose entire past lives had already been dug up and aired out. And a complete rookie, three streams to her name, was supposed to collab with people like that? Ridiculous. Even setting that aside, those peers had spent three weeks building relationships of their own, and they wanted a shut-in loser like me to wedge herself into the middle of it.
...Wouldn't it be better if the world just ended tomorrow?
Just talk along with whatever subject they handed me? If I could do that, I would have friends! And no, speaking without seeing a face is not the same as reading chat on stream. Chat lets me pick and choose the lines I actually want to read!
I could see the future. The mood on the collab would die, I wouldn't be able to stand the silence, I would open my mouth, and whatever came out would be absolute bullshit—and the community would go up in flames. Right. I had to tell them I couldn't do it.
And what came through those messages was nothing but goodwill. My manager wanted the stream to go well.
Right. If I could have spoken up at a moment like this, I wouldn't have shut-in-loser communication disorder.
Damn it.
The peer who became my first collab partner: Koga Suzuha. Her real name, I was sure, was Komachi Yuika.
Honestly, of everyone in our generation, she was the one who had lodged deepest in my memory. For good reason. She was an incredibly cute girl.
I'm short. The last time I measured, I came in at 151 centimeters, nowhere near the average of 163. Not that it matters. I'm a peerless little beauty whose whole charm is being petite and cute, so it's fine, isn't it? I still believe I can get taller, okay?!
...Anyway. I'm short.
So before I met the other second-generation members, I had naturally assumed I would be the smallest. Except—surprise. Someone was smaller than me. And that someone was Koga-san.
If it had been Akabane-san, I wouldn't have been shocked. The manager had already told me her concept was a chuunibyou little-girl act. Koga-san's concept, though, was an angel who had fled the heavens. An angel. You picture someone sacred, striking, a beautiful adult woman, don't you? And yet here was a cute girl who looked seven or eight centimeters shorter than me.
...Ah. Maybe she qualified as an angel in another sense.
She was also the oldest of us. A full eight years older than I was now—twenty-four. The contrast was adorable enough that Utsumi-san reached out and patted her head without thinking. The person in question, of course, raised a tremendous fuss about being the eldest.
Even so. That deep-purple ponytail, those pitch-black eyes, that sharp, catlike face, stacked on the gap between her age and her height, had slammed into my memory with ridiculous force. And that Koga-san was my first collab partner?
It might not be so bad. Perhaps because she was conscious of being the oldest in the second generation, she was the one who talked to me, the youngest, more than anyone else. A gentle mama attribute on top of that. Koga-san is incredible.
Someone like her... couldn't she become the first friend of this life?
We had decided to stream from my channel. The others had broadcast steadily through the two weeks of my hiatus and had already cleared monetization. I, on the other hand, didn't have nearly enough videos; monetization was still a ways off. So Koga-san suggested we go live on my channel, to push the application through even a little sooner.
Koga-san is so kind.
Once the stream actually started, there would be even more. I was supposed to hold a conversation with another person in front of that many people?
...Am I going to experience death for the second time today?
"Nngh, uwaaah...."
"Miss Izumi, are you all right?"
Koga-san's voice came through the headphones. Calm, and kind. For most people that voice alone would have loosened every knot and healed them on the spot. Unfortunately, for the me of right now, it was nothing short of another poison.
"Th-th-that, I-I'm o—kay? Huh? Am I okay?"
"Try a slow, deep breath. There's still a little time before we start."
I did as she said. Eyes closed, breath drawn in, I could feel my heart slamming.
"Hoo. Hoo."
Quietly, I opened my eyes and looked above the monitor. A frame hung there, a sentence set inside it.
Ah. This feeling of being healed. Even if my self-esteem is garbage—ultra-amateur-tier garbage—if I have Nacchan's support, I can endure.
"Are you feeling better?"
"Y-yes. I-I'm much better."
At about the level I managed on stream, I thought I could speak.
"Then shall we get started?"
I looked at the clock. 4:59. Just as she'd said—it was time.
"...Haa."
One last deep breath, and I quietly took the waiting screen down.
"Ko-Konzumi~. S-S-Stars Flow talent, the a-atmosphere maker who dreams? of a world? where everyone can smile. Kaino I-Izumi...!"
A flood of welcomes answered the greeting. Once I was sure of it, I went on.
"A-as I said I would, t-today Koga-san is here with me!"
At those words, her avatar rose onto the screen. Pure-white hair falling all the way to her knees, crowned by a diamond-shaped ring of gold. Beneath soft, pale-green eyes, a beauty mark made the accent, and behind a sailor uniform awash in silver frills, a pair of small wings fluttered. Cuteness that suited a frame even smaller than mine, and with it a noble air that seemed to prove she truly was an angel.
...I feel purified.
"Suzu-hi~. Stars Flow talent, the angel who wants to be praised by everyone—Koga Suzuha!"
...Yeah. That was probably impossible.