The Third Booth (3)
Contrary to what the surface world believed, the Church still held a meaningful measure of real power well into the twenty-first century.
At heart it was an organization that had stepped back from politics to devote itself to keeping the peace of the world — and yet, armed as it was with both force and the weight to throw around, it could never be parted from politics entirely.
That Vatican City should keep an intelligence service of its own was only natural.
…For the present Holy See, however, even that was no more than one among several ways of gathering information.
Reports out of the intelligence bureau under the Secretariat of State. The prophecies of Apostle James the Greater. The ledgers of the tax-farming concern M&Z. The statistics of ORACLE.
And the deductions of Apostle John — Elif Yazıcı Nino.
That, in itself, was a tribute to her. To John Nino. A tribute in the sense that a single person's reasoning stood equal to an entire intelligence service.
"……"
And so Han Seoyeon trusted her word. If the woman did not brush a thing aside with an I don't know but said it is so, then it truly was.
"Uh, so why isn't anyone asking me who my favorite character is?"
"No — before you open your mouth, take a look at whose character is printed on your own shirt."
Which meant, in the end, that the man talking over there was not the prophet Seoyeon had been looking for.
And here I thought my luck was finally turning, for once.
She could hardly go poking at the suspects however she pleased; approach one of them without a proper pretext and she risked being found out. Amid all of that, a chance had happened to fall into her lap to make contact under something resembling a justification, and she had been glad of it.
No — think positively. With the mastermind confirmed to be a woman, more than half the suspects had been struck off the list at a stroke.
Tell it as having already narrowed the field to three, and this was nothing short of a genuine windfall.
Well, in any case, the upshot was that for the moment she could stop fretting over whom to investigate and give the broadcast her attention.
It wasn't Mary's own channel, granted, but it was a broadcast she appeared on, and an official broadcast of a game she loved dearly. As a servant of the sole, Seoyeon could hardly have done anything but lose herself in it.
She watched the monitor, where the footage bound for Etube was playing.
There was an audience; people showed here and there in the seats that flickered into frame. Up on the stage, set apart from the seating, the participants sat divided to the left and to the right.
What stood out, if one had to name it, was that the numbers on either side didn't match — and the two monitors stationed at the far right, each with a Live2D model glowing on its screen.
It was a method she had seen used a handful of times, whenever a VTuber turned up for something like a television interview.
Propping up a standing placard and simply playing the voice felt a little thin, and with a live audience in the room there was no compositing the image over in CG, so there was likely nothing else for it.
Wring every last option out of the situation and a hologram became one answer — but set against merely putting a model up on a monitor, the cost on that end ran far too high.
Frankly, even as things stood, a separate crew of staff was already scrambling just to render the two VTubers onto those monitors in real time.
They could hardly put the person inside the VTuber on open display, so the women's filming had to be done in another room entirely.
From that moment it was effectively the same as broadcasting out of two locations at once, and a corresponding surcharge was surely piling up.
And even supposing they had the capital and the capability to push a hologram out live, there was still a problem — or so Ninomae had said.
Mary may have been invited, but only ever as a broadcaster who enjoyed playing the game. The star, in the end, had to be the game and not the VTuber.
If they had the leisure to lavish that much care on a guest, oughtn't they to bring in a voice actor and float a game character on the hologram instead?
At any rate, the broadcast was rolling along smoothly enough in this shape, and one of the two seated on the left side of the stage opened his mouth.
As said before, the split was lopsided: six guests, Mary and Tsubasa among them, sat on the right, while the people from the developer and the operating company sat on the left.
"Yes… well then. Next — Miss Mary?"
The man, from the company that handled distribution and operation in Japan, lobbed the ball of the conversation over to Mary.
"Which Servant do you hold the most affection for, Miss Mary?"
"Let's see. My favorite…"
Finding the question come around to her, Ninomae answered with her head tipped to one side.
That her movements came out oddly large was partly because she was simply that sort of person — but it was probably also so she'd be easier to read.
The other side wasn't accustomed to real-time motion capture as a job either, it seemed, and the camera's recognition wasn't particularly sharp.
It looked less like a problem with the settings than with the equipment itself, and so, even though it had been flagged in rehearsal, it had been left as it was.
Set against the time and money it would take to rush new gear in, this much had struck them as the lesser trouble — a minor thing, better ignored.
Even under those conditions, Ninomae carried on unbothered, correcting for it on the logic that she need only move bigger, and moving exactly that much more.
A small thing, admittedly, but watching it Seoyeon had to admire her. A professional was a professional after all.
"Truthfully, there isn't any character I hold a great deal more affection for than the rest. …Ah, there is one I thought made a truly wonderful showing in the recent story. Naming them here would be a spoiler, though."
"Ah… I believe I know who you mean, but if at all possible, we'd ask for a character implemented on the Japanese server."
"I knew it, didn't I?"
Han Seoyeon watched her from behind.
By rights, no one but the staff was allowed in while filming was underway, and Seoyeon had precious little pretext for squeezing herself in here.
Force an excuse and the best she could manage was the claim that today she was, for all practical purposes, acting as Ninomae's manager.
"…Hic."
"……"
That she could stay at Ninomae's side through the shoot was owed entirely to this drunk.
Hyakurenno Yuri was not someone one could simply wave off as a rich young lady and leave it at that. Say that the girl required an escort, and there was no one here, at least, who could rise to object.
And so Seoyeon, alongside the maid Chisa, had secured the finest seat in the house for admiring Ninomae, all while pretending to be bodyguard to the young lady of House Hyakurenno.
"Something along the lines of 'I like this character!' is quite all right."
"I see. Ah — the one I've had standing in the lobby lately is Nomi. I suppose you could say I like the design."
"Ah, Nomi's wonderful too."
She was watching the broadcast run on like that when, all at once, she felt eyes on her and turned her head.
Chisa was looking down at her phone, then up at Seoyeon's face, and back again, over and over.
"Is something the matter?"
"Nooo, nothing~"
Wondering what it could be, Seoyeon glanced at the screen and found a character there.
A black-haired woman with a distinctly gloomy cast to her. Dressed in a suit, she was drawing a red necktie tight with her own hand, and at each hip rode a cord-lashed ring-pommel sword and a holster with a pistol seated in it.
She was, in a word, the very image of a cold-blooded killer cut straight from the mold. Something was written in the lower right corner. The character's name, most likely — Nomi.
"You just plain look alike, so I was only thinking about what the order would be, is all~"
"The order?"
Whether Ninomae's tastes had always run this way and Seoyeon merely happened to suit them, or whether those tastes had been bent out of shape on Seoyeon's account — Chisa did not go so far as to say.
Seoyeon was left to turn it over alone, wondering what on earth the girl had meant.
"Now then, our next ranking is the Servants you Knight Commanders have picked out — the ones you'd like to see implemented. Shall we begin with our guests' opinions?"
The broadcast, of course, had no intention of waiting on Han Seoyeon's pondering. On it went regardless.
The one putting the question this time was the woman of the pair from the game company's side. From the developer — the director and programmer who had come over from Korea, Seoyeon had heard.
She certainly seemed to speak Japanese fluently, and yet something about her accent sat strangely.
"Then, Mr. Ichimonji Shirobe…"
"No, I'm telling you, there's no point asking Shirobe-chan. The guy's a commie, so he's obviously just going to say bunny-girl Marx or maid Marx again."
"What exactly do you take me for. None of those."
"Then what?"
"Wedding-dress Marx."
"So it is Marx!"
Well, a reasonably smooth run of things followed after that.
The game company hadn't invited its guests with anything grand in mind. Filling the air to a reasonable degree and giving reasonable responses was quite enough.
There was nothing in particular they were obliged to put on display.
If they hoped to pull viewers in through this, they would have to show off some charm — but in so short a time, and within so narrow a format, even that had its ceiling.
Lean too hard into self-promotion, on the other hand, and they might sour the gamers against them. Better, then, not to try to show too much, and simply offer an easily grasped piece of themselves in moderation.
Since the circumstances would never let them show all of themselves anyway, leading with a flat, primary-colored character was, from a certain angle, actually the wiser play.
The Marx devotee over there was a fine example of precisely that. …That one seemed to mean it in earnest, but regardless.
"If I had to choose, perhaps Vlad III."
"Miss Mary — favoritism toward your own kind, is it?"
"Hehe. Well, I suppose so. I do go about bearing the name Țepeș, after all."
"That's certainly true. For the very same reason as Lady Mary, I'm looking forward to the Crusader heroes being implemented."
And for Mary and Tsubasa, this sort of thing was effortless.
A concept that read easily and sat well with an audience was something one had to be thinking about from the very moment a VTuber character was born.
More than that, these two were long since hardened to the business of catching a broadcast's current and riding it.
If the other guests had seen plenty of stages like this one, then these two made personal broadcasting their living.
At that point, one could very nearly come down with an occupational compulsion about letting the audio go dead.
"For me, maybe Billy-chan. She's on the villain side, but she isn't a child with a rotten heart, so I'm hoping the story has her change sides down the line."
"Ah, Billy-chan is cute. A villain, sure, but she's only a clumsy little airhead, so you just can't bring yourself to hate her."
They could even follow, without the slightest strain, the game talk that was the broadcast's real subject.
Tsubasa — Yuri — was a player who enjoyed the game a great deal herself, and Ninomae was a diehard, raising an account all the way on the Korean home server.
"Right. That was the introduction video. Any thoughts?"
"Oh. Did Duke Cone-Hat get buffed this time, by any chance? The cast frames on his skill look different."
"You can see that, Miss Mary…? No — more importantly, please keep to the matter at hand. That was an introduction video for a different character's technique, wasn't it?"
"Ah, I'm sorry. By future-sight reckoning it won't be patched in for months yet, so it just slipped out."
"Bringing up future sight on an official broadcast… is that really all right? No, well — everyone knows it all anyway, but still!"
…She was a diehard fan. Rather severely so.
Against the general reaction of can you even tell that by eye?, Mary only cocked her head.
"At this level, it's the difference between a skill cycle coming around seven times or eight in a single fight, you know?"
"Whoa… so this is the kind of person who writes those low-level Wailing Wall guides. Terrifying."
At the very least, it had been firmly established just how serious Mary was about this game. A few gamers charmed by the fact might well wander over to the channel.
At any rate, aside from the odd moment when Mary and the other guests went and demonstrated exactly why people called them fiends… it was, as noted before, a broadcast with an easy, even flow.
It could hardly have been otherwise. Barbara Knight had already been in service in Korea for over a year before it ever reached Japan, and like most games of its kind, it followed the home server's updates to the letter.
In short, future sight was a real thing.
And the guests — even if not all of them played on the Korean server — were, every one of them, the sort of player who had at least a rough hold on that future-sight material.
Nearly everything being announced on this broadcast, then, was something they already knew.
Knowing precisely what was coming, they played along as a matter of course. Professionals that they were, not one of them let slip a lukewarm we know all this already.
What the guests had genuinely not known came down to about two things.
User-friendly patches pulled forward ahead of the Korean server's schedule, as Mary had pointed out. Or Japan-only fan service of the this-collaboration-this-merchandise sort.
For the record, even those had been pounced on and annotated — the first by a vampire suspiciously fluent in every last detail of the Korean server, the second by a holy knight suspiciously well briefed on the state of the industry in question.
Which was why the whole thing had inevitably settled into so smooth a current.
"…What."
"Huh? Wha—whaaat?!"
It stayed that way right up until the operations side, calling it their final announcement, rolled the PV for the event due to be patched in starting next week.
At first the reactions were perfectly ordinary. Some of them had already watched that very video, in Korean, a full year ago.
"Eh?"
But from somewhere around the middle, the reactions began, somehow, to curdle. Raw, unvarnished confusion started getting caught on the microphones, one voice and then another. Murmuring rose from parts of the audience as well.
Then the video ended, a short stillness hung in the air — and an uproar broke out among the guests.
"Whoa. Whoa. Whoa…"
"What. How is that one over there…"
"Huh? Hold on. What is this…"
"A game company out of its mind, same as ever — how reassuring!"
"Even so, it's the same event! Since when does the story change from server to server?!"
While everyone else floundered, the woman sent over from the developer alone sat grinning, broad and smug, like someone who had just landed a clean blow.
Ah. A flustered Miss Ninomae is cute, too.
…No. In truth, there was one more.
Long before any question of how the story had or hadn't changed, Han Seoyeon hadn't known what the original contained in the first place.
As ever, Ninomae was simply cute. That was all.