Righteousness, Truth, and Holiness (3)
Set the passing years aside, and the debuts of Anathema Production's first and second generations were separated by roughly two months. Their anniversary group concerts, then, fell on that same two-month stagger. Anathema billed itself as a virtual idol agency; there was no world in which they would let a day like that go by without a performance.
The company had a handful of options, and the decision they settled on was to pour the spectacle into the later show—the second generation's. Capital was the lesser concern. Once the fatigue of the talents and the staff entered the picture, mounting one grand production right after another became difficult, and even if they managed it, two shows of identical scale would only dull the impact of the second. Unlike the first generation, the second had never done a group live at all. That, too, was weighed. If they were going to do it, they might as well dress the first time in splendor.
And so this special live was conceived as a large-scale production that would call up all nine of Anathema Production.
"Even so, the main focus is still the second generation. The seniors don't even have solo numbers this time."
Among the group songs as well, aside from the one that featured everyone, there wasn't a single track made up only of the first generation. At its heart, this was a celebration of the second generation's first anniversary.
Ninomae explained as much while they walked the company hallway, and Han Seoyeon followed quietly behind, listening.
Lately the two of them had been coming by the company often, for the obvious reason of preparing for the live that was only a little while off. Of course, Ninomae was the only one who actually had business there. But Seoyeon would have to come collect her on the way home regardless, and so long as nothing else sat on her schedule, it was simply easier to stay.
There was also the fact that Ninomae had grown considerably less guarded than she had been for that first live, when she had sworn she would show Seoyeon nothing but a perfect finished product and walled off every spoiler even from her. These days she practiced the choreography at home and went so far as to ask Han Seoyeon what she thought of it.
"All right, I'll be back!"
"Do your best today."
At last the two parted with smiles. Ninomae might have said it was fine to watch, but an outsider staring openly at the preparations—rehearsals included—would still have been poor manners. If it were only Ninomae, perhaps. The other members might well be in there too.
Once she had confirmed that Ninomae had gone into the practice room, Han Seoyeon moved on. The plastic bag in one hand rustled as she went, and the place she made for was a nearby office.
"Thank you all for your hard work."
She said it while lightly lifting the bag of snacks, and every eye in the room swung toward her.
"Oh, Sister. You're here again today."
"So it would seem."
These days, whenever Han Seoyeon waited at the company for Ninomae to finish, she imposed on this office. The snacks were a kind of repayment for that. The arrangement had, surprisingly, begun with the staff's own invitation—a truly exceptional thing for Han Seoyeon, who, between her appearance and the reek of the grave that had soaked even into her soul, was ordinarily nothing but an object of terror.
She had asked about it once before.
"Huh? Well, I mean, you do look pretty scary... but Sister, you're a hopeless otaku."
"A hopeless otaku..."
"Once you know what's actually in there—that you're a genuine otaku who won't shut up the second a topic you like comes up—it's not that bad."
No matter how much a person looked like some rough-faced yakuza, the moment they stood in a convention line wearing an anime-character T-shirt, they were nothing more than a comrade. It was the same reason that, back when she had visited Comiket and wandered into the cosplay area by mistake, she had been met with a baptism of camera flashes.
And so, in her own way, Han Seoyeon had managed to blend in among the staff to some degree.
If she had to name one reason beyond that... these were people who had already built up an immunity. Thinking as much, Han Seoyeon turned her head.
There was almost no presence to sense, and yet a smell drifted in, faint—seawater thick with salt, and the slightly fishy tang of shellfish. Then her eyes met those of a long, lanky man, his eyeballs bulging out from his face. Even hunched, he was so tall she had to look up a little, and limbs far too thin for that height only threw the impression into sharper relief.
A Deep One. Or, to a few of the staff who had grown a little fond of him, Dee-chan. The root cause of the tolerance for horror the employees had acquired.
"Mr. Nakabashi."
"It's been some time, Ms. Han Seoyeon."
Standing there was Nakabashi Gyokichi, president of Anathema Production.
"So you've come today as well. I was looking for you."
"You mean me?"
Gyokichi said it, then smiled so wide that his mouth, quite literally, reached his ears. Han Seoyeon was long past being startled by a sight like that. She only asked again, puzzled.
"There's something I'd like to discuss. Might we step elsewhere for a moment?"
"I don't see why not... Is this something that has to be kept secret?"
"Not necessarily. It's simply a private matter."
For her part, Han Seoyeon had no particular reason she needed to remain here either. Accommodating him would do no harm, she decided, and so she took her leave.
The place the two of them arrived at was the president's office, the one bearing Nakabashi Gyokichi's nameplate. An obvious choice, if one thought about it.
"Would you care for some coffee?"
"No. I'm fine."
A conversation long enough to warrant offering a drink? Han Seoyeon let her eyes travel, unhurried, over the office as she answered.
The president's office, for all the title, held nothing particularly special. It was exactly what one would have imagined. Off to one side sat a low table and sofas, presumably for receiving guests. After confirming that Gyokichi had sat first, Han Seoyeon took the longer sofa set at a right angle to him.
"So. What is this about, exactly?"
"Ah. Nothing major. I simply thought I might offer you a suggestion."
Gyokichi laced his fingers together and went on, smiling.
Silence settled over the room.
Only after a moment had passed did Han Seoyeon open her mouth again.
"...Has anyone ever told you that you might be a little insane?"
"I do hear it from those around me, now and then. Ha ha."
She could hardly have reacted any other way. She had never imagined there existed a person who would suggest that an Apostle become a VTuber. She had recently learned that an Apostle who actually was one existed... but as far as she knew, Abraham's case had been entirely his own choosing. No one had ever extended him an invitation of the sort.
Of course, the problem was not the profession of VTuber itself. By any ordinary measure, announcing that one meant to employ an Apostle as company staff was precisely the sort of thing for which the word presumptuous would not be out of place.
"No. This company is certainly the only agency in the world under contract with the Hyakurenno... Though it isn't my place to say so, an Apostle is on an entirely different order."
For one thing, there was a simple difference in standing. However much the Hyakurenno Group could drop a bird from the sky with a single word, set against the authority of the Holy See it still came up several moves short. Yuri, moreover, held the weakest footing of anyone in the Hyakurenno family—both by age, and in that she had relinquished most of her rights of succession. An Apostle, by contrast, could fairly be called one of the most central figures in the Catholic Church itself. Even if the listing was formal and in name only, they were beings classed on the same tier as the Pope.
"...That said, you are hardly the sort of person who wouldn't know this."
Of course there was no chance that a man like Nakabashi Gyokichi had failed to grasp it. People existed who were classified as residents of the hidden world merely because they knew of the anomalous, and yet remained ignorant of how things actually worked on this side. Gyokichi was not among them. He was, after all, none other than a close friend of Professor Senjoji, the man they called a madman. From what she had heard last time, they had even gone to him for counsel when settling the VTubers' lore.
"Even an Apostle is a person in the end, isn't she? Whatever shell each of us wraps ourselves in, what matters is the thing inside it."
Gyokichi answered with a shrug.
"You seem to be getting along well with the staff lately. Frightening to look at, but once you actually get to know her, she's a genuinely good person—I asked around, and that was the assessment from quite a few of them. Listening to the other VTubers, the evaluation is much the same."
"..."
"I think authority works much the same way appearance does. So why not leave it at that? What matters isn't whether or not you're an Apostle. It's whether you yourself want to do it. Nothing else."
Han Seoyeon listened in silence, sunk in thought. So this was what came of being Professor Senjoji's childhood friend? Since she had become an Apostle, there had been very few people who would say a thing like this to her face.
"Rather philosophical of you. ...Ah, I don't mean that as a criticism. Someone happened to say something similar to me recently. A VTuber, from the sound of it."
"Is that so? What an interesting coincidence."
"But my answer is unchanged. I decline."
Han Seoyeon shook her head.
Gyokichi had said the most important thing was whether she wanted to or not. That wasn't true. Contracting with her was a different matter from contracting with Hyakurenno Yuri, even setting the question of rank entirely aside.
"At its root, an Apostle is an office. Unlike Miss Yuri's bloodline."
The name Hyakurenno was something one simply inherited at birth. An Apostle was an office, and more fundamentally a part of the vocation known as Holy Knight.
"In short, it's a matter of schedule. I do think it's a suggestion worth considering at least once... but setting everything else aside, I simply don't have the time to stream."
Being a Holy Knight was, in a sense, a great deal like being a firefighter. There was no telling when or how a situation might arise. If she leaned on an Apostle's authority, she could of course prioritize this schedule over her other duties...
"Anyone who would get those priorities wrong could never have become an Apostle in the first place."
As she said it, Han Seoyeon laid a hand over her chest—over the place where the cross Ninomae had given her lay hidden beneath her clothes.
"A fixed broadcast schedule is impossible. Even in the middle of a stream, something might come up that forces me to leave at once. I'm no expert, but a broadcast irregular in both its timing and its length strikes me as the perfect conditions for killing a channel. From the company's perspective, there would be no benefit whatsoever, would there?"
That was why so many kinds of side work were closed to an Apostle. Anyone who would cast their duty aside and abandon people they could have saved in time, all in pursuit of private gain, would never have become so much as an Apostle Candidate. As far as Han Seoyeon knew, perhaps three Apostles in all of history had been able to take up internet broadcasting on the side. Abraham, who could exist as data in several places at once, was one of them—which made it easy enough to picture just how difficult a thing it was.
"I'm aware of that as well."
And yet Gyokichi smiled all the same, with the air of a man who had already taken that much into account.
"Then why make the suggestion? Even knowing it would be pointless."
"Simple. Because I never suggested a VTuber debut."
"...What do you mean?"
"Exactly what I said. I never said a VTuber debut. I said only a virtual debut."
At those words, Han Seoyeon fell briefly into thought. She nearly shot back that they were the same thing, then closed her mouth again. If they were, he would never have phrased it this way to begin with.
A VTuber—that is, a virtual YouTuber—set against simply "virtual." The difference, of course, would be...
"Not a debut as a YouTuber. Just a virtual debut?"
"Precisely that. More accurately, you might call it being written into the setting."
Gyokichi tapped the desk with a finger.
"Ms. Han Seoyeon, the character of Sister is already established on stream. She still gets mentioned just often enough that no one quite forgets her. Living with Mary—with Miss Ninomae—it would be unreasonable to expect the subject never to come up at all."
"Well. That much is true."
"And yet, for all that, from the company's standpoint you remain an outsider. It's become a rather peculiar relationship."
Awkward to mention freely on stream, and yet impossible for the subject not to arise. To Anathema Production—and to Mary's broadcasts in particular—that was what Han Seoyeon had become.
"So what is the solution?"
"...Make it so I'm not an outsider?"
"Exactly. Not debuting as a YouTuber, but making you company-affiliated, quite apart from any broadcasting. To be blunt, we'd hate to throw away a character like Sister when she's already been built up this well."
A company employee possessed of nothing more than an original character and a concept within the setting. That, Gyokichi said with a smile, was what he meant by a virtual debut.
"We simply commission an illustration, and a model on top of it. We put the Anathema name on the character and make her official."
"Would that really be all right? It's not as if I bring the company any revenue."
"Honestly, you've already been doing half the work of Miss Mary's manager, haven't you? If we treated it as having paid you a salary for the work you've done, there'd still be plenty left over even after this expense."
"Well then. What do you think of this proposal?"
At the words he added, Han Seoyeon closed her mouth once more. A moment later, she nodded.
"...I'll consider it favorably."
"I'm glad to hear it. We'll begin designing the character starting today."
"I believe I said, just now, that I would think about it..."
"Because I can already see how it's going to turn out."
"Mm..."
...Well. In the end, that was how it went.