Pascha (1)
"We've arrived, Chiyo-san."
"Thanks, Shion-chan—."
The brakes squealed. The truck brought its massive bulk to a halt and blinked its lemon-yellow eyes, over and over. May had only just begun, and the days were stretching longer with every one of them; even at this hour, the sunset was barely deciding whether it meant to spread.
Senjoji Chiyo opened the rear door and stepped down, smiling with her eyes. Perhaps because she had hopped out, the beauty mark hidden beneath a slightly crooked pair of glasses showed itself again, together with a bewitching smile. Set beside Bansei, who was that sort of woman from the blood up, her own allure was inevitably overshadowed a little—and yet she was a woman who carried a seductive air all her own. Enough, at the least, that word had it the agency's president had marked her as the second generation's sex-appeal member the moment he saw her at the interview.
"We're only dropping you off on the way back, after all."
Han Seoyeon said it as though it were nothing, and Ninomae, seated beside her, nodded in agreement.
"And we had business of our own, besides. It isn't the sort of thing we ought to be thanked for one-sidedly."
Seoyeon added the rest a moment later. Strictly speaking, they had not come all the way to her house merely for the sake of seeing Chiyo home.
"Still, a favor's a favor, isn't it? Anyway, I'll go get it right now, so wait here."
Chiyo answered that it was plenty worth thanking them for all the same, slipped into the house for a moment, and came back out with a paper bag in one hand.
"I'll leave the things here."
She opened the truck door again, climbed into the back seat, and set the bag down in one corner.
"The clothes I wore then—I took them off and sealed them the second the stream ended. The recorder's underneath, right at the bottom of the bag."
"Thank you, Chiyo-san."
Hearing the explanation, Han Seoyeon thanked her once more for the trouble. To answer the question of what these things even were, one would have to turn the clock back a fair way.
Specifically, to around the time they had sifted the prophet candidates through the Hyakuren family and, with the Church's half-paralyzed administration, somehow finished running background checks on all of them.
Kan'in Tomoe, under the stage name Tomoe, was a VTuber who specialized in song. She wrote her own music, so she could fairly be called a singer-songwriter, and having taken theme songs for popular anime, she was a particularly well-known singer on the subculture side of things. Ninomae had even performed one of her songs at her very first live show.
In any case, when it came to investigating her further, Han Seoyeon held one advantage: her connections with Anathema Production, the VTuber agency. She raised the matter with its president, Nakabashi Gyokichi, and he agreed to cooperate without a moment's hesitation. True enough, if a public-safety office came asking for help in catching a terrorist, how many people would refuse—but regardless, he lent them his hand.
Collabs—in their parlance, collab streams—were of course most often held between VTubers, and among those, usually between members of the same production. Not always, though. Anathema billed itself as an idol agency to begin with, and it was entirely plausible to start with talk of commissioning a song and, somewhere in the middle of it, casually float a collab stream. The single most important thing in a prophet hunt, a pretext for getting close, had been secured.
Of course, if the one paying the visit were Ninomae—Mary—who went so far as to live with Han Seoyeon, there was a risk of stirring needless suspicion. The person they decided to ask for help was her fellow second-generation member, Serena Razania. Senjoji Chiyo, the very woman here now.
The reason she was chosen was simple. She happened to have room in her schedule; it seemed about time she put out a new song in any case; and she shared an interest with Kan'in Tomoe. Some novel, apparently, whose fandom had been begging for a sequel for years. Han Seoyeon honestly had no idea what any of that was about. She had only heard that Korea had cases of the same sort, and that was the whole of it.
At any rate, Chiyo had been picked as the investigator for those reasons, and her face-to-face with Kan'in Tomoe had been only yesterday. The contents of the paper bag were the yield of that meeting. Strictly speaking, the recorder was the heart of it, and the sealed clothes were closer to an extra. They were a means for Han Seoyeon—still limited in her approach, with no pretext yet for meeting the suspect in person—to learn the suspect's scent.
"Then… would you come a little closer this way?"
"Hm? Uh… no reason I can't."
"Lean forward just a bit more…"
"Ah, ah… yeah, got i—hyaaak?!"
And the very person who had brought those results home followed Han Seoyeon's instructions without a second thought, only to let out a shrill scream. From the driver's seat, Han Seoyeon had slipped an arm around her shoulders and, as if drawing her into an embrace, pressed her face to the nape of Chiyo's neck.
"Pardon me. If I'm to pin the scent down properly, I have to filter out the error."
"Nnh, ah… mm. R-right, right. Then it can't be hel—kyaa?!"
The clothes Chiyo had handed over would of course have Kan'in Tomoe's scent worked into them, but only faintly, because they were clothes Chiyo had been wearing, not Tomoe herself. Most of what remained, in other words, belonged to Senjoji Chiyo, and isolating the suspect's scent meant filtering Chiyo's own out with certainty. Han Seoyeon's conduct was nothing more than the gathering of information to that end.
That, of course, was only Han Seoyeon's side of it. Even if Chiyo managed to grasp the intent, it was still a flustering ambush, because taken purely as an action it was being held close while a face nuzzled against her. Color rushed up into Chiyo's cheeks. It was a reaction that sat poorly on someone who seized every opening to crack a dirty joke. She tried somehow to press down her pounding heart, but when Seoyeon's face traveled up from the nape along her cheek—perhaps to check the scent behind her ear as well—she could do nothing but open and close her mouth.
"…Heh. Heheh. Well, if it helped, that's a relief."
A beat late, she forced out a laugh, doing her best to feign composure. She was flustered past the point of fluster, the corners of her eyes faintly trembling, but Han Seoyeon seemed not to have noticed, and that was a mercy.
Han Seoyeon hadn't, that is.
Ninomae watched with her eyes lifted to a thin, level stare as Chiyo—cheeks still pink—hurried to get out of the truck again.
"…Shion-san. Would it be all right if I went and had a word with Chiyo-san?"
"Yes? Ah, um…? Of course there's no reason it wouldn't be. Go on."
If that was what she wanted, then by all means. Having her answer from a puzzled Han Seoyeon, Ninomae climbed down from the passenger seat. Her steps toward the distant Chiyo were a little quick. The other woman seemed eager to be gone herself and was already hurrying, so this much speed was necessary.
"—Chiyo-san."
"H-Hitomi-chan?!"
She called the name once the distance had closed enough, and Chiyo, who hadn't seen it coming, startled and turned her head.
"What's this, all of a sudden…?"
"Nothing. Um. There was just something I wanted to say."
"Ahaha, it's going to get dark before long, and you came rushing over to say what? Don't tell me this is a confession from my darling Hitomi-chan…"
"Chiyo-san."
"…Mm."
Chiyo tried, as she always did, to slide past it on a well-placed joke, but she soon read in Ninomae's face and voice that this was a serious talk in its own way, and quietly shut her mouth.
"Chiyo-san. What do you think of Shion-san?"
Chiyo gave a bitter smile. It was more or less the question she had expected. If there was something Ninomae would discuss with her in an attitude this earnest, there were only a handful of possibilities, and one of them was anything to do with streaming. No matter how she turned it over, she couldn't think of a thing she had done wrong on that front, so it could only be about Seoyeon. For her part, it wasn't as though she had no guess at all. She smiled, and answered.
"Come on, it's not like that. She came at me out of nowhere, so I just got flustered."
A kind of jealousy. A rather cute one, at that.
"…But Chiyo-san, your face is still bright red."
At Ninomae's words her shoulders jumped. Even now her heart was pounding hard enough that the beat reached the back of her neck.
"Really. I said it's not."
An awkward laugh—and yet the way she quietly avoided the other girl's eyes called to mind, without a doubt, a girl who had fallen in love. Thinking on it, there had been faint signs even before this, and Ninomae drew her brows together a fraction. It didn't seem to have reached quite that feeling yet, but…
Under that gaze, Chiyo looked away for no particular reason.
"That my heart skipped a little… well, I'll give you that. But Shion-chan's low-key gorgeous, isn't she? A beautiful woman suddenly does that, and the body reacts first. What are you supposed to do?"
"You get the gist, don't you, Hitomi-chan?"
Chiyo tacked it on. Ninomae was inclined toward women herself; she had thought she would more or less understand.
"And, well. Shion-chan is the person you like, Hitomi-chan. Even so, I'm not going to go and fall for someone like that. I'm not shameless enough for that."
"I-I mean, she is someone on Shion-chan's level, so sure, I'm a little drawn to her. Even I think I'm kind of weak to beautiful women. But that cuts the other way, too. If they're beautiful, any of them will do, so it's not as if I only get shaky over Shion-chan. I'll be out confessing to somebody else again before you know it."
Perhaps she had taken the look in Ninomae's eyes for suspicion. Chiyo's words ran long, as if she were making excuses. Whether Ninomae actually doubted the feelings Chiyo held was another matter. That Chiyo herself felt the prick of a guilty conscience was, at the least, beyond question.
"Is that so."
Hearing it, Ninomae nodded all the same. Chiyo nodded back and smiled.
And in the very next instant Ninomae rose onto her toes, and her lips found a cheek.
"Eek?!"
A blow no one could have seen coming. Senjoji Chiyo's eyes flew wide, and she screamed. The blood that had nearly settled rushed to her head all over again.
"Hito—Hitomi-chan?! Wait, what is this…"
"…Hmph."
Their eyes met. The red rising in Ninomae's face could not be blamed on the sunset alone, which was to say that even for Ninomae this was not something she had done empty of meaning. It was an act that understood perfectly well, at least, how Chiyo would take it. And still her eyes were fixed straight on her.
"Even me."
Still flushed, Ninomae opened her mouth again. Her voice had gone a little shy, and yet it was clear.
"That's what you meant, isn't it. That even I would do. You're the Chiyo-san who's always told me I was cute, after all."
"Hitomi-chan? Th-that meaning…"
"It would be a problem if you went and fell for Shion-san all on your own. Yes. That's what this is."
Ninomae Hitomi had settled it clearly in her own mind. Even if she could not be Han Seoyeon's only, she would not surrender being her first.
Perhaps that was closer to a streamer's way of thinking. She could hardly claim she had no wish at all that people would look at no one else and give their attention to her channel alone, but at the same time she knew perfectly well that such a wish was an idle fantasy. Whether the same logic could be carried over into real life, she wasn't sure. Even so, so long as I'm first, I don't have to be the only one was nothing more than the lowest line she would accept. She had not the slightest intention of standing by and watching anyone who drew near to Seoyeon.
"I won't leave you free to become a rival. Even if I have to make you fall for me to do it."
"…Urk."
As she said it, Ninomae took another step closer. Chiyo, without meaning to, stepped back. From the eyes meeting hers, the sincerity came through unmistakable. Chiyo swallowed.
"P-prepare yourself. All right?"
Even the small hesitation at the end, as if embarrassment had caught up with her, felt in a moment like this like nothing but charm.
"…No, seriously. What."
Left alone where Ninomae had scampered off, Chiyo covered her face with both hands.
"So what am I supposed to do now? You're a professional at same-sex love, aren't you, Philotanuss-san?"
"Nay—the one you mean to seduce is the wrong party entirely, is it not? Ought you not confess to Lord Bartholomew first?"
"Ah."
"And what manner of ah is that? Honestly. This girl."