Pascha (2)
"Chiyo?"
Senjoji Chihaya stepped out of her room with an empty mug in one hand and found her little sister face-down across the dining table. She tilted her head.
"Is something the matter?"
"Ah... yeah. It's just..."
Chiyo hauled herself upright, bit by bit, and let out a sigh.
"Lately. Um."
She went on, picking her words with care.
"I feel like I've been cast as the body double in some NTR plot—threatened over my lover and made to offer myself up. Strictly speaking it's nothing like that, but that's the feeling."
"Hmmm... A considerably difficult explanation to follow."
"...Anyway. Something like that happened."
Chihaya, for her part, still could not make heads or tails of it, but in the end she shrugged and sat down across the table.
"Well then. Think it through. Is this a matter that will be solved by brooding on it here and now?"
"I mean, no, but..."
"Then it is a perfectly useless endeavor. Give it up. You would accomplish twice as much fretting over what to wear tomorrow."
"...Kind of hard to fret about clothes when you wear a lab coat every single day anyway, Sis."
"Ha?! A lab coat has fashion of its own, I'll have you know! The minute differences in cut, the garments one layers beneath..."
"Yes, yes, I get it. I get it, all right."
Realizing she had unconsciously jammed her sister's berserk button, Chiyo hurried to shut the subject down.
"Oh. Wait. Look at the time. Ninomae-chan's stream must have started."
Chiyo scooped up her phone and opened Etube. Watching her, Chihaya asked, puzzled.
"Ninomae-kun. Is there something today?"
Chiyo did not ordinarily look like someone who watched Mary's streams without fail, so a reaction like that left little doubt that today's broadcast held something special.
"Something happening? Today's the one-year anniversary of Mary's debut, isn't it?"
"...Is it?"
"Excuse me? Official consultant to Anathema Production? You could at least know this much. And besides, today is my debut day too."
She doesn't even know her own sister's debut day? Chiyo stared at her. Chiyo—Serena—had debuted one hour after Mary's stream ended.
"Hardly. How could I fail to know? I had simply not registered that today was the date."
"...Hold on. Exactly how many days has it been since you last came out of your room?"
It was not long, though, before Chiyo's face went blank for an entirely different reason. Now that she thought about it, it felt as though days had passed since she had last seen Chihaya's face.
"If today marks one year since Ninomae-kun and Chiyo debuted, then it has not yet been a week. Rest easy."
"...How about you go take a bath first, Sis?"
"Very well. I shall."
It was quite some time later when Chihaya returned. By then Chiyo was absorbed in the stream on her phone.
"Really... mm. I'm so full of feeling. It seems like only yesterday that I debuted..."
Platinum blonde. Eyes of a red that called rubies to mind. Mary Tepes, the very figure Chiyo had already been watching for a full year.
On the screen she was smiling faintly, reading Superchats one after another.
"'I love all of you'... or something—no, what are you making me read?!"
Her expression shifted again. At the sight of those eyes flying wide as she shouted, Chiyo let out a snort of laughter. Even in the middle of all that, reflexively flushing her model pink could only be called quietly cunning.
Then she went quiet, and carefully, furtively, stole glances at the chat.
"...Thank you, everyone. I-I love you. Yeah. This isn't me reading along with a Superchat."
"...Wow."
The line that followed drew a comparatively sincere breath of admiration out of Chiyo.
If Gen 1 had Rokumondera Aki, then the most-subscribed talent of Gen 2 was Mary. People sometimes joked that the only qualification for a "king" was impact, but there was no way it ended there. Even if that line had belonged entirely to calculated territory, it would already have been the work of a monster—and Chiyo, who had seen Ninomae in real life, could tell it was sincere, which only made it more astonishing.
"Aah, cancel! Cancel after all! That just now really was me reading a Superchat!"
"I feel this pretty often, but Shutang is seriously a bewitching little thing!"
Chiyo muttered it through a giggle.
"Not a bewitching spirit. A vampire, it would seem."
"No, I mean, conceptually, sure. But that's not the sense I meant it in."
She tossed a light jab at her sister, who had suddenly come in with a perfectly serious objection. Even so, Chihaya was not the sort to miss context this badly...
But the one wearing a puzzled look was Chihaya as well.
"Concept? I was not speaking of a concept."
"Huh? If you weren't saying Mary has a vampire concept, then what on earth were you talking about?"
Tap. Chihaya's finger pressed the phone screen. What occupied that spot was, of course, Mary Tepes's model.
"...See? It is Shutang."
"No. I am not speaking of the shell."
"What? ...Whaaat?!"
For a streamer, an anniversary is nothing other than a chance to collect. Read the congratulatory Superchats, pad them with a little chatter, and a full day's broadcast comes easily enough—and the sums, more often than not, are no small thing. Even among viewers who usually only type in chat, more than a few open their wallets for the occasion, and today, with the scheduled slot so short, the density ran high on top of it.
"With this, it's really the end! I really did read every one of them!"
And so Mary, having taken "reading Superchats" as the concept of the day, barely cleared her quota and could only pant, spent. From the midpoint on she had shut off any further donations and read only the backlog, and still it had come to this. Her jaw had been throbbing mercilessly for some time.
"The time... whoa. It really was that close. There's not even ten minutes left."
She lifted the cup beside her, wet her bone-dry throat, and murmured. An internet solo stream, as a rule, has no time limit—the streamer's own schedule, if one insisted on naming anything. This time, though, things were a little different.
The concept for Anathema Production Gen 2's one-year debut streams, just as it had been for Gen 1, was to go live on that same day, at that same hour, one year later. In Charlotte's case—Tenka's—they had gone so far as to match the hour she had accidentally started early.
Gen 2 had debuted across three days, so aside from Amairo Tsubasa the other four each shared a debut date with someone. Mary's fell on the same day as Serena's. To honor the anniversary concept, then, Mary had to finish within a fixed window and hand the stream off to Serena.
"I-I didn't cry, okay?!"
She shrieked the moment she read it. The odd crack in her voice, one suspects, was not merely the result of talking without a rest. Just as the chat had pointed out, Mary had grown so overwhelmed while reading Superchats that she had, in the end, burst into tears. It was not wailing—she had managed, barely, to swallow it down into stifled little catches—but she could not hide it completely, and for the viewers that was plenty.
"...I hate all of you."
"R-recorded? Which one...?"
"Ghk—are you all really going to keep this up right to the end?!"
"G-good grief. The rest of your lives. And you think I'll be pleased with you for that? ...Heh."
Mary wrestled her slack, grinning mouth back under control and brought the stream to a passable close. Neither the viewers nor Mary herself were ready to let go, but if she did not end it soon, the timing really would be razor-thin.
The stream cut, and silence settled over the room. Only the whir of the fans in the tower kept circling her ears.
"Nnngh...!"
Mary stretched her arms high overhead, for no reason she could name. The stream had been shorter than usual, and these days she kept body reinforcement active at all times, so she was not actually stiff—she simply felt like it.
She took another sip, then winced. Put the other way, if her mouth throbbed this much even under body reinforcement, she had overdone it by a considerable margin. Even so, she had not wanted to let the Superchats her viewers spent their money to send simply wash past her. She could not do this every day, but for today alone she had resolved to take each and every one of them onto her tongue, and that was what she had done.
"One year. It's really been a whole year."
She murmured it to the empty room. Honestly, it still did not feel real. She could think of herself as nothing but a streaming novice, and yet a year had already passed.
No. Even so, looking back, there were ways she had grown, if only subtly...
"—Ninomae-san!"
"Hnyah?!"
In the very instant she sank into the thought, the door burst open, and Ninomae sprang like a startled cat. She still had her earphones in, so as she shot to her feet the jack yanked clean out of the PC.
"S-Shion-san?"
The one who had come in was, of course, Han Seoyeon. Aside from Ninomae, she was the only person who lived in this house. Of course it was her.
"Is something the matter...?"
But Han Seoyeon was someone who would ordinarily at least have knocked, and Ninomae was thrown. With a face that serious, closing in on her in long strides, something had to have happened.
"Ninomae-san."
"Urk."
She came right up in front of Ninomae and seized both her shoulders, sudden and hard. Seoyeon's face drew near.
"Uu..."
This is different from usual... b-but maybe this isn't so bad either...?
Even then, Ninomae reacted before she could stop herself. Ashamed, she closed her eyes and offered her lips, just a little.
"Would you open your mouth for me?"
"H-hueh?!"
E-even so, isn't going as far as mixing tongues much too fast?!
"H-hueeh..."
And yet she opened her mouth in the end, which left no conclusion but that she was nothing but desire. Ninomae felt shame, and a sour self-disgust, at the fact. The largest feeling of all, of course, was anticipation.
"...Eh?"
But no matter how long she waited, no touch came, and Ninomae cautiously slit her eyes open. What she found was Han Seoyeon with her face brought right up to Ninomae's mouth, peering in—and she flustered.
"...So it was true."
"S-Shion-san...? What is this...?"
"Ah. My apologies. My explanation may have been insufficient."
So saying, Han Seoyeon drew out her phone.
"I received word from Chiyo-san. Her older sister—that is, Professor Senjoji—watched a little of Mary's stream and said something felt amiss."
But the application she opened was not a messenger. It was the camera.
"The professor's conjecture is that Ninomae-san may have become a vampire."
"Whaaat?!"
"Pardon me."
"Ahbuh."
Han Seoyeon turned the screen, flipped to the front camera, toward Ninomae, and carefully parted her lips with a finger.
And what the camera showed was—
"Hueheh, i-it weally ith..."
Sharp fangs. Not so prominent as to leap out at a glance, but compared to usual they had unmistakably grown keen.
"W-what in the world happened? I've never been bitten by anyone..."
"Most likely, your divine rank has advanced a step. Ninomae-san is already established as a living deity, so in passing through the feast day of your one-year debut, the faith must have amplified."
Because she was already half a god, she had come to be swayed by divinity and faith in this way—so Han Seoyeon explained.
"The particulars will have to wait until we examine you later."
"This isn't going to change how I look into Mary as well, is it...?"
"I do not believe so. Ninomae-san is a god and, at the same time, a being with a definite body, so the extent to which faith alone can alter you ought to reach its limit here. This is strictly according to my own experience."
"That's a relief, at least..."
As she said it, Ninomae prodded her fangs this way and that with a finger. So that was why, partway through the stream, her gums had throbbed and her teeth had itched.
"More importantly, just now... you weren't asking me to open my mouth because you wanted an adult kiss, were you..."
"...Pardon?"
"...Ah?"
At the words muttered without thinking, Han Seoyeon whipped her head around. A moment later, as if the meaning had landed, her eyes went wide.
"N-n-no. Of course not! There is no way I would burst in and demand a deep kiss out of nowhere!"
"R-right! Of course! There's no way Shion-san would want something like that from me! Yeah! Right?!"
"A-ah... um..."
"R-right...? That's how it is, isn't it...?"
Han Seoyeon was silent. Honestly, if one asked whether she wanted to or not, it was the former.
Her face colored, faintly. Ninomae's, having read that true feeling, went a far deeper red.
"A-at least... set the mood, and then ask me..."
Ninomae murmured it, her voice shrinking back down her throat.
It was not a refusal. Han Seoyeon caught that as well, and so she only turned her gaze aside all the more awkwardly.
"Th-then, next time...?"
"A-ah. Yes. Next time..."
Neither of them had meant for it. And yet neither had the nerve to swim against the way the air was moving, and so a promise was sealed with no date attached—one that would someday have them both kicking at the blankets.