I Shall Not Drink of It Again (1)
The first-anniversary broadcast for Anathema Production's second generation had been laid out to fill an entire week.
First came three days of solo streams, each timed to a member's own debut, and the day after that a group broadcast. One day was left entirely clear, another given over to a live concert, and on the last day a stream had been booked that would serve as both afterparty and recap. That, and the week was complete.
Split another way, it divided into a broadcast-heavy first half and a performance-driven second, and today's group stream—the whole of the second generation together—was the highlight of the former.
When she followed Ninomae up to the company, a few employees who caught sight of them paused to offer greetings. Han Seoyeon had been coming and going from the Anathema Production building on Ninomae's account for quite some time now, and to the people who worked there she had become a familiar presence.
"Even so, wouldn't it have been better if I only saw you to the door and turned back?"
"Oh, come on. You're hardly an outsider anymore, you know."
"That still doesn't mean I can appear on the broadcast."
Seoyeon had the right of it. A contract had been signed to create a character, of course, precisely so that going on stream would be easier… and yet the character in question was still unfinished. More precisely, the design art seemed to have been completed, while the modeling—the rigging, and all the rest of it—had not. She might have joined with nothing but an illustration up on the screen, but the real trouble was that the Sister character had not even been officially announced. The delay had been arranged on purpose, so that she would not steal the spotlight at the second generation's first-anniversary party. From what she had heard, the president intended to flick nothing but a silhouette across the screen at the tail end of the post-concert recap, and leave everyone dying of curiosity.
The conclusion, at any rate, was simple. At the present moment, Han Seoyeon could not appear on the broadcast.
Turning up on a solo stream as Sister, Mary's friend from the real world, was only barely permitted—and even that had lately come with a request that they hold back, so the first official appearance could land with as much impact as possible. Sitting in on a studio group stream on top of it was out of the question.
Even after hearing all of that, Ninomae only smiled, bright and sweet, and squeezed Seoyeon's hand tight.
"What if it isn't because the stream needs you? What if I just want you beside me a little longer? Isn't that reason enough?"
"…As if it could be anything but."
The words landed cleanly. Seoyeon let out a short, helpless breath of a laugh, like someone who had just taken a direct hit. Said like that, there was no refusing her. And so the two of them went on flirting all the way into the elevator, and from there on to the studio where the recording was set to take place.
"Huh? Why is everyone here so early?"
Finding the rest of her gen-mates already waiting, she went round-eyed. For Ninomae, whose iron rule was that too early was better than late, it was a deeply unfamiliar sight.
"Ah, well, you see…"
At the question, Tsunashi Tenka scratched out an awkward smile. The one who actually answered, slipping in a moment later, was Hyakurenno Yuri.
"We told you the time forty minutes late, Ninomae."
"What?! Why?"
"Now, now. Just think, for a moment, about what time our Ninomae actually arrived today…?"
"U-um……."
They had given her the time forty minutes late, and she had still come in without falling far behind the rest. Ninomae could find nothing to say in her own defense. It had been a full year since she had streamed under this company's name, and by now everyone seemed to be learning how to handle her. …In truth, it was a trick Han Seoyeon used herself from time to time.
"Anyway, let's all do our best again today!"
Well. A trick was a trick, and Ninomae decided to get on with what needed doing. There was still a good while before the stream began, but there was no shortage of work—setting up the broadcast, learning the script, and the rest of it.
"As for my seat… ah. It's next to Chiyo."
Today's broadcast was in two parts, and the first was a relatively quiet arrangement: everyone seated around a table, talking. Ninomae found the place where a paper nameplate reading "Mary Tepes" had been set, and sat.
"I'm counting on you again today."
She turned to Chiyo in the seat right beside her and offered the greeting with a smile.
"Ah, y-yeah. Sure. Counting on you too, Hitomi."
Chiyo's reply, though, was a little strange. She returned the greeting, and awkwardly looked away while she did it.
"Did something happen?"
On any ordinary day, Chiyo would have been plastered against her closely enough to make it awkward. Now she was the complete opposite. Ninomae smiled and closed both hands around hers, and Chiyo, though she plainly had no idea what to do with herself, could not quite bring herself to push her off. It was at that, puzzled, that Han Seoyeon had asked.
"No. It's nothing."
Ninomae said it while looking at Chiyo with a meaningful light in her eyes. Anyone could see that it was not nothing…
"I see. Understood."
"Wait. You're just going to let that go?"
"Ninomae said so. Then that is how it is."
Seoyeon nodded without a heartbeat of hesitation. It was not the same thing as trusting Ninomae, and so believing she would not have lied. Ninomae had not spoken the truth. It was the truth because Ninomae had said it. The sheer matter-of-factness of it left Tenka, who had been listening in silence, muttering in disbelief, and Yuri could not help a hollow little laugh.
"Wow. Point at a deer and call it a horse……."
"Ninomae has said it is a horse. Wouldn't the beast be the one at fault, for insisting on remaining a deer?"
For Han Seoyeon, and for her alone, Ninomae possessed the sort of authority that could drop a bird from the sky with a single word.
"Um, Hitomi."
"Yes? Chiyo?"
While the rest of them were taking, all over again, the measure of Seoyeon's profession of faith, Senjoji Chiyo called to Ninomae in a small voice.
"Are you okay? Your body?"
"My body?"
"The thing is… my sister said you'd really turned into a vampire. Nothing's gone wrong since, has it? When you went out today, or…"
"Ah. That?"
Ninomae answered in a whisper of her own. Bansei Marin, and the staff, belonged to the surface world, and so the Secrecy Protocol had to be minded.
"I'm fine. There's no problem at all. I was terribly worried at first, too, but…"
She called up a memory from a few days prior, and smiled.
"— Shutang is a True Ancestor."
Too much divinity had gathered upon Mary, and she had truly become a vampire. Hearing Seoyeon explain it, Ninomae sank, as anyone would, into worry. Overnight, her very species had changed.
Seoyeon's answer to that was comparatively calm.
"The setting is that of a True Ancestor, and faith gathered around it, so of course the body that changed is a True Ancestor's as well."
"Um… but what exactly is a True Ancestor?"
Ninomae asked it with her head tipped to one side.
As a setting that turned up in subculture, she knew it well enough. The word had its origin as a translation of vampire lord, and it usually meant a born vampire, one never infected by another. Such a being did not share the things commonly known as a vampire's weaknesses, and more often than not was written as possessing power vast beyond that of other blood-drinkers. She knew that much. The Mary she herself played had been given the setting of a True Ancestor vampire, after all.
She remembered how excited she had been, certain that a vampire roleplay would let her show off a perfect fidelity to the lore. She had even brought the company the materials from the time she and Han Seoyeon had researched vampire tradition together for a group project.
"Ah. Mary Tepes is a True Ancestor vampire, so you needn't concern yourself with any of that. She may walk beneath the sun, and garlic and all the rest have no effect on her. That would be more convenient, wouldn't it?"
And she also remembered how thoroughly deflated she had been when that was the answer that came back.
Ninomae knew, of course, that there were moments when entertainment had to come before thorough accuracy. Even so, as a student of folklore, she could not help but care. Some of it was her own fault for watching Anathema's first generation and deciding, all on her own, that this was a company serious about the lore. Yugure Tama, a shrine maiden by profession, had displayed a rich knowledge of Shinto and the like, and Rokumondera Aki had gone so far as to study the Ainu language to suit her concept as an itako.
That disappointment, of course, had melted away like snow not long after the streams began. Leading a great many viewers, there was no leisure at all for fussing over every minute point of setting. Early on, it was all she could do to keep the roleplay of a vampire queen from breaking.
Looking back now, though, the setting did not seem to have ignored the lore entirely. They were serious enough, at least, to employ Professor Senjoji herself as a consultant on the traditions. And the way Han Seoyeon had just spoken only confirmed it—an air of treating the category called True Ancestor as something that actually existed. Seen in that light, the president did not seem to have invented the notion out of whole cloth.
"It matches the definition you already know. The first, and the progenitor, never infected by another. Or else a kind upon whom the things commonly known as weaknesses do not hold. In my experience, the former is usually the latter as well."
The hidden world was a place ruled by belief, and Ninomae knew well that a vampire's weaknesses, too, had been born of that same subjectivity.
Among the things regarded as the origin of vampire lore was rabies. The extreme violence, the infection by a bite—people said the traits had come from there. A vampire's aversion to running water had its source in the hydrophobia peculiar to a rabies patient.
Vampires had seen fit to appear, as well, out of the ignorance of older ages concerning how a corpse decays. The scalp could no longer hold the hair, and so it slipped loose, looking for all the world as though the locks kept growing after death; in the same way, the gums shrank as the moisture left them, until the teeth seemed to jut out sharp. A corpse in the midst of that decay quite often filled with gas in the abdomen, and if one drove a stake into it, the gas leaking up through the throat sounded like a scream in a low register.
The inability to enter a house uninvited came from the lore of the vrykolakas, which shares an ancestor with the werewolf. The weakness to the cross and to holy water arose from the peculiarly Christian vision of the demon in the West, and the matter of garlic, it was said, from Bram Stoker's Dracula.
And yet, if one picked through them one by one, a question was bound to arise. Did every vampire truly share these weaknesses?
Those who had lived before Dracula was written would not have had garlic counted against them. Strictly speaking, the original text spoke of garlic flowers, and so even after the book was published, it would not have been a vampire's weakness until the detail was distorted.
Anomalies shaped in large part by the mind were bound to produce, in just this way, individuals that slipped little by little out of the "universal." And if one looked carefully, cases appeared that had sidestepped most of these weaknesses altogether.
"In the hidden world, we gather up every such exceptional case and call it a True Ancestor."
In short, if there was no especially fatal weakness, one called it a True Ancestor, and Mary Tepes was one such aberrant kind. Ninomae, influenced by her, had therefore become a body that need not concern itself with a vampire's weaknesses at all. It was enough to think that no particular weakness had attached itself, and that her body had only grown sturdier. Only after hearing that did Ninomae press a hand to her chest and let the breath go.
"I'm really glad the concept the company assigned me was a True Ancestor. I nearly ended up draped in a whole string of conditions that would have made ordinary life miserable."
"Even if it had happened that way, I would have nursed you at my side for the rest of your life, so you needn't worry too much."
"Hngh! That is exactly why you have to watch what you say, Shion! The rest of my life…? I feel as if you've done this a few times before, but if it weren't me—someone who knows you—it wouldn't be the least bit strange to mistake that for a proposal."
"……."
Hearing that, Han Seoyeon sank for a moment into thought. Come to think of it, she was right.
All I did was say whatever came to mind, words that rose up because I had been fooling myself. If even that can be taken, out in the world, as a proposal… then doesn't it mean these feelings of mine are, by any ordinary measure, love?
By now it had been a long while since she had finally looked straight at the feelings she had spent so long dragging behind her… but looking back, the clues one might have noticed had been there from the start, and more than enough of them.
"Mmph?!"
She had been sinking into that reverie when something soft suddenly met her lips. Her eyes crossed Ninomae's, a flush risen in her face.
"N-Ninomae?"
"No, I just… you looked like you wanted me to kiss you. …Ehehe."
"Sorry if I imagined it?"
Ninomae offered her an impish little smile.
"Maybe the one who really wanted this was me, and the feeling was so big that I only ended up projecting it onto you, Shion… maybe— mmn…♥"
And a moment later, Han Seoyeon gave it right back to her.
"It may be nothing more than my imagination. Your eyes changed, as though this were what you wanted."
Adding the line was, itself, an imitation of Ninomae from a moment before.
"Th-that is definitely you imagining things, Shion."
"…Is that so."
And yet she answered like that even while her face went red, and the attitude seemed to strike Seoyeon as more than a little provoking. Quietly, Seoyeon began to repent—
"I want to do this for twenty-four hours straight, so there's no way my eyes changed halfway through."
"……."
"…Shion?"
"W-wait…! Shion?! A-ahhh…"
And so Ninomae was borne down, both wrists caught in Seoyeon's grip.
…She had never, for a moment, expected to learn the recovery speed of her altered flesh by way of kiss-marks burning red here and there all over her.