That Which Shall Not Be Moved (3)
They could call it a pajama-party stream all they liked. In the end, the broadcast still had to come down before anyone actually slept.
She had heard of streamers who left the feed running and dozed off on camera, but the second-generation talents of Anathema Pro, at least, were not among them. Even if some all-nighter special came along someday, today was not that day.
As they wrapped the stream and each of them settled into getting ready for bed, Senjoji Chiyo murmured under her breath.
"Third-gen juniors, huh."
"So the day we become the seniors is actually coming."
"Well, I still think it's going to be quite a while yet."
Ninomae answered while thumping her pillow into shape.
Companies that built the character first — the ones that cast a person to fit a role already finished in advance — had a short gap between audition and debut. Hand them the streaming gear, drill the part into them, and that was the end of it. No real company would be quite that crude, but at the extreme, putting someone on the air the moment they were hired wasn't impossible.
Anathema Production was the opposite. They hired the person first and built the character to match.
The advantage, of course, was that talent and character lined up so closely they were practically one and the same. The drawback was that most of the work happened after hiring, which stretched the road to debut. The second generation, for instance, had debuted in May off an audition held in mid-January — nearly four months. From what she'd heard, four months to shape five characters around the talents' own temperaments was considered quite fast in the industry.
So even by the most generous estimate, the juniors wouldn't be debuting before October of this year.
"Oh, right. How are people taking it online?"
"Mmm. About half of them are just happy, and the other half are theorycrafting every little thing."
"Theorycrafting?"
"Well, all they put out was a loaded image and a scrap of news that there's going to be an audition. I checked, and the speculation thread is getting updated at a pretty lively clip."
Yuri, who had been sitting on the futon, said as much and held out the smartphone she'd been fiddling with to Ninomae.
"Looks like they've already got an answer on the image background. Some ruin or other in Jerusalem, apparently."
What Yuri showed her was a comparison with a photograph taken somewhere in the real Jerusalem. Not merely pretty similar — the camera angle itself was almost a perfect match. Unless a Japanese-speaking Anathema Pro fan living in Jerusalem had snapped it just now, the company had probably referenced that very photo when they made the image.
from H
"And they're going back and forth over what the H in the title from H is supposed to mean."
"That's ecchi, obviously. President Kyokichi's grand ambition to cast every last junior as a total pervert..."
"No, there's no way, right?"
"Nnngh. So it wasn't a nefarious little plan to plaster the whole roster with slender loli characters, all done up in white......"
"...Did we just accidentally expose the president's fetish?! That's actually fine, right?!"
Mary shot the remark down, then flicked rapidly through the replies under the post.
"There's a theory they borrowed From Hell from the Jack the Ripper letters. The counterargument is that if you're talking hell, the only monster you'd get besides a devil is already taken, since Sae does demon roleplay. And somebody twisted it the other way and suggested it might be Heaven..."
"Hebrew and Hellas would be people fixating on the Jerusalem part, I suppose. History is in there too. The rebuttal that we're hardly about to start copying FGO is winning, though."
"Why is nobody saying Barbara?! And here I thought you were a comrade, Yuri!"
"Come on, objectively speaking, isn't the other one hundreds of times more famous? More to the point, it's basically the original of the whole summon-a-figure-from-the-past setup."
...They had agreed, for the time being, to set aside the game Ninomae was sunk in. Presently Chiyo picked the thread back up.
"Not enough to go on, maybe? Feels like there are way more people just tossing jokes out than making any serious guess. Hong Kong, Hokkaido, that sort of thing."
"Hokkaido's already covered, though, since we've got Aki-senpai, right? If our side has any Ainu connection at all, it'd be Tohoku Ainu, but..."
"Hitler and Hatsune Miku are in there too. Oh, and Hyakuren no showed up."
But when all was said and done, what otaku cared about most was always the cute girl.
"Yeah, figures the biggest reaction is so who the hell is that silver-haired character? Obvious, if you think about it."
At another company, people might have assumed she was one of the roles up for audition. As already noted, that was not how Anathema did things.
"This is Sion, right? Or would it be more correct to call her Sister here?"
"Either works. We were told the name in her setting is Sion, too."
Ninomae nodded, confirming Yuri's question.
The path by which Yuri had reached that conclusion was simple. Not long after the live concert ended, word had come down that Sion's character would be officially revealed.
"Hitomi, look at this."
"Can you believe somebody already landed on the truth? Isn't that wild?"
"...Are we allowed to mark that one correct?"
Ninomae murmured it in a trembling voice. This was the moment she understood her high-school math teacher, the one who had sworn that an answer with no work shown would be marked wrong.
"Anyway, where did the other two go?"
"Oh, Tenka and Marin? They said they were stepping out for some air. They'll be right back."
"Yeah? Should I go ahead and get the beds ready, then?"
Those two, of all people, will be just fine.
The most dependable member of the second generation, paired with the eldest. Nothing much was likely to go wrong, and even if something did, they'd handle it themselves. Hearing Chiyo's answer, Ninomae promptly put the thought out of her mind.
Tsunashi Tenka was, by nature, remarkably dense. That lack of tact, paired with a handsome face and a deeply considerate disposition, had put more than a few girls through an emotional wringer back in their school days.
"So... can I hear what this is actually about now, Bansei?"
And that was still true. Both in the sense that the nickname Prince had, for some reason, followed her even after graduation, and in the sense that she remained rather lacking when it came to reading a room — women's feelings, in particular.
She was not, however, foolish enough to believe that in a situation like this the other woman had asked her along purely for the sake of a walk.
In truth it was less tact than knowledge earned by experience. More specifically, an instinct built on all the times during her school years that she had been summoned out to the cherry tree where confessions were known to happen.
Even so, it didn't seem as though Bansei Marin had called her aside in order to confess.
This was a woman who demurred every time with some version of an ajumma like me — though Tenka herself still thought Marin was very much in her prime; at least, Marin was the one who said it. More likely, there was some other story.
"Tsunashi."
And indeed the voice was grave, a little tense, and yet the air of it was nothing like the confession scenes lingering in her memory.
Marin went on, careful with her words.
"Tsunashi... um, do you happen to have someone you like, or...?"
...Wait. Is this a confession after all?
The line that followed, though, was more than enough to throw Tenka off balance.
"Ah — yes! I'm sorry. That isn't what I meant to talk about... I put it badly."
So it had been a misunderstanding after all, and Marin corrected herself at once. She must have read Tenka's reaction and caught the thought behind it.
"What I wanted to ask... and I'll put it a little more bluntly this time, so there isn't another misunderstanding... is what you think of Ninomae."
"Ninomae?"
The correction did nothing to stop her from being thrown. Called out of nowhere, and this was the subject that came out of it — bewilderment was the only natural response.
No. Before she even reached the question of why...
"Ninomae's dating Sion, isn't she? I'm sure that's what she said herself."
Yes. That was the real problem. Asking what feelings a person harbored toward someone who already had a lover was, plainly, a bizarre thing to ask.
Marin nodded all the same, still entirely serious.
"That's why I'm asking. What kind of relationship do you have with Ninomae?"
Coworkers, she supposed she ought to say. Puzzled as she was, Tenka was about to answer just that when Marin landed the follow-up.
"...A kiss?"
Who? Me? For an instant Tenka's brain simply stopped, and she went blank. She couldn't begin to guess what this was about.
"I saw you steal a kiss from behind Akaba."
"Akane...? ...Oh."
Only once that was said did Tenka seem to grasp the shape of it, and she let out a sigh. It was probably the time she'd been putting the lenses in for Ninomae.
Their faces had gotten awfully close then, now that she thought about it. The usual Ninomae, shy as she was, would have gone scarlet and jumped a foot in the air.
...In reality, Ninomae had been too busy shivering through her first time having contacts put in to have any room left over for embarrassment.
"That wasn't — it wasn't like that..."
She couldn't very well leave the woman with a needless misunderstanding, so she started to explain—
...Hm.
Halfway through saying she'd only been helping with the lenses, Tenka shut her mouth.
Everyone knew Ninomae's eyes weren't bad enough to need glasses. But telling the truth and calling them colored contacts was awkward in its own way. A concert held in the real world might have been one thing. This was a virtual live, nothing but the model going out over the stream. There was no reason whatsoever to wear colored contacts.
And she could hardly say it was to hide eyes whose color had changed because of an anomaly. That would have defeated the entire purpose.
...Does telling the truth to clear a coworker of cheating suspicions count as a violation of the Secrecy Protocol?
Tenka's eyes darted. However she turned it, she could not casually tell someone from the ordinary world that Ninomae had become a vampire.
"Um, so, the thing is, she just got some dust in her eye, and all I did was blow it out for her?"
"Y-you did?"
That was the answer she had managed, barely, to wring out in the middle of all this. Even she thought it wasn't a bad excuse, as excuses went.
"You did? Hmm."
"...Ahaha."
The problem, however, was everything that had led up to producing the excuse.
Set aside how long the answer had taken to arrive. Tenka herself was simply not very good at lying. The air around her couldn't help but become the air of someone plainly hiding something, and judging by Marin's reaction, she had noticed it too. Her mouth said what it said. Her eyes showed not the slightest sign of being convinced.
No — if she actually thinks it through, she'll see it doesn't make sense. They're so devoted they'd die without each other. Bansei has to understand there's no way one of them would cheat.
And since Marin was at least putting on the face of someone who understood, that would do.
This wasn't some trashy daytime soap. Think about it for a moment, and it was obvious nothing of the sort would happen. Once Marin calmed down a little, she would realize it herself. Later, when she saw how Ninomae and Tenka were around each other, the misunderstanding would clear up in no time.
Oh my. Oh my goodness. Oh my...
...But there, Tsunashi Tenka had miscalculated.
An office romance, a same-sex romance, and an affair on top of that...? A-aren't young people these days a little too free...?
Bansei Marin. Thirty-six years old.
She was a devoted viewer of that breed of drama commonly filed under the trashy affair melodrama.