Quo Vadis? (2)
June in Italy. Midday, under a sun that ran a little too hot. A breeze kept moving through, though, and simply sitting in the shade the parasol cast was cool enough.
Hitomi drew on her drink through the straw and met Seoyeon's eyes—Seoyeon, who had been watching her. A light, reflexive smile crinkled her own, and the same smile came back from across the table. A foreign man had been standing nearby, as if he meant to come over. In Hitomi's experience, that was the look of someone working up to a pickup.
──He stood like that, and then, without warning, he staggered and was led off by a pair of men, and vanished.
"……."
Ignorant as she was of this country, even Hitomi couldn't help the sense that something was off once the same thing kept repeating. A seat would open, right on cue, at a place everyone said was packed to the walls. Men would drift in wearing that hunting look, only to be caught by their "self-proclaimed friends" and hauled off somewhere...
Put plainly, it felt like someone was stepping in to keep Hitomi's trip a pleasant one.
"…Those people must be having a rough time of it, too."
"……So even you've caught on, at this point."
She let it out on a small sigh, and Seoyeon answered with a wry smile of her own. At first Hitomi had wondered whether Seoyeon had arranged all of it for her... but even Seoyeon wasn't someone who would go this far. Which meant a third party was doing it, catering to Han Seoyeon and Hitomi both. Take that as the premise, and the truth was simple enough.
Gather twelve Apostles in one place, and a nation had to answer them on the scale of the state. Hitomi's impression was that they all seemed like good people. Even so, it was also true that a fair number of them gave off a faintly (?) eccentric air. Just as Han Seoyeon had Ninomae Hitomi for a reverse scale—the one place no one was permitted to touch—the other Apostles might well have scales of their own. Whoever was handling this would want to step around every land mine they could.
"Shion, shall we head back to the hotel?"
A last slurp sounded from the cup, emptied to the bottom before she'd quite noticed.
"Isn't it a little early?"
"Even if you could call it goodwill, once I start thinking about other people's eyes it gets to me... and I feel a little bad, making so many people work this hard on our account."
"And you're all right with that, Hitomi?"
"I don't think a hotel date sounds bad at all. You'll be there with me, Shion."
She said it, and broke into a bright little laugh. A moment later came the click of a shutter. Han Seoyeon had pulled out her phone in a flash and taken a picture of her face.
"What was that for, all of a sudden?"
"A smile I simply had to keep. I believe I'll make it my lock screen."
"Wasn't your lock screen already a picture of the two of us?"
"You look even lovelier than you did then."
"Ugh. You do know your flirting's gotten ridiculously good since we started dating, right?"
She grumbled, and yet the corner of her mouth twitched. She was, if anything, quietly pleased.
"Then I'm changing mine, too."
She picked up her own phone, and the lens turned on Han Seoyeon. Hitomi's lock screen was an ordinary landscape, but her home screen was a photo she and Seoyeon had taken before—a selfie from their date on Christmas Eve the year prior, holding the wallpaper ever since.
Han Seoyeon looked straight into the lens and lightly traced a V with her fingers, wearing, as always, that faint smile of hers that was so hard to read. There was no particular reason it had to be that pose. It was simply the safe, ordinary one people used when a photo was being taken, and nothing else had come to mind.
Having made one another their phone wallpapers, the two of them cleared their cups and stood.
"Oh, right. If there are people watching us right now, which way are they?"
"Let's see. There, and there. So far as I've been able to tell."
"Over there, you mean? ——Thank you for all your hard work."
Hitomi bowed low, once and then again, toward the directions Seoyeon had indicated, hoping it might be even the smallest comfort for the trouble those people were going to.
"Is she actually an angel……."
"Hey. Cut it out with the weird comments and let's just get to the hotel."
The unexpected can happen at any time.
Ninomae Hitomi was made to realize that all over again on the afternoon of the day before they went home. …Even calling it "the day before they went home" was a little misleading. It wasn't that any great stretch of time had passed. It was the very day the Apostles' council had ended.
"Hey, Shion."
Hitomi—who had spent a good long while tumbling about the hotel bed with Han Seoyeon, not in any suggestive sense but in the strictly literal one—abruptly spoke.
"What is it?"
Seoyeon asked, looking down at Hitomi gathered in her arms. Hitomi tipped her chin up a little and looked back.
"Since we're in the room anyway, shall we do a quick catch-up stream? If you were watching as a viewer, how do you think you'd take it?"
"A surprise stream, after roughly a week away for travel abroad... First I leave it running on my phone. Then I bathe, and purify myself."
"…So you're saying you'd be happy."
"Immensely."
The reaction was a touch exaggerated, but it came through clearly enough: for the fans, it would be an unexpected joy. Hitomi nodded and went on.
"By the way, the time in Japan right now is..."
"A little before eleven at night, I should think."
A reasonable hour to stream, then. They'd missed the golden slot of the evening, but late night drew viewers of its own—all the more if tomorrow was a day off. Even a stream sprung on them without warning would likely pull in a good share of the subscribers who had notifications turned on.
So Hitomi put a message through to the company at once. A check, more than anything: she was thinking of going live a little suddenly, and would that be all right? Streaming aside, it was rather late to be contacting anyone... but Charlotte's broadcast happened to be on. She sorted, in her head, through the people likely to be monitoring that stream, and sent the message their way.
The reply came back at once. There was even a suggestion—since things had turned out like this, what about streaming while on a call with Charlotte? She pulled Charlotte's stream up. From the look of it, she was drinking and making idle conversation, the sort of broadcast a friend could ring into lightly and join. Charlotte herself—Tsunashi Tenka—had answered that if Hitomi wanted to do it that way, she was welcome to get in touch.
"Shion. A suggestion like this came in. What do you think?"
"A Charmea drinking stream...!"
"No—it's not a ship. It's about whether you come on the stream...?"
Han Seoyeon's reaction drew a hollow laugh out of her. She really was someone who never changed at all.
Well... I suppose there was never any chance she'd refuse.
Even if appearing on stream gave her pause, she was the sort who would do it gladly the moment it meant a Charmea collab. Asking had been almost strange.
"I don't mind. I agreed to being shown that way from the start. It's why I accepted the model the company prepared."
"Ah. Right, of course. And here we went and did a whole virtual debut, then came all the way overseas without you appearing on a single stream."
Murmuring that she'd forgotten, Hitomi gently rubbed the back of her head against Seoyeon's chest. From the moment Shion had agreed to belong to this company—VTuber or not—a question like this was a little late in coming.
"Oughtn't we to have something to drink as well?"
"Ah, that's true..."
"Then shall I ask room service for wine?"
"…Won't that be expensive?"
"Isn't it a little late to be asking?"
"……Well. I guess so."
Wine carried an expensive image, in any number of ways, and hotel room service carried a considerably expensive one of its own. Put the two together, and Hitomi couldn't even bring herself to place the order... Recalling Han Seoyeon's means all over again, she quietly closed her mouth. If she was honest, she herself had room enough to indulge for a special occasion like a trip abroad, even if not on any ordinary day.
"But if it's going to be like this, maybe we shouldn't turn a stream on. We'd only be siphoning Charlotte's viewers."
Of course, in a collab it was common enough for each side to broadcast on its own. You could watch whichever stream suited your taste, or see the same thing from a different angle, and some people, she'd heard, even kept two channels up at once. On their side, though, with no particular setup, it would amount to putting up a single image and leaving it there... Better, then, to send the viewers over to Charlotte, who was already running a proper broadcast. Having decided as much, Hitomi opened the voice-chat app.
"Eh? Eh? Ehhhh?"
"Uh……?"
"Huh? Huuuh?! Shutang, this viewer count is acting kind of strange... huh?"
…Even so, she hadn't meant to herd them over quite like this.
It was roughly two minutes after a certain foreign VTuber, just wrapping up her own stream, had out of absolutely nowhere thrown her viewers at this one and left.