To Call Is to Name (4)
Osean Lee—a Frenchwoman of mixed Korean blood, who these days picked up a few shifts a week at Guroyuki Sui's café.
"Thank you for your time. You're free to go, Miss Anri."
"Yes! Thank you!"
She bent deep at the waist and walked out with a confident stride. Set against the thick accent she had come in wearing, her Japanese was fluent now, with nothing left of it but a faint French lilt.
When Han Seoyeon had asked—setting everything else aside—what she would do if someone found that accent grating, she hadn't hesitated for a second.
"If I'm conscious of it, I can correct it."
And just like that, her manner of speech had changed. Knowing full well that the first voice had been nothing but an act, Seoyeon could only manage a wry smile.
Sociable to a fault, the woman had kept insisting they call her by the nickname Anri. Once she was gone, Han Seoyeon turned carefully to the others.
"What did everyone think?"
"That personality was an act after all, wasn't it?" Yuri said. "Did it seem that way to you as well, President? I had much the same feeling."
"Yes. It did."
Seoyeon nodded at the two of them. However much a master of acting Anri might be, she had chosen the wrong room this time—the young lady of House Hyakurenno, paired with President Gyokichi, whose eye, at least, even that young lady was willing to grant.
"That manner of speaking just now was her building a character to win people's favor. Hitomi did say she isn't a bad person at heart, but…"
"Then she must certainly be a good person. If Miss Ninomae says so."
"Please don't speak of someone else's lover as if she were a radar for the virtuous."
"Haha. I'm joking."
"I don't believe my eye has rusted so badly that I have to lean entirely on other people's judgments to size someone up," Gyokichi added, grinning crookedly.
"Miss Shion, did you find her manner artificial?"
"Artificial… even so, that feels like too negative a word. Not that she struck me as particularly admirable, either."
She balked at calling the woman artificial, but slick was a word Anri could more than earn. That was Han Seoyeon's measure of her.
"I see. Still, to my mind that too feels like a kind of talent."
Yuri, for her part, seemed to have found no small share of good in her.
"Even if the aim is to look well to others, living while wearing a character that isn't yourself is no easy thing. By your account, Miss Shion, she doesn't keep that character up only for this interview—she holds to it as her baseline everywhere else, too?"
"Yes. As far as I know, that's the case."
"Honestly, from the standpoint of being a VTuber, I think that's a considerable gift. And then there's the nerve of it—her act cracks the moment she sees you, Miss Shion, who knows what she really is, and she still gathers herself at once and carries the performance on."
"Hmm."
Put that way, it did suggest another reading. Seoyeon drew her brows together and turned it over.
This was, after all, an industry where a trait like that could just as easily become a strength, exactly as Yuri said. It verged on a cruel thing to observe, but performing as a VTuber could, in the end, be understood as acting in whatever direction made one look better to the viewers.
"I don't take her for someone rotten at the root, either. Half of that is instinct. The other half is simply whether Miss Guroyuki would have kept employing her, if she were."
Gyokichi, speaking next, offered an answer that leaned toward praise as well.
"The slickness, too. So long as it doesn't cross a certain line, viewers have a way of taking it for honesty. I wouldn't call it a very great flaw in itself. —For now, we'll mark her as a favorable hold. There are still a great many people left to see."
The finer points of her character could be confirmed with Guroyuki later. With that, the president called for the next interviewee.
"Well, now. Nearly two in a row… I'm truly glad this audition is so rich in talent."
"Anapro has grown since the old days, so perhaps the pool of people hoping to audition has simply grown that much wider."
Yuri met his next remark with a smile of her own. Quite right, Gyokichi agreed, and nodded—looking satisfied, or else like a man howling with laughter as he offered up a human sacrifice.
…One minute later, audition participant number three foamed at the mouth and collapsed the instant they stepped through the door.
Anapro really is no small company at all…
The waiting room for Anathema Production's Gen 3 selection audition. Watching the press of people, Sakuragi Honoka let out a sigh wound tight with nerves. The sheer number of rivals was enough to set her on edge, and more than a few glances kept sliding her way. Were they marking her as competition from over there, too…?
"No. I shouldn't lose heart before I even walk in. Eru-chan, I'm going to give it everything!"
"Yeah, yeah. Honopi's gonna do just fine, 'kaaay?"
…It never once crossed Honoka's mind that those stares had an entirely different cause: a living calamity in a human skin, one who had climbed all the way to Apostle Candidate.
Like her older sister, she was a dweller of the surface. And so, to her, Mika Eru was nothing more than a no-good gyaru who liked to play the nights away.
"Interviewee number forty-nine!"
"……!"
The staffer handling the calls spoke Honoka's number, and her shoulders jumped. She had been bracing herself after a fashion, but the moment her turn was truly at hand, the nerves came flooding in. She was drawing a shallow breath when Eru grinned and smacked her between the shoulders with an open palm.
"Go get 'em— Captain."
"You… you only call me that at times like this?"
All right! I mean, it's not like I'm going to die, is it?
She grumbled, but the encouragement must have loosened her a little, because Honoka let out a short laugh of her own.
Of course, there's the one who fainted the second they went in and got carried out, the one who bolted shaking, the one who came out sobbing… but I'll be fi—
Halfway out of her seat, Honoka stopped cold.
I will be fine… right?
It took a fair store of courage before she could make her feet move again.
"This is…"
Familiar faces had been turning up one after another, and so Seoyeon had picked up a small habit. Nothing grand—she simply looked over the next application a step ahead of the interviewee coming through the door. Better, at least, than being caught off guard once they were already inside. Going on that way, she came to a name that made Han Seoyeon's eyes widen a fraction.
"Maya-senpai's little sister."
Just as Yuri had said. In Han Seoyeon's case, she had met the girl herself. Sitting in on a class as Mika Eru's guardian, she had stopped by the gym once the lesson ended and watched her playing basketball. A short wait, and that familiar face came into the room.
Her hair was cut short, but the set of her face and the curves of her body would have been hard to mistake for a man's. Set beside her sister, the brown of her skin was likely not something she was born with at all, only a tan laid on by the sun. Her gaze moved over the interviewers, and then her eyes went round. They had landed on Han Seoyeon.
"Huh? W-wait…? Eru-chan's big sister? What are you doing here…?"
"Well… because I work for this company."
The flustered words slipped out of her. It was the look of someone who had never once imagined Han Seoyeon had anything to do with Anapro. She simply hadn't known that the Sister was Han Seoyeon. Among those born to the surface, that was surprisingly common.
Strip away any knowledge of the underside, and Sister was only Mary's close friend—and Mary Tepes's own real life was hardly well known to begin with. The rest of Gen 2 were public figures, more or less. A former idol, a voice actress, a Hyakurenno… Even Tsunashi Tenka, the nearest of them to an ordinary person, had appeared more than once as a fitting model in magazines and on home-shopping sites.
Against that, the only public photograph of Ninomae with her face showing was a single shot taken by chance at a university event. Her own station amounted to nothing more than that of a college student. Even a fan, unless they set out on purpose to dig, would come away with nothing beyond I hear she's pretty, and her chest is something else.
If that was true of the broadcaster herself, there was no chance the private details of Seoyeon—a mere acquaintance—had spread far. She came up so often as a hot topic on the internet boards only by virtue of her renown as a Holy Knight.
"So you knew Miss Shion, Miss Sakuragi."
"I-it's less that we know each other. We've only met, that's all…"
"Ah, of course. This won't bear on the evaluation in the slightest. We won't be granting you any particular favor, nor any disadvantage."
"Yes! That's exactly what I was hoping for."
"I like the confidence. Now then—"
Gyokichi grinned and began the questions in earnest. At that unsettling face Honoka flinched, then seemed to gather herself and set her back straight. From there, her manner hardly changed.
"Setting aside your sister—Miss Maya, that is—is there anyone at Anapro you're particularly fond of?"
"Ah. The one closest to my taste is Miss Tachibana Rin, and after her, Miss Mary Tepes…"
Nerves still flickered through now and then, and yet she answered nearly every question cleanly, in a voice that knew itself.
"Your nerve is considerable, unexpectedly. This was meant as something of a pressure interview."
An ordinary person, and yet she had held her ground the whole way through. Curiosity apparently stirred, the president saved that question for the last.
"Sorry? No. You weren't really pressing me, were you?"
"I mean in terms of the panel's lineup."
"……?"
Even at that, Honoka only stared blankly, as if she didn't quite follow.
"The visual side, I mean. We assembled this roster on purpose, for the frightening impressions."
"I've come to feel, lately, that judging people by how they look isn't right. The big sister here— um, Miss Shion, too. At first I only thought she was a scary person. But the more I heard from my friend, the more she was just a good person."
Seoyeon, and President Gyokichi as well, only looked frightening; she didn't yet know what lay inside them, and so she was trying to look without prejudice. That was the shape of it. Rationally it was correct, and as a matter of principle it was correct… but there was no one in that room who didn't know how far the saying sat from the doing.
"Hmm."
Still, if she truly held a conviction like that, then why she hadn't shrunk back too far was simple enough to understand. Not knowing she was an Apostle, Han Seoyeon was only a frightening-looking person. Gyokichi was the same, and Professor Senjoji, for her part, was nothing but a woman who gave off a cute impression. Interviewer and interviewee—not being nervous in the slightest had, it seemed, been too much to ask.
"But what about me, then? Miss Sakuragi, do you happen to know who I am?"
"Um, well, you're Miss Hyakurenno Yuri, right? I saw you on the news the other day. And… you're Miss Amairo Tsubasa from Gen 2, too."
Even so, if a doubt remained, it was this. Yuri asked it, looking puzzled.
Knowledge of the underside might blunt the fear the others inspired, but the Hyakurenno Group was very much a corporation that reigned on the surface. Short of a sturdy nerve, treating a Hyakurenno so easily was no simple thing.
"Uh… well, Miss Amairo Tsubasa is kind of famous even at Anapro for just being a total nutj— no, an eccentric, right?"
"U-uhhhmm…"
Yuri's expression turned exquisitely complicated. Professor Senjoji's face, in perfect counterbalance, filled up with delight.
"I say, Yuri. How strange do you have to act before the image you broadcast swallows the Hyakurenno name whole?"
"Uuuhm."
Should I cancel tomorrow's stream? The ten-story house of cards? Delivered to her face, that particular truth was a critical hit—enough that Hyakurenno Yuri, however briefly, seriously meant it.