Come Into My House, Hyena (1)
"If foreigners have finally made it all the way to Seoul, Gyeongbokgung Palace is the obvious choice, don't you think?"
"Historical heritage is precious, of course. But depending on the person, it might be a little dull, no?"
"Mary-chan in a hanbok. God-tier costume."
"We're going. Right now."
…And so, by the verdict of that solemn debate, the party's destination was decided.
"Shion, honestly…"
"Sister in a hanbok. God-tier."
"Let's go, now!"
There had, admittedly, been a wicked busty villain(?) poised to scold them for an about-face so utterly steeped in desire—but a single sentence made an accomplice of her as well.
"Those two are already a lost cause."
"W-well, they truly love each other, so it's fine, isn't it?"
The remaining two raised no serious objection either. Renting a foreign traditional costume in order to tour a foreign palace seemed, in the most ordinary sense, like a perfectly decent experience.
And so the women made straight for a hanbok rental shop.
"Oh. Shion, you're taking the men's?"
"Yes. Skirts—especially the kind that billow out in a great loose sprawl—aren't something I'm used to……."
"This looks amazing on you too!"
Hitomi looked her over as Han Seoyeon lightly fingered the gray vest layered over her dopo—the kwaeja.
"It suits you as well, Hitomi."
Seoyeon drew her lightly into an embrace and smiled, faint and small. There was nothing adorned in it. It was simply the truth. A yellow that bright was not an easy color to wear well, and yet.
Watching them, Kuroyuki raised her phone and took a photo. A little shy, Hitomi still looped her arms around Seoyeon's and held the pose. When Seoyeon, just as carefully, settled an arm around Hitomi's shoulders, the shutter sounded again, and Kuroyuki put up a thumb as if to say this one had come out well too.
"Put her in a hanbok and the resemblance is unmistakable."
"Resemblance to what?"
"Nomi."
"…Ah. That game character Hitomi said she liked."
The remark came from Yu Hyena, who had drawn up beside them before anyone quite noticed, and at the sound of it Han Seoyeon recalled the official game broadcast to which Mary had once been invited. Yes—that had been the name of the character she had set on her lobby screen.
"If the chance comes, perhaps I ought to cosplay for her next time. Last time, Hitomi was the one who did."
"The hell. A girlfriend who cosplays for you? I'm so goddamn jealous. …So, what was the costume?"
"A Mary cosplay."
"Oh, for fuck's sake. This is officially a matter requiring an apology to every Mary fan on the planet. For real."
A lover who cosplays for you makes you an enviable bastard. A lover who is the VTuber herself, made to cosplay her own avatar, makes you a bastard outright. Such, at least, was the verdict Yu Hyena handed down.
Of course, she could hardly have the offender strung up in the square and the story shouted through the whole neighborhood, so in the end it amounted to nothing more than cursing out of envy.
"Well then. Looks like everyone's changed, so shall we head out?"
Kuroyuki said it while watching them, drawing a fingertip along the brim of the gat she wore. Hers was a dopo the color of jade. Unlike Seoyeon, she had put on men's hanbok for no better reason than that she wanted to try the hat once.
"So even a woman can rent the men's set."
"The other way around would probably be fine too. These days, tell a woman she can't wear men's clothes and all hell breaks loose."
Fair enough, Bansei seemed to grant, and she nodded. Say a thing like that nowadays and you were more than likely to be buried alive under a chorus of gender this and gender that.
She lightly set to rights the fall of her crimson jeogori, and was quick to second Kuroyuki's proposal.
"Right. No point standing around here all day. Let's be off."
"Ah, yes. Then allow me to guide you. First, the building you can see far over there is……."
And so the palace tour began. Or rather, so it tried.
"Uh, so this place is… damn it, what was 'court lady' in Japanese again. The thing is. It's where the king's maids used to live……."
"…Just speak Korean. I'll interpret."
It did not take long for the guide to run aground on the language.
Yu Hyena had been an otaku since long ago, and she had studied Japanese on her own besides, but even that had its limits. Everyday conversation gave her no trouble. Instantly translating historical terms on the spot was another matter. And since she herself had chosen an old palace as the destination, she was in no position to complain.
"It's all right. My Korean only goes as far as basic conversation, too."
Worse still, the comfort had come from her very own oshi. At those words, Yu Hyena looked toward Seoyeon.
"Am I supposed to take this as a humiliation, or as an honor?"
"How should I know. Truly."
Set aside the fact that the very person who had proposed it ended up groaning over her Japanese, and the Gyeongbokgung tour was a reasonably good choice.
In the capital of a foreign land, what could be more meaningful than looking upon that land's old palace?
"Take a photo in front of the Statue of a Girl and post it on Twitter."
"K-Kuroyuki-san…? That would actually start a flame war, wouldn't it……? Meaningful, yes—so meaningful it has one foot in politics……."
"Net right-wingers can all drop dead. It'd serve them right. I don't raise fans like that."
It was, in fact, an act of tremendous meaning. Provided one was willing to overlook the minor detail that their home base stood in Japan.
It hardly needed saying that Anathema Production was a company of openly pro-Korea sympathies, and for precisely that reason they caught, now and then, the mutterings of net right-wingers going on about Zainichi this and Zainichi that. Even so, that was no reason to snipe at such people in the open and set the whole thing alight.
There wasn't a trace of a smile on her face, which made her look entirely serious… but it had probably been a joke. So long as they mixed and streamed under a single company, one person's controversy never ended with that one person. Kuroyuki was not the sort to let her own bad mood spill over and wreck someone else's broadcast.
…At any rate, touring a palace was quite a meaningful thing.
That, however, held true for an hour or two at most. Unless one happened to be enrolled in a history department, circling a cultural heritage site for hours on end was unlikely to feel rewarding. Which was why they stepped back out of Gyeongbokgung Palace a little over an hour later. Considering that most tourists only skimmed the place in passing, this still put them among the unusually attentive.
"So, what now?"
"…You really were a normie until two years ago, right? How are you this fluent in memes?"
"I roam every community there is, nationality no object, in order to gather intelligence on Superchats."
Han Seoyeon, who lurked across Korean, Chinese, and Japanese sites, and English-language ones besides. She might not have excelled at much else, but when it came to meme literacy she was in a class of her own. Watching her declare as much so matter-of-factly, Yu Hyena looked utterly at a loss.
"I said it like a joke. So, where will you be taking us now?"
"Hmm. If we're talking ordinary tourist spots, there are a few. Namsan Tower, Gwanghwamun Square, Myeongdong."
Ah, but maybe they ought not go too far? Yu Hyena muttered it half to herself. The group was still wearing the rented hanbok, so it would be better to keep within a range that didn't stray too far from the shop.
"I remember you can ride a rickshaw around here, too."
If anything, there were so many options that choosing one was the difficult part, and her brow furrowed. She took out her phone. Better, it seemed, to search and take a recommendation.
The moment the phone was in her hand, though, her expression twisted.
It didn't look like an unsatisfactory search. At a glance, she had only just unlocked the screen. She hadn't even opened a browser.
"What's the matter?"
"Nah, something suddenly came up at the company……."
"Is it serious?"
"If it weren't a real problem, I'd have ignored it on the spot. Oshi came to Korea to have fun and trusted me to play guide—you think some piddling little incident matters right now?"
"That is true."
Seoyeon nodded. If she were in the middle of a good time with Hitomi and got hauled off over something trivial, she would certainly be thoroughly unpleasant about it. Put the other way, it meant something large enough had happened that Hyena was weighing whether to give up an experience countless fans could not have bought even with money.
"Sorry. I've got to go see about this. It's not actually dire, but if I don't deal with it now it could blow up into something huge… Everyone, I truly am sorry. A problem came up at the company."
Yu Hyena said so and bobbed her head. No one, of course, blamed her.
She was not a guide hired and paid, only a fan who had come along out of kindness. Had they been the sort of people to give someone like that a hard time for needing to leave, they would have been screened out at the audition stage long ago.
"Hm."
Only Kuroyuki watched the scene with a blank face, rubbing at her chin as if turning something over.
"We still haven't decided where to go next. A place we need to go has just appeared. …I think an answer that satisfies both has come out of it."
"What are you saying, Kuroyuki-chan. I don't care how you look at it—marching into someone else's company unannounced, and when there's a problem on top of that—"
"We would be absolutely delighted!"
"Eh?"
Bansei Marin, it was plain, knew nothing of what had happened in Japan a short while ago.
Had she known, she would never have overlooked the fact that a sufficiently enormous devotion will, from time to time, step clean outside of common sense.