Your Judge (6)
Water poured from the rainfall showerhead—or, as Guroyuki had noted, what people in Korea more often called a sunflower shower.
Droplets struck the floor tiles and burst apart. Bansei Marin watched them for a moment, then carefully turned her gaze aside, only to drop her head again, flustered anew by the bare skin that filled her eyes.
How on earth did it come to this...
No. It couldn't be helped, she supposed. Summer or not, and warm as it was, there was nothing to be gained by standing about in clothes soaked through to the skin. Waiting for one of them to go in and come out again was certainly no better an idea. Only—did a conclusion reached by so reasonable a path really have to be this? The thought came to Bansei despite herself.
"This isn't a hot spring. What's the towel for?"
"Eek?!"
The other woman glanced her way, lifted a brow, and yanked the towel Bansei had been hiding behind clean out of her hands. Not a thread remained. Bare skin was laid open all at once, and Bansei startled, covering her chest with her forearms.
"Planning to wash with a towel on?"
"N-no. Not that, exactly, but..."
"Then you don't need it."
With that, the other woman—Guroyuki Sui—flung the towel past Bansei's shoulder. Unhurried, she slipped a hand into the stream spilling from the showerhead and gave a nod.
"Good. Hot water's coming through fine."
She stepped in beneath the spray and swept her hair back from her bangs all the way to the nape. The material itself was excellent enough that the gesture alone made a picture—but Bansei had no room to admire it. Guroyuki, showering at this very moment, was of course wearing nothing either. There was simply nowhere for Bansei's eyes to go.
"We're both women. Why are you so worked up about it?"
"Even so, how am I supposed to not be worked up..."
Bansei mumbled it under her breath, then sighed and moved toward the shower. When Guroyuki shifted aside to make room, she stepped under and let the warm water take her face.
"You ought to be used to it, though. You said you lived in a dorm back when you were active."
"We never once went so far as sharing a bathroom. A hot spring, perhaps. Not this."
Hotel or not, the shower stall could hardly be called spacious, and being in one with only the two of them was a first even for Bansei.
"That's pretty unexpected. When it's just girls, don't people usually wander around in their underwear?"
"The girls were terribly strict about that sort of thing."
Going into the bathroom together, walking around dressed too comfortably—Bansei Marin's old colleagues had been fiercely sensitive about all of it, and never failed to call her on it. She wasn't the sort to argue that they needn't take it so far, so she had simply gone along, keeping what needed keeping through their life in the dorm. If she had to compare it to anything, it was the fastidiousness of a boarding school.
"Live that tightly even at home, and can you still breathe?"
"Once you're used to it, it's all right enough."
Guroyuki had a dependent of her own in tow, but the air on her side was considerably looser. Of course, her housemate Marbas was a demon—and the sort whose three great appetites had been all but castrated—so there was little about her that called for minding. Not that the two households could be set on the same line.
Were they even really a group? Complete strangers, nothing but business. ...Well. She did say they broke up over bad blood.
Even so, it was true that Bansei's old active years felt terribly bleak. Guroyuki shifted her eyes a few times, then spoke again.
"So none of those situations people talk about when they're doing yuri fanservice, either."
"Of course not. And besides, VV wasn't even a group that did yuri fanservice..."
If anything, talk that certain members didn't get along had been circulating since the very start of their activities. Back then Bansei had worn her heart thin trying to mend things among them, but looking back now, the group had been rigged to explode from the opening day. Never had so much effort bought so little.
"All right. Then, in the spirit of doing what you couldn't back then—how about I wash your hair, Bansei-chan?"
"Why would it come to that?"
"It's fine. Think of it as an experience."
"I'm hardly a child..."
At the way Guroyuki kept on, Bansei muttered, half a complaint.
"I've thought this for a while, but why do you insist on treating me like a child, Guroyuki-chan?"
"Your RP is that type to begin with, isn't it?"
"That's an entirely different matter."
A voice actress who specialized in loli roles didn't get treated like a child by her colleagues. A VTuber and a voice actress couldn't be equated outright, but as logic went, it was near enough.
At that, Guroyuki thought for a moment, then answered.
"Hard to say. Call it trusting the president's ridiculous eye."
There were, broadly, two ways to build a VTuber character—fit the person to the character, or fit the character to the person. The merit of the latter was a high match between the streamer's actual personality and the persona. Anathema Production had chosen the latter as well, and even allowing for that, the sync rate among its talents ran high.
A viewer, hearing some off-stream anecdote, might marvel that they were "just the character itself" and let it pass. For someone who met them often in real life and actually talked with them, the point landed harder still. This was no work produced by analyzing a person over years. It had come out of a single interview and a handful of meetings. Grant that, and President Gyokichi's insight, in this one respect, stood at the top of the industry.
People were usually dazzled by the outward show and quick to decide that, short of a youkai, none of it made sense. What was truly absurd, Guroyuki thought to herself, was that eye of his.
"Only three of them, so far, differ between real and virtual."
And of those, the other two—setting Bansei, which was to say Komori Sae, aside—didn't stray far from their essence either.
Natsugahara Hina's case was so severe that even "anthropophobia" fell short of it, but that was only because an unfortunate accident in the past had left her unable to show her own personality in front of other people. From years of keeping company with her, what Guroyuki had come to grasp was that the character of Rokumondera Aki was, if anything, the closer likeness to her original nature.
Ninomae Hitomi was the same: quiet and well-behaved in person, while Mary Tepes was the thoroughly self-assured type. Yet in being, at heart, an endlessly good, cute, and praiseworthy girl, the two were identical whichever face one looked at. The same, too, in the way she sometimes broke into a somewhat unreasonable rampage—chiefly when Han Seoyeon, or a mobile game, was involved.
"So. The theory that there's no way President Gyokichi built that cheeky loli, Komori Sae, without taking Bansei-chan herself into account."
"U-umm..."
"From her girl-group days, Bansei-chan was the big sister. I'm sure of it."
A girl group that breathed out rumors of discord until, in the end, the relationships ruptured and the whole thing exploded. A leader who had tried, somehow, to bind those colleagues into one and make a success of it. Bansei Marin had been that kind of woman, so it wouldn't be strange if she harbored, even a little, the wish to slip free of responsibility—or felt like acting spoiled with someone else. That was how Guroyuki Sui saw her.
"Guroyuki-chan... don't tell me the way you've been treating me all this time was because of that..."
"Well... yeah. It was. You're a junior I finally have. If I could, I wanted you living easy, doing what you wanted. That's about seventy percent of it."
Guroyuki, too, had been forced out of acting by an accident, then scouted into a new life. That she should feel a certain kinship with Bansei—retired from the entertainment world, then brought in—was probably only natural. The Guroyuki of now could say with confidence that she was living while doing everything she wanted to do. And so she wanted Bansei to have a happy life on stream as well.
"Guroyuki-chan..."
She had always been quietly grateful that Guroyuki came up to her so freely, never minding the difference in their ages, but she had never dreamed the other woman had been thinking of her to this depth. That the method rested on the peculiar reading that Bansei Marin wants to be treated like a child was a little much; still, the intent itself was perfectly kind. Bansei looked away without meaning to, fidgeting her fingers. An odd tickle stirred in her chest. She had, it seemed, been rather moved.
"But seventy percent... then what's the rest?"
Somehow glad, and somehow restless, Bansei turned the subject aside. Honestly, it wasn't a feeling she could bear for long.
Guroyuki answered the question lightly.
"Oh. That?"
"Usually, in manga and the like, the heroine's mother gets designed so well that a pile of fan art comes out of it."
"That does happen. But why bring it up?"
"And in no small amount of that fan art, she shamelessly puts on her old school uniform. Or her daughter's, outright."
It wasn't untrue. Only, why was it surfacing now? Before Bansei could ask back in puzzlement, Guroyuki went on.
"A shameless older woman. Erotic, plain and simple. Isn't that nice?"
"..."
"...Bansei-chan?"
Bansei kept her mouth shut just like that. The fist she had clenched tight trembled. She was quite certain her face had gone a fair shade of red.
"No matter how I think about it, that abnormal sex drive of yours is clearly most of the reason—?!"
"Abnormal? I can't let that stand, not even from you, Bansei-chan. This is a normal sex drive."
"Is now the time for nonsense like that?! Close your mouth and take your shower!"
Every last trace of how moved she had been a moment before swept clean away, Bansei ended up shouting just that.