What Is Hidden Shall Be Revealed (3)
"I'm sorry. The lecture ran long. You waited quite a while, didn't you?"
"Not at all. The manager and I were already talking."
The manager unlocked the door, and Ninomae slipped into the back seat, setting down the bag that held her textbooks. Han Seoyeon had told her it was fine, and still her face stayed dark. It wasn't that she took Seoyeon's reassurance for empty courtesy. Weighed honestly, the reaction was only natural.
Up until the moment she caught Han Seoyeon reading that long, thoughtful blog post, the worry had been a comparatively light one—the sort of thing that might, at worst, have matured into a write-up titled So a College Classmate Caught Me VTubing.txt. Once she had heard the details from the manager, though, it had swollen to the scale of her friend perhaps becoming the target of a doxxing. There was no way a face could stay bright under that.
"I'm sorry. Because of me..."
"No apologizing. This is hardly something you need to be sorry for."
"H-hardly, you say."
From the way she spoke, it was impossible to believe the talk with the manager had gone well. A reaction like that meant she had surely said something to the effect that no particular measures were necessary. Ninomae flicked her a look, the question plain in her eyes, and Manager Hatsuna answered with nothing but a bitter smile.
"I'm telling you, your personal information could end up posted online, Shion-san."
"It's all right."
It wasn't an empty reassurance. She truly was fine.
"My life is so ordinary that even if they dig, nothing worth finding will turn up."
More precisely, her past had already been laundered into exactly that sort of cover. They could rake through it all they liked; there was nothing there that could touch her.
"Th-that may be, but what about the life you're living now? If something like your home address gets out, and someone actually comes looking for you?"
"I don't believe I'm worth anyone going to the trouble of a visit. And in any case, if it came to a fight, I would win."
The conditions are rather strict, I'll grant, but I do hold a license to kill. She gulped the words back down before they could clear her throat.
"I don't care how fit you are, Shion-san, it's still dangerous! What are you going to do if they come at you with a weapon?!"
"Mm. A weapon. I'll think about that when the time comes."
The truth is, we have quite a few of those at home.
"And in the first place, anyone unhinged enough to show up in person and do harm isn't going to be stopped by a warning from the company, wouldn't you say?"
At Han Seoyeon's glance, the manager nodded, her expression bitter. It wasn't as if the point were wrong. Ninomae let her head droop.
"Worry along those lines and there will be no end to it. So don't trouble yourself too much. This isn't your fault."
"Sor— ...mm. Thank you."
Ninomae had been about to apologize all over again, but the warning from a moment ago seemed to come back to her, and she changed course. Then she went on, her voice gone a little damp.
"I... I'm really glad I got to meet you, Shion-san."
Silence settled over the inside of the car.
Just as Ninomae, belatedly wondering whether she had said something unbearably embarrassing, felt the heat begin to rise in her face, Han Seoyeon carefully lifted a hand, like someone with a thing she wanted to say. A moment later her lips parted.
"Um... could you say that just now one more time? In Shutang's voice...?"
For the first time in the year and a half they had known each other, Han Seoyeon beheld on Ninomae Hitomi's face the look of an illusion coming apart.
That was the prize.
"Let me see you home."
Grateful for Manager Hatsuna's kindness, Han Seoyeon fastened her seat belt. Vibration climbed from the chassis through the seat and tickled along the small of her back.
"Shion-san."
A low voice from behind. Seoyeon turned her head and glanced toward the back seat.
The woman with the dark chestnut bob, Ninomae Hitomi, was fidgeting with her fingers.
"So... you've seen me stream, then?"
"Yes, well..."
Han Seoyeon nodded. There was no particular reason to deny it, and at this point she couldn't have denied it anyway.
Hearing that, Ninomae offered an awkward smile. Her feelings had to be tangled in all sorts of ways. An acquaintance had, after all, caught her in the middle of streaming. The largest of those feelings was probably embarrassment.
"H-how much have you seen?"
Even now, it seemed, she couldn't quite defeat her curiosity. She had to know the answer would only embarrass her further, and still she had gone and asked.
"Mm. Since the middle of May."
"...My debut was May seventeenth."
"Yes. I've been watching since then."
She was forcing a smile, and still the corners of Ninomae's lips gave a fine, helpless tremor.
"For the record, Shutang is my oshi. My absolute favorite."
"Th... thank you?"
"I joined the membership, too."
Han Seoyeon held out her phone as she said it. This was no ordinary early fan. This was a fan from the stretch of time one would have to call the very, very beginning. Set against a streaming career of only five months, the word early did lose a little of its shine. It was nowhere near enough, though, to take the red out of the blush a peculiar shame was already kindling in her cheeks.
"Honestly, I thought someone like you wouldn't even know what a VTuber was, Shion-san. You barely knew anime either. You only started watching recently."
Ninomae fanned her face with one hand, steering the talk elsewhere.
"Actually, I first learned what a VTuber was when I happened to see an advertisement back then."
"So that would make me your very first VTuber, then?"
"Well, I suppose it would."
"Worth every bit we spent on promotion."
The manager, having slipped into the conversation, smiled.
"The anime, too. That was what got me seeking them out on my own. Shutang does like to bring them up."
"Ugh... when I realize I hold a one-hundred-percent stake in leading you down the otaku path, Shion-san, the guilt..."
At the sight of her covering her face with both palms, the corner of Seoyeon's mouth lifted, just a little.
"By the way, is Shion a nickname?"
"If I had to give it a name, I'd call it my Japanese name. The real one is rather difficult for a Japanese person to pronounce."
Seoyeon. Neither eo nor yeo exists as a sound in modern Japanese. In writing and in speech alike, the nearest anyone could come was Han Soyon.
"So I usually just ask people to call me Shion. There's a religious meaning to it as well, in its own way."
"Ah, you did say you were a Christian."
Among viewers, after all, she was known as Sister—enough so that some called her the Nun outright.
"Come to think of it, I've talked about you a lot on stream, Shion-san. Is that all right?"
"I did feel envious. I go to church perfectly well myself. I could have been good friends with Shutang too. Thoughts of that sort."
"...You really are one of her true Servants, aren't you."
"Thank you."
Ninomae's expression turned inscrutable all over again. Her lips parted several times, as if to insist she hadn't meant it purely as praise, but in the end she closed them and kept quiet.
"Ah, left here."
Even as they spoke, the car carrying the three of them pressed on toward its destination. Han Seoyeon indicated the way, pointing to the bank on one corner of the intersection.
"Shion-san."
Had she sensed that their arrival was drawing near? Ninomae drew one deep breath, then called her name in earnest.
"What is it?"
"It's, well... you know."
Ninomae Hitomi hesitated, as if a little afraid of the answer that would come back from Han Seoyeon.
"Shutang, the one you liked so much... Mary Tepes being me, actually. You weren't disappointed, were you?"
Mary Tepes of Anathema's second generation, and the person inside her, Ninomae Hitomi. Having learned that, might Seoyeon have been disappointed after all? Afraid as she was, Ninomae asked anyway, lamenting once more the weakness of a curiosity she could not conquer.
"Huh? Why?"
And that was the reaction she received. Han Seoyeon stared at Ninomae with eyes gone perfectly round, as if she couldn't begin to understand the point of the question. The premise that she might have been disappointed—she seemed never even to have considered the possibility.
"...No. I just wanted to say, please look after me from here on."
Those eyes, eerie and yet perfectly clear. Looking into them, Ninomae couldn't help it and burst out laughing. At the sight of Seoyeon, brow drawn tight, genuinely sunk in thought over why on earth she was acting this way, she felt pathetic for having worried over nothing.
"See you tomorrow, Shion-san."
"Yes. Get home safe, Ninomae-san. You as well, Manager."
When that single sentence would have been enough.
"Ah... what a relief. Really, what a relief."
The offices of Anathema Production. A woman had come to the building—respectable in scale, in its own right, and equipped even with a studio for broadcasts.
Hatsuna Miho, the manager in charge of Anathema's second-generation VTubers. She walked the corridor of the office, murmuring to herself. The sigh she let out was colored with relief.
"A relief how?"
The voice of someone passing at just that moment brought her steps to a halt.
A face with a slightly androgynous air. Her height didn't greatly exceed the average for a woman, but her proportions were so good that she gave off a tall, clean-lined impression. In every respect, the sort of looks that in her girls' school days would have earned her the name of Prince and left any number of underclassmen in tears—all the more so because her hair, back then, had not been long as it was now.
"Tsunashi-san?"
Manager Hatsuna looked at her, plainly surprised.
"You weren't meant to have a studio stream today."
"I forgot my tumbler here yesterday."
Ah, of course. Hatsuna nodded, satisfied. She herself had been the one to drive Tsunashi to the office the day before.
"So what did you mean, just now?"
"Ah, Ninomae-san's personal information getting out this time. An acquaintance of hers got pulled into it, so I went to meet with them."
"Sister, then."
At that murmur, the manager nodded.
"Sounds like it worked out."
"Yes. Thankfully."
It wasn't that she was glad Han Seoyeon had demanded neither measures from the company nor compensation. This was a matter for which someone truly had to answer, and she wasn't shameless enough to rejoice merely because they had slipped free of it. What she counted as fortunate was Ninomae's state of mind. Ninomae was sturdy enough in that regard, in her own way, but having one's personal information laid bare before an unspecified public was hardly easy on the heart. If one's own acquaintance had been caught up in it besides, that went without saying.
"I'm truly glad she seems to have such a good friend."
Not only this time. She fully expected that presence to go on being a pillar for her, from here on as well.
"Mm... I don't know the details, but that does sound like a good thing."
Tsunashi smiled. Watching her, Hatsuna opened her mouth as if something had just occurred to her.
"By the way, when you were in the car yesterday, you didn't notice any kind of smell, did you?"
"Hmm. I'm not sure. Was there some problem?"
"No. Shion-san—that is, Sister—said something odd as she was getting out."
She had asked whether they kept a pet. Hatsuna murmured it.
"Apparently the passenger seat smelled of fur."
"...Fur. A smell."
"Yes. I do keep a dog, but I haven't had him in the car recently."
Why would that be? The manager looked thoroughly puzzled.
"Huh? Tsunashi-san, you don't look well. Are you all right?"
"Ah, aah, I'm just a little dizzy. I slept poorly last night, so I'm tired."
Oh dear, that wouldn't do. Hatsuna fretted over Tsunashi, who had pressed a hand to her brow.
Tsunashi Tenka. A talent of Anathema's second generation, she was the woman behind Charlotte Lupus, the werewolf-concept VTuber.
Of course, that was nothing more than a character setting.
Th-this sharp a nose... she has to be with the Church...
She herself had been the one to pitch the roleplay concept to the company before her debut. All the same, that surely had nothing to do with the problem at hand. Probably.