Son of the Dawn (1)
"Ah, that festival? Yeah, that's right. We're not going."
Tsunashi Tenka—Charlotte Lupus, to her viewers—answered a question she'd caught drifting through the chat. On the screen, the character drawn in her likeness curved into a bright little smile.
She'd said we for the simple reason that she was not alone. Seated beside Charlotte was a witch with brown hair.
Today's stream was an off-collab with her: Serena Razania. The venue was Serena's home—which was to say, Senjoji Chiyo's house.
There was no special plan behind it. They had been talking about the concert, the talk had wandered into a shape of its own, and somehow the people who weren't performing had ended up streaming together.
"Am I disappointed? Well, of course I am. It's an incredible lineup. Famous people everywhere, and a chance to meet other VTubers, so..."
"Booo, Dii-chan had better guarantee us a huge event toooo—."
Serena aimed the whine at Charlotte's words, pure playful complaint. Nakabashi Gyokichi, president of Anathema, was a man who tried rather hard to get by with no aura of authority at all, and anyone who knew anything knew that Serena had been in and out of his life since they were children. It was famous enough that, whenever the subject had been quiet just long enough, a fresh controversy would come creeping: hadn't he handed her special treatment for being an acquaintance? In most cases, of course, it died on the conclusion that the man would never do such a thing.
And because that closeness was so well known, even the occasional remark at the president that bordered on verbal abuse tended to get a pass. When the protest was as obviously a joke as this one, there was nothing to say at all.
"Serena-chan. I think you'd better be careful saying things like that."
Which made Charlotte's warning genuinely unexpected. Said to someone she barely knew, it would have been plain rudeness—but as a VTuber joking at the president, a man who was practically a childhood friend, there was nothing strange about it whatsoever.
"No, I don't mean the president. I mean, with Tsubasa-chan..."
"...Ah."
Serena let the sigh out like someone who had only just understood.
"No, so—that just now was a joke. Honestly, if they actually told me to go on right away, the pressure would kill me."
A complaint tossed off as a joke—I wish I could, what a shame—could come back, in a heartbeat, as Oh? Then would you like to? It was a lesson more than a year alongside her Gen 2 peers had beaten into her.
She could not afford to relax just because the participant list was already out and they therefore couldn't add her to the festival.
No. If anything, a full house was the more dangerous condition. Yuri was the sort of woman who might found an entire new event for the sake of Serena alone.
"I said no!"
At the superchat that followed, Serena shrieked in genuine horror. If something like that actually came to pass, the only ending she could picture—no matter how she turned it over—was the stress boring a hole clean through her stomach.
"...Haa. So, anyway. Who's going to this one? Shutang, Tsubasa-chan, and Sae-chan. Among the seniors, Tama-senpai and Rin-senpai."
She snatched a passing chat in a hurry, desperate to change the subject.
"The criteria? Dunno. Whoever sings well, then whoever's popular, something like that? And they roughly balanced the Gen 1 and Gen 2 ratio?"
Mary, by subscriber count, was the highest of the second generation. Tsubasa and Sae were the sort of virtuosos you counted from the top of the list, because starting from the bottom would take all day.
"Tama-senpai's actually pretty skilled at singing, too. She just gets buried under Hina-senpai."
Tsubasa and Hina, who were called overwhelming even inside the company—and, half a step behind them, Komori Sae, subject of a smear-campaign (?) meme about how she'd been extraordinary in her prime, but, well, she had a few years on her now, so what could you do. Those three sat at the very top.
The tier just beneath was usually either Mary Tepes or Yugure Tama.
"Rin-senpai's pretty popular too. Isn't she second in subscribers at Anathema?"
"Didn't Mary-chan catch up? I remember them trading places for a while."
"Did they? Anyway."
At Charlotte's correction, Serena tilted her head.
Mary had already chased the Gen 1 seniors—who had started ages before her—all the way up to their heels. She was good-natured, her streams hit with a satisfying punch, and with so many fiercely distinctive personalities among the second generation, she was treated as something like their center.
Then, from the start of this year, the channel had climbed even more steeply. The analysis said a great many of the accounts were foreign, which meant most of the influx was presumed to have come through Sarah Groothuizen.
Put another way: even granting the advantage of being a senior, Tachibana Rin was someone who had already been holding a subscriber count on that same level as Mary.
"A deadpan kuudere beauty really does gouge straight down into otaku taste, huh..."
"Serena-chan? Are you allowed to say that on stream...?"
Charlotte asked, looking a little worried. It would have been one thing if they were her own viewers. These belonged to someone else.
"She said it herself, to her own fans, so it should be fine, right?"
"She said that...? I mean, if it's Rin-senpai, it really wouldn't be that strange..."
"That's what she said on Mengen, though?"
If the woman herself had said it, there wasn't much to argue. Charlotte scratched her cheek anyway.
"Anyway, since we're on Rin-senpai. She's doing a talk stream this time, too."
"Ah, yeah. With Sae-chan."
The moment the subject turned, the chat became a sea of laughter. Which, frankly, was fair.
"I heard she's appearing with Guroyuki Sui-san and Bansei Marin-san."
But that did not mean the two of them were allowed to laugh. Serena fought down the laugh trying to burst out of this absurd situation and said, with studied nonchalance:
"Wow, that is a... very unique combination..."
Charlotte looked as if she were struggling. She murmured it in open admiration, her manner unmistakably awkward.
Anyone could tell it was an act.
"Hey now, no wild speculation, everyone. It could cause trouble for Guroyuki-san and Bansei-san."
Of course, saying so was never going to make them listen. It was a festival full of people doing the deceiving, and not a single person being deceived.
They gossiped for a while about a drama Guroyuki Sui had appeared in back when she was a child actor, and then the doorbell rang. Charlotte's eyes went round.
"What? Serena-chan. I think someone's here."
"Uh... yeah. Who is it, at this hour?"
Serena looked just as puzzled.
The clock said just before eight in the evening. Not so late you could call it unreasonable, and yet an odd hour for someone to come calling.
She rummaged through her memory for anything that might explain it, and nothing caught.
"I'll go check real quick. Chat with the viewers for me."
While she was still turning it over, the doorbell rang a second time. In the end Serena got up and headed for the entryway.
"Yes, I'm coming."
"Delivery. Are you Ms. Senjoji Chiyo?"
"Ah, yes. That's me..."
"I'll need the recipient's signature."
When she opened the door, a man was setting a considerably large box down nearby.
Even hearing it was a delivery, nothing clicked. She hadn't ordered anything, and no one had told her they were sending her something.
She puzzled over it and looked at the courier without much thought—and then she saw the small badge on his chest.
A simple motif, like wings reduced to an abstraction. In her memory, it was the mark of a shipping company that dealt chiefly in special handling goods.
Special handling, of course, meant the uncanny.
She said nothing.
The box came up to her waist, and ran even longer across. The courier had carried it in as far as the entryway, and at a glance it looked heavy.
The moment he was gone, Chiyo called her older sister. There was no one else around who would send a special-handling item without a word.
"Hello, Sis? What is this, exactly?"
At that utterly unruffled tone, Chiyo's brow creased. Much to her regret, this was far from the first time her sister Chihaya had done something like this.
Chihaya, who researched the uncanny, often came into possession of objects bound up with ritual arts. Most of the time she analyzed them herself and that was the end of it—but now and then her constitution made it impossible to carry the research through. Then someone else had to examine the thing, and as a rule, Chiyo was the one left holding it. After Han Seoyeon came to Japan, such incidents had grown rarer. Rarer, however, was not the same as gone.
"So what is it? ...A coffin?"
Chiyo pinned the phone against her shoulder and started tearing the box open. Inside was a pitch-black coffin plastered all over with grotesque talismans.
"Yeah, I know that. It looks sinister at a glance..."
Even under the lights, the air around it felt somehow dim. It did not look ordinarily dangerous. It looked worse than that.
"Can't you just keep it yourself until then?"
"But the little sister who has to live with this dangerous-looking thing isn't worth worrying about. Right?"
A sigh escaped her on its own.
"You did it properly, right?"
She sounded thoroughly certain. And in this field she was the highest authority, so if you didn't believe her, who were you going to believe...
In any case, Senjoji Chiyo believed what her sister had said.
"...Sis, I think I need to call the Church. Right now."
She had believed her. Which was why she was now certain that this situation was well and truly fucked.