327: We All Gather in One Place (3)
The song ended, and in the same instant she froze in that pose, stock-still. Each time Ninomae Hitomi stared straight into the camera and drew a breath, her chest rose and fell, heaving. On the monitor set nearby, Mary Tepes's avatar let slip a flicker of the same thing — movement, as if her own breathing had gone rough.
But it wasn't stamina. She had danced and sung two songs back to back without a rest, so most of the crowd would have taken it that way, and yet she wasn't tired in the slightest. A True Ancestor vampire, and one of the Shinto who had received a divinity passed down from Tatari no Moyoko; a Fortune God who called luck to herself, and the god of Bartholomew Margarita. There was no world in which movement of this degree would burn her out. She had simply never been given any special training — look at raw physicality alone, and it was no exaggeration to say she stood above an ordinary Holy Knight.
Even so, her breath came short from the elation crashing over her. The excitement a live stage calls up. She glanced not at the screen broadcasting the stage where her avatar stood, but at the camera turned on the seats.
The in-ear, meant to carry directions for running the stage, had at some point been patched through to the sound of the venue itself, and the roaring cheers drove into her ears raw, nothing held back. Cheers made of living voices, from a crowd in the flesh — something she was hearing for the first time in her life. Listening, it felt as if a crackling current were running through her head.
Hitomi pressed that swelling feeling down as far as she could. A performer getting drunk on emotion is close to taboo. It wasn't that she was forbidden to be moved by the audience; it was that the feeling must not get in the way of the show. If the song came apart because she was choking up, that would be a disaster. They had not spent their money and their time to come all this way in order to watch her lose herself, and so she owed them her best.
"Let's go straight into the next one! This one isn't my song, but it's one I really love. Among the covers up on my channel, it's the one sitting at second in views, too."
Saying so, she stole a glance at the screen. Some of the reactions brimmed with curiosity over what song could possibly have her like this, while others in the crowd wore something near a wry little laugh, as if to say she was doing this even here. There were, surprisingly, quite a few of the latter. A reaction like that meant they had known Mary from the start.
Looking over them, a woman in a black coat that had no business being worn in summer caught her eye. At an angle where their gazes ought to meet by now, Hitomi smiled, small and bright. A few others were dressed the same way — the control team's staff uniform — but this was a face she could pick out even from this distance.
Her wife, loved past all measure. Right now, though, they were fan and idol, and too blatant an approach would have to wait. Later, while I'm singing, I can wink that way on the sly and blow her a hand-kiss. Thinking it, Hitomi lightly swept her side-hair back: the signal that she was ready to carry on into the next song.
"Shutang, moving as a 3D hologram… I could die right now and have no regrets, don't you think."
"Shouldn't you be standing over there, in the middle of that rowdy cheering section, instead of here?"
Han Seoyeon had her fist clenched tight, as if the feeling were more than she could hold. Yu Hyena looked at her with a stare that said she could not believe what she was seeing. A face that looked ready to casually put a person or two in the dirt, and she reacted like this — no matter how many times Hyena saw it, she could not get used to it. Split hairs and the personality she'd so often watched online was closer to this; it was the looks that felt like they didn't belong.
"I'm staff, for one. It wouldn't do for someone wearing a staff armband to kick up too much of a racket."
Seoyeon answered like that. She didn't look particularly unhappy about it, either. In exchange for not getting to make a little noise, she could take in the show from a prime seat, so there was no grounds for complaint.
"I didn't think you would come, though."
"Is it weird that I'd show up to stan?"
"I mean today."
As Seoyeon had said, Komori Sae — Yu Hyena's oshi — was scheduled for tomorrow. Tickets would not have been easy to begin with, and securing two of them so she could attend both days would have taken no ordinary effort. Unlike Alejandra, who had been stanning all the way back to the Bansei Marin days, Seoyeon had figured Hyena paid the past life itself very little mind.
"If I can catch the other Anapro shows too, of course I should. Normally scoring two tickets would've been impossible, but I happened to get comps."
"Comps?"
"That just now was our company's song, wasn't it."
"Ah……."
It seemed that, while the clearance was being arranged, they had sent invitation tickets along as well — a good thing being a good thing. That the director of Barbara Knight was an Anapro fan was a reasonably well-known bit of gossip, after all.
"Anyway. Watching it like this reminded me of something."
"Yes. Of what?"
"What do you say we run a collab with Anapro?"
"That does not follow from 'watching reminded me' in the slightest."
At a remark that had leapt out with no cause, no effect, and nothing in between, Seoyeon knit her brow and looked at her.
"No — I was thinking, what if we handed them an OST vocal. Put an ad in, too."
"And why are you telling me."
"You're already something like a manager."
"That much is true."
Thought of that way, floating a proposal like this wasn't so strange. Han Seoyeon nodded, as if convinced.
"Just Hito— …only Mary?"
"For the OST. The sponsored stream itself, I figure it's better to put several people in."
"Barring anything unusual, I expect the answer that comes back will be a yes."
So long as it wasn't something like an adult-product advertisement, Anathema Production basically left sponsorships — the ad streams famous in Korea under the name homework broadcasts — to each VTuber's own discretion. They would pass along word that this or that ad had come in, but whether to take it was entirely up to the talent herself. Hitomi, a diehard fan of Barbara Knight, went without saying, and Seoyeon didn't think the others were likely to refuse either.
"The OST side, though, will need a proper talk with the company. It's plainly a different matter from simply accepting a sponsorship."
Handing over the vocal for an original song the other side had made was a different set of circumstances from an ordinary ad stream. Even so, so long as nothing major stood in the way, this too was likely to go through.
"Have you settled on anyone besides Mary?"
"Well. Mary and Sae for now, and one more, feels about right……."
"Isn't there some personal interest mixed in there? Komori Sae doesn't even play Barbara Knight, normally."
"Which is how we pull people in from somewhere we don't usually reach."
Watching her toss out her oshi's name as if it were nothing, Seoyeon flicked a glance at Yu Hyena. A plausible excuse had come out fast enough, but the thought was hard to shake. Does she actually mean it?
"Wouldn't Amairo Tsubasa do perfectly well for the last one? She does play Barbara, for one."
"Mmm. I do think that's the correct pairing… but isn't it a little too painfully cliché?"
"At this point, that hipster streak of yours is a disease."
To begin with, placing ads with internet broadcasters was not particularly cheap. Cheaper than flesh-and-blood celebrities, people said — but only by comparison with them. Ordinary viewers watched Superchats detonating on a stream and assumed a VTuber raked in a fortune from donations, yet among broadcasters there were, surprisingly, more than a few who preferred an ad stream to donations. Set against money that could lurch at any moment with the mood of the audience, an ad tended to be a little more stable. For that to matter, of course, it had to be not merely stable, but a stable fortune: an eye-opening sum, paid out as the fee for a single broadcast. It was hard not to think this was something to decide with a little care.
Not that Hyena was the sort who would have made a game like this if she were careful. Why is it that every last person in charge around me runs their work on the heart of a wild beast? Seoyeon lamented it inwardly.
"I was also thinking of slotting in one of the third gen. You couldn't leak me the debut groups' info ahead of time? Gaming-buddy favor."
"As if I could. To begin with, a sponsored stream dropping suddenly right at the start of a debut — talk might start going around."
And if the ad came in naming one specific person, there was the worry that talk of special treatment — of favoritism — would follow. One might think that merely landing an ad or two a little ahead of everyone else wasn't trouble on that scale, but this was an industry where smear campaigns past all imagining occasionally blew up. Anapro, besides, was already in a spot where they had to take care that murmurs of isn't this just a family business didn't start to leak…….
"Unless a megafan turns up so devoted that it would be strange not to give them an ad, the sensible choice, generally, is to pick from the first generation or the second."
"Yeah…? Well. Even short of Shutang, there probably aren't that many people who just happen to be dead serious about our game……."
Amairo Tsubasa, mentioned a moment ago — Hyakurenno Yuri, that is — was herself only an ordinary gamer and user, a little ambiguous to call a diehard. Seoyeon knew her as the type who played all sorts of mobile games, broadly and evenly.
"Couldn't just one more megafan our own users would actually acknowledge — a real Shutang — please drop into our laps—"
"Kindly say something that makes sense. And quiet, now. It looks like the next song is about to start."
"Cold."
"As if that's news. You'd have been exactly the same if it were Komori Sae's stage."