Signs in the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars (1)
"—Anri?"
"Ah— yes. Yes!"
The woman who had been hammering something out on her phone startled at the voice calling her and jerked her head up. She flipped the phone face-down onto the desk in one quick motion and set a brilliant smile across her face. Pale skin, golden hair, blue eyes — the very specimen of a European beauty as Japanese people picture one — so that the smile alone turned her into something like a painting.
Guroyuki Sui regarded the performance with a thoroughly unimpressed look. At a glance it was the stare of someone about to scold her for having done something wrong, but Anri knew perfectly well that Sui wore that face when she was thinking of nothing in particular, and wore it even when she was in quite a good mood.
"The tamper we ordered. They say it arrived. Did you receive it, Anri?"
"Ah, yes. I put it inside the counter, over there."
"So you did. Here it is."
Only after that did Guroyuki notice the cubic box, a little larger than her palm, and lift it.
"And what were you doing. Concentrating that hard."
"Uh, that was... I was just trying to decide what to write on Twitter!"
The gaze swung back to her, and Anri's shoulders gave a small flinch. Idle hour or not, she could hardly tell her employer she had been steering opinion on a forum. She offered a passable deflection, and Guroyuki — who had not been especially interested to begin with — nodded almost at once.
"The virtual account?"
"Oui. I don't use Twitter otherwise, anyway."
"Right."
Eyes fixed on Osean Lee, Guroyuki opened the box without looking and set its contents out. From that look, she was probably picturing the character who would soon be her junior. The foreign part-timer standing here was Guroyuki Sui's employee and, at the same time, the VTuber junior about to debut as Anathema Production's third generation.
The name, as she recalled, was Shirase Hikari. An angel with water-pale hair and eyes of the same color — a decidedly innocent impression, and an interior that was considerably sinister and greedy. A so-called haraguro character. The angel, of course, was strictly a thing of the past, and in the present only self-proclaimed. A fallen angel, as people say. From the standpoint of Christian demonology, a demon that simply happened to have feathered wings would have done just as well.
A perfect copy of the original. That was precisely Guroyuki's impression. Add that all the sinister energy pointed toward lust, and she was not much different from the Anri of real life.
Anri was the one who insisted that a naive foreigner who looked as if she truly loved Japan was guaranteed to land, and who went so far as to deliberately stumble over her words. Right now the only person nearby was Guroyuki, who already knew her nature, so she was speaking like a normal person — but let a female customer walk in and she would change faces on the spot and scamper off to pour on the charm. In that light, the character of Shirase Hikari suited Anri perfectly.
Whether it was a personality that suited a broadcaster was another question. A black heart was, at base, the sort of thing that made people dislike you.
"The reception. Will it be all right."
Which was why it slipped out of Guroyuki without her meaning to say it.
"Excuse me — is it all right to start saying ominous things like that already? You won't even encourage your junior?"
"I couldn't call it a good personality. Not even as a lie."
Of course, even negative traits could win people over or lose them, depending on how far you took them and how you combined them. The arrogance that had settled into Mary's character, for instance, was considerably neutralized by the airheaded side she showed from time to time. A slightly ditzy noble young lady was practically a cliché by now. And more than anything, in Mary's case the fact that her inner self was a person of almost absurd goodness did enormous work. There was even a joke that she was Anathema's only light — a gentle human being trying very hard to act superior, and still unable to completely hide the goodness that kept leaking out. That, too, was a kind of charm.
Set beside her, Shirase Hikari was the exact opposite. Against a kind person feigning wickedness: a sinister hypocrite. A character built to harvest far more abuse than support.
"Isn't a girl who's just a little bit sly actually cuter?"
"A little?"
At the shameless follow-up, it even crossed Guroyuki's mind, briefly, that she ought to conduct a serious review of her part-timer's Japanese vocabulary. She seemed to catch the meaning soon enough, though, and idly wound a lock of her own hair around one finger.
"...Since she's rotten through with ulterior motives anyway, the intent is to simply count that as the concept."
"Boss? Even I would be hurt, hearing that to my face..."
Ignoring the stricken Anri, Guroyuki sank into thought. It was a fair point. For a VTuber, RP was a charm and a shackle at the same time — and sometimes even a shield for protecting yourself. An image that other people find easy to like is not hard to build. The trouble is that if it differs from your actual nature, it is not easy to keep up for long while you are on stream. A mistake, or a slip of the tongue, is bound to come out eventually.
But if you could smooth it over with that was the concept from the start — or if the problem was too large even for that, and you could still fall back on something like I fried my brain trying too hard to stay conscious of the RP — it would help a great deal. A crisis that would have killed the broadcast on the spot might be reduced to a few disappointed subscribers drifting away. Not a method you could abuse, of course.
...Knowing our president, he might not have thought about any of this at all.
That was the thought that followed. An inhuman with a fish-man's heart — he might well have gone and done it on nothing more than a haraguro character seems fine. She doubted he would be quite that reckless. And yet, having worked alongside Nakabashi Gyokichi for several years now, Guroyuki had a fairly good read on him.
Bold and insightful at once, and possessed of a flexible mind unbound by common sense — an excellent man, as CEOs went. And yet, on the point that mattered most, he had a tendency to leave nearly everything to impulse and gut feeling.
Well. How it would actually turn out was a matter of turning the cards over. Like it or not, Gen 3's debut day was coming soon. Guroyuki could only pray that her part-timer would not become Anathema Production's first talent to graduate in disgrace.