Signs in the Sun, Moon, and Stars (2)
Stirring a rather sweet iced tea with her straw, Ninomae Hitomi made her way back to her room.
Room was a generous word for it. It wasn't the bedroom, but the computer room she ordinarily used for streams, and the tower of the PC she had switched on ahead of time—a talisman stuck fast to the case—let out a low, steady hum.
"Here you go."
She held the cup out to the woman seated at the desk. Han Seoyeon took it and smiled, just a little.
"You're not having any, Hitomi?"
"I've got mine right here."
Seoyeon had reason to look puzzled, since Hitomi was carrying only the one cup—and then Hitomi flicked her fingers and called up her servant. A misshapen arm stretched out of the shadows, pressed a can of soda into her hand, and withdrew again.
She cracked the tab with a sharp hiss and, beaming, planted herself squarely on Seoyeon's lap. Seoyeon raised no real complaint. She simply wound one arm around that waist and held her steady.
"What time is it?"
Seoyeon glanced at the clock in the corner of the monitor.
"Five fifty-six. Four minutes left."
Four minutes until six, and the hour mattered, because today was the day Anathema Production's third generation would debut. Four of them in all—Sakuragi Honoka, Momomomo Chisa, Osean Lee, and Ryuumai Fuu. Beginning with Honoka, they were to take the stage in order from six in the afternoon, thirty minutes apiece, and finish at eight.
That was why Hitomi had set the evening aside to watch the streams with Seoyeon. From the vantage of someone about to become their senior, she could hardly help worrying over them.
"What was it like when you debuted, Hitomi?"
"Honestly? I was so nervous that once it was over, I couldn't even properly remember what I'd said. I was only talking to myself in front of a computer for a little while, and it still wore me out completely."
It had been what they called a box stream, and it wasn't as if she had no experience on air at all, yet she had been needlessly tense, moving on what felt like pure instinct. Looking back, she wondered whether it had really been worth trembling over to that degree, but at the time the weight of it had been immense.
"All I remember is that I talked a whole lot."
"That's all right. I remember how cute Shutang was."
"What's this? Showing off that you're an oldbie?"
"Maybe I am."
Hitomi laughed under her breath at that, and they brushed their cheeks together lightly.
Thought of that way, there really was no bond quite like theirs. Han Seoyeon had known nothing whatsoever about VTubers. Left to herself, she was someone who would never have taken an interest in subculture at all—and yet, of all days, she had clicked an advertisement banner on the very day of Mary's debut and become a fan of unmatched fervor. And in the end they had come to this.
Of course they had already been precious to one another even before she debuted as Mary Tepes… but in the matter of that fondness ripening all the way into love, Mary's part had surely not been nothing. In that light, a debut stream could not help carrying a great deal of meaning for Hitomi.
"The situation's different from when we second-gens debuted, though."
Even as she turned it over, she seemed to decide she ought to say what she meant, and so she added as much.
"Different in what sense?"
"They're running their Twitter accounts ahead of time. We've never done it that way."
"Ah. True enough—Shutang only really started using her account properly after she debuted."
If every generation were identical, there would have been no point in running a generation system at all. The differences between this debut group and the first and second were several, and one of them was that they had activated their Twitter accounts before the debut streams themselves.
The first and second generations had gone no further than making an account and leaving it there. At most they posted a silhouette of the character, set a synopsis-like blurb on top of it, and used the account to announce the debut schedule.
This debut group, by contrast, had been granted permission in advance, and their accounts were already live. They were kept from spoiling anything important early, of course, and limits had been set on them—restrictions on how often they could post, and interactions confined to their fellow debutants.
"To promote the debut streams, I take it?"
"That too. And since the concept is a school club, I think they also want to build the relationships between them beforehand."
The senior generations had a framework in place—managers on humanity's side, and the anomalies under their charge—but the relationships within the setting were fairly loose. Putting forward a concept in which they all belonged to a single organization was a first. In that respect, social media was a sound approach. A debut stream had to deliver one's own points of charm as briefly and as hard as possible, and in a window of time too short even to reveal all of one's own appeal, one could hardly cram in relationships with other people as well. So the idea was to promote themselves in advance, and at the same time to forge a certain bond entirely outside the broadcasts.
"From what I hear, they've already got a third-generation group collab on the schedule."
Looked at that way, one could almost call it a debut as a group. Seoyeon nodded at Hitomi's words, then turned her eyes to the screen where the live broadcast had been set to begin.
The one to start things off, as already noted, was Sakuragi Honoka—under her VTuber name, Masachi Nodoka, the leader according to the setting. Her role was president of the Occult Research Club at Rokugen Academy: a passionate girl with a keen interest in every sort of anomaly and ghost story. She claimed, on the family register at least, to be a distant heir of Solomon, though the claim was difficult to credit; in truth she was nothing more than an ordinary student, a mysticism enthusiast who had never once brushed against the hidden world. That, roughly, was the roleplay.
In short, the cheerful club president whose members are all anomalies, who hasn't noticed a thing, and who nurses a dream of one day seeing an anomaly for herself—that faintly light-novel arrangement was the broad outline of the third generation's setting.
…The people at the company knew it, and so did the viewers: some nine-tenths of any initial setting evaporated within half a year of debut. For the moment, though, what mattered was to establish that this, at any rate, was how things stood.
While they talked, the time slipped quickly by, and the screen changed.
An image that seemed to be the waiting screen went out. Perhaps because she had taken purple as her personal color, shapes in that palette were drawn here and there across it, and looked at closely, every one of them was a symbol used in alchemy.
"Mercury, phosphorus, sulfur, Saturn, the sun… was that one arsenic? Do you think they mean anything?"
"Hard to say. I suspect she simply chose them for how they looked."
Watching it, the two of them talked for a moment. In the midst of it Seoyeon, with Hitomi gathered in her arms, rubbed at her belly a little too persistently and caught a crisp smack across the back of her hand.
It didn't look like anything particularly sorcerous. Just a waiting screen made to suit an occult-maniac concept.
And before long, a voice began to come through. It called to mind the Sakuragi Honoka they knew, though the tone sat a little differently. The microphone accounted for some of it, but more than that she had surely done what so many broadcasters do and made herself a separate voice for the stream—tipping into a moe register one moment, settling into something more grounded the next. In short, she had prepared what one might call a voice that sells.
Even Hitomi, perched on Seoyeon's lap at this very moment, sounded considerably different when she was Mary. Before a portion of her private life had been made public, even Seoyeon had been unable to tell.
Set beside that, a fair amount of the original voice still remained. Even so, it was a relief that her voice wasn't shaking with nerves, though she did seem startled that so many viewers were watching her.
And not long after, just as she had said, the waiting screen gave way. A character model appeared against a background that seemed drawn from a private bedroom. An ordinary progression—if one were speaking of the ordinary.
…It would have been, had what went out on the air been her own model, and not her older sister's.
The picture cut back with a reaction speed bordering on the miraculous… but there was only so fast a pair of human hands could be. The chat alone was enough to tell them that most of the viewers had witnessed the moment just past.
"…Is this blowing up?"
"This is blowing up……."
The operations side of Anathema Production had surely been thrown into emergency. There could not, after all, have been a guideline for a disaster of this kind. Confronted with a situation neither of them had met in all their lives, the two who had been watching pressed their hands to their brows.