Signs in the Sun, Moon, and Stars (3)
"Yes... well, then..."
Han Seoyeon rubbed lightly at her temple and went on.
"In that case, we will begin the reflection meeting for Anathema's third generation."
She let her gaze pass lightly over the company gathered in the conference room.
Sakuragi Honoka, Momomomo Chisa, Ryuumai Fuu, and Osean Lee — the four VTubers of the third generation. Three senior VTubers who had come along after someone else: Ninomae Hitomi, following her wife; Hyakurenno Yuri, following her maid; and Sakuragi Oka, following her little sister. And besides them, Nakabashi Gyokichi, president of Anathema Production, plus one of the staff assigned to the third generation. A full muster of everyone even remotely involved, in short.
Considering how long it had taken for the first generation, and the second, to assemble in person down to the last member, one could fairly call this exceptional.
Of course, the third-generation members had been summoned before today as well, prior to debut. It had been one of the measures taken so that things like activating their Twitter accounts ahead of debut, and the relationships among them, would come across properly. This gathering, however, had a slightly different reason. As Han Seoyeon had just said, it bore the purpose of a reflection meeting.
No one needed to ask why. Yesterday — the day of the third generation's debut streams — one accident after another had blown up.
"...But why am I the one running this meeting? More to the point, did I even need to come?"
The question slipped out of Seoyeon as if the curiosity had only just struck her. Truly a question asked far too late.
"Your post is assistant manager for the third generation, is it not."
President Gyokichi answered with a pleasant smile — or rather, by working the corners of his maw until they drew a long, sweeping arc. Seoyeon seemed to hesitate for a moment, but on reflection there was nothing in particular she couldn't do, so she decided to simply carry on with what she had been saying.
"Yes... to continue, then. As you all already know, we gathered you because of yesterday's streams. Feedback, you might call it."
At those words Honoka, who had something to feel pricked by, let her head dip a little.
The other three showed no particular reaction. Not because two of them were guiltless — their temperaments were simply that shameless.
Then Oka, wearing that same expression that never quite gave her away, quietly raised a hand. It had the look of a request for the floor. Seoyeon flicked her a small glance, and the question came at once.
"If that's all it is, there wasn't any need to drag us into the office, was there~? Back in our day I think we just did it over a call."
Feedback didn't strictly have to happen with everyone in one room. Given that criticism was inevitable, it might even have been better to speak with each of them separately. When the first and second generations had been given feedback after their debut streams, it had been done that way — apart, and not even face to face, but through voice chat. Those times, of course, had passed without any major incident...
"This is starting to feel weirdly like we got called in to be scolded~"
The agenda being what it was, there was nothing wrong with summoning them for exactly that purpose. Still, knowing the president's character as Oka did, she doubted this was the reason.
"Hmm. I see."
At that, Gyokichi stroked his chin. The jawbone showed faintly beneath the skin, so the gesture looked oddly like he was fiddling with his gills.
"When a flame war of this sort breaks out, what do all of you believe ought to be done first?"
And he put the question to them.
"Um... an explanation, or an apology?"
It was Hitomi who answered, figuring that common sense would probably make that the right reply.
"I wouldn't say that's necessarily so. First you'd have to determine whether it's even a matter that calls for an apology."
Yuri, by contrast, shook her head.
There was no need to apologize blindly for something that wasn't one's own fault. More than a few people would simply jump to the conclusion that ah, so they must have done something wrong. Of course, considering the general temperament of Japanese society, even if it wasn't your fault, it was often wiser to offer words of apology once you seemed connected to the matter at all...
"But if the question is how one intends to clean it up, then an apology as a method of doing so would be the correct answer."
Wouldn't it? Yuri sought confirmation with a glance.
The president, having heard her out, merely rolled his eyeballs from side to side with a wet little flick.
"Er... why would you handle it that way? First, you make it go viral."
"......"
At the answer that followed, most of the room couldn't help but go stiff. No one had imagined he would say a thing like that as if it were perfectly obvious, without a shred of hesitation.
"If it were something you could call a controversy, or an incident, that would be another matter. For a little happening of this scale, isn't it better to turn it into promotional material?"
Heard out, though, it wasn't entirely wrong — setting aside how deeply strange the phrasing was to listen to.
"The verdict that this is the disaster generation is already unavoidable. In that case, it's better to make it your identity. This meeting is the first step."
"Um, that — what exactly does that mean...?"
"It means we are manufacturing an anecdote in which, on the very first day of your debut, every last one of you was hauled into the company and scolded."
Honoka had asked carefully, and Gyokichi had kindly answered.
Certainly, that would stick the disaster-generation image to them for good. Add a remark about how long it had taken the other generations to all meet in person, and it might become even more of a talking point.
"So you are free to speak of today's gathering on stream. Whether that is those of you in the third generation, or the rest of you who came to observe."
The detailed feedback, of course, would be awkward to make public. Gyokichi said as much with a wide, toothy grin.
At any rate, first up in the feedback that began this way was, of course, Sakuragi Honoka — the one who had opened both the debut streams and the flame war.
The staff member in charge of the third generation worked a laptop and brought a video up on the large monitor at one side of the conference room.
"No, ah... wait, ah?!"
Footage from just after the debut stream of Honoka — that is, the third generation's Masachi Nodoka — had begun. Evidence of an accident probably without precedent in the industry: putting a senior's avatar on screen during a debut broadcast before ever revealing her own.
Unable to bear the sight of the wreckage, Honoka let her head drop.
"Th-that's not — an excuse, but... when I checked the settings later, they were completely fine... I think it was a program error."
"Mm~, I can vouch for that one."
"So you are saying it was not a mistake."
Gyokichi nodded. He didn't take her for the sort to lie about a thing like this, and in any case he had not gathered them to assign blame for it.
Thought of that way, it might not have been such a great matter after all. It wasn't her responsibility — a simple program error had merely produced the wrong model on output. If only the modeling data for her older sister's avatar, Kitayama Maya, hadn't happened to be sitting in the program installed on that PC.
"But why was the data on there in the first place?"
"Ah, that~. A while back my computer broke, so I streamed on Honoka's for a few days~"
"In any case, the follow-up was decent enough."
The stream, which had been left sitting on a standby screen, changed again, and this time the proper model was up at last.
Violet hair and violet eyes. The black sailor uniform, accented with a blue ribbon, was by her lore the uniform of Rokugen Academy, the school she belonged to. A smile that looked a little troubled, and a little sheepish — and from that mouth burst a hurried voice.
But it was not panic over the accident that had occurred mid-broadcast.
"Huh? There was definitely something just now?! You saw it?! You all saw it too, right?! That was an oni, wasn't it?!"
Fluster, yes — but if one had to name it, it was closer to excitement, shot through with a measure of expectation and delight.
The viewers, too, were mostly bewildered, as if they hadn't expected an attitude like this in a situation like this.
"Hm? No. An oni. You all know this. Oni — once called mono, and worshipped as ancestral gods! Then, come the Heian period, the souls of the dead got tangled up with spirit worship, and the image curdled into something hulking and brutish..."
The sight of her pouring Japanese folklore at the head-tilting viewers without taking a single proper breath. By that point most of them had probably remembered the occult-maniac persona assigned to Masachi Nodoka, and yet...
But the creature known as a viewer, unless they are a fan unusually well trained by the streamer, is contrary by nature. To put it more plainly, they are a rotten lot who will absolutely never do what the streamer wants — and when she insisted that strongly that she had seen it, they answered like this instead.
"No, that's not — it was definitely there..."
And so, even though a happening of a completely unprecedented scale had occurred, Nodoka argued a few lines more and then finally backed down from her claim, and the stream snapped back to its original flow in an instant. For as long as the debut broadcast went on, at least, it became a matter of nothing having happened. As a bonus, right before the allotted thirty minutes ended and she closed the stream, she muttered, No, but it was really there, I'm telling you, and hammered the point home.
Having watched the footage with everyone — not the full thirty minutes straight through, of course, but skipping along — Gyokichi then shifted his gaze to Hitomi.
"Ms. Ninomae, how did it look to you?"
"...Honestly, I'm not confident I could have done it like that either."
Hitomi let out a sigh in which exasperation and admiration were mixed together.
Never mind her debut, when she had been a beginner. Even thrown into that situation now, with her present skill and nerve, she doubted a response like that would have been possible. Give her time and tell her to work out a solution, and it wasn't as if she couldn't. Responding that immediately, though, would have been beyond her. The moment the wrong model came up, her composure would have snapped and she would have wrecked the stream spectacularly.
If it had happened during an ordinary broadcast, she could have just laughed, said she had made a mistake, and switched it. But there was roleplay in play, and breaking that from the debut stream itself was close to taboo. She had to hold the flow of the broadcast together while keeping the concept intact — and that was nowhere near as easy as it sounded.
She was, by now, someone who could fairly be called a professional when it came to streaming, and precisely because of that she could tell how impressive it was. Hitomi gave a quiet nod.
"I can see why you didn't pick her as the third generation's leader for nothing, President."
"Isn't that so?"
At Hitomi's words, Gyokichi stretched into a satisfied grin. Whether he was pleased with his trustworthy employee or with his own excellent eye was unclear.
"Then, rather than going into the detailed feedback, let us go through the others' streams in order first. Next is Mikazuki Umi... that is, Ms. Momomomo Chisa."
"Huuuh? I don't think I did aaanything worth getting in trouble fooor~!"
"Cut the crap. You bastard. ...Please play the video. That part."
Chisa, half-sprawled across the table, spoke in her usual tongue-tied slur. Ryuumai muttering something vicious on top of it was the usual picture as well.
At Ryuumai's word, the staff switched the video. It was the debut stream of Mikazuki Umi, whose lore had a leviathan attending school in the guise of a human.
Indigo hair worn in braids, and golden eyes. Over them, black horn-rimmed glasses — a character design that called a model student to mind, smiling from the screen. The early stretch of her stream had gone relatively smoothly... but the staff skipped a section without hesitation. Judging by how boldly they did it, they had probably checked the timestamp of what to show in advance.
Before anyone quite noticed, the stream had reached the self-introduction segment. For a VTuber debut, it was a flow one could fairly call ordinary.
"What I'm good at is housework, all of it. What I like is reading and singing, and alcohol, maybe? What I dislike would be the cold, and hippos."
"Hm? Why alcohol? ...Oh, right. I was supposed to be seventeen."
"Mm~, that's right. Then let's say I like reading, singing, and seawater. Mikazuki Umi complies with Japanese law~"
"And you think that's not a problem, you goddamn drunk?"
"Heh."