334. Signs in the Sun, Moon, and Stars (4)
"Well. In truth, it isn't a serious problem."
Nakabashi Gyokichi said it with a thin, awkward smile. Eyes gathered on him as a matter of course, but he only cocked his head, as if to ask whether he had said something wrong.
"Um… excuse me, but what was that?"
The one who seized on it was Ryuumai Fuu. She had been in the middle of gleefully laying into Chisa, demanding to know what on earth she had been thinking.
"I said it wasn't much of a problem."
"From what I've heard, breaking RP right from the start isn't a good idea…?"
RP. Short for role-play. Taken literally, it meant something like "playing a role" or "acting a part," but in the VTuber industry it was generally used to mean a character's concept.
Take Mary Tepes. It covered not only the lore of species and class—True Ancestor Queen—but the personality and the patterns of behavior that belonged to the character as well. Hitomi showing, on stream, an arrogant and faintly shameless face that wasn't really hers was part of that same thing.
Of course, RP was still only acting in the end. Stream long enough and it thinned away until it was as good as gone… but smashing it to pieces from the debut itself was another matter entirely. All the more so if one went and said, out loud, "Oh, right, I did have a setting like that."
Better, in that case, to debut without building an RP at all. And it mattered even more for Anathema Production, a company that had made something of a name for itself on the painstaking youkai authenticity tucked into those character settings.
Hearing him call it nothing, Fuu could only be baffled. She was almost certainly not the only one in the room thinking so.
"It's quite all right."
Gyokichi, however, pressed on, still wearing that smile—or that wide, terrifying grin.
"Saying 'I forgot that being seventeen was a setting' doesn't damage the RP in the slightest."
"……What?"
Hitomi's eyes went round. It was the sort of remark one could fairly call meta, and she could only wonder what he meant by claiming the RP took no harm from it.
"Have you forgotten? Aside from Sakuragi Honoka-san's Masachi Nodoka, every member of the third generation is a youkai who enrolled under false pretenses."
"…Ah!"
If that was the case, then it didn't matter even if their RP as students shattered completely. From the outset, what they were doing amounted to a performance of performing as a student.
"Don't tell me you gave us this concept because you'd planned for this from the very beginning?"
Anri murmured it, sounding faintly impressed. She had wondered why the setting had to be knotted up and fastened onto them like this. It turned out to have been the president's own little arrangement.
"So you mean you were counting on an accident from the start, yeah~?"
Sakuragi Oka said it with a bright, easy grin. Gyokichi nodded to her.
"I have, after all, already debuted two generations. Call it experience. Reliable data has had time to accumulate."
"I believed in all of you. Believed, one hundred percent, that you would cause an incident."
He tacked it on as if it were nothing at all.
"President, a remark like that is still a little…"
"Ninomae-san. Before any rebuttal, would you take a look at the company assembled here?"
Hitomi, who had been about to say that it still bordered on slander, looked back and forth at his next words between Oka and Yuri, both seated in the room.
"No, just a finger~ I'll only put a finger in! I'm begging you~"
"I really think we need to seriously consider whether futanari counts as yuri, or as a dick crashing the party~"
"Huh? Oh, this was my art account, not my streaming one. Sorry~ Lemme switch the screen~"
"Yes. Today, Mengen will be doing a calligraphy ASMR stream. First, shall we grind the ink."
"Uh… the card tower's climbing to the eighth floor right now. Does the stream even matter?"
"Shall I put it on stream?"
"……You really are the president! I think you have a gift as a CEO!"
Hitomi reversed her stance at once. Thinking about it, if a man had dealt with people like these and still failed to install a single safeguard, that would have been the real mistake.
"Well… in any case, I built it on the assumption that the RP would break. So long as the distinguishing trait of 'Leviathan' remains, I have no objections."
"Ah! I can drink on streeeam?!"
"If you maintain that it is seawater, then only so far as you do not become severely drunk. And the streams on which you do not drink must outnumber the ones on which you do."
"Woohoo!"
A few of those present shot looks that asked whether this was really all right, but Gyokichi granted permission to drink on stream without resistance.
At a glance, Chisa looked like an alcoholic no one could possibly control, but she was the absurd sort of person who could cut alcohol off entirely the moment she decided to. He was confident, at least, that she would not cause an incident on account of drink.
…Of course, she was going to cause incidents even without drinking. He was confident of that as well.
"Then, next is Ryuumai Fuu-san."
What played on the screen next was the recording of Ryuumai Fuu's stream.
Black hair tied low. The bangs left hanging so as to hide one eye were surely there because the woman inside had lost the sight in her left eye. The red armband on one arm looked like a prop meant to emphasize the public-morals-committee setting.
Iwa-bami Kyouka. If Momomomo Chisa's Mikazuki Umi was a Leviathan, then hers was the setting of a Behemoth in disguise.
Where she differed from Mikazuki Umi was that she had inherited the actual divine rank of Behemoth herself—an existence that was, in practice, closer to a divided spirit. Which meant that if someone merely possessed the will, they could carry out rites pertaining to Behemoth even through the character called Kyouka.
Because the arrangement took the form of sharing a measure of divinity between them, it was not something that could be handed over lightly. Behemoth, however, had graciously extended the favor, declaring that Anathema Production and Ryuumai could be trusted.
"Truthfully, there is nothing much to criticize in this stream. It is the only one in which nothing that could properly be called an incident occurred."
It could be summed up, more or less, as this: the flow had been comparatively uneventful, and it had ended uneventfully.
"There was, of course, a suspicious amount of Russian in the chat…"
"That could hardly be helped, could it?"
"Well. Shion-san is correct."
Gyokichi had asked Behemoth herself for permission to use the name, angling for a measure of virality. He had never expected her to go so far as to partially cede the rights to the name itself.
Still, after a thing like that, the Paranormal Citizens who knew the true shape of the Russian government could hardly have failed to take an interest.
"It didn't particularly interfere with the running of the stream, and it became a chance to demonstrate a fair command of language, so I would even call it a boon."
Triage was an organization on the order of a supernatural phenomenon. Whenever a situation arose in which people were about to die in great numbers, it burst out of nowhere, rendered aid, and vanished.
There was no world in which Ryuumai—an officer of that worldwide body, once even called one of the Three Omnipotents of the Far East—would be unable to speak Russian, which was, for that matter, an official language of the UN.
At any rate, they batted the subject around in a reasonable fashion until the hour came, and the stream was brought to a tidy close. That was a fair summary of Iwa-bami Kyouka's debut broadcast.
"And last… Lee Océane-san."
"Yes! It's my turn-yo!"
At that, Anri beamed and thrust her hand high. Was she like that because she genuinely believed she had done nothing wrong on stream, or was she simply shameless?
For the record, this debut had caught fire in its own right. As already noted, the only one that had passed without incident was Ryuumai's Kyouka.
"I'll spare you the long version… Yes. Play that scene."
A moment later, the debut stream of Anri's character, Shirase Hikari, came up on the screen.
…It struck her all over again: she really did look exactly like the Hikari that Hitomi usually summoned. Hitomi swallowed a hollow little laugh where no one could see.
In a future not so far off, the faith accumulated in that character would give birth to a demon of the same face and the same name. In this room, only Han Seoyeon and she knew it. She still couldn't begin to grasp how she ought to say it, and so it remained something she had not yet passed on—not to the president, and not to Anri herself.
Shirase Hikari's concept was an angel fallen from heaven. At the academy she played a model student and a pure young lady, which meant that in truth she was pitch-black inside: a two-faced character, sweet on the surface and rotten underneath.
Even Hitomi had no real sense of how they were supposed to bring that side of her to life. On yesterday's debut stream, she had shown nothing but a demure, gentle face.
They had, at least, seeded the third-generation profiles on Anathema's official site with a thread of foreshadowing—that there was something faintly rotten about her…….
The stream itself had gone smoothly enough. She introduced herself, declared her ambitions, performed a few of the songs she had claimed to be confident in—all of them quiet, or bright and fresh, of course—hinted at the group stream that would be coming before long, and ended.
Was there even anything here to find fault with?
In truth, Hitomi could only tilt her head, wondering what incident this stream could possibly have contained.
Presently the video skipped through the middle and resumed at, as it happened, the moment just before she was to perform that song. She opened a browser, connected to Etube already autocompleted in the address bar, and searched for the track.
"Yes, stop there. No… yes, just a few frames further back……."
The screen paused. At the president's direction, it was adjusted to the frame of the very instant she entered Etube.
The Etube address completing itself the moment she pressed e. She must have visited that way often; even the strike of Enter flowed on in one perfectly smooth motion.
The address bar, then, would have been exposed for only an instant… no more than a few tenths of a second. What was written there, however, was unmistakably Korean. In short, among the sites beginning with e that she had visited recently, or often, there had been a Korean one.
Judging by the president singling this moment out, someone had likely spotted it and spread it across the internet. That alone was trouble enough, and yet—
"But which site was it, exactly…?"
"Mm, well…"
Sakuragi Honoka asked, head cocked. Hitomi, who could read Korean, was only mortified, and could not bring herself to give a proper answer.
Besides her, there were plenty of people in the room who could speak Korean. Every one of them only hesitated.
In the end, the burden fell to the only Korean present. Han Seoyeon lightly worried a lock of her hair between her fingers, then carefully opened her mouth.
"…It is a post titled 'Whoa, holy shit, those tits BWAAAAANG lololol.' To be precise, the site is the community for a mobile game called Barbara Knight."
"……What?"
"And the one beneath it is titled 'StalinMom Draws a Plump Purge-Pouch.gif'……."
"…………What?"
Yeah. This generation's image is completely fucked. So muttered, inwardly, the staffer assigned to the third generation—the one who, for this meeting, had been running the footage from a laptop.