Only, the One Who Flees (1)
The third generation may have debuted, but Mary Tepes's streams, surprisingly enough, had hardly changed at all. A broadcast was something you carried alone in the end, and for a set stretch after debut, collabs with the other generations were forbidden anyway, so there had been little point of contact with Mary to begin with.
If anything had shifted around the debut, it was only that exchanges over Twitter had been permitted. Even that, in the end, merely handed the viewers something to talk about off-stream, so it could hardly be called a great influence.
"I was sure everything would turn upside down once I had juniors... There's even less to it than I thought."
"My sister said something like that, too."
What answered Hitomi was a wry smile. Sun-browned skin only made the girl look healthier, and since she was, in fact, captain of her high school basketball team, her athleticism hardly needed stating — all the more so because, even if she didn't match that giant of an older sister, a faint thread of oni blood ran in her veins.
Sakuragi Honoka. The third-generation VTuber who had debuted this time under the name Masachi Nodoka — a junior, from Hitomi's point of view. A ban on collabs didn't mean a ban on actually meeting. Considering that every member of Gen 3 was already tied to the existing roster, telling them not to see one another would have been unreasonable from the start. Mentioning those meetings on stream was permitted as well, which had caught Hitomi a little off guard. They were only just building an image, and the broadcasts still needed to find their footing; surely it was better to keep real life out of it as much as possible. That was how she had been thinking.
"Gen 3 will be making rather more active use of their real lives."
The president, however, seemed to see it differently.
"Frankly, it would be a waste to leave those real-world connections sitting unused, wouldn't it? And it would be somewhat troublesome if, down the line, people started saying they had known each other all along and merely pretended otherwise."
Since the ties existed anyway, they ought to be put to use. That was Nakabashi Gyokichi's position.
Gen 3 had another thing in common: not one of them had any official record of prior activity. Sakuragi Honoka was simply a high school student. Anri had been plenty active in online communities, but nothing there could pin her down as a specific person. The other two had worked for organizations that could not officially be named, so their personal information was scarcely known at all. It was a far cry from the seniors — actors, idols, models, and the like. If anything, they resembled Hitomi. She, too, had been an ordinary person, setting aside the single detail that she did have one very short stint of streaming as a VTuber.
The advantage, in a case like that, was that the odds of one's personal information being dug up — of the so-called red pill going public — dropped to nearly nothing. Look at Hitomi and Akane: within Anathema, they were the ones whose faces had been found out latest of all. Of course, against people truly determined to hunt you down, there was no real defense. Even back when she had been doing brief personal streams and had given away almost nothing — a civilian in all but name — hadn't someone identified the university she attended and turned up the single frame of her that happened to sit in a festival photo on the school website?
But that, too, had only been possible because the details reached a degree of specificity that actually held, backed by circumstantial evidence enough for anyone to say, this is that Sister's true identity. Digging that relentlessly, and needing luck to cooperate — or rather, to refuse to — that was what it took to strip an ordinary person of their real-life identity.
In other words, letting a few hints about one's real life slip was unlikely to cause much trouble. With that in mind, they had settled on a slightly bold strategy: quietly putting Gen 3's relationships on display. Even then, "on display" meant only the barest hints. That the Sakuragi sisters streamed under the same roof. That Shirase Hikari worked at the café run by first-generation Tachibana Rin. Information just substantial enough to stir a little talk among the fans, and nowhere else.
"A chummy atmosphere can be manufactured in any quantity, so long as one sets out to manufacture it. Push too hard and side effects may follow, but the act itself is not the problem."
What he added was that the most important thing was getting along behind the scenes — or, more precisely, making people believe that they did. In that respect, if real-life relationships could be drawn upon, nothing could serve better. That was roughly the shape of the argument.
"Then shall we do it the moment collab clearance comes through?"
"Huh — really? Is that all right?"
"Well, there's no reason it wouldn't be."
One of the tools available for this "strengthening of real-world ties" was the oshi. By the nature of a VTuber company, anyone who belonged to one was usually a fan of that company's streams. A mention along the lines of so-and-so senpai dropped by shored up the relationship, of course, and could also serve as the opening through which a senior's viewers might be drawn over to this side. Some people sneered and called it poaching, or whatever else, but the fact that it could actually be used this way was one of the advantages of the generation system. And since it wasn't a matter of loathing someone in private while flattering them in public, Hitomi felt no particular aversion.
In that regard, the people Honoka — more precisely, Masachi Nodoka — had publicly named as her oshi were her older sister, Kitayama Maya, and Mary Tepes. Strictly speaking, she didn't have a special oshi so much as a sense that, of all the streams she watched here and there, these were the ones she watched most. She had simply been advised that, on stream, it would play better to call them her oshi outright, and so she had. Even so, they were certainly people she had watched enough to call herself a viewer, and once there was talk of streaming together, Honoka could hardly help being glad. Watching that face brighten, Hitomi felt oddly pleased herself, and smiled.
"Then shall we pick up where we left off?"
"Ah — yes."
The reason the two of them were meeting at a café just now, though, had nothing much to do with relationships or any of that. What it was for, of all things, was a folklore lecture.
Masachi Nodoka, whose character setting as president of the Occult Research Club required a deep interest in the uncanny. For the sake of that setting, Honoka had studied this folktale and that in her own fashion — and the problem had been the machine-gun TMI during her debut stream. She had been in a rush and riding the momentum, so rattling off everything she knew was fine enough; but after she kept up that infodumping streak for a few days, her store of knowledge had run dry far faster than she had expected.
So she had sent an emergency plea for rescue to a folklore major, and little by little, whenever there was time, she had been taking lessons. That brought them to the present. Hitomi was first in her department on the theoretical side and, practically speaking, kept company with Apostles; as a choice of instructor, she could hardly have been more fitting.
With the materials up on a tablet, Hitomi went on with a brief explanation. She was sharp to begin with, and she was someone long accustomed to streaming, so the commentary came out remarkably easy to follow. From Honoka's side of it, she had only asked because an older girl she knew at a few removes happened to be an expert in exactly this field. After meeting a few times and listening, though, she couldn't help being stunned by the sheer mass of knowledge.
"If you study hard and get into a good university, are the people who come in first there all... like this?"
The words slipped out on their own. It wasn't even limited to Japanese folklore. Folk traditions, myths, and religions from East and West alike poured out without a hitch, and from the vantage of a high schooler preparing for entrance exams, it started to seem as though university students were all supposed to be like this. Most university students, had they heard it, would have recoiled and said that was no undergraduate talking. Regrettably, Hitomi was a woman with a considerable deficit in the ability to see herself clearly.
"No, forget that field — how do you know history and military stuff this well...? Are you a military otaku, or something?"
"Uh... I don't think I'm quite at the level of a military otaku."
At that, Hitomi scratched her cheek for a moment before answering.
"It's like this. The military knowledge a Barbara fan is expected to study is basically the same kind of thing as the mythology a Type-Moon fan is expected to study..."
"......?"
"Anyway, there's a game like that. Well — it isn't a game, actually."
"???"
This isn't a game was, it seemed, a reference several layers too online for Honoka, who lived at a considerable distance from internet communities. She only tilted her head, plainly lost.
"—Ah, and it's been a while since I heard this name, too."
Hitomi had been carrying the explanation of oni onward when she noticed something in the materials and smiled, a little bitter.
"You mean Shuten-doji? My sister's character is an oni, too, and... I heard Momomomo-san's nickname was that as well."
Shuten-doji. Counted among Japan's Three Great Evil Oni, and very likely the oni whose name was known most widely in Japan — no, even taking the whole world into account. What had caught Hitomi's interest, though, was not the name itself so much as the place name set before it.
"Mount Oe. This is actually where Shion and I went, a little over a year ago, just the two of us, on a field survey of oni folklore."
Onitake Inari Shrine, in Oe-cho, Fukuchiyama, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. According to Seoyeon, it was the place where she had first become conscious of Hitomi. Perhaps remembering how she had felt when she heard that story, Hitomi lifted a hand to one cheek and laughed, soft and low.
"Ah, right. If you've got the time, want to go sometime?"
"Huh?"
"This is a field where you really can't skip the site visit. Seeing it in person is bound to be a good experience."
"Uh, I... yes?"
And that, out of nowhere, was how an unofficial offline collab — a hike up the mountain, in the bizarre combination of married couples and sisters — ended up on the schedule.