Incorruptible, and Unseen (1)
She worked the iced-tea powder through with a teaspoon until it would dissolve cleanly, and when it seemed well enough melted, she dumped in a handful of ice from the freezer.
It chilled fast. The cold reached her even through the glass.
Seoyeon set the glass on a tray beside a few chocolate-chip cookies and carried it toward Hitomi's room.
Hitomi's room—though that was only half true. The bedroom had been shared with Han Seoyeon since long before the wedding, and the room where Seoyeon used to sleep had since been given over to clothes, books, and whatever else needed storing. So when one said Hitomi's room and meant her private space, one did not mean the bedroom at all. One meant the streaming room, the one with the computer in it.
Strictly speaking, she used that room whenever something on a computer needed doing, stream or no stream. Even so, what it was used for most was Etube.
"Hitomi."
"Oh, thank you."
Today was no different. With the hour to go live drawing near, Seoyeon had brought the snacks Hitomi would nibble through the broadcast, and when she stepped inside Hitomi smiled, bright and open. Seoyeon met her with a faint smile of her own.
But as she set the tray down and glanced at the PC, the screen was not the usual one. There was a dual-monitor arrangement—or rather, since a separate machine handled the actual broadcast, it was not, strictly speaking, a dual monitor at all, but the display of a second PC. One side stood ready to go live, as it always did. The other was already occupied by an Etube channel in the middle of a stream.
A virtual avatar, one eye hidden behind bangs faintly touched with brown. Iwabami Kyouka of the third generation—the persona in Ryuumai Fuu's charge.
"It seems to have been weighing on you."
"Well, how could it not?"
"That is fair."
Seoyeon nodded. Hitomi had a point.
Yesterday, in the brief space of stepping away from the desk, gunshots had cracked out of nowhere. Men speaking Russian had come in talking dark, ugly talk, and they had killed the stream.
The VTuber industry was an unmistakable red ocean, and it had never been short on incidents. Even so, Han Seoyeon was certain that nothing of this order had ever happened before. This was the broadcast the day after. Even if Kyouka had not been a junior from the same company, it would have been impossible not to care, and the story had spread thick through fandoms and communities well beyond Anapro. Even in corners of the internet that had nothing to do with VTubers, people were picking the bait apart.
An incident without precedent had been more than enough, in a single day, to set at least one corner of the internet boiling. However Anapro's management might have wanted to answer it, the thing had propagated too fast for them to do anything about it.
…Not that this unhinged company had tried. They had taken one look, called it a viral opportunity handed down from heaven, and led the anonymous spread themselves.
Thanks to that, Kyouka's stream was pulling a staggering number of viewers.
Viewer counts on the internet do not climb forever, not even for a successful broadcaster. You hold steady, or you ease into a gentle decline, until some moment brings a fresh influx and a rebound. Then the portion of that influx that never settles leaks away, the numbers dip, and after that the line runs flat. Repeat the cycle, and you have what people generally mean by a successful streamer.
For the third generation, the present moment was precisely when the mass of viewers who had flooded in at a debut under a company with a name were failing to stick, and leaving. For a while yet, the debut stream was supposed to remain the high-water mark. It was also the hour when the hearts of certain broadcasters broke the hardest—the ones who had debuted cleanly on the corporate side and tasted the dizzy high of that first flood. At Anapro, too, this was the stretch when they advised you, again and again, not to cause an incident out of some conviction that you simply had to do better. To put it a little more crudely: do not fry your brain.
In short, a slow downward drift was the normal shape of things. And yet at this very moment Kyouka's stream had drawn in more people than her debut. No—more than double that number.
Seen in that light, the notion of riding the viral wave had succeeded to a maddening degree. The problem was everything that came after. How did you clean up after a crowd this loud, and what did you give them that would make them stay?
"When she said she'd just push straight through it, no special measures at all, I honestly wondered if Shion had come back hearing voices…"
"To be frank, I wanted to believe that myself."
"I never thought she'd actually go through with it…"
Murmuring, Hitomi shot a glance at the monitor where Kyouka was live.
The channel was not even monetized yet—yesterday's replay had exploded in views, so the threshold had probably been cleared by now—and with no Superchat to pin a message in place, the chat had to be chased by eye. The scroll was climbing at a vicious speed. It could not have been easy. Kyouka, for her part, carried on with a fairly unbothered air.
Quite apart from the raw assets that did a broadcast good, her actual sense for running one was the sort of thing that made you tilt your head. Of course, the attitude itself had almost certainly been worked out with management beforehand. The order would have been simple enough: go out there and brazenly treat the whole thing as nothing.
Even so, she did not explain it as it had actually been.
However one dressed it, this was a broadcast whose audience lived mostly in the surface world. She could hardly announce that Russia was, at present, an imperial state; that she had been selected as a sacrifice for the sake of dragging its emperor down; and that, on that account, a Russian PMC which had entered Japan illegally had come to attack her. Set even the first of those aside, and the moment she admitted the thing had truly happened on Japanese soil, it became an international incident.
And so the conclusion that Ryuumai, the president, and the Apostle had put their heads together to reach was simply this: call it something that happened while she was briefly abroad.
Explaining the Triage Team itself on the surface was already too much to ask. What resulted was a cover in which she had been a member of a PMC working mainly across Eastern Europe and the Middle East, attacked by old enemies nursing a grudge while she tied off loose ends in order to retire and settle for good in her home country.
For the sake of smoothing over any number of administrative problems, Triage did in fact take the form of a multinational, and it kept an armed force above a certain threshold. Classify it if you had to, and PMC was not wrong. Honestly, Seoyeon had thought the whole notion insane. In the end, though, President Gyokichi had talked her into it. The killing blow was his observation that former special-forces soldiers ran Etube channels too, didn't they? Once she had heard that much, she caught herself thinking, Huh. Is that so?
"Anyway… I should start getting ready to stream on this side as well."
Hitomi took a sip of the iced tea and murmured it.
Whoever was broadcasting, and wherever, and however, she could hardly announce that the viewers would all get sucked off in that direction, so today's stream would be postponed. The people who meant to watch would watch even if they had to keep two streams up at once, and a full week's schedule had already been posted. Without some extraordinary reason, a promise to the audience could not be broken.
More than that, today was a sponsored stream—a broadcast taken on under an advertising contract. Before any promise to viewers, it was a legal one. No one could have imagined yesterday's disaster, but what had already been set could not be undone, and it was not even a solo broadcast. Hitomi opened the voice-chat program to get ready.
The person she would be streaming with was already online. At this hour, that was only natural. She placed the call, and almost at once that mature voice came through.
"Hello? Ninomae-chan?"
"Hello, Bansei-san."
Bansei Marin. Or Komori Sae—a fellow second-generation talent, booked onto the sponsored stream alongside Hitomi. Alongside Mary.
Looking at the name glowing on the screen, Han Seoyeon sank briefly into thought.
That woman really did it. Went and plastered an ad all over her own oshi...
Was this a successful fan, a hobby and a living made one and the same—or a madwoman who could not keep her work and her worship apart? It was not the sort of question she could simply set down.
Yes. The thing scheduled for promotion on today's stream was the mobile game in the care of Seoyeon's friend Yu Hyena. Barbara Knight.
The hour had come for Mary Tepes to awaken—that wicked little fiend who had clearly never been asleep in the first place, not when ambush-worship kept bursting out of her at every hour of the day and night.