Immortal, Invisible (2)
Mary Tepes was a fan of the mobile game called Barbara Knight—or rather, hardcore fan would have been the fairer word. So the arrival of an advertisement for the game on Mary's stream was, looked at a certain way, only natural.
It is simply human nature to catch fire when you see someone who loves the thing you love, perhaps even more sincerely than you do yourself. Praise aimed at your own person makes you suspect flattery and raise your guard, but praise aimed at what you love is a difficult thing to doubt. And isn't it the common wisdom that otaku, the instant anyone so much as reacts to their favorite, get so deliriously excited they can no longer be controlled?
That, however, was only the story as told by people who knew Mary through internet communities and the like. Hail her as the gallery's reigning queen or whatever else you liked—in the end, it applied solely to the layer of users already enjoying the game.
Of course, if a streamer with a fairly solid audience ran an advertising broadcast, that alone would carry some promotional effect. In this case, though, the very same reason Mary's name was known among the players was what held her back. The long and short of it was that Mary Tepes had been mentioning the game often, and playing it on stream, whether an advertisement was slotted in or not.
In games as in most other fields, promotion is fundamentally an act meant to draw in new customers. Judged with real coldness from that angle, Mary was a VTuber on whom an ad stream simply failed to deliver any cost-performance. The effect it produced would not have been small by any means, but set beside contracting some other streamer at a similar rate, it was just enough to inspire a faint tilt of the head.
And so the advertising broadcast that came to her was halfway to a courtesy. Repayment for having loved the game and promoted it all this time—and, at the same time, a kind of show to the tune of our company stands with the people who have always loved our game.
…Which is all to say that this is how it would have gone, had it been Mary's solo stream.
The company on the other end had evidently racked its brains as well, for when the time came to sign, they stepped forward and proposed the form of a collaboration broadcast. A joint stream between one stagnant veteran and one completely blank-slate newbie: they would draw out the fun that only Mary, steeped in the game, could produce, while advertising it to the viewers of a partner who had never once played the game on her own broadcast.
The one settled on as that partner was Gen 2's Komori Sae. Her real name was Bansei Marin.
As for why she had been made the first-choice candidate, there had been this explanation and that from the person in charge… but the rest was surely all pretext. It was simply that the game's project director was a fan of hers. At least, that was the version Han Seoyeon had explained to Hitomi.
The last time Hitomi had seen her, she had certainly looked like a fan of no small caliber. Of course, that was no guarantee the woman would choose a business partner according to her personal taste. Just as Han Seoyeon knew Yu Hyena well in her capacity as a gaming friend, Hitomi, as a dyed-in-the-wool player, knew Director Yu well—and she held a confidence bordering on certainty that blurring work and private feeling to this extent was something the woman would absolutely do.
"Right. The game we're playing today is… Barbara Knight! Clap, clap, clap~"
And so, chosen in that fashion, Komori Sae carried the broadcast onward with a bright smile.
"For the expert who'll be guiding us, I brought Mary. She's probably the person at Anapro who knows it best."
"Konmea! True Ancestor Queen Mary Tepes, here to promote Barbara Knight today!"
According to the plan, the one serving as the main of today's broadcast was Sae. Mary's part was to assist her—to play, in other words, the role of guide. From the standpoint of the prospective new users the game company was after, a newbie like Sae would be the easier one to empathize with and sink into, so in that sense it was a reasonable arrangement.
Reasonable or not, someone with a strong sense of pride might well have bristled at being made to run around as the assistant. It was paid work, so they wouldn't have said so out loud, but feeling that way was, in itself, a person's own freedom. Mary—Hitomi—however, accepted the proposal with great delight. That she was not a particularly prideful sort surely played its part, but…
A fresh newbie!
…The greatest reason of all was, in all likelihood, the simple fact that she could personally spoon-feed her favorite game to a newbie. In the DNA of those gamers commonly called stagnant veterans, or outright rotten ones, the compulsion to hand-feed newbies is, as a rule, embedded down at the level of the genes.
"Before we officially start the stream, is there anything you want to say, Mary?"
"Hmm… No spoilers, obviously. And no backseating, either. Please do keep to those two. A viewer's reckless remark can all too easily snap a newbie's tender sprout."
"If you wish to backseat, I would ask that you first authenticate an account of higher rank than mine!"
"Ah. Since that came up—how good are you, Mary, exactly?"
"I knew that question was coming, so I brought screenshots of the accounts! …Ta-da!"
"Uh… Korean? Ah, right. They did say it was a Korean game."
"As you can see, the left is the Korean server, and the right is the Japanese server account."
Sae promptly put the image Mary had sent up on her own broadcast screen.
"Honestly, I can't really tell how impressive this is… but judging by the chat, it seems pretty high up there?"
Talk of what the standing was and what the rank was could only draw, from an outsider, the reaction of so how hard is that, exactly? Still, Sae's room seemed to hold a certain number of Barbara players—whether they were still active or had already quit—and from their reactions, one could gather that it was a considerably difficult thing. Anyone with at least enough knowledge to backseat would understand what that level meant, and so pointless backseating would grow rarer.
Of course, there was no guaranteeing it would vanish entirely. Astonishingly enough, this world contains people who will backseat even a certain pro gamer they worship as a matter of habit.
"Naturally, I too will do my best not to backseat to excess. Even when it isn't backseating, chattering too much from the side can get in the way of immersion. …You're asking whether a Barbara fiend is even capable of that? Of course I've prepared a countermeasure for that as well!"
So saying, Mary rapped the desk in front of her. Tap, tap.
And what the microphone caught next was not her voice.
"…Yes. Hello. This is Sister."
"Yes! Shion-chan, making her long-awaited appearance!"
Officially, it seemed no one had ever stated that "Sister" and "Hinata Shion" were the same person. For a moment it felt as though the point ought to be raised—but everyone already knew it was nothing but peekaboo with hands over the eyes, and so the matter was allowed to pass. They had simply never brought it up in any official capacity. Seoyeon's model had been made on the premise that the viewers already understood the two were one and the same, so it might have been more accurate to call it peekaboo without so much as a hand over the eyes.
"Now, Shion-chan. Would you tell the viewers what your role is?"
"If Shutang gets absorbed and her talking runs long, I step in and physically restrain her. …Ah. Even if I say restrain, it isn't violence. I will merely be covering her mouth, so please rest assured."
Of course, if Hitomi truly set out only to restrain herself, she could have managed it whenever she pleased. Simply biting down on the words you want to say is, for someone who runs an internet livestream, something of a basic competency. But when she thought it over carefully, it occurred to her that there had been no need for that in the first place.
Even this could become a quirk, a part of the character. If anything, no small number of the viewers would be waiting precisely for the sight of Mary getting worked up and pouring words out everywhere. So Mary resolved simply not to hold back. The broadcast still had to move forward, though, and for that she had brought Han Seoyeon along to serve as the limiter. Seoyeon could keep the talk from wandering off into the hills, and the spectacle of a runaway, chattering Mary being put down would generate broadcast-worthy fun all on its own.
"Hmm… Then, before we really get into it, if you gave a brief explanation of the game, what sort of feel would it have?"
Sae knew all of that perfectly well herself, and so she tossed Mary the ball in that fashion. It was a chance to stamp upon the viewers, if only briefly, just how today's broadcast was going to proceed.
Mary drew a light breath, then opened her mouth.
"To put it simply… it's a collectible RPG. That is, a game of the sort people call a pretty-girl gacha. Historical figures appear as cute girls—a concept common enough these days. But if this genre has a hurdle, it would be the question of how, exactly, those figures are to be summoned. So in Barbara, they make use of the concept of a time machine."
Up to here, it was still well within the bounds of a perfectly ordinary explanation. It would have remained so, if her words had not begun, strangely, to pick up speed the further she went—and if she had not still had a great deal left to say.
"This game's foundational setting starts from a single premise. If a time machine truly exists and one travels into the past, then doesn't a time machine exist, even temporarily, in the past before it was ever developed? Go further: from the moment invention and operation have succeeded even once, doesn't theory allow a time machine to exist in every era? In some cases, two or more time machines existing in a single time period is entirely possible. And among all of these, the gravest situation would be the people of the past seizing the time machine for themselves. Those are precisely the events that form the background setting of Barbara, and because of that Snatch—of which there are seventeen in all—a profound time paradox occurs, and with a great explosion the boundaries between every sort of parallel world come crashing down, a little while before the prologue's point in time… mmph?!"
Naturally, that impassioned tirade was cut short midway by Han Seoyeon. With her mouth sealed, Mary—Hitomi—went wide-eyed.
She was not startled merely because her mouth had been covered all of a sudden. Even as she chattered away in high spirits, a corner of her mind had been thinking that she had gone on quite long enough, and that it was about time someone came to stop her.
"…Yes. Then let us continue the broadcast, Shutang."
"……."
The problem, of course, was that what had barred those lips a moment ago had not been a hand.
This had truly not been part of the plan, and Hitomi looked at Seoyeon with a deeply flustered face gone bright red. Under that gaze, Seoyeon said nothing at all. She only ran her tongue lightly across her own lips.
Somehow, it felt as though today's broadcast was going to be a far rougher ride than anyone had expected.