Immortal, Invisible (8)
Once the ceremony proper had ended, the reception—the second half of the broadcast—was bound to follow. The breakneck tumble of chaos had eased at last into something of a lull, and the stream cut over to a new scene.
It was a reception in name only. The guests amounted to no one but the viewers, and so the whole affair sat much closer to a collaborative talk show with the two who had taken the roles of host and officiant. With Han Seoyeon—Shion—added in, four avatars were up on the broadcast, posed as if seated together around a single table.
"By the way... it's been a while, Sarah-san. This is the first time since the festival, isn't it?"
"Yes. If my memory isn't mistaken, that would be right."
Of everyone there, the one inevitably drawing the viewers' eyes was Sarah Groothuizen.
While she had been officiating, the pace had left no room to think, and half the audience had watched in a daze. Now that the confusion had settled and actual conversation was possible, the chat came flooding in with every question at once.
"Looking at it now, the question of how we booked Sarah-san seems to be the most common one."
"As it happened, a chance came up to meet in the real world. I imagine some of you already know about that."
"Right. Last time, on the Italy trip, I popped up for a bit on Shar-chan's stream, didn't I? I did mention it back then."
At the time, she had passed it off as a chance encounter in the middle of a trip that had somehow ended with them hitting it off. Careful not to contradict that earlier account, Mary kept the explanation brief.
"And also, she and Shion already knew each other. Right?"
"Well... yes. We met while I was helping with the Church's work. I've received a great deal of help from her in all sorts of matters since."
"Not at all. If anyone is in debt, it's me."
The reply drew a wry smile from Shion. Considering Sarah's personality—Abraham's—it didn't seem like empty courtesy. Not that Abraham was incapable of saying what they didn't mean. They simply didn't waste needless words on someone like Han Seoyeon, who wouldn't have cared either way.
Even so, set against the many missions on which Seoyeon had borrowed Abraham-Delta's power, there had been nothing one could really call the reverse. This "debt," then, likely meant something other than what had just been said on her side. It was not that they had received any direct help from Han Seoyeon Margarita. More likely, they were speaking of something from the distant past.
Once, when Seoyeon was so young that by now the memory itself had gone dim, she had unconsciously worked a miracle and raised someone from the dead—and because of that resurrection a snowball had begun to roll, stopping an incident that had already come within a breath of turning the whole world into a sea of fire. From time to time Abraham would take the story out, saying that if not for it, they themselves would never have been born. Surely this was that same incident again.
"At any rate, we've kept in touch here and there since then, which is also why I was invited to the festival... something along those lines."
"Besides, Sarah-san attended the actual wedding, too. That's part of why we called her on as a guest."
"Huh? Mary-chan?" the host cut in. "If that's the reason, shouldn't the whole of Anathema be assembled?"
"Ah, yes. They all came, for a start. Including Rokumondera-senpai."
"Honestly, that one truly surprised me. We did send an invitation, but it was indoors, with that many people gathered."
Most of the viewers were no less startled. Among the audience of Anathema Production, the severe fear of people that belonged to first-generation Rokumondera Aki was famous.
VTubers with a powerful loner streak who had nonetheless passed a corporate audition and debuted certainly existed. Aki's case was on another level: put her in a situation like that and she was the sort to faint on the way to the interview. The consensus among viewers was that if the first generation had gone through auditions like the generations after them, instead of being scouted to a one, she would never have debuted even if the Earth had split in two.
"She did show up wearing a gas mask... but she's Rokumondera-senpai, so she must have tried incredibly hard. I was genuinely moved back then."
"Right up until she went and caught the bouquet, everyone looked at her, and she fainted," the host put in. "So in the end she missed the reception, too..."
To Hitomi and Han Seoyeon, who knew the person behind the avatar, that verdict was not far wrong. Knowing her as well as they did, they understood all the more how grueling it was simply to walk into a wedding hall.
It was true that she feared the very act of facing other people, but in Aki's case—in Natsugahara Hina's—the symptoms that verged on germaphobia ran far deeper. She had watched, right before her eyes, as colleagues infected by the early samples of Vampire Syndrome turned without warning and set about slaughtering one another. Two terrors sat at the core of her fear of people: I might catch it, and end up like that, and the people around me might turn at any moment and come for me.
Time had eased the latter, more or less. The former had sunk its roots deep in her unconscious and never quite let go. It was one of the reasons that every meeting with her in the flesh became a private exhibition of masks of every kind.
"What was it that time, again? A gas mask?"
"Yes, that's right. A few of the guests did seem a little bothered by it."
Once the subject had been opened, stories from the real wedding spilled out one after another. Two of them had been the very stars of the ceremony, one had served as host, and the last had attended as a guest. They filled in one another's memories as they went, and the account that emerged was remarkably fine-grained.
Of course, they took care not to step outside what people of the surface world could accept. Talk of the Pope this and a cardinal that was out of the question, and a great many Church folk turning out for a wedding between two women could look strange, depending on the eye of the beholder. So they let it pass with nothing more than a light touch: there had, gratefully, been people who came—Christians, yet ones who set conviction aside and held the relationship dear.
"...Huh?"
It happened at one such moment, while the talk was still winding on. Hitomi's gaze went to the phone she had set at the edge of the desk, which had begun to ring.
The screen told her the caller was her mother, Ninomae Fumiyo.
"Ah, one moment. My mother's calling..."
She said as much to the viewers, and answered.
"Hello? Mom? I'm in the middle of a stream, so..."
"I know."
"What?"
What came back from her mother was not what she had expected. The call had come out of nowhere; she had assumed her mother simply hadn't realized a broadcast was underway.
"Did something happen, maybe...?"
Put another way, it might have been urgent enough to demand a call even when there was no room to keep a conversation going. Once her thoughts carried her that far, Hitomi had no choice but to worry.
"Did something happen? Is that a question you get to ask?"
"Uh... pardon?"
"For heaven's sake—where in the world is there a daughter who doesn't even invite her parents to her wedding!"
"...Whaaat?"
And the moment she understood that the reason was more absurd than anything she had imagined, a thoroughly stupid voice had slipped out of her all on its own.
"I only just found out because your father told me. You could at least have said something."
"W-wait a second?! The 'wedding' is only a stream with that concept, and— no, before that, does you saying that mean Dad is watching the broadcast too?!"
"We're watching it through the TV. The technology these days really is something..."
"Through the TV?! No, wait— what?!"
"Anyway, hand the phone over. Parents ought to at least greet the guests, wouldn't you say?"
Unfortunately, Hitomi's mother had no intention of waiting for her flustered daughter. Judging by her tone, she genuinely believed that offering a greeting was the least a parent ought to do.
Hitomi did try, somehow, to persuade her that this was nothing more than a virtual wedding put on as broadcast content.
"So this virtual whatsit you broadcast—you're telling me it's nothing but a crooked fake that props some scrap of a drawing up in front?"
"Th-that's not it!"
"No, that's... I think it's a little different..."
Her mother had set a finger, dead accurate, on a virtual streamer's reverse scale—the one place that must not be touched. Hitomi had no argument left.
No—having family who looked at this thing called virtual broadcasting with such sincerity was, from a streamer's seat, something very near a blessing. Even as that strange, tangled feeling moved through her, Hitomi surrendered at last to her mother's will, and had no choice but to switch on the speakerphone.
"Ah, hello, everyone. I'm the one who would be Mary's mother. Come now, you should say hello too."
"...I am our daughter's father."
"I'm sorry. My husband has always been such a terribly stiff man..."
She had hung her last hope on the claim that a thing like this would need the company's permission, and thinking of it now, Hitomi regretted not knowing better what was worth her faith. This was, after all, the company that had walked in with a wedding-broadcast proposal under the words from here on, we'll simply say Mary is a married woman. As if they would ever stand in the way of an event so minor as this.
"There was a similar incident not long ago, as well—"
"Aaaah! Mother! Stop! Please, stop?!"
"It's quite all right. Please, do go on, Mother!" the host threw in.
"I am not oka—mmph!"
"I'll be holding Shutang in check," said Shion.
And so Mary Tepes's wedding broadcast, which had begun by stirring up every kind of chaos, came at last to its end as a talk show devoted to the wholesale unearthing of Mary's black history.
I'll go first.
"What is this reaction supposed to be?!"
"Judging by the response, it seems you considerably underestimated the modern otaku's pursuit of the maman, Hitomi."
"I mean, it's a relief the marriage business didn't drift off in some strange direction and blow up into a real mess, but... this feels strange in a whole different way...?!"
"Then Shutang need only become a mama as well, wouldn't you say? If that is what you want, shall I see to the arrangements?"
"Be quiet...!"
Her voice crumpled.
"......Still. I-I'll go wash up first."