My Light and My Salvation (1)
"I pulled together the keyword data from all the usual sites about yesterday's stream, and... this is what I got."
Akaba Akane said it as she rapped a graph at the edge of the screen with her pointer. A pie chart sat there, each slice marked with a short note, and Ninomae Hitomi studied it a moment before carefully raising her hand.
"...But why are you the one explaining this, Akaba?"
"......Yeah. You tell me."
Akane let out a small sigh.
"Officially I'm the assistant manager for Gen 2, so there's nothing wrong with it as far as the work goes, but..."
"No, that title was from back when our manager—Miss Hatsuna—was still a surface-world human, wasn't it? They needed someone to handle the anomaly-related business in her place, so they handed you the position just to borrow your help for that, and only then."
An ordinary company would never have needed a post that specialized. Anathema Production, though, was in the peculiar situation of having a good share of its signed VTubers be anomalies themselves. Even so, that manager had since set a foot into the hidden world, which meant there should have been no reason to foist fiddly little jobs like this onto Akane.
"Probably to strengthen the tie between Gen 1 and Gen 2."
Akane answered after thinking it over for a moment.
"Take Shion. She's already got the Gen 3 assistant manager title and keeps showing her face here and there. Word's out that the Sakuragi sisters live together, at least that far. Hyakurenno's two employees aren't public yet, but sooner or later it's going to come out that they live under one roof. Same goes for the pair working at the same café."
A word of clarification: Hyakurenno's employees did not mean the maid Momomomo Chisa alone. It also meant Ryuumai Fuu, whose house had been blown away in its entirety during the recent attack. Strictly speaking, the ones who demolished the house were not the attackers but Han Seoyeon's side—yet the cause still lay over there, so they had agreed to let it pass.
In any case, the one who took Ryuumai in after she lost her place to sleep was Hyakurenno Yuri. Ryuumai had a younger sister, and imposing on her for a while had been an option, but with the risk of further attacks still ahead they had decided to employ her at the Hyakurenno estate, the better to keep her safe.
Those same people were not likely to come charging in again, of course. Even today, Seoyeon had left the country for a short trip to Mongolia over business connected to them. Still, a standing scarcely different from being Behemoth's other self was enough on its own to make her a target for any number of factions. Having felt that in her bones after what had just happened, Ryuumai quietly accepted Hyakurenno's protection. The arrangement came to this: Ryuumai would guard Yuri in person, while the household as a whole protected her. Anyone with even a scrap of sense would, before throwing a punch, stop and think again about whether they could handle the Hyakurenno standing at her back.
"Everybody's link to Gen 3 is pretty solid. Honestly, a little too solid."
"So they want to tangle Gen 1 and Gen 2 together at least a little, to even the balance out? But you were childhood friends with Tsunashi too, weren't you?"
"We were. That's as far as it goes."
Bonds existed between Gen 1 and Gen 2 as well, of course. Yugure Tama and Charlotte Lupus were childhood friends, and taken more broadly, Rokumondera Aki and Komori Sae also shared a senior-and-junior tie from their idol days. Set against the relationships with the Gen 3 talents, though, with whom they spent a considerable amount of time, those bonds really were a little thin. It didn't help that they were closer to connections between individuals than connections between generations. Giving Akane a share of the Gen 2 manager's role was meant to shore up exactly that. Had they suddenly piled a brand-new job on her, it might have been different, but they were only having her go on with work she had already been doing, so it was hardly a burden.
"I'll probably turn up on stream a few times with the manager title on, officially... Anyway. Let's get back to what we were doing."
"Ah, right. ...But is this actually okay?"
"Is what."
"No matter how I look at it, the second-most-mentioned keyword is my mother...?"
At that Akane looked at the graph again and murmured an ahh.
First place was locked, of course, to talk of Mary Tepes's own marriage, which meant that among the keywords with any real point to analyzing, this one had been mentioned the most.
"I searched my name, so I knew it was something of a topic, but... I didn't think it was this much."
"Well... I definitely didn't see it going this far either. From the way he talks, though, the boss put her in expecting it."
"He expected it?"
"The one who reached out about this stream in the first place was the boss, I hear. You didn't catch that?"
"Uh... wait a second. So the call I got was because the president told them to?"
Akaba nodded. That was what she had heard.
"But why?"
"Image management."
She clicked ahead through a few of the slides up on the screen, then went on. Several illustrations that had sprouted overnight like bamboo after rain were laid out across it.
"Even if your mother hadn't appeared on the stream, pictures like these would've come out. The tag just would've been 'Mary Tepes' instead of 'Mary Mama.'"
"Uh—what? Why?"
"You don't seem to have fully registered it yet, but you're Anathema's official married woman now. The boss's read was that sooner or later, whatever the timing, the viewers were going to stick a mature image on you."
In the subculture industry—and not only there—that was the image the words married woman carried. So like it or not, a change in Mary Tepes's image could not be avoided.
"Not that you'd want to flip the image all at once, I assume."
"No. It's sudden, and to begin with I'm worried whether I could even keep a concept like that going..."
"A shadow double for the job, then. Something like that."
Hitomi seemed to turn it over for a moment, and then her eyes went round.
"A bullet sponge... no, a MILF sponge... er, no, that sounds wrong... anyway, that's what you mean?"
"Assuming I actually understood the boss."
Deliberately shift the image most likely to stick to Mary onto someone else. That was the gist of it.
"So this reaction online, right now, is..."
"Going exactly the way the boss wanted."
"...All I can ever think is that what he actually pulls is a wild beast and nothing else, but when you look at the final result, there are times I seriously wonder if he doesn't have future sight."
You really did have to give him his eye, at least. Wasn't it a gift even that Hyakurenno young lady had acknowledged?
"Anyway, the next highest in mentions is the totsumachi, like you'd expect."
"It really was an all-hands Anathema utawaku."
"That one already had plenty of mentions, and they went up again once the day rolled over."
"Hm? Was there some special issue?"
"No. From morning straight through the afternoon, people kept popping up one after another, either mocking somebody else or lamenting themselves over not getting to watch it live."
"Ah..."
This, too, she had no choice but to accept at once. Hitomi knew how the internet worked, seasoned as she was by game communities and searching her own name.
"Next... though this one's a different situation."
"In what sense?"
"This data was only tallied from the sites where the existing Anapro fandom mostly hangs out."
Something in the way she said it suggested a wide gap with opinion on the outside, and Hitomi tilted her head.
"Sarah Groothuizen."
This one, of course, she accepted just as quickly.
"True, there's no way it wouldn't come up... She keeps her real life hidden at the level of pure mystique."
In truth she was the sort who had no real life to reveal in the first place, but that fact was known only to a handful even in the hidden world. On the surface, then, she could only look like a VTuber who clung to an extraordinary air of mystery and never once yielded to being doxxed. And now a clue had surfaced? Of course the communities concerned would lose their minds.
It had already been known that she and Mary were acquainted, but back then the feeling had been nothing more than a chance meeting that led to knowing each other's faces. When the fact first came out, Mary herself hadn't even been live, which took the heat down, and for several days afterward she had kept her guard up hard whenever a related question came in, so the whole thing had passed as a simple bit of fuss. The accepted theory was that her recent festival booking had also been thanks to her connection with Mary, but even that closeness was assumed to be an exchange carried on over an internet line. Hadn't she performed at the festival without ever going to Japan, just by sending the data?
There was a difference, in that Mary had seen her in person once, but set that aside and even a Sarah who hid her personal information as fiercely as she did had no small number of people she simply talked with often online, so it had never become a major issue. And yet, by their own account, she had gone out of her way to come all the way to the Far East and attend a wedding held there. Not knowing that she could come and go easily as data, viewers were bound to see the two of them as closer than they had ever imagined.
"So watch yourself on personal information for a while. The Anapro fandom isn't all that big, which might be why you've been fine until now, but the bigger the sample gets, the odds of a lunatic turning up climb exponentially."
Mary nodded. Hitomi knew perfectly well how frightening the people everyone called a Bill Gates of spare time could be—the ones who set out in earnest to dig a person's life up. Hadn't they worked backward from her hiatus schedule and the things she let slip, identified her university, and then picked Hitomi out of the single photo of her among the festival pictures on the school homepage? Looking back, that was what had led to Seoyeon finding out about the VTuber work.
"Your face and your university are definitely already blown, right? Then if somebody decides to, they can pick you completely clean."
Looks like Hitomi's made a person famous whether or not she mixed with the people around her. Turn up at the university, show a photo, and ask a few simple questions, and all sorts of information would come loose. As for an excuse about why anyone was asking, even Akane could think of several on the spot. And in this particular case, the narrowness of Hitomi's circle of friends actually worked against her. If a friend had been the one asked, word might have slipped out in the shape of someone was showing your photo around and asking questions, and then they could have grasped the situation and answered it before the problem grew.
"Who in their right mind would lay a hand on that Apostle's wife, sure. But this world has more crazy bastards than you can imagine. And being from the surface world doesn't mean they won't cause an incident."
People who didn't know how terrifying an Apostle was, and madmen who charged in even knowing. With no fewer than two such kinds, it was hard to feel entirely easy.
"It'll probably be fine, more or less, but..."
"Right. I'll keep it in mind."
It might have been an overreaction, depending on how you looked at it, but there was nothing to lose by being careful. Thinking so, Hitomi nodded.