I Strike My Own Body (1)
Anathema's sports festival was being broadcast over two days, and unlike the first, the second day's show would be held on an online game server. A difference like that was bound to sprout complications of every sort, and the greatest of them, inevitably, was Rokumondera Aki—a woman whose inability to communicate with other human beings in the flesh was severe enough to qualify as a diagnosis.
On the first day she had been unable to take part properly at all, and had filled the caster's seat from the safety of her own home. Her viewers had not made an issue of it. Had management hauled her into the studio, the arrows of blame would have whipped straight back around at them: what on earth did they think they were doing?
Once the exchange moved online, however, it became a different story. She had handled commentary the day before, so doing the same today was unlikely to cause any real trouble—and yet there was no sense in picking at a scab. Her own mind was what held her back, yes. Even so, Aki already carried the faint, uneasy air of someone being left out.
"We were fortunate to have Miss Sion. Thanks to her, the numbers came out even."
Nakabashi Gyokichi murmured it under his breath. A reserve who could be put in or left out without either choice seeming strange made the business of building teams a great deal easier, and the thought drew a smile out of him.
"Boss. The broadcast is ready."
"Ah, is it? That was fast. There's still a fair amount of time."
Growing adept at broadcast preparation with every passing day was, it seemed, not a gift reserved for the VTubers themselves. The staff were no different. At the report, Gyokichi rose and made for the filming studio inside the company building.
The studio looked a little different from usual. At its core it was a space built for the VTubers' motion capture, and shooting anyone in the flesh had required preparations of its own.
If yesterday's two commentators were going to enter the competition themselves, someone else would have to serve as both host and analyst. Leaving that to the other staff was awkward, though: they were not accustomed to being on a broadcast. They were not skilled at leading a show—and just as much, from the viewers' side of the screen, those faces were unfamiliar.
Which raised the question of who, among Anapro's non-broadcasting personnel, was even passingly familiar to the audience. That the president's own name should come up at that point was surely one reason the internet regarded Anathema Production as a pack of lunatics.
Gyokichi had not even been the one to suggest it. The proposal had risen from the staff: how would this be? They were given to complaining that their boss was strange, and yet an outsider looking in would have judged that the staff had already caught it quite thoroughly.
"Ah. You've come, Gyokichi-kun."
And so, in one of the chairs set out in the studio, another person was already seated. Even allowing for the average height of a Japanese person, the build and the babyish face looked, at the most generous reckoning, like a first-year in middle school. From that small frame a girl in a loose white lab coat raised a hand, and the voice that called Gyokichi's name was, set against such an appearance, surprisingly a little low.
Senjoji Chihaya. Elder sister of Serena, a talent of the second generation, and Nakabashi Gyokichi's childhood friend. Officially, for the present, she was the professor of occult folklore retained by Anathema Production as its consultant on authenticity.
Gyokichi's own view was that live coverage of this sort needed two people at the very least—one for play-by-play, and one for commentary besides. He had accepted the request that he take the caster's seat, but that was not the same as having any confidence he could carry it skillfully alone. He was hardly what one would call a professional of internet broadcasting. Trading lines with another person would sit easier on the one speaking, and go down better with those watching, than a man staring at a wall and talking to it.
With whom, then, could things proceed most smoothly? When a staffer put the question to him, Gyokichi thought for a moment, and the answer he produced was her.
To bring their eyes somewhere near a level, a cushion very nearly a perfect cube had been set on the chair, and it was atop that cushion that Professor Senjoji Chihaya sat. Gyokichi watched her dangling legs swing for a beat, then brought his gaze back to her face and spoke.
"Have you done your makeup? The air about you feels a little different from usual."
"So you can tell the difference, can you? Then the time was not wholly wasted."
Chihaya grumbled it at him as he took the chair prepared at her side.
"If one is to go on a broadcast, makeup is mandatory, or so they say. To my eye there is scarcely a difference at all. I cannot imagine why they labor over it for so long..."
Gyokichi let out a short laugh. He had gone and pictured just how far the complaining would have run, had he failed to notice. She would certainly have launched into a heated address on the subject of why she had been made to waste time on a thing no one could even perceive.
"...Hm? No. Wait. Wait just a moment."
Midway through airing the grievance, though, Chihaya knit her brow, leaned in, and studied Gyokichi's face up close.
"It does not seem so no matter how I look, so I will ask. Did you put on makeup, Gyokichi-kun?"
"I did not."
"Then why on earth did you not!"
A faint sense of being wronged settled over her expression once more. She had been told that appearing on a broadcast meant she absolutely must, and had submitted even to makeup she never otherwise wore—while her friend had strolled out in perfect comfort without a trace of the stuff. Displeasure was only reasonable.
"Is it because you are a man? I hear that male entertainers these days wear makeup as well, once they go on a broadcast. Or is this simply the authority of the president?"
"Nothing of the kind. This side of me simply tends to be better received."
So saying, Gyokichi hooked his little finger into his own mouth and drew it off to one side, stretching his lips out in a long, unnatural split.
"When 'D-chan' steps out before the viewers, a slightly horrific presentation tends to be rated more kindly."
"Cheap, as ever."
"What can I do. I happened to be born a monster."
Was it not rather like a VTuber who had debuted locked inside a difficult roleplay, envying the ones free to stream naturally and at their ease? Watching her reaction, Gyokichi laughed again.
What answered him in the very next breath was a look unlike her usual self, grave enough to startle, and a voice sunk low enough to feel faintly cold. Gyokichi's smile went a little stiff.
He understood, a beat too late, that the line he had tossed off without thinking, as if it were a joke, had landed somewhere near a reverse scale—the one place that was not to be touched. He used his own appearance for humor so often that he had grown dull to it without noticing, and he offered himself a mild rebuke for it.
"I proved as much. You are not a mon—"
"I know. I know. It was only a thing I said in jest, so there is no need to concern yourself."
Gyokichi let out a small sigh, and then went on.
"Making a joke of it means I have come far enough to take it as if it were nothing. Would you not say so?"
"Hm. That is certainly also true. Understood!"
Only then did Professor Senjoji return to her usual bright, unshakable smile.
"When does the broadcast begin? Do you remember?"
"Some thirty minutes remain. Would you care to look the script over once more, at the last?"
"I memorized that ages ago! There was never much of it to begin with."
In the end, set aside the opening, the close, and the brief stretches between where they would have to play host, and it was a seat that would have to be carried almost entirely on improvisation. There was no telling what situation would break out in which event.
"We would do better simply to keep talking like this, and oil our tongues while we are at it. Would we not?"
"There is that, yes."
Gyokichi nodded at her words.
"So. How much do you suppose it will come to?"
"How much? I have told you time and again, from long ago, not to leave out the point when you are speaking to another person."
"You understood the meaning well enough. Why insist on putting it that way?"
"Play along with this sort of thing, and it becomes a bad habit."
"And what am I, then—some manner of beast?"
Chihaya grumbled to exactly that effect, and in the end supplied the explanation anyway.
"The negligence fine for violating the Secrecy Protocol. How much is it to be?"
"We did not, to begin with, violate the Protocol."
"Claiming that one merely stopped short of the line does not mean one is forgiven for the whole of it."
At that, Gyokichi gave a bitter smile and tipped his gaze a little toward the ceiling.
"Well... it came to quite a sum."
Acts that broke the Secrecy Protocol were subject to punishment, and under that heading fell both the attempt to break it and any act that merely might. Of course, shatter the Protocol outright and fines were beside the point—the Church intervened on the spot—so this was hardly a matter of that gravity. Even so, yesterday's broadcast had sat, unmistakably, on a razor's edge.
Realistically, one could not declare it a thing that could not be. Even in the surface world, people with bodies capable of such feats were scattered here and there. But possible was not the same as commonsensical. Several of them had shown a standard that would have placed them, at the least, in the upper middle of the field even running against active male athletes, and those two of the third generation who could not abide each other were monsters who would have survived being dropped into an American football league, to say nothing of any ordinary sport. It was a line the people of the surface world could accept, just barely, in the register of what kind of human being is that—and yet.
"On account of me, I suppose."
"Most likely, yes."
No small share of it was surely an aggravated penalty for the crime of insolence, and at Chihaya's words Gyokichi nodded his agreement. This was a company with none other than Professor Senjoji installed as advisor. There was no way they had failed to know the thing might become a problem, and still they had gone and done it. It could only be taken as impudence.
One might wonder at levying negligence fines in such volume over a matter like this. Consider, though, that the people in question made their business of internet broadcasts, and had drawn attention by precisely these means, and the measure became entirely understandable. Put it another way. Suppose a company were turning a profit on conduct that could threaten the Secrecy Protocol, all the while protesting that they had not, strictly speaking, broken it. There would be nothing for it but to bring the hammer down.
"This month's revenue will have flown off nearly in full, I should think. Have we slipped into the red?"
"On the books, we are in the black. Barely."
"That is a genuine relief."
Chihaya breathed out a sigh of relief, as though she meant it from the heart.
"And yet you are not a man who would have failed to see that it would come to this. Profit, at the least, cannot have been the object."
"It was not."
"Nor, I think, did you mean to whip up a controversy in a hurry and haul in a rush of new viewers."
"That as well—well. If I am to be honest, there was some measure of it."
What business was not so, to one degree or another? Even set beside the rest, though, this trade was one in which people converted directly into profit. In short, even if the return were zero—no, even if it ran to a loss—so long as one could raise a stir and draw viewers in by the mass, it was an attempt well worth making while the company stood on stable ground.
Chihaya's guess, however, was that this was not the whole of it, and Gyokichi did not deny her.
"So. What, exactly, is the objective?"
"A countermeasure against stalkers."
"...Hm."
"Something unfortunate befell Miss Mary recently."
"Ah, that. I heard of it as well. Those Church bastards were up to their tricks, so I lent a little aid."
Mary had been attacked, not long past. It had since come to light that this was not, in truth, what it had seemed—but at the outset the incident had been taken for a stalker. And even setting this one aside, it was the sort of thing any woman broadcasting on the internet might meet with at any time.
"Are you familiar with the line? That modern people are rude because, unlike in primitive times, there is no prospect of having one's head split open with a stone axe for failing to observe courtesy."
"Ah, I know it well. Conan the Barbarian, is it not?"
"And so, for the present, we showed them on the broadcast the stone axes our Anapro members carry. Those of the hidden world have always known what manner of place Anapro is, and will restrain themselves accordingly. Seen from the surface world, however, they are only ordinary women who happen to be VTubers."
At that, Chihaya stared blankly at her friend. Then she let out an empty laugh.
"Gyokichi-kun, you have truly attained mastery in the art of drawing an ox-cleaver to kill a chicken. You really do not scruple over your means."
"I must have caught it off someone, playing the assistant. Set the nonsense aside, and let us get back to the broadcast."