Joyfully Bearing the Ark of the Covenant (2)
"It seems to be connected, more or less. Would you care to turn it on?"
Han Seoyeon said it as she crawled out from under the desk, where she had been crouched and fussing with the cables. At her word, Ninomae pressed the power switch, and a small hum rose from the tower.
"The performance got so much better."
Less noise than usual. A faster boot than usual. Ninomae took both in and murmured it like a sigh of admiration.
Having hauled the boxes in, Seoyeon had started with the PC. For a streamer, it was the single most important thing Ninomae owned, and it was also the job that took by far the longest. The work only wrapped up after Ninomae had sent her minions to put the rest of the luggage in some kind of order and come back.
A perfectly ordinary installation would never have taken this long, of course. Anointing every last part with holy oil and consecrating it was another matter entirely. Several talismans were stuck to the side of the case besides.
"Do people from the other side all get by on performance like this?"
"Well. Ordinarily it does not go quite this far."
Seoyeon worked the stiffness out of a body that had been crouched too long, then got to her feet.
"Shall we connect the VR equipment as well?"
"Ah, you said you'd use it to watch the live today."
Hearing that, she picked up the device she had left in the corner of the desk. It had to be hooked to the computer to be of any use, so she had simply set it there for the time being.
"…Hm."
A moment later she realized she had no idea how any of the equipment worked, and stepped aside to give Ninomae the chair. Ninomae connected what she had been handed to the PC, mounted the motion-capture camera on top of the monitor, stuck several trackers to her body, and only then, looking satisfied, pulled the HMD on.
"The picture's coming through nicely."
Next she clicked the mouse a few times and launched a program—something to do with the 3D avatar, no doubt. At the center of the screen stood a white default model like a wooden mannequin, arms spread in a T. Soon its pose shifted to match the one Ninomae was holding, and from then on it followed every movement of her limbs. When she worked the controllers, the avatar clenched its fingers and opened them again.
Watching, Han Seoyeon spoke.
"You are testing whether it tracks you properly. I will step out for a little while and bring back something simple to eat."
"Oh, if that's all, I'll come with you."
"I will be quite enough on my own. You received the new model, did you not? There must be a great deal you wish to check."
Mary's model had been finished yesterday. It had arrived late at night, though, and the very next day was the move, so she had not had long to look it over. With the move, Ninomae had also been given this room in addition to the bedroom—a room set aside for streaming, large enough to wander in with a headset on. With so much more space than she was used to, she would want to see just how far the avatar followed her. Seoyeon, however, had already decided she would not look at Mary's new model yet, and so she meant to clear out while Ninomae checked it.
"Since I am going out regardless, I intend to patrol for anomalies while I am at it. …Ah. Will a hamburger do for lunch?"
"Mmm. Yes, that's fine."
"Then I leave the house in your care, Miss Ninomae."
With that, Han Seoyeon passed Ninomae and left the room. Ninomae watched the space she had left for a moment, then turned her gaze. At the end of it stood the goat-horned woman she had put to work as labor during the move. Nearly all the heavy lifting was done, so she had sent most of the minions back—but she had kept one, just in case.
"Th-that just now was an incredibly married-couple conversation, wasn't it? Splitting the inside work and the outside work between you… that whole, um, you know?"
The little goat only tilted her head at Ninomae's peculiar reaction. What on earth was this human saying? Between her pea-sized brain and her poverty of social grace, it was a conversation well beyond her. But, well, it looked delicious, so what did it matter? With tentacles reaching in from beyond the material plane, she set to munching, bit by bit, on the feeling Ninomae herself could not quite name and was letting spill out of her.
How had Ninomae Hitomi ended up a VTuber? Anyone who knew her was bound to ask.
"Did you know? The first VTuber I ever watched was actually Korean."
"Truly?"
When Seoyeon finally put that curiosity into words, the answer she received was rather unexpected. A viewer from Japan—all but the homeland of VTubers—watching a VTuber from another country was uncommon indeed.
"Which agency were they with? Or were they an indie?"
"Mmm, they were with a company, technically, but it wasn't an 'agency.' It was a VTuber made to promote a game."
"Ah… one does see those, now and then."
A mobile game Ninomae had once loved. As part of its marketing, a single VTuber had debuted. Looking back on it now, the general reception had not been especially kind. Neither the gamers nor the VTuber fans had thought much of her. To Ninomae, though, she had not been just another cookie-cutter, mass-produced VTuber. It was the moment she first met the very idea of a VTuber, and the spark that started her fall. Whatever anyone else had thought of it, Ninomae had loved that stream.
"Well, the company had one disaster after another, and she vanished within a month."
The game ended service. The stream, only middling in popularity to begin with, was of course discontinued. It must have been a thoroughly black company, because from that point on quite a few of the developers fled as well. A game from the studio some of them went on to found, she was still enjoying to this day.
"Anyway, right when the game I loved and the streamer both disappeared, the first-generation senpais showed up in my algorithm."
From there the path was simple. She fell, little by little, for the VTubers of Anathema Production, and then, carrying that admiration with her, tried streaming herself. The results were hard to call a success as a streamer… but before long she saw the recruitment notice for the second generation, applied, and was accepted. Ninomae laid that sequence out for her in brief.
The aside had run long, but the point she was coming to was this. Whatever else one might say, Ninomae had been a fan of her first-generation senpais.
"I'm looking forward to the live."
Which was why there was nothing strange at all about the way she sat on the sofa now, cheerfully swinging her legs—judging by the look of it, entirely without realizing. Dirty jokes might leave her uncomfortable, but that was a separate matter from the fact that Maya was someone she held a certain admiration for.
"It's my first time watching a live in person, too. I've only ever seen the clips."
Today was Ninomae Hitomi's moving day, and it was also the day of a live from the first generation's Kitayama Maya. A live broadcast. Taken literally, that would mean a live stream, but of course that was not the sense in use here. More precisely, the phrase called for was live concert. Anathema Production sold each of its VTubers with an idol flavor attached, so anyone signed there ended up doing lives on a regular schedule. The second generation all had their 3D models now; they would be jumping into concerts themselves before long.
At any rate, the two of them sat side by side on the living-room sofa, waiting for that live to begin. Seoyeon looked at the television in front of her. Maya's channel was up on it, still on its waiting screen. If they were going to watch, better on a big screen—that had been her judgment, which was why the eTube stream was currently cast to the TV.
Ninomae, for the record, had gone one step further. A sidelong glance. Seoyeon looked at the seat beside her. There sat Ninomae Hitomi in the VR headset. Her eyes were covered, but the expression on the lower half of her face made it perfectly plain that they were sparkling underneath.
"Ah! Shion, I think it's starting."
The voice was bright with excitement, and yet Ninomae spoke as if whispering. There were only the two of them; there was no need to keep her voice down… but from where Ninomae sat, she was probably looking out at seats packed with people to either side, and had done it without thinking. Whatever the reason, what she had said was true, and the screen changed.
The illustrated waiting card gave way to a 3D stage, and before long a rain of pink blossoms began to drift across it. A drum came thumping through, and a traditional stringed instrument—Seoyeon's knowledge did not extend to which one—began to play a Japanese-flavored melody. The drumming grew steadily louder and rougher, while the plucking of the strings hardly changed at all, until, inevitably, the melody was swallowed whole by the percussion. Then the drum boomed out hard once more, and the rain of petals shuddered. Caught as if in a whirlwind, they whipped around, swirled in time with the beat, clenched all at once into the center, and burst outward again with force. Thum. Tak. A strike on the head, and right after it the stick rapping the side of the drum.
Where the vanished petals had been, Kitayama Maya appeared, and every instrument stopped.
Silence. And yet, inside that silence, Ninomae let out a breathless whoa. Had this been a concert in actual reality, with other audience members beside her, this would have been the moment applause and cheers rose from the seats.
A cozy voice with not a trace of nerves, even from the stage. The pink-haired oni greeted the audience just like that. True to the oni concept, she looked quite tall. It was a rendered stage and a rendered character, so the proportions were not quite those of reality, and even so, by feel alone, she seemed a full six feet if she was an inch.
In that soft, supple voice, Maya carried on with a little light small talk. In truth, the opening of a concert like this fell into one of two broad cases: greet the crowd first and then go into the show, or give them a performance first—usually a song or two—and save the greeting for later. The advantage of the latter was that you could seize the mood from the very first moment. Maya's concert this time was closer to the former. She had shown off a flashy entrance possible only in a virtual world, but set against the performance itself it was still a fairly short single punch.
That was by no means her surrendering command of the stage. Nor was it confidence—or arrogance—that she could seize a stage even like this. Simply, for a person like Kitayama Maya, this was the most effective path there was. An audience waiting on the live. Lift that anticipation just a little with a handsome bit of staging, then let it back down again on the unhurried air that was hers alone: tension rolling from high to low.
And then Kitayama Maya seized that tension all over again, in a single breath.
The VTuber known as Kitayama Maya was what one would call a half-lidded character. And to put it a little extremely, it was no exaggeration to say that nine-tenths of half-lidded characters existed so that, someday, they might open their eyes. When Maya opened hers, sanpaku eyes the color of blood came into view. The same drawn-out way of speaking as always, the same gentle voice as always, and the same faint smile as always. Nothing in particular ought to have changed, and yet, somehow, the whole atmosphere seemed to have turned over.
Playing two characters without shifting the tone of her voice by so much as a note—there was nothing to call it but extraordinary talent. Those red eyes slowly swept the audience from right to left.
"Wow, so it's really starting now."
"……."
"…Shion?"
"Ah. Yes. So it is."
Come to think of it, she had said this was her first time properly watching a live. Staring blankly at the stage was not so strange. That was how Ninomae read Seoyeon's oddly spellbound state—though with the headset on, she could only guess from the voice.
"Mmm……."
This technique for seizing a room…
The actual reason, however, was considerably different.
It isn't that she has any talent for acting. She's just an anomaly.
…At this point, the president of the agency was starting to look suspicious to her.