The Place Where You Stand Is Holy Ground (2)
Han Seoyeon put on the VR gear and sat neatly in her chair.
Gear was a generous word for it. There was nothing but a headset, so her avatar would only sit there with its limbs locked stiff, the head turning this way and that. It hardly mattered. She was not the one whose avatar was meant to be on display.
The PC was already logged into a game called VR World. It was filed as a game, but in practice it was less entertainment than a simulation program for raising another world inside the virtual. At any rate, Han Seoyeon's avatar in that world was seated as well—not because anything had read her motion, but only because it had been parked in a chair, more or less, with the keyboard and mouse.
"I'm ready, Ninomae-san."
"How is it? This is your first time in VR, isn't it, Shion-san?"
"How shall I put it. It is a curious feeling. The scenery unfolds just as it would in reality, and yet the art style is nothing like the real thing."
Art style—ought she to have said modeling, or graphics? The thought crossed Han Seoyeon's mind, and she let it pass. Ninomae seemed to have understood her well enough.
"...Ninomae-san?"
"Hehe..."
In the very next instant her vision was blocked. Something had come down across her eyes. By rights the light should have cut out and the world gone black, but these were not her real eyes. Only the face of a character inside VR World had been covered, and so the white of whatever lay across it stayed perfectly visible. It did not take her long to realize that the white belonged to a gloved hand—the hand of the character Ninomae was piloting.
All of this had begun with Ninomae's proposal: she would show Seoyeon the 3D model of Mary Tepes, made vivid in VR.
"But if I just went ta-da and showed you right away, it'd be such a letdown, wouldn't it?"
She seemed to want a little more drama in the presentation. Considered that way, Ninomae might have been a broadcaster by nature.
"And besides, I'm not 'Ninomae' right now, am I?"
"Ah. Of course. Shutang."
The person called Ninomae Hitomi was stubborn about the character she played. For as long as she moved inside that avatar, she was not Ninomae at all, but Mary, the True Ancestor Queen.
"Ahem. Are you prepared to look upon me, Shion-san?"
Still covering Han Seoyeon's eyes, she shifted around from behind until she stood directly in front of her. The hand moved little by little as she went, and color flickered through the gaps between the fingers, though never clearly enough to make out a shape.
Then Ninomae—no, Mary—cleared her throat and changed over to the voice she used on stream.
"You're the first to see me this close, and in three dimensions, you know. Shion-san."
"That is quite an honor."
There was not a scrap of empty courtesy in it. She was genuinely uneasy about whether something this precious ought to be viewed for free, and that said all there was to say.
"Well then..."
Mary drew a long breath. And then she snatched her hand away from Seoyeon's face.
The backdrop filling her vision was the same street at sunset she had seen when she logged in. At its center, though, with the evening glow at her back, someone was standing.
With a crisp, confident flourish, she set a hand on her hip. Mary Tepes had given her greeting.
"...Konmea, Shutang."
The reply came a beat late, and no wonder. The sight before her had stolen her wits. She had already seen Mary on stream, of course—seen her living and breathing, even dancing with bright energy. Three-dimensional though the model was, the broadcast itself remained flat. To step into the VR world in her own person and meet her there was a reality of another order entirely, both as a figure of speech and in the most literal sense.
"Well? How is it?"
"...You're beautiful."
"Hehe... I'm glad."
Mary smiled, soft and bright, and when that smiling gaze turned her way, Han Seoyeon felt her heart kick hard against her ribs.
"Mmm. It's all wonderful, except I can't see your face, Shion-san."
"It is a thoroughly vacant face. You are better off not seeing it."
"But that's exactly what I want to see."
As she said it, Mary swayed from side to side, and her brilliant platinum hair swayed with her.
"Well, you can look a little more closely if you like. For this one moment, Mary Tepes belongs to you and you alone, Shion-san."
She opened both arms, gently, as if offering that beautiful body up to be admired at leisure.
Han Seoyeon swallowed for no good reason, and let her eyes travel down Mary's avatar from top to bottom.
"...Hey. Where exactly are you looking?!"
"Pardon? Were you not the one who told me to look my fill, Shutang?"
"I—I didn't say you could stare a hole through nothing but my legs...!"
The white socks hadn't been bad on stream, either. That thought did occur to her. But judging by Mary's reaction, she had been looking at those legs for considerably longer than she herself had realized.
"Ugh... Shion-san, are you a pervert? If you were staring at my chest I could at least understand, but my legs...? Do you have a foot fetish or something?"
Whether she had felt the heat in the gaze fixed on her legs, Ninomae came unraveled, spilling every thought that rose to her tongue. Her fingers fidgeted near her thigh, and she turned her eyes away as if ashamed. To be stared at so hard in a place like that had left her needlessly mortified, and so she was blurting whatever came to mind. Any third party watching the present Mary with a shred of objectivity would have said as much.
Han Seoyeon, however, was silent for a moment, with the air of someone who had something to think through in earnest.
"Um... Shion-san?"
"Shutang."
"Y-yes?"
The silence must have worried her, because Mary tried calling her name, but the timing was unfortunate. Just then Seoyeon, her deliberations finished, snapped her head up and met Mary's eyes.
"I have given it careful thought, and I suspect I may in fact possess a genuine foot fetish."
The conclusion was a little—no. It was grievously unhinged.
"Yes... ...Yes?!"
Ninomae Hitomi doubted her own ears. What she had just heard was, unmistakably, a bombshell, so the reaction was only natural.
"Ah. The fetishism I mean is not fetishism in the sense of fetish-worship. I mean it as a sexual deviation—"
"I know that without you saying it?! There wasn't one milligram of intention to ask because I didn't understand!"
Fearing some failure of communication, Han Seoyeon had launched into a clarification. Mary, horrified, cut her off.
"W-why on earth would you arrive at a conclusion like that...?"
What followed was, of course, pure disbelief. Was she really announcing this as if she had attained some fresh enlightenment?
"It seems to have begun flowering properly only recently. Specifically, I would say, from this trip onward."
Han Seoyeon hummed to herself and nodded as she said it.
"The catalyst was Hyakurenno Yuri-san afterward showing off her slightly damp stockings. Looking back, that was when other people's legs began to weigh on me in particular. My eyes kept drifting that way in the inn room, and at the hot spring, too, I find I was gazing at legs quite a bit without realizing it."
"N-heheh..."
Calm and meticulous, Han Seoyeon laid out this exposure of her proclivities as if she were giving a testimony of faith, while the Ninomae listening had gone so red she looked ready to burst. The usual Seoyeon would have read that reaction, realized she was saying something rather extreme, and checked herself. For better or worse, the flush did not carry past the avatar.
"It was much the same even when I faced the fox yokai that had seized the shrine. Some time has passed, so the finer details are hazy, but that her legs were bare—that, I remember with perfect clarity. I must have kept following them with my eyes even while we fought."
If it had held even in a moment that desperate, then this was a rather severe case, wasn't it? Han Seoyeon considered the question in all seriousness. The severe case is Shion-san's head, which knows no restraint and is confessing every last proclivity to me. Ninomae barely managed to swallow the words that had climbed all the way to her throat.
What is this? Some new kind of embarrassment play?
But the testimony went on.
"A question I have carried since childhood is resolved by this as well. When I lived at the convent, walking the corridors barefoot left me strangely anxious. All shivery. I never knew why."
"Th-that's enough..."
"But I was wrong."
Once she was older, she had simply assumed the body reacted that way for safety's sake—that the brain stirred up anxiety so soft bare skin would not be hurt, an evolution bent toward keeping shoes on one's feet whenever possible.
"In other words, it was the anxiety of exposing a sexual part of oneself out in the open. It seems I had the aptitude even then. Unconsciously, I had been treating the feet as an indecent region."
Only then, as if she had at last made peace with her past self, did Han Seoyeon nod several times in succession.
"W-wait a moment. Don't tell me the slippers you wear around the house..."
A thought flashed through Ninomae's mind. Han Seoyeon was, by nature, the sort who wore slippers at home, and when Ninomae moved in, Seoyeon had matter-of-factly set aside one of the guest pairs entirely as hers.
"Yes. Might this not be the aptitude for fetishism expressing itself, even though I had no awareness of it until now? Much as wearing underwear is a matter of manners, this too is something that steadies the heart when kept covered. That is the sense I have of it."
"E-ehhh..."
And with what feeling, exactly, was she supposed to walk around the house in slippers now? From here on, every time she put them on, she would remember that Han Seoyeon regarded it as covering the object of a fetish.
"Auuu..."
Perhaps because far too much had crashed over her at once, Ninomae looked thoroughly lost. She bowed her head and hid her face in both hands—certainly not peekaboo, not the game she had played when unveiling this avatar. She was embarrassed. Embarrassed enough to die, from the sheer what is this person even saying of it, and the shame only surged higher because, even while she talked, Seoyeon kept stealing glances at her legs. Consciously or not, Ninomae couldn't tell.
But once that shame had been given time to burn away, what remained was a very faint sense of satisfaction. A faint heat had begun to rise in Ninomae's gaze as she looked at Han Seoyeon in her chair. Neither of them, most likely, noticed.
"Um, so, these are actually a removable part..."
Ninomae Hitomi licked her drying lips, just barely, and said it while working the controls to slip the low-heeled shoe from the avatar's foot. Even so, her eyes never stopped checking Han Seoyeon's reaction.
"W-would you like to... inspect this side carefully, too?"
"...!"
She lifted one leg and quietly offered it up before Han Seoyeon's face. Seoyeon looked as if she might lunge forward that very instant to examine it, but she was wearing only an HMD—a headset—and could not lean her body in as she pleased. So Ninomae extended the foot toward her instead, and her heart pounded.
In the manga she had read, a composition like this usually had the one holding the upper hand—a queenly persona, or at least the poised older sister—being served by the other. But whether because Han Seoyeon simply sat there without moving, or because Ninomae was too drowned in shame to claim any advantage at all, she could not shake the sense that she was the one doing the serving. Her heart beat harder for it. Perhaps because she knew she was putting a shameful version of herself on display.
Even so, she could not deny it: the transgressive thrill was terribly addictive. Trembling, Ninomae pushed the sole of her foot still closer to Han Seoyeon's face.
"Snffff—!"
"Hiek?! Don't sniff it...! No—it's virtual, so sniffing won't even do anything!"
...Of course, conduct of the genuine article was more than enough to shatter even a rapture like that.