The Holy City, New Jerusalem (3)
On Mary Tepes's stream, the person known as Sister was not slotted into anything so simple as a real-life acquaintance.
Ninomae Hitomi kept a narrow circle of friends, and the moment talk turned to real life, this was the woman who surfaced—weekday or weekend, it made no difference. She was not a VTuber who streamed herself, and yet viewers brought her up often enough that a modest scatter of fanart existed. In name recognition, she sat at about the level of certain staff inside the agency.
A recent leak of personal information—the agency had held, without wavering, to a policy of no comment—had made her appearance public and drawn eyes to Sister all over again.
And that same Sister had, it turned out, been one of Shu-tan's viewers, now appearing on the broadcast as a surprise?
How is anyone supposed to sit still for this?
She wouldn't have managed it either. Han Seoyeon was certain of that. On this stream, a person called Sister was worth every bit of the fuss.
That her true identity was me, though—that really was outside anyone's calculations.
Tastes regarding Sister would differ from viewer to viewer, of course. Public sentiment did seem, on the whole, to lean fond. Still, whether one liked the character called Sister or not, anyone who regularly watched Mary Tepes would look in, if only out of curiosity.
Even now, tweets carrying the news were probably going up in real time.
"Eh—wait. What is this. Why is Sister..."
this woman's ability to just do things is unhinged lmaooo
Only then, as if grasping that this was not a complete bolt from the blue, did Mary's expression ease. It had clearly been decided on short notice, but the agency, at least, had signed off.
"Haa. You could at least give the person who's actually streaming a heads-up."
"Nngh. You're still watching the stream, right? Then could you hop into Pasta? The channel we used last time we played together."
Pasta—a voice-chat program. It was a solo broadcast, so she hadn't even had it open; Mary launched it now. A short wait, a bright little chime, and Han Seoyeon's name flipped to online.
"Ah, ah. Can you hear me all right?"
voice is way deeper than I expected
eh, it's actually Sister
"You're welcoming me so warmly I hardly know what to do with myself. In any case, it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Sister."
"Uh, hello...? Mmm. This is more awkward than I expected."
"Well, everyone's like that the first time they stream."
One of the walls people hit when they first go on the air is precisely this: the feeling of talking to yourself into empty space. You know, in your head, that viewers are out there on the other side, and getting used to it is still difficult. Han Seoyeon's side was not even broadcasting directly. She was reading chat through Mary's stream window, so the viewers' reactions reached her a beat late. Of course it felt awkward.
"You'll get used to it as you go."
"I hope so... Oh, we got a match."
The lobby gave way to a loading screen.
"FPS, you mean? Better than Shu-tan, at least."
"Urk."
if you're worse than Shu-tan we're cooked
"Hey! Those are my viewers!"
"The servants have no thought in their heads but teasing Shu-tan, the moment an opening appears."
and that concludes the remarks of Sister, official representative of the servants.
"Does Sister-san do that too...?"
"Mm... Ah, let's drop here. This spot should do nicely."
"Please don't dodge the question?!"
Sister's character answered by flinging herself out of the plane. Mary complained, and jumped after her without a moment's hesitation.
Mm. Right. The one at fault is Shu-tan, for being so satisfying to land a hit on.
avoiding other players?
"Ah... Sister-san. The servants want to know why we're dropping here."
Mary said it after a glance at chat. She herself had played this game with Sister—with Han Seoyeon—even off-stream, but the viewers had not. Some explanation of what they were doing seemed necessary.
Setsukoto, like any other battle royale, dealt out a different spread of items every match. The places where those items came generously, however, were more or less fixed, and once a player grew familiar with the game, the viable drop points narrowed to a handful. And since every engagement was itself a risk, steering clear of the landmarks where people clustered was a strategy in its own right. Viewers who had yet to get a proper read on Sister were ready to conclude that this was simply her style.
"Aha, you mean this? I just got a feeling about it, somehow. Drop here and we'll hit it big."
Folding her parachute, Sister brushed the theory aside, in a tone of perfect, untroubled calm.
is Sister-san secretly a vibes player?
"No—what do you mean, I'm strange..."
"Mmm. She's kind of like this in a lot of ways, even on a normal day."
Mary's avatar put on a wry smile.
"Still, it is true that Sister-san's hunches tend to land."
She let out a sigh and offered what might, generously, be called a defense—as if to say she would hardly have followed her down with no results to show for it.
"Once you reach that level, prayer begins to have a meaningful effect on gacha rates, you see."
"Of course, the fact that she says things like that with a straight face does mean Sister is a weird person."
"Mmm. But it's true."
Even as they spoke, the character on Mary's broadcast walked into a building. From the first crate she opened, armor of the highest grade tumbled out, along with a couple of healing items.
you're kidding, right?
Sister-san is cracked lmao
The very next crate yielded a respectable firearm—one most players would rate as better than average—and ammunition to match. Sister's crate produced a rather powerful gun of its own.
"Thank you for the Super Chat, ShotgunWorshipper-san. ...Sister-san, a viewer says they'd like to convert? They're asking which denomination."
"Ah, how wonderful. My affiliation is the Roman Catholic Church. For those who aren't familiar, you might say I serve under the Holy Father."
Japan was, in many respects, a country where Christianity held little ground. There would be no small number of people who could not tell Catholic from Protestant.
"Well, formally speaking, yes. My name is on the rolls of a religious order, after all."
Sister answered the questions as they came, one after another. They had dropped where no one else was, so no early fight even broke out, and there was time to spare.
"The work I do for the Church, you mean? The truth is... Shu-tan has a debut-mate, doesn't she? Amairo Tsubasa, of the second generation. I do work rather similar to hers."
Amairo Tsubasa, a second-generation Anathema VTuber alongside Mary Tepes. Her persona was a fresh recruit in an order of Holy Knights devoted to hunting monsters. The rest of that generation ran on concepts drawn from the monsters of Europe, so the pairing fit well enough.
is Shu-tan gonna get hunted?
what? Shu-tan's gonna get eaten by the husky-voiced nun?
"I am not dead, thank you?! Would you please stop seeing people off whenever the mood strikes you?"
She had told the truth, and still they only folded it into Shu-tan's vampire bit and laughed. No one actually believed it. Then again, with a crowd this large, it was plausible that someone who knew monsters were real was sitting in the audience...
Even if they realized I was a genuine Holy Knight, they wouldn't say so in chat. Would they.
People like that would know well enough to keep quiet. Speak, and no one would believe them; and if someone truly did believe, word of the monsters would spread, which would be a problem all its own.
"'The immoral, forbidden love of the hunter and the vampire'... excuse me! I am remembering that username, just so you know?!"
do we have a SisMea teehee?
"Shu-tan. You would do well to give up. We are a people who will unearth a teehee angle in even the most barren soil."
"Ah—and Shu-tan knows this already, I'm sure, but I belong to the SharMea faction."
Sister added it with a faint smile.
so SisMea... doesn't exist?
"Rejected—what rejection?! I've never even confessed!"
Mary shouted, her face gone red.
"No, more importantly, why does my name come after that insolent wolf's?"
"By my reading of the characters, Shu-tan is the head of the second generation."
now that I think about it, every Shu-tan Gen 2 ship is—
SharMea, AmaTepe, SereMea, MoriMea. Even with Sister, who was not a VTuber at all—SisMea.
Of course, the order of names in a ship was not always settled by who took the lead and who yielded; sometimes it was only a matter of how the words fell. And yet, asked which of those partners Mary could actually get on top of, one found oneself rather at a loss for words.
"Be quiet!!"
Mary cried out just like that.
"—Hnyaaah?!"
"Ah. Oh dear."
Of all moments, a motorcycle shot out from beside her and sent her sailing. Even body armor of the highest grade was powerless before a steel horse with a gasoline engine on its back.