I Shall Not Eat of It Again (3)
"Yes? What is this?"
There had never been any shortage of tricks for catching a genuine reaction on camera.
One of them was the surprise. Drop the actor a beat sooner than the cue you'd agreed on. Or, in the scene where a secret of one's birth comes to light, slip them a fake script and film a face that is actually, truly rattled—though that latter method, from the sound of it, was only a rumor.
In any case, exactly as the company had predicted, the Gen 2 VTubers, Tsubasa among them, were wearing the same vacant look to the last.
It was a perfectly reasonable reaction. This was no cue-card soap opera, and they were being handed a new script in the middle of shooting a special? Live, no less.
But a thoroughbred is a thoroughbred even when the rest has gone to rot. The composure drilled into her by a distinguished house had not gone anywhere, and Tsubasa gathered herself at once.
She took the single page a staff member held out and began to read.
"'Reflecting upon oneself is, of course, a difficult thing. There are always parts one lets pass without thinking, or knowingly waves through. That is precisely why one must sometimes look with another's eyes. Therefore, from this point forward'... eh?"
The composure did not last.
"Hm? What's wrong, Tsubasa-chan?"
"It says... 'Therefore, from this point forward, we will be holding an exposé segment, conducted by our special guests...?'"
"W-wait a moment. Excuse me?!"
"In other words... a guest corresponding to whoever the roulette lands on will reveal something. That appears to be the shape of it..."
"Hah?! Hold on, what is production even doing?! Wai— there's actually a roulette on the screen."
The situation changed before anyone could get a grip on the confusion. A roulette wheel appeared on the broadcast in an instant, and just as quickly it began to spin.
Each slot bore the name of a Gen 2 member... and before long the wheel stopped on Tsubasa's.
"An exposé? Special guests? What are they trying to pull?"
"If the note is to be believed, the voices will be modulated to protect the guests' identities... which suggests it is probably someone we know..."
For the moment, that was as far as anyone could guess. A fresh scratch of microphone noise cut into their ears. The call with this so-called guest had evidently connected.
"They say the voice is modulated, so we won't even be able to tell who's come on, or what they're about to—"
"...You really can't tell who it is? Pretty sure I already know."
"Why are you the one coming through, Chi— no. Dame Maid."
"Blech. They ran a voice filter and I can still smell the liquor through the speakers. Somebody drag that woman out of there!"
It was a vibe that simply did not exist unless a person was spectacularly drunk. From those few slurred words alone, everyone present had identified the voice on the other end of the call.
Momomomo Chisa. Bodyguard and attendant to Tsubasa—to Hyakurenno Yuri.
"No. Kindly refrain from lies so transparent that even a fool could see through them. And if this is you sober, that is dangerous in an entirely different way."
"By what conceivable application of rounding does that follow. Apologize to every mathematician in the country this instant."
She was also, to a hopeless degree, a drunk.
Tsubasa pressed a hand to her brow with the air of someone long accustomed to this particular drunkard.
"So. This revelation of yours. What, exactly, is it?"
"So that is how you mean to play this, Anathema..."
A story from last year—though the Gen 2 talents had not yet been debuted a full year. In practice, every episode since their debut fell inside the blast radius.
"I have a bad feeling about this already..."
Not even production, surely, had expected the exposé to go that far.
Click. The call cut without warning, and Chisa's voice was gone. Staff, no doubt, responding to the sudden detonation.
Silence settled over the studio.
"......Ha."
"......Just you wait until I get home."
Tsubasa muttered it through clenched teeth, face gone red. The blush was only an expression built into the model, but Tsubasa's usual temperament meant the viewers rarely got to see it, and they drank their fill.
"Huh? The roulette's going again?"
"I imagine it will keep turning until everyone has had a share."
The wheel, Tsubasa's name now absent, spun once more... and stopped on Mary's.
"Eeh, me? Right after a revelation like that?"
"It'll be Sister."
"Yeah. Sister."
"Who else but Sister."
"Could you please not talk about me as if I don't know a single person besides Sister?!"
At her genmates declaring the secret guest a settled fact, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, she had no choice but to snap.
"Heeh? Mary-oneechan, do you even have a friend who'd show up to something like this?"
"I-I do, okay?"
"Hoh... besides Sister?"
"O-of course I do. I mean... um. Char-chan, or Tsubasa-chan."
"Those are all your genmates."
"And Sister, or... yeah. Sister..."
"Hey. This one has finally attained the realm of cloning Sister."
It was defamation, of course. The kind committed by simply stating the facts.
They were her own words, but some remnant of shame seemed to catch up with Mary; her eyes slid off to the side.
"It is not?! And don't say strange things on purpose when you know perfectly well it isn't, Sister."
That's Shion-san, isn't it! The shout surged all the way up to her throat. Mary, just barely, swallowed it.
"Sister was living with Mary-chan, right? There must be some interesting episode or other?"
She denied part of what Charlotte had said, and then went quiet for a moment, as if she meant to give the question itself some genuine thought.
"Ahh... yeah. She does kind of have that side to her..."
"Ha? Excuse me? I am a charismatic True Ancestor queen! As if I would ever show a feeble face like—"
"......What?"
Mary's face took on the look of someone whose instincts had just sounded an alarm. Once you had set foot in the world of the anomalous, a thing like a hunch was no longer something you could afford to ignore.
"Hnyaa—?!"
Mary floundered, face scarlet. Whether the reaction had caught her interest, Sae smiled a meaningful smile.
"Heh... you really are bold, Mary-oneechan."
"I-I'm not! It's not like that?! You stopped halfway through, so of course it sounds strange!"
"Our sly little Mary-oneechan—what did she get up to in a nice dark corner where nobody was looking—?"
"I-it's not! It really isn't...! Sister-san, say something, make an excuse at least— aah! She hung up?!"
Sister had said her piece, tossed the bomb, and fled. It was deliberate. Of that, Mary was certain.
"A peck! It was only a peck on the cheek!"
"No. That, too, is quite sufficiently teetee material, is it not?"
"No, no. Between friends, that's well within the range of what's possible, isn't it?"
"U-umm? Well, it's not like oneechan is entirely wrong..."
"It was a sight you saw at a girls' school now and then, wasn't it...?"
It wasn't exactly a wrong account. Close female friends could manage that much. On that point, at least, it could be called the orthodox position—setting aside, for the moment, whatever feelings Mary, which is to say Ninomae, actually harbored toward Sister.
The orthodox position, however, does not always carry the day. The spectrum of the genre called yuri is, to begin with, considerably wide.
Even if one insisted it was friendship and not love, that too fell inside yuri's borders. The momentum of the teetee bloc did not flag in the slightest.
No. If anything, now that Mary had confirmed it with her own mouth, they seemed to burn all the hotter.
"S-so... it isn't like that, all right? My dear servants, everyone, please calm yourselves..."
Flustered, Mary tried, belatedly, to settle the chat. It was not merely that she was embarrassed.
Sister—Han Seoyeon—was connected to the broadcast, yes, but in the strict sense she was not a broadcaster. The owner of a broadcast had to be the broadcaster herself, and in this case that meant the Gen 2 members.
Even on Mary's own streams, mentions of Sister were quietly handled with care. Bring her up and the reaction in that moment would be wonderful, of course, but a solo broadcast that leaned on someone else was no sound strategy in the long run.
Stealing the spotlight from the other talents in a group collaboration went without saying.
Production had built the segment, so yielding a certain amount of the focus was within expectations—but only within reason.
If she could, she needed to drag the attention back this way, back onto the members of Anathema. With the mood already this far gone, that was by no means easy.
What was she supposed to do...
"Hmm... now that you mention it. Mary-chan, you're all close with your genmates, aren't you?"
Into the middle of that fretting slipped Serena, finding the gap. The witch, wearing a bewitching smile, caught the lull in the audio and slid neatly into it.
Set aside Ninomae, whose own stretch of it had been extremely brief, and she was effectively the only Gen 2 member with a prior career in internet broadcasting. The seasoned ease of that experience showed.
Chiyo met Ninomae's eyes and smiled with her own, a soft crescent—as if to say she had caught exactly what Mary was worried about, and that the solution could be left to her.
"Then you could give me a kiss too, couldn't you?"
"......Nyeh?"
Or perhaps she had simply spotted a chance to indulge herself, and her eyes had lit up.
"I'm right, aren't I? Or is this all the bond we Gen 2 have between us? Were we nothing but business? If that's how it is, I'd be terribly sad."
"Eh, eeh? No, that's... not it... I mean..."
"This vulgar old lady... she's finally shown her true colors!"
"Hehe. I haven't the faintest idea what you mean. Mary-chan said it herself just now, didn't she? That it was only friendship."
Well. Insofar as it dragged the mood back onto the Gen 2 members, it was more or less a success.
The chat, admittedly, splintered—the SereMea faithful insisting I'm telling you, this ship is valid; the omnivorous teetee bloc giggling anyway, hot enough to start a fire; the faction that didn't entirely follow but cracked open the popcorn anyway, on the grounds that the situation was funny; the SisMea purists wailing huh, we were eating just fine, give us SisMea back; and so on.
Whatever the case, a mood had formed in which Serena's remark could not simply be ignored and stepped over. That was the problem, if there was a problem... except.
"If that is the aim, then the other party need not be Dame Serena, need it?"
The one who produced yet a third option was Amairo Tsubasa.
"If what we mean to prove is the bond between us, then it need not be Serena-chan. Anyone will do. Is that not so?"
"Ugh, coming at me with the correct argument is so unfair!"
"A correct argument, is it... First, Dame Serena, brimming with wicked intent, is removed from the candidates."
Serena grumbled, but there was a faint awkwardness in the exaggerated gloom of her expression. Subtle enough that a model driven by facial tracking could barely render it.
The sulking was entirely an act. No—more likely, the leading-up to this point had been intended from the start.
A woman who was, by her own admission and everyone else's, a lesbian, she would of course be delighted by a kiss from a lovely girl. And yet, precisely because of that, she was the type who took care never to cross the very last line.
Whether the stream was on or not, the frequency varied, but she was someone who fired off dirty jokes without restraint—and tucked inside them, perceptible if you knew to look, was a consideration for other people. A few months of acquaintance had been more than enough to notice.
"......No, wait. Even so, the fact remains that this is heading toward me kissing someone's cheek, doesn't it?"
"That part... hmm. Let us say there is meaning in having secured at least a minimum of choice..."
Pressed on it, that part had not changed. A little more consideration, enough to keep the situation from arising in the first place, would have been welcome... but this portion, she supposed, had to be counted as taking responsibility for the bomb Sister had thrown.
"...The roulette. Let's do it that way. I'll spin it again, and kiss whoever's name comes up."
Mary, after a brief struggle, arrived at that conclusion.
"Heeeh? Oneechan. So you're saying you don't care who it is?"
"Yes. Well. I like all of my Gen 2 genmates, and— no, what are you making me say, you wicked demon...!"
"...From this side, ambushed out of nowhere, I feel like I'm the one who ought to be asking what you're talking about."
A slightly ridiculous scene, speaker and listener alike flushing and turning their faces away. The viewers watching were ready to strike up a festival... and in truth, the staging had been calculated rather carefully.
To choose someone is to not choose someone else.
If the male lead of a harem series said a thing like this after being confessed to by several people at once, he would be a self-justifying piece of garbage. From the position of someone who made a living selling yuri, though, the honest wish was to avoid locking any single ship in place.
And while she was at it, an appeal along the lines of I really do like all of you would draw the mood in a nicely teetee direction.
Fortunately, Sae had played along.
Mary looked, in turn, at the roulette wheeling around inside the broadcast window and at the chat racing upward in a flood of Superchats. The messages themselves were too fast to follow by eye, but a great many of them were surely prayers.
Eeh. The possibility of an official cheek kiss for the ship you're stanning. Of course the reaction isn't going to be bad.
If a thing could not be avoided, then sell it at the highest price you can. Steer it so that even a little more comes back as profit.
Not that she had left the whole of it to luck. Ninomae was—at least in her own estimation—quietly on the calculating side.
To begin with, two people had refused to be chosen. Off-camera, Serena and Sae had both signaled as much with a wave of the hand.
The former, as already noted, was the sort who held back past a certain degree of skinship precisely because of her own inclinations. The latter, though Mary couldn't be sure, was probably something along the lines of feeling bad about inserting herself among the younger ones.
Which left two... and the young lady of the Hyakurenno house, Tsubasa, was honestly too much of a burden to dare lay a hand on that jade-like person. So the practical choice was only one.
They called her the prince of the girls' academy. The decision included, in some small part, the private judgment that she might be used to this sort of thing.
Having settled that, Mary spun the roulette.
"...Oh. It's me."
When it came to rigging probability inside a digital space, there was, after all, an apostle of the CharMea faith whom no one could surpass.
"Char-chan... is it. Yeah. The roulette picked you, so I suppose it can't be helped..."
With that, Ninomae rose carefully from her seat. Slipping outside the camera's tracking range, her avatar froze at a tilt.
"I'm only doing this because of the roulette, all right? Don't get the wrong idea, you stupid wolf."
"Mmm— that so. Yeah. Sure."
Ninomae came around behind Charlotte's chair—behind Tsunashi Tenka's—and set a light hand on the backrest. Tenka glanced over her shoulder, then, as if even she found this a little embarrassing, put her gaze back where it had been.
A fact only now coming to light: the nape of Tenka's neck had flushed a faint red.
"......"
"......"
In the quiet, Ninomae drew one breath, then moved. Loud enough for the microphone to catch it cleanly—a distinct, audible chu.
"Wow. I didn't think the chat could get any faster than this. I can't even read it anymore."
"More to the point, Dame Charlotte. Going by the rumors alone, I had expected you to be accustomed to this sort of thing, and yet you are surprisingly shy."
"Mmm, well... ahaha. Still, I don't think anyone's ever come at me quite like this."
"So Mary-oneechan is the first?"
"...That's what it amounts to."
VTubers and viewers alike had their attention wholly on Charlotte. Mary did not miss the moment. She slipped away from her place.
Not, however, straight back to her own seat...
"......Huh? Mary-chan. When did you get over he—"
"Shh. This is thanks, for looking out for me just now."
"?"
Serena noticed Ninomae's approach a beat too late and looked back, but Ninomae stopped her. For a moment, caught in a situation she had not accounted for, she was simply elsewhere.
—Chu.
"Hyah?!"
"Ah, if you react out loud like that... Mmm. Was I too late?"
Hearing a cute yelp she had not expected, Ninomae scratched at her cheek. She had thought Serena would be pleased, and meant to give her a gift in secret from the viewers, something with her usual gratitude folded into it...
Whether the public knew or not, the level of embarrassment was simply different. Turning her eyes as far as she could from the torrent of chat, Ninomae scurried back to her own seat.
"Ah, right. That was the segment. Sorry, Tama-chan."