That sure was enough surprises for one day. Not only did my little sister draw BL doujinshi, but we were also going to help her sell them at Comiket. The most shocking thing, however, was that she’d let me come and even given me one of her precious circle tickets. I knew how much Kisaki hated me. Had Kokoro not been there, none of this would have happened. If it wasn’t for her, Kisaki and I probably wouldn’t have even talked much to begin with. After all, we only used to speak to each other when strictly necessary...
＊ ＊ ＊
Later that morning, Kisaki left the house to meet up with some friends that she hadn’t seen in a while. She said she’d also buy the things she needed for Comiket on her way back and explained—to Kokoro, not to me—that she’d already turned in the doujinshi she would be selling at the event. My sister now only needed to prepare the booth and the free pamphlets she wanted to hand out there.
Kokoro was sitting on the couch looking at her phone while I washed the dishes left from breakfast.
“Oh, oh! Minami’s gonna be at Comiket too! She just replied to me on LINE. It’s not gonna be for work either; she said she just wants to buy some books.”
The mention of Elena’s name took me by surprise and left me dumbfounded for a second.
“I, like, told her your sister’s gonna be there with a booth and that the two of us get to help her. Telling Minami was fine, right?”
“Huh?! O-Oh, sure. What did she say back?”
“She said to tell her when we know where our booth will be so she can come visit!”
“I-I see...”
This was going to be my first time seeing Elena since that incident. Since she said that she’d come despite knowing that I’d be there, I’d possibly just been worrying too much. Maybe she didn’t even consider what had happened to be that much of an incident at all.
“By the way, did you hear? Minami’s actually, like, doing some awesome stuff in secret!” Kokoro said.
Awesome stuff? Voice acting is awesome enough, but... could this be about her voicing Emily Saionji?
“I might know what you mean...” I said. “But I’m not exactly sure which part you’re talking about.” I tried to keep my answer as generic as possible. Although the truth about Elena’s secret career had already been leaked online, I didn’t know whether it’d be fine for me to tell Kokoro about it.
I’d finished washing the dishes, so I joined Kokoro in the living room and took a seat in front of her.
“You mean the VTuber thing, don’t you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she replied. “So you already knew about it too, huh? It’s literally everywhere online at the minute.”
So she did find out... The leak has already spread across a ton of different sites, so it was only a matter of time.
“Uh-huh...” I nodded, hoping that she’d assume that I’d also found out about it from the internet.
“I mean, being a voice actress is cool enough, right? But she’s also a super famous VTuber! I’d already heard of Emily Saionji before I found out, and then I tried watching her videos, right? And her voice is just like Minami’s. She’s just as cute as well, and she loves yuri! It’s like Minami’s been made all virtual or something!”
“Yeah, it really is...”
As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one to think that Elena wasn’t just voicing Emily Saionji... Elena was Emily Saionji.
“Oh, apart from that, I meant to ask you about how things went with that cute cosplayer you managed to take pictures of last time!”
“Well...”
I did take pictures and take note of her Twitter handle, but I hadn’t even bothered to follow her. I was still too busy thinking about Elena to care about some random cosplayer.
“Things haven’t gone anywhere, to be honest,” I replied.
“What a total waste! You got the camera and practiced taking pictures and everything!”
She had a point, but I couldn’t bring myself to flirt with other girls while I still didn’t know what Elena really thought.
“Anyway,” I said, remembering that there was still something that I had to ask Kokoro about. “What about you? How’s it going with that guy we saw at WonFes?”
“Hmmm, I haven’t really spoken with him since then. I check his Twitter every day, but I can’t work up the courage to reply to anything, you know?”
“Oh, wait, so you know his Twitter? Then you can see what kind of person he is around other people. Does he give off those same sleazy vibes that Bambi did?”
“Not in the slightest! Literally no sleaziness!”
“Really? A guy that handsome, cosplaying a character so popular with girls... and he isn’t even a bit sleazy?”
After all that had happened with Bambi—creepy, narcissistic, pretty-faced cosplayer Bambi—I was pretty skeptical of all handsome cosplayers, and Kokoro could have used some of that skepticism herself.
“If you don’t believe me, here, see for yourself!” she said, shoving her phone under my nose to show me the profile of the guy in question: Yuya. That was his nickname on Twitter, at least.
The bio, other than stating that he was just a beginner cosplayer, included a list of the characters he cosplayed and series that he liked. His icon was a selfie of him dressed as Toppo from HypMic, the same cosplay we’d seen him wearing at Wonder Festival. He looked just as attractive in his picture as he did in real life.
The dude had less than a hundred follows and a few hundred followers—between this and the fact that his account was only four months old, he probably really was a beginner. His pinned tweet was more of the same: a self-introduction with a couple of cosplay pictures, featuring more Toppo as well as Merlin from FG0.
In general, he mostly tweeted about gacha games and other otaku stuff, his life at university, and his part-time job. Except for the occasional rant about this or that, he didn’t look like a bad guy. More importantly, I could tell that he wasn’t just pretending to be an otaku—he really was one.
What weirded me out a little bit were the tweets about the basketball club he was part of at university. Sport clubs were things that cool people joined.
An otaku and cool? I thought you could only choose to be one of those. There’s no way someone that lucky isn’t a womanizer...
Next, I checked the “Tweets and Replies” tab. I was sure I’d see tons of messages sent out indiscriminately to a bunch of different girls... but I was wrong.
The few accounts that he was replying to regularly all seemed to belong to men. I had to scroll down quite a way before finding a reply he’d sent to a girl. It wasn’t even that interesting of an exchange: the girl was thanking him for letting her take his picture, and he’d simply replied thanking her and saying that he’d followed her account back. That was the end of the conversation.
“He doesn’t look sleazy at all...” I said.
I didn’t know how he acted offline, but from what I could gauge from his Twitter account, he seemed to be a decent human being. Handsome, an otaku, cool, and a decent person? Huh.
“Right?! See, what did I tell you?! He isn’t dodgy at all!” Kokoro grinned.