The Hololive EN building stood pristine and whole once again, its walls bearing no trace of the apocalyptic battle that had taken place exactly one week ago. The repair work had been nothing short of miraculous, accomplished in record time thanks to the legendary efficiency of Kaela Kovalskia and Moona Hoshinova from the ID branch. They had arrived the morning after the incident, taken one look at the devastation, sighed in perfect unison, and gotten to work.
Kaela had reconstructed the entire structural framework in three days, working around the clock without sleep, food, or apparent need for basic human functions. Moona had handled all the magical and technical aspects, somehow making the building even better than it had been before. When asked how they'd done it so quickly, Kaela had simply responded with "Efficiency," and Moona had added "Also, we're used to this," which raised several concerning questions that nobody really wanted answers to.
Life had returned to normal—or at least, Hololive's version of normal. The various members had gone back to their respective routines, schedules, and only occasionally apocalyptic shenanigans. Myth was doing Myth things, Advent was planning their next big collab, Justice was recovering from their shopping stream trauma, and Council was... well, Council was missing a member.
Mumei had been gone for a week.
The note on the door still read "GONE FISHING :D" in her cheerful handwriting, and nobody had thought much of it at first. Mumei did things on her own timeline. She was Civilization itself, after all—she operated on scales that mere mortals couldn't quite grasp. A week-long fishing trip was perfectly normal for her.
What wasn't normal was what happened on the eighth day.
It started with Kronii, who was walking through the entrance hall while checking her phone, probably reading comments from her latest stream. She'd made peace with coming back from her tropical vacation and was ready to resume her duties as the Warden of Time. Fauna was beside her, the druid having finally recovered from her wilted state, her leaves once again vibrant and healthy.
"I'm just saying," Fauna was explaining, "that if we're going to have another big collab, we should establish some ground rules about property destruction."
"Rules?" Kronii replied, not looking up from her phone. "Fauna, you sweet summer child. Rules are just suggestions when half our members can summon giant mechs."
"Well, we should at least try—"
Kronii stopped walking so abruptly that Fauna bumped into her.
"Kronii? What's—"
"Do you hear that?"
Fauna paused, tilting her head. From outside, there was a sound. A scraping sound. Like something massive being dragged across pavement. And underneath it, the unmistakable sound of ocean waves.
"Why do I hear ocean waves?" Fauna asked slowly. "We're nowhere near the ocean."
They exchanged glances and moved quickly toward the entrance doors. Kronii reached them first, her hand on the handle, but before she could open them, a cheerful voice called from outside.
"I'M BACK!"
Kronii opened the door.
Then she stopped moving entirely, her time-manipulating brain trying desperately to process what she was seeing.
Fauna peered around her, and her jaw dropped.
"Mumei?" Kronii's voice was strangled. "What... what is..."
Behind them, Bae came bounding down the hallway, having heard Mumei's voice. "Oh thank god, Mumei's back! I was starting to worry she'd—HOLY SHIT."
The commotion drew more members. Sana floated down from upstairs, still looking a bit sleepy. Ina emerged from the kitchen with a sandwich. Gura and Ame came from the gaming room, controllers still in hand. One by one, more members gathered at the door—Kiara, Nerissa, Bijou, Shiori, the Justice girls, IRyS—all of them stopping dead when they saw what was outside.
Parked in front of the Hololive EN building, taking up the entire street and part of the neighboring block, was the RMS Titanic.
Not a model. Not a replica. The actual, genuine, historically-sunken Titanic, somehow raised from its watery grave and repurposed as a fishing vessel. Its hull, once white and pristine, was now covered in rust, barnacles, and what appeared to be several layers of improvised patches made from various materials. But it was floating—somehow—in what could only be described as a massive pool of seawater that had no business existing in the middle of their parking lot.
And on the deck of the Titanic, waving cheerfully, was Nanashi Mumei.
She looked exactly as she always did—brown hair, owl-like features, that sweet innocent smile—except for the fact that she was covered head to toe in dried blood, bits of scales, and what appeared to be kraken ink. Her usual outfit was barely recognizable under the layers of oceanic carnage coating it.
But that wasn't the most shocking part.
Arranged on the deck of the Titanic, like some kind of twisted maritime trophy collection, were the corpses of:
Four megalodons, each one easily the size of a bus, their massive jaws frozen open to display rows of serrated teeth.
Eight krakens, their tentacles sprawled across the deck in a tangle of suckers and hooks that made everyone's skin crawl.
Three leviathans—biblical sea monsters that shouldn't have even existed—each one large enough that they had to be partially coiled to fit on the deck.
And what appeared to be approximately four hundred piranhas, arranged in piranha fillets like someone had been organizing their fishing haul.
"Mumei," Fauna said faintly, "what the fuck?"
"Fauna never curses," Gura whispered to Ame. "This is bad."
"I went fishing!" Mumei called down cheerfully, as if this explained everything. "It was super fun! A little challenging, but I got a really good haul!"
The Council members stood frozen in the doorway. Kronii's eye was twitching. Fauna's leaves were beginning to wilt again, this time from pure psychological stress. Bae's mouth was hanging open, though there was a distinct gleam in her eye as she stared at the massive pile of aquatic creatures. Sana had floated backward slightly, her usually calm expression replaced with something approaching existential horror.
"That's..." Sana started, "That's the Titanic. The actual Titanic."
"I know, right?" Mumei beamed. "I found it while I was out there! It made a great boat after I fixed it up a bit."
"FIXED IT UP A BIT?!" Kiara shrieked from behind them. "MUMEI, THAT SHIP HAS BEEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN FOR OVER A HUNDRED YEARS!"
"Well yeah," Mumei said, as if this was obvious. "That's why it needed fixing. But it's fine now! See?" She stomped on the deck, which made an ominous creaking sound that suggested it was very much not fine.
"Mumei," Kronii said, her voice carefully controlled in the way that suggested she was very close to having an aneurysm, "how did you... why did you... what..."
The Warden of Time, who had seen countless timelines and infinite possibilities, apparently couldn't form a complete sentence.
"How did you even get it here?" IRyS called out, her wings manifesting slightly as if her body was preparing for another crisis. "We're nowhere near the ocean!"
"Oh, I rowed it!" Mumei said brightly.
"You ROWED the TITANIC?" Bijou's voice cracked on the last word.
"Yup! Took about four days. My arms are super tired." Mumei demonstrated by rotating her shoulders. "But it was worth it! Look at all these fish!"
"Those aren't fish, Mumei," Ina said quietly, her tentacles starting to manifest as her eldritch nature reacted to the sheer wrongness of the situation. "Those are prehistoric apex predators and mythological sea monsters."
"Potato, potahto!" Mumei replied cheerfully.
Cecilia had to sit down on the ground. She'd walked over to see what the commotion was about, still holding her morning tea, and the shock had made her legs give out. Gigi was standing next to her, plushies forgotten, just staring. Raora had her phone out and was taking pictures, muttering in rapid Italian that sounded like a mix of prayers and curses. Elizabeth had stopped humming Agadoo, which was perhaps the most concerning development of all.
"I have so many questions," Nerissa said, her demon nature apparently giving her a higher tolerance for insanity than most. "Starting with: are those megalodons?"
"Yes!" Mumei said proudly. "They were really tough! Fought them for like four hours."
"FOUR HOURS?!" multiple voices shrieked in unison.
"How are you alive?" Shiori asked, her scholarly nature demanding answers. "Megalodons went extinct millions of years ago, but theoretically, one of them could sink a boat with a single bite. Four of them would be..."
"Oh, they definitely tried," Mumei said, nodding. "That's why I had to get creative!"
"Creative," Fauna repeated numbly. "Mumei. Please. Explain. Everything."
Bae suddenly perked up, pushing past Kronii and Fauna to get a better look at the corpses. "Wait, are these... are these still fresh? Like, could we eat them?"
"BAE!" Fauna shrieked.
"What? I'm just saying, that's a lot of meat! We could feed the entire company for months! Maybe years!" Bae's chaos energy was clearly overriding her sense of normalcy, if she'd ever had one.
"We are NOT eating the Mumei's eldritch fishing haul!" Kronii snapped.
"Why not?" Mumei called down. "I caught them specifically to bring back! Otherwise, I would've just left them in the ocean."
"You caught four megalodons, eight krakens, three leviathans, and four hundred piranhas... on purpose... to bring home and eat?" Gura's voice was getting higher with each word. As a shark herself, she seemed particularly disturbed by the megalodon corpses.
"Well, yeah!" Mumei started making her way to the edge of the Titanic's deck. "I figured we could have a big cookout! Oh, and I need help bringing them inside. They're kind of heavy."
"KIND OF HEAVY?!" Ame wheezed. "MUMEI, THOSE ARE BUILDING-SIZED SEA MONSTERS!"
"That's why I need help!" Mumei said reasonably. She reached the railing and casually vaulted over it, dropping three stories to land on the ground with perfect grace. The landing created a small crater in the pavement.
Up close, the true extent of the carnage covering her became apparent. Her hair was matted with blood and seawater. Her clothes were torn in multiple places, revealing scratches and what looked like bite marks that had somehow already healed. There were scales embedded in her sleeves, and one of her shoes appeared to be made from shark skin because her original shoe had apparently been destroyed.
"Mumei," Sana said softly, floating down to her level, "what happened out there?"
Mumei's innocent smile widened. "Oh, it's actually a really cool story! Want to hear it?"
"I both do and don't," Gura admitted.
"I'll tell you anyway!" Mumei said cheerfully. She walked toward the entrance, tracking bloody seawater footprints across the pristine floor that Kaela and Moona had just finished repairing. "So, it started after I left the building..."
FLASHBACK
The scene shifted, Mumei's voice narrating as the memory played out like a movie.
The ocean stretched endlessly in all directions, dark waters churning under a sky choked with storm clouds. Lightning crackled across the heavens, illuminating the torrential rain that fell in sheets so thick it was almost impossible to see more than a few feet ahead.
In the middle of this chaos, a medium-sized fishing boat bobbed like a cork, and standing at its helm was Mumei.
She was wearing a full rain slicker set—bright yellow jacket and pants that stood out against the dark waters. In one hand, she held a fishing rod that looked far too normal for what was about to happen. In her other hand, she gripped a harpoon that gleamed wickedly even in the dim storm light.
"So I'd been out here for about six hours," Mumei's narration continued, "and I hadn't caught anything yet. I was starting to think I'd gone to the wrong spot. But then..."
The water around the boat began to churn more violently. Not from the storm—this was different. This was deliberate.
Massive shapes moved beneath the surface, circling, their dorsal fins cutting through the waves like knives through butter.
"That's when they showed up," Mumei said, and there was actually excitement in her voice.
Four megalodons breached the surface simultaneously, their massive bodies launching into the air in a display of predatory coordination. Each one was easily forty feet long, their jaws capable of swallowing a car whole. Their eyes, dark and ancient, fixed on Mumei with the hunger of apex predators that had known no natural enemies.
They crashed back into the water, creating waves that nearly capsized Mumei's boat.
"COME ON THEN!" Mumei's past self screamed into the storm, and her voice carried a war cry that seemed impossible from such a small, seemingly innocent girl. "LET'S DANCE!"
The first megalodon lunged at the boat, jaws open wide enough to engulf the entire stern. Mumei didn't hesitate. She planted her fishing rod in a holder on the deck, gripped her harpoon in both hands, and dove straight at the creature.
Not away from it. At it.
The watchers back in the present gasped collectively.
Mumei swam through the water with inhuman speed, her body cutting through the waves like she'd been born in them. The megalodon's jaws snapped shut on empty water as Mumei twisted around its head, her harpoon flashing as she drove it into the creature's eye.
The megalodon thrashed, its tail whipping the ocean into a frenzy. Mumei held on, one hand gripping the embedded harpoon while her other hand glowed with an ominous light.
"That's when I used my Civilization Beam!" Mumei's narration explained cheerfully. "It's really useful for fishing!"
A beam of pure bureaucratic energy shot from Mumei's palm directly into the megalodon's wound. The effect was immediate and horrifying. The mighty predator's flesh began to wither, aging centuries in seconds. Taxes, paperwork, red tape, and the slow grinding death of bureaucracy made manifest as a weapon.
The megalodon's struggles weakened, then stopped. Its ancient body, which had survived millions of years of evolution, couldn't survive the concentrated essence of civilization's most soul-crushing invention.
One down.
But the other three had learned from their companion's mistake. They didn't attack head-on. Instead, they circled, creating a whirlpool that dragged Mumei and her boat toward the center.
"This part was tricky," Mumei's narration admitted. "The whirlpool was making it hard to aim."
The boat spun wildly, Mumei clinging to the mast as water poured over the sides. The three remaining megalodons moved in perfect synchronization, tightening their circle, preparing for a coordinated strike.
Mumei's eyes narrowed. She released the mast, grabbed her fishing rod, and cast the line directly into the whirlpool's center.
The bait she'd been using wasn't visible, but whatever it was, it worked. The megalodons' hunting instincts overrode their caution. All three lunged for the center point simultaneously.
And became tangled in each other.
"Gotcha!" Mumei shouted. She released the fishing rod, gripped her harpoon, and dove into the water again.
What followed was a battle that defied description. Mumei swam between the tangled megalodons, her harpoon flashing as she struck at joints, eyes, and gills. When the harpoon wasn't enough, she used her fists, her feet, anything she could. The water turned red with blood—both the sharks' and her own, from where teeth and scales had torn her skin.
She swam inside one megalodon's mouth as it tried to eat her, firing her Civilization Beam from inside its head. She used another's tail as a springboard to launch herself at the third, driving her harpoon through its brain. She was screaming the entire time—war cries that belonged to ancient battlefields, to the rise and fall of empires, to every conflict that civilization had ever known.
"This went on for about four hours," Mumei's narration continued casually. "They were pretty tough! Good fighters. I respected them."
Finally, all four megalodons floated motionless in the water. Mumei treaded water beside them, panting, covered in blood and wounds that were already beginning to heal thanks to her nature as an immortal concept.
"Right, so then I had to get them on the boat," she explained. "This was actually the hardest part."
The scene showed Mumei, somehow, using her harpoon and fishing line to create a complex pulley system. She tied it to her boat, then dove repeatedly to attach lines to the megalodons. Then, with strength that should have been impossible for her size, she began to pull.
And pull.
And pull.
It took two hours to get all four megalodons secured to her boat. By the time she was done, the boat was riding dangerously low in the water, and Mumei was sprawled on the deck, completely exhausted.
"I was going to take a break," Mumei's narration said, "but then..."
The water around the boat began to bubble. Massive tentacles, each one thick as a tree trunk, emerged from the depths. Eight of them. Sixteen eyes on stalked heads rose from the water, fixing on Mumei and her cargo with predatory intelligence.
Krakens. Eight of them.
"Oh come on!" Past-Mumei shouted at the sky. "I just finished!"
The krakens ignored her complaints. Their tentacles shot toward the boat, wrapping around the megalodon corpses, trying to drag them—and the boat—into the depths.
"So I did what any reasonable person would do," Mumei's narration continued.
Past-Mumei stood up, grabbed one of the dead megalodons, and started harvesting its teeth. With a speed that suggested she'd done this before, she extracted tooth after tooth, each one the size of a human hand, serrated and razor-sharp.
"I made four hundred and fifty makeshift javelins," Mumei explained. "It took about twenty minutes."
The scene fast-forwarded, showing Mumei working with manic efficiency while the krakens tried to steal her catch. She fashioned handles from pieces of her boat's railing, creating spears. She modified her harpoon to rapid-fire. She even fashioned a quiver from megalodon skin.
Then she went to war.
Mumei launched herself into the water again, but this time she was armed. She swam between the krakens' tentacles like a dolphin, her improvised spears flying true. Each throw hit a kraken eye with perfect accuracy. When she ran out of throwing spears, she loaded them into her modified harpoon and fired them like a machine gun.
The krakens fought back. Tentacles wrapped around her, squeezing, trying to crush her bones. She fired her Civilization Beam, withering the flesh enough to break free. She dove deep, striking at the krakens' heads directly. She used their own tentacles against them, tying them in knots, making them tangle with each other.
"This fight took about seven hours," Mumei's narration said. "Krakens are smarter than megalodons. They learned from my tactics. But I learned from theirs too."
The battle was more brutal than the first. Mumei's improvised weapons broke. Her harpoon shattered. She was reduced to using her bare hands and her Civilization Beam, grappling with creatures ten times her size in the dark depths of the ocean.
But one by one, the krakens fell. Their massive bodies floated to the surface, joining the megalodons.
Past-Mumei emerged from the water for what she hoped was the last time, pulling herself onto her boat which was now so overloaded it was barely staying afloat. She was bleeding from dozens of wounds, her rain slicker was gone, and she looked half-dead.
"I was going to rest," Mumei's narration said, and there was actual annoyance in her voice now. "I was going to take a nice long nap. But then..."
The water went still. Too still.
Three enormous heads rose from the depths, each one large enough to swallow Mumei's boat whole. Leviathans—serpentine bodies covered in armor-like scales, eyes that glowed with ancient malevolence, and jaws full of teeth that put the megalodons to shame.
They smelled the blood. They saw the corpses. And they wanted them.
"ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!" Past-Mumei screamed.
The leviathans attacked simultaneously. Past-Mumei dove back into the water—she didn't have a choice, they'd destroyed what remained of her boat with their first strike.
"So this is where I got creative," Mumei's narration explained. "I used the dead krakens' tentacles as weapons."
The scene showed Mumei swimming with a kraken tentacle wrapped around her torso like a scarf. When a leviathan struck, she dodged and wrapped the tentacle around its jaws, binding them shut. She used another tentacle as a rope, lassoing leviathan heads and pulling them into each other.
She fired her Civilization Beam continuously, withering whatever she could reach. When one leviathan tried to swallow her whole, she let it—then fired her beam from inside its throat until it gagged her back up.
The fight was chaos. Three leviathans against one small girl, in the middle of the ocean, during a storm that seemed determined to kill anything that survived the monsters.
"This one only took about five hours," Mumei said. "I was getting better at it."
Finally, mercifully, the third leviathan's body went limp and began to sink. Past-Mumei grabbed onto it, using the last of her strength to drag it back to the surface where the other corpses floated.
She was done. Exhausted. Wounded. But victorious.
Or so she thought.
The water around her began to bubble and froth. Small shapes, thousands of them, darted through the blood-filled water.
Piranhas.
"Four hundred piranhas," Mumei's narration said flatly. "Because apparently, the ocean hates me."
The piranhas swarmed the corpses—and Mumei. They stripped away what remained of her boat in minutes, the wooden planks disappearing into the frenzy of teeth. Past-Mumei screamed, not in fear, but in pure frustration.
She climbed onto one of the dead megalodons, using it as a platform. When piranhas came close, she kicked them away. When that wasn't enough, she started using pieces of kraken tentacle as whips, batting piranhas out of the air like baseballs.
But there were too many. For every ten she killed, twenty more took their place.
"So I did the only thing I could think of," Mumei's narration said. "I used the corpses as shields and just waited them out. Piranhas eat fast but they also get full fast."
The scene showed Past-Mumei hiding in a megalodon's mouth while piranhas stripped flesh from the outside. She sat there for hours, occasionally firing her Civilization Beam at particularly persistent fish, until finally, the frenzy died down.
When she emerged, the ocean was calm again. The storm had passed. Dawn was breaking.
And Past-Mumei was standing on a pile of dead sea monsters with no boat and no way to get home.
"So that was a problem," Mumei's narration admitted. "I'd caught all this great food but couldn't bring it back. I was thinking about just swimming and dragging it behind me, but then I noticed something floating nearby."
An iceberg drifted past. And on its side, in faded red paint, barely visible, were the words: "R.M.S."
"I remembered reading about the Titanic being in this area," Mumei explained. "And I thought, 'Hey, that's a boat!' So I dove down to get it."
The scene showed Past-Mumei diving deep, deeper than any human could survive. The pressure should have crushed her. The cold should have killed her. But she was Civilization—she'd survived worse than the ocean floor.
And there it was. The Titanic, split in two, resting on the ocean floor where it had lain for over a century.
Past-Mumei swam around it, inspecting it with the critical eye of someone who needed it to float. Then she started working.
"I plugged the holes with pieces of kraken tentacle," Mumei explained. "I used leviathan scales to patch the big tears. I cleared out all the water. It took about a day, but I got it working!"
The scene showed an absolutely absurd sight: Mumei, single-handedly raising the Titanic from the ocean floor. She couldn't carry it—even she had limits—so instead, she created pockets of air underneath it, using pieces of the dead monsters to seal them. Slowly, impossibly, the legendary ship began to rise.
When it finally broke the surface, Past-Mumei climbed aboard and immediately set about loading her catch onto the deck. Four megalodons. Eight krakens. Three leviathans. Four hundred piranhas, which she'd collected into neat piles.
"Then I just needed to get home," Mumei said. "But the engine was broken and I didn't know how to fix it. So I made a rower!"
The scene showed Mumei fashioning a massive oar from pieces of the ship's metal railings. She attached it to the stern, stood at the back of the Titanic, and started rowing.
And rowing.
And rowing.
For four days straight, Mumei manually rowed the Titanic across the ocean, through calm seas and rough waters, navigating by the stars and her innate sense of direction. She didn't sleep. She didn't eat. She just rowed, one stroke at a time, pulling the legendary ship across hundreds of miles of ocean.
"And then I got here!" Mumei's narration concluded cheerfully. "Oh, and I had to create the pool of seawater in the parking lot because the Titanic won't float without water. But that was easy compared to everything else!"
END FLASHBACK
The members of Hololive EN stood in stunned silence as Mumei's flashback concluded. She was still smiling, wiping sweat from her brow with a blood-stained sleeve.
"And that's how fishing went!" Mumei said brightly. "Pretty good trip, right?"
Kronii slowly raised her hand, then lowered it, then raised it again. "I... have notes. So many notes. Starting with: HOW ARE YOU ALIVE?"
"Oh, I'm really hard to kill," Mumei replied casually. "Civilization has survived a lot worse than sea monsters."
"You fought LEVIATHANS," Fauna said, her voice strangled. "Biblical sea monsters. PLURAL."
"They were pretty tough," Mumei agreed. "But not as tough as the krakens. Those guys were smart."
"You ROWED the TITANIC for FOUR DAYS," Sana added, her cosmic perspective apparently unable to process this level of absurdity.
"My arms are super sore!" Mumei demonstrated by rotating her shoulders again. "But it was totally worth it. Now we have lots of food!"
Bae's eyes were gleaming. "Mumei. Mumei, listen to me very carefully. Are you saying we can eat all of that?"
"Yes!" Mumei beamed. "That's why I brought it! I figured we could have a big cookout, invite everyone, make it a party!"
"WE ARE NOT HAVING A COOKOUT WITH EXTINCT APEX PREDATORS!" Fauna shrieked.
"Why not?" Bae and Mumei said in perfect unison.
"BECAUSE IT'S INSANE!" Kiara added her voice to Fauna's.
"But they're already dead," Mumei pointed out reasonably. "It would be wasteful not to eat them."
"She's got a point," Gura muttered. As a shark, she understood the logic of not wasting a catch.
"DO NOT ENCOURAGE HER!" Ame grabbed Gura's shoulder and shook her.
"I'm just saying, logically—"
"THERE IS NO LOGIC IN THIS SITUATION!"
Ina had been quiet throughout the entire explanation, but now she spoke up, her voice carrying that otherworldly quality it got when she was channeling her eldritch nature. "Mumei. The Civilization Beam you used. That's... that's your conceptual power as Civilization, isn't it? You weaponized bureaucracy and taxes."
"Yup!" Mumei said proudly. "It's really effective! Nothing survives prolonged exposure to tax forms."
"That's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard," Shiori said, her novelist brain already working on a horror story about weaponized paperwork.
"It's also brilliant," Ina admitted grudgingly. "Horrifying, but brilliant."
Cecilia had finally recovered enough to stand up, though she was using Gigi as a support. "Mumei, darling, I say this with all the love in my heart: you are absolutely insane."
"Thank you!" Mumei replied, completely missing the point.
"That wasn't a compliment!" Cecilia cried.
"Okay, okay, everyone calm down," Raora said, trying to be the voice of reason despite having spent the entire flashback photographing everything. "Let's think about this logically. Mumei caught a lot of... seafood. Yes, it's unconventional seafood. Yes, she brought it back on a historical shipwreck. But the important thing is—"
"Whether we can eat it?" Bae finished hopefully.
"I was going to say 'whether Mumei is injured,' but sure, let's go with yours," Raora finished dryly.
"I'm fine!" Mumei said. "All healed up! Civilization recovers quickly."
"What about mentally?" Ame asked. "Are you traumatized? Do you need therapy? Should we call someone?"
"Nope! It was fun!" Mumei's smile was genuine and completely unhinged. "I can't wait to go fishing again!"
"PLEASE DON'T," multiple voices chorused.
"Guys, guys," Bijou spoke up, pushing her way to the front of the crowd. "I think we're all missing the real question here."
"Which is?" Kronii asked warily.
"How do we preserve four megalodons, eight krakens, three leviathans, and four hundred piranhas?" Bijou gestured to the Titanic. "That's a LOT of meat. We need, like, industrial-sized freezers. Multiple ones. Actually, do we even have space for this?"
There was a long pause as everyone processed this extremely practical question.
"...huh," Gura said. "She's right. Where are we going to put all of this?"
"The storage room?" IRyS suggested weakly.
"Our storage room is not designed for sea monsters," Nerissa pointed out.
"We could call Kaela and Moona again?" Elizabeth offered, having apparently recovered from her shock enough to contribute. "They fixed the building. Maybe they can build us a... a monster meat freezer?"
"I am NOT explaining this to Kaela," Kronii said firmly. "Last time she looked at me like I was personally responsible for everyone's chaos. I'm not doing that again."
"But someone has to explain it to management," Fauna said weakly. "Right? We can't just... not tell them that Mumei brought the Titanic back and parked it in front of the building?"
Everyone turned to look at the Titanic, which was still floating in its impossible pool of seawater, corpses arranged on the deck like the world's most disturbing art installation.
"Maybe they won't notice?" Gigi suggested without any real hope.
"IT'S THE TITANIC!" Ame shrieked. "IT'S ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS SHIPS IN HISTORY! IT'S THE SIZE OF A CITY BLOCK! PEOPLE ARE GOING TO NOTICE!"
"She's got a point," Shiori agreed.
Mumei seemed completely unbothered by all of this. "So can someone help me bring them inside? The sun's going to make them spoil if we leave them out too long. Oh, and we should probably drain the pool eventually. And figure out what to do with the Titanic. Maybe we could keep it? It makes a good boat!"
"NO!" Everyone shouted in unison.
"We are not keeping the Titanic!" Kronii added.
"Why not?" Mumei pouted. "I worked hard to raise it!"
"BECAUSE IT'S A HISTORICAL ARTIFACT AND ALSO IT'S HUGE!" Fauna's voice was reaching pitches that suggested her sanity was hanging by a thread.
"Plus there are definitely ghosts on it," Ina added. "I can feel them. A lot of them. They're confused about why they're on the surface again."
"Oh, the ghosts are nice!" Mumei said cheerfully. "I talked to them during the rowing. They gave me directions! Very helpful ghosts."
"THE GHOSTS ARE REAL?!" Shiori's eyes lit up. As a horror enthusiast, this was apparently the most exciting part of the entire story for her.
"Oh yeah, super real. Want to meet them?" Mumei started to turn toward the Titanic.
"NO!" most people shouted, while Shiori shouted "YES!"
"You know what?" Bae said suddenly, clapping her hands together. "I'm making an executive decision as the one member of Council who isn't having a breakdown. We're accepting the fish. All of it. We're going to figure out the logistics, we're going to preserve it properly, and we're going to have the most insane cookout in Hololive history."
"BAE—" Fauna started.
"Nope, decision made. Mumei went fishing and caught dinner for everyone. We're not going to waste her hard work just because it came with a side of historical maritime resurrection and eldritch fishing techniques."
"I love you, Bae," Mumei said sincerely.
"I know," Bae replied. "Now everyone who's not having a mental breakdown, come help me organize this. Everyone who IS having a mental breakdown, go sit with Calli."
"I'm not having a breakdown," Calli called from somewhere inside the building, where she'd apparently fled to avoid this entire situation. "I'm just lying on the floor!"
"That's basically the same thing!" Ame called back.
As the members began to reluctantly organize themselves into work groups—some to deal with the corpses, some to contact Kaela and Moona, some to figure out how to explain this to management, and some to just sit down and process the trauma—Mumei stood in the center of it all, smiling her innocent smile.
"I'm glad everyone likes my fishing trip!" she said to no one in particular.
From the Titanic, a ghostly voice called out: "WE'RE STILL CONFUSED ABOUT WHY WE'RE HERE!"
"Just go with it!" Mumei called back cheerfully.
And thus began the Great Hololive Seafood Processing Incident of 2025, which would go down in company history as the second-most insane thing to happen that month.
The first was still the lobby battle.
But this was a close second.