I’ll Take On The Modern World—And Dominate It—Relying On No One But Myself. - Chapter 10: Kickoff Meeting.

Kickoff Meeting.

“Huh? You’re making it OSS? Isn’t that a waste?” Nitta spoke with genuine surprise.

Kagetaka had invited her out under the pretense of a kickoff meeting, half-expecting a rejection. But to his surprise, she accepted without hesitation.

In this era, it wasn’t common to release program source code publicly. So Nitta’s reaction was only natural.

Hiiragi calmly explained their reasoning for going open source.

“Hmm, I see… That makes sense.”

“Though I’m not sure you’ll find a developer of Nitta’s caliber out there.”

The LMS’s source code, including its documentation, was planned for release in English—making it accessible to developers around the world.

Hiiragi believed that sharing the information would ultimately bring far greater benefits than keeping it closed.

“By the way, how did you two—Nitta and Hiiragi—meet in the first place?”

The three of them had grown quite comfortable talking with each other, helped by their similar (apparent) ages.

(Quite the leap from our first impressions…)

“You know the blogging platform our company runs?”

“Oh yeah, a colleague at Delta uses it.”

By “our company,” Nitta was referring to CyberFusion, where she worked. It was the dawn of the blogging era, and CyberFusion had been quick to jump on the trend.

Kagetaka suddenly recalled that Shiratori had a blog.

He had also heard that Shiratori’s younger sister ran a blog too—and it was wildly popular.

“Did you know Hiiragi built that platform?”

“What!?”

“Wait, you hadn’t told him?”

Nitta shot a sharp glare at Hiiragi, who visibly shrank back.

“I originally developed the blog service and ran it under Kiripro. Later, I sold it to CF.”
Here, “Kiripro” referred to Kirishima Productions, and “CF” was CyberFusion.

“Why was Kiripro operating something you made?”

“I always wondered about that too.”
“Well… that’s a long story for another time.”

According to Hiiragi, the details were too long to get into right now. Kagetaka had a feeling he was being brushed off.

“So Hiiragi came to us as a technical advisor to oversee the migration of the blog platform, but… his first impression was just ugh.”

 “What happened?”

Nitta sounded exasperated, while Kagetaka asked hesitantly.

“He brought Kumari and Shiraya to the internal briefing.”

 “Who?”

 “What? You don’t know? Kumashiro—the top actress—and Shirakawa—the top idol.”

 “Wait, Kumashiro showed up!?”

 “What, you know her too?”

Kagetaka instantly regretted his reaction.

Shirakawa was a member of Paws, a wildly popular idol group—and the most famous among them.

(So he’s connected to actresses and idols now…? I’ll have to dig into this later.)

“The first official users of LMS will be Kiripro’s talent training school. Kumashiro-san is somewhat involved too.”

In reality, Kumashiro’s involvement was minimal, but Hiiragi carefully chose his words to make the story more convincing for Nitta.

“I see… I was only interested in the technical side of things, but the employees were in such a frenzy.”

It was clear that Nitta had little interest in celebrities.

Given that IT engineering was still male-dominated, she may have felt frustrated seeing the excitement over a marketing stunt that clearly appealed to the male demographic.

“Well, no surprise there.”

“We were overwhelmed with applicants.”

“So… why did you apply, Nitta?”

From her demeanor, it didn’t seem like she had any particular attachment to the blogging service.

“W-Well… the technology behind it looked interesting, that’s all!”

Nitta replied, stumbling over her words for some reason.