Feedback!
After wrapping up a brief meeting with PD Oh Seok-ho and finishing the second broadcast PUG had lined up for me, I dragged my wrecked body back to the dorm.
"Go straight up and rest."
"Yes..."
My voice was barely more than a breath. My body was already spent, one step from folding where I stood.
A bed... I want a bed... I'm so tired...
Beep-beep-beep.
I punched in the passcode with trembling fingers and stepped inside. The first thing that greeted me was pitch-black darkness.
Click!
The mood lamp that should have been in my room flicked on out in the living room. Seated at the dining table were the other three members — everyone except me.
"What are you all doing? It's late. Why aren't you in bed?"
"We were waiting for you, Jiwoo."
Me? Why? I have no idea.
I dumped the bags I'd been carrying onto the floor, pulled out the remaining chair, and sat.
"All right. Let's begin."
Lee Yuwol set a heavy mood and turned the lamp so its light fell on me.
What on earth are they trying to do? At this hour I just wanted to get into my room and pass out.
Ah — I can't. I have to wash up first. I'd had makeup done at the shop; if I wanted to keep my skin from breaking out, I had to take it off before I slept.
"Um, I'm exhausted. Do we really have to do this right now? Tomorrow, maybe? Or..."
"No. It has to be tonight. Feedback like this is best delivered right away."
"Feedback?"
While I was still blinking at the word, Tsuki, sitting beside me, raised her hand first. I stayed quiet and waited to hear what she would say.
"Then Tsuki will go first!"
She tapped the tablet on the table and started playing the PUG broadcast Little Boy and I had just finished.
When my face showed up on a TV drama, I could stay stone-faced. That was acting. It wasn't really me. A PUG broadcast, though, might as well have been my raw self. No performance — just me actually playing a game and sending the unfiltered version of myself out to the world.
"Aaaah... s-stop! That's embarrassing! Do it when I'm not here!"
"No. We have to do it now. Like I said, this is feedback."
She'd said that a minute ago too.
Feedback: take the result of what you put in, feed it back in, and make something new. In other words, it was necessary if you wanted to look better next time.
Still... this is way too embarrassing!
My eyes, which had been sliding shut from exhaustion a moment ago, snapped wide open. Were they trying to jolt me awake? If so, it had worked. I was completely up now.
I reached for the tablet. No one stopped me. They just watched in silence. The reason came from Lee Yuwol, sitting across from me.
"Are you sure you're all right with that? If you really don't want to, we won't. But... we've got about seventy days. Are you going to be this shy on our first broadcast too?"
"What... does that even..."
"It's still confidential, but the company is going to monitor us in real time and brief us on what to fix and what not to do."
In short, they were assigning each of us a dedicated manager.
Then what about Kang Ho-yeon?
Yuwol read the question on my face and kept going.
"I think Hoyeon unnie is planning to take the role of our general manager."
"Ah... I never heard any of that, though..."
We were the same team, and I was the only one out of the loop. A little sulkiness crept in. My lower lip pushed out and I folded my arms — a small protest, the picture of a pout.
"Don't puff up like that. Unnie probably just didn't tell you because you're so busy and scattered. She wanted you focused on your work."
"I know that, but..."
I knew how much Kang Ho-yeon cared about me. About all of us. You'd have to be an idiot not to.
I nodded, settling myself. Time to take the feedback.
"All right. So what feedback am I supposed to be getting?"
"First up. Tsuki."
"Okay!"
Tsuki worked the tablet with complete confidence and paused the video in the middle. Wait. This scene.
It was the moment I'd been eliminated for the first time during the match. Without a word, Tsuki hit play.
"Ah... aaaah... I-I'm dead. Why? How?"
"Stop."
Yuwol froze the video, her expression hard.
What? Which part of that had been the problem? My death reaction had been solid, and the viewers hadn't hated it either.
I tilted my head. Yuwol stared straight at me.
"You thought the reaction was good and the response wasn't bad, didn't you."
"Uh... how did you..."
"Of course you did. You were doing a facecam stream. What we're going to be doing isn't facecam. We're VTuber idols. Viewers won't be able to see our faces."
"Ah..."
That was when it clicked. On a cam stream or in drama acting, people could read emotion from a gesture, from the smallest shift in expression. A VTuber couldn't move a face in that kind of detail. You had to react with big, readable motion — and with your voice alone.
"Your voice is good, so it wasn't bad. But you need to put more power into it."
"Got it."
I straightened in my chair and nodded. Yuwol watched me do it.
She's something else. She just came back from a broadcast and she has to be exhausted, but that hunger to learn... I really like that.
A small smile touched her mouth.
Even if the rest of us all fail, as long as Jiwoo is here, we can climb pretty far.
Not that she or the other members planned to sit still. They would work themselves raw and keep changing. But add Jiwoo's talent on top of that — talent enough to make another woman jealous? The impact would be enough to bury every VTuber idol currently standing.
The future unspooled so clearly in her head that she almost drifted.
"Unnie? So is there more feedback?"
"Ah... of course there is. Next is this part."
Tsuki and Jina both typed today's notes into the memo apps on their phones, taking one more step forward.
I'm not sleepy at all. If anything... I want to hear more.
My eyes were shining. Even after I'd taken in every piece of Yuwol's feedback, I turned it over again in my head.
Voice. Reaction...
I swallowed it all down.
As expected. She's done this before, so she knows exactly where to put her finger.
I had a feeling I wouldn't be sleeping tonight. And wasting the hours now felt like a crime, so I pulled the script I'd been given at today's meeting out of my bag.
"Mm... Jiwoo-chan...? You're not sleeping?"
"Sorry. Was I being loud?"
"Nnnh... no. I was just wondering what you were doing."
"I'm going to look over the script a little and then sleep. I'll do it in the living room, so go back to bed."
"...Okay."
Tsuki, who'd gotten up half-asleep, stretched back out on the mattress and dropped off again.
I eased myself off the bed, gathered the script and a pen, and slipped out to the living room.
Scritch.
I picked up a pen and started picking apart the role I'd been given, line by line. If I used the trait, I could lock in almost immediately. The uncanny part wasn't the depth of immersion — it was that everything felt as vivid as something I had actually lived through. Amazing, and a little terrifying.
"If D-Rank Immersion is already like this, what happens when the rank goes up?"
Would I become the role itself? A shiver ran through me at the thought of the trait swallowing me whole. I shoved the ugly picture aside and sank into the script.
Nice. I'm catching things I missed when I skimmed it earlier.
The relationships between the characters were complicated, but the sentences themselves had a serious pull.
The writer who did this was Park Ja-wook, right?
I searched his other works on my phone. Every single one was famous. Even I, who barely watched dramas, found myself going, Oh, that one! Calling him a star felt cheap. Superstar was the word you had to use.
Lee Jiwoo, the actress acknowledged by a superstar writer. Just thinking it made a smile tug at my mouth.
"I'm glad I said yes."
I was still buried in the script when time slipped past me, and the sun was already coming up beyond the window.
"Hwaaaah... huh? Jiwoo? What are you doing out here?"
"Mm...? Jina? Why are you up at this hour?"
"This hour? Do you have any idea what time it is.... Wait. Did you not sleep?"
What was she talking about? I tapped the phone beside me and checked.
Current time: 5:23 a.m.
Huh? When did it get this late?
The script had been so good I hadn't even noticed the hours draining away.
Ah, whatever. I'll sleep at school.
I popped up from the chair and flicked a glance at Jina in her workout clothes.
"Hold on! I'm coming with you!"
Whatever else I skipped, morning exercise and breakfast were non-negotiable.
Meanwhile.
An expensive-looking private room. A man opened the door and came in, a hat pulled low and a mask covering half his face.
"Hey~, you finally made it? Sit down. How about a drink?"
He sat, pulled off the hat and the mask, and the hidden face came into view. The man was Choi Chun-sung, the actor lately famous as Kim Jinwoo in Ghost Singer.
He looked at the man who'd called him — fellow actor Lee Gil-hyun — and furrowed his brow.
"Skip it. What's this about."
"Don't be so prickly. We haven't seen each other in ages. Would it kill you to drink easy?"
"I've got a shoot tomorrow. That's a no."
"Ah... right. You're the famous Kim Jinwoo these days."
Lee Gil-hyun flicked a glance at him and chuckled under his breath. His hands hadn't stopped moving, dropping ice into a glass and pouring a drink that had gone cold.
"At least clink glasses with me. We did manage to meet."
Choi Chun-sung looked at the glass that had appeared in an instant and swallowed. He'd been on a forced dry spell ever since filming started. It was a rule he'd set for himself, which made breaking it himself a little hard to swallow.
"Fine. I'll take the glass. So why'd you call me."
"Ah...."
Lee Gil-hyun dragged it out, sipping alone. The stalling was enough to get Choi Chun-sung up out of his seat.
"If you've got nothing to say, I'm leaving. I'm a busy man."
"You're the only one who's busy? I start shooting next week too."
"Right, you said you were going into a drama. Park Ja-wook's, wasn't it?"
"Yeah... that's why I'm worried."
"Worried about what."
The closed mouth opened. Lee Gil-hyun let out the things he'd been holding back.
"Park Ja-wook. You know what he's like."
"Fiery."
"If that were all, we'd be lucky. Lately I've been hearing the drama nearly got scrapped because some idol went off the rails with drinking."
"Ah..."
He'd heard the news. He hadn't known it was Park Ja-wook's drama. Choi Chun-sung looked at his friend with something like pity.
"Don't look at me like that. I've got a headache as it is... On top of that, I hear they're bringing in a new actress to replace the drinker... What was her name..."
"Who?"
"You know. The one shooting a drama with you. The rookie who's gotten famous lately. The one Teacher Go Eun-hye supposedly acknowledged."
What was this, twenty questions? The hints kept stacking. Even so, they were more than enough.
Shooting Ghost Singer with me. A rookie. Teacher Go Eun-hye...
Those three words alone and the answer was already there.
"Lee Jiwoo."
"Yeah. That was the name. What's she like on set?"
"Haa..."
Choi Chun-sung let out a long breath, stood, and put the hat and mask back on. He caught the doorknob, then looked back and left one piece of advice.