Trouble in Unexpected Places
When the video stopped, Jong-woo dragged the player window down and scrolled through the comments underneath.
Most of the comments came from fans of the idol group, but plenty of people seemed to have wandered in purely on word of mouth. Aside from a handful of overtly malicious remarks, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.
Jong-woo swore under his breath and raked his fingers wildly through his hair. Hye-gyeol's eyes went round as saucers as he turned to him.
"Hyung, what do we do? They stole our choreography, didn't they?"
"Sons of bitches, for real!"
The words were barely out before Cathy clenched his fist and bolted for the door — gone in one second flat — until Jungseo and Taein lunged and grabbed him back.
"Hey! What exactly are you going to do when you get there?"
"Don't! No punching! Let go of the fist, let go!"
With Jong-woo and the staff piling on as well, Cathy finally uncurled his hand and slapped it flat against the floor as ordered. Jong-woo had him keep his palm pressed to the ground, then turned to the staff member.
"First thing, we contact the choreographer. It's possible the other side reached them first."
"Even if they did pay first, it's still stolen goods... but yeah, let's make the call."
Jong-woo nodded and got the choreographer on the phone. The line connected before long, and while Jong-woo sent over the link to the problematic video, Rembrary lowered himself onto the floor and asked Jungseo, "So what happens now?"
Jungseo shook his head. "No idea. If we got the choreography late, it's the choreographer's fault. If we got it early..."
"...Then the other side has to change it?"
"They might not, even then."
"Why not?"
"It's already been made public. The fans will all know there was a problem with the choreography, sure — but to the general public, if the other group *doesn't* dance the routine that's suddenly all over everyone's feeds and we do instead, it'll look bizarre."
Jong-woo stepped out of the practice room with his phone and didn't return until nearly an hour had passed.
"What did they say?"
Hye-gyeol, who had loved that choreography more than anyone and had memorized it hardest, hurried over. "What did they say?"
"The choreographer says she never took a commission from them."
"Then we take it back! It's ours!"
"Hold on — she's going to look into it and call back. She says she'll check the circumstances on her end too."
Hye-gyeol stormed out of the practice room, muttering that there couldn't possibly be anything left to look into. The staff member went upstairs to report the whole affair to CEO Im, and the members stayed behind in the practice room, sunk in glum silence.
Is this how it ends — with the dance being scrapped entirely? Rembrary, caught up in the middle of it all, secretly harbored a flicker of hope, though he painted a gentle, sorrowful expression onto his face and matched everyone else's mood.
But by evening the matter remained unresolved, and the members returned to the dorm for the time being. It wasn't until around two in the afternoon the next day that Jong-woo gathered them and explained.
"Apparently one of the dancers on that choreographer's team leaked it."
Hye-gyeol jumped in at once. "Then we bought it legitimately — so it's ours, right?"
Jong-woo's face darkened. He wished he could say yes that simply, but the situation was messier than that.
"It's not?"
Catching that shift in his expression, Hye-gyeol's face crumpled on the verge of tears.
"The one who leaked it — it looks like they sold it as if it were choreography they'd created themselves. The idol team that bought it seems to have had no idea there was anything wrong with it."
After that, Jong-woo kept up a steady stream of calls with the other side — the choreographer, the leaker — and the staff held meeting after meeting among themselves.
The money paid for the choreography would be refunded without issue, but opinions split on whether to revise it, scrap it, push ahead anyway — and whether to make the whole incident public.
In the end, the choreography was thrown out entirely, and they agreed to bury the incident.
"What?! WHY!"
Hye-gyeol practically jumped out of his skin with frustration. He'd loved the choreography; he'd drilled it, practiced it, matched it to the others note for note. And now the side that had bought it in good faith was being told to shut up and move on — it felt profoundly unfair.
"I hate it too. It's infuriating."
Jong-woo thumped Hye-gyeol on the back and heaved a long sigh.
"But what can you do? Going public gets us nothing."
"Why nothing?"
"They already blew up with that choreography. It trended on the real-time search rankings multiple times. The video view counts are enormous, and tons of people say they can't stop watching it like they're hypnotized."
"Goddammit..."
"Yu Hye-gyeol. Language."
"How is anyone *not* supposed to swear in this situation?"
"Look, even if we performed it, their image and that choreography already fit together perfectly. The whole promotion cycle, all we'd hear is 'theirs is better,' 'theirs suits them more,' over and over. And since they didn't knowingly buy stolen choreography — they got scammed too — their fans and our antis would pile on *us*, going 'how could you do that to fellow victims?' The second they do that, our fans won't go after the leaker. They'll go to war with *that group* instead."
The fault technically lay with the leaker, but a culprit with no face was easily forgotten. Nine times out of ten, this whole affair would spiral into a brawl between Wild Animal and the other idol group — and fan wars profited no one. Not one bit.
Worse, the people who couldn't care less about the kids' careers — even if every circumstance were laid bare and the choreography used anyway — would most likely just squint and say, Hmm, doesn't Wild Animal's dance look familiar somehow?
Hye-gyeol accepted it grudgingly, though his expression stayed dark. Taein gave his shoulder a few light thumps with his fist.
The mood stayed heavy even back at the dorm.
Rembrary was fiddling with the self-cam when he recalled Jong-woo's mental plea — 'DO NOT under ANY ANY ANY ANY circumstances bring this up!' — and slid the camera back into the drawer.
Jong-woo was forever walking around saying 'don't do such-and-such', but today the word 'absolutely' had been stapled onto everything he said, which meant something unusually serious was afoot.
Still, writing a diary meant running the risk of a slip of the tongue. So today, he decided, the video diary would simply be skipped.
Then what shall I do instead?
Rembrary rolled around on his bed for a while, posted a few photos to his social media, watched his believers' reactions pour in, and fell asleep.
The next morning the atmosphere was still limp as wet paper, though mercifully better than yesterday. Hye-gyeol ate quietly, and Taein drank his throat-soothing tea with his usual sulky face.
Cathy, still half asleep, kept nodding off mid-sip. Rembrary slumped at the table, one cheek flat against it, staring into space. And Jungseo clutched his script, murmuring his lines over and over, checking and rechecking what he'd memorized.
Jong-woo had texted that they were all tired, so anyone could practice at home or come into the studio if they felt up to it — and two hours later, Rembrary was the only one left in the apartment.
He stretched out on the sofa and closed his eyes, trying to reclaim the sleep he'd missed earlier. He must have drifted off like that, because when a shrill ringtone yanked him awake, three hours had already slipped by.
He still wanted more sleep, so Rembrary simply stretched out one arm, snagged the phone, and pressed it to his ear.
"Accepted."
"Hey, Yeon-woo! Yeon-woo!"
It was Sunwoo Sil.
"Sunbae, why all the commotion?"
Rembrary answered warmly — it had been a while since they'd talked — and Sunwoo Sil's voice came crackling back through the receiver. "Are you okay?"
"What about me?"
Rembrary, who was perpetually fine by definition, asked back, and Sunwoo Sil said, "You don't know?"
"Know what, exactly?"
"Your member. The one called Hye-gyeol or whatever."
"Yes. What about him?"
"You don't know something happened?"
"Hye-gyeol?"
Rembrary, well aware Hye-gyeol wasn't home, lifted only his head and swept his gaze lazily around the empty room. "Hye-gyeol's gone out."
"Yeah, he went out, all right. His sanity went out."
Sunwoo Sil clicked his tongue.
"Jeongshini's at the neighbor's house, so I can't tell you whether he left or not."
"Not your neighbor's dog-loving brat, you idiot. I'm saying the reason in your members' heads walked out the door."
Rembrary advised him to check Hye-gyeol's social media if he still had no idea what was going on, then hung up.
Not before adding that if things blew up, he could quietly slip away and join the same agency.
After the call ended, Rembrary pulled up Hye-gyeol's feed.
It was a pointed shot, no attempt to hide it.
The saving grace was that while it was a direct jab, the subject was vague enough that anyone who didn't know the circumstances wouldn't understand it.
The problem was that while the subject was vague, anyone who *did* know the situation would understand it perfectly.
Rembrary distinctly heard the phantom sound of Jong-woo screaming "UAAAAAGH!" right in front of him, and clicked his tongue.
The man is in for some suffering, I suppose.
He'd been told in no uncertain terms not to post — and he'd posted. To be fair, he hadn't named any specific culprit.
Checking the comments on the post, the overall mood was one of support and encouragement. Relieved, Rembrary folded the phone shut and sank back into his nap.
When evening came, the text from Shin Jo-woon arrived. Rembrary ached to go, but he held himself in check and put it off until next time.
Shin Jo-woon, flatly declaring there would be no next time, settled every future appointment on the spot and stopped texting altogether.
That was sneaky of him.
Grumbling inwardly, Rembrary kept an eye on how people were reacting to the whole affair. Just as Jong-woo had said, the general portal search rankings seemed blissfully unaware the incident had even happened.
It had flared up briefly enough to hit the real-time searches, but it never caught fire as a topic — on most sites, it was barely mentioned at all.
Better still, the people who did take an interest sided, surprisingly, on the favorable side, and plenty of them were furious right along with the group.
Hye-gyeol came home that night dragged back by Jungseo, still unable to smooth out his sulky face — but when Rembrary showed him the comment section, he perked up and decided things had turned out fine after all.
"I never named any names. So it's all good, right?"
But by the next morning, the winds had shifted again. Groups with zero connection to the matter — including the group at the center of it all — got dragged into the fray, and their names started getting thrown around.
The trouble was that even the people who'd initially taken Wild Animal's side changed their tune the moment a group *they* loved got lumped in: "Why bring this up at all in the first place? If you're not going to name exactly who's at fault, just don't say anything."
No one knew who had started dragging in the names of entirely unrelated groups, but the situation unfolded precisely along the lines Jong-woo had feared most.
In the end, CEO Im stepped forward and released an official apology, and the controversy died down quickly — but Wild Animal, Jong-woo, CEO Im, and the entire staff were left thoroughly bitter about the whole thing.
Sure, Hye-gyeol had let his fingers wander a little carelessly, but at the end of the day, the party responsible for all of this was the other side. The way it had played out just felt unjust.
After turning it over in his head, CEO Im finally summoned Jong-woo and gave the order.
"Jong-woo. Find out the schedules for every group that got tangled up with us in this mess."