A Teammate Stirs Up Trouble
Jong-woo had told him to do roughly the same thing as the other members.
So I must needs do that as well?
Even while Rembrary was still reeling from the shock, the microphone had already passed to Jungseo.
Jungseo was the aloof type on a normal day, so surely he wouldn't deliver his introduction with that much fervor.
Rembrary harbored a sliver of hope, but...
"I'm Jungseo, the red deer of Wild Animal, our leader."
Jungseo wasn't quite as far gone as Taein, but it made no difference — he was nothing like his usual self either.
He held the microphone in one hand, blew a kiss at the camera, and followed it with a wink.
Compared to Taein it was mild, but given how strong his usual image of gruff reserve was, it came as a shock in an entirely different way.
Rembrary's skin crawled even harder.
"I'm Hye-gyeol, the baby hamster of Wild Animal!"
"I'm Cathy, the adorable puppy of Wild Animal! Woof!"
Hye-gyeol and Cathy, at least, were bright and noisy by nature, so the dissonance was less jarring with them...
But on average, it seemed that every single one of them would burden the audience with an aegyo-laden introduction.
Without a hint of exaggeration, it truly felt as if every hair on his body was standing on end.
Members who were always bickering with each other cooing cutely at the camera in voices sickeningly sweeter than usual — it was profoundly, deeply strange.
And the real problem was that he, too, was expected to follow suit.
I too... must do... that?
Since inhabiting this body, his pride as a High Priest had already been crumpled well past the point of wrinkling.
But to think he would have to deliver an introduction drowning in cutesy aegyo — the kind that scrambled a man's very sanity...
In the meantime, the microphone of terror crept ever closer until it arrived before Rembrary.
Unable to bring himself to do it that way, Rembrary wrestled briefly with himself, then finally took the mic and spoke with quiet dignity.
"I am Woo Yeon-woo of Wild Animal. I am a sloth."
With that, Rembrary solemnly handed the microphone back to the MC.
However, something strange happened.
The MC cackled in exaggerated delight, then thrust the mic right back at Rembrary with a demand.
"Why a sloth? Because you look like one? Come on, do a sloth impression for us!"
Does this man...
Rembrary fixed his gaze on the MC, eyes hardening.
The MC's face was positively radiant — remarkably cheerful for someone making such an absurd request.
"Quickly, now. Yes? Mm?"
Now he was wheedling.
Doing it with a smile somehow made it all the more infuriating.
But that reaction came purely from Rembrary's ignorance of this whole sphere of things.
In truth, the MC's request right now was an act of consideration toward Rembrary.
He could tell that Yeon-woo wasn't managing to secure his fair share of screen time, so this was a sly way of slipping him one more chance to appeal to the audience.
Jong-woo, standing pressed against the wall, gestured frantically — do something, anything.
There is no help for it, then.
Rembrary let out an inner scream of anguish — and raised both hands.
Had refusing the sloth impression meant facing the fallout alone, he would have refused outright.
But right now Rembrary stood in a line with all the other members.
He feared that if he alone preserved his dignity in the middle of all this, the consequences might spill over onto his companions as well.
"Whoa! Look at him go!"
Before the oblivious, applauding MC, Rembrary raised his hands and let out a sound.
"Ehhh. Ehhhh."
"!"
"Ehhhhhh. Ehh-ehh."
Back when Hye-gyeol had informed him — "You've been ordered to do a sloth impression" — he had shown Rembrary a video of a sloth.
That was the sound the sloth in that video had made.
And then Rembrary stretched both arms out long and swayed them, slowly.
"Mmmm. Ehhhaaaah."
The MC stared with his mouth hanging open, then asked:
"What scene is this supposed to be?"
Hye-gyeol supplied the commentary from the side.
"It's the one where a sloth hangs from a tree and makes noise."
Jong-woo let out a silent scream, his face frozen into an expression like Munch's The Scream.
The point of doing an animal impression is to make it just cute enough to be endearing.
What on earth was the man doing, channeling his very soul into a flawless, exact replica?
It was not cute at all.
I should have just let him stay as the Unicorn, Jong-woo regretted, too late.
Granted, Yeon-woo was the neglected member — but still, he wasn't the variety guy, he was the visual center.
And with the visual center acting like that, any trace of a cool image had evaporated.
It had punched clean through the atmosphere and was gone.
Rembrary was, at this point, nearly possessed by the spirit of the sloth itself.
"Kheh."
The cameraman who had been filming his teeth finally lost the battle against his laughter, cackling as he doubled over.
"Ehhh."
When Rembrary bowed at the waist along with his overturned camera, the cameraman clenched his jaw and outright wept.
"How went it?"
After the Happy Talk interview had ended,
Rembrary asked Jong-woo the question while checking his makeup once more.
"...It was incredibly vivid."
Jong-woo answered him honestly.
Rembrary took it as a compliment and smiled in relief.
"It gladdens me that it proved of use."
It was hilarious, sure, but you torched your own image doing it... Jong-woo gave an awkward nod, thinking this to himself.
Rembrary, by contrast, was simply glad to have weathered the crisis, and closed his eyes while the finishing touches went on.
After that came two full rehearsals, and by the time the live broadcast stage itself was over, evening was already creeping up on them.
But they had to appear on the #1 announcement stage, so it was back to the waiting room once more.
Because Wild Animal had performed earlier in the lineup, the wait until the #1 announcement was a long one.
Jong-woo brought a mushroom salad, and Rembrary munched on the mushrooms while searching his phone for things like How to Become a Monk and How to Vanquish Evil Spirits.
At last, when the time for the #1 announcement finally arrived, a staff member came to fetch them up to the stage.
Rembrary trailed at the heels of the members, filed out of the waiting room, and climbed onto the stage.
As always, Wild Animal's assigned spot was in a corner at the very back.
But this time, something was different.
From below the stage, a staff member was signaling them to move further in toward the center.
They'd heard orders to move back plenty of times, but never one to come forward, so even Jungseo, the leader, faltered in surprise at first.
When the staff member's face scrunched up in irritation, though, Jungseo shrewdly read the room and ushered the members further in.
Rembrary followed along from the rear as well.
Once they settled into position, it turned out they were standing directly behind the group nominated for first place.
It was still the back row — but from this position, they could clearly see the audience below.
The fans were screaming their beloved idols' names until their throats gave out, all of them waving identical stick-shaped objects.
"Must be nice."
Hye-gyeol murmured, very quietly, from beside him.
"I wish I had fans like that."
Jungseo said nothing, only patted Hye-gyeol's shoulder.
Rembrary found himself feeling strangely moved.
Back in his original world, the spotlight up ahead had always belonged to Rembrary alone.
It mattered not how hard those behind him labored.
The gods loved him — and that single fact had been the beginning and end of everything.
But now, standing at the back of the line in another world, for the first time he could hear the voices of those standing behind.
He could even see the faces of the many colleagues who had once failed to advance in rank for want of divine power.
How tedious.
Yet even that strange feeling gradually gave way, as time crawled by, to simple boredom.
For some reason, today's filming was running behind schedule.
The idols were all lined up across one stage while a handful of PDs huddled off to the side, deep in discussion among themselves.
It must have been well past thirty minutes by now.
Utterly bored, the two MCs at the very front center kept bending and straightening their knees with their mics clutched in one hand, while the first-place nominee groups chatted up their fans.
The idols in the back row, too, had begun murmuring among themselves.
Jungseo struck up some conversation with Taein, and Hye-gyeol — apparently on familiar terms — started chattering with a member of another group in the front row.
"Ugh, this is exhausting. Seriously, how long are we supposed to wait?"
Cathy, standing right beside him, spoke to Rembrary as well.
Rembrary answered with his public-facing manner — "Tell me about it." — then flinched.
Cathy was looking at him with a smile somewhat gentler than usual.
It felt oddly familiar.
That was exactly how Sunwoo Sil had behaved in front of the cameras...
But Cathy's mood always improved when he was in good spirits, even back at the dorm, so Rembrary quickly shook the thought away.
Even if Cathy was only pretending to be friendly because of the people around them, it wasn't Rembrary's place to do anything about it.
After all, Rembrary himself had adopted a different manner of speech in public as well — albeit at Jong-woo's behest.
But as they talked, he noticed something strange about Cathy's eyes.
There were stars embedded in them.
"There are stars in your eyes?"
Rembrary asked, startled.
He didn't mean the poetic sort of "your eyes are as lovely as stars." There were literal star shapes in them.
"Ah. Colored contacts."
Cathy answered as though it were nothing, but Rembrary didn't understand.
There was no phone in his hand at the moment, so he couldn't even search what that meant.
Rembrary finally asked again,
"What is that, exactly?"
and Cathy answered with a laugh.
"Glasses you wear over your eyeballs."
"You wear glasses over your eyeballs? How?"
"How do you think? You just press them on with a finger."
Curious, Rembrary asked,
"May I touch them?"
Cathy told him to go right ahead, opening his eyes wide and leaning his face in.
At this unexpectedly docile response, Rembrary pressed his finger against Cathy's eyeball.
"Ack! Hey!"
The next day.
To prepare for the Monday competition, Cathy and Rembrary were to skip the music broadcast and instead head to their respective agencies to practice.
Since they needed as much camera time as they could get, Jong-woo had tried every angle to arrange for the two of them to attend the broadcast first and then practice — but with their duet partners' schedules to factor in, there was nothing to be done.
So who do I follow today? Jong-woo debated between Cathy and Rembrary, and ultimately decided to go with Rembrary.
Of the two, Rembrary was, frankly, the less trustworthy one.
"Work hard at practice. And make sure you greet everyone at the agency properly."
"Got it."
After sending Cathy off, Jong-woo headed with Rembrary to Sunwoo Sil's agency.
The moment Sunwoo Sil saw Rembrary, he snickered and started needling him.
"So why exactly did you stab a man in the eye?"
"Stab a man in the eye?"
"That Cathy fellow. You poked him plain as day."
"He had a lens on his eye, so I attempted to touch it..."
When Rembrary smiled awkwardly, Sunwoo Sil chuckled and called him a lunatic.
"You really are a strange one, you know that?"
Seeing Sunwoo Sil treat Rembrary so familiarly, Jong-woo breathed a sigh of relief.
And so began the four-hour marathon of practice.
Once again today, Rembrary didn't shirk, accepting every one of Sunwoo Sil's demands, while Sunwoo Sil pressed the keyboard with passion, tweaking notes here and there.
Right through that flow came the blare of a ringtone — some other idol group's signature song.
It was coming from Jong-woo's pocket.
"Oh, I'm so sorry. My bad."
Jong-woo hurriedly apologized and ducked out into the hallway.
The interruption seemed to break the momentum, because instead of telling them to keep practicing, Sunwoo Sil called over his manager with a request.
"Noona, could you grab me a cup ramyeon or something? And a drink too."
"Will cup ramyeon hold you over?"
"Yeah. Or should I add some gimbap?"
"One sec."
Sunwoo Sil's manager opened the door to go.
And in that instant, through the gap of the opened door, Jong-woo's furious shout rang through from the hallway.
"I sent you there to match the SONG, not because I thought I'd sent you to match mouths, you idiooooot?!"