Starting Image Management
With the song needing urgent rearranging and preparation, Rembrary practically lived in the agency's practice room until Monday.
Jong-woo was dragged out along with him, and Jungseo came too, shuttling lunch boxes and tomato juice back and forth without a moment's rest.
At last, competition day arrived.
Having placed fifteenth in the dance-themed round, Rembrary was set to perform sixth this time.
As he had planned in advance, Rembrary went on stage wearing an ornately decorated mask with a weeping face.
Still masked, he traced the simple choreography the dance teacher had painstakingly drilled into him while tearing his hair out.
Around him, other masked dancers expressed sorrow with their bodies.
And Rembrary, in a voice quiet yet brimming with grief, sang softly of parting.
It was a song that struck straight at the listener's heartstrings.
But it did not seem to fit the theme of Carnival at all.
"This is way off from the theme."
Watching the stage, the AD clicked his tongue.
"They told him his concept overlapped with someone else's, so he must've just thrown the whole stage out and started over. Feels like a stretch to me."
PD Kim Moo-rok agreed.
"Exactly. Why didn't he just stick with what he had?"
Oh Jung-shin's manager, watching the performance, seized the moment to add his own note of pity.
"Still, when you drift that far from the theme, shouldn't there be some kind of last-place penalty or something?"
That was the moment.
Right where the original song should have burst open into raw, aching emotion, the arrangement suddenly shifted and the instrumental swelled into something dazzling.
Tiny fireworks seemed to pop, the dancers covered their weeping masks with both hands — and Rembrary, in perfect contrast, removed his mask and smiled.
The lyrics remained sorrowful and pitiful, but the face of the man singing them looked utterly blissful. That unsettling dissonance wove itself into the festival-like music.
Oh Jung-shin's manager's expression hardened in an instant.
"It's a festival."
The AD, who had been clucking his tongue in sympathy, now murmured with his eyes gone round.
"Wait, hold on. Wasn't the staging completely different from what he prepared?"
Oh Jung-shin's manager, who had seen the changed staging not a minute ago, raised his voice as if only now discovering the fact.
"Is that even allowed?"
PD Kim Moo-rok, watching Rembrary's stage, let out a short laugh.
"Nothing says he can't."
By then the music on stage had faded back into a quiet, sorrowful breakup song, and Rembrary was once again wearing the weeping mask.
And then, the very instant the stage ended —
Rembrary lifted the mask halfway up, and the smile he had been hiding beneath it was revealed.
It was a chilling ending.
Having finished his performance, Rembrary walked alone back toward the waiting room.
Cathy's turn was coming up soon, so Jungseo had headed over that way.
He was about halfway there when he spotted someone unexpected — Oh Jung-shin, standing near Rembrary's waiting room.
"Hello."
Rembrary greeted him calmly and walked past.
They had never been close to begin with, and with Oh Jung-shin — normally always wearing that pleasant grin — looking so grim today, Rembrary had even less desire to exchange words with him.
But before he could fully pass by,
Oh Jung-shin spoke from behind him.
"Did you do this on purpose? To screw me over?"
Rembrary turned around, hand still on the doorknob.
"I beg your pardon?"
Oh Jung-shin's face was frozen stiff.
"What do you mean?"
When Rembrary asked again, Oh Jung-shin repeated himself in a low voice.
"I wanted to do an Eastern-style carnival from the start. That's what I'd been preparing the whole time. Then they told me the setup was that my concept had to be similar to yours, so even though I hated it, I was forced to change my concept. And then what is this? You had some whole thing about four masks or whatever going on over here, and then you went and changed your entire concept yourself?"
Rembrary raised an eyebrow.
Oh Jung-shin's account differed somewhat from the story Rembrary had heard.
"A setup that you had to be similar, you say?"
"Even variety shows run on a script to some degree. I was told the script this time just had our two concepts coincidentally overlapping."
Rembrary tilted his head.
"That's a little different from what I was told."
"And what were you told?"
"That someone had copied my concept wholesale."
The moment Rembrary relayed it exactly as he had heard it, Oh Jung-shin's expression turned murderous.
"Who copied whose concept, exactly?"
"You copied mine."
Rembrary said it again, smiling pleasantly.
Oh Jung-shin's face stiffened even further, but Rembrary, indifferent to it, simply wore his gentle smile all the more graciously.
Being a priest meant knowing when to smile even in unpleasant situations. Rembrary was a master of manufacturing the look of gracious warmth. As he was now.
That smile only darkened Oh Jung-shin's expression further.
"Too cowardly to face me head-on, so you scheme your way into forcing me into some bizarre concept. 'Copied my concept'? People talk endlessly about your character, and I figured it was all a misunderstanding. Now that I've seen it firsthand, the rumors were actually going easy on you."
Then, finally unable to contain himself, he began spitting out ugly words.
"Hey. The only reason your group still hasn't made it is because you're trash like this. You know that? The second your name finally starts getting out there, you completely lose sight of yourself, you punk?"
"I'm sorry."
"Apologizing now isn't going to—"
"But if you wore lifts and still never measured up in my eyes, that's hardly my fault."
"Hey."
"Character has no correlation with making it big. If it did, you wouldn't have made it either — and yet here you are, doing just fine."
"HEY!"
Oh Jung-shin's face darkened into something fierce.
Passing staff members stopped to steal glances at the pair.
Though they stayed off the broadcasts, fights between celebrities were common enough that nobody found the sight of two idols squabbling strange in itself.
They were watching simply out of curiosity — since the notoriously ill-tempered Woo Yeon-woo was the one fighting, they wanted to see how he fought.
Even in the middle of all this, Rembrary did not drop his gracious smile.
And watching that smile, Oh Jung-shin felt his fury boil all the way to the crown of his head.
He couldn't speak for any bystanders, but having someone smirk and needle him to his face like that was insufferable.
Moreover, from Rembrary's side, Oh Jung-shin was twisting the story — but from Oh Jung-shin's side, everything he said was the truth.
And it was no empty claim: Oh Jung-shin had genuinely wanted the Eastern-style carnival concept. He had been forced into a rushed concept change only because of all this talk about scripts.
Oh Jung-shin was certain that Rembrary had pulled this stunt out of anger at his fans.
But just before he could unleash his rage in earnest —
"Coming through. Coming through. Move."
Sunwoo Sil swooped in like a robot vacuum, gliding smoothly across the floor, snatched Yeon-woo by the collar, and dragged him away.
Before he knew it, Yeon-woo was being steered into Sunwoo Sil's waiting room.
Closing the door behind them, Sunwoo Sil lectured Rembrary.
"You still don't get how scary his fans are? What're you picking fights for?"
"He is a thoroughly vile creature."
"Why'd you two fight?"
"He copied my idea, and when I found out and changed mine again, it seems his feelings were hurt."
Sunwoo Sil clicked his tongue in a way that said he understood all too well, then tossed a drink bottle from the table to Rembrary.
"Even if it's filthy and unfair, hold it in for now. Write it down in your little grudge journal with the date and pay him back later. But not now. Fight him right now and win or lose, you're the only one who loses."
"Because I still haven't made it big?"
"No. Because your image is bad."
Sunwoo Sil delivered the blunt truth without a flicker of hesitation, then pondered for a moment before asking:
"I've been meaning to ask you this. Why don't you work on your image a little? Is it the company? Did they tell you to play the bad-boy concept on purpose?"
Tuesday.
When the competition aired, public reaction unfolded exactly as predicted.
People sneered that the hypocrisy Rembrary displayed on stage was surely his true self — and yet not one of them could dispute his skill.
The digital charts told the same story: from the moment they went public, Rembrary's numbers were the strongest.
Though fans, antis, and Oh Jung-shin's fandom turned the album review sections into a war zone, the streaming results were undeniable.
Oh Jung-shin's stage, by contrast, drew a fair share of mockery.
Under CEO Im's orders, the staff at LLL Entertainment, who had been sitting on a pre-prepared article, decided to hold off on releasing it for the time being.
His stage was getting rave reviews, and no one was claiming the two performances were similar anymore.
With reaction to Rembrary's stage far outstripping Oh Jung-shin's, publishing such an article now would needlessly provoke Oh Jung-shin's fans — and, on top of that, earn nothing but the ire of PD Kim Moo-rok.
That evening.
Rembrary summoned Jungseo, laid out what Sunwoo Sil had told him the day before, and asked for counsel.
"Sunwoo Sil, having witnessed my quarrel with Oh Jung-shin, suggested it might be wiser for me to tend to my image. Does it seem so to you as well?"
"Sunwoo Sil-sunbae said that to you?"
"He did."
"You must really be his favorite."
"In your judgment, is it good for me to manage my image?"
"Honestly, even now you've got your own kind of charm, so it works. You haven't caused any scandals lately, either. But at your core, you're a decent person. There's no upside to being misunderstood, so managing your image couldn't hurt."
At Jungseo's answer, Rembrary asked gravely:
"And how does one go about managing one's image?"
Back in his original world, all the way up through his days as a High-ranking Priest, Rembrary had spared no thought for others' opinions except when tending to believers.
But after becoming High Priest, he had been compelled to mind his reputation — and in Rembrary's estimation, that experience would be of little use here.
For back then, whatever the High Priest Rembrary said, people received it all favorably.
Moreover, the values of the world he had lived in and this one diverged far too much.
Even anchoring his conduct to morality proved difficult — for morality itself is shaped by one's values.
It was plain enough from the affair when Oh Jung-shin was made to play the role of his slave. In the original world, a Rembrary who ordered nothing more than errands to fetch drinks would have been reckoned a kind master; yet here, for merely observing the terms of a penalty, he had heard no end of ill words.
Rembrary could not be certain how he ought to behave for the people of this world to judge him well.
"Just act nice. That's all it takes."
"That is no simple task. My memory is wanting, is it not? At times I cannot tell what counts as kind."
"Then let's do this. When I'm next to you or nearby, I'll give you a signal or keep you on beat."
"You could manage that?"
"After a few tries you'll get the feel for it. Let's start tomorrow at the agency. The acting teacher doesn't like you much, does he?"
"So it has seemed."
"Try being nice to him first. He's an acting professional — he'll be able to tell whether you genuinely look kind or just come across as fake. He might be the perfect sparring partner to practice on, actually."
The next day.
Arriving at the agency for acting practice, Rembrary recalled Jungseo's words as he opened the door.
Be gentle. Be kind.
That was Jungseo's follow-up instruction, given on the grounds that Rembrary's standard for "kind" kept getting muddled.
Answer meekly, Jungseo had said, and you've already won half the battle.
Gentle. Gentle. Gentle...
Repeating the word to himself over and over, Rembrary bowed politely to the acting teacher inside the practice room.
"Oh, you're here?"
The acting teacher greeted Rembrary and Jungseo with the same frosty smile as always.
Rembrary felt relief.
Today was the day he had to play the good man, and he had worried that the acting teacher might, in a single day, turn unexpectedly agreeable along with him.
Sure enough, the acting teacher remained as merciless toward Rembrary as ever.
"You're about to land a supporting role on a public broadcast, and this is all you've got? You got your break easier than everyone else who's grinding for it, so you'd better be damn good! If you're taking someone else's opportunity, you'd better be worth it!"
Rembrary rejoiced inwardly, and asked in the gentlest tone he could muster:
"Dost thou care for me, then?"
The acting teacher stopped mid-scolding and scowled.
"What?"
"It seems to me thou art forever fretting over me. All this must spring from affection, and from hopes held high. Am I wrong?"
"!"
The acting teacher's eyes went wide.
Rembrary judged it a remarkably gentle remark, even by his own estimation, and — flexing his improvisational gifts — added a flourish of consideration on top.
"Grant but half, nay, a quarter of the care thou lavest upon me to the other trainees as well. They grow melancholy, every one of them."
Having delivered his line, Rembrary closed with a warm, kindly smile, then looked at Jungseo with full confidence.
How was that? Well done, was it not?
Jungseo shook his head as fast as he possibly could.