My Bias, a Perpetrator?
This is me?
My bias is the perpetrator?
The hand wrapped around the bottle wouldn't stop shaking. I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it.
The headline swam in front of my eyes. It wasn't the alcohol. My mind was coming apart.
"Hah…"
I stared down at my phone and let out a long, empty breath. Yu Na-bin — the member with the biggest fandom in the group — was at the center of this. I scrolled into the comments, and the air snagged in my throat.
"You've got to be kidding me…"
One swallow. Then another. The cheap liquor burned its way down my throat. I couldn't make any of this fit inside my head.
A few hours ago I'd been rewatching their stages, getting wrecked all over again. A few weeks ago she'd smiled at me at a fansign, that angelic face lighting up the second she saw me. A few months ago I'd been screaming at my screen because their new album had blown up.
And now it was all over.
"It's a lie…"
Something lodged hard in my throat. The fandom had already split down the middle and gone to war, and the ones walking away were cutting ties like they'd never cared at all. I wanted to believe in her. I just had no idea how.
"Hah…"
I set the bottle down and flipped my phone face-down. Articles, communities, the fan cafe, social media — there wasn't a scrap of hope anywhere. I wanted to run. I wanted to go to a world where none of this had happened.
I dragged my hands through my hair and muttered at the ceiling.
"They were already doing fine. What more did they need that they had to bring in a new member and wreck everything like this?"
And with that resentment toward the agency's CEO still burning in my chest, I fell asleep.
Ugh… my head.
The hangover lasted about a second. The instant I was conscious, my hand was already groping for my phone.
Lumiere…
I opened YouTube and typed in the name I knew better than my own. And then… nothing. No results. Everything that came up was some other video about some other thing. There was not a single clip related to the girl group Lumiere.
…What?
I kept tapping. YouTube, social media, news articles, the fan cafe, the communities. Gone. All of it, actually gone.
Have I lost my mind…
My heart dropped through the floor. How does a fan cafe vanish overnight? This was insane. This was too much. No matter how big a scandal got, the trail of a group's entire career didn't just wipe itself clean. The press could have lived off the articles that had already dropped for days, and a hundred drama-farming YouTubers should have been wringing views out of the wreckage. So why?
They already deleted everything?
The videos that had been there yesterday. The stages. The traces of the fans. All of it, gone. That wasn't possible. Even the clips I'd saved myself were missing.
And then, all at once, something felt wrong.
The wrist holding the phone was slender. Pale, smooth, the bones delicate. And it wasn't just the hand. Now that I was looking — this wasn't even my phone.
"What the hell?"
The startled voice that came out of me startled me even more. I grabbed my own throat.
That is not my voice.
My heart hammered against my ribs as I whipped my head around.
Where am I?
An unfamiliar studio apartment. And in it, a full-length mirror, waiting.
"……!"
The person standing in front of that mirror stumbled backward, caught the edge of the bed, and went down hard. I planted a hand wrong and my face twisted with the jolt — and even then, the girl in the glass wore that wince like it was just another kind of pretty.
That was when the memories arrived, filling my head as if they'd always been there.
Name: Lee Seo-yeon. Age: seventeen. A high schooler who had come up to Seoul chasing an idol dream.
"What the hell is going on."
I was a breath away from hyperventilating. I dragged air in through my nose and held it until the room stopped tilting, then snatched up the phone and checked the date.
Five years ago?
Lumiere hadn't even debuted yet.
"……I've lost my mind."
I pinched my cheek as hard as I could. The sting answered like it was trying to be helpful. Not a dream.
Still. Just in case.
I spun everything in the room that would spin. I didn't have a top, which was the only reason I was reduced to this. Every last thing wobbled for a few seconds and fell over. The laws of physics were in perfectly fine working order.
"This is actually real? How does that make any sense?"
This wasn't a webtoon. It wasn't a web novel. All those stories I'd torn through for fun — and now the premise had landed on me?
Which meant, maybe.
I opened my mouth, carefully.
"Status window."
Silence.
"…Ability window?"
The quiet only deepened.
"…Stats? Quest log?"
Nothing appeared. I stared at the ceiling.
"…Now what."
No status window. No quest. So why had I woken up in this body?
That was when the phone buzzed. I checked the sender on the off chance I'd recognize it. I didn't. The message itself, though, was straightforward enough.
I stopped breathing and read it again.
The Super Rookies?
This audition…!
The memory landed all at once. Five years ago — this year, from where I was standing — I had watched this show. It was the audition the major agencies sent their trainees to, and it had been a monster hit.
And none of that was the part that mattered. The part that mattered was this: Yu Na-bin had been one of the contestants. The program where my bias first appeared on camera was The Super Rookies.
I sucked in a breath. If I walked into that audition, I would meet her. Of course I would. And then there would be the long stretch of dorm filming, all of us living on top of each other.
I tightened my grip on the phone. A thought slid through my head and wouldn't leave.
What if the reason I woke up in this body is some kind of divine message — to stop the catastrophe that destroyed Lumiere?
A chill ran down my spine.
The bullying scandal. The fighting between members. The group on the edge of disbandment. None of it had been a rumor. The new member had come forward about what she'd suffered, then sat through a tearful press conference and said she wanted to retire.
As a fan, I had lived through that collapse in real time. It had been a single day. I hadn't been able to do a thing. I had just sat there with my chest torn open and watched them fall.
And now there was a chance. I might be able to stop the Lumiere incident from ever happening.
I looked in the mirror again. No matter how I turned it, the face looking back was close to finished — the kind of pretty that didn't need a stylist's help. She'd gone to an audition with this face and this body and not made it? Forget not making it. How had she not even registered?
It didn't make sense. A face like this should have pulled as much attention as Yu Na-bin. And I couldn't remember the face or the name at all.
Either way — with this body, I could become a member of Lumiere. And if I did, I would be standing closer to them than anyone. Close enough, maybe, to change what happened to them.
With The Super Rookies coming up, I found a practice room — partly to take stock of what this body could actually do, and partly just to get ready. Finding one wasn't hard. Lee Seo-yeon's memories were already there.
She'd been in Seoul a little over six months, drifting from practice room to practice room as an independent trainee, working alone. The place I was standing in was one of those rooms.
How does someone who looks like this not have an agency?
I filed the question away and stepped inside. A narrow, stripped-down private studio — shabby, but it had a full-length mirror and a speaker. That was enough.
I set my bag down and faced the glass. Honestly, it was still strange. There was no one watching, and I was embarrassed anyway. I had never danced. I had never sung. I'd loved watching other people do it. I had never once thought about doing it myself. And now, the same day I'd woken up in this body, I was standing in a practice room about to try both.
Even if it's for Na-bin, this is mortifying.
I didn't have time to hesitate. I pulled out the phone, scrolled to a song I knew by heart, and chose it.
Let's just try.
I drew a slow breath and hit play. At first I only meant to move. And then the body moved — exactly the way I pictured it. The second the choreography started playing behind my eyes, my limbs followed. Fingertips, toes, even the angle of my gaze. The rhythm was exact, as if I'd drilled it a thousand times.
The more I moved, the harder my heart beat. Not from effort. It was closer to thrill. And then, without deciding to, I was singing.
What? My voice is good too?
Not just good. Perfect. My pitch didn't waver. There was even feeling in it. The girl in the mirror was too perfect. No — really. She was so perfect I almost laughed.
"What even is this…?"
I wasn't even out of breath. I had just run a full song by myself, start to finish, without a single cracked note or a step out of time. Every move had unspooled in my head and the body had simply taken it, as if it had belonged to me from the beginning. The singing was the same. It felt like my song. No — like Lee Seo-yeon's.
"……."
A face like that, and ability like this on top of it — so why? Why had she never debuted? Debut aside, how did someone with this kind of spec not even have an agency?
Unless it wasn't Lee Seo-yeon's ability at all. Had I always been like this?
No. Of course not. I knew myself better than that.
Wait.
I opened my eyes wide and looked straight into the mirror.
There's no "of course" here.
If Lee Seo-yeon hadn't been this gifted to begin with, then this was something that had come with me when I woke up in her body.
Either way, I was sure of one thing.
I could make Lumiere. Easily.