Participant Number 101
Up until the moment she'd received the first audition video, Team Leader Seong hadn't expected all that much.
Her voice was definitely good. Excellent diction for someone with only half a year of training, too.
Every line that came out of Han Yeo-reum's mouth conveyed exactly what it was meant to convey, vividly and without effort. And yet.
She's still lacking in a lot of ways. Hard to say she's shed the amateur label yet.
But it had been Senior Yeo's recommendation. If that notoriously picky woman had approved of her, then at the very least she'd land somewhere above the middle of the pack—she'd given decisive advice every single time, after all. Which meant Team Leader Seong couldn't help but suspect the girl was holding something back.
Still, surely that voice isn't all there is.
Team Leader Seong swept her gaze around the room.
Everyone's come well prepared.
True to the concept of a teen romance web drama, most of the applicants were dressed in school uniforms, and they all but sparkled—clearly fresh from a trip to the hair salon at the crack of dawn.
"Participant number forty-nine! Choi Ji-young, beginning my performance."
A single sheet of paper lay waiting in the lobby: one short scene from Pachehi.
⟪An ordinary person, Pi Chae-won, wakes up inside a cliché-riddled shoujo manga.
Her lines, spoken after becoming one of many forgettable extras—a mere backdrop to the heroine, Hina.
Pi Chae-won: (scowling) "Ha... this is ridiculous...."⟫
Not much of a monologue to work with. It was simply a scene meant to show the protagonist's deadpan, unbothered personality.
"Ha... this is ridiculous...."
One contestant tilted her head with the weary air of someone utterly fed up; another crumpled her face as though irritated beyond words.
"Thank you, that was lovely."
Each performance differed in its small details, but not a single one had actually amounted to acting.
They're all similarly competent... and equally forgettable. No impact whatsoever.
Like dolls on a conveyor belt, the contestants spat out the same line and disappeared, one after another.
"Next number, please come in."
Team Leader Seong made a brief check mark on her paperwork with her ballpoint pen—paring down the list to those who might not look terrible paired opposite the male lead, Ju Jun-seo.
And then.
"Participant number one hundred one! I'm Han Yeo-reum."
The name Team Leader Seong had been waiting for rang out. She raised her head—and could only blink in bewilderment.
...Is that the same person?
The contestant before her looked nothing like the face on the paperwork.
Really?
Windswept long hair, glasses, a loose flowing skirt, and an enormous backpack the likes of which no shoujo manga heroine would ever carry. Standing there was, in every sense, an actual Korean high school girl.
"Team Leader, Team Leader, look at that...! That's exactly what I wanted!"
The writer seated beside Team Leader Seong whispered excitedly. She was the same writer who had shrugged indifferently at the parade of polished, well-styled contestants.
Certainly....
Han Yeo-reum's entrance was a fresh, almost scandalous departure from the rest.
Looks like it never even occurred to her to try to look pretty.
A bare, unmade face, hair pulled back into a tight ponytail.
It's not like the photos—but honestly, this is even better.
Far from being put off, Team Leader Seong found herself drawn to the real thing.
"Then, whenever you're ready, please begin."
Han Yeo-reum, who had been smiling brightly, changed her expression in an instant. The pupils that had been catching the light and sparkling went dull and clouded—the dead-fish eyes written into the scenario, exact to the letter.
Oh... seeing it like this, she really is different.
Yeo-reum turned her head, surveyed her surroundings, then dragged an empty chair over. The legs shrieked against the floor.
"What is she doing?"
"No idea...?"
Slowly, the judges' boredom began to drain away. The same line, the same scene—and yet.
Something is genuinely different. What do I even call it?
As though bewitched by something, life began to stir in the judges' eyes—eyes that had gone dead-fish themselves after hours of identical repetitions. Even Team Leader Seong found herself leaning forward, curious about this Han Yeo-reum.
A Second Glance (C)
Online or offline, what a star needs is the public's gaze! In person, in your photos and videos—even your voice will make people stop, look back, and focus, one more time.
The judges never knew it, but at that moment Yeo-reum's skill switched on. And every gaze in the room began to converge on her.
Thud—
Yeo-reum dropped the backpack she'd brought to the floor like it weighed nothing at all—and the sound said otherwise, heavy with however many workbooks were stuffed inside.
"Whew...."
Then she flopped into the waiting chair. This was no mere recitation of lines.
Yes. It really feels like she exists.
Every gesture, every movement, resembled Pi Chae-won—the heroine of The Cherry on Top of the Parfait Belongs to the Heroine that the production team had imagined. Team Leader Seong, too, found herself hanging on Yeo-reum's every motion.
Riiip—
Yeo-reum unzipped the bag and pulled out a workbook. The rustle of flipping pages was crisp and clear.
Then, on one page, she stopped mid-motion.
"Ah...."
She peeled off a pink heart-shaped post-it stuck to the page and crumpled it in her fist.
"This is ridiculous...."
Snap!
She shut the workbook.
That was all.
The given performance was over. Meeting Han Yeo-reum's jaded, world-weary eyes, Team Leader Seong understood instinctively.
...Now I see why Senior Yeo recommended her.
Han Yeo-reum was a performer who knew how to drape a story over a scene.
The vast majority of contestants had kept their focus fixed squarely on the words "Japanese shoujo manga." And that was precisely the problem.
The hook of this drama is that she has to be a real Korean high school girl.
Only then did the punchlines land—lines dripping with sentiment like "Let's take one more step forward, together, with courage... Yeah...! Because we're friends...!" and situations like being abruptly locked in a gym storage shed were funny because of it.
Good thing I watched all the behind-the-scenes footage.
So I had come dressed in my actual high school uniform, sneakers and all, with the same backpack I'd carried back then. Styled exactly as the writer intended, so I could show her the protagonist living inside her head, just as she'd pictured it.
And one more thing, on top of that.
I mixed in a scene from Pachehi—"leaving messages inside textbooks with post-its." It was one of the habits of Hina, the shoujo heroine whom Pi Chae-won watched through those dead-fish eyes.
Slapping cute little messages everywhere to hammer home her sunny-girl image.
Being together is what gives us strength, right? ٩(๑>∀<๑)۶ No one can live this life alone. — Hina —
The content itself was nothing special. But in a shoujo manga, even a message like this works its magic on the cold-blooded delinquent king of the school, melting his heart by degrees—that's the cliché, and it works every time.
"Could we take a look at one of the post-its from your workbook?"
A woman who looked like a writer asked, her eyes gleaming. I smoothed out the crumpled post-it and handed it over.
Naturally, since the drama hadn't aired yet, I'd written the message so that its nuance merely resembled the one that would actually appear on screen.
Shoujo heroine dialogue is all more or less the same, anyway.
The little post-it traveled from the writer's hand to the person beside her, and from there to the next, and the next.
"You've interpreted it properly."
And once it reached the very last person in the row—
100% of the audience is focused on you!
Current audience: 8
The stage has concluded successfully.
▶ Current heat of the space (20℃): [F]
A status window popped up. Apparently I'd made my appeal properly.
I let the dead-fish eyes I'd been holding this entire time blink once—slowly, and just for me.
"Nothing left to see here. Let's start working out the schedule."
And just like that, I was cast as the lead of a web drama in a single stroke.
Click. Pause.
Do Gyeo-ul stopped on the very same frame yet again.
"Twenty-five minutes, twenty-seven seconds...."
Murmuring to herself, she picked up her pen and scribbled something down. The notebook in her hand was worn ragged at the edges.
Click—
As though possessed, Gyeo-ul dragged the playback bar forward one more time.
"Why on earth," she breathed.
The wall of her room, covered from end to end, was papered with screenshots from the film Yeo-reum had acted in.