Guilty of a Transformation
People like to say a woman's transformation is no crime. Transform that far, though, and wouldn't it start to look guilty?
The time was five in the morning. On any ordinary day I would still have been wandering the land of dreams, but today I didn't have that luxury. Today was my regular scheduled break from streaming, which meant it was also the day of the music-video shoot.
A day off, and I still had to go to work. How tragic was that? Tragic enough that if my viewers saw me like this, they would have offered the warmest comfort.
…They would, right?
"…So this is how a working adult feels, clocking in."
I muttered it and drank the energy drink I'd set out the night before. Breakfast, of course, was misutgaru—that roasted-grain mix you shake up and call a meal. I had neither the time nor the strength to sit down to a proper morning. Even if I'd had both, the odds that breakfast would still have been misutgaru were extremely high.
At any rate, once every preparation was done, I finally set out for the destination. The music-video set.
As for what I actually needed to know about the production schedule, it came down to roughly this: knock out the shoot as fast as possible, then knock out the recording as fast as possible after that. The end.
That wasn't a joke. It really was the whole of it. Filming and recording—those were the only two things I had to worry about. Hearing it the first time had thrown me a little, but the more I thought about it, the less strange it seemed. Even on my first music video, the parts I'd touched directly were the lyrics and composition, the vocal recording, and the concept plus final approval. Everything else had been crushed under the glorious power of outsourcing. This time, that outsourcing had simply cast a slightly wider net.
Maybe that was why, right up until the moment I headed in to film, I didn't feel particularly burdened. If anything, it felt like I was about to go experience an idol anime in real life, and the thrill of it sat pleasantly in my chest. I met my manager at the place we'd agreed on, rode in her car to the set, and what came out to welcome me was—
"Okay, so what do I do now!"
"You'll need to be styled."
"…Sorry?"
Not a heart-pounding idol-anime experience. Cruel reality. And so began not the heart-pounding idol-anime experience, but the heart-pounding styling experience.
"Your makeup takes so well! How hard do you usually work on your skin?"
"…About as much as anyone else?"
Lee Hari's skincare routine ended at soap and a foam cleanser. Right after I'd become a woman I had put on lotion for a while, and then even that got to be a hassle, so I stopped. I did not, of course, report this fact as it stood. I, Lee Hari, was a human who understood Bitik well enough to unfold an entire lecture on Introduction to Bitik Studies on stream, and I also understood extremely well that the instant I bragged about this out loud, it would become a Bitik offense deserving of death.
"What kind of hairstyle are you thinking? My recommendations are this one, and this one, and this one…. Oh, this would look wonderful with the costume too!"
"…I like this. Could we go with this one, please."
I just grabbed something at random. Lee Hari was the sort of person who walked into a salon and asked the stylist to cut it pretty and tidy, thanks. Tell a person like that to choose a hairstyle? You'd get more reliable results leaving a fish with a cat. Well, she was a professional, so every style she'd recommended would probably suit me fine.
"Want to try this on? Oh, and while you're changing, take this and this as well."
"…Ah. Sure."
Even when I'd gone clothes shopping with Eunha, I hadn't been reduced to a dress-up doll changing outfits at quite this rate…. Or had I? It might have been worse, actually.
And that wasn't all. There was nail polish. There was the relentless try this, try that of earring selection. Which meant that if I had accepted that casting offer, scenes like this might have been ordinary daily life.
…Good thing I turned it down. Really, truly good thing I turned it down…!!!
I let out a silent sigh of relief and looked down at the costume I was wearing. This looked expensive. All at once, curiosity about the price of the thing on my body welled up, and the means of resolving that surging curiosity stood very close by.
"Um…."
I edged carefully toward the person who had brought me the outfit.
"…Oh. Was there something you wanted to ask?"
"Would it be possible to know how much this costs?"
"I believe—"
While streamer Märchen was diligently receiving a styling steeped in expert hands, what was her manager, Ryu Chae-in, doing? Thinking about work, as befit a workaholic.
The problem currently occupying Ryu Chae-in was the timing of the announcement that streamer Märchen had an agency. Märchen still hadn't told her viewers that she'd signed an MCN contract with AY Entertainment. She couldn't hide the fact forever, though. The moment a music video that had passed through AY Entertainment's hands was released to the world, the outline of the truth would surface right alongside it.
If the truth was going to come out anyway, it was far better to use it well. Reveal the affiliation before the video dropped, and turn it into noise marketing for the release to come. That much had already been settled at the last three-way meeting. The problem was exactly when, and exactly how. Announce it at the same moment as the video, to spike the impact? Or roll it out step by step and let the viewers' anticipation build? Use a YouTube premiere to break the news, or weave it into stream content?
She had talked it through with Märchen more than once, and the rough shape of the reveal was already drawn. Still, a better method might yet occur to her, so she didn't stop turning it over.
"…Manager."
The moment Märchen's voice reached her, she set the thought aside. This was a person's first time on a set like this. She'd looked lively enough, for a first-timer, that Chae-in had eased off her worry—but unfortunately, that seemed to have been a misreading. Unlike when Märchen explained Raider, her voice was drawn tight with nerves. Anyone listening could have guessed she was strung tight over a music-video set she was experiencing for the first time. On top of that, nearly everyone in this place was a stranger to her. Everyone except her manager, Ryu Chae-in. Which meant the only person a nervous Märchen could lean on was Ryu Chae-in. So Chae-in meant to answer at once.
"…Ah, yes!"
But the sight of Märchen after styling made the reply come a beat late.
Lay it on a little thick, and the verdict went like this: dress her properly, with intent, and she was a national-treasure beauty; get her to close her mouth, and she was a face that could bring a kingdom to ruin. That was the assessment of someone who knew Märchen extremely well.
So. So, then. What if you went past dressed-properly-with-intent? What if professional hands had been on her? What if specialists who could create something out of nothing had cut and polished the raw stone? The result was standing right here.
A work of art. Surely everyone in the room, looking at Märchen, had thought the same. People said a woman's transformation was no crime—but transform to this degree, and wouldn't it be guilty? The thought went even that far.
And the brain of workaholic Ryu Chae-in, having beheld the work of art, began to spin at a ferocious speed. That would sell. It would sell no matter what. Footage that held that work of art had no choice but to succeed. The tide was coming in—a tide beyond any comparison with the growth they had now. When that water rose, the oars would have to drive like mad. And the more she prepared before the water came, and the harder she worked after it arrived, the more strokes she could get in.
It wouldn't be easy, of course. She would have to convince the people above her that this plan made money, and pry a budget out of them. At the same time, she would have to suit the taste of the person who actually had to do it: Märchen. It was a situation for which "a landslide of work just hit" was the perfect phrase. From the standpoint of a workaholic like Ryu Chae-in, it was something to welcome.
The assignment fairy who had just fetched a workaholic more work began to approach, stiff and awkward. She was rigid enough that you might worry whether she could even get through a music-video shoot. Märchen came in close and spoke in a voice small enough that the people around them wouldn't hear, almost a whisper.
"Um, there's something I wanted to ask…."
"Yes. Ask me anything."
"If the outfit rips during filming, do I have to pay for it? These clothes are insanely expensive…."
Apparently, she had been mistaken. Märchen wasn't tense because this was the first shoot of her life. She was worried that if, by some one-in-a-million chance, the outfit she was wearing tore midway through, she might have to pay for it.
"…You don't have to worry about that. All you need to think about, Märchen, is finishing the shoot successfully."
The instant she heard it, the tension that had held her a moment ago vanished without a trace.
"Really?! Ha, I was worried for nothing."
Yes. It really had been for nothing. The odds of a person, in the course of a life, ending up in a situation where their clothes tore badly enough that they had to pay for them were close enough to zero to call them zero. Properly unwound, Märchen took a selfie and checked how she looked. And then, as if drunk on her own face, she let her true feelings slip out in a whisper she didn't even seem to notice.
"Holy shit…. This is actually stupid levels of good…. Kore ga watashi?!"
…Right. She really had been worried for nothing. Ryu Chae-in thought so with complete sincerity.