Room and Board
The public announcement of Luna's transfer, and the exposé on Moon Entertainment.
These two things went forward at the same time.
Her contract termination was fast approaching, but it was still true that she was technically under Moon Entertainment.
Only by announcing the transfer could we preempt any dirty tricks the company might try to pull.
If they suddenly booked her some bizarre schedule, that would have become an exhausting headache of its own.
And in anticipation of the spin Moon Entertainment was bound to put out the moment the contract became public, the opening strike we threw was the exposé on what the company was actually like behind closed doors.
That alone was enough to leave Moon Entertainment more or less half-conscious.
Controversy over overworking your artists is an issue that's always been around, but the revelation that there had been no settlements at all was an outrage no one could wrap their head around.
Whether some secret deal had existed between Moon Sooyeon and Moon Entertainment was hardly the important question anymore in light of it.
I mean — the bank balance of a superstar who'd generated profits in the hundreds of billions of won was a mere 1.7 million won?
Even the luxury apartment she'd been living in belonged to the company, which meant she was left with literally nothing to her name.
Just exposing her financial state had been enough to turn the whole world upside down.
But as far as I was concerned, it still fell a little short.
It had already been proven how justified Luna's move was, but it wasn't the kind of blow that would put Moon Entertainment under for good.
Granted, a Moon Entertainment without Luna was a pizza without the cheese — doomed sooner or later — but we didn't even want to wait for that much.
Moon Entertainment's feelings toward Flame, which had poached Luna, would naturally be hatred and fury, and dealing with someone brimming with malice is a fairly tiring business.
"So we were planning to start hitting them with legal action, and then this happened."
"Right."
"Nobody saw this coming, though."
"Tell me about it. Honestly, neither did I."
The counterpunch that finally landed on Moon Entertainment was the drug scandal.
You know that villa I infiltrated to get my hands on their files?
I'd felt a little too unsatisfied just walking out, so I placed an anonymous tip — and apparently that was where it all came crashing down.
A substantial quantity of narcotics was discovered at that villa that day, and the people who'd been doing the drugs were rounded up in droves, which promptly obliterated Moon Entertainment — or more precisely, CEO Moon.
What's more, some of the trainees were caught up in it too.
Moon Entertainment trainees weren't celebrities, exactly, so it wasn't covered as major news, but eventually everyone who mattered knew about it anyway.
The creditors and investors who'd decided there was truly no hope left turned their backs all at once, and Moon Entertainment reached the point of no return.
The IPO that CEO Moon had clung to until the very end went down the drain along with everything else, leaving him in a truly hopeless position.
"W-were any of them kids who were close to Luna sunbae? I never expected things to turn out like this."
There were, however, a few things I hadn't anticipated — one of them being the question of what would happen to the trainees.
If they'd been dragged into those hosting parties against their will and then connected to drugs on top of it, this situation would be brutally unfair to them.
Maybe I'm just a soft-hearted fool of a Shin cultist after all — at the time, all I'd thought about was sticking it to CEO Moon, but seeing how things unfolded, I realized it might wound Moon Sooyeon.
After all, she'd already blown up at him just for using trainees to arrange those hosting parties.
So I asked her whether there was anything she wanted to do to help, and her answer was quite different from what I'd expected.
"If they were close to me, would they have gone to a place like that? That's the very first thing I hammer into the kids."
"Is that so?"
"The moment you set foot in one of those places even once, you can forget about ever having a normal career. Do you think things stay hidden in this day and age? Something always comes out, one way or another."
"Well, that's true."
"And even when I say all that, it's only ever the kids who listen that actually hear it. They're at the age when they're at their most vulnerable to temptation, so CEO Moon was the one who should have shown restraint..."
"From what I could tell, though, none of them were forced to go."
"In the end, you're responsible for your own life. Just like I ended up penniless like this."
"...I suppose you're right."
She seemed to lament the situation, but there was no sign of shock or anger.
Well then, no problem.
I'm not exactly a paragon of virtue myself, so I tend to be somewhat numb when it comes to other people's affairs.
See, this is the part where I failed to take after my father.
Fortunately, since no one had apparently been coerced into attending those parties, I decided to simply erase the whole matter from my mind.
The first thing Luna announced after officially joining Flame Entertainment was that her next activities would be postponed indefinitely.
She'd already been through grueling exploitation and was worn out, both physically and mentally.
And the comeback album Moon Entertainment had produced was nothing like what she wanted — besides, it wasn't something we could use anyway.
So the plan was changed: rest and recover first, then build a new album from the ground up.
Rest first, album after — that was the company's decided next schedule for Luna.
The fans seemed quietly pleased about it, too.
Once you become a core fan, you more or less memorize your artist's schedule, and even a jaded veteran who'd watched Luna's schedule get run through the wringer for years could see it was excessively brutal.
That was why a fair number of fans had protested to the company, practically saying our Luna was being worked to death — and now that the company had changed, seeing genuine care arrive immediately helped restore at least a measure of trust.
Of course, fans could never all be of one mind, so there were still some muddying the waters with all sorts of nonsense — claiming they'd gotten full of themselves, or crying betrayal.
Worse, a problem I hadn't anticipated cropped up on our side as well: when the hosting-plus-drugs scandal broke at Moon Entertainment, some people started pointing fingers at Luna herself.
Within Luna's own fandom, no less.
It hadn't even blown up into a real controversy, and still those kinds of whispers came crawling out.
Are people like that actually fans?
Like I said, this place has a bottom you can't see.
Moon Entertainment had never properly controlled its fan communities — not the antis, not the toxic fans, not even the sasaeng stalkers. A textbook do-nothing trash company.
Which meant every variety of filth imaginable had latched onto it.
And so, naturally, people spreading absurd rumors about Luna popped up even inside the fandom.
But our Flame was a company dead serious about teaching the sincere lesson that life is combat, and we began swinging the hammer of lawsuits to purge the rumors swirling through every community.
The ones who rallied enthusiastically to our side were Luna's core fandom.
They had their own firm conviction that Luna had never been involved in anything like that — because the notion that a woman who'd supposedly taken hosting money had a total net worth of 1.7 million won didn't add up no matter how you looked at it.
Besides, Luna's sudden rise had been powered by a music video and fancams, so it was hard to argue she'd had anyone's backing.
The drug accusations were even more absurd — going by Luna's schedule, she'd slept four hours a night while grinding through events and concerts, working like an ox, plain and simple.
The general consensus was that if she'd actually been doing drugs on a schedule like that, she'd have died several times over by now.
Drugs don't build up a person's stamina, after all. If anything, they drain it.
She'd kept up that schedule nonstop for three straight years, so the fans had plenty to say on the matter.
Which is why the fandom's current theory is that the hosting offers were, in fact, one of the reasons Luna left Moon Entertainment.
If you connect it to why Luna — who'd worked like an ox for years and endured it in silence — suddenly exploded, the story hangs together well enough.
The arsonists vanishing one by one under Flame's mighty lawsuit hammer also played a big part in the fandom's self-purification.
Around the time Moon Sooyeon's transfer to Flame was more or less wrapped up.
I found myself facing yet another situation I hadn't expected.
"...So, you're saying Luna sunbae is moving into this building?"
"Of course. Do I have anywhere else to go? I'm broke. Where am I supposed to find money for rent?"
"...Didn't you receive a signing bonus?"
"Ah, that. I rolled it into the contract on the condition that Flame takes on the old Moon Entertainment staff."
"That's..."
Are you kidding me? This lunatic woman signed away her money again?
Hiring the people who'd worked under Moon Sooyeon at Moon Entertainment had been part of the agreement from the start.
But waiving her entire signing bonus over it?
With Flame, I could chalk it up to the Shin cult being the Shin cult and not find it too strange — but this woman still hasn't come to her senses.
Someone of her caliber could have commanded at least several hundred million won as a signing fee, and with that she could have rented a place with proper security.
"I'm going to have to lodge an objection about this."
"Why are you sticking your nose into my contract, Siwoo?"
"I made a promise, didn't I? This isn't right."
Someone who'd lived under oppression for years was bound to crave freedom — of course she would.
So even after joining our company, I'd assumed she'd avoid living in the company dorms at all costs.
And yet here she was, moving into company housing because she had no money.
This felt wrong enough that I was about to have a serious talk with Cheon Yua — but she beat me to it, blocking my path.
"It was my idea."
"...Why? Isn't it suffocating? You're finally free — you should be enjoying that freedom."
"...I don't need that."
"...Why not?"
"Because being alone is lonely."
"...Is that so."
Well, I can't exactly argue with that.
She is at the most hollow-hearted point of her life, so maybe having people bustling around her is actually better.
And it would be ridiculous of me to keep telling her to move out when she doesn't even want to.
Things really do have a strange way of working out.
That said, this arrangement felt less than pleasant for me.
Cheon Yua and Yang Yuri alone already kept me quietly on edge, and now Moon Sooyeon was being added on top?
Isn't the female density of this company getting a little out of hand?
Don't get me wrong — the company still had thirty able-bodied guards standing watch, and as an overwhelmingly male majority, they actually left the place feeling understocked on women.
But these women would be living on floors one and two, which made it a different story entirely.
The seventh and eighth floors, where the actors stayed, were strictly off-limits to the guards, after all.
And already, I could see troubling signs of something demanding.
"More importantly, what's with 'Luna sunbae'? From now on, call me Sooyeon sunbae."
"Is that really the important thing right now?"
"It is. You call Cheon Yua 'Yua sunbae,' don't you? Siwoo, are you discriminating against people right now?"
"...Why would that possibly matter..."
"It matters. To me."
She'd started nitpicking over the most absurd thing imaginable.
Worse, Cheon Yua and Moon Sooyeon had an odd, almost uncanny awareness of each other, so being stuck between them was exactly the kind of situation where I'd end up in a difficult spot.
Really, this doesn't feel right at all.
"Things might get a little noisy, perhaps?"
But everything had already been decided, so there was nothing for me to say about it.
I could only hope everyone would get along.
Of course, this company felt so much like an extension of Cheon Yua herself that Moon Sooyeon would never dare stand against her.
Yet for some reason, when the two of them were placed side by side, Cheon Yua seemed to give ground slightly, which made it hard to predict how things would unfold.
"It's probably because Sooyeon sunbae is the type who lives for the moment, no? Her compatibility with Yua sunbae is a bit off."
Well, what can you do.
Cheon Yua must have anticipated all of this when she took Moon Sooyeon in.
She separates public duty from private feeling, that woman.
It'll be to protect Moon Sooyeon from the stalkers and sasaeng fans still lingering out there.
If she'd truly judged it a bad idea, she'd have found some way to make Moon Sooyeon independent instead — so there was no reason for me to fret over it.
"It's time to focus on filming, anyway."
Now that the Moon Sooyeon matter was settled, my one and only concern from here on out was making my debut work a success.