Yes. I Lost It.
At the lodging, the meeting raged on through the whole of the dawn.
"I came running the moment I heard the casting problem was finally about to be solved. And now—what? Did I hear that correctly?"
The casting director—the man charged with choosing actors fit for a drama—pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
"Kim Yu-han. You're giving that role to a rookie?"
"That's how it turned out. A recommendation from someone I know actually landed."
Jung Soyen nodded with perfect ease. Perhaps the answer was too unruffled; the casting director swallowed a breath that went nowhere.
"How can you drag personal feelings into a matter like this and bring in an acquaintance?"
"It wasn't personal feelings alone. I checked the skill first, and then I brought her."
"I ran myself ragged looking for an actor worthy of Kim Yu-han. Wore the soles right off my shoes. Still couldn't find one. Come on—at least give me a name. What is it?"
"Lee Sua."
"Lee Sua... let me see..."
The casting director immediately hammered a search into his phone. A moment later, having turned up nothing at all, he blinked.
"A raw rookie, for real? Nothing comes up?"
While his bewilderment only kept swelling, the production manager from the drama company Art Warehouse was every bit as much at a loss.
Writer Lee Geumsuk's magnum opus—the great work she had long prepared as a script—could at last enter production. He had come rushing over, hardly stopping for his shoes, at the news that the collaboration between the two of them was resuming, only to arrive and find nothing but talk he could not begin to understand.
...A rookie in the role of Kim Yu-han? A casting meeting over a rookie?
"There are aspects of this that I, personally, cannot understand."
At last the production manager spoke, stroking his neatly trimmed mustache with one finger as he did.
"If the right person for Kim Yu-han truly is a rookie, then there's no need whatsoever to worry about how we bring them in, is there?"
"Hmm."
"I'm asking because, by any ordinary reasoning, I simply cannot make sense of it. Writer Lee's script, and two actors of real standing on top of that. If anything, people ought to be begging us to squeeze them in."
The casting director nodded beside him.
"Agreed. How is this even a subject for a meeting...?"
"Certainly. Hear nothing but the word 'rookie,' and that's the thought you'd have."
"You mean once we've seen it, we'll think differently?"
"That's right."
Jung Soyen nodded.
"Explain it in words all you like, and the doubts will only grow between us. So—why don't you simply take a look at the video."
Only then did the casting director and the production manager nod, for the time being. Talk alone was an armchair debate. They would understand once they saw it.
But the static started from the very first moment.
The casting director frowned at once.
"...What is this. Isn't this shop CCTV?"
"It is. We promised beforehand that we wouldn't film. This is all the footage that remains."
"Soyen, this is really too much."
He pushed his glasses up once more.
"Reviewing someone on shop CCTV—does that even make sense? You have to zoom to the limit just to barely make them out, and the picture is terrible."
His complaint was entirely justified. And yet Writer Lee and PD Choi Heewon showed not the faintest trace of unease, nor of displeasure. They simply played the video. Quite confidently.
"...What on earth are we supposed to be looking at."
Even Art Warehouse's production manager muttered as much.
Try as one might, it was shop CCTV. The angle was a wreck from the start, and once it was enlarged enough to hold on Sua, the quality was a wreck as well. Watching footage like this was enough to spoil a meal.
However.
The performance began, and Sua stared once straight into the shop's camera. From that moment—brief, and yet considerably intense—
"...!"
Image quality was no longer any kind of problem.
Silence alone filled the room.
The production manager and the casting director raised no further objections. More precisely, it would be fairer to say they couldn't. The reason, of course, was Lee Sua's acting. Jung Soyen only watched them with a face that said she understood; they themselves had gone through that same reaction at first.
"...She finds the camera. Instinctively?"
The casting director spoke. He must have been badly startled; he kept touching, over and over, the glasses he had already adjusted.
"I can't tell whether she found it as an actor discovering the camera, or because of Kim Yu-han's habit of scrutinizing everything around him. But whichever reason it was, this is extraordinary."
Excitement soaked his voice.
"Most of them, when you have them act, ask where the camera is and so on. They mean they'll follow directions as closely as they can. But this is different, isn't it? It feels like she's telling us to keep up with whatever she does."
"And Kim Yu-han is an unfinished role, at that. It also means she has that much confidence in her own reading of him."
"Here—here, PD! Pause this part for a second!"
At his word, the video froze.
The moment Lee Kang-cheol and Kim Yu-han shake hands at their first meeting. The beat where Kim Yu-han's eyes flick swiftly over every inch of Lee Kang-cheol.
"Rolling the eyes like that—you can't do it even if you practice. These days it's common enough to CG something as small as a trembling eyelid."
"And she did that entirely under her own power..."
"...It means she became one. With the role."
As if it galled him, the casting director wildly mussed his own hair.
"No—where has she been, that she's only showing up now? If a rookie like this existed, I wouldn't have had to run myself ragged!"
"We don't know her past either. But put the clues we've been given together, and a guess does start to form."
Jung Soyen went on.
"Sua says acting is a hobby. But she also says there isn't a hobby she hasn't tried. I imagine that means she excels in other fields as well."
"If that's true, then cooking, action, romance... there isn't a drama she couldn't carry? Are you serious?"
"No, no, no—wait! Enough! All of it!"
The one who suddenly shouted was Art Warehouse's production manager. Face grave, he cut every one of them short.
"Let's watch it just one more time. No—just three times..."
They sat together and savored Lee Sua's acting once more. It did not even stop at three. Four times. Five. The drawback of its being shop CCTV had, by now, become something that fed their anticipation. If it was this good even at miserable resolution, there was no way they could keep from wanting to see the real thing.
In the end the production manager nodded, as if in surrender.
"This one—we're going to have to bring her in. I acknowledge it."
Writer Lee Geumsuk brightened, as if she had been waiting for exactly that.
"You know this script was a chicken rib even for us, don't you? Wonderful to read on the page, and utterly impossible to evolve into a drama—the kind of scrap you can neither throw away nor make a meal of."
"A script we could neither discard nor save. Miss Sua became its final piece."
Once Writer Lee Geumsuk drove the point home, no one offered any further rebuttal. The assistant writers seated behind them like a fence nodded their heads like chicks. And yet...
The production manager rubbed at his mustache.
"First, I understand why we're holding a casting meeting over a mere rookie. Still—couldn't the fee come out on the cheap side?"
"I doubt it. Miss Sua even received an unofficial interview fee."
"...An interview fee?"
He drew his brows together. Was there any precedent for giving such a thing to a rookie? No—it would be fair to assume there was none. And yet, having seen the skill, he found it somehow persuasive all the same.
"Understood. An extraordinary rookie, so something in the way of pocket money? About how much did you hand over?"
"Three million won, out of Kim Seonil's own pocket. And Seo Yeon-ju's credit card."
"...?"
Listening at the side, the casting director's eyes went perfectly round.
"What? What did you give her?"
"Exactly what I just said. We gave her those."
"...Then there's nothing left to give!"
Thoroughly worked up, he pressed on.
"The acting being good? Yes, I acknowledge that. But in this business, there are assets you can't necessarily convert into money."
He tapped the script with a fingernail. Tok, tok, tok.
"This rookie's first line of credits will be Writer Lee's work. And the actors appearing alongside her are formidable. That experience alone is tremendous—and three million won and a card on top of it? Come now, that's plenty!"
Writer Lee Geumsuk only shrugged.
"That's what we thought, too. But either way, we're the ones without leverage. The moment the other party decides it isn't much, it ceases to mean anything."
"She thinks this isn't much? Impossible!"
At that, Writer Lee switched the video up on the laptop. This time it was the CCTV from the floor beneath the café.
"..."
The casting director and the production manager both stared at it in silence—
"...!"
—and soon had no choice but to shoot to their feet.
"This—no, this is... is this real?"
Kim Seonil, famous for being difficult, dropping to his knees would have been astonishing enough. Then Seo Yeon-ju drew a credit card from inside her clothes and pressed it into Sua's hand.
But what was truly shocking came after that.
The expression. Lee Sua's face.
The look of someone gazing down on mere trash. Eyes that found it genuinely offensive, the way these people were stealing her time...
She was not pleased in the slightest. She was annoyed. Plainly.
Taking off his glasses, the casting director said,
"Wow. I'm going to lose my mind. What kind of monster is this...?"
At dawn that day, the contract ended up revised again and again.
Meanwhile, Sua stepped out of the taxi without incident.
Whew... thank goodness.
That was the whole of her feeling on the way home. She had worried that the experience might be vivid while the reproduction proved pathetic, but the reactions said otherwise. She wanted to try even harder.
Today was busy. So busy.
She had confirmed the tremendous power of the Special Privilege, recognized that her own acting wasn't bad, and learned that this appearance of hers was not purely a disadvantage. Her body was tired. Her heart was deeply, quietly proud.
...I want to try everything. Really, really hard.
A life she had wandered through without talent, colorless and without a scent of its own—only now did it feel as though she had found a road, and the thrill of it set in. Her heart pounded.
For today, I'll rest properly. I'm so sleepy.
It was just as Sua quietly firmed her resolve.
Halt—
All at once, the footsteps that had been carrying her on without pause locked in place. Something planted itself before her as if demanding she look. There was, it turned out, such a thing as an irresistible force.
Gazing at the transparent display, Sua thought.
Why am I like this?
Dolls, no matter how she turned it over, were not among her interests. Yes—a conclusion that would not change if she thought it a hundred times, or a thousand.
And yet.
Again and again.
"...?"
Her gaze was drawn to a rabbit doll. Every other doll was fine. Only the rabbit, uniquely. Like instinct.
In truth, she had already been aware of it. Since she had become a woman, her way of speaking had changed, and quite a few of her habits along with it. Was it possible that even her tastes were undergoing a transformation?
Come on—but dolls were a bit much. She wasn't a little kid.
Sua shook her head hard.
"I can't do this. You have to become a cool actor."
If she was going to be an actor anyway, she wanted to be a cool one. A refined, sharp sort of woman. So dolls were absolutely out.
"...Right. This is nonsense. I am absolutely not interested."
Sua muttered it with complete confidence—even as she flung open the door of the doll department store.
"Welcome~"
"...Huh?"
The next morning, Sua was extremely busy from the moment she woke.
Bonk! Bonk!
The two rabbit dolls, one gripped in each hand, knocked together. Sua lay flat on her stomach, her chest pressed to the floor for a cushion, and every so often she kicked her feet in the air. For the record, she had bought both dolls on Seo Yeon-ju's card. Free.
Hm? This isn't just playing around, you say?
It was not. At least, Sua was entirely certain of that.
It might look like simple doll-play, but in her own way she was reading through various scripts and practicing. For the record, the scene currently underway was a perfect match for her taste: the forbidden love between a princess and her bodyguard...
The princess rabbit doll spun her back on him.
"Set your heart aside. Heaven has forbidden this."
But pit-pat, pit-pat—Sua moved her hands, and the bodyguard rabbit hurried diligently after the princess.
"This is forbidden, that is forbidden. Forbidden—does forbidding pay? My lady seeks out nothing but things to prohibit."
Smack! The princess doll slapped his cheek.
"I told you not to! Think it over ten times and your heart still won't mend? Then think it over a hundred times and mend it, I say!"
"Even if I think it a hundred times, this is the only path. My lady."
That was when it happened.
—♪♫♬
The phone rang. An unknown number.
"Damn it."
A bad word slipped out of Sua's mouth. But the truly important part was just about to start...
She answered without a second thought, and a familiar voice slipped in at her ear—a tone as refreshing as a sea breeze on some clear-aired summer day.
"Hello? This is Sua's number, right? It's me, Seo Yeon-ju."
"Ah, yes. That's right."
Sua answered first, even as she felt faintly dazed. How did Seo Yeon-ju know her number? Ah—was this about the contract? Then there didn't seem to be anything strange about it.
However.
"Sua, did you happen to buy dolls?"
"...!"
What followed struck the back of her head. She muted the microphone and scrambled over to examine the card Seo Yeon-ju had given her.
No way. The statement gets sent to her? Not just the amount—it goes into detail about what was bought?
She was not given long to think.
"Hello? Huh, can you not hear me?"
"Ah, yes. Uh, yes. Why—why?"
Her brain stopped. It had to. Buy dolls at her age, and what would become of her image? The perfect actor she had planned—refined, sharp, untouchable—would collapse completely. Worse, with a contract hanging just ahead of her, this did her no good whatsoever. If she wanted decent terms, she had to put on as convincing a front as she could manage.
Was this the end? Had it already gone sideways?
The moment she thought it—
"Dolls showed up on the statement, you see? I wondered if maybe the card had been lost."
"..."
At last Sua's expression turned grim.