A-il
“They’re known as a VTuber company, but looking at the people going in and out of the building, it really does feel more like an entertainment agency.”
“……Hmm?”
In the photo, a girl with a baby face was walking through the company entrance.
“A trainee?”
“Just a guess, but the odds are high. She comes in around lunch, eats, then vanishes somewhere. My bet is she’s practicing in a practice room and only drops by for meals.”
“She definitely has the idol look. Give her a few more years and she’d be center material.”
They’re raising trainees separately? Kim Hye-min, of all people?
That scatterbrained woman?
Or maybe…
Yeong-il?
Is he already drawing up some grand plan? No way, right?
Kang Seong-min’s suspicions deepened another notch.
“And the second one—judging by how she gets out of a van, she’s a signed celebrity. Circumstantially, this has to be Lunari.”
“Oh? Let’s see.”
He’d heard in passing that Lunari had celebrity-level looks. She’d come to IG in person once before, and the staff who’d seen her had all said as much.
“The reviews weren’t exaggerated.”
Why bother being a VTuber? Wouldn’t it make more sense to prep her for a proper debut? She’s already got plenty of hit songs.
Coldly speaking, she’d make far more money that way. Other than privacy, I don’t see the upside.
“Please take a look at the last photo—the man.”
“The last one?”
Kang Seong-min flipped through a few more shots.
“There’s a man who only showed up once.”
Tall, dressed in rumpled clothes that still somehow carried presence. One photo caught him getting out of a taxi and heading into the company; another, later, after sundown, showed him climbing back into a taxi and leaving.
“Mask and hood pulled all the way down—pretty suspicious, right?”
Kang Seong-min pulled the photo closer and studied it.
“……Decent height, good proportions.”
“Right?”
“Even with the mask, the eyes and nose bridge are clean. Unless the jawline is wildly off, this is prime material. And if it isn’t, you just fix the lower half.”
The long-buried occupational disease of an entertainment boss flared at the sight of such a massive raw gemstone.
“Yes. So in my opinion… this is A-il.”
“……Yeah. That tracks.”
He’d uploaded songs to YouTube, but it was hard to call that a formal debut.
“Is he a trainee too? They really snagged a solid one.”
“Wouldn’t you say? They call Muse Family a VTuber company, but the latent value is endless.”
Kang Seong-min set the photos down.
“But.”
“Yes?”
“Where’s Yeong-il?”
“Ah—while I was staking the place out, I photographed several other people, but the rest just looked like regular employees. Clock-in, clock-out on a fixed schedule.”
Silence settled for a beat after the manager’s answer.
“You made it sound like you’d found something huge…”
Kang Seong-min’s fist started to tremble, and then he bellowed at the employee.
“You just dug up the VTubers’ red pills and came back—! What the hell did you even go there for—!!”
“I-I’m sorry!!”
Ugh.
Kang Seong-min’s gaze lingered on the photo of the man presumed to be A-il.
A-il.
The unidentified vocalist.
The singer who performed the songs Yeong-il wrote.
“……A-il, A-il, Yeong-il.”
A comment he’d once seen on a community board floated up out of nowhere.
It was the kind of absurd place where people also claimed Lunari and Yeong-il were the same person.
A half-assed nickname, never showing his face.
Either someone close to Yeong-il—or.
……There might actually be a chance they’re the same person?
“That masked guy.”
“…Yes!”
“How old does he look?”
The employee thought for a second.
“Mid-to-late twenties? It’s winter and he was bundled up tight, so I can’t be exact.”
“No, he looks about that age to me too… Young.”
For someone in his twenties, arranging, composing, vocals, trend sense, operations—nothing seemed to be missing.
There are people who stand out from a young age.
In the arts, geniuses like that did show up from time to time.
And if he liked VTubers, the youth checked out.
A young, good-looking composer-slash-vocalist, huh.
Polish a guy like that a little and run one viral push, and he’d blow up overnight.
A-il might not be Yeong-il—but if he couldn’t even get near Yeong-il, he had nothing to lose.
“Alright.”
Kang Seong-min straightened in his seat.
“We’re changing direction.”
“Pardon?”
“Stop going after Yeong-il directly. We go for A-il.”
“A-il?”
“Yeah. If we pitch Yeong-il something right now, it’ll look obvious. A-il is a singer. Offering a singer a CM song is a perfectly natural pretext. And if A-il is Yeong-il, we create a chance to reel him in and talk.”
Aside from the web drama OST, Yeong-il had never taken outside commissions. Whatever it was, the answer was always no.
But every single project—including that web drama—shared a common thread.
They all had something to do with VTubers.
And as it happened, a good commercial offer had just come in.
An audio equipment company and a VR hardware company had partnered up on a next-gen VR headset.
Shin Se-young had already been approached as the main model.
The concept: Shin Se-young steps into a VR world and sings while meeting various VTubers.
When the pitch first landed—
Did word get out that Shin Se-young likes VTubers?
He’d been careful to keep that from leaking, but apparently no secret lasts forever.
An offer that had once irritated him had come back around as the perfect opportunity.
“Let’s recommend Muse Family’s A-il and Lunari for that commercial. We’re the main client—we have enough pull for that.”
“A-il isn’t a VTuber, though?”
“Doesn’t matter. A-il only has to sing.”
“And if they turn this down too?”
“Hmm… I think they’ll take it. But tell them it has to be both of them. No one without the other. Both. And they promised VR gear sponsorships—make sure you mention that.”
A terrestrial TV commercial, no less.
Judging by every move Yeong-il had made so far, he always acted for the VTubers around him.
If this put Lunari in the spotlight, wouldn’t he step up willingly?
If A-il wasn’t Yeong-il, that would be a shame—but still.
Kang Seong-min had been wrong about Yeong-il more times than he could count, yet this time he had a gut feeling he’d finally hit the mark.
“Hurry. We’re short on time. We need the deal signed and access secured before MAMA.”
“Yes, sir.”
That evening, Shin Se-young cheerfully confirmed her appearance in the commercial for the VR equipment company Nova Space.
Views: 10,000,000
It hit ten million views in a single week.
Lunari’s Eumnya, riding the Japanese wave, currently sat at eleven million—and we’d nearly caught up.
Eumnya had cost real money, looked great on video, and got proper promotion. Invisible, on the other hand, was a black screen and my time—purely economical.
Blood is thicker than water, I guess.
Both were songs I’d made, but maybe because I’d sung Invisible myself, I found myself ever so slightly favoring one of them. Around the time I thought, Wow, I’m being pretty childish, I cut off the comparison altogether.
At first I wondered if the view count was just high because of Mellow’s nonsense. Looking at the comments, though, that didn’t seem to be the whole story.
Maybe that was just what I wanted to believe. But at least to my eyes, people genuinely liked my song.
“The digital release is already in review—should I tell them?”
What I was looking at was the fan cafe Han So-yeong had mentioned before.
There weren’t that many people, and the YouTube comments alone were enough to make me happy, so at first I hadn’t planned on ever checking it out.
Separate from cleaning up the Mellow mess, I also didn’t want the song interpreted in a way that had nothing to do with my intent—so I’d decided to post on both YouTube and the fan cafe.
On YouTube I added a note in the description that this was a song written for my fans. For the fan cafe, the company got in touch with the A1st admin and secured me staff privileges.
It wasn’t anything major, and rather than pile more work on the manager, I figured I’d just do it myself and started typing.
“Phew. Done.”
Nothing groundbreaking. A greeting, a note that the lyrics were dedicated to the fans, and a closing goodbye.
I finished feeling proud of myself, lay down—and then my phone started vibrating like crazy.
I hadn’t known comment notifications would go off.
After that I turned notifications off and only lurked now and then, like I was doing right now.
Once Han So-yeong pinned the cafe link in the YouTube video description, more people joined. We were up to a whole five hundred!
Modern streamers might be used to fan cafes, but for an old-timer streamer like me it was novel.
Back in my day we didn’t have stuff like this.
It wasn’t packed with people, and with A-il doing nothing, the post refresh rate was pathetic—but when I dropped by, it was oddly entertaining.
“Oh, you can sort by popularity too.”
Lots of little features. What was the popularity metric based on?
Hearts?
There was a like function, same as YouTube.
I couldn’t go leaving comments—that would just draw aggro. So I went through and pressed a heart for every person who’d come by. It was the best I could do.
There weren’t that many posts, so it wasn’t hard.
I was diligently tapping away when—
Bzzzzt—!
What is it?
“Hello? What’s up?”
“Pffft— Do-yoon-ah, what are you doing?”
“Just hanging out.”
“Oh, really? Is that sooo.”
What? What was this.
Yu Nari’s voice was thick with laughter. Unsettlingly so.
“Keup— hahahaha!”
“…?”
“Aww~ Do-yoon’s so cute. Are you brewing yuksu?”
“What are you even talking about all of a sudden? Have you been drinking?”
“Heh, no, see—someone was out there spamming hearts all over the place.”
“Huh?”
Spamming hearts…?
A chill ran down my spine.
“……What do you mean by that?”
“Guess you didn’t know ‘cause you’ve never used a cafe properly—when you hit a heart, people get a notification~?”
Shit.
“For real?”
“Yeah. What, did you think I installed CCTV in your house?”
I scrambled back into the fan cafe and checked the latest posts.
In a cafe where a single post might go up every three or four hours—
Posts poured in.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Heheh, looks like you hearted every single post that was up.”
Damage control was impossible. You could say, It’s just hearts, what’s the big deal?—but that was only something people who lived boldly in front of their fans could pull off. I was living in hiding.
When you always kept an escape route ready, you had no business giving people affection.
That was the real cruelty.
Back when I was a streamer, the guilt of throwing everything away and walking out had been beyond words.
Wait.
Hold on a second.
How did Nari know?
“Nuna, are you in my cafe?”
“Yep, go find me~ I got a heart too. A heart, of all things—so awkward!”
“……You’re enjoying this.”
The embarrassment would pass. I just had to quietly pretend nothing happened.
I scrubbed both hands over my face and despaired in silence.
“I seriously want CCTV now…… What are you even doing over there.”
“What kind of horrifying thing is that to say.”
“I can only hear little rustling sounds, so I’m curious.”
“……Nuna, what’s your ID. What did you post.”
“It’s a seeeecret—!”
“Ha…”
When had she even joined.
I’d hearted everything from the notices to the random posts, so finding which one was Nari was a lost cause.
“Ah, but that’s not the only reason I called.”
“Huh?”
“The timing just lined up—this is the real reason! We got a commercial offer?”
“We?”
“Yep—for A-il and Lunari!”
“……”
A-il again?