It Begins with Variety: Next K-Star (2)
I opened the comments and found more than two thousand of them. The bulk of the fire was aimed at Lemon Girls and Lee Yuram, though a fair number of posts concerned Next K-Star as well, and nearly all of those were glad the production team answered feedback so quickly.
Fortunately, almost none of the malice was pointed at Neptune. There wasn't much interest in them either.
The PD had called them a team with potential, and the general mood seemed to be that people would wait and see.
If they had shoved Lemon Girls aside and forced their way in, the comments would have been a storm of abuse. Lee Yuram, though, had caused such an enormous mess that she appeared to have soaked up every hater on the board.
I searched Neptune and found articles with their name sitting right in the headlines.
I clicked through. Neptune's profile had been written up as a proper article, and both the albums they'd tanked and the single they were promoting now were packaged to sound surprisingly respectable. Photos of members I'd never seen before came up alongside it. Beneath the piece, a credit line said the material had been provided by W&U.
Skimming the comments, I found several praising their visuals. I saved them one by one as I read, and then I stumbled on a pair that were genuinely unbelievable.
Dozens of likes. You've got to be kidding me.
I logged in to leave a reply and found a keyboard warrior already on the field. The handle was NeptuneMom, and a look around showed the same account had plastered defensive replies under plenty of other comments too. Not a single curse anywhere, and yet the combat rating was maxed out. The haters were dropping one after another.
Did Neptune already have a fan?
Sleep fled while I read the thread through. What rushed in to take its place was excitement, a bright lift in my chest. Kim Hyunjo had been exactly right. Raising rookies with your own hands, lifting their name, watching them win recognition — that taste was genuinely addictive.
Well. I hadn't raised them with my own hands. Still, I'd played a part in this, so I was more than entitled to feel proud of myself. More than entitled.
The subway soon came to a stop. My station. I was walking into the company with a Neptune song in my ears when the phone rang. Kim Hyunjo. The time was 7:53. Safe!
"Hello?"
"You on your way?"
Why did this man keep flipping between formal and casual? Not a scrap of consistency.
"I'm right outside the door. Which floor should I come to?"
"Management's on the fourth floor. Come to Conference Room B. Don't just walk in — there's a coffee shop out front of the building, so pick some up. Two hot Americanos…"
I jabbed the record button.
"One vanilla latte, one café mocha with whipped cream on top… hang on, Geon-young, what do you— one cappuccino, and one of whatever you feel like drinking."
"Yes, understood."
"You got all that?"
"I recorded it."
"Look at you. Competent."
To think I'd earn a compliment for competence on a coffee run.
I stepped back outside. Cross the street and a twenty-four-hour coffee shop sat right there. I bought everything I'd been told to get, settled the cups into a carrier, and took it in both hands.
The worry about being late had already evaporated, but I hurried back into the building anyway, afraid the coffee would cool.
"Damn it, what floor did he say?"
I'd forgotten.
Calling again after being praised for doing a good job felt a little… A man was just stepping onto the elevator, so I hurried in after him.
"Excuse me, what floor is Management Team 3?"
"Fourth. Want me to press it?"
"Thank you!"
Hell of a voice. Did he work here?
I glanced sideways and nearly jumped. It was the actor Sung Do-won.
A top star of his generation, still in his twenties. Tall, with shoulders broad as a swimmer's, and a blessed frame that would have made even rags look expensive — the clothes wouldn't carry Sung Do-won; Sung Do-won would carry the clothes. A radiance that sunglasses couldn't dim.
He wasn't an actor who lived on looks alone, either. His acting was every bit as solid as his face, and he had box-office power to match. A drama of his had exploded in China, and the two films he'd shot recently had drawn ten million and six million admissions apiece, so his stock in Chungmuro was climbing by the day.
I'd read the piece about W&U hooking him this summer, the first time he'd come out on the free-agent market, with a massive signing fee and the bait of a Hollywood launch. I just hadn't expected to run into him this soon.
This was a kind of fate. Should I ask for a handshake…
The thought had barely formed when the world in front of me went hazy.
The future?
But this time it was different.
The image stuttered and broke apart like a screen losing its signal, and my vision smeared. What was this? Every future I'd seen until now had been an interview with Chief Park and Reporter Song. Now I was sitting across from a man in an unfamiliar office. Other people seemed to be around us, but the noise was so heavy I couldn't make them out. I could barely confirm the face of the man seated directly in front of me.
Huh?
It was Sung Do-won. Sung Do-won with his sunglasses off, smiling. A face that hadn't aged a day. The exact face I'd seen in the flesh a moment ago.
What was this supposed to be?
I was still lost in the confusion when Sung Do-won's voice reached me.
Benefactor? Me? And what scheme?
"I'd like you to be my manager."
…!
"We're at the fourth floor."
The same voice layered over itself. When I came back to myself, Sung Do-won was holding the elevator's door-open button.
"Th-thank you."
I stepped off in a daze.
"Have a good day, then."
"…Have a good day."
The elevator climbed on with only Sung Do-won inside. I stood there like an idiot, staring at the closed doors.
What was that just now?
It was clearly different from the future I'd seen yesterday. The view had been thick with noise, and the vision itself had lasted only a moment. More than anything, it hadn't felt like the distant future.
When was this supposed to happen? There were far too few hints.
What had I helped him with? Was this something still ahead of me? It had to be. Didn't it?
Sung Do-won, asking me to be his manager… If I'd been able to answer, I would have said yes on the spot.
Neptune flickered through my mind. I was only just beginning to learn the pleasure and the pride of raising rookies — and yet what I wanted, when it came down to it, was still to manage an actor. And this was Sung Do-won.
"What are you doing over there? Hurry up."
A familiar voice hauled me back to the present. Conference Room B, across from the elevator. Through the half-open door, the traitor leaned out and beckoned.
A future that might arrive at any time could stay tucked away. For now, the present. Focus on the present.
I checked that the carrier was still steady in both hands and hurried into the room.
"Hello! I brought coffee."
"I'll get you the money later."
Kim Hyunjo seemed to have settled on casual speech for good. He should have just done that from the start.
Besides Kim Hyunjo and Choi Geon-young, two women and one man were in the conference room. I was halfway through my greetings when Kim Hyunjo's clothes made me flinch. Jeans and a loose sweatshirt. The same outfit he'd been wearing yesterday.
Don't tell me he never went home after we split at the pub, and came straight to the office.
"This is Jung Sunwoo, the new hire. And these are the folks from the PR team."
I matched faces to names in my head and committed them to memory. The rail-thin woman in her thirties, no makeup on her face, was PR Team Leader Park. The man and woman who seemed to work under her looked about my age.
Yesterday I'd failed to leave a good first impression. Today, though—!
"I'm Jung Sunwoo. It's a pleasure to meet you."
"Coffee!"
"Let's talk after we've had some. I'm about to drop dead."
The coffee won.
I took my own cup and slumped into an empty seat.
Honestly, I'd been looking forward to my first meeting. Men in suits and ties, women in white blouses and tailored pencil skirts, legs crossed, trading serious opinions. And when the fatigue set in, the small leisure of a single cup of coffee… Well, even if it wasn't quite that scene, I'd expected something in the neighborhood.
Ha. A futile expectation.
The room looked less like a conference room than an all-night internet café. Laptops and loose papers sprawled across the table, and the people drank their coffee like game addicts who had been grinding through the night.
"You're Team 3's lucky charm, right?"
Team Leader Park asked it out of nowhere, looking straight at me.
"Sorry?"
"Management Team 3's lucky-charm rookie, no? The one who struck gold on his first day. Congratulations."
"Beginner's luck is a real thing, I guess, Team Leader."
"How does somebody just stumble into that? You must have saved the nation in a past life."
"Two years we couldn't make it happen, and he does it in a day… What a filthy world."
The PR trio chewed on me like bar snacks for a good long while.
The traitor watched the fire from the far bank of the river, and Kim Hyunjo was busy staring at his phone. Wherever the messages were pouring in from, the thing had been buzzing without pause.
Team Leader Park flicked a glance at it.
"Chief's phone won't stop ringing. Neptune's about to get busy."
"Tell me about it. Now it's actually going to feel like the work is worth doing."
"When the tide comes in, you row. Anything that looks like article material while you're with the Neptune kids, toss it all our way. You two rookies included."
"Yes."
I wasn't sure what I was being told to do, but I answered first. Fortunately, Team Leader Park explained at once.
"Anything that looks like it'll land well, film it and write it down. Them teasing each other, eating something, even tripping while they walk. Whether we end up using it or not, the more source material the better."
A decent photo, she said, would go up on Neptune's official socials and be handed off for articles, and the fun little episodes would be kept in reserve to pull out later on talk shows and interviews.
Try to dredge something up in the moment and you wouldn't remember, so you'd invent a story or tell one so dull it got edited out. Better to stack the material carefully, starting now.
"I heard Seoyoung mistook PD Go Joon-tae for a fan yesterday and offered to give him an autograph. Stories like that are perfect."
"Huh? How did you know about that?"
The only people who knew were me, Lim Seoyoung, and PD Go Joon-tae. Three of us.
"Because we're the PR team."
Team Leader Park smiled, sly.