I Woke Up and the World Had Changed (1)
The front door opened, and Kim Hyunjo came in with a shopping bag.
"You're here?"
"All set to monitor?"
"Yes. Three laptops. I checked the Wi-Fi, too."
Traitor answered, nodding at the laptops lined up across the living room.
"The kids okay?"
"The others are fine. Only Seoyoung's emotionally unstable."
"I am not! I'm perfectly fine!"
At that, Lim Seoyoung protested at full volume. I turned and found her gripping her smartphone in both hands, staring our way.
"If you're fine, put the phone down. You've been refreshing entertainment articles for an hour."
"Something might get posted! If I don't check, I can't calm down!"
"That's what emotionally unstable means, idiot."
LJ laughed at her without a shred of mercy. Everyone but Lim Seoyoung had chicken, chips, and the rest of the snacks spread across the living-room table, sitting there with nothing to do but wait for Next K-Star to start.
Kim Hyunjo set the shopping bag down on the table with a thud.
"Young-hoon hyung sent this. Says it's precious—we're only allowed to drink it if we hit a peak rating of 1.5."
"Precious? What is it? Booze?"
"Wine?"
The girls crowded in, bright with curiosity, and Kim Hyunjo drew the contents out of the bag. I stole a glance. A cylindrical glass bottle, about sixteen inches tall. Under leaves and a stem bleached white, a root as thick as an index finger dangled. I'd seen that somewhere before.
"......What is this?"
"Wild ginseng liquor. Says he dug it himself and steeped it. His hands were shaking when he handed it over."
The girls' faces made it plain they did not care. To someone it might have been a precious tonic, but to girls in their early twenties it was just soju with an expensive weed root soaking in it. The wild ginseng liquor made a lonely exit under the table.
Kim Hyunjo glanced at the wall clock.
"Thirty minutes left. Did everyone call their families?"
"Already did. Mom says she even dragged all my aunts over."
Lim Seoyoung answered, straining to settle herself. Lee Taehee and LJ nodded along. The only one who didn't answer was Lee Songha.
"Songha, why? You didn't tell them at home?"
"I got scolded a lot at the start."
Lee Songha said it flatly, a snack bag hugged to her chest.
I suddenly remembered what she'd told me before. Her parents were against her being an idol. Why keep doing something that wasn't working? After the last album flopped, they barely even called. If that was how things stood, not telling them made sense. At the first mission recording, she was the only one the judges had torn apart. Maybe that was why, waiting on the premiere, she looked a little more subdued than the others.
Brrt.
My phone had been buzzing without a break. My parents out in the provinces, my brother's family—all of them were planted in front of the TV. My friends had piled into a beer pub together, put on Knet, and sent a photo to prove they were waiting. This one was a text from Reporter Park Woo-jung.
"Chief. A reporter I know just texted. She says she heard the Next K-Star premiere is centered on Neptune."
Kim Hyunjo and the girls whipped around.
"Yeah?"
"For real? For real? Is it actually real, oppa?"
At Lim Seoyoung's noisy pressing, Kim Hyunjo licked his lips and answered.
"If it's coming from a reporter, it's not completely baseless. I heard that when Knet screens a cut, about twenty people pile into the room. Somebody in there could've let it slip."
The mood in the room climbed another notch. I sent Reporter Park Woo-jung a thank-you and sat down at my laptop. Beside me, Traitor tapped away at another.
"I'll sweep SNS and the portal entertainment sections."
"Yeah. Then I'll monitor the sites."
I opened a string of community sites I'd bookmarked for today, all of them places where celebrity talk ran hot. For tonight I'd even applied to a members-only cafe crawling with kids from grade school through high school.
A quick pass turned up nothing much yet. Even I was on edge, and I already knew from the future visions that Next K-Star's first season would be a ratings smash—so the others had it worse. Traitor and Kim Hyunjo worked their mice with deep lines cut between their brows.
The worst of them, of course, was Lim Seoyoung.
"What do I do? Somebody posted 'Anyone waiting for the Next K-Star premiere?' in a cafe and it's been eleven minutes with zero comments! Should I leave one? I shouldn't, right?"
"Geonyoung...... Never mind. Something tells me you'd just get it snatched right back."
At that, Traitor laughed, looking sheepish.
"Sunwoo. Take her phone."
"Okay."
I snatched the phone out of Lim Seoyoung's hands. She clung to my leg like an addict in withdrawal.
"Ah—ah, oppa!"
"Watch the TV. The TV."
"I won't even look, I'll just hold it! No—once a minute, I'll only check once a minute!"
"No."
"You don't have a drop of blood or a single tear!"
"I've got blood and I've got tears. Watch the TV. Now."
I pointed at the TV and didn't budge.
While we talked louder and louder, trying to drown the nerves, the minute hand kept moving, notch by notch, without a pause.
And then, 11:12.
"Aaaah, it's starting, it's starting! I'm shaking, I can't watch!"
"Hey, be quiet. I swear I'm about to just—"
The premiere of Next K-Star, so long awaited, began.
The broadcast was centered on Neptune.
In the worst way.
From the opening, a brisk edit brought the competing teams on one by one, and the moment it was finally Neptune's turn, footage of Lemon Girls lunged onto the screen. It kindly explained that they had been the team originally cast, and walked through the drunk-driving scandal that forced them off. Then the headlines and internet comments from the day of Neptune's casting slammed into place.
— Some nobody group pops out of nowhere. Production must've been desperate lollll
— The second the Lemon Girls dropout article hit, their joining article dropped. What is this? Unreal.
— Heard they're under W&U. A hundred percent the company shoved them in.
Footage from the first-meeting shoot interlocked with pre-interview audio from the other teams.
"Nobody knew who they were. Everyone was going, who's that team, do you know them? Then somebody said they were from W&U, and it was just... ah."
"Did they get in on special treatment because they're from a major agency?"
"Wouldn't everybody think that? Ah, this doesn't feel right......"
And the next instant, Neptune's own pre-interview footage jumped out.
The cut froze on Lim Seoyoung's face hardening as she heard PD Go Joon-tae say it.
A cold silence settled over the room. Of course it did. Anyone could see an edit like that was built to lock Neptune and the other groups into a standoff and feed the controversy.
From there, the cut kept sliding against Neptune the whole way. Reactions started popping up on the community sites one after another, and nearly every post that mentioned Neptune was negative.
Taking the phone from Lim Seoyoung had been a blessing.
I was sighing when Traitor poked me in the ribs and mouthed a question.
"How's it looking on your end?"
I shook my head instead of answering, and mouthed back.
"You?"
He clicked his tongue, short, and shook his head too.
If even the relatively tame community boards looked like this, the comments under portal articles and the SNS reactions were surely filling up with something more vicious. I didn't need to look. A glance showed Kim Hyunjo's face gone dark over his monitor.
"Ah...... I shouldn't have told Mom...... I told her to watch for nothing."
Lim Seoyoung muttered it in a sunken voice and buried her face in her knees. LJ kept punching a cushion between glances at the TV, and Lee Songha's hand dove in and out of the snack bag faster and faster. The only one still holding her composure was Lee Taehee—or so I thought, until she wordlessly cracked the wild ginseng liquor and started drinking it from a beer glass.
Kim Hyunjo raked a rough hand through his hair.
"Let's wait a little longer. The mission went well. They might drag it out for the shock and finish on a reversal."
Traitor and I nodded.
"They even threw up that comment about the crew looking desperate and took a shot at themselves. Looking at that, there's a good chance it's a twist structure, like you said, Chief."
"Dramatic stuff tends to land, anyway."
Even so, the mood didn't lift. In the end it wasn't only the members—we joined in too, pouring that harsh wild ginseng liquor straight down our throats with nothing to eat alongside it. After several glasses in a row, Kim Hyunjo announced in a funereal voice that if the broadcast ended like this, he was going to kill PD Go Joon-tae.
Then the mission stages began.
A cappella performances, the judges' raves and their unfiltered savagings, cut together for maximum sting. Through a viewer's eyes it was an edit you couldn't look away from. The reactions online kept swelling, and when Sugar Cat's turn came they exploded outright.
And at last the TV showed the Neptune girls climbing onto the stage.
Right. It had to be a twist edit. Anyone could see it had been a great stage.
But what if they gave the performance a scrap of airtime and pasted in nothing but the harsh comments aimed at Lee Songha? Surely that thing I'd heard in the future vision—Neptune getting torn apart—wasn't this?
My mouth went bone-dry.
Tense music, the other members' sniping lines from the opening sliding past once more as inserts, and then Neptune's stage began. Even then my shoulders were locked stiff with nerves.
But the moment Lee Taehee's lead poured out of the speakers, the tension broke as if it had been a lie.
"Oh......"
It wasn't only me. The gloom that had settled thick over the living room washed away in a breath. They looked dazed, then hollowed out, and at last they watched the screen with relief on their faces.
Lim Seoyoung broke the silence in a dazed voice.
"......We're good, aren't we? Right? This isn't coming out weird right now, right?"
"How many seconds is this? I think our stage is running the longest."
"Oh no, oh no, what do I do, they're catching so many one-shots too......"
Cuts of the girls performing cross-edited with the shock on the judges' faces and on the other teams watching from the audience, wringing every last jolt out of the reversal. Neptune's stage ran longer than any other team's, and it landed.
Brrt!
The phone that had stayed quiet through the whole broadcast began to buzz.