Chapter 68

Chapter 68. The Eve of the Strike

I sent Dae-hun to the parking lot first and headed to the restroom.

When I received the picture of Kim Min-jun, I had been under an insane time crunch.

I didn't want to go through something that frantic again, so I needed to check these GIFs as soon as they arrived.

I stepped into a bathroom stall and opened the message.

[Title: 6/7]

[Photo Taken: 2023.04.24. 18:20]

This was already the sixth image.

Hopefully, the next one would be another upgrade message.

Judging from the date, and from the GIF itself, the location was clearly the live filming site for 〈Rebooting〉.

The first live broadcast was scheduled for April 24 at 6 PM.

Besides, the stage design was identical to the one I'd briefly seen earlier when I dropped the members off.

There was quite a lot of useful information in the GIF.

First, all ninety-nine idol trainees were standing evenly across a massive stage built with multiple platforms and structures.

They were all standing with their arms crossed, breathing hard.

It looked like an ending pose.

Just from that alone, I could more or less guess the concept.

I'd been curious about the trainees' introductory group performance since Universe hadn't sent any trainees of our own.

They were wearing school uniforms, while the lighting was soft and subdued.

It seemed like a concept designed to evoke both emotion and a protective instinct.

Fine.

Let's say their performance had ended.

Even then, the cameras should keep rolling until the very end.

It was tradition to capture the ending pose.

Even if there were no such tradition, the cameras weren't supposed to turn away from the stage.

...Yet the instant the GIF began, every camera operator tilted their camera upward, unplugged their cables, started packing up, and walked away.

This was a massive unexpected incident.

It was a live broadcast, yet every single camera had been pointed away.

If that happened, the main broadcast feed would go completely dark.

In other words, viewers at home would see nothing but a black screen.

The recorded time was 6:20 PM.

The live broadcast began at 6.

The MC would probably come out, explain the program, introduce the entertainment-company representatives serving as judges, and then greet the trainees.

Around 6:16, the trainees' group performance would begin.

Which meant the scene in this GIF was telling me...

Only one song.

The very first stage.

That would be the only performance aired during the first live episode.

The mentor stages were supposed to begin after the trainee group performance.

And since Blue Moon was first in the mentor-stage order...

Even Blue Moon wouldn't make it onto the live broadcast.

Unless every camera operator had collectively lost their minds, this had to be an organized strike.

Even if they suddenly stopped the broadcast, they must have prepared something to replace it.

Otherwise, they'd all be liable for damages.

But if it was a surprise strike, there was no way to investigate it ahead of time.

I knew KBC had a broadcasting workers' union, but as an outsider, I obviously couldn't join it.

I considered asking Seo Hoe-dong.

But even if he belonged to the union, I doubted he would tell me their strike schedule or the reason behind it.

Still, I couldn't waste all day sitting in a bathroom stall.

Now that I had analyzed the GIF, I should finish the work in front of me first.

I could lie around at home later and think about this properly.

When I reached the broadcasting-station parking lot, a sharp whining voice was echoing across the entire place.

Did someone get into a fight?

I turned toward the noise and saw Dae-hun standing there.

To be precise, the voice obviously wasn't his.

The Pantheon idol girl from earlier was furiously arguing with him about something.

I quietly turned around and headed back to the Starex.

"What do we do? They've been fighting like that for a while."

Serin, who had been waiting in the van, looked toward them worriedly.

"Fighting? Dae-hun and that girl?"

"Yes. I think it might be because of us..."

That girl was a member of Pantheon's rookie group Silky Red, under Management Division 2.

They weren't famous yet, but apparently the group had been invited as mentors for promotional purposes.

According to the members, she'd gone to check out the stage and had gotten into a minor conflict with Blue Moon.

Apparently it hadn't been anything serious, so everyone thought it had ended there.

But the moment Kim Dae-hyuk told her Blue Moon would perform first, she had started throwing a fit.

"Why? She wants to go first?"

"Yes."

"Then why is she yelling at Dae-hun?"

The members didn't know either.

Apparently, Dae-hun had simply been the first person she spotted.

"No, listen, Hee-jung. What exactly do you want me to do? I already told you, we weren't the ones who decided the first slot."

"We're performing either first or last. Just so you know."

"Is this girl completely insane?"

And now Dae-hyuk was desperately clinging to her, telling her that absolutely wasn't possible.

They had both gotten dragged into hell over nothing.

There were circumstances adults had to deal with too.

Why was she so obsessed with getting a specific performance slot?

"Should I go settle it?"

Youngchae started to step forward, but Anna grabbed her shoulder and shook her head.

So I stepped in instead.

"Hey, Dae-hyuk! We'll sort it out somehow, so let Dae-hun go already. We want to go home and rest. As for the order, work it out with Hee... whatever her name was, and text me later."

Yep.

This was Pantheon all right.

It would take a long time to dilute all that mud.

The moment we got back to the company, I called a managers' meeting.

The trainee roster Tak Hyun-mo had handed out at the pre-meeting listed the first twenty as the "main trainees."

From number twenty-one to number ninety-nine, they were basically treated as an appendix of low-expectation trainees.

We couldn't touch anyone in the top twenty.

If we did, yet another poor grouper fish might end up being served on a dog's dinner table.

We needed to inspect trainees ranked twenty-one through ninety-nine in advance and go into the introductory-stage evaluation prepared.

That was the purpose of this meeting.

After returning to the company, I'd also looked into whether there had been any recent negotiations between the KBC broadcasting union and management, or any small-scale labor disputes.

There had been some grumbling about technical staff shortages in Production Division 2 and complaints about working hours.

But there was nothing I could immediately connect to a large-scale strike.

Wondering whether I'd missed something, I watched the GIF again.

If they'd planned to stop filming at exactly the twenty-minute mark, you'd expect them to move in perfect coordination.

Tilt the cameras.

Unplug the cables.

Move out cleanly and efficiently.

But one young-looking crew member was just standing there, fumbling around.

I zoomed in on him.

His face was full of confusion.

He looked like he had no idea what he was supposed to do.

Yet he also wasn't immediately copying the other camera operators.

Which probably meant he wasn't a union member to begin with.

Maybe he'd known something beforehand.

Next time I went to KBC, if I saw him, I should try talking to him.

"It would've taken too long to photocopy everything and print it again, so I scanned it. Let's look at it together."

Dae-hun displayed the PDF on the conference-room screen and began the meeting.

There was no reason to even look at the first twenty.

Starting from number twenty-one, we carefully reviewed them one by one.

If someone was a trainee, we checked their physical traits.

If they had previously debuted as an idol, we searched for old performance videos and evaluated them.

Even if they'd been called failed idols, anyone with actual debut experience would still be different from an ordinary trainee.

Our initial strategy was to choose former idols whenever possible.

If someone hadn't debuted yet, they were probably still young and had plenty of agencies willing to give them another opportunity anyway.

"Wait. Doesn't trainee number forty-four look familiar?"

When I pointed at her, Dae-hun enlarged the profile.

"Yes. This trainee used to be an idol too... Hm?"

Trainee number forty-four.

An ominous number from the start.

Her name was Song Eun-bin.

The number was ominous, but the name was familiar.

"Oh! She's the lady who sat beside me during that interview!"

Lee Ha-na recognized her first.

That's right.

Song Eun-bin.

The former idol leader who had applied to work here as a manager.

It had been a good idea to hold a separate meeting for the appendix candidates.

We'd even found a familiar face.

"But she's with an agency? She was job hunting until recently."

"Some small agencies couldn't fill all nine trainee slots. I heard there are around four unaffiliated participants. She must be one of them."

Sure enough, the agency field on her profile was blank.

I didn't know if Dae-hun's number of four was accurate, but if only four of ninety-nine participants were unaffiliated, that was actually pretty impressive.

Still, they probably wouldn't get any attention.

They'd most likely be cut immediately in the first round.

"Let's look up her old group activities."

"Yes. I'll search."

I'd researched Song Eun-bin when we interviewed her before, but I hadn't paid much attention to the group she'd belonged to.

From what I remembered, she was a very good dancer and quite pretty, but they hadn't presented her strengths properly.

Sometimes even her makeup had looked strange.

Her weight had also fluctuated quite a bit between photos, as though no one had been properly managing her condition.

"Her group was called Angel Eleven. There were eleven members total. I guess their strategy was, 'Surely at least one of these girls will be your type.'"

Song Eun-bin was my type.

Since we were already looking, we watched their debut performance.

It was devastating.

Since the group was called Angel Eleven, they had apparently tried to stay faithful to the concept.

Eleven girls walked onto the stage wearing feathered wings.

The result looked less like heaven and more like hell itself.

The song and choreography were actually decent.

So it seemed the stage director who had suggested attaching wings to them for their debut was the one who had taken a dump all over the performance.

Thankfully, they'd escaped the angel-wing concept fairly quickly.

So at least their situation had been a little better than Blue Moon's early days.

"They continued as an unknown group, then one day they suddenly cut five members."

"They cut five at once? What are they, pieces of sujebi dough?"

"That's pretty common at small agencies."

Of the six members who remained, five were minors.

The only exception was Song Eun-bin, who was already heading toward her mid-twenties.

If the group failed, she'd be the only one who'd become "washed up."

Her mentality must've taken quite a beating.

That was probably why she'd eventually given up and started looking for a regular job.

Experience working from the bottom when no one knows you is actually some of the most valuable experience there is.

Blue Moon wasn't in that situation anymore.

But a manager who understood what Blue Moon had gone through to escape obscurity would have had a real advantage.

In the end, we hadn't hired her.

But now that we were choosing idols instead of managers, that same quality became even more valuable.

Why had she decided to try being an idol again?

She wasn't standing in front of me, so I couldn't exactly ask.

Still, from the moment I first received her manager application, I'd vaguely felt that she would eventually return to the idol industry.

Because becoming an idol had been her original dream.

"So what happened to the other members? Are they doing well now?"

"Let's see... Oh. They're doing pretty well. One passed the real-estate-agent exam, and another is working as a local government employee now."

That's doing well after leaving the entertainment industry.

Apparently, not a single one of them had succeeded as an entertainer.

Sadly, we'd never see a full Angel Eleven reunion again.

I focused on Song Eun-bin and watched several videos closely.

There was a reason she'd been the only one unable to completely let go of the dream.

Of all eleven members, she was the most talented.

And she seemed to have a bright personality too.

Song Eun-bin should be safe for me to take, right?

Last time, we'd unfortunately missed our chance to form a connection because she hadn't matched what we were looking for in a manager.

But this time, she wasn't applying to be a manager.

She was applying to be an idol.

This time, I was definitely taking her.

"I can see Blue Moon in her history. Let's give Song Eun-bin the Blue Moon treatment too."

"She has to apply to us before you can do anything for her."

That was true too.

"Come to think of it, what are we doing for Blue Moon's mentor stage? Why haven't we talked about that at all?"

"Oh. Right."

When Dae-hun suddenly remembered, the other staff members agreed and looked at me.

Everyone was so indifferent...

Not that the members would slack off just because we weren't paying attention.

"We're doing 〈Homesick girl〉 there. They've already been practicing it."

"What? You're releasing it before then?"

"No. I'm planning to use our first 〈Rebooting〉 stage as the showcase."

Everything we'd been preparing for the comeback stage.

The concept.

The outfits.

All of it.

We would pour it into 〈Rebooting〉.

"Huh? You really think that makes sense? Hahaha! You're revealing a brand-new song on a competition program? Tak Hyun-mo is going to die of happiness."

Dae-hun naturally thought I was joking, so he responded with a joke of his own.

Understandable.

There was no reason for us to reveal a new song we'd poured the entire company's resources into on a trainee survival show designed to revive failed idols.

The main characters of that program were the trainees, after all.

"I'm not joking."

But I already knew that stage would belong entirely to Blue Moon.

Because I wasn't just going to change the performance order.

I intended to change the commercial break order too.

"...You're insane. You're serious?"