| Episode 132. Company Workshop (1)
It was almost three in the morning.
The Spark dorm was in complete chaos. Everyone had spread open their suitcases and was getting ready to film a packing video. Anyone who didn’t know what was going on would have thought they were all planning to run away from home together.
When I told them that if they kept packing in such a haphazard way, the filming—and everything else—would be ruined, Spark decided on an order: pack one by one and film according to that sequence.
“Considering how much time each group will be given, we won’t need that much footage. Let’s film three people at a time, by roommates.”
“Then should we film our room first?”
“Sure. Seongbin, check first whether Giyeon and Joo have anything usable for bags.”
A little while later, once they told me they were ready, I headed to Jeong Seongbin’s room with the camcorder.
Three suitcases had been spread out snugly across the narrow floor.
One of them stood out in particular.
It was covered all over with cute characters on a fluorescent lime-green suitcase.
“Whose is that wonderfully distinctive suitcase?”
I asked because I assumed it belonged to Kang Giyeon, who liked comics, but surprisingly, it was Jeong Seongbin’s. Apparently, he had brought it from Mr. Jeong Seongjun’s house as well. At this point, I wasn’t sure whether Mr. Jeong Seongjun had any household belongings left at home.
“What have you packed so far?”
“Extra clothes and toiletries. Should we each pack our own pajamas? Or should we bring the group practice uniforms?”
“If the accommodation’s air-conditioning is centrally controlled, it might get cold. Pack one short set and one long set.”
At my words, Kang Giyeon nodded and put one black tracksuit and one training suit into his suitcase.
“I’ll pack all the vitamins at once!”
Jeong Seongbin diligently gathered supplements for all the members. How could someone be this thorough without even being told? What would you have done without Jeong Seongbin?
“Guys, packing is great, but please lift your heads a little. Your faces are completely backlit.”
“Okay……!”
I did my best to capture their faces and bags properly, folding myself as tightly as possible into the corner of the room.
I hoped the producers of Idol Dynasty Annals would understand how desperately I was filming this. Camera directors, fighting.
I gave the three boys’ luggage one final inspection.
“Giyeon, pack a heat pack separately. Joo, put in a honey stick, just in case. Seongbin, did we have a Polaroid camera at our dorm?”
“We do. Should I bring it?”
“Yeah. We probably won’t have time to take pictures separately, but just in case.”
Unless being unprepared causes trouble, there’s no harm in being overprepared. There’s a reason pack mules survive, you know.
On the other hand, Kang Giyeon took charge of filming our room.
“There really aren’t any belongings in this room, no matter when I come.”
Kang Giyeon said this, and Lee Cheonghyeon just grinned and shrugged.
“Both of you are minimalists. I like it since there’s plenty of room for me to put my stuff.”
Just as Lee Cheonghyeon said, Choi Jeho’s suitcase contained practically nothing. I wondered whether he had even packed any extra clothes.
“Are you…… a one-outfit kind of guy?”
“I put them in the front pocket.”
“All your clothes fit in there?”
At this point, had he brought nothing but underwear?
Well, surely he had packed whatever he needed himself. He was twenty-one, after all.
No, but still, shouldn’t I tell him to bring a jacket, just in case?
In that brief moment, I agonized dozens of times.
Then I made up my mind.
“Pack your clothes again in front of me.”
I decided to act recklessly, trusting the camera.
As expected, Choi Jeho couldn’t resist. All that brainwashing about acting as meekly as a newborn lamb in front of the cameras had paid off.
No sooner had Choi Jeho finished packing all his clothes than he slipped out of the room.
When he returned, he was holding a mood lamp.
“You’re bringing that now?”
“Yeah. We’re filming overnight, right?”
“Then what are you going to do tonight? If you pack it now, you won’t be able to use it later tonight.”
“Oh.”
Oh? Oho?
What had Manager Nam’s daughter seen in this guy that she liked so much?
Setting aside his exotic features, shoulders broader than a keyboard, inverted-triangle upper body, and the smooth line running from his thighs down to his knees.
I had lived with Choi Jeho for over a year, and I still didn’t understand.
“What did you pack, hyung?”
Kang Giyeon asked as he approached my suitcase.
The old suitcase the system had thrown at me contained several changes of clothes, a diary, and all kinds of skincare products.
“This is the toner we all use, and this is the toner Joo uses…….”
“You’re bringing two bottles of toner?”
“Joo has sensitive skin. He can’t use just anything.”
In the past, during one of the few precious outdoor shoots we’d had, Park Joo had used the wrong sunscreen and broken out all over. How many Sparkler fans had been heartbroken over that?
My finger joints had nearly given out from retouching all of it, too. From now on, I wouldn’t let anyone suffer that kind of pain.
“Your bag must be heavy, hyung. You’re bringing a first-aid kit too, right? If there’s no room, you can put it in my bag!”
“Let’s say blood suddenly starts pouring from Cheonghyeon’s hand right now. Would it be faster to open the suitcase, or to open the auxiliary bag?”
“……I’ll go get the auxiliary bag!”
“Good.”
Only after putting this thoughtless Lee Cheonghyeon to work, packing every manner of medicine—including motion-sickness pills—did we finally finish filming the packing content.
I prayed that our accommodation would be somewhere nearby, checked that the footage had been safely recorded on the camcorder, and lay down on the bed.
* * *
The day of the group retreat dawned.
I didn’t have a particularly good feeling about it. Strange things had been appearing in front of my eyes since morning.
A small number ‘3’ floated in the upper-right corner of my vision. No matter how hard I rubbed my eyes, it wouldn’t disappear.
I wondered if it was caused by the system, but it felt different from the system as I knew it.
‘An update?’
Sometimes the development team would put strange things on the homepage while updating it. The confirmation process was just as time-consuming as Manager Nam, so it wouldn’t have been strange for them to make an error.
Since I couldn’t exactly visit an ophthalmologist right before filming, I decided not to worry about it for the time being.
The weather was unbearably hot, too. At the salon, I had said, “Please put two layers of sunscreen on all their faces!” only to hear the stylist tell me, “Iwol, you should go get a tan!”
With them encouraging idols to tan like this, Lee Cheonghyeon ended up burning his skin to a crisp every vacation, the fans’ blood pressure rose, and my sanity caught fire……
I swear, if the community hadn’t been plastered with positive posts the day before, I would have shaken these guys out like sesame seeds.
≫ Spark made history today
The stage was f***ing gorgeous……
└ Is that really a competition stageㅠㅠ I thought it was a concert
≫ Today’s survival-show stage looked like a storybook
Spark’s “Starlight”
The hair, makeup, styling, props, and stage direction were perfect,
so even though it was a stage, it felt like watching a music video!
└ I think the rearrangement was really goodㅇㅇ The stage was pretty too
└ I was worried because the original song was on another level, but my jaw dropped when I saw the direction at the end
└ I loved how they changed the theme from love for a romantic partner to affection for a research subjectㅠ
≫ During the planning meeting, I had no idea what kind of stage they were going to do
but they pulled this offㅋㅋㅋㅋ
There’s no way our boys aren’t absolute geniuses
Anyone who disagrees is completely wrong
Thanks to that, I was able to monitor the performance with genuine enjoyment. I even shared a few posts in the group chat. Everyone had passed out after packing, though, so they only checked them in the morning.
“Should we wait here?”
Jeong Seongbin asked the camera director once more to confirm the waiting area.
Since it wasn’t a studio shoot, the network had arranged for a tour bus to depart and pick up the teams starting with the ones closest by.
Because the Spark dorm was on the farthest outskirts of Seoul, we ended up being the last to board. It was fortunate that idols weren’t office workers commuting every day.
Perhaps the previous team had been delayed, because the bus arrived twenty minutes later than we had been told. I thought I was going to die trying to fill the footage without leaving any dead air.
The bus we had struggled so hard to welcome had a large banner attached to it.
“~Off We Go to Baekjungnori~”…… was what it said.
Apparently, they had wanted to do something worthy of the name Idol Dynasty Annals after all, rather than merely calling it a team-building event. The timing was a little early, but by the time this episode aired, the date would more or less match.
When we boarded the bus, I saw that the forty-five-seat interior was almost full. Strangely, there were empty seats here and there.
‘Don’t tell me we have assigned seats?’
Sure enough, small pieces of paper had been attached to the seats.
I had two ears, but with five people each seated in their assigned places, I was apparently going to have to listen to an endless stream of pointless remarks. I was already tired.
Still, if we were going by assigned seats, it would be better for me to sit with Parthena or Allover.
Especially since the seat next to Mr. Song Minil happened to be empty.
Why did it have to be that guy? If it were Han Gawoon, at least we could talk about music.
I was cursing him profusely in my head when someone in the distance suddenly raised a hand.
“Iwol! Iwol, your seat is here!”
It really was an Allover member. Specifically, the member who had formed a unit with Choi Jeho—and who would go to prison in the future.
For a moment, I wanted to shout that I suffered from severe motion sickness and collapse onto the floor.
The bus quickly became warm and lively.
The cast members seated in pairs were busy chatting about this and that.
Even Choi Jeho was talking to someone.
And then……
“Iwol, would you like something to drink?”
“No, thank you. I appreciate your concern.”
……Seo Yunseop of Allover and I began a silent battle of hellish social cues.
Keeping your mouth shut in front of the cameras was a sin. I knew that.
But this bastard was going to get caught doing drugs, wasn’t he? And not just taking them alone—he’d offer them to his fellow members and get dragged in as a distributor, wouldn’t he?
I’d rather take a few beatings than exchange words with someone like him and get tied up in the Idol Dynasty Annals drug cartel.
It wasn’t time yet, but honestly, I even suspected that something might be mixed into that drink. I’d rather eat hardtack without water.
“What do you do to relieve stress when it builds up, Iwol?”
“I don’t get stressed very often.”
Normally, when someone asked you a question like that, it was polite to ask them the same thing in return. But I wasn’t going to. This man would soon be using drugs to relieve his stress, after all.
I had already been branded an ill-mannered bastard who didn’t properly greet his seniors’ group. Adding one more charge—that of staring blankly into space in the corner of a tour bus—didn’t seem like it would make much difference, so I stayed silent. Seo Yunseop spoke to me again.
“I heard Cheonghyeon composes music in Spark?”
“Yes. He’s arranging our competition song as well.”
“I see. That’s impressive. Isn’t he still quite young?”
He certainly was impressive.
Even though he had worked with music before, Lee Cheonghyeon’s rate of growth was astonishing. Whenever other people recognized that aspect of him, I could feel his genius all over again.
Compared to those achievements, he was……
“He’s very young.”
A few rows away, I could see the round crown of Lee Cheonghyeon’s head. He seemed to be having a wonderful time, chatting and laughing brightly with the invisible person in the seat beside him.
“He must feel a lot of pressure, composing while he’s still so young.”
“Fortunately, he still seems to be enjoying it.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
How many idols who composed their own music could possibly be unsuited to it? Still, I didn’t feel like putting in the effort to be sincere, so that was all I answered. He should be grateful that I was still smiling without losing all my social skills.
Even in the face of my insincere attitude, Seo Yunseop persisted in carrying on the conversation.
“Still, creating things can’t be easy. Inspiration isn’t infinite, after all. Right?”
“Ha-ha, I suppose you’re right.”
I was an ignorant, benighted member of humanity who knew jack shit about creativity. I had no idea.
So I wished he’d stop taking such an interest in a member of another group……
‘Wait.’
The back of my head prickled.
I looked back and forth between Seo Yunseop beside me and Lee Cheonghyeon, who was grinning up ahead.
Then, for just a moment, a rumor I had once read in passing came back to me.
≫ Is it true that LCH is addicted to drugs?
He had been booked by the police, but the results had come back negative, and the issue had quietly faded away.
But that issue had once gotten Lee Cheonghyeon dropped from every advertisement.