| Episode 73. Added to Interested Listings
In the darkened stage, the sound of a rusty iron door opening rang out.
Heavy footsteps followed, and a man walked to the center of the stage, knelt on one knee, propped his chin in his hand, and stared into the camera.
The man smiled faintly and spoke in a whisper.
[Cheonghyeon]
Shall we go?
At that very moment, the stage flooded with bright light.
A man with black hair and round-rimmed glasses appeared side by side with a man whose gray hair was flamboyantly styled and who had a character bandage stuck to his face.
The bespectacled member, “Iwol,” was dressed neatly in an ordinary school uniform, while “Jeho” had lost even his necktie somewhere along the way.
[Iwol]
There are times when
one single dream feels vivid
[Jeho]
Deep within the darkness of a long, long night
a force that makes my heart race
so I can’t even sleep
The next member to appear left just as strong an impression as Jeho.
[Giyeon]
To fuel that holds a wish
I set a spark
and send it into the night sky
a single signal flare
But Giyeon, dressed far more neatly than Jeho, mimed shooting something into the air, and from the opposite side, someone ran toward the center of the stage and continued the song.
[Seongbin]
Sound the warning alarm
Let the cheers explode
And when all six of them gathered in formation, the melody reached its peak.
[Ju-u+ALL]
Until the whole world heats up
and burns hot
As the music raced toward its midpoint, Cheonghyeon appeared again.
This time, in an outfit that hadn’t been visible before the lights came on—his clothes and hair were smeared all over with paint.
[Cheonghyeon]
A clear goal becomes the driving force
It makes you kick off the ground and rise
It makes you cut through the day
when sunlight comes pouring down
Lyrics as hot as the sun, paired with a radiant smile.
And choreography that suited it perfectly, so well composed it felt like a full performance.
Blue lighting that flaunted refreshing energy to the fullest, and the six faces smiling even more clearly than that, filled the screen in harmony.
[Ju-u]
Sound the warning alarm
Let the cheers explode
[Seongbin+ALL]
Until my heart boils over
and spills beyond control
The stage, which had surged all the way to the climax, ended with all six members each holding up a strip of paper dyed red at the tip and looking at one another.
It was, truly, a stage like fireworks in broad daylight.
* * *
‘Fuck.’
Only blunt profanity came to Baek Haewon’s mind. After all, didn’t many modern people, including Baek Haewon, find themselves unable to hold back curses when they were extremely happy?
Baek Haewon thought, ‘Ah…… wait a second,’ and pressed a hand to her forehead.
Then she replayed the video she had just watched one more time.
When the video ended, she cursed inwardly again.
‘That was fucking insane.’
That was the only way Baek Haewon could express it.
There were plenty of handsome idols in the world.
But groups where every single member was handsome were not common.
And groups where every single member was handsome “to my taste” were even rarer!
Baek Haewon slapped her innocent bed three times. Out of habit, she also smacked her own forehead a few times.
‘I…… I need to watch the MV.’
Without even taking the time to post a short message on SNS, Baek Haewon searched “Spark Flowering MV” in the search bar.
The MV was over five minutes long.
Was it drama-style? With only a vague guess, Baek Haewon played the video.
The video began on a six-way split screen, showing six hands turning off alarms.
Five of the hands vanished from their beds, excluding someone who had fallen asleep with their hand still resting on top of their phone.
Jeong Seongbin arrived at the classroom first and put his textbook into his desk.
Kim Iwol came in and immediately tossed his bag onto the windowsill, then collapsed over his desk to sleep again.
Park Ju-u quietly entered and stared fixedly out the window, while Kang Giyeon, earphones in, only fiddled with his phone.
Choi Jeho came in after them, and one by one, the members gathered in the classroom.
Then the camera closed in on several tools inside Choi Jeho’s bag.
‘What is this? A delinquent story?’
Baek Haewon, who had been comfortably watching the MV’s warm color palette, frowned at the thought that they might be glorifying thugs.
For a moment, she considered turning off the MV right then and there. But deciding to keep watching for now, Baek Haewon pressed play again.
After a brief insert shot of some unknown switch being flipped on, the camera returned to the school.
Once all the students had entered, and even the teacher had come in and begun taking attendance, Lee Cheonghyeon ran in with his hair all mussed up, and the song began along with the title.
The six members’ attitudes in class were all different.
There was a member sitting up straight and listening to the lesson more passionately than anyone.
Meanwhile, Kim Iwol’s forehead showed no intention of leaving his desk, and Lee Cheonghyeon had another notebook open beneath his textbook and was only doodling.
What bothered her even more was that the video kept showing Kang Giyeon’s bracelet, the keychain hanging from Lee Cheonghyeon’s belt loop, and Choi Jeho’s bag, which looked suspiciously heavy.
Of course, the MV wasn’t made up only of dramatized scenes.
Whenever a group dance shot with different styling appeared, Baek Haewon debated whether or not to take screenshots right away, but she decided to watch the whole MV first and capture them later, boldly focusing on the video.
After the group dance shot, the setting changed to the inside of a large container box.
The six of them had a school blueprint spread over a desk piled high with all sorts of odds and ends, and they put their heads together in discussion.
If one followed the tip of Jeong Seongbin’s finger, the word “Boom!” was written at the edge of the paper.
‘No way. Are they going to blow up the school?’
Somehow, aside from one or two of them, they did all have unusually intense impressions.
Not betraying Baek Haewon’s expectations, they began steadily preparing something.
Following Kim Iwol’s instructions, Jeong Seongbin stuck the bundle of papers Kim Iwol had pulled from his bag onto the wall.
Park Ju-u also pasted a “Caution: Fire” sticker outside the door of the container box.
Kang Giyeon appeared with his sleeves rolled up, having abandoned his jacket after carrying heavy loads, while Choi Jeho even had his necktie snatched away by Lee Cheonghyeon, who was rummaging around looking for something.
‘Looks like what explodes isn’t cheers, but the school……?’
Had they changed the lyrics on their debut stage to pass broadcast review? Baek Haewon couldn’t hold back the chuckles that kept escaping.
Every now and then, scenes whose meaning she couldn’t figure out appeared in the video.
They were mostly shots of a golden ball passing quickly under objects or falling from high places.
She didn’t know what it was, but if she waited quietly, surely someone would post a killer interpretation.
So rather than stopping the video now to analyze it, watching the dance break unfolding before her eyes was more important.
Having stanned idols for many years, Baek Haewon could tell without needing to capture a single frame. Their choreography was ridiculously well synchronized.
Shots of school uniforms against the backdrop of an abandoned school and shots of jumpsuits against a large container background crossed over dizzily. The song, too, charged toward its end.
『Sound the warning alarm
Let the cheers explode』
Kang Giyeon knocking down all the boards, and Lee Cheonghyeon lifting a welding mask.
Park Ju-u watching everyone with his arms crossed and his back against the wall, and Choi Jeho with a claw hammer slung across both shoulders passed by in order.
Then Jeong Seongbin took the match Kim Iwol handed him and lit the fuse before him.
Flames flickered over Jeong Seongbin’s face.
『Until my heart boils over
and spills beyond control』
The camera tilted upward toward the sky, and the screen went dark.
At the same time, the song stopped, and silence fell.
“……What?”
So did the school blow up in the end, or not?
Baek Haewon tilted her head.
Just then, the screen brightened again.
It was the classroom where the members had first gathered.
On the blackboard, “Making Groups (Drawing Lots)” was written in large letters, and the six of them stood gathered in front of it.
Each holding a lot dyed red at the tip.
‘Huh?’
They were definitely the lots the members had each held up at the ending of their debut stage.
Only then did scenes pass through Baek Haewon’s mind—the members, looking exhausted, using their heads and their strength as they went through all kinds of hardship.
‘It was a group project……!’
No wonder the kids had looked so rough around the edges. As a current high school student, Baek Haewon fully understood how they felt.
‘So what kind of project did they even do?’
Around the time that thought occurred to her, the camera captured the miscellaneous objects in front of the container wall that had only been used as background in the MV.
Wooden blocks tied together with Kang Giyeon’s bracelet and Choi Jeho’s necktie were hooked onto all sorts of devices in strange shapes.
It was a “Rube Goldberg” machine, with everything connected as one.
When the heat of the fire melted and snapped a thread, the ball painted gold raced nonstop along a PVC pipe split in half, wooden chopsticks, and the like.
The incomprehensible scenes that had continued appearing in the music video overlapped with this shot.
After knocking over dominoes and bouncing over Lee Cheonghyeon’s keychain, the metal ball quickly circled the container once and pressed a wooden button. The fishing line connected to the button was pulled, and there was a “pop.”
At the same time, flower petals poured down like a waterfall over the heads of Choi Jeho, Jeong Seongbin, Lee Cheonghyeon, and Kang Giyeon, who were standing beneath the paper ball.
The handmade banner that unfurled from the paper ball, reading “Group Project: Huge Success!” swung pitifully.
While everyone was brushing off flower confetti or spitting it out of their mouths, Jeong Seongbin froze and asked,
『But…… who filmed this?』
The expressions of the other three stiffened.
The four of them creakily turned to stare at one wall.
Then Park Ju-u, who had been standing by in protective gear with a fire extinguisher, pointed toward a corner of the container.
There, Kim Iwol was filming with a tripod set up and gave them a thumbs-up.
And with everyone cheering in success and pulling one another into hugs, the video truly ended.
There were ending credits too.
Director: Jeong Seongbin
Planning: Kim Iwol
Design: Lee Cheonghyeon
Production: Kang Giyeon
Support: Choi Jeho
Inspection: Park Ju-u
.
.
.
Filming: Kim Iwol
Only the last filming credit had a different font and slant, as though it had been added in a hurry.
It was truly…… perfectly idiotic group-project vibes.
* * *
Baek Haewon spent a very busy time that day.
Even after scouring the sea of information, no one had posted an interpretation of Spark’s MV, so she had to tearfully cobble together and post one herself.
On top of that, despite them having just debuted, there was a whole pile of their self-produced content uploaded, and she had to savor it frame by frame.
Only when it was nearly ten at night was she finally able to leave a post on SNS.
≫ Guys, wanna Spark?
Their faces are delicious and the things they do are weird.
└ LOL wait, don’t people usually write that the other way around?
└ It’s because with faces like that, you can’t write it the other way around.
≫ Miheon-nim, are you getting into SPK??
└ I’m not getting into them yet, um,, just sampling?
└ Stop lying, you did this before and ended up going to your fifth viewing of the Marbling Series.
After recording even her overwhelming emotions, Baek Haewon flopped down on her bed.
‘If they came out holding lots this stage, what are they going to bring next time……?’
At the same time, the chorus of the song she had just heard kept ringing in her head.
It was the sign of it seeping in.