Chapter 101
“Yaaawn… I’m home.”
Although the house was empty, greeting it without fail after coming home from school had become a habit.
But today, unlike usual, I looked around furtively after entering the house, keeping an eye on my surroundings.
Because a film crew had come that morning and installed cameras throughout our house.
Even though I’d been active long enough to become thoroughly accustomed to cameras, having cameras installed in my home to watch me still gave me a strange feeling.「
「The Omniscient Parents’ Perspective」 is a program that films three days—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—and has its cast react in the studio with other panelists while watching the edited footage.
The basic format was to cast two people and share their impressions while watching the two of them go about their lives, and I was appearing because Kim Seol had asked me to.
‘I need to establish my image properly while I have the chance.’
The public’s image of me was still trapped between two ideas: a pitiful orphan and a mad musical genius.
In other words, neither was an image that made me approachable to the public.
I needed to take this opportunity to play a somewhat ordinary middle-school girl and make my image reasonably more relatable.
‘But what does an ordinary middle-school girl do first when she gets home?’
Come to think of it, I had no idea.
I wasn’t an ordinary middle-school girl to begin with.
First, I went into the bedroom I used out of the three rooms and changed clothes.
Naturally, I changed in an area outside the cameras’ blind spots.
The clothes I changed into were the character pajamas Yoo Seol-ha had given me before.
Then, with my hair roughly let down, I sat in the living room and turned on the TV.
‘Girls probably like watching male idols, right?’
As it happened, our house had countless concert DVDs.
I picked out a recording of RPS’s concert at Gocheok last year and started playing it.
Personally, I considered it the most perfect concert, in terms of the stage, out of all of RPS’s concerts.
‘It’s a shame the audience was only half full because of COVID.’
So it lacked a little in terms of the live atmosphere, but it was still a concert video with plenty to enjoy.
Nearly two hours had passed as I watched RPS perform with total focus.
When even the final encore song had ended, I checked the clock and saw that it was around seven, so I realized it was about time to eat.
I had two choices.
I could order room service or cook for myself.
‘But room service would make me look way too bourgeois, wouldn’t it?’
To begin with, I hadn’t ordered it more than a few times since moving here. Everything started at tens of thousands of won… I simply never felt like eating it.
So I stepped in front of the stove.
Today’s menu was pasta and steak.
A classic Western meal.
Since I didn’t eat very much, I took out small portions of both dishes from the containers where I kept the ingredients separated.
Pasta and steak were both fairly simple to prepare, so cooking them didn’t take very long.
After quickly finishing the food and washing the dishes until everything was spotless, it was past eight.
“Hmmm.”
Normally, I would be working at this hour.
Making songs or digging through my own musical junk pile for usable melodies.
If not, I might go to somewhere like SoundCloud and look for references worth buying.
But if I did anything work-related… wouldn’t it feel too alienating to the viewers?
So I went into the study and turned on the computer.
I normally enjoyed playing games quite a bit. As a result, my desktop had various games installed on it.
I didn’t discriminate between single-player Steam games and competitive games.
Still, I thought it would be best to play a game everyone knew, so I launched Korea’s most famous game, commonly called LoL.
My current tier was Platinum.
Compared to the Grandmaster rank I’d reached in my previous life, it was pitiful, but objectively speaking, it wasn’t a low tier.
It was a tier that could put me in the category commonly known as a female LoL player.
As a pop singer, having an image of playing a lot of games could only be a good thing, never a bad one.
So without hesitation, I queued for a ranked game.
And thirty minutes later.
“……”
Darius(1 / 11 / 2): JG diff, gg
I lost miserably.
There had been several scenes in the process that were difficult to explain… but in any case, the fun had drained away, and I felt that if I kept playing LoL, my true nature would be laid bare, so I took my hands off the keyboard.
Then came the emptiness.
“Ah. Seriously.”
As I wondered what I should do next, my eyes fell on the countless books lining the shelves in the study.
They were packed with everything from various comic books to ordinary literature.
Most of them were books I’d read, but there were still some I hadn’t.
Holding back my rising anger, I took out one of the literary books I’d bought last time and left sitting untouched.
And ten minutes later.
“I’m sleepy… Let’s just go to bed.”
Overcome by boredom, I decided to go to sleep.
Waaah, this baby can’t read difficult books…
And the next day.
Naturally, showing me alone like this the entire time would be boring television, so we had prepared a special event in advance.
The producer had asked me to invite any friend from the entertainment industry and create some new footage.
The choices would most likely be Noiris or Blooming, so I thought the producer had been clever.
They could milk the buzz for a two-for-one deal.
But I made a different choice.
“Woooow. The house is huuuge. Do you live here alone?”
“Unnie, welcome.”
“A-are the cameras rolling?”
“Yes. Don’t pay attention to them, and just act naturally.”
“Okay!”
A lively girl.
Her name was Kim Byeol.
She was my school friend and the younger biological sister of Kim Seol, who was filming with me.
In fact, I thought people might be more interested in her than in most celebrities.
She was someone whose existence was known, yet who had never once appeared on television.
There were probably quite a few people interested in Kim Byeol because of her father and sister.
‘And she’s cute, too.’
Kim Byeol possessed the textbook vivacity and cuteness a girl her age could have, making her a pretty good card for winning over the viewers.
“So what are we doing today? Got anything planned?”
“U-um.”
In fact, I didn’t.
Since the production staff hadn’t specified anything in detail, I had to handle things myself.
I wondered if they had trusted me a little too much.
“Uh, what do you want to do, unnie?”
“Me? Hmm… Want to watch something on an OTT service?”
The safest suggestion.
I wasn’t sure whether it would be entertaining from a television standpoint, though.
‘But do I have to think about that, too?’
Wasn’t it the production staff’s job to edit even boring scenes into something entertaining?
Since that thought suddenly occurred to me, I immediately gave an affirmative answer.
“Sounds good! Then let’s order lunch and watch it together.”
We ordered a pizza on the spur of the moment, and as soon as I opened the OTT app, my past viewing history was exposed in all its glory.
“……So you like anime?”
“Ah, I guess so?”
“You’re like my sister.”
Of course.
Anyway, we picked a suitable drama and started watching.
By the time the first of its six episodes ended, I came to my senses and realized that quite a lot of time had passed.
I had let the entire day slip away without doing anything.
‘This is a little…’
Feeling a sense of impending crisis, I hurriedly suggested that Kim Byeol and I go out.
Come to think of it, staying cooped up at home all day wasn’t very middle-school-girl-like.
We left the house without a plan, but once outside, we had no idea where to go.
I felt terribly sorry for the lone cameraman following behind us.
Kim Byeol made a suggestion to me as I stood there in confusion.
“I want to play claw machines!”
After blowing ten thousand won at a claw-machine arcade, we browsed Olive Young.
After that.
“Want to go to karaoke?”
After showing off my skills to my heart’s content, I took Kim Byeol by the hand and arrived at a reasonably priced conveyor-belt sushi restaurant.
It had such reasonable prices that even eating until our stomachs burst would have been hard to push the bill past thirty thousand won per person.
After we finished eating, Kim Byeol led me to a movie theater.
Only after watching a decent romance movie there did I realize it.
‘Ah, so this is a real everyday routine a middle-school girl might have.’
Of course, this was only possible on the assumption that she came from a reasonably well-off family, but I figured the kids around here probably spent their weekends like this.
You really do need good friends.
While I’d been completely unable to figure out what to do, Kim Byeol, who had provided enough footage for the show, looked impossibly adorable to me.
After we finished filming without incident.
I unexpectedly ran into a difficult obstacle.
The program’s format required a family member who could appear in the studio, but I didn’t exactly have a family member who could do that.