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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 20
Chapter Title: Center Selection
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“Ah, you’re hilarious, Eonni.”
“What?”
Cha Ju-yeon from the Middle grade, sitting a short distance away, nudged Hye-sung’s arm and burst into laughter.
Ju-yeon had been quite surprised to see Hye-sung get an Ace grade, but Hye-sung was equally surprised to see Ju-yeon move up to Middle.
“You should volunteer too, Eonni. It’s all good experience.”
“Not my thing. I don’t enjoy being in the spotlight.”
“Huh? Then why did you come on an audition show?”
“There are adult reasons you wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re not even an adult.”
“No talking back to your eonni!”
“Yeees, yeees~ Nooo taaalking baaack to my eonniii~”
Ju-yeon mocked her, stretching her words out strangely. She seemed to be having a lot of fun teasing Hye-sung.
‘Ugh, that kid. I can’t just smack her one.’
“We will now begin the selection for the signal song’s center. Will all volunteers please come forward.”
The moment Seol Han-na finished her announcement, most of the Ace grade trainees rose from their seats.
“I told you, you should go too. Some of us can’t even if we wanted to because our grade isn’t high enough.”
As the Ace trainees flocked down, Cha Ju-yeon practically shoved Hye-sung toward the stage.
“Hey! I said I don’t want to!”
“Ah, just go give it a try.”
“I said I’m fine. Seriously, why are you so strong!”
Seeing Hye-sung hesitating in a gray area, neither fully on stage nor off, Seol Han-na asked.
“Trainee Yoon Hye-sung, are you volunteering or not? Please be clear.”
“Uh, it’s not me, my daughter is going.”
“Your daughter?”
“N-No, not my daughter, Yeon-woo. She’s a dongsaeng who’s like a daughter to me.”
Hye-sung snatched the arm of Na Yeon-woo, who was sitting next to Han Young-won, and dragged her onto the stage.
“E-Eonni? I…!”
“Yes, very good. Then we will consider both trainee Yoon Hye-sung and trainee Na Yeon-woo as volunteers.”
Na Yeon-woo had been roped into volunteering with Hye-sung without even knowing what was happening.
“Eonni. What is this?”
A flustered Na Yeon-woo whispered into Hye-sung’s ear, clearly startled by the suddenness of it all.
“Sorry. This is all because of Ju-yeon.”
“Ju-yeon?”
“Look over there.”
Hye-sung gestured with her head, and Na Yeon-woo turned to look. Cha Ju-yeon was waving her long arms like an orangutan, mouthing the words, “Yoon Hye-sung, Na Yeon-woo, fighting!”
“Ha. I can’t with her.”
Na Yeon-woo pressed her forehead and shook her head. It seemed Cha Ju-yeon’s bizarre antics were a common occurrence.
After a series of rather impressive talents from the previous volunteers, Hye-sung’s turn arrived.
“Um… I will… show you my special talent.”
“Excellent. What kind of talent is it?”
“It’s… screaming.”
“Screaming?”
Seol Han-na’s expression, holding her cue cards, turned peculiar. It was likely the first time she had ever heard an idol trainee claim screaming as a special talent.
With nothing else to show, Hye-sung had just squeezed out ‘screaming’ on the spot.
Back when she followed Lunesta to music shows, she was famous for her siren-like voice that could cut through the sound system, so she was quite confident in her screaming.
“Al-Alright. Then shall we see it?”
“Yes…”
Hye-sung took a deep breath and screamed with all her might.
“A REBUKING ROAR!!!!!!”
ROAR!!!!!~ ROAR!!!!!~ ROAR!!!!!~ ROAR!!!!!~
Hye-sung’s voice, loud enough to have come from a train whistle, echoed throughout the set.
“Is this… really a… talent?”
Seol Han-na asked, covering her ears.
‘Hey now… you can’t say that to me when you used to do weird animal noises during your rookie days because you had nothing else to show.’
“Yes! It’s my talent.”
Hye-sung answered shamelessly, her face a mask of confidence.
“…Alright. Everyone, a round of applause for trainee Yoon Hye-sung!”
Clap, clap, clap.
The trainees, stunned by the sudden noise assault, gave Hye-sung a round of applause.
“Her lung capacity is insane, though.”
“Sounds like she swallowed a pterodactyl.”
“What kind of life did she live to end up here? I’m kind of curious.”
A few trainees before her had shown off perfectly normal talents, but after Hye-sung’s screaming performance, the center selection turned into a showcase of bizarre skills.
Influenced by her, Na Yeon-woo presented walking on her hands as her talent.
“Oh my, oh my, oh my, how long is she going to walk?”
“Her core strength must be incredible.”
“I thought Yeon-woo was just nice, but she’s out here bench-pressing the Earth.”
Fortunately, however, the center position went to a trainee who had performed a cover dance earlier. It was Kang Hae-in, who had been promoted from Middle to Ace in today’s re-evaluation.
‘Hmm… so the signal song center is the same.’
* * *
“Alright, girls! You’ve been practicing this song, so it shouldn’t be too hard, right? I’ll give you an hour to learn the formation quickly. I’m going to check on the other classes.”
As if in a hurry, Jade simply gave them the formation and positions before leaving the Ace class practice room.
The stage they would be performing on was an inverted triangle. The Ace grade, including the center, would be at the very front, followed by the Middle grade, and the rest would be placed on the edges rather than the main stage.
The stage used lifts, so the levels would change during the performance. This meant the Middle grade had a chance of getting some solo shots, but the Basic grade and below, positioned on the flat edges of the stage, were essentially part of the background.
The F grade trainees wouldn’t even be caught on camera. They had to dance on the floor below the stage, without microphones.
“There’s not much to the formation, really. As long as we get used to the lift stages during rehearsal, we should be fine,” said Lee Ju-ha, the Ace class leader.
“But with this positioning, does that mean the people in the back have to stay in the back the whole time?” asked Kim Yoon-ji, who had just moved up from Middle to Ace today.
She was a vocal-focused trainee who excelled at ballads and wasn't particularly skilled at dancing, having barely scraped her way into the Ace grade.
She seemed to have a problem with the formation the trainers had decided on.
“Yoon-ji, I know what you mean, but we’re still at the very front. And it’s not like the cameras only shoot from one angle.”
“When the stage levels change in the middle, I think the front row of the Middle grade will be more visible…”
The center and the two spots next to her, which would get frontal shots from the start, were given to trainees with the best overall balance. Behind them were the dance-focused trainees.
The vocal-focused trainees had a part in the chorus where the formation split, giving them a chance to get a shot, but it seemed that wasn't enough for her.
‘Then she should have said something to the instructor earlier… Complaining to Lee Ju-ha won’t change anything and will just ruin the mood. There’s always one of these types.’
And to think she was saying this while the cameras were rolling, with no idea how it would be edited. Seeing Kim Yoon-ji, who seemed to genuinely believe she was raising a valid point about fairness, Hye-sung spoke up.
“We can’t change the formation anyway. We can’t change the positions either. Does anyone want to voluntarily stand in the back? Let’s just hurry up and practice.”
Hye-sung’s assigned spot was in the very last row.
In truth, for the song “Chance,” Hye-sung was more skilled than Kim Yoon-ji, but she had been placed in the back after considering various factors. And Hye-sung had no complaints about it.
“No, I know that, but… Ugh, seriously.”
Kim Yoon-ji muttered, “I should have just stayed in the Middle grade,” and returned to her spot. It was diagonally in front of Hye-sung.
“Don’t you want to be in the front, Eonni?”
Kim Yoon-ji said, looking back at her.
“You have to earn the right to stand there. There’s no one in the front row less skilled than me, so how could I?”
Hearing this, Kim Yoon-ji’s expression hardened. She seemed to take offense at Hye-sung’s words.
“…Such a show-off. Ugh, so annoying.”
Kim Yoon-ji muttered under her breath, just loud enough for herself to hear. But Hye-sung heard it too.
‘What’s with this brat? Don’t kids these days learn any manners? She needs to be sent to etiquette school.’
Normally, she would have been ready to tear into her, but she didn’t want to cause a scene, so she decided to pretend she hadn’t heard.
It seemed she had made an enemy, but that didn’t matter either. What other trainees, aside from Na Yeon-woo, thought of her wasn’t important. It was just absurd to be talked to like that by a seventeen-year-old.
‘…The things I have to hear now that I’m here.’
* * *
A new day dawned. Stage rehearsals at M Space were scheduled for early in the morning. The trainees all grabbed their suitcases and boarded the prepared buses. Today’s filming would mark the end of the first training camp.
After about an hour’s drive from the camp in Gyeonggi Province, they were back in Seoul. Hye-sung’s jaw dropped when she saw the magnificent stage set.
‘To think I’d see this in person one day.’
It was on a completely different level from the usual stages at M Space. This was an end-of-year awards show-level set. It had to be, with nearly 100 people standing on it.
They had practiced late into the night on a practice room floor marked with tape, but this was their first time on the actual stage, and everyone was visibly nervous. The sheer scale of it seemed to have overwhelmed them.
The current time was 7 AM.
They began a dry rehearsal in their practice clothes. They knew the stage would move, but there were a few small mistakes, like trainees flinching when a lift suddenly shot up.
Especially during the chorus, when the Ace grade’s stage rose once, and then the front part of the stage split horizontally to raise only the back row of vocal trainees to a second level, there wasn’t a single person who didn’t make a mistake.
“Girls. You should have all memorized the lift sections by now, right? It’s not going to collapse, so don’t be scared.”
“Yes!”
‘This isn’t a game of Whac-A-Mole, why does it keep going up and down? It’s so nerve-wracking I can’t dance properly.’
Hye-sung clutched her trembling legs.
Hye-sung, who had always had weak lower body strength, had been taping her knees and ankles as heavily as a soccer player since the day before yesterday. She would have to remove it soon, which made her anxious.
“We’ll do a run-through after lunch and a change of clothes.”
After a quick meal crammed into a tiny waiting room, she saw the broadcast station’s stylists moving around, pushing hangers laden with identical uniforms.
It seemed there was no separate changing room; they had to change and get their makeup done in an area sectioned off by partitions.
‘This is exactly like a rookie’s waiting room.’
The conditions were poor, but seeing the partitioned waiting room, something she had only seen in idols’ behind-the-scenes content, Hye-sung felt more curious than anything.
But that feeling soon vanished.
There were maybe ten stylists and hair and makeup artists at most, but 100 people needed to be made up.
“People who are changed and have their makeup done first! Sit in the back and wait!”
A hair stylist shouted while straightening someone’s hair with a flat iron. They were professionals, but they seemed even more frantic than the trainees with this many people.
“Eonni! Isn’t the uniform pretty?”
Na Yeon-woo held the outfit against her body, clearly pleased with it.
“Yeah. Last season’s was really not it.”
The uniform last season had a space crew concept, but the vaguely hero-suit-like design was just not pretty.
The contestants were younger then, too, and the drab olive and gray base colors didn’t suit them at all. Perhaps because of the immense criticism, they had returned to a navy sailor uniform concept this season.
“Yeon-woo. What are you going to wear underneath?”
They could choose between a shirt or a turtleneck to wear under the navy jacket with its white sailor collar.
And this time, unusually, the uniform came with pants as well as a skirt. It seemed that costumes only improved after being criticized.
However, for the first reveal video, there was a rule that they had to wear the traditional skirt for uniformity.
Following Na Yeon-woo’s lead, Hye-sung chose a turtleneck and stood in line in front of the makeshift changing room, curtained off for privacy.
*Swish.*
The curtain slid open, revealing a familiar face.
