CHAPTER 211: I SAW IT IN A DREAM (1)

After a tense moment of silence, Rex continued the meeting.

"And for the song, what should we choose?"

"Let’s just start with all the songs we know where water was used as the concept. That way, we don’t have to work too hard on choreography or anything else. It will fit right in." William spoke first.

"But it has to be sexy too, so something with a hip hop vibe and more energy? I like the song Body. Its choreography looks great, especially when you’re soaking wet." Justin added, laughing as multiple people screamed ’Pause!’

Jerome: "I want something with a bold, aggressive rap section."

Benjamin: "I can rap to anything, so let’s just make sure it’s a good song, innit?"

Levi: "+1 to the aggressive rap."

As Rex went around the room asking everyone, when he got to Ari, he just gave a simple response, "I don’t have an opinion on the song right now."

"Throwing a fit because your idea got shut down? Or are you going to crash out and go cry to production to get your way?" William smirked as he began antagonizing Ari again, hoping to get a reaction.

"Heh."

Ari just laughed to himself because it was pretty amusing to hear someone who used the assistant PD to threaten people, accusing him of crying to production to get his way.

Not wanting to get into it on camera, he turned to Rex, whom he expected to handle the situation as the leader.

Unfortunately, the Korean boy just let it slide.

"Okay. Then let’s start listening to people’s suggestions and work from there."

And the music listening party began with Rex inputting songs into the tablet.

But rather than positive discussions, it was filled with-

"No."

"It’s weird. The vibe is off. Instead of shuaaahh uh uh uh, it’s more like a whooosh peh and that doesn’t fit the stage or us the characters."

"I don’t like it."

Repeated refusals from Levi, who gave single-word answers with an expression that made it difficult to press him, Justin, who seemed like he was speaking a different language when explaining his refusal with long, unknown words, and William, who didn’t bother to give an explanation, constantly rang out.

After close to three hours of refusals, even Rex’s patience seemed to have run thin as they had tentatively shortlisted only two songs after dealing with vehement refusal across the board.

The cameraman, seeing that no resolution was in sight, had left, leaving the room cameras behind.

"Fine. Let’s finalize the concept details now and spend the evening searching for songs that fit our criteria. We’ll regroup at 5 am tomorrow and have everything ready to submit by 8. Is that fine with everyone?"

"I guess?"

"That’s kind of early, no?"

"Then let’s stay up all night until we figure it out?"

At Rex’s sharp question, the dissent died down.

Then the team meeting continued with basically all the details of Ari’s Warrior performance being copied into this new performance, with only slight changes brought up by Justin and Rex.

Since each time he said something, either Jerome Tyler or William responded with a snide remark, Ari just stopped talking, watching things play out with cold eyes.

It wasn’t that he was upset that his idea was being plagiarized.

It was just that he was anticipating how much blowback there would be if their team didn’t come out with something amazing, especially after PD Jiho said that there were no holes on their team.

Everyone on this team was within the top 20 contestants.

It meant that the expectations were set very high.

And the phrase ’the higher you are, the harder you fall’ was constantly on his mind.

From his point of view, with the direction things were going, this was simply a train wreck.

Not due to a lack of individual skill, but rather because everyone wanted to coast along or include individual ideas without considering the cohesiveness of the performance.

But since he didn’t have any good ideas, it seemed that he would have to spend some time doing research so he could find a way to avoid being forced to take off his shirt.

After they were finally released with a loose game plan and the room finally emptied, Ari rubbed his aching head before asking Benjamin the pressing question that had been on his mind.

"What exactly is everyone’s problem with me? I’ve been getting more snide comments than usual. I usually don’t care, but it’s getting annoying. Should I be worried, or do I need to go apologize?"

"Nah, the mandem are just being unreasonable and petty since an incident happened while you were gone. Notice how we’re down to 50 people when we should have more?"

"Yeah, I thought the PDs just cut extra people because they can."

"No, bruv. A proper big incident happened, yeah? 10 people got kicked out for secretly drinking alcohol in their room. 2 minors got alcohol poisoning and had to be taken to the hospital, so everyone involved in the incident got sent home. Permanently. It was a mess."

Ari: ಠ_ಠ

What the heck were people doing that they had time to be drinking alcohol instead of practicing?

And why the heck did they think they could make snide comments to him because of that incident?

"...okay, but what does that have to do with me?"

Benjamin tapped the floor for several seconds before responding slowly.

"You’re a loner for the most part, so you might not know, but a lot of contestants are pretty close, innit. A good number of them feel that if you get to come back after being ’arrested’ by cops, the production team should have been more lenient with those involved in the drinking incident. Especially those who were over 21 and were caught drinking. They think the PDs are playing favorites with you by letting you come back, especially considering how often Jelissa and Bing Yongsun compliment you. Even PD Emily seems to have a soft spot for you and lets you chat nonsense before shutting you down. Add in your insane growth in popularity with the fans, among other things, and quite a few of them are jealous and stressed as the reality is setting in that they might not make it to the end. I don’t feel that way obviously, but chatting with the mandem and digging through their words, that’s the general consensus."

Ari was silent as he tried to process Benjamin’s words.

He could see why the other contestants might be angry, but blaming him for someone else’s actions was actually crazy.

No matter how many snide comments they made toward him, the people who were eliminated weren’t coming back.

"...again, what does that have to do with me. They should go complain to production or the fans?"

"I told you, it didn’t make sense. Just ignore them, they’ll get over it sooner or later and stop making snide comments when the PDs give them a spicy edit. Let’s go to the comp lab, yeah? Your eyes looked like they were spitting fire as they planned the performance."

"It was that bad?"

"It’s pretty clear on your face when you’re not happy, bruv. The sun has nothing on your laser eyes. Pssssst. Instant charcoal when you’re looking at someone."

Oops.

It seemed that he needed to work on his expressions a bit more.

"You don’t have to come, you know. I’m the one dissatisfied with the performance idea."

"Nah. I may not mind performing the current concept because I know I’ll do well, but I agree that we should try to do a bit more. And at the very least, I’d like a better song than the two we have now. There are too many rappers on the team and not enough spacing, so it sounds terrible."

"Fair enough."

And then Ari spent his entire evening until midnight, along with Benjamin, trying to figure out how to make a sexy water concept so that he didn’t have to take his shirt off.

He went through everything from fantasy themes to beach themes, but wasn’t really inspired by anything he saw, especially when he had to figure out how to make it sexy.

After bookmarking several songs both he and Benjamin liked for tomorrow’s meeting, Ari went to bed after taking a shower and washing his clothes.

And while he was asleep, Ari had a strange dream about fish, mermaids drowning sailors, pirates waving a black flag with a skull, while searching for treasure and singing a basic nursery rhyme.

’Row, row, row your boat across the seven seas,

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, your treasure is my dream.’

Gasp!

Taking a deep breath as he snapped awake, Ari began muttering to himself as he looked for his sticky notes and pen to write down the dream ideas before he forgot them.

"What about pirates? Sexy pirates? Are pirates considered sexy? Or mermaids?"

"Yo! Shut up and go to sleep!"

Ignoring the voice of Jerome Tyler, who was in the same room as him, Ari began scribbling things down before he went back to sleep.