still trying to settle with all the recent events, she focuses on the first task at hand: flyers. the fact that she’s gotten sphere flyers before from friends and now it’s her turn to hand them to people makes her excited. she’s already good with promoting things to people. hell, that was basically her last job. so she’s confident that she can do this. even if she’s still trying to process everything that’s happened to her.
as she walks around, she spots a vaguely familiar face that she immediately remembers from the mgas. “hi! excuse me!” she calls out to him, walking up to him. “hi! i think i saw you on the mgas. you were really cool,” she compliments. she then takes out a flyer and hands it to him. “this is a flyer for sphere entertainment. it has future dates for shows and it’s the home to super cool artists, including convex.”
there’s something else she wants to say... and she remembers it! “oh, by any chance, are you related to the streamer yuzu at all?” she asks curiously.
maybe it’s because daniel knows. it’s a little funny: how it seems like he and sungmin understand each other so well without being particularly close. daniel understands sungmin, at least.
he understands the signs of something wrong during training: a little quieter, a little less focused, a little more scolding from the coaches and a little more resignation. sungmin just doesn’t seem like himself.
daniel knows because he’s been there many times; sometimes it feels like more often than not. he was there after woojin’s departure, and then kenta’s, a failed evaluation and now sungwoon’s enlistment. he feels like he’s finally emerging-- finally seeing the light of day again, but maybe life is always an equal exchange, and it’s at the cost of sungmin plunging into the darkness instead. no, surely they can both be happy at the same time, can’t they?
it’s after a dance lesson, difficult for both of them, that daniel approaches him. he catches him before he leaves the practice room. “hey, sungmin,” he begins, and then hesitates, second guessing himself for a moment. he already spoke up, so he might as well see it through. “is everything okay...? you just seem...a little down, i don’t know. you don’t have to talk about it if anything is wrong, just know that...” what? “i’m here to listen, if you ever need anything.”
picking lo siento as his eval song for the month had been a rather spur of the moment decision and not one he really put any thought into. which was more or less a given, given the fact he couldn’t speak spanish and had decided to take the spanish singing parts all the same. not the best idea he had ever had, but he supposed it was going to be fun. and he’d managed to find some other guys as well to do the song with him. which was great as this was supposed to be group evaluation and he couldn’t just do the whole thing by himself.
he was sat with sungmin, feet propped up on the chair next to him as he leaned back, holding the sheet of lyrics in front of his face as he scanned over them. “sure you don’t wanna sing spanish with me?” he teased, peering over the top of the sheet at the sphere trainee. though he was only joking, the other trainee was taking the rap parts, as jordan was no rapper. best leave that to the people who actually could do it.
May Evaluation - Sphere Entertainment
Inter-company Company; Sphere Boys vs TRC Boys (Team 1)
Song: Egotistic (Remix) [line distribution, video reference]
Performing with: @rksungmin, @danielxrk and @chrxsrk
Now that Daniel’s mentioned it, Moonbok can’t really get the thought of this evaluation being a ‘light’ version of the MGAs. 10 teams vying for the attention and praise of the CEOs of the Big Five. Thankfully, there seems to be no threat of elimination this time round, so the stomach churning nervousness isn’t there any mores. (He’s still nervous, of course. But nothing like back then.)
That doesn’t mean Moonbok intends to lose.
Of course, he never intended on losing during the MGAs either. But as their group is called forward, he firmly pushes any thoughts out of the competition of his head. Making their way to the stage, he smiles easily at the judges, laughing internally at the thought that they must be sick of him appearing in front of them like this. He even manages to not avoid Hyun Bin’s glance. (Mostly.)
Then the music starts and they fall into their roles. It had taken them less than a day to decide on CONVEX’s version of Egoistic, with Chris and Daniel adding their own twists to the song. While Moonbok felt a little guilty in not being able to contribute to the actual arrangement of their piece, Sungmin promised him he was doing the group a huge favour by taking a vocalist position instead of a rapping one.
(Personally, however, Moonbok still thinks that Sungmin is too harsh on himself.)
But you become the center anyway.
But you shouldn’t do whatever you want.
And Moonbok has to admit, he enjoys it much more than he’d thought. And even compared to when they’d all worked together at the start of the year, this performance felt even better than that one. As though they’d become more in tuned with each other and their strengths and weaknesses. (In fact, he almost regrets the fact that they don’t have to dance for this performance. Almost)
I wanna do whatever I want.
As he sings the song’s final line and their performance comes to an end, Moonbok is grinning and he pushes his hair back from his face. Hopefully, they’ve done enough to win, but even if they haven’t, it’ll just be a disappointment.
Because he’s not going anywhere. Not for a long time to come.
with a year-end show at every angle, seungcheol would probably have lost his head if it weren’t attached. it’s no surprise to him, or perhaps anyone, that he barely knows what day of the week it is, or what’s going on within the company outside of convex. he hears of new trainees long enough after they’ve started that he feels ashamed, but not too long that he can’t greet one of them when he spots him in the corridors on the way to lunch. it only takes a glance at his side profile to know it’s a face he’s not seen around here before, so with a little hesitation, he approaches with a shaky hand extended.
“h-hi!” he bows once he catches up to him, misses any expression on his face at his appearance until he straightens up and places said hand on the other’s arm. “w-welcome to s-sph— hey! sungmin, congratulations! I d-didn’t know you were s-signed here!” he’s beaming, bright and sunny in contrast to the dreary winter days outside. he and sungmin knew each other more so through mutual friends, but any friend of his members especially is always a friend of his, even if he does still stutter with them every so often. “h-how long h-have you been here n-now? man, I’ve t-totally lost track of this m-month. how are you s-settling in? finding e-everything okay?”
june was running late to his diving lesson, but he blamed his father. he had promised to drive him there, but at the last minute to take an important call from work. and his mother was busy at the cafe, meaning that he was having to sprint down the streets and try and catch the next bus to the leisure centre. and he was almost wondering if it was worth it because by the time he arrived, the lesson would be half over. maybe it was just a better idea to text his coach and tell him he was not coming.
but he held off on that as he boarded the bus, feeling a little out of breath as he managed to find a space to squeeze himself into. damn crowded bus. and it only got worse when it pulled off, junhyuk finding it quite hard to keep a stable footing and the bus bumped along the road. so maybe it wasn’t a surprise when he almost managed stumbling right into the back of someone else. “sorry!” he was quick to apologize, looking up to see who it was, expression brightening somewhat as he recognized the other passenger. “oh, sungmin. hey!”
admittedly, zhengting didn’t like sungmin at first. it wasn’t that sungmin had done anything -- it was more of, well, the general vibe. he felt a particular energy from the other that didn’t seem to resonate well with his own, and he was certain that they’d get into it, if they continued to interact.
in a surprising twist, things don’t go that way. he wouldn’t consider them good friends; several weeks of seeing each other doesn’t constitute a fair relationship in his books, but they are on decent terms.
and being on decent terms means being somewhat intuitive when it comes to subtle changes in behavior. “you all right?” zhengting asks as he plops down next to @rksungmin. “you seem a little . . . off.” it’s not the right word for this instance, but there’s no other way to describe this energy that sungmin appears to radiate. it’s different than before, and he has an inkling that it’s not a good different either.
Sungyeol during the evenings at the bazaar after practice, decided that he would once again go back to his usual festival hobby of drawing caricatures and portraits for people as he used to do almost every other festival occasion. he liked drawing and he was fairly good at it, so people were often glad to pay money for nice art. He was going to take advantage of that at least for one day.
Within a few hours, sungyeol already had a lineup and he was being rather quick with art request, clearing the line within an hour. He leaned back to take a break and stretch fingers when he noticed someone looking at the caricatures on display. “i can do one for you, if you wanna wait a bit.” he said, grinning at the boy.
