Destia Jayden March 11th,20XX

“Are you sure about this, Destia? If Eva is forcing you to do this, then I’ll scold her and make her stop.”

Archer’s worried voice came from my side and pierced through my growing nerves, but the mass quickly recovered and increased in intensity.

Ahh, what the hell was I doing?

When Aaron had gently asked me if I would be willing to take a trained idol’s place on the stage in less than four days, I’d meant to reject the offer, but between Eva and Joyce’s hopeful expressions, I’d found it too difficult to say no.

I wasn’t exactly worried about keeping up with the choreography since one of the many benefits of my abilities was an increased kinetic memory and awareness of my body. So as long as I could memorize the choreography and run through it a few times, then I would be fine.

The issue was the crippling stage fright I’d never known I possessed until now.

Even though I’d done fine during filming for our Page content, it was because I’d been invested in getting my vision across the screen and to my future viewers. The engaging nature of the content had helped me forget there was even a camera on set, and all the staff had been focused on their work and my guests.

This, this was different.

It was much closer to hell.

Even though I knew there was a chance that Archer was reading all my thoughts, I couldn’t stop them.

Ahh, I was in trouble.

“Destia?”

“Ah. Ah yeah. No I’m fine. I already said I’d do it so I will. And Eva isn’t threating me at all, I just thought that since I could help I should. But are you okay?”

My tone was a bit brusque and harsh, but Archer didn’t seem to mind and returned to his own worrying. It occurred to me that if Eva was going to threaten anyone out of the two of us, it would more likely be her older brother. I could see he clearly didn’t want to do this, but he still walked toward the practise studio Joyce had rented out and hadn’t let out a word of complaint.

The twins would have been a much better fit for this than either of us, but unfortunately, they were out of commission. For all they didn’t enjoy dancing, they were well trained as dancers and were good-looking enough to pull off an idol image. They could even change how they looked so others wouldn’t recognize them. They could also change their voices to sound good.

The twins also seemed disappointed that they couldn’t rise to the occasion of helping Joyce and seemed to see their sprained ankles as actual inconveniences for the first time since they had gotten to the hotel.

I wasn’t a terrible singer, but I wasn’t great either, and I couldn’t confirm I would sound the same while dancing. But, then again, it probably wouldn’t sound too different. I could talk fine while I was running, an experiment I’d unwittingly run while I’d had to hold a phone interview on my way to the hospital.

For the first time, I cursed my highly physically efficient body.

If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have been stuck in such a situation.

I didn’t know what to wear, so I’d just thrown on a pair of jogging pants and a hoodie, but Archer had shown up in designer track pants and its matching jacket. A branded headband pushed his hair back, and now I looked closely; his shoes were expensive as well.

He definitely didn’t go shopping on his own, so I guessed this was what happened when you let a millionaire take charge of your closet. I briefly wondered if he knew that he was currently wearing the financial equivalent to the mortgage of my family home on his body, but I didn’t bring it up.

We arrived at the front of the studio and tried our best to put smiles on our faces.

Regardless of our personal feelings, we were here to help those two girls.

There were three individuals in the room, and they all sat on the floor and worked hard on their stretching. I didn’t know when they had gotten here, but a thick layer of sweat beaded on their foreheads despite the slightly chilly air in the room.

One of the women looked slightly older than the other two, and I could tell that they deferred to her.

Cherry, Joyce’s younger sister, had dyed her hair to a shocking white in accordance to their concept, and the other girl’s hair was a murky greyish green that somehow didn’t look as ugly as it should have.

I somewhat belatedly started to worry about my hair. The older woman was decent looking, but I by far paled when compared to my two age mates.

I mean, idols were idols, after all. There was a certain level of beauty required to even get one’s foot into the gate.

Would I have to dye my hair as well?

And their clothes in the video hadn’t been the most revealing costumes I’d ever seen, but they were far from what I was comfortable with. Well, I would wear whatever I had to, but I wondered if Joyce would make us go out in the skin-tight suits I’d seen other idols wear.

Another thought barged into my head.

What would Archer wear?

He couldn’t wear stuff completely different from the rest of us, but I doubted he would be comfortable wearing a mini skirt and bounding around the stage. Well, not that I would either.

“You two came!”

Cherry bounced up and welcomed us into the studio. She looked a bit nervous as she didn’t know us that well, or at all, but her evident gratitude made it all worth it.

Now that we were closer, I could see how much she resembled Joyce. It was not enough to call them twins, but they were most definitely related.

“Come on! This is Jade! She’s the chorographer, and that’s Tenzin, the sub-dancer, or well, I guess she’s our main vocal now.”

Tenzin rose out of her split too quickly and collapsed onto the ground in pain, but she still spoke up to deny Cherry’s introduction.

“Cherry, you were already the lead vocal, even if you didn’t make it to main. You should be the main vocalist now. I’m already struggling to rehearse the lead dancer role.”

Cherry just smiled back at her friend and gently led us over to Jade.

The older woman looked us over twice before nodding approvingly.

“Do you two have any experience with dancing?”

I nodded and to my surprise, so did Archer.

“I took a few dance classes when I was younger.”

I tried not to look as surprised as I was, but then again, it made sense. I knew little about Archer’s background, but it wasn’t uncommon for parents to send their kids to classes like that when they were young.

My mom had tried, but I’d thrown a tantrum after the first few classes and had opted to go to a writing workshop instead. Remembering my mom suddenly made me miss her, and I realized I hadn’t called her this week.

Even though our parting had been less than great, having some distance between us had helped a lot, and she seemed to be having a lot of fun on the island.

“Then I’ll assume you have experience following choreography, even if its just a little.”

The choreographer looked hopeful and encouraged us to get onto the floor and work on the intensive stretching.

“Have you two seen the choreography before?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, my little sister is a fan.”

Tenzin blushed brightly at his sudden confession on Eva’s behalf.

“Feel free to bring her down whenever she has time. Lena said she’d be here by this evening so your little sister can at least meet three out of the five of us.”

It suddenly occurred to me that if the third member was to return, one of us could go home, but before I could address this flaw in scheduling, Archer and I were ushered into our first official dance training session.