2025. Blockberry Creative was in a process of merging with Xenoa East, a Chinese mega company which was spreading its wings into the South Korean market. The Moon Girls were each dealing with their own issues, and they try to answer the one big ques...
Spring has come. It was March after all. The budding cherry blossom trees provided beautiful colors to the city as the weather got a little bit warmer, but still... My heart was tumultuous.
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It had been around two months since that horrific night on Xenoa Lim's cruise ship off the coast of Incheon, and the days following that night were... Stressful, to put it simply. With the amount of police and emergency responders waiting for us at Incheon, as well as the presence of the idols and myself, I knew it was only a matter of time before the media learned of what happened and started spinning it into sensational stories, and unsurprisingly, it was the cancellation of the Blockberry Creative takeover on the following morning that made the nation took notice for the first time.
Blockberry and Xenoa East announced the cancellation of the takeover, citing the untimely deaths of both their young CEO and Chairman Xenoa Lim as the reason. I took the risk and immediately proposed to buy out the company, and although initially BBC were interested, without Leo to manage them, the process took longer than expected. It gave the media enough time to dig for stories, and soon, they learned about the incident off the coast of Incheon, even if they never knew the whole story. Still, they put two and two together, and the story spinned out of control, becoming a media fiasco.
The media dubbed it 'The Loona Incident', pushing the poor girls into the spotlight as the nation learned of their involvement in the failed deal. Haseul, Yves, and Kim Lip, the three leaders of Loona, held a press conference a couple days later, and they announced that they were entering an indefinite hiatus as they tried to make sense of the situation they were in.
Xenoa Lim's body was recovered a few days after that, but Leo was never found. The girls held a private memorial service for him in solidarity with Choerry, who was utterly devastated by the death of her boyfriend. Fortunately, Haseul told me that she was receiving professional help from psychologists, and both Kim Lip and Jinsoul were caring for her, so I knew she would recover sooner or later.
As both Haseul's boyfriend and the only party who entered the bidding process for Blockberry Creative that was still alive, I was pulled into the legal proceedings that inevitably followed such a massive and public incident. I was thankful that the one who responded to Haseul's call was that young detective Moon Hyejin. She was a junior inspector in the SMPA, but she commanded respect from her colleagues, and she was surprisingly understanding when I proposed that the investigation be kept relatively private from public eyes, in respect for the girls' loss. Still, we had to deal with the future of Blockberry Creative and Xenoa Lim.
Against my advice, Blockberry Creative's board of directors decided to sue Xenoa East for the losses inflicted by the hostile takeover and subsequent cancellation of the deal, as well as for the intangible damage and psychological trauma the girls had to experience as a result. I expected Xenoa East to just negotiate a deal to settle with BBC and protect their business and corporate image, but Fin Leung, who took over as Chairman after his father's death, instead chose to go to war against BBC in the courts. He demanded the deal to be reopened, intending on having the plan to be carried forward: Heejin, Hyejoo, and Chuu would stay in Korea, while the rest would transfer to China under Xenoa East's management.
