Aeon Nether & Idol Effigy

Chapter 75- B-Roll

I stood and cast a polite observation over my surroundings. This time I didn't try to look out of the corner of my eye to focus on one person. I just observe my surroundings in a way to fight off boredom.

Harvey was near a big grouping of people mingling. All of my friends' performances were on stage yesterday. Felixe would be after today's. Harvey's, Trina's, the fake sister I successfully avoided to some extent and a few judges who hate me, were all here.

I had thought that some main character garbage would happen to me, as vain as that is. But it didn't. Songs played on the phone I'd connected to a set of earphones to. From the earphones played the two familiar instrumental songs I'd be singing and dancing to.

No one came up to me. Everyone just did what they had to do for themselves. And yes, I did feel lousy for thinking, 'And in reality all these people are pieces of crap', in my mind.

It was true. They proved it to be true from the gossip I heard from their accommodations and the classes they had. All centres of the world and all proving to almost be embodiments of the mean girl cliques dressed in pink numbers.

The scantily dressed rich girl, Rebecca, still trying to catch her chosen prince's eyes as a confident woman who'd one day propose to her man (probably forced or coercing him by some means).

Trina, one of the centres of the group with intelligence she puts to good use trying to become the queen bee of the triad. Her innocent victim playing draws the attention of those who'd bow to her before the night is over in some dungeon bleeding from all the ill-fixed knife wounds when they become useless to her.

Harvey, another one who fights for the centre, this time trying to support the money and the means of the group, while casting his shadow over them in multiple ways. If the cliques in school normally had people who played chess behind the curtains, Harvey would be one of those people. Around the times I saw him as average or acting in a certain way, it cemented the idea that he wasn't as average as he seems. Somehow I could picture his glow-up villain era self revealing that he's just been acting average all this time.

Breaking my eyes away from Harvey with a shake of my head and a voice in my head telling me that this man is someone I should consider an enemy. Rebbeca and Trina were both bad for me, but Rebbeca without Trina isn't scary. In fact, I'm pretty sure Harvey would eventually deal with her in a more concrete way after a while.

When I looked up again, I thought I saw Harvey looking at me. I drank some water from my water bottle, which had a warm ginger, lemon and honey tea. It tasted better now that I had grown up and changed or matured my palate.

Time was all I had to wait for my stage, so the stories flowed and a smile appeared on my lips that I'd dulled down to fix my stage. Rock, indie and pop being my choices for putting into my b-roll. I took these two stages to be my intro numbers for this show from now on. More people will watch and pay attention. A necessity that I wanted to achieve by dance and song drawing attention to myself by bringing out some personality from within me.

Within seconds I was on stage and after the songs started I knew I was right.

My clothes weren't overstated either with a glove on both hands and simple changes to clothing in the form of a reversible jacket/blazer with some accessories that I would clip on whilst dancing.

My songs were both confident and me centric. Something that made me cringe, knowing that I've just been criticising other people backstage and now I'm doing a B-roll that tries to push myself forward. I could have tried to put a piano or some kind of non-musical prop on stage to become the centre of my performances. But no, I worried that it would show my lack of talent and I'd make more mistakes. Just imagining me having to handle more than myself on stage was daunting enough.

My stages were more than enough to pass me through to the fifty top rankers of this show at this stage. There was no question about it, because during this long period that the contestants passed relying on their studying skills, the original top ten lost six contestants. You'd think the viewers would be against ousting the really great potential future artists; you'd be wrong. The study period had also decreased the number of judges turned contestants too. Judges turned contestants still had most of the people who'd entered though.

More than fifty contestants at this stage are barely passable into the big leagues. We don't have anyone really bad, but they weren't people that blew audiences away as idols. And, if we're being honest, the audience rarely votes with the idea of picking an idol from the show. Normally those types of votes could occur in the finals and even then, it's a vote for people you like the most, reasons that aren't wholly relevant to the craft.

What's more is that us contestants all have to do one cover of someone else's song from the competition in a random draw from Rain and we have to make another original song for ourselves without any outside help. And Rain traded my song to Felixe and gave me a song that Trina had performed from the composing contestant she'd 'befriended' on the show. So when the cover songs we'd done were completed we'd have to rewatch the other person's original song to compare it to our performance.

Since it was a cover song it wasn't meant to be a direct copy of the other person's song, which made it easier to compare the two without embarrassing the other. However you'll forever subconsciously run the possibility of comparing the two of their performances anyway.

Even if the cover of the song is entirely different from the original, people will still notice and compare things between the performances to a critical degree. It's not about one suiting country singing, whilst the original suited their pop singing. Both will be judged more critically on their singing skills and less attention will go over who sang the best in their genre. It would become who sang the best in their performance. And since it's the same song being sung just being sung differently, the viewers watching it would be more critical.

Regarding the covers, some contestants don't get other people doing a cover of their on stage songs and dances. Some receive fully professional songs from those who were musicians outside the show. Some get songs that were done well on the show's stage and/or sold well outside of the show. Some songs were like the one that Felixe received from me, which showed me in school at fifteen years old, dancing and singing on top or besides a piano.

Trina's song I'd cover was just one of those on the show. The comparison was going to be more obvious even if I did change the song to my style a bit more. That cutesy song she'd done could have been kept cutesy, but I'd have to do my original song after I've done her cover. I wanted both songs to meld into each other with a clear flow, but a clear difference between the two songs without making the contrast look like I was making fun of the song or the people related to the song. Somehow it still came out cutesy, but not the bubble gum child friendly cutesy. I think. It flowed at least from a pop song cover to a more rock type of song.

When I came up I did my part. After I'd finished both stages. Trina's live performance of her song played out after I'd finished. It was like a discount version of the one I did, where the dancers who did most of the dancing and the aesthetics that had been carefully curated were made obvious. There was nothing to say about her singing that was better than Emma's, but paled to my stable careful singing attempt of her song. It was embarrassing. The comparison was even more harsh than I'd expected.

Out of the corner of my eyes I saw the contestants who went before me sitting in the ornate chairs in the audience. I didn't have to look over to notice that the additional gasps and giggles had been directed at the ugly expression on Trina's face. To be honest I was more curious about the expression on the face of her composer who'd thought of Trina as a muse who'd transform her music. I was hopeful that the comparison was grating her too. If the composer could see Trina's lack of trying when it came to the music part of the performance that she was in charge of after getting the song... Wouldn't the betrayal and death come sooner? Wouldn't I not need to play a killer and potentially get hit with all of the emotions I'd been missing due to Emma technically withholding them from me?

It was possible.

But a louder voice in my head pointed out that I couldn't do that. I needed to kill her myself, in some direct way. It was the best way to get the most out of my possible future rewards and save myself from Trina's vengeance that always took things too far.

A part of me wondered what her vengeance would entail this time with her possibly not knowing that I was in Emma's place. Would she kill me on stage and burn me alive afterwards knowingly?