Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

The panel waited while Park’s attention quietly disappeared behind the translucent System screen hanging in front of his eyes, the newly assigned mission sitting there with all the subtlety of somebody kicking open a door and announcing that subtlety had been cancelled for the afternoon:

[Mission: Show Off]

[Objective: Establish yourself as the most talented musician NX Arc has ever evaluated and make the agency consider you the greatest musical talent they have ever encountered.]

[Reward: Golden Mic]

[Type: Special Career Privilege/Contract Protection]

[Effects: Golden Mic automatically protects the Host during negotiations involving original musical works, recordings, publishing, songwriting, composition and related commercial rights. Clauses designed to permanently seize, disguise, dilute, reclassify or contractually erase protected ownership will be identified and alerted for host. Protected Ownership: The Host will retain up to 25% ownership in qualifying original master recordings created and commercially released with the Host as principal creator and performing artist but ownership remains subject to negotiation between Host and NX Arc agency.]

Golden Mic did not negotiate on his behalf but only ensure the he enters negotiations not blind.

Park stared for several seconds before looking past the floating notification toward the eight people waiting for him to sing, then back at the System again.

’Was there ever a solution without a problem hiding somewhere behind it?’

Because if Park looked at Golden Mic from that angle, its sudden appearance made a disturbing amount of sense:

Why would the System decide he needed contractual protection before he had even finished the audition? Either it knew something he didn’t, which would hardly be the first time, or it was simply intelligent enough to follow the same line of thought Park was only now catching up to.

If he completed Show Off properly, NX Arc would no longer be dealing with some handsome rookie who happened to show promise in two departments:

They would instead have an actor who had already walked out of his first intake as its strongest prospect and earned praise from one of the most stoic AD’s, then turned around and revealed that he could sing, compose and write at a level that made their actual professionals stop what they were doing.

Priceless might have been overselling himself.\:

’A little.’

Not by fucking much, though.

And businesses did not discover something valuable and immediately begin wondering how best to preserve that thing’s beautiful personal freedom.

They protected investments, and sometimes protecting the investment meant protecting the company from the very person they had invested in.

Park remembered enough about entertainment from Earth to know how ugly that could become without anybody involved needing to twirl a moustache and laugh.

A rookie could sign what looked like a dream recording agreement and discover years later that the company owned every master created during the contract term. A seemingly harmless work-for-hire clause could turn songs written during agency hours into company property because technically the agency had commissioned the work. Publishing could be assigned away through language a nineteen-year-old was never expected to understand properly. Exclusivity could lock an artist from recording elsewhere for years.

Option periods could allow the company, rather than the artist, to decide whether another album was owed.

Advances sounded wonderful when deposited into your account and considerably less romantic when studio fees, producers, music videos, promotion, touring support and half the fucking building apparently began crawling back out of future royalties.

Then there was songwriting itself:

That was where Park’s situation could become particularly stupid.

Imagine NX Arc realizing today that he could produce genuinely valuable music whenever inspiration, or apparently random fucking furniture, gave him something to work with.

Why would a company let that sit unused?

His contract could demand a minimum number of compositions each year. Maybe twenty, thirty, maybe fifty if some executive developed a cocaine problem and started believing Park’s fingers ran on batteries.

NX Arc could demand first refusal on anything he wrote, meaning every song had to pass through them before he could even consider giving it elsewhere.

They could insist on publishing percentages because agency producers completed the arrangements; they could claim partial ownership of anything created using their studios, musicians, equipment or production staff.

Worse, Park could unknowingly sign some broad clause covering all musical intellectual property created during the period of exclusive service and suddenly realize he had transformed Peerless Male Siren into the world’s most luxurious office printer.

NX Arc presses the button, Park produces a song, NX Arc owns the paper.

Wonderful.

None of that required NX Arc to be evil either, which was exactly why Park took it seriously.

NX Arc was a business, and a frighteningly successful one at that:

It spent ridiculous money finding talent, training them, producing and advertising the while fixing their scandals and throwing enough money behind selected artists to turn their faces into six-storey advertisements across RoraWood.

Naturally, the company wanted protection in return.

The better NX Arc was at business, the better its lawyers were probably going to be at writing sentences that sounded harmless until five years later an artist discovered their own voice technically belonged to a corporation every second Thursday.

Park doubted Golden Mic had appeared because NX Arc secretly kept songwriters chained underneath the sixth floor.

It didn’t need to.

The danger was ordinary.

’Legal and contract clauses.’ He looked at the number again.

Twenty-five percent.

It was nowhere near total control, and Park actually liked that.

The System wasn’t going to teleport into contract negotiations wearing sunglasses and declare that Nathaniel Park now owned ninety-nine percent of the music industry because destiny loved his face.

Golden Mic merely created a floor beneath him.

Whatever he negotiated later, however stupid or inexperienced he was, there would always remain a protected piece of qualifying music that belonged to him and could not quietly disappear behind legal vocabulary.

’A firewall.’

If NX Arc wanted anything beyond that, then they could sit across from him and negotiate for it like adults.

Park’s lips slowly curled upward.

’So that’s how it is, huh?’

If he showed them what he was genuinely capable of today, maybe they really would start thinking about how to tie him permanently to the company before anybody else could get close enough to offer something better. Fine. He had no problem with NX Arc wanting him badly enough to fight for him.

But he just wasn’t coming to the fight naked.

’Show them what you can do,’ Park thought, looking toward the people waiting beyond the System screen. ’Difference is, you handsome bastard, you have a fucking firewall now.’

He had never believed this second life would become some Disney movie where a talented boy wandered into an entertainment company, sang beautifully, received applause from management and signed a wholesome contract before living happily ever after while every corporate executive respected boundaries and discussed feelings over cocoa.

He wanted NX Arc.

That did not mean he trusted NX Arc.

And if they discovered later that the pretty nineteen-year-old rookie sitting across from Legal understood perfectly well when a contract was trying to bend him over a table, good.

’They would negotiate accordingly.’

Park wasn’t asking the third-ranked agency in the Empire to kneel before his talent and give him whatever he demanded.

He wanted respect, a fair negotiation, and enough leverage that both sides left the room believing there was something worth protecting.

’That is business.’

The System vanished from his sight.

The audition hall returned completely, eight professionals sitting beyond the stage, the camera trained on him and who knew how many senior executives watching somewhere upstairs. Park released a slow breath, stepped closer to the microphone and rested his fingers lightly against the stand.

’Okay, handsome bastard. Show them.’

He sang.

{...I loved you hard enough to lose my name,

called every locked door love and took the blame, um...}

The lines came out gorgeous, the second somehow cleaner, his pitch sitting so perfectly centered that the senior vocal coach’s eyes sharpened almost immediately. His tone was warm and effortless, breath hidden so well underneath the phrase that there was barely any physical suggestion of where the sound had been supplied from.

Park stopped.

"Sorry."

The female producer nearest the center blinked at him: "What?"

"That started badly."

The senior vocal coach looked almost offended. "Badly?"

"My entrance was lazy."

One of the composers actually leaned back and stared at him. "That was your lazy entrance?"

Park nodded. "Yeah. Again."

That single word carried none of the embarrassment most rookies would have felt after stopping themselves ten seconds into an audition. Park simply adjusted his grip, closed his eyes and allowed the little showman inside him to stretch.

If the System had literally named the mission Show Off, subtlety had officially become somebody else’s problem.

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