Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

The New Talent Manager seemed particularly pleased with that answer.

Someone farther down asked, "Do you think you’re better than NX Arc’s current recording artists?"

Park answered immediately. "No."

Several expressions relaxed, he added, "I haven’t heard all of them."

A producer closed his eyes.

The woman beside him started laughing; "And if you had?"

"Then I’d know."

"Of course you would."

Park smiled. "You asked."

The A&R executive switched direction. "What do you think of the artists you have heard?"

Park knew enough not to insult the exact company he was trying to sign with just because honesty had become his favorite recreational weapon.

"Some of them are incredible. You have voices I’d like to hear in a room instead of through speakers, people with years of stage experience I don’t have, artists who’ve already figured out things I’m still going to have to learn the annoying way; hopefully they’d be willing to give me a few pointers." He paused, then smiled.

The New Talent Manager asked the question Park actually cared about.

"What do you need from NX Arc?"

Park thought about it instead of giving them some stupid answer about needing fame:

"Scale."

The man’s expression changed slightly.

Park continued. "I can make things. You’ve seen that. But making something and building a career out of it aren’t the same skill. NX has studios I couldn’t reproduce by myself without wasting years and stupid amounts of money, Producers who’ve been doing this longer than I’ve been alive, vocal people who can hear things I don’t know to ask about yet, directors, engineers, choreographers, stages, distribution, marketing, international connections, other artists."

The people behind the table had become very still.

Park looked between them:

"I know what I’m capable of. What I don’t know is everything that happens after the talent. That’s why an agency like NX matters to me almost as much as my talents matter. I don’t want people around me who clap because something I did was already good. I want people who know enough to tell me what I did needs this and that and how to make the next thing even better. If I’m going to find the limits of what I can do, I’d rather do it somewhere that actually has the resources and experience to push me there."

If Park had physically stood up and begun scratching NX Arc’s ego behind the ears, he probably couldn’t have done a better job.

The A&R executive’s expression softened into the careful satisfaction of someone who had just heard exactly why her company mattered from the most absurd prospect she’d evaluated in years. The New Talent Manager looked pleased. Even several producers who had spent most of the audition trying to break Park now had that little look professionals got when somebody recognized their expertise rather than treating them like furniture around a genius.

And whoever was watching through the camera upstairs?

Park could practically imagine important executives sitting there thinking, ’Yes. Exactly. We are magnificent.’

An agency was basically courting with paperwork anyway, no point calling your date ugly before dessert.

By the time Park finally walked out, he had no idea how long he’d actually been inside. Long enough for his throat to remain perfectly fine while his patience had started requesting overtime pay, apparently.

He did, however, have one reason to thank the heavens...

...and Lucky.

’Mostly Lucky.’

The next two music prospects went in after him.

Both came out crying.

Park hadn’t been present for every second of their auditions, but word moved fast enough among rookies that he understood what had happened:

neither was terrible and under ordinary circumstances, one of them might even have been considered promising.

Unfortunately, they had walked into a room full of judges whose understanding of promising had been brutally vandalized less than twenty minutes earlier by Park.

Someone sang a good original and the judges subconsciously remembered Park making songs out of cold coffee and elevators... another showed decent range but the the vocal coach failed to locate Park’s edges.

One prospect hesitated when asked to alter a melody.

Everyone around the table had just spent an hour watching a nineteen-year-old treat melody like wet clay.

It wasn’t fair.

Park knew it wasn’t fair but entertainment had never promised fairness.

By the second rejection, though, something useful happened.

The judges came back down to Earth.

’Well not exactly but who cares about specifics.’

Their expectations stopped asking for another Park because reality had already slapped them twice for trying.

They no longer needed the next applicant to be 10% as creatively insane as the monster who had just walked out. At that point, they probably would have welcomed somebody who could sing beautifully, understand their own music and avoid making the producers question their life choices.

Then CJ walked in and Park thanked Lucky all over again.

Because if CJ had gone directly after him, she still would have passed, he was certain of that; her voice was too damn good not to but the panel would’ve listened to every good thing she did while some ugly little part of the human brain whispered Park did more.

Her "songwriting" would have suffered worst.

Not because CJ’s songs were bad. They were anything but.

But after seeing Park compose on command, rewrite genres for fun and make random prompts sound release-ready, almost anyone else’s creative process was going to look painfully ordinary.

Instead, two normal talented people had gone between him and CJ and by the time CJ entered, the room had remembered that human beings were allowed to possess limits.

Then Cecilia Jensen Henderson opened her mouth and the judges found their second problem of the day.

Her voice wasn’t Park’s.

Thank fuck.

It did not possess his ridiculous range of possibilities or the same almost supernatural ability to reshape itself into anything demanded of it, but CJ had something different:

Her voice was beautifully clear, naturally expressive and strong enough in its upper range that the senior vocal coach leaned forward almost immediately. There was a delicacy to it that never became weak, and when she let a phrase stretch, the sound seemed to grow prettier instead of thinning.

After two disappointed auditions, the room woke up.

CJ gave them the music.

Park wasn’t there to watch every expression this time, but he could imagine it.

The first song she chose was one of the pieces they’d worked on together. She didn’t present herself as some genius songwriter who could produce endless material for NX Arc, either. CJ had enough sense to know when lying would eventually bite her in the ass.

When they asked, she admitted that songwriting wasn’t her main strength.

"I can create music for myself who either sit down too and have time," she told them. "I don’t think I’d be useful if you’re looking for someone to write for ten other artists."

That should have hurt her under NX Arc’s current shortage but they could live with the disappointment that didnt last long when CJ sang the second song.

And suddenly nobody cared nearly as much; exceptions existed for a reason.

CJ was not another songwriter the agency could feed into its music department but she was an damn genius artist whose voice justified feeding the music department to her.

The two songs she brought were strong enough to prove she wouldn’t arrive completely dependent on whatever random material reached her desk, and her singing was rare enough that rejecting her because she couldn’t become an internal songwriting factory would’ve been the sort of decision somebody got yelled at for five years later while watching her accept awards under another company’s logo.

She passed.

’Of course she fucking passed.’

And the funniest part was that Park had protected their secret before CJ even understood there was something to protect:

Every song he had made specifically for her lacked him.

Not literally... Park had created the lyrics, melodies, structure and emotional direction, but there was no obvious Nathaniel Park fingerprint waiting for some clever producer to notice; he had too much flexibility for that.

He could compose around CJ’s phrasing, her preferred breathing spaces, her natural lift, the emotional colors she carried easiest and the genres that suited her without accidentally making her sound like a female version of himself.

The lyrics didn’t talk like Park, the melodies didn’t move like his own songs and the vocal runs didn’t keep reaching toward tricks designed for his impossible voice.

Even the emotional architecture changed around CJ.

If somebody heard Park’s prepared breakup song and then listened to CJ’s audition pieces, there was no obvious line connecting them beyond both being veryfucking good.

That mattered more than either sister knew yet.

Because if every secret song Park gave CJ sounded suspiciously like Nathaniel Park with a woman’s voice sitting on top, their grand lifelong conspiracy would survive approximately three albums before somebody on the internet built a seventy-slide thread titled WHY CJ IS SECRETLY PARK’S MUSICAL LAB RAT.

Instead, Park could disappear completely from the creation when he wanted to.

CJ’s music could become unmistakably CJ.

And Park could sit somewhere far away, collect his System rewards, watch her climb the charts and smile like an innocent man who had absolutely nothing to do with any of it.

Thinking about it later, Park could only arrive at one conclusion:

’Our deal has a fucking plot armor.’

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