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keith_ltd2022-01-14 10:38 pm
runawayballista) wrote in keith_ltd2022-01-14 10:38 pm
Live at the Mile High Club! Chapter 6
Fandom: BanG Dream!, Scum Villain
Title: Live at the Mile High Club!
Summary: Shang Qinghua finds out what Shen Yuan is like after a couple of drinks and has a very weird night. Luo Binghe reads Shen Yuan's review of their performance and decides Proud Immortal Demon Way has some work to do.
Notes: i love my proud immortal demon way kids. six balls is VERY important to me
End notes
AO3 mirror
“I’m just saying,” Shen Yuan said heatedly, slapping a hand down on the table, “that Afterglow’s sound has definitely changed since their debut! You could hear it in their set tonight! Seriously, sit down with a pair of headphones, listen to ‘That Is How I Roll’ and ‘COMIC PANIC!!!’ back to back, and tell me I’m wrong. I’ll wait.”
Shang Qinghua, who had spent the better part of the last week mainlining Afterglow’s music, let out a snort. “Okay, you’re wrong. ‘COMIC PANIC!!!’ is a natural evolution of their sound. And if you’re going to toss their first single around, you can’t ignore the B-sides! ‘True color’ has all those warm vibes, right from the start. You can totally feel their growth as a band in ‘COMIC PANIC!!!’, it’s like—in their first single, it’s like the band has just one voice, but now, it feels like every song is all of them, you know?”
“Because the entire band sings in that track,” Shen Yuan retorted, haughtily adjusting her cardigan.
“And what’s wrong with that? It’s cute! It’s fun!”
“‘Cute’ and ‘fun’ aren’t part of the Afterglow image! It’s off-brand, that’s all I’m saying!”
“They’re in high school! Why do they have to have a brand? Seriously, you are so critical!”
“I’m a music critic,” Shen Yuan said through her teeth. “It is literally my job.”
It turned out that after a few drinks, Shen Yuan shed her demure and elegant shell, and out crawled the horrible little internet gremlin who loved to smear contempt all over the comments section of Airplane’s every release. It wasn’t like this was a shocker, Shang Qinghua read her blog on the regular, but there was something uniquely gratifying about seeing it come out in person. She knew it! There was no way Shen Yuan could actually be that cool.
Sure, yes, Shang Qinghua would admit that Shen Yuan did know how to dress cool, she really could pull an outfit together, and she clearly put way more time into the whole hair-and-makeup routine than Shang Qinghua—but Shen Yuan had the soul of a terminally Online die-mad-about-it nerd, and no glow up could change that. Shang Qinghua found herself grinning stupidly as Shen Yuan took an angry sip of her beer. An angry sip. Not an angry gulp, not an angry chug, just a little angry sip. It was hilarious. It was almost cute.
Shen Yuan composed herself with a huff, swatting a stray piece of hair from her face. “The only exception I’ll accept is ‘Y.O.L.O!!!’, but it doesn’t even count, because it’s technically a Pastel*Palettes song. The agency let them retain performance rights, but it’s basically like getting permission to play a cover of your own song.”
Shang Qinghua blinked, lowering her beer. “Hey, I thought that one sounded familiar. Afterglow wrote a song for an idol group? How did that happen?”
Teen idols weren’t really Shang Qinghua’s obsession these days, she was well out of college now, but Pastel*Palettes had caught her interest after their debacle of a debut. They had a rough start, but an idol band that actually played their instruments? It was a neat concept, and they had a lot of personality, and they had some pretty good hits! High school bands really were where it was at these days.
“I covered it on my blog,” Shen Yuan said smugly, with the undercurrent of didn’t you say you’re a reader? Okay, but how could Shang Qinghua be expected to remember stuff like this, aside from the fact that it was actually really relevant to her job? “The idol agency approached Afterglow because they were interested in their sound. But honestly, they should never have sold that song. Something like ‘COMIC PANIC!!!’ would have been a much better fit for Pastel*Palettes anyway! Ridiculous that they tossed away such a hit.”
Shang Qinghua pointed across the table at her. “That just proves my point! ‘Y.O.L.O!!!’ is a pretty recent release, which means it’s Afterglow’s current sound the agency wanted, which means they’ve still got it!”
“But it’s different,” Shen Yuan said, and pressed two fingers to her forehead. “Ugh, never mind. You don’t get it.”
“Uh huh,” Shang Qinghua said, and then, because she couldn’t help herself: “Man, if this is the way you talk about music you like, I can’t even imagine what a bad review from you sounds like.”
“Don’t you read my blog?” Shen Yuan said, and she could not have sounded any more obnoxious if she tried. “Besides, I offer constructive criticism. You can’t improve without honest feedback.”
Shang Qinghua would have liked to say that it was a totally joyless reply, in full accordance with the distant and sophisticated image she pasted over what Shang Qinghua thought of as her true personality. But the truth was that in person, Shen Yuan was just as passionate about her critiques as her blog posts made her sound.
“So you think you’re like, genuinely helping people grow artistically?”
It was difficult to say with a straight face. Shen Yuan gave her a dumbfounded look.
“Of course. And I am. People have thanked me for what I’ve written about them.”
Right, right. It was true that Shen Yuan was (for some reason) pretty popular these days, and people absolutely slavered for her opinion. Shang Qinghua saved herself from having to think of a sincere response to that by tagging Yuka’s elbow as she passed by.
“Hey, hey, hand me two of those? We’re both dry over here.” Shang Qinghua shook her empty bottle. Yuka glared.
“Why did you invite her,” she hissed into Shang Qinghua’s ear. Instinctively, Shang Qinghua flinched away, but there was no accompanying smack. She gave Yuka a pout.
“It was a good show! You said we should celebrate! We really owe her, you know?”
“You owe your staff,” Yuka said icily, “not the hipster influencer you keep begging to hang out with you. You didn’t need Shen Yuan for Afterglow or Moon Dew.”
“No, but we needed her for Proud Immortal Demon Way and a lot of customers. You saw the reception in the lobby. Are you really trying to tell me we don’t need every ounce of that we can get? If she gets invited to the afterparty, then our odds of her posting about us go way up! And that will definitely help us book more bands, so please stop looking at me like that, it’s freaking me out, okay!”
Yuka, for once, didn’t have a good response, mostly because she didn’t want to concede the point. She all but dropped a bottle of beer on the table and marched off. Shang Qinghua twisted in her chair.
“But I asked for two!”
“Share it!”
Shang Qinghua turned back around with a sigh, but Shen Yuan was already out of her seat and slinging her bag over her shoulder.
“I’m heading home,” she said brusquely, tossing her long hair over her shoulder. She was already making a move for the door. Shang Qinghua jumped to her feet.
“What, already?” She hadn’t even worked up to asking about a blog post yet. She was still warming Shen Yuan up, okay? You couldn’t rush a good schmooze!
“It’s already eleven-thirty,” Shen Yuan said, shaking back the loose sleeve of her sweater to display her oh-so-chic watch, as though there wasn’t a clock on the wall behind her. “My train stops running at midnight, and I’d rather not risk missing it. Thank you for inviting me to your little afterparty.”
It would have sounded like a backhanded thanks if not for the hint of a smile around her eyes. It was just enough. But she did sound pretty tired despite how animatedly she’d been contesting Shang Qinghua’s music opinions not ten minutes ago.
“Yeah, well,” Shang Qinghua said, badly stalling, “at least let me walk you to the door, okay? You never know who’s hanging around outside at this time of night.”
Like, for instance, Luo Binghe. And maybe she could speed up the schmooze just a little bit. Shen Yuan looked like she was about to brush off the offer, but then seemed to think the better of it and agreed with a little hum.
In the full light of the lobby, Shen Yuan looked distinctly tired. The lively flush from earlier was gone, and she looked…kind of like shit, actually. Shang Qinghua was certain that she herself also looked distinctly tired and probably a lot more like shit, but Shen Yuan hadn’t been running a show all day. The life of a music blogger was surely not that taxing. Shen Yuan pushed up her glasses with a finger and, as if noticing Shang Qinghua’s gaze, spread her fan over her face again.
“Thank you for coming,” Shang Qinghua said after a beat of silence. “Like, really, I cannot overemphasize how grateful I am. I haven’t slept in a few days, so I really can’t tell if I sound grateful, my own voice just kind of sounds like a long, drawn-out buzzing to me? But I’m pretty sure that if you hadn’t come tonight I would’ve had all of my limbs torn off by angry teenage girls. By one angry teenage girl, anyway. I’d get down on my knees and everything, but at this point I don’t think I’d be able to get back up.”
“Please don’t. It’s embarrassing.”
“Not for me,” Shang Qinghua said earnestly. Shen Yuan rolled her eyes.
“That’s what’s so embarrassing about it.” She paused, considering, and swept a glance around the lobby. Post-show and pre-cleanup, the floor was still littered with trampled flyers, torn tickets, and abandoned light sticks. “Hmm. This place has always been kind of a garbage dump.”
“I know,” Shang Qinghua agreed immediately. Shen Yuan’s eyes slanted her way with the strong suggestion of—well, some kind of face.
“I’m not finished. This place has always been kind of a garbage dump, but—” She gestured with her fan. “Since the management changed, I’m seeing some improvement. Last time I was here, it was…well, the lineup wasn’t a problem. Hello, Happy World! always draws a crowd, for better or worse. But it still felt like the same Mile High Club—all grunge, no substance, grabbing low-hanging musical fruit since the start. No one’s ever heard of any local band hitting it big and throwing a shoutout back to this place.”
Shang Qinghua failed to suppress a wince. Ouch! This is exactly what she was talking about, okay!
“This show, however,” Shen Yuan continued, her voice growing thoughtful, “was different. For the first time, it felt like you were really trying to amplify the music that matters to this scene, the music you and your people care about. Not just filling a stage for the sake of making money. The energy in that crowd tonight was rich. It was real. Tonight was the first night the Mile High Club started to feel like someplace new.”
Shang Qinghua just barely stopped herself from saying that actually, all she’d been focused on lately was filling the fucking stage for the sake of keeping the whole business from going under, but… She thought back to her conversation with Marina at CiRCLE again. Yes, it was true that she was primarily motivated by the terror of looming debt, but when Marina had asked her about how she felt about the music here, she’d answered without hesitation.
And actually, it felt kind of cool to hear Shen Yuan acknowledge that.
That didn’t mean she was falling prey to Shen Yuan’s nonexistent heartthrob vibe! Shang Qinghua was a sucker in many, many ways, but definitely not that one! It was just a nice change of pace, okay!
“So…that means you’ll post about tonight’s show, right?”
The corners of Shen Yuan’s mouth turned up in a faint smirk. “I said I’d think about it, didn’t I?”
The mixed devastation and exasperation on Shang Qinghua must have been palpable, because Shen Yuan actually laughed.
“Check my blog tomorrow. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.” They came to the front doors, and Shen Yuan paused, one hand on the handle. She took a moment, as though she had to work to pull the words together. “I never thought I’d say this, but…mm. You actually have good taste in music, Shang Qinghua. I’m looking forward to seeing where you take this place.”
There were no loitering or lurking teens outside. Shen Yuan left, the doors swinging quietly shut behind her. Shang Qinghua stood there, rubbing her jaw absently, and the second Shen Yuan was out of sight, something lit up like a fifteen-watt bulb in her head.
Yes! Yes! Mission success! Shen Yuan came to the show, it was a total success, and now she was going to blog about it! Everything really was coming up Airplane!!
“Who the fuck is Airplane?” came Yuka’s voice from behind her, and Shang Qinghua realized some of her internal monologue had escaped out her mouth. But Yuka didn’t bother waiting for a response. “Princess Cucumber finally leave?”
“It’s Peerless Cucumber,” Shang Qinghua said automatically. Yuka snorted.
“I know. I’m not saying that out loud. Did you get your blog post or whatever?”
“Tomorrow.” A wired, extremely tired grin split across Shang Qinghua’s face. “She said there’d be something up tomorrow.”
“So happy for you.” Yuka took a sip from her beer. “Good job today.”
Shang Qinghua blinked. “What?”
“Don’t make me repeat myself. You didn’t suck today. And—don’t take this the wrong way, I just think you’re giving that blogger way too much credit—a lot of it is thanks to you. So.”
Shang Qinghua clutched a hand to her chest. Was this it? Was this finally the moment when her prickly floor manager and de facto second in command would reveal her true tsundere nature in an honest heart to heart?
“What is that look for? The work’s not done.” Yuka jabbed two fingers into Shang Qinghua’s shoulder. Shang Qinghua let out a pitiful whimper. “Yes, we pulled together a good lineup. Now we have to do that again for next Saturday. And the Saturday after that. A single show isn’t going to save this place.”
Shang Qinghua let out a deflated whine. Ah, precious Yuka, so dedicated, but so cold! “Can’t you let me bask in this one just a little bit before you hit me with the reality check?”
“No. Go home and sleep, you look like shit. And don’t come back until Monday.”
“You do care!”
“I care that there’s someone alive to sign my paychecks,” Yuka said, shoving her towards the door. “And to pay the rent on this place next week. Go. Home.”
The train ride home kept Shang Qinghua awake just enough longer that by the time she kicked in the door of her cramped apartment, she was on her second wind. Or fourth? The coffee/beer combo was doing a number on her, as was the overstimulation of having spent the last fourteen hours running around and talking to people, moving heavy things, and being blasted with loud music. She shouldn’t have gotten too drunk off just a couple of beers, but Shang Qinghua was laughing inanely to herself as she kicked off her shoes and dropped her bag on the floor.
Her apartment in the sweaty Tokyo summer felt like walking into somebody’s open mouth, so she stripped off everything but her underwear, threw them onto the now toweringly high dirty laundry pile (who has time to do laundry these days!), and flung herself down onto her futon to sleep. Yes, she should sleep. But every time she tried to lie still, she was suddenly seized with wheezing laughter over absolutely fucking nothing. Underneath the constant buzzing in her brain, she felt vaguely sick. Was this what sheer, unadulterated relief felt like? If so, it was awful, and she wanted more.
She thought, at least, that if she couldn’t sleep, she could write music. She’d dropped her last buffer track yesterday and hadn’t had any time to sit down and compose for days, so really, this was a great opportunity! But after an hour of playing the same six-note melody in varying but ultimately unsatisfying arrangements, she realized she was barely even hearing what she was playing. That was fine too! That thought repeated itself in her head as she paced between her keyboard, her laptop, the fridge, and the bathroom in an aimless, milling cycle for—well, she lost track of time, really, but the next time she looked at her phone it was two in the morning.
She pulled up Peerless Cucumber’s blog on her phone, as if it were somehow reasonable to expect an update in the middle of the night. But that was fine too! If she couldn’t sleep, she’d just stay up until Shen Yuan posted her new review.
The coffee/beer combo finally came back to haunt her around two thirty, and she spent a torturous forty-five minutes on the toilet, face buried in her hands.
Three-thirty saw her watching Vine compilations on her futon in absolute fucking tears. She laughed so hard she accidentally flung her phone against the wall, then doubled over wheezing.
At four, she decided it was time for food. She really hadn’t eaten very much in the last twenty-four hours, and suddenly she was fucking starving. She’d been taking less of a salary to bolster the live house’s finances, so she was mostly down to ramen packs, but that was fine. She had a cold beer or two in the fridge, that’d be perfect with some noodles. Totally worth boiling a pot of water in her un-air-conditioned apartment. While she waited for it to heat up, Shang Qinghua found herself compulsively tidying the tiny kitchen surface. At the very least, she was moving shit around.
“Kyabetsu! Kyabetsu! Kyabe—fuck!”
Shang Qinghua jostled the pot of water and immediately doubled over as a few drops of scalding hot water splashed onto one nipple. She clapped a hand over her tit with a hiss and hopped away from the stove, jamming her knee against a cabinet in the process. This was exactly why you didn’t cook on the stove without a shirt on! Rookie mistake!!
By the time Shang Qinghua wrestled a new shirt on, the pot was boiling over. She unspooled half a roll of paper towels cleaning up the spill on the floor, and, undaunted, dropped the noodles in what water was left. T-shirt splash guard: success! She poked the noodles with a spoon, humming a catchy little melody that had gotten caught in her brain. Oh, man, as soon as she was doing making ramen, she was totally going to sit down and write some—
Shang Qinghua came to on a sharp inhale, her entire body twitching on the futon. Her head was groggy, pressed under the weight of a coffee/beer/late night combo hangover. One of her hands felt wet. She lifted her heavy head off the futon to see her left hand submerged in a half-eaten bowl of noodles.
Hmm.
She shook her hand out, wiped it on her shirt, and slowly sat up. Alright, well, she hadn’t started a fire in her apartment, so that was fine. Apparently she’d just blacked out while eating noodles and scrawling illegible broth-stained sheet music to which she desperately hoped there was a recording somewhere. As she wiped her hair from her sweaty face, she saw that her five best girls from her collection of anime figures were arranged in a semicircle around the pillow end of her futon.
She definitely didn’t remember doing that. Maybe she’d wanted company?
Still feeling sluggish, Shang Qinghua washed her hands, located her phone (left on top of the stove, yikes), and poured herself a glass of water to fend off the headache while she checked her messages. She’d managed to pass out until well into the afternoon, and there was a stack of notifications waiting for her. Marina had sent her a message asking how the show had gone, apologizing for not making it (work, of course), Moon Dew had sent messages to both the Mile High Club and Airplane, and one of her staff had accidentally texted her a decidedly racy selfie and immediately followed it up with nvm. And then there were all the unread comments on the track she’d dropped Friday, like a little post-show treat.
She dropped down on her futon and scrolled through the comments, munching on a piece of bread. There was no better hangover cure than reading people saying cool stuff about you on the internet.
Wait. Shit. Peerless Cucumber’s blog! She’d tried to stay awake until the new post had gone up and instead blacked herself out into oblivion. In the half second it took for her to type the url on her phone’s browser, she was seized with the sudden fear that Shen Yuan had written something nasty, that all that talk about how much the Mile High Club had changed was actually just the setup to a very mean joke.
But no, as soon as she saw the title of the post (posted at noon, so maybe it was for the best that she passed out after all): “Shinjuku’s Mile High Club Reaches New Heights!”
Shang Qinghua wrinkled her nose. She would have workshopped that title a little bit, but sure.
Hold up, this was exactly how Shen Yuan started that topic last night! Was she secretly recording their conversation or something?!
Peerless Cucumber, no matter what the headline says, this doesn’t sound like a good review at all!!
Stuffing the rest of the bread in her mouth, Shang Qinghua kept scrolling.
Okay! Thank you! That was more like it!
The post went on to detail Peerless Cucumber’s impressions of all three bands that performed that night. Shang Qinghua was privately relieved to see that Shen Yuan hadn’t seen fit to bring up Moon Dew’s “abysmal taste”; actually, aside from honestly noting the awkward newness of their sound, it was…not a terrible review. It also wasn’t a very long one. She had much more to say on the topic of Afterglow’s performance, which was generally favorable, although she insisted on inserting the same dumb opinions about their musical growth that she’d expressed last night. But it was her brief, almost passing mention of Proud Immortal Demon Way sandwiched between them that Shang Qinghua found herself looking for.
Shang Qinghua cringed. Well, that wasn’t…bad, but it wasn’t great, either. Other than the little sting of resentment at the suggestion that the live house is somehow responsible for their lack of progress—Shang Qinghua has always encouraged them, okay!—she felt a nagging worry about how Luo Binghe might receive that. There was no way Luo Binghe hadn’t read this already, and she seemed to really…look up to Shen Yuan?
Ah, no, there really was no way around it: Luo Binghe was obviously, definitely obsessed with Shen Yuan.
The rest of the post concluded much the same way as their conversation had last night, down to the last “the new management appears to have good taste, I’m looking forward to seeing where they take the place”. It didn’t count as plagiarism if it was her own words, but Shang Qinghua had to wonder how much of their conversations last night had been actual conversations between two people, and not Shen Yuan just drafting a blog post out loud.
Still, all in all, it was a good review, if a little backhanded! The barbs about the Mile High Club’s history washed right off of Shang Qinghua. She couldn’t disagree; in the several months before her “promotion” she’d never witnessed a show she would have actually considered good. It’d just been nice to be close to the local music scene, however shitty the place. And as long as Shen Yuan was encouraging people to come to the new and (well, maybe) improved Mile High Club, she could shittalk its past all she wanted!
It left Shang Qinghua in a good mood, and maybe the blackout sleep was partly responsible, but now that she’d woken up a little and drank some water, she was feeling pretty rejuvenated. Inspired, even. She was off for the rest of the day, with no demands on her time for once—now she could really make some music.
And she really needed to. Airplane could not afford to miss another release date.
It was as though the last few weeks hadn’t been so thoroughly soul-sucking: just like before, the music came together easily, like it was pulling her fingers along the keys instead of the other way around. Tapping a pencil rhythmically against her keyboard, she pored over the sheet music she’d slapped together overnight. Most of it was incomprehensible garbage, but one of the things that made Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky so prolific was that she had the tireless ability to sift through garbage to find the few golden threads she could stitch together to make something truly resonant. It didn’t matter how much shitty music she wrote; there was always something good in there she could use, and when there wasn’t, there was always something good enough.
By the time she stopped flitting between her laptop and synths like a sweaty little techno butterfly, it was nearly midnight, and she’d amassed a handful of half-assembled tracks she could polish up into the weekly two-minute releases her listeners had come to expect. There was still plenty of work to do, but it was a different kind of work, not quite as exhausting as starting from the ground up. Best to let her brain marinate in it a bit before picking it back up or she’d get all tunnel vision-y about it.
But she still felt restless and ready to go. Part of it was, probably, the fact that she’d spent a conservative ten hours in a dead sleep, but the exhilaration from the success of the live show—and Peerless Cucumber’s net positive review—hadn’t worn off since last night. After a little thoughtful wiggling in her chair, she sought out the notes she’d made the last time she’d had a spurt of creative energy. If she could keep up with Airplane’s regular release schedule—if things at the live house got just a little bit easier—then…she might actually have time to get back to her concept album.
She’d gone so long without working on anything truly creative. Sure, she liked working on her steady stream of remixes, dance tracks, and sick techno covers of anime themes, but it just wasn’t as fulfilling. The elaborate fantasy scape set to painstakingly crafted music and videos was where her heart was really at. Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had fallen into a lull lately, if not a rut; it was time to put herself back on the uphill climb towards success instead of just treading water.
And…there was another little glimmer of hope. Shen Yuan said Shang Qinghua had good taste in music, which meant that she couldn’t have hated Airplane’s music that much. In fact, in the past—before she’d become an influencer—her reviews had been mixed more often than not. Peerless Cucumber was fond of charting out her perceived decline of Airplane’s music, but that just acknowledged that there was something she liked about it!
And she did go on and on about that concept album on her blog. So maybe Airplane would finally release it and give Peerless Cucumber something real to review for the first time in a while. If she could get Shen Yuan to admit that she liked Airplane’s music, then Shang Qinghua could come clean, and plan her own debut without worry. It was a perfect plan! How could it possibly go wrong!
“We’ll have a Christian-style wedding,” Luo Binghe announced. She was staring into the middle distance with great intent, although the effect was slightly ruined by the angle of the massage chair, and the fact that her feet were both currently submerged in a bubbling foot bath. “Shen Yuan-sama would look so beautiful in one of those white dresses with pearls stitched in—and she’d look stunning in lace…”
Mobei Jun made a noncommittal noise, but didn’t look up from the music magazine she was reading. One of Meiyin’s little sisters was diligently painting her toes in a rich matte azure, listening to Luo Binghe go on with furtive interest. Meiyin’s family’s beauty parlor was where the band usually hung out outside of practice, as for the most part they went to different schools, and the sprawling spa complex also conveniently provided them with a space to practice on their own. Their past attempts at holding post-band meetings at any of Sha Hualing’s family’s restaurants had been varying shades of disastrous. The calming atmosphere of the beauty parlor was much better suited as a cooldown to their usually heated rehearsals. And Meiyin’s horde of sisters was always eager to provide an audience to mini-concerts.
“I found a wedding dress catalogue online,” Luo Binghe went on. Her eyes were starting to look a little glazed. “They’re all so expensive, but I’ll save up, of course. It’ll be so worth it. I think she’d look best in an A-line dress. With one of those layered tulle skirts…she’d look like an elegant fairy crossing over from a mystical realm…”
She sighed. Sha Hualing exchanged a raised-eyebrow glance with Meiyin, who was currently painting her nails in a shimmery hot pink. Playing the guitar would ruin the manicure immediately, but Sha Hualing didn’t care. Meiyin never minded redoing her nails; she always gave her bandmates’ hands the most careful attention. They were a musician’s most important tool, after all.
“What if she doesn’t like those big floofy dresses?” Six Balls said around a mouthful of chips. Luo Binghe sat up straight, her lips parting in deep thought.
“I…didn’t think about that. I just thought…no, it’s not about what I want. If Shen Yuan-sama isn’t happy with it, then I don’t want it.” Luo Binghe’s eyebrows were deeply furrowed, her expression adamant. “Of course a simple gown would better suit her elegance! Something sleek and off the shoulder. The kind of dress you’d wear if you were going to romantically elope…”
“Don’t you think you should wait until you’ve proposed to make these plans?” Sha Hualing couldn’t help herself, suppressing a snicker but not a smirk. Meiyin gave her an exasperated look as she finished up Sha Hualing’s nails, mouthing don’t encourage her. Sha Hualing ignored her. “So when are you planning to propose? Oooh, you were thinking of doing it onstage, weren’t you?”
Luo Binghe’s eyes narrowed, her mouth thinning, but her cheeks flushed pink. Before she could reply, her phone buzzed in her lap. She snatched it up and all but pressed it to her face.
“Don’t wiggle around so much,” Meiyin said to Six Balls, sitting in front of her and grasping her by the ankle. “You’re going to get polish everywhere. You might as well just dip your toes in it.”
“Aaah, but it tickles! Ahaha! I can’t help it, my feet are acting all on their own!”
As if to demonstrate her demonic foot possession, Six Balls kicked her feet and sent a splash of water flying. Meiyin dabbed her face with a towel and firmly pulled Six Balls’s feet from the bath. “If you get your chips in my foot bath again, you lose pedicure privileges.”
Sha Hualing, who was scrolling on her phone as lightly as possible so as not to disturb her nails, looked up at a strangled noise from Luo Binghe. “What, did the dress you were saving up go out of stock?”
She was staring at her phone in abject dismay, looking on the brink of tears. “Shen Yuan-sama…Shen Yuan-sama doesn’t think we’re good enough.”
“What?” Sha Hualing scoffed. “Let me see. It can’t be that bad.” She pulled up Peerless Cucumber’s blog on her own phone with a few dainty taps, mindful of her drying nails, scrolled a bit, and squinted. After a minute she let out a scoff. “One measly paragraph? That’s all she has to say about us? We killed it!”
“She was so nice to me when we talked.” Luo Binghe stared down miserably at her phone. “She said…she called our performance memorable.”
But then she clenched her jaw in a grimace, and with a flash of frustration, she flung her phone down into the foot bath. Mobei Jun sighed, put her magazine to the side, and reached over to fish Luo Binghe’s phone out of the water.
“Mm…it’s not really that bad, though, is it?” Meiyin had looked up the review on her own phone. Six Balls was leaning forward out of her massage chair to peer at it. Meiyin gently pushed her back. “Brief, yes. I suppose it makes sense she wrote more about Afterglow. They were the main event, after all.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re friends with their bassist,” Sha Hualing said accusingly. “I mean, yeah, they were pretty cool, but so were we! It’s not like she’s got a word limit, she could’ve written more!”
Meiyin tilted her head in concession. “Even so, it’s not a bad review, especially from an influencer. We’re still a relatively new band. I don’t think anything she said is necessarily untrue. We just need more practice, and the Mile High Club is still letting us play, so we’ll keep getting exposure—”
With an agonized howl, Luo Binghe leapt from the foot bath, somehow managing not to slip and break her neck into the process. She landed with a wet thud and immediately booked it for the back door without even bothering to dry her feet. Meiyin sighed.
“Hey!” Sha Hualing shouted. “Where are you going? She didn’t even do your cuticles yet!”
“Practice,” Luo Binghe said doggedly. “We have to practice! There’s no way Shen Yuan-sama will deem us worthy if we don’t improve!”
“I didn’t mean right now,” Meiyin said with exasperation. Mobei Jun grunted in dissatisfaction and politely pulled her feet away so she could step carefully onto the towel, despite her unfinished nails. After quickly but carefully drying her feet, she went to follow Luo Binghe downstairs, considerately closing the door behind her. Meiyin rubbed her forehead.
“Ah, what are we doing to do with her? I’m so worried she’ll wind up with her heart broken.”
Sha Hualing snorted and went back to scrolling on her phone. “What do you mean, what are we going to do? You think you can talk her out of her future wife? I’d like to see you try.”
Six Balls wiggled one foot at Meiyin. She was piling a wild variety of nail polishes in her lap. “Hey, hey, can you do all my toes in different colors?”
Mobei Jun followed the muted scratching of Luo Binghe’s electric guitar to the basement where they often practiced, and found her sitting in the middle of the floor with her guitar in her lap and a notebook in front of her. She was alternating furiously between working out chords and scribbling something down with such force she was at risk of snapping the pencil in half. Mobei Jun approached her and peered over her shoulder.
“Writing a new song?”
“We need something new if we’re going to impress Shen Yuan-sama,” Luo Binghe said fervently. “We need to give her proof of our growth as a band. Something she won’t be able to deny. Something she’ll never forget.”
Mobei Jun watched as Luo Binghe became absorbed in her work again. She was somewhat concerned about her friend’s fixation on someone whose opinion, quite honestly, Mobei Jun did not consider to be of very much consequence. But it mattered to Luo Binghe, and it motivated her like hell on her heels, and Shen Yuan had been right: they did still have a long way to go. Mobei Jun crossed the room in a few easy strides, picked up her bass, and came to sit on the sofa behind Luo Binghe.
“Play me what you have so far,” she said. “If we want to show proof of our growth, we’ll have to write it together.”
End notes: every single song that shen yuan & shang qinghua argue about is a real song and they are all bops
we never forget a classic vine. that silly sqh interlude was a lil treat just for me :)
Title: Live at the Mile High Club!
Summary: Shang Qinghua finds out what Shen Yuan is like after a couple of drinks and has a very weird night. Luo Binghe reads Shen Yuan's review of their performance and decides Proud Immortal Demon Way has some work to do.
Notes: i love my proud immortal demon way kids. six balls is VERY important to me
End notes
AO3 mirror
“I’m just saying,” Shen Yuan said heatedly, slapping a hand down on the table, “that Afterglow’s sound has definitely changed since their debut! You could hear it in their set tonight! Seriously, sit down with a pair of headphones, listen to ‘That Is How I Roll’ and ‘COMIC PANIC!!!’ back to back, and tell me I’m wrong. I’ll wait.”
Shang Qinghua, who had spent the better part of the last week mainlining Afterglow’s music, let out a snort. “Okay, you’re wrong. ‘COMIC PANIC!!!’ is a natural evolution of their sound. And if you’re going to toss their first single around, you can’t ignore the B-sides! ‘True color’ has all those warm vibes, right from the start. You can totally feel their growth as a band in ‘COMIC PANIC!!!’, it’s like—in their first single, it’s like the band has just one voice, but now, it feels like every song is all of them, you know?”
“Because the entire band sings in that track,” Shen Yuan retorted, haughtily adjusting her cardigan.
“And what’s wrong with that? It’s cute! It’s fun!”
“‘Cute’ and ‘fun’ aren’t part of the Afterglow image! It’s off-brand, that’s all I’m saying!”
“They’re in high school! Why do they have to have a brand? Seriously, you are so critical!”
“I’m a music critic,” Shen Yuan said through her teeth. “It is literally my job.”
It turned out that after a few drinks, Shen Yuan shed her demure and elegant shell, and out crawled the horrible little internet gremlin who loved to smear contempt all over the comments section of Airplane’s every release. It wasn’t like this was a shocker, Shang Qinghua read her blog on the regular, but there was something uniquely gratifying about seeing it come out in person. She knew it! There was no way Shen Yuan could actually be that cool.
Sure, yes, Shang Qinghua would admit that Shen Yuan did know how to dress cool, she really could pull an outfit together, and she clearly put way more time into the whole hair-and-makeup routine than Shang Qinghua—but Shen Yuan had the soul of a terminally Online die-mad-about-it nerd, and no glow up could change that. Shang Qinghua found herself grinning stupidly as Shen Yuan took an angry sip of her beer. An angry sip. Not an angry gulp, not an angry chug, just a little angry sip. It was hilarious. It was almost cute.
Shen Yuan composed herself with a huff, swatting a stray piece of hair from her face. “The only exception I’ll accept is ‘Y.O.L.O!!!’, but it doesn’t even count, because it’s technically a Pastel*Palettes song. The agency let them retain performance rights, but it’s basically like getting permission to play a cover of your own song.”
Shang Qinghua blinked, lowering her beer. “Hey, I thought that one sounded familiar. Afterglow wrote a song for an idol group? How did that happen?”
Teen idols weren’t really Shang Qinghua’s obsession these days, she was well out of college now, but Pastel*Palettes had caught her interest after their debacle of a debut. They had a rough start, but an idol band that actually played their instruments? It was a neat concept, and they had a lot of personality, and they had some pretty good hits! High school bands really were where it was at these days.
“I covered it on my blog,” Shen Yuan said smugly, with the undercurrent of didn’t you say you’re a reader? Okay, but how could Shang Qinghua be expected to remember stuff like this, aside from the fact that it was actually really relevant to her job? “The idol agency approached Afterglow because they were interested in their sound. But honestly, they should never have sold that song. Something like ‘COMIC PANIC!!!’ would have been a much better fit for Pastel*Palettes anyway! Ridiculous that they tossed away such a hit.”
Shang Qinghua pointed across the table at her. “That just proves my point! ‘Y.O.L.O!!!’ is a pretty recent release, which means it’s Afterglow’s current sound the agency wanted, which means they’ve still got it!”
“But it’s different,” Shen Yuan said, and pressed two fingers to her forehead. “Ugh, never mind. You don’t get it.”
“Uh huh,” Shang Qinghua said, and then, because she couldn’t help herself: “Man, if this is the way you talk about music you like, I can’t even imagine what a bad review from you sounds like.”
“Don’t you read my blog?” Shen Yuan said, and she could not have sounded any more obnoxious if she tried. “Besides, I offer constructive criticism. You can’t improve without honest feedback.”
Shang Qinghua would have liked to say that it was a totally joyless reply, in full accordance with the distant and sophisticated image she pasted over what Shang Qinghua thought of as her true personality. But the truth was that in person, Shen Yuan was just as passionate about her critiques as her blog posts made her sound.
“So you think you’re like, genuinely helping people grow artistically?”
It was difficult to say with a straight face. Shen Yuan gave her a dumbfounded look.
“Of course. And I am. People have thanked me for what I’ve written about them.”
Right, right. It was true that Shen Yuan was (for some reason) pretty popular these days, and people absolutely slavered for her opinion. Shang Qinghua saved herself from having to think of a sincere response to that by tagging Yuka’s elbow as she passed by.
“Hey, hey, hand me two of those? We’re both dry over here.” Shang Qinghua shook her empty bottle. Yuka glared.
“Why did you invite her,” she hissed into Shang Qinghua’s ear. Instinctively, Shang Qinghua flinched away, but there was no accompanying smack. She gave Yuka a pout.
“It was a good show! You said we should celebrate! We really owe her, you know?”
“You owe your staff,” Yuka said icily, “not the hipster influencer you keep begging to hang out with you. You didn’t need Shen Yuan for Afterglow or Moon Dew.”
“No, but we needed her for Proud Immortal Demon Way and a lot of customers. You saw the reception in the lobby. Are you really trying to tell me we don’t need every ounce of that we can get? If she gets invited to the afterparty, then our odds of her posting about us go way up! And that will definitely help us book more bands, so please stop looking at me like that, it’s freaking me out, okay!”
Yuka, for once, didn’t have a good response, mostly because she didn’t want to concede the point. She all but dropped a bottle of beer on the table and marched off. Shang Qinghua twisted in her chair.
“But I asked for two!”
“Share it!”
Shang Qinghua turned back around with a sigh, but Shen Yuan was already out of her seat and slinging her bag over her shoulder.
“I’m heading home,” she said brusquely, tossing her long hair over her shoulder. She was already making a move for the door. Shang Qinghua jumped to her feet.
“What, already?” She hadn’t even worked up to asking about a blog post yet. She was still warming Shen Yuan up, okay? You couldn’t rush a good schmooze!
“It’s already eleven-thirty,” Shen Yuan said, shaking back the loose sleeve of her sweater to display her oh-so-chic watch, as though there wasn’t a clock on the wall behind her. “My train stops running at midnight, and I’d rather not risk missing it. Thank you for inviting me to your little afterparty.”
It would have sounded like a backhanded thanks if not for the hint of a smile around her eyes. It was just enough. But she did sound pretty tired despite how animatedly she’d been contesting Shang Qinghua’s music opinions not ten minutes ago.
“Yeah, well,” Shang Qinghua said, badly stalling, “at least let me walk you to the door, okay? You never know who’s hanging around outside at this time of night.”
Like, for instance, Luo Binghe. And maybe she could speed up the schmooze just a little bit. Shen Yuan looked like she was about to brush off the offer, but then seemed to think the better of it and agreed with a little hum.
In the full light of the lobby, Shen Yuan looked distinctly tired. The lively flush from earlier was gone, and she looked…kind of like shit, actually. Shang Qinghua was certain that she herself also looked distinctly tired and probably a lot more like shit, but Shen Yuan hadn’t been running a show all day. The life of a music blogger was surely not that taxing. Shen Yuan pushed up her glasses with a finger and, as if noticing Shang Qinghua’s gaze, spread her fan over her face again.
“Thank you for coming,” Shang Qinghua said after a beat of silence. “Like, really, I cannot overemphasize how grateful I am. I haven’t slept in a few days, so I really can’t tell if I sound grateful, my own voice just kind of sounds like a long, drawn-out buzzing to me? But I’m pretty sure that if you hadn’t come tonight I would’ve had all of my limbs torn off by angry teenage girls. By one angry teenage girl, anyway. I’d get down on my knees and everything, but at this point I don’t think I’d be able to get back up.”
“Please don’t. It’s embarrassing.”
“Not for me,” Shang Qinghua said earnestly. Shen Yuan rolled her eyes.
“That’s what’s so embarrassing about it.” She paused, considering, and swept a glance around the lobby. Post-show and pre-cleanup, the floor was still littered with trampled flyers, torn tickets, and abandoned light sticks. “Hmm. This place has always been kind of a garbage dump.”
“I know,” Shang Qinghua agreed immediately. Shen Yuan’s eyes slanted her way with the strong suggestion of—well, some kind of face.
“I’m not finished. This place has always been kind of a garbage dump, but—” She gestured with her fan. “Since the management changed, I’m seeing some improvement. Last time I was here, it was…well, the lineup wasn’t a problem. Hello, Happy World! always draws a crowd, for better or worse. But it still felt like the same Mile High Club—all grunge, no substance, grabbing low-hanging musical fruit since the start. No one’s ever heard of any local band hitting it big and throwing a shoutout back to this place.”
Shang Qinghua failed to suppress a wince. Ouch! This is exactly what she was talking about, okay!
“This show, however,” Shen Yuan continued, her voice growing thoughtful, “was different. For the first time, it felt like you were really trying to amplify the music that matters to this scene, the music you and your people care about. Not just filling a stage for the sake of making money. The energy in that crowd tonight was rich. It was real. Tonight was the first night the Mile High Club started to feel like someplace new.”
Shang Qinghua just barely stopped herself from saying that actually, all she’d been focused on lately was filling the fucking stage for the sake of keeping the whole business from going under, but… She thought back to her conversation with Marina at CiRCLE again. Yes, it was true that she was primarily motivated by the terror of looming debt, but when Marina had asked her about how she felt about the music here, she’d answered without hesitation.
And actually, it felt kind of cool to hear Shen Yuan acknowledge that.
That didn’t mean she was falling prey to Shen Yuan’s nonexistent heartthrob vibe! Shang Qinghua was a sucker in many, many ways, but definitely not that one! It was just a nice change of pace, okay!
“So…that means you’ll post about tonight’s show, right?”
The corners of Shen Yuan’s mouth turned up in a faint smirk. “I said I’d think about it, didn’t I?”
The mixed devastation and exasperation on Shang Qinghua must have been palpable, because Shen Yuan actually laughed.
“Check my blog tomorrow. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.” They came to the front doors, and Shen Yuan paused, one hand on the handle. She took a moment, as though she had to work to pull the words together. “I never thought I’d say this, but…mm. You actually have good taste in music, Shang Qinghua. I’m looking forward to seeing where you take this place.”
There were no loitering or lurking teens outside. Shen Yuan left, the doors swinging quietly shut behind her. Shang Qinghua stood there, rubbing her jaw absently, and the second Shen Yuan was out of sight, something lit up like a fifteen-watt bulb in her head.
Yes! Yes! Mission success! Shen Yuan came to the show, it was a total success, and now she was going to blog about it! Everything really was coming up Airplane!!
“Who the fuck is Airplane?” came Yuka’s voice from behind her, and Shang Qinghua realized some of her internal monologue had escaped out her mouth. But Yuka didn’t bother waiting for a response. “Princess Cucumber finally leave?”
“It’s Peerless Cucumber,” Shang Qinghua said automatically. Yuka snorted.
“I know. I’m not saying that out loud. Did you get your blog post or whatever?”
“Tomorrow.” A wired, extremely tired grin split across Shang Qinghua’s face. “She said there’d be something up tomorrow.”
“So happy for you.” Yuka took a sip from her beer. “Good job today.”
Shang Qinghua blinked. “What?”
“Don’t make me repeat myself. You didn’t suck today. And—don’t take this the wrong way, I just think you’re giving that blogger way too much credit—a lot of it is thanks to you. So.”
Shang Qinghua clutched a hand to her chest. Was this it? Was this finally the moment when her prickly floor manager and de facto second in command would reveal her true tsundere nature in an honest heart to heart?
“What is that look for? The work’s not done.” Yuka jabbed two fingers into Shang Qinghua’s shoulder. Shang Qinghua let out a pitiful whimper. “Yes, we pulled together a good lineup. Now we have to do that again for next Saturday. And the Saturday after that. A single show isn’t going to save this place.”
Shang Qinghua let out a deflated whine. Ah, precious Yuka, so dedicated, but so cold! “Can’t you let me bask in this one just a little bit before you hit me with the reality check?”
“No. Go home and sleep, you look like shit. And don’t come back until Monday.”
“You do care!”
“I care that there’s someone alive to sign my paychecks,” Yuka said, shoving her towards the door. “And to pay the rent on this place next week. Go. Home.”
The train ride home kept Shang Qinghua awake just enough longer that by the time she kicked in the door of her cramped apartment, she was on her second wind. Or fourth? The coffee/beer combo was doing a number on her, as was the overstimulation of having spent the last fourteen hours running around and talking to people, moving heavy things, and being blasted with loud music. She shouldn’t have gotten too drunk off just a couple of beers, but Shang Qinghua was laughing inanely to herself as she kicked off her shoes and dropped her bag on the floor.
Her apartment in the sweaty Tokyo summer felt like walking into somebody’s open mouth, so she stripped off everything but her underwear, threw them onto the now toweringly high dirty laundry pile (who has time to do laundry these days!), and flung herself down onto her futon to sleep. Yes, she should sleep. But every time she tried to lie still, she was suddenly seized with wheezing laughter over absolutely fucking nothing. Underneath the constant buzzing in her brain, she felt vaguely sick. Was this what sheer, unadulterated relief felt like? If so, it was awful, and she wanted more.
She thought, at least, that if she couldn’t sleep, she could write music. She’d dropped her last buffer track yesterday and hadn’t had any time to sit down and compose for days, so really, this was a great opportunity! But after an hour of playing the same six-note melody in varying but ultimately unsatisfying arrangements, she realized she was barely even hearing what she was playing. That was fine too! That thought repeated itself in her head as she paced between her keyboard, her laptop, the fridge, and the bathroom in an aimless, milling cycle for—well, she lost track of time, really, but the next time she looked at her phone it was two in the morning.
She pulled up Peerless Cucumber’s blog on her phone, as if it were somehow reasonable to expect an update in the middle of the night. But that was fine too! If she couldn’t sleep, she’d just stay up until Shen Yuan posted her new review.
The coffee/beer combo finally came back to haunt her around two thirty, and she spent a torturous forty-five minutes on the toilet, face buried in her hands.
Three-thirty saw her watching Vine compilations on her futon in absolute fucking tears. She laughed so hard she accidentally flung her phone against the wall, then doubled over wheezing.
At four, she decided it was time for food. She really hadn’t eaten very much in the last twenty-four hours, and suddenly she was fucking starving. She’d been taking less of a salary to bolster the live house’s finances, so she was mostly down to ramen packs, but that was fine. She had a cold beer or two in the fridge, that’d be perfect with some noodles. Totally worth boiling a pot of water in her un-air-conditioned apartment. While she waited for it to heat up, Shang Qinghua found herself compulsively tidying the tiny kitchen surface. At the very least, she was moving shit around.
“Kyabetsu! Kyabetsu! Kyabe—fuck!”
Shang Qinghua jostled the pot of water and immediately doubled over as a few drops of scalding hot water splashed onto one nipple. She clapped a hand over her tit with a hiss and hopped away from the stove, jamming her knee against a cabinet in the process. This was exactly why you didn’t cook on the stove without a shirt on! Rookie mistake!!
By the time Shang Qinghua wrestled a new shirt on, the pot was boiling over. She unspooled half a roll of paper towels cleaning up the spill on the floor, and, undaunted, dropped the noodles in what water was left. T-shirt splash guard: success! She poked the noodles with a spoon, humming a catchy little melody that had gotten caught in her brain. Oh, man, as soon as she was doing making ramen, she was totally going to sit down and write some—
Shang Qinghua came to on a sharp inhale, her entire body twitching on the futon. Her head was groggy, pressed under the weight of a coffee/beer/late night combo hangover. One of her hands felt wet. She lifted her heavy head off the futon to see her left hand submerged in a half-eaten bowl of noodles.
Hmm.
She shook her hand out, wiped it on her shirt, and slowly sat up. Alright, well, she hadn’t started a fire in her apartment, so that was fine. Apparently she’d just blacked out while eating noodles and scrawling illegible broth-stained sheet music to which she desperately hoped there was a recording somewhere. As she wiped her hair from her sweaty face, she saw that her five best girls from her collection of anime figures were arranged in a semicircle around the pillow end of her futon.
She definitely didn’t remember doing that. Maybe she’d wanted company?
Still feeling sluggish, Shang Qinghua washed her hands, located her phone (left on top of the stove, yikes), and poured herself a glass of water to fend off the headache while she checked her messages. She’d managed to pass out until well into the afternoon, and there was a stack of notifications waiting for her. Marina had sent her a message asking how the show had gone, apologizing for not making it (work, of course), Moon Dew had sent messages to both the Mile High Club and Airplane, and one of her staff had accidentally texted her a decidedly racy selfie and immediately followed it up with nvm. And then there were all the unread comments on the track she’d dropped Friday, like a little post-show treat.
She dropped down on her futon and scrolled through the comments, munching on a piece of bread. There was no better hangover cure than reading people saying cool stuff about you on the internet.
Wait. Shit. Peerless Cucumber’s blog! She’d tried to stay awake until the new post had gone up and instead blacked herself out into oblivion. In the half second it took for her to type the url on her phone’s browser, she was seized with the sudden fear that Shen Yuan had written something nasty, that all that talk about how much the Mile High Club had changed was actually just the setup to a very mean joke.
But no, as soon as she saw the title of the post (posted at noon, so maybe it was for the best that she passed out after all): “Shinjuku’s Mile High Club Reaches New Heights!”
Shang Qinghua wrinkled her nose. She would have workshopped that title a little bit, but sure.
As anyone who’s ever set foot on those sticky floors would know, the Mile High Club has always been kind of a garbage dump.
Hold up, this was exactly how Shen Yuan started that topic last night! Was she secretly recording their conversation or something?!
It’s never quite been able to compete on the same level as places like CiRCLE or Galaxy, and the reason is clear: with its subpar PA system, out-of-date lighting rigs, and a long history of booking any band desperate enough to pay their own ticket quota, who’d be surprised that their gigs mostly played to empty rooms?
Peerless Cucumber, no matter what the headline says, this doesn’t sound like a good review at all!!
Stuffing the rest of the bread in her mouth, Shang Qinghua kept scrolling.
But when murmurs of new management began to surface in the local music industry, this critic knew she had to see for herself just how it might have changed. And readers, as of last night’s show featuring the rising stars of Afterglow, I can safely say that the horizon is looking a little brighter.
Okay! Thank you! That was more like it!
In truth, last night’s show was not the first one I’d gone to since the change in ownership. A couple of weeks ago when they hosted Hello, Happy World! for a miniature circus of a concert, even with the musical change-up, the atmosphere was more or less the same: dank, dim, and derelict. Not the sort of atmosphere that fosters the budding sound of aspiring musicians, and certainly not the kind of place any well-established band would consider worth their time.
But as soon as the Mile High Club hosted Afterglow on their stage, that all began to change.
The post went on to detail Peerless Cucumber’s impressions of all three bands that performed that night. Shang Qinghua was privately relieved to see that Shen Yuan hadn’t seen fit to bring up Moon Dew’s “abysmal taste”; actually, aside from honestly noting the awkward newness of their sound, it was…not a terrible review. It also wasn’t a very long one. She had much more to say on the topic of Afterglow’s performance, which was generally favorable, although she insisted on inserting the same dumb opinions about their musical growth that she’d expressed last night. But it was her brief, almost passing mention of Proud Immortal Demon Way sandwiched between them that Shang Qinghua found herself looking for.
Proud Immortal Demon Way, a band whose origins lay in the Mile High Club’s own practice studios, might as well be considered their in-house band—-perhaps because it’s the only venue that will lend them a stage. Their performance was rich, raw, and electrifying, but at heart, still quite unrefined. One wonders if the Mile High Club has been holding them back; this five-piece girls band is clearly not lacking for talent, but they have a long way to go before they can be considered worthy of a headlining act.
Shang Qinghua cringed. Well, that wasn’t…bad, but it wasn’t great, either. Other than the little sting of resentment at the suggestion that the live house is somehow responsible for their lack of progress—Shang Qinghua has always encouraged them, okay!—she felt a nagging worry about how Luo Binghe might receive that. There was no way Luo Binghe hadn’t read this already, and she seemed to really…look up to Shen Yuan?
Ah, no, there really was no way around it: Luo Binghe was obviously, definitely obsessed with Shen Yuan.
The rest of the post concluded much the same way as their conversation had last night, down to the last “the new management appears to have good taste, I’m looking forward to seeing where they take the place”. It didn’t count as plagiarism if it was her own words, but Shang Qinghua had to wonder how much of their conversations last night had been actual conversations between two people, and not Shen Yuan just drafting a blog post out loud.
Still, all in all, it was a good review, if a little backhanded! The barbs about the Mile High Club’s history washed right off of Shang Qinghua. She couldn’t disagree; in the several months before her “promotion” she’d never witnessed a show she would have actually considered good. It’d just been nice to be close to the local music scene, however shitty the place. And as long as Shen Yuan was encouraging people to come to the new and (well, maybe) improved Mile High Club, she could shittalk its past all she wanted!
It left Shang Qinghua in a good mood, and maybe the blackout sleep was partly responsible, but now that she’d woken up a little and drank some water, she was feeling pretty rejuvenated. Inspired, even. She was off for the rest of the day, with no demands on her time for once—now she could really make some music.
And she really needed to. Airplane could not afford to miss another release date.
It was as though the last few weeks hadn’t been so thoroughly soul-sucking: just like before, the music came together easily, like it was pulling her fingers along the keys instead of the other way around. Tapping a pencil rhythmically against her keyboard, she pored over the sheet music she’d slapped together overnight. Most of it was incomprehensible garbage, but one of the things that made Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky so prolific was that she had the tireless ability to sift through garbage to find the few golden threads she could stitch together to make something truly resonant. It didn’t matter how much shitty music she wrote; there was always something good in there she could use, and when there wasn’t, there was always something good enough.
By the time she stopped flitting between her laptop and synths like a sweaty little techno butterfly, it was nearly midnight, and she’d amassed a handful of half-assembled tracks she could polish up into the weekly two-minute releases her listeners had come to expect. There was still plenty of work to do, but it was a different kind of work, not quite as exhausting as starting from the ground up. Best to let her brain marinate in it a bit before picking it back up or she’d get all tunnel vision-y about it.
But she still felt restless and ready to go. Part of it was, probably, the fact that she’d spent a conservative ten hours in a dead sleep, but the exhilaration from the success of the live show—and Peerless Cucumber’s net positive review—hadn’t worn off since last night. After a little thoughtful wiggling in her chair, she sought out the notes she’d made the last time she’d had a spurt of creative energy. If she could keep up with Airplane’s regular release schedule—if things at the live house got just a little bit easier—then…she might actually have time to get back to her concept album.
She’d gone so long without working on anything truly creative. Sure, she liked working on her steady stream of remixes, dance tracks, and sick techno covers of anime themes, but it just wasn’t as fulfilling. The elaborate fantasy scape set to painstakingly crafted music and videos was where her heart was really at. Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had fallen into a lull lately, if not a rut; it was time to put herself back on the uphill climb towards success instead of just treading water.
And…there was another little glimmer of hope. Shen Yuan said Shang Qinghua had good taste in music, which meant that she couldn’t have hated Airplane’s music that much. In fact, in the past—before she’d become an influencer—her reviews had been mixed more often than not. Peerless Cucumber was fond of charting out her perceived decline of Airplane’s music, but that just acknowledged that there was something she liked about it!
And she did go on and on about that concept album on her blog. So maybe Airplane would finally release it and give Peerless Cucumber something real to review for the first time in a while. If she could get Shen Yuan to admit that she liked Airplane’s music, then Shang Qinghua could come clean, and plan her own debut without worry. It was a perfect plan! How could it possibly go wrong!
“We’ll have a Christian-style wedding,” Luo Binghe announced. She was staring into the middle distance with great intent, although the effect was slightly ruined by the angle of the massage chair, and the fact that her feet were both currently submerged in a bubbling foot bath. “Shen Yuan-sama would look so beautiful in one of those white dresses with pearls stitched in—and she’d look stunning in lace…”
Mobei Jun made a noncommittal noise, but didn’t look up from the music magazine she was reading. One of Meiyin’s little sisters was diligently painting her toes in a rich matte azure, listening to Luo Binghe go on with furtive interest. Meiyin’s family’s beauty parlor was where the band usually hung out outside of practice, as for the most part they went to different schools, and the sprawling spa complex also conveniently provided them with a space to practice on their own. Their past attempts at holding post-band meetings at any of Sha Hualing’s family’s restaurants had been varying shades of disastrous. The calming atmosphere of the beauty parlor was much better suited as a cooldown to their usually heated rehearsals. And Meiyin’s horde of sisters was always eager to provide an audience to mini-concerts.
“I found a wedding dress catalogue online,” Luo Binghe went on. Her eyes were starting to look a little glazed. “They’re all so expensive, but I’ll save up, of course. It’ll be so worth it. I think she’d look best in an A-line dress. With one of those layered tulle skirts…she’d look like an elegant fairy crossing over from a mystical realm…”
She sighed. Sha Hualing exchanged a raised-eyebrow glance with Meiyin, who was currently painting her nails in a shimmery hot pink. Playing the guitar would ruin the manicure immediately, but Sha Hualing didn’t care. Meiyin never minded redoing her nails; she always gave her bandmates’ hands the most careful attention. They were a musician’s most important tool, after all.
“What if she doesn’t like those big floofy dresses?” Six Balls said around a mouthful of chips. Luo Binghe sat up straight, her lips parting in deep thought.
“I…didn’t think about that. I just thought…no, it’s not about what I want. If Shen Yuan-sama isn’t happy with it, then I don’t want it.” Luo Binghe’s eyebrows were deeply furrowed, her expression adamant. “Of course a simple gown would better suit her elegance! Something sleek and off the shoulder. The kind of dress you’d wear if you were going to romantically elope…”
“Don’t you think you should wait until you’ve proposed to make these plans?” Sha Hualing couldn’t help herself, suppressing a snicker but not a smirk. Meiyin gave her an exasperated look as she finished up Sha Hualing’s nails, mouthing don’t encourage her. Sha Hualing ignored her. “So when are you planning to propose? Oooh, you were thinking of doing it onstage, weren’t you?”
Luo Binghe’s eyes narrowed, her mouth thinning, but her cheeks flushed pink. Before she could reply, her phone buzzed in her lap. She snatched it up and all but pressed it to her face.
“Don’t wiggle around so much,” Meiyin said to Six Balls, sitting in front of her and grasping her by the ankle. “You’re going to get polish everywhere. You might as well just dip your toes in it.”
“Aaah, but it tickles! Ahaha! I can’t help it, my feet are acting all on their own!”
As if to demonstrate her demonic foot possession, Six Balls kicked her feet and sent a splash of water flying. Meiyin dabbed her face with a towel and firmly pulled Six Balls’s feet from the bath. “If you get your chips in my foot bath again, you lose pedicure privileges.”
Sha Hualing, who was scrolling on her phone as lightly as possible so as not to disturb her nails, looked up at a strangled noise from Luo Binghe. “What, did the dress you were saving up go out of stock?”
She was staring at her phone in abject dismay, looking on the brink of tears. “Shen Yuan-sama…Shen Yuan-sama doesn’t think we’re good enough.”
“What?” Sha Hualing scoffed. “Let me see. It can’t be that bad.” She pulled up Peerless Cucumber’s blog on her own phone with a few dainty taps, mindful of her drying nails, scrolled a bit, and squinted. After a minute she let out a scoff. “One measly paragraph? That’s all she has to say about us? We killed it!”
“She was so nice to me when we talked.” Luo Binghe stared down miserably at her phone. “She said…she called our performance memorable.”
But then she clenched her jaw in a grimace, and with a flash of frustration, she flung her phone down into the foot bath. Mobei Jun sighed, put her magazine to the side, and reached over to fish Luo Binghe’s phone out of the water.
“Mm…it’s not really that bad, though, is it?” Meiyin had looked up the review on her own phone. Six Balls was leaning forward out of her massage chair to peer at it. Meiyin gently pushed her back. “Brief, yes. I suppose it makes sense she wrote more about Afterglow. They were the main event, after all.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re friends with their bassist,” Sha Hualing said accusingly. “I mean, yeah, they were pretty cool, but so were we! It’s not like she’s got a word limit, she could’ve written more!”
Meiyin tilted her head in concession. “Even so, it’s not a bad review, especially from an influencer. We’re still a relatively new band. I don’t think anything she said is necessarily untrue. We just need more practice, and the Mile High Club is still letting us play, so we’ll keep getting exposure—”
With an agonized howl, Luo Binghe leapt from the foot bath, somehow managing not to slip and break her neck into the process. She landed with a wet thud and immediately booked it for the back door without even bothering to dry her feet. Meiyin sighed.
“Hey!” Sha Hualing shouted. “Where are you going? She didn’t even do your cuticles yet!”
“Practice,” Luo Binghe said doggedly. “We have to practice! There’s no way Shen Yuan-sama will deem us worthy if we don’t improve!”
“I didn’t mean right now,” Meiyin said with exasperation. Mobei Jun grunted in dissatisfaction and politely pulled her feet away so she could step carefully onto the towel, despite her unfinished nails. After quickly but carefully drying her feet, she went to follow Luo Binghe downstairs, considerately closing the door behind her. Meiyin rubbed her forehead.
“Ah, what are we doing to do with her? I’m so worried she’ll wind up with her heart broken.”
Sha Hualing snorted and went back to scrolling on her phone. “What do you mean, what are we going to do? You think you can talk her out of her future wife? I’d like to see you try.”
Six Balls wiggled one foot at Meiyin. She was piling a wild variety of nail polishes in her lap. “Hey, hey, can you do all my toes in different colors?”
Mobei Jun followed the muted scratching of Luo Binghe’s electric guitar to the basement where they often practiced, and found her sitting in the middle of the floor with her guitar in her lap and a notebook in front of her. She was alternating furiously between working out chords and scribbling something down with such force she was at risk of snapping the pencil in half. Mobei Jun approached her and peered over her shoulder.
“Writing a new song?”
“We need something new if we’re going to impress Shen Yuan-sama,” Luo Binghe said fervently. “We need to give her proof of our growth as a band. Something she won’t be able to deny. Something she’ll never forget.”
Mobei Jun watched as Luo Binghe became absorbed in her work again. She was somewhat concerned about her friend’s fixation on someone whose opinion, quite honestly, Mobei Jun did not consider to be of very much consequence. But it mattered to Luo Binghe, and it motivated her like hell on her heels, and Shen Yuan had been right: they did still have a long way to go. Mobei Jun crossed the room in a few easy strides, picked up her bass, and came to sit on the sofa behind Luo Binghe.
“Play me what you have so far,” she said. “If we want to show proof of our growth, we’ll have to write it together.”
End notes: every single song that shen yuan & shang qinghua argue about is a real song and they are all bops
we never forget a classic vine. that silly sqh interlude was a lil treat just for me :)