2024-09-22: The Halls of Sacred Remains/Writings/Anecdotes/Ideas/Graves (idolPlan:festivals();ideas();create(outfit);)
- Log: 2024-09-22: The Halls of Sacred Remains/Writings/Anecdotes/Ideas/Graves (idolPlan:festivals();ideas();create(outfit);)
- Cast: Leila Misakiyama, Yuta Hibiki
- Where: Public Library, Nouvelle Tokyo
- OOC - IC Date: Sept 22 UC0099
- Summary: A girl and her temporary hired help work on a thing. Three days and counting. Sleeplessness is the least of one's worries when ideas are swirling inside.
<Pose Tracker> Leila Misakiyama has posed.
Day Three of this. Day Three of agreeing on a meetup time in one of Nouvelle Tokyo's many libraries, poring through the past to look for ideas and things.
'Yes, I'd be a good idea to look at what other people have done. Learn from the people who've pulled it off, right?'
Che, she should've went for her gut. This is the third day in a row she's here in the library, walking through the near-silent halls as the weight of the past visibly loomed above and around her. Eyes scanning along the books along the spines of references, manuals, histories of the past enshrined in text, catalogued, and stored away for someone to peel back the curtain on their writing, whether by their own hand or by someone else's (permission acquired or not).
"I can't believe this was their grand idea..." It strikes so obvious in hindsight, and yet. Running her fingers along a few spines, watching the decimals of the NDC count upwards with every step down the aisles; slower than the usual haunts, but still ticking upwards all the same.
Through the 700s, the arts. 740. Photography. 750. Crafts. 760. Music and Dance. Around here. 760, 770. Music. Dance. Theatre. Movies. The ways of motion and the people who made them.
...
A few books placed down on a desk, the same large table that's been the de-facto established base of the past 72 hours (sleep, idol prep, and other things notwithstanding).
"Here. A few more to pore through." Tome upon tome of work, adding to the sprawl of open notebooks.
There's a particular enjoyment for the physical, even if there was more books digitzed than ever.
<Pose Tracker> Yuta Hibiki has posed.
Day Three, but not Day Wasted. While Leila was hitting the books, Yuta themself were poring over her scribbles again and again, comparing to what would be a fit, what would be on time, what would be a miss. "My request for you was to look for something that catches your attention, to see if I can refine what we'll need."
Nope. Another bust. This would be way too similar to another idol group. Another page. Another design. Ah, this one wouldn't be ready on time. "Time is really our hardest constraint here..." Still, even if they have to pull a couple all-nighters and sew this outfit themself, they will damn deliver this on time. That's putting the cart before the horses, however. First, a design. A fitting design.
"Haaaaah. You're really unlucky with your timing. Going with a goth design right now will put you in the direct line of fire against another rising and popular group... and since you'd be playing second, it'd be like shooting your damn foot." Yuta was slightly less polite than they had been two days ago. Mostly because they have slept two hours a day and have been working on this at any point they weren't eating, or showering.
No. This one is wrong too. This wouldn't feel the solemnity of the score. This one was too bright. No, no, no. If nothing else, Leila couldn't complain they weren't taking this seriously.
Still, no results against a ticking clock. If only they were in Carnival season, they'd be able to justify going with a Masquerade or Jester theme due to the on-going festivities with minor repercussions if they used the adequate amount of propaganda and forum dissemination....
....wait. Wait. On-going festivities? A caffeine-and-sleep-deprivation-derived surge of energy boosted the synapses in their brain like they just connected the dots in a locked island murder mystery. Yuta shifted back to their tablet and popped a couple more tabs open, searching the calendar to double-check on a certain event, before a smirk crossed their lips and they shifted the electronic device towards Leila.
"What do you think about this as an anchoring theme?" The red-haired youngster asked, a news page for this year's Moon Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival, open."
<Pose Tracker> Leila Misakiyama has posed.
She's being conscientious enough to toss away the accessory-laden (Read: Whipped cream and other toppings) coffee drinks earlier. There's a grunt of affirmation at that repetition of what they asked three days earlier, flipping open another tome and scanning through the index. Theater. Grandiosity. The subtlety of motion, the intent of costume design that shows and hides parts of the body and in turn, the spirit.
"That's everything in these books..." A slow mutter. Another flip of the page, quickly scanning over the pages for another book of concepts. Ideas that were pressed into a page, drafts of things that came before, before being discarded and immortalized in the annals of their own collections. Again and again, the same wording.
'This is what we were able to do without taking up so much time.' Paraphrased, rewritten, and yet the intent remained the same.
"What, don't accuse me of stealing from them." What's the phrase. "Codivergent evocation or something like that." Nothing new under the sun; Ideas, reformed, remade, twisted, forming back into each other. Another page turned, another set of concepts. Direct words on a page that said what they wanted, and the multitude of ways to try and refine their intent into sharper and sharper points.
Two hours of sleep had only worn her down. The first day of being woken up was nearly enough to push the timescale up. The second day was begrudgingly accepted on the first hint of Yuta trying to keep a schedule. Fine, fine.
Another page. A grab of a pencil, drawing a quick, half-realized scribble of vague thoughts on yet another piece of the sketchbook laid out. Something was forming. So she told herself. It'd be the only way to keep going forward.
"Geh, this one's no good..." After a point, this book focused on the genre shift into the distasteful. She could see it: The way that one section and another became incongruent with intent, the artist commentary veering more towards "someone else asked for this". No, no, no. Next book.
The next. "God, he's gonna talk my ear off when I get back..." A soft mutter, one half-interrupted by the tablet. A glance over. "...That was last week." No stranger to delayed events, more a statement of acknowledgement than a literal complaint. Taking the tablet in hand, quickly scrolling through the page...
...And opening another tab. Searching. Again. Again. Setting it down, scooting it back, and... "..." Pulling out one of the more buried books, one focused around festivities of the world. "The harvest festival, huh?" No cotton in sight, the lavish dressings highlighting themselves.
"Could be an option. Hold on." Writing. Mooncakes? No. It's the moon. The moon is the focus. Moon. New to waning? Waning to full? No, it was for the full moon. Which means...
"...There's no masks of the moon. A rabbit?" ...Was that it? "Rabbit and...purple. Red." Something's there. Find the colors.
Something's digging at the mind.
<Pose Tracker> Yuta Hibiki has posed.
"I wouldn't accuse you of copying them, but what the public will think is another story entirely." Yuta said, back to researching. Okay, this does given them some direction. Pages flipped. Another tablet. A frown. Still too vague, but there's something to be done here. "Another venue would be Princess Kaguya. Sure, the moon-viewing festival in Japan don't usually have such extravagant clothing, but we can be permitted a little artistic liberties."
Red, and purple, red and purple. Yuta had been thinking of black, but that can be arranged. "We could subvert her formal outfit with darker colors. Red and Purple.... What about a silver lining? Particularly, quicksilver, as in mercury." Was this a deranged barrage produced by hyperactivity? Maybe. "Of course, you can't exactly do the choreography we had in mind with it, but the default outfit would be too... pure and proper for what you had in mind anyway." They look back at the sketches.
"No, let's not only subvert colors, let's go for something that clearly pages homage, but also looks... Hmm" Tapping, tapping. Trying to put words to ideas and ideas to words. "Not the princess of the moon that loved her earthly friends, but a haughty queen that completely acknowledges her self worth." Tap. Tap. Tap. "No, maybe it's better if you play both." Staring from the begginning. "A rabbit mask is also not a bad idea.... How about a crown? Following the mercurial pattern, we could add actual fluidity to it, liquid shifting under the stage light."
"Okay, this is starting to shape up. Depending on how we play your setlist, we could start from the traditional Kaguya, and then slowly derail it as your songs of choice, get.... Well, you know it better than I do, you wrote them yourself." Shifting a picture of what would be the 'traditional and elegant' and probably terrible for dancing Princess Kaguya outfit.
<Pose Tracker> Leila Misakiyama has posed.
"Like they can see past the surface." The stuff around the hubbub of Junius Seven's blame gmae was firmly in her mind; Everyone, saying this and that, laying blame in one place or another. Who had done it? What did it matter? A bit vexing, but it does feel nice to have a target, no matter how fake. "...Ah." Isn't this similar?
"Hah? You're using mythology..." No, wait. This is an easy shortcut to showcasing things. Leaning in next to Yuta, looming over their shoulder to stare down at the pictures being brought up. Rabbits. The famous one from the moon, coming down to the lands below. "Quicksilver in the underseams, only revealed when..." There's a trailing off, lightly pushing her hired help to the side to gaze closely at the refences pulled up. Pencil scribbling, working on some form of mental idea threatening to boil forth.
"I can't do anything in that outfit. What am I, the Orbital Elevator?" A thing rooted in place and seemingly controversial to even exist, moreso now? "You need to think about-" Well, at least there was a similar track, even if she deigned to talk about everything other than the show.
"What, like ferrofluids? Or screens implying such..." That's a thought. That's extra work. She'd do it. "Or just lights under the crown." The dim stage serves perfectly for illusions, trickery, or worst case, quickly swapping while distracting the audience. "Still. Silver lining with..." Not with red. Too heated. No. If there's a perversion of the situation, it'd recede to purples. Color theory. Lean on it.
"...Haa." A scratch of her own head, sighing out. A few blinks of the eyelids. "A three-stage transformation." A snort. "There's always something under the surface."
Leaving that statement to hang, there's a rip of another sketchbook page. Scribbling a few things. Words. A few ideal silhouettes and colors. Something like... "Geh, so traditional." The same opinion as before: The mind's eye and what she was seeing was one and the same, a traditional Princess Outfit meant for display and ogling than actual action.
"Kaguya's so stupid for it. She paraded herself around and left. For what? Because of others?" The parable left to rot. "At least she's remembered for something." A sentence said with distaste, already sketching out a vague outline of the next stages of the outfit.
Prodding at the layers required. Possibilities of ventilation. How to keep everything together, layer by layer, and where to keep light for dancing. It's a bit rapshod, a bit unrefined, a bit wobbly. Two days of forcing the self to keep going on this wasn't the best of ideas....
"...Now I'm glad it's not hourly."
<Pose Tracker> Yuta Hibiki has posed.
"Who knows. Kaguya might actually been quite the trickster - after all, she easily denied all her suitors and then had the bloody emperor under her thumb without even marrying the guy." It's not the usual portrait of when someone thinks about the princess of the moon, but... Yuta was sure Leila would get what they meant. Or maybe sleep deprivation was giving them a sense of camaraderie - the always distant and logical part of their brain told them it was possible. "And yes, the first outfit only only fit one particular song of your setlist.... but that's fine. That subversion is the angle we'll be playing with this.
Another couple taps. Showing what they had in mind for the 'final' version of the outfit, for reference. "You can leave the gimmick to me, I'm sure I can fit under your budget, one way or another." Otherwise they wouldn't have suggested in the first place. Not that they wouldn't put a dent in their own earnings and fudge some numbers if it meant 'a job successfully done'. They had a growing reputation to maintain, after all.
They'd need a couple functional sketches by the end of the day. Even if they started with a traditional base, they gimmick itself would take most of the time. "We'll have to adjust your choreography for the first part, but I believe it's worth the end result and the curveball angle." The pink-haired idol might garner some naysayers for subverting Kaguya on moon festival season on all things, but that one was worth the risk and easy to subvert.
"....you're still paying the rush fee, you know that, right." It was because this kind of creativity job could either take forever or be solved in a flash of inspiration that they didn't rate it hourly, though.
A sigh as tension left their body for a second.... before immediately redoubling their focus. No distractions, but seeing a light at the end of the tunnel was a relief on their shoulders. The rest of the week was still going to be a fight.