[Amber]
On her birthday, they ate cake for breakfast.
Amber almost died from embarrassment when the hotel staff played happy birthday over the sound system. It definitely caused a few heads to turn her way to stare incredulously at her. And not in a good way.
Amber had been very close to standing and bowing to them in apology.
She hadn't expected the surprise, having already spent the entire morning making mango and avocado toast for herself and the mysterious masked man.
After that, they were running off to the concert venue. Their hotel was mere minutes from the venue so the two opted for public transport. As expected, the trains were swamped with fangirls accessorized with IDOL merchandise and holding light sticks.
If it was bad on the trains, it was worse at the venue. The minute they had stepped out of the station, they could not move.
Literally.
There were people everywhere from all walks of life, of all kinds of cultures and ethnicities. Amber had never seen so many people in a single area before, not even at DisneyWorld.
This was more than just packed sardines in a can. This was a can of sardines that a vendor was trying to make into a biscuit and so shoved it into a hydraulic press and pounded it into a flat disk.
Amber shimmied past a group of women screaming excitedly as they waved their light sticks in the air. Her fingers were wrapped tightly around Miri's as they manoeuvred through the sea of fans, STARs to be exact. She didn't like the group's name for their fans but she had to agree that it was kind of cute.
There was no personal space at all and walking involved the brushing of body parts against body parts. It was honestly, the perfect place for pickpockets and Amber gripped tightly on to her wallet in her pocket as they marched through the crowd.
It was kind of awkward holding her ass while shimmying through crowds of people, but Amber couldn't care less at that point.
She winced, jerking back as a fan started to hack violently into the air, spewing whatever germs she had into the surrounding environment. Amber clasped her mouth to her face in an attempt to stop the beads of saliva from spraying across her lips.
Disgusting. This was also exactly how an epidemic would start. One sneeze, one zombie and a hundred thousand people would end up as carriers of a deadly virus.
Tip of the day: When one wanted to kill the population, start at an IDOL concert.
Amber was in a daze.
There were people lugging suitcases around to carry their IDOL official merchandise. There were people selling homemade hair bands and posters on picnic mats. There were lines of people everywhere queuing up for so many different things and girls dressed in thousands of different shades of colours.
As a creative pessimist, Amber found her mind swerving towards the death section as she surveyed the crowd.
She was very sure that if any IDOL member walked out to say hi. The whole group would run like a swarm of bees towards the guy. Amber would (of course) trip and fall. She would then be trampled and killed by a mass stampede, like Mufasa versus the herd of wildebeest in Lion King.
A gruesome and very sad death.
Amber pursed her lips as body odour wafted in the air towards her extremely sensitive nose. Her eyes travelled to the sweaty group of males who looked like they ran twenty kilometres to get here. Their shirts, while cute and printed with the faces of the IDOL members, were drenched yellow with sweat.
They looked like they had camped here for days. As expected of IDOL, the numbers of super crazy fans they had were sky-high. She wrinkled her nose, trying her best to keep her feelings from being too obvious on her face. No offence, but it appeared that not all the males she met in Korea smelled good.
Who would have known?
Amber did not know what to feel at that moment. She was in a dreamy, out of body state where she just could not believe that this was happening. She was pretty much floating about in her mind as Miri dragged her along like a sack of potatoes. Her stomach was fluttering with thousands of butterflies with her excitement.
Today was the day. The day she could listen to her favourite boy band live.
They passed through the metal detector, emptying bottles of water and were scanned from head to toe for hidden weapons. She was shaken out of her stupor when Miri screamed for her to run because the sound check event was about to start soon.
Sound check.
The preparation that took place before a concert performance. It was when the performer and the sound crew would go through a small portion of the upcoming show just to test the venue's sound system. It wasn't the actual show, but the company usually allowed for some lucky fans to have the opportunity to watch them practice.
Miri and Amber were part of this lucky few.
They were tearing across the stadium towards the doors that led them deep within, heading towards the front of the stage. They were lucky. Extremely so. The numbers on their tickets were so low it was crazy. AirSound Entertainment had given Deok-Su one of the best standing tickets possible. It was number twenty-one and twenty-two in Category One.
In other words, during the actual concert itself, they had first dibs on where they wanted to stand.
And Miri had the audacity to only tell her that additional information now.
Miri was pulling her to the actual line that snaked into the stadium. They were pushed forward to take their spots at the front, and fans around them were talking and screaming excitedly. Amber's head was swimming. Her heart was pounding in her chest so hard she could hear her blood rushing in her ears.
She was fidgety, unable to stay in one spot as she danced about on her feet. She'd wrung her fingers a thousand of times as she panicked. Each minute was like an hour to her and she could not stand still.
She was, after all, going to see the people who had pulled her out of the depths of darkness for the first time in her life, in the flesh. They were no longer going to be just 2D material on her phone and she died a little inside not knowing what to expect.
The instant the doors to the main venue cracked open, fans beside her were screaming and crying. Miri held her hand tightly, rubbing comforting circles on her palm as they entered. And when her ticket was scanned, Amber was in.
The stadium was a sight to behold.
There were so many seats that from where she stood, the specks of pink ran and disappeared into the far distance, melting together in an endless line. It all surrounded the single main stage at the very centre of the stadium.
Ginormous posters with the words: IDOL WORLD TOUR, LISTEN TO ME stood proudly next to the two ginormous LCD screens that flanked the sides of the main stage. There were thousands of spotlights flickering and moving over the main stage as staff members tested the light intensity.
The familiar IDOL symbol was displayed upon a huge LCD screen at the centre of the stage. And the mist machine was already at work, spewing out vapours of water into the air. The tiny clouds drifted across the stage, reflecting the light of IDOL's minimalistic star-like symbol. It turned into a pretty purple-pink hue, similar to the clouds in the sky at dusk.
Like a dream, it was utterly and irrevocably beautiful.