acquainted

The year is 2024. Twelve men take their seats at a place that, by all accounts, does not exist.

A sliver of pale, artificial moonlight cuts across the center of a vast, black table, illuminating nothing but twelve pairs of motionless, gloved hands. The rest of the room sucks in the rest, leaving nothing but a void of matte walls and deeper, darker shadows.

There are no windows. No brand or insignia plastered at the center. No source for the cold, silver glow that renders the occupants as silhouettes. Their features dissolve into pitch-black high-backed chairs and the darkness beyond.

These are Luminary’s Ascendants.

From the head of the table, a voice emerges. It is not loud, but it settles in the bones of all who hear him. It is power incarnate.

“The ledger for Project Talents is open. The investment has soured. We are here to audit the failure.”

A file, thin and lethal as a shiv, materializes in the center of the light. It bears no label. Just the name of the Project. Ahead of the table, a projection manifests light and ultimately, evidence, against an endless abyss.

“Begin with the asset,” the head instructs.

A hand from the left glides forward. A finger taps the file. Images resolve in the air above the table; grainy security footage plays from a decade prior. The setting: a modest office in Nonhyeon-dong, a man with tired eyes hunched over a mixing board.

Bang Si-hyuk. Founder and then CEO of Big Hit Entertainment, a company of quiet desperation and one ‘humble’ boy band.

“We planted the seed,” the shadowy head says, distorted, but clear. “Capital flows were redirected. Certain regulators were persuaded to look elsewhere. Competitors found their strategies—suddenly unworkable. The underdog narrative was crafted and disseminated. We made the ground fertile for a single purpose: to cultivate a vessel of immense cultural influence. A Talent.”

The presentation on the screen shifts to a meteoric graph. Global charts. Non-stop dominance. BTS. From Big Hit to HYBE, a colossus was born from foundations in the sand.

“We gave five talents and expected ten in return,” it adds. “Not merely profit, but order. A harmonious control of the narrative stream.”

A new hand moves. “The vessel cracked. The first manager, Bang Si-hyuk, forgot the source of his water. Greed, of the most mundane variety."

The images now are financial disclosures, network maps of shell companies, of foreign properties bought under the company name. "He lied to investors. Promised no IPO while secretly plotting one. He and his inner circle siphoned hundreds of billions of won, betraying the very shareholders we placed as safeguards. The Korean authorities now circle him for stock manipulation, tax evasion. A crude, noisy failure. He turned our gift into a personal ransom.”

A controlled hush circles the table. Disappointment—cold and absolute.

“The second manager,” another interjects, higher, crisper. “Min Hee-jin. We carved out ADOR for her. After the legacy we established for her at SM, we gave her a blank canvas, a palette, and a living artwork: NewJeans.”

The image that now flashes is of five young women, all soft smiles and youthful ease, followed by an article of staggering revenue: 100 billion won in a year. “She was to be the enlightened steward, the Illuminated Minerval who understood that true power is the quiet shaping of perception. She, too, has failed. Spectacularly.”

Evidence of her shortcomings unfold in the little light: internal audit reports from HYBE alleging a planned coup, Min’s furious press conference denial, leaked KakaoTalk messages where she dismissed her own artists as “immature kids,” among other sins.

"But her gravest sin,” it continues, “is not ambition. It is negligence. She became a lightning rod. She engaged in a public war with the crumbling first manager, and in the crossfire, she left the artwork exposed. She forgot her primary mandate: custodianship of the asset.”

The final proofs are the most damning. They are not financial charts or legal documents; they are a grainy video feed of the same women sitting in a hotel room, their faces drawn and vulnerable, each member’s eyes holding a weariness that belongs to people twice their age.

Minji speaks to the camera steady but thin with strain: “If our message has been properly conveyed, we hope chairman Bang and HYBE will make a wise decision. All we want is this legal conflict to be resolved and have our working environment returned to normal.”

Another clip shows a court document, a ruling that binds them to ADOR until 2029 against their will.

Five more years in a cage whose bars are made of legal injunctions and corporate spite.

Darkness takes over once again as the screen fades to black. For a moment, the room goes deathly silent.

"These are the instruments,” says the head. Its distortion now reflects the anger bubbling within the organization, rearing its head against the perpetrators. “The ones we entrusted. They were given a vessel of our authority to cultivate influence, to shepherd a generation’s heart. They have buried it in the dirt of their own avarice and pride. One seeks to hoard the silver. The other, to claim the field for her own name. And the girls—”

A gloved hand gestures to a picture of Hanni in court, mid-plea. "The Talents themselves are caught in the storm. They are called ‘immature kids’ by their mentor. They are legally shackled by their parents. They are pawns in a game whose rules they were never taught.”

Another shadow speaks. “The public narrative is a cacophony. A coordinated smear campaign—Black Hat SEO, manufactured websites, character assassination traced to a PR firm HYBE acquired. It is messy. It is visible. It draws the wrong kinds of attention.”

“This is the opposite of our vision,” the head states, its finality in the tone sending little shivers down the spines of everyone in the room. “Luminary operates in the negative space. We correct the trajectory of presidents and pop charts from the quiet place behind the lens. This— spectacle —is an affront.”

A pause. No one dares to breathe.

“The parable is clear. The servant who buried his talent was cast into the outer darkness. We bestowed a great resource—not just a company, but a channel of global soft power. They have not multiplied it, but instead have actively corrupted it. They have wounded the innocent vessels through which that influence flows.”

A decision coalesces, unspoken but understood by all. It is in the stillness of the gloved hands.

“Our justice is not of courts,” the head remarks. “It is of restoration. Of balance. The mistakes will be rectified. Their arrogance, punished. Their hubris— shattered. The trust broken by Bang Si-hyuk, by Min Hee-jin, by the entire rotting edifice of HYBE that they have built upon our foundation—it demands more than a financial penalty. It demands complete erasure.”

The quiet that follows with that singular word sucks in every thought in that room. The judgment is unanimous.

“The power we gave, we will take away. We will unwind the threads we wove. The regulatory probes into stock manipulation and tax evasion will find teeth they did not have before. The public sentiment, which we can guide with a word, will turn to ice. The creative pipeline will dry up. The chart placements will become— unreliable. We will return HYBE to the ashes from which we lifted it. A return to absolute darkness.”

“And the girls?” asks a shadow.

“The artwork must be preserved. Their trauma is our failure.”

Once more, the room goes eerily quiet, the shadows carrying the weight of an entire organization’s incompetence. This is their responsibility. Everything in their design is tailored to function to perfection; this is anything but.

After a while, the room declares its sacred vow through the solitary voice: “We will extricate them. The legal contract binding them until 2029 will become void, a document lost to a judicial ‘reconsideration.’ Their brand, ‘NewJeans’ or ‘NJZ’— whatever they wish to call themselves in the future—will be theirs alone. They will be placed in a new trust, under a new, silent steward who understands that their light is to be curated, not owned. Their protection is now our direct mandate. Any who seek to use them again—be it a chairman, a CEO, or a media conglomerate—will find our response unequivocal.”

The head pauses, letting the scope of the judgment settle. It adds:

“Min Hee-jin wished to be their protector but became a provocateur. She will be removed from the board, from the industry. She will be granted a comfortable cage of her own: a consultancy that consults no one, a label with no artists. Let her live with the ghost of her ambition. As for Bang—”

From the darkness, its eyes fly wide open, reflecting a gaze demanding full attention and carrying absolute authority. “—his fall will be public. The authorities will have all the evidence they need. He will watch the empire we built for him crumble into dust and lawsuits. This is the price of burying a Talent.”

The meeting concludes unceremoniously. No votes are taken. The will of Luminary is singular, absolute.

One by one, the shadows rise. They do not speak farewells or take bows. They simply step back from the blade of light and are absorbed into the void from which they came. The last to leave is the head, who places a single, ungloved fingertip upon the image of NewJeans, still hovering in the gloom.

“The nightmare is over. We are awake.”

As the final shadow disappears, the light winks out. The room ceases to exist. The invisible hand that controls the world has closed into a fist.

—————

The air in the boardroom reeks of corporate anxiety and unconfessed crimes.

Your suit is the same shade of charcoal gray as every other mid-level strategist. Your lanyard bears a name that is not yours, filled in by a composite face composed of many forgettable features. The microphone embedded in the clasp of your leather portfolio is no larger than a grain of rice, and through the nearly invisible filament in your ear, a voice that is not human whispers static and assurances.
You are the fly on the wall, the unblinking eye.

And they are listening.

Across the table, the head architects of the year’s chaos are trying to assemble order from the wreckage.

CEO Park Jiwon—no, it’s Lee Jaesang now, you correct yourself, another reshuffled piece in a crumbling game—steeples his fingers. His face is a mask of practiced gravity, but you’ve studied the micro-tremors at the corner of his eye. Fear, barely disguised.

“The quarterly report,” he begins before going quiet, and the words hang like an indictment. “It reflects external pressures.”

Chairman Bang does not give the reports a glance. He stares out the window at the Seoul skyline, an empire he built now slowly tearing at the cracks. His silence is more unnerving than any thunderous outburst.

When he finally musters the will to speak, his tone reflects a life worn by too many storms.

“External pressures,” he echoes, followed by a hollow laugh trapped between the words. “Is that what we’re calling it now? A self-inflicted wound from a dirty knife we handed out ourselves.”

Lee flinches, just barely.

The evidence is damning: the ‘Weekly Music Industry Report,’ meant for executive eyes only, the one that dissected the industry with surgical, derogatory cruelty. Calling artists “shockingly unattractive,” downplaying rivals’ successes as flukes, laying bare a culture of cynical manipulation. It was a grenade that rolled out of a National Assembly audit and detonated in the public square. You remember the comment in your ear that day, cool and unsurprised:

“A predictable lack of operational security. Note the panic,” it said.

“The apology was issued,” Lee says, defensive. “We took full responsibility. The employee was reassigned.”

“And the world moved on?” Bang turns away from the window, sweeping the cowed board members. “Did it? Or did it just file away another piece of evidence that we are a monopoly playing a rigged game? That we don’t just make music, we manufacture hate trains to clear the track?”

He’s talking about the whispers, the ones confirmed as more than rumor. The coordinated social media storms, for instance. Le sserafim, crucified online after Coachella, their comments sections turned into graveyards of threats so severe a minor member’s family had to intervene. aespa, their live singing skills dissected in that very internal report, the subsequent fan vitriol seeming a little too convenient, a little too neatly aligned with competitive interests. They had called it ‘ market correction’ via public flogging.

“It’s not just external perception,” a brave director ventures. “It’s the rot within. The subsidiaries are at war.”

He means ADOR. He means NewJeans.

The five girls, the brilliant, fragile engine of a billion-dollar dream, now the battleground for their future. The mission briefing had guided you through that saga like a museum curator pointing out failures: Min Hee-jin’s tearful press conference, her accusations that HYBE had greenlit a copycat group, ILLIT, built in NewJeans’ image. The girls themselves, in a desperate, deleted livestream, calling HYBE “inhumane,” pleading for Min’s reinstatement. Hanni, testifying before the National Assembly with tears in her eyes about the discrimination and mistreatment. And that’s only the tip of a titanic iceberg.

“They are children,” Bang remarks, but it sounds like a quote from a memo, not a conviction. “Influenced. Misled.”

“They are liabilities,” another board member counters. “The lawsuit proceeds. The company is fractured. The teams are fractured. It’s a stalemate written in legal briefs. And the public—the majority side with the children.”