"Club President? What's wrong with her? I think she's pretty good."
Having already swapped places with Elio, Elusi, now draped over Hachiman's back, gave his face a puzzled little lick.
She thought this girl was pretty great: good looks, great proportions, and solid acting too.
Even counting the top-tier idols, Kurokawa Akane ranked among the better types out of the many idols. It was just that she'd never had the resources before, and hadn't gotten to appear in any good works.
Even though Kurokawa Akane had already been with a top-tier theater troupe before, a genius of the younger generation among its actors, actors' pay was generally low across the board, and on top of that her split with the agency was 2:8. She'd been badly exploited.
But things were different once she was "bought" into their idol agency and joined the Service Club.
Here, background didn't matter so much. As long as her acting was genuinely good, the club could call on an actress like Kurokawa Akane for its games from now on.
"It's nothing. I was just a little surprised. I felt like the role she picked suited her own vibe really well. But now it looks like it might just be that her acting's good."
Hachiman shook his head with a smile, looking toward a slightly nervous Kurokawa Akane.
"Akane, do you know Kana? Arima Kana, from B Komachi in the agency now. She's an actress around your age too."
At the moment, the idols who made up the largest share of the agency's idols were the pretty-girl idols from the various idol projects of the Idolmaster series, followed by Underworld idols, and other Surface World idols.
When it came to looks and figure, Kurokawa Akane wasn't inferior to any of the others. She was exactly the type he liked, too.
But what really caught his attention wasn't Kurokawa Akane herself, but B Komachi, the group that Arima Kana, who shared a fair bit of history with Kurokawa Akane, belonged to.
An idol group that happened to share the same name as his little sister, Komachi.
B Komachi's members were originally supposed to be Hoshino Ruby, Arima Kana, and MEM-cho, but now it was Hoshino Ai, Arima Kana, and MEM-cho instead.
"Thank you for the compliment. Yes, I've met Arima at the agency."
Kurokawa Akane hadn't expected Hachiman to bring up Arima Kana. She froze for a moment, then answered hesitantly.
"Actually, the reason I became an actress in the first place was Arima too, a child prodigy actress the same age as me."
"It's just..."
Something felt off to her. Arima Kana really had been a child prodigy actress once, but when it came down to it, there wasn't really anything special about who she was.
As a former child-star prodigy who, by this age, was already washed up, Arima Kana these days had a pretty lousy personality, but she'd managed to hang on in the industry through some social cunning.
From an idol she'd once looked up to, to a rival she'd taken seriously, Arima Kana, who'd just been coasting along all this time, had left her thoroughly disappointed either way.
That she'd even noticed Arima Kana among all the young, pretty, talented girls at the idol agency was only because Arima Kana meant something special to her, even if, in her eyes, Arima Kana had already "fallen from grace."
Still, well aware of how little her own words carried, Kurokawa Akane forced down the urge to ask Hachiman about it.
"Well then, Akane, why don't you go ahead and start."
Hachiman nodded with a smile, without explaining much further.
Some things didn't need much explaining at all, and no one was going to press him on how he knew Kurokawa Akane and Arima Kana knew each other.
Kurokawa Akane would just assume the agency had looked into their backgrounds, and Elusi would just assume she'd seen the agency's idol roster and, taking a liking to a performer with an actress's background like Kurokawa Akane, had looked her up ahead of time.
"Okay, Producer, please give me a moment. I'll get myself into the right state."
Seeing that Hachiman had stopped zoning out and had raised his camera to aim it at her, Kurokawa Akane let out a breath of relief, closed her eyes to steady her breathing, then snapped them open and threw herself seriously into cosplaying Yelan.
"The spring water flowing from this hot spring inn's source is quite remarkable. It doesn't just greatly enhance the effects of the hot spring water. Even the pond water here carries a special effect."
In her high heels, Kurokawa Akane walked slowly over to Hachiman, dropped to one knee, and looked down at him, surrounded tightly by the three mermaid songstresses Elusi, Elio, and Ayla, as she gently scooped up a handful of the clear, sweet pond water with her bare hand.
"You must have had quite the night last night. If there's anything else you need, feel free to come find me."
"Of course. Yelan, do you want to come down and try it out again now?"
Watching Kurokawa Akane drink the pond water one-handed, glittering droplets trailing from the corner of her mouth all the way down to her collarbone, Hachiman was a little caught off guard.
Maybe he really had been thrown off by the mermaid songstresses' performances. The self-introductions before this, from Kanzaki Ranko and the others, had all seemed so nervous that no one had even volunteered what food they liked, what sports they enjoyed, or what they usually liked to do.
Even the ones who weren't as nervous had, at most, just stood there striking poses in character, nothing like the way Kurokawa Akane was performing her role by actually interacting with him.
"Heh, no, I'd better finish today's shoot first. There are a lot of my fellow idols waiting their turn after me."
Hearing Hachiman's invitation, Kurokawa Akane's heart clenched. Feigning composure, she waved a hand and, with a light laugh, began posing for photos on the bank instead.
She really didn't have much choice in the matter, if she were just an idol, she probably would have ended up like all the others.
But she wasn't an idol, she was an actress. Simply standing there posing just wouldn't do. An actress naturally had to actually play off a scene.
Originally she'd wanted to take a bit of a shortcut, even if she felt too embarrassed to face the Producer directly, she could still act out a scene using props, like sitting in the pavilion next door drinking tea, handling paperwork, or taking a nap; a little bit of a scenario like that would show off her acting even better.
But who could have guessed the Producer would get dragged straight into the pond to play around with the mermaid songstresses, with even the cosplay photoshoot happening right at the water's edge.
Now, just standing by the pond like this, no pose was going to properly show off her strength as an actress.
The fact that the other idols didn't have acting skills like hers didn't mean they had nothing going for them. Everyone had picked roles that either matched their personality or matched their looks and air, so her acting alone wasn't enough to put real distance between herself and everyone else.
Still, fortunately the Producer really was, just as the rumors said, someone who wouldn't force them into anything. This little display of hers should have earned her quite a few points.
Even though, while being photographed, her body had heated up at a speed that was more than a little unusual, more taxing than even her own high-intensity workouts.
It was just raising both hands to show off her underarms for a shot, just keeping a cold expression while slowly lifting a leg, just leaning forward to let the Producer get a shot of the mole on her chest.
It was just sitting at the edge of the pond with both legs soaking in the water, reaching out to tip the Producer's chin up with a finger of her own accord, and murmuring suggestive sweet nothings in front of the camera.
*Mmm... honestly, it was all so embarrassing...*
This wasn't the kind of dramatic performance focused purely on acting out a scene. It was being shot up close by the Producer, and it felt less like showing off her acting and more like showing off her figure.
Still, compared to going on a variety show for hype and promotion, this kind of situation, simply being seen by the Producer alone, actually put a lot less psychological pressure on her.
Plenty of male and female entertainers shot swimsuit photobooks that pushed things far further than this, compared to the top-tier idols and popular idols who went all the way into the water, what she was doing here barely counted as anything.
"That's good. Akane, your acting was great. Have you thought about what you want to cosplay next time?"
Photographing Elio, who was cosplaying Janus in his arms, on one side, and Kurokawa Akane's Yelan cosplay on the bank on the other, Hachiman was thoroughly satisfied, and even found himself looking forward to the next time already.
Although Haimeng's character quest still wasn't finished, considering the requirement called for fifty people, he already had a feeling the quest reward, temporary role-play, would be especially suited to a cosplay party, letting him freely run cosplay-themed Service Games from then on.
"Thank you so much for your guidance. Next time I might go with Joumae Saori, a student from Blue Archive, or maybe Ling, the poet from Arknights. Both of their types suit my own natural air pretty well, so they shouldn't be too difficult to pull off."
Kurokawa Akane, a little breathless, drew her long, pale legs out of the water, put her shoes back on, and stood up, bowing deeply to Hachiman to show her respect before finally taking her leave.
"Though Ling's the type who likes to drink, if it comes to actually drinking, I might have to rely on an alcohol-flavored drink to pull the cosplay off. I won't be able to recreate that part exactly as it is."
Even though today's shoot had pushed things fairly far, and the Producer, as her photographer, kept getting distracted by having to look after the wildly popular, world-class idol mermaid songstresses, she could still tell just how high his standards for cosplay were.