Gamer Superstar

Chapter  180 - Strange request

//NunuNote//

Last chapter was released wrong, now is fixed, sorry.

-------------------------------

"So... is there anything special I should know about Dark Pistol?" I asked Selena as we sat in her car on the way to the concert.

Jason was in the back seat with the camera on, recording everything I might need for the video.

One thing we realized was that it was better for him to record everything and then I would pick out the best parts and leave out the useless parts, instead of him just recording what he thought was important and we might miss some interesting scene that suddenly came up.

"Anything special...?" Selena asked herself with a thoughtful expression as she drove to the concert venue. "I think the most important thing for you to know is about the band's style and what their fans are like... you know the punk rock stereotype?"

"Yeah, long hair, black clothes, hates any other kind of music?" I asked, confirming that it was exactly that.

Selena nodded at me. "Yeah, while a lot of them really don't like other styles of music, there's a part of the audience that doesn't care about that, and that's exactly the part of the audience that we're trying to win over with this show."

"Oh, what do you think about that?" I asked curiously.

"Since we want to do a solo show for you, the audience that only likes punk rock isn't going to add anything to your show, since you're the most eclectic artist I've ever seen, so we have to focus on the part of the audience that likes everything." She explained. "So I would recommend that you add a few songs from other styles to your repertoire tonight, even if some of the audience won't like them. It's better to lose that audience now than to have them come to your show thinking it's going to be something completely different than what's actually going to happen."

As I listened to her explanation, I realized she was right.

I was so focused on completely pleasing the audience that I forgot what the real reason for singing this show was.

My goal wasn't just to give Dark Pistol a completely enthusiastic audience and give them a great show.

They were paying me little because I was going to get a lot of popularity at their show, so my obligation was to enjoy as much popularity as possible with the audience that would actually consume my songs, instead of pretending to be someone I'm not for the audience that won't like most of my songs.

"That's interesting, I'm going to change some of the songs I had planned for today." I said as I nodded.

"Ahh, there's something else too!" Selena remembered something and was very surprised. "How could I forget to tell you that?! I guess my family is exhausting me..." She sighed.

"What happened?" I asked confused.

"My family came from LA to see how the AJP San Francisco branch is doing, the problem is that they're staying at my house these days... a tip for you, enjoy your mother with you every day while you're living with her, because after you move out on your own, you'll find that a lot of things you thought were normal before will now annoy you to the extreme..." She sighed in frustration.

Seeing her acting like this, breaking away from the serious facade she almost always maintained, I laughed. Especially since my question had been to find out what she'd forgotten to tell me, not about her private life, since she'd hardly ever told me anything about it before. So I answered, laughing. "Okay, I'll take your advice, but what did you forget to tell me?"

Realizing that she had misunderstood the focus of my question, Selena was a little embarrassed, but answered. "The lead singer of Dark Pistol said he really liked In The End and asked if he could sing your song in their part of the show as well."

Hearing this, I was surprised that he wanted to sing my song, and thinking that this could be a great promotion for me and the song, I didn't think much of it and nodded.

"Sure!" I replied quickly. "It's not like it's forbidden to sing covers of other artists at gigs, right? I sing covers of other people's songs myself, it would be very hypocritical of me not to allow them to sing my music."

"I thought you'd say that." Selena nodded when she heard my answer.

After a few minutes we arrived at the concert venue.

Mark and Frank were already there, with Mark's Subaru parked in the parking lot reserved for event staff, but they couldn't get in because we weren't there yet.

After Selena let us in, we grabbed our instruments and went to the dressing room.

Looking at my makeup skills, I sighed, knowing that I was still far from being able to use them for concerts.

[Makeup Mastery Lv 1 -> 4]

This was my slowest growing skill ever, considering that the skill was still below Lv 10, I was even worried about how slowly it would increase after this skill was above it, and even more so when this skill reached Lv 20, how long would it take to reach Lv 30?!

So I just ignored the makeup and got ready as usual.

Considering that I was going to a punk rock concert, my bleached hair, black clothes, and various accessories were perfectly appropriate.

In fact, I think my look would have been more in tune with the crowd at this show, as opposed to the big contrast I had when I walked on stage at Lila Brooks with the crowd dressed in country clothes.

My advantage for those situations was that even if I wasn't wearing the style that the audience liked the most, my appearance still managed to make no one feel that it was ugly, so there was never a problem with that.

As we finished getting ready, Selena was called over by one of the show's production staff and returned with a frown.

"What happened?" I asked confused.

"I feel like something's wrong..." She sighed thoughtfully.

"What's wrong?" I asked. 

"Dark Pistol's agent came to see me and asked me not to let you sing In The End at the gig tonight." She said, making me frown along with her.

"Why would they ask that?" I asked confused.

"I don't know..." She sighed. "His explanation was that since the band wanted to sing your song, they didn't want to sing it twice in the same show and asked you to let them sing it alone today."

"And what did you say?" I asked.

"I said I wanted to talk to you first." She said. "When I said that, their agent said that if you agreed, they would double your payment for today, making it $5,000."

When I heard this, I was surprised. What happened to them wanting to raise my salary so much? Had they always wanted to pay me as little as possible?

I began to wonder what was going on, but when I thought that they would make more than $200,000 from today's show, it was not a high price for them to pay me the extra $2,500 in exchange for being able to sing the song and feel the sensation of the audience hearing it for the first time.

While $2,500 might seem like a lot of money to normal people, it wasn't that much to C-Rank artists, especially those who were already very close to B-Rank.

"I guess that's okay?" I replied a little unsure.

Unfortunately, Selena was unsure as well. "I think it's okay too? Since you didn't mind, I'll tell her agent that we don't mind."

I nodded to her and watched her leave the room while I sat in the dressing room, wondering what was going on that could make me feel weird.

While this was going on, Jason, who was recording everything, just turned the camera on Selena and recorded her talking to the Dark Pistol agent, since there was nothing much to record now.

After that we finished our preparations and went on stage with our instruments.

When we got on stage and looked at the huge crowd, the four of us were surprised.

Even though all 3,000 people hadn't arrived yet, from what I could see, there were at least 2,000 people here and more were arriving every second.

It was quite funny to see everyone dressed in black, but I just smiled as I excitedly looked at the crowd, thinking how much fun it would be to sing for them.

And to my surprise, not only was I surprised to see the crowd, but part of the crowd was surprised to see me.

"Hey, isn't that BlackVelvet?" I heard a girl ask.

"BlackVelvet? Who's BlackVelvet?" Another girl asked.

"I think it really is him!" The first girl was surprised to recognize me, even more so when I smiled and waved at her. She turned to her friend and explained. "Don't you know BlackVelvet? He's a singer from San Francisco who's been quite successful lately. My cousin came to town for a few days and made me go to a bar with her, the day we went was the exact day BlackVelvet was singing, I liked it so much I added his songs to my playlist!"

"Really? I've never heard of him." Her friend replied in confusion, but with interest piqued in me.

I also overheard a few people commenting on Jack Storm of the Duncan Family, which made me laugh as we began testing the instruments with the equipment before the show.