Chapter 240: Von’s Declaration
<🎧 Song Recommendation: a good man with a broken heart by LoVibe>
...
Von looked across the table at Emily.
"The song. How fast can we put it out officially?"
Emily blinked. "Put it out?"
"Yeah."
Emily opened her mouth to shoot it down. There was no artwork, no rollout, no pre-save campaign, nothing that a release was supposed to have.
But the more she turned it over in her head, the more the objections fell apart one after the other.
"...Distribution can push a surprise release in about six hours," she said slowly. "If I call now."
"Alright, then call now."
"Hold on." David raised his hand with an excuse me expression on his face. "You want to release the stolen song?"
"It’s not stolen if I put it out." Von shrugged. "Right now there’s rips of my song on Musify and nobody’s getting paid. In six hours there’s an official version everywhere with my name on it, and every one of those rips will become a worse sounding copy."
David nodded slowly in agreement.
It would kill the surprise premiere they had planned for opening night, but that surprise was already dead. There was nothing left to protect.
"People are gonna listen either way," Von added. "Let them listen to mine."
Max let out a long breath. "That’s... that’s actually the only way to save it."
Emily was already typing, but she paused halfway through and looked up.
"We don’t even need a campaign for this one," she said. "Think about it. Whoever leaked it did our marketing for free. The song’s been trending and every single person talking about it is angry on your behalf."
She tapped her pen against the edge of her laptop.
"So we don’t rush it out blind. We watch the reaction for a few hours first, see which part of the song people are actually latching onto, and then we drop it while the conversation is still at its peak."
Von smiled at that.
"That works too."
"Second thing." Von turned to David. "The rehearsal footage."
"That’s out," David said. "We can’t unring it."
"We don’t have to. We just make it wrong."
David’s brows drew together. "Wrong?"
"They’ve got nineteen minutes of a show that isn’t happening anymore." Von leaned back against the window ledge. "So let’s just do a new opening and a new order."
"In thirty-six hours?" Kiana asked, sitting forward. "Von, my crew—"
"Oh, you don’t have to worry about that." Von waved a hand. "I’m not putting that on you and your dancers. Keep the choreography exactly as it is. Run the same routine you’ve been running all week."
Kiana stared at him. "Then what changes?"
"Me." Von shrugged like he was talking about switching shirts. "I’ll change my own parts and sync to whatever you guys pull off. You don’t have to move for me. I’ll move around you."
The room went quiet.
Kiana let out a small, disbelieving laugh. What he was describing wasn’t a small adjustment.
He was talking about rebuilding his own entire performance from scratch, around a thirty-person routine he wasn’t going to be allowed to alter, in a day and a half.
Nobody did that. Not even people who had been doing this for twenty years.
She glanced sideways at Tobias, expecting the movement coach to be the one who shut this down.
Tobias wasn’t shutting anything down.
The old man had his arms folded and a faint, tired smile on his face, the expression of a professional who had spent the entire morning watching this exact kid do things he had no business being able to do.
He caught Kiana’s look and just gave her a small shrug that said let him.
Kiana slowly sat back in her chair.
"...Okay, okay."
"Third thing," Von said.
David closed his eyes briefly. "Of course there’s a third thing."
"They stole a show. So from tonight, there isn’t one."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning no two nights of this tour are ever the same." Von looked around the table, meeting each of them one by one. "Different opening, different order, different closer. Every city. Twenty-six shows, twenty-six versions."
Max’s jaw came loose.
"Bro."
"That way," Von continued, "it doesn’t matter what anybody films or steals or sells. By the time it’s online, it’s already expired. You can’t spoil something that hasn’t been decided yet."
"That is insane," Max said, with total sincerity.
"Probably."
David rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, and when he spoke again, his voice had the flat calm of a man doing arithmetic he didn’t enjoy.
"Von. I’ve been running tours since before you were born. Artists repeat the same set for eight months straight, and there’s a reason for that. It’s not laziness. It’s that a show is four hundred cues, thirty dancers, a lighting crew, pyro timings, and a hundred people who all need to know exactly where you’re going to be standing."
"I know."
"Then you know that if you change it every night, one mistake anywhere in that chain and somebody gets hurt."
"So I won’t make one," Von said.
David looked at him for a long moment.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, he simply picked up his clipboard and started writing.
"Fine," he said. "I want every department head in this room in twenty minutes. And I’ll need the full rundown from you tonight."
"You’ll get your part tonight."
David’s pen stopped moving.
"My part."
"Everyone gets their part," Von said. "Nobody gets the whole thing."
The temperature in the room shifted.
"Von," David said carefully, "I’m the tour director. Holding the whole thing is literally what I’m paid for."
"It was." Von’s tone stayed light and friendly, and his eyes didn’t move at all. "But two hours ago somebody in this circle sold us out. Until I know who that is, the only place the whole show exists is up here."
He tapped his temple with two fingers.
Nobody said anything.
Tobias examined the table. Max looked around at everyone with wide eyes. Emily’s expression didn’t change, but her thumb had stopped moving over her phone screen.
Kiana was the one who broke the silence.
"That’s fair," she said, shaking her head. "Honestly, I’d do the same thing."
"Nobody take it personally," Von said, smiling around the table. "I’d hold it back from even my sister right now."
A ripple of laughter went around the room, and the tension broke.
David sighed and stood up.
"Twenty minutes, everybody. Somebody find me a drink before I start crying in front of my staff."
The room emptied out fast, meanwhile Von stood there looking at the empty doorway for a while.
Alone in the conference room, he finally let the screen come up.
It had been sitting there in the corner of his vision since the moment the words no two nights of this tour are ever the same left his mouth, blinking patiently while he finished the meeting.
[A DECLARATION HAS BEEN MADE.]
[NEW QUEST: THE UNCROWNED TOUR]
● Condition: You have pledged that no two performances of this tour will be identical.
● Objective: Complete all 26 shows without repeating a set.
[MOMENTUM]
● Every show will be scored out of 100.
● A score of 90 or above builds Momentum. Momentum multiplies the EXP reward of every show that follows.
● Momentum begins at x1. There is no ceiling.
● A show scored below 90 resets Momentum to x1.
● A show scored below 70 fails the quest permanently.
● Base reward: 1,000 EXP per show × current Momentum.
[BONUS — THE UNSEEN]
● Any show containing something you have never performed in front of an audience grants an additional Momentum tier immediately.
● The System will determine what qualifies. You will not be told in advance.
[HIDDEN OBJECTIVE: ??????? — LOCKED]
● Unlocks at Momentum x10.
[FAILURE PENALTY:
○ EXP gain will be frozen for 1 year.
○ Title (Uncrowned King) will be removed. EXP gain will]
Von read the penalty and let out a wry smile. The System really wasn’t going easy on him. He could imagine how high it was to score above 90, and yet the System wanted him to achieve that consistently.
Twenty-six nights, no repeats, and if he ever had one bad show anywhere in there, everything he had stacked up collapsed back to zero and he’d have to build it again from nothing.
’So being great once doesn’t count for anything.’
He scrolled back up to the bonus condition and read it again more slowly.
Something you have never performed in front of an audience.
Von tilted his head.
That was interesting. That was very interesting, actually, because he had been so buried in production meetings and choreography and budget calls for the past two weeks that he hadn’t sat down and properly written anything in a while.
And more importantly, he hadn’t borrowed anything in a while either.
’It’s been long enough,’ Von thought, staring out the window at the arena floor below, where the crew were already dragging the lighting truss back into position.
Long enough since the rewind. Long enough that the timeline had shifted far enough off its original track for him to know, with reasonable certainty, which songs from his old life were never going to exist in this one.
Artists who had gone in different directions. Records that would never be written. Hits sitting in a future that no longer had a road leading to it.
Songs nobody on this earth would ever hear.
Unless somebody sang them.
And back when he’d first started pulling from that well, he’d been a busker with an F-grade voice, doing what he could with what he had.
Now?
Now he had both his Vocals and Composition in the A range, and a set of hands that could do anything he asked them to.
’If I take one of those songs and build it with what I’ve got today,’ Von thought, ’it won’t just be as good as the original.’
A slow smirk crept across his face as he pushed off the window ledge and headed for the door.
’It will be better.’
Who cares if one song was leaked online? He had a multitude of songs to release in the next few weeks.