Project: Socialize (Chapters 1-197)

160. Doing the Right Thing

"So I guess we'll start with this one," Irina said into the microphone while holding it close to her and staring at the monitor as the music started playing from the loudspeakers.

Surrounding the stage around us were the general public of Palisia who all had their phones out as they took pictures or recorded. It was quite loud as well with chants of support from Irina's diehard fans, and I know that it might be somewhat rude for me to think this way, but I am seriously annoyed by them.

Anyways, after she had chosen the song, I simply stared at the monitor in a momentary shock as I had never heard of the song before. It would appear that Irina had caught me with my mouth gaping open slightly and eyes widened as well.

"This is one of my more popular singles," she informed me.

"Well..." I said in a quite awkward and nervous manner as I quickly glanced around at the crowd to make sure that the security was secure before I continued. "I've actually never heard any of your songs before..."

"R-really?" Irina exclaimed and appeared quite taken off guard by my sudden confession. "..."

She appeared somewhat disappointed, a bit down even, that I had not heard of any of her music. However, you can't really blame me. I'm not the type of person who would actively go out in search of new music to listen to. The music I have on my music playing app only has those that I had added to my playlist in the past. On the occasion that I would use the Recommended playlist that recommended me music based off of my listening history, I had never come across any of her songs as well as there was a huge pool of music that could be randomly selected.

Irina frowned and pouted somewhat, but no matter what, nothing can change the fact that I will have to go in blind. Well, maybe it should be go in deaf. But that doesn't matter. What does though is the fact that we have just wasted one of our tries on this one song that I had never heard of before.

When Irina began singing the first part, I felt a somewhat nostalgic feeling. It would appear that I actually recognize the lyrics, and once the lyrics stimulated my memory, I recalled that I've actually heard this song before. It wasn't that long ago, yet it feels so so distant. It was a memory of a much simpler time, a time that was blander in color where nothing of much excitement occurred. Well, maybe not entirely peaceful times as it was a few days after I had the Socialization app installed on my phone. I remember this song now. Mura had sung it at the karaoke place we went to. So Irina was the person she was talking about back then.

Once Irina finished with her part, my mouth started moving automatically as I tried to transfer my memory of Mura singing the song into my own body. I was actually surprised by how well it went, and apparently, Irina was as well. Initially, there was shock on her face. However, that expression soon disappeared as a content smile replaced it.

The singing and such ended on a pretty good note as the crowd seemed to have got into it in the climax portions of it. Some even sang along to the chorus and such. However, that wasn't much of my concern as I was more worried about the scoring by the machine. In the end, it turns out that we succeeded.

After obtaining our first Holiday Orb, we started immediately to our next destination. Since we were on the mainland now, there were way more challenge locations nearby to us. And since the other groups were mostly behind us on Palim, we were able to quickly obtain even more Holiday Orbs without any distractions.

Everything went pretty smooth for us, aside from some difficult challenges that we were unable to complete. An hour and a half into the live stream, we were notified of multiple groups that were eliminated. Lucky for Irina and I, we never encountered a Hunter and had maintained a solid viewer count.