The sun was blazing high in the sky when Ilani Cho opened his eyes.

He immediately winced at the intense glare and rolled over mumbling. The 21-year-old buried his face underneath the blankets, desperate to escape from the sharp rays that poured in from the window into his tiny single dorm room in Manhattan. Over the past week, he had already packed the curtains into a storage unit, so there was no protection from the outside light.

In fact, his entire room was empty.

It was completely bare except for the bed that he was sleeping on.

The university was kicking him out of the dorms since he was taking a leave of absence. Ilani didn't have anyone to help him move out, so he had been slowly moving his belongings to a rental storage unit several blocks down the city streets. It took several trips to move everything, so Ilani had started pushing a moving cart since the beginning of last week. Yesterday, he had finished packing away everything except the bare essentials, and he planned to take the rest with him today when he turned in his room key at the residential affairs office.

But right now, Ilani didn't have the motivation to move.

Even without checking his phone, Ilani knew that it was probably eleven o'clock AM or later. He could heard the busy clamor in the city streets outside of his window, the steady noise of beeping utility vehicles, and the occasional rumbling of the red 1-2-3 line subway that passed by underground every 7-8 minutes.

He didn't want to get out of bed.

He felt so tired.

So tired.

A swirl of thoughts bubbled up in his mind.

Ilani only had a few thousand dollars in his bank account, barely enough to afford a month or two of rent in New York City.

He thought of the class that he failed from submitting in an unsatisfactory original composition after the deadline — his advisor's comments that maybe he wasn't cut out to be a professional musician. After all, very few people could pursue a professional career in music, and Juilliard's philosophy was to rake out the weeds of aspiring artists who weren't likely to succeed in the real world.

Succeed.

97% of students who graduate from Juilliard immediately find employment in the music industry, but that insanely high success rate is less a factor of the conservatory's education, and more of the fact that the university kicks out any student who threatens to bring down the prestigious statistic. Up to a third of the students who matriculate into Juilliard flunk out before finishing their degrees.

Truthfully, Ilani's advisors had been generous. Rather than "failing" him entirely, they had given him an "incomplete" on his transcript and told him to take a year off before repeating the class next year. They told him to sort himself out and work on his portfolio. Sometimes, a little freedom was good for stimulating the creative inspiration that he desperately lacked in his songs.

But that was before they told him that he'd have to forfeit his scholarship for failing to remain in good academic standing.

All of that had spun out of control in the last two weeks.

It was now Christmas break and winter vacation.

Ilani Cho didn't want to get out of bed.

He still hadn't told his parents about taking academic leave.

He wasn't even sure about how they would react. His parents were thousands of miles away, and they had a huge argument when Ilani said he wanted to go to a music conservatory rather than a regular university. Back then, he had wielded his scholarship and insisted that he had the talent to chase his dreams, but he had been incredibly naive.

In high school, he was just a fish in a small pond.

Everyone told him he was amazing, and he had let his self-inflated ego get to his head.

But the wider ocean was a scary place, and honestly he was mediocre compared to his talented classmates at Juilliard. It was a struggle to pass even the basic classes, and the faculty were ruthless with their criticism. It only took a few weeks for Ilani to realize that he lacked the special ingredient that set his genius classmates apart from the amateurs.

The legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma graduated from Juilliard, but he was already performing professionally at four and half years old. Many of Ilani's classmates were similarly talented, and there was no way Ilani that could measure up to them.

Now he didn't know what to do.

+ + +

Several hours later, Ilani was dragging a large trash bag down the Lincoln Center subway station. It contained the remainder of his belongings, including his bedsheets and pillow. The black plastic bag was quite heavy and oversized for the amount of things he stuffed inside, and he had trouble getting it past the turns-aisle. 

He also had a large suitcase, and attempting to juggle these two oversized items was too much one person to handle.

Eventually, he made it to the subway platform, and then onto the #1 train. 

He felt so tired.

While he was waiting to transfer trains at the Columbus Circle station, he pulled out his phone.

Originally, Ilani was only going to check his direct messages to see if @mystia_ch messaged him, especially since he was going to meet up with her today. However, when he opened up Twitter, he was surprised to see his inbox flooded with dozens of messages from random strangers. There were easily over a hundred notifications.

At first, Ilani was confused.

But then he remembered that Mystia introduced him on her stream last night. She had probably linked his Twitter account.

This was a throwaway account that he had made after Mystia insisted on having a separate account for his online identity. Since Ilani wasn't taking it very seriously, he was originally planning to abandon it entirely. The only issue was that Ilani forgot to change his Twitter privacy settings to block messages from strangers. 

With his brow furrowed, Ilani attempted to scroll through the long list of messages in his inbox. Mystia had sent him the address to her apartment, except now it was a buried under an avalanche of other mail.

He clicked on a handful of messages purely out of curiosity.

「 Do you have a youtube account? I want to see your songs! 」

「 Your singing is amazing! I love your voice! Will you do more collaborations with Mystia? 」

「 I heard on the stream that you're going through rough times. Do you have a GoFundMe? Can we donate to help out? 」

「 Have you ever thought about covering Wasteland by Karnivore? I think it would go great with your voice! 」

Ilani paused on some of the messages.

「 What's your relationship with Mystia? Do you know each other IRL? 」

「 Are you a dude? 」

「 Rofl you forgot to turn on your voice changer. 」

Ilani frowned and put away his phone as the #C train on the red line arrived at the subway platform.

For some reason, he felt deeply uncomfortable in his heart.

Surely as expected, he wasn't cut out for this kind of work.

∎

minacia

The song inspiration for this chapter: Cover by 茜雫凛 - いつか / Saucy dog

I was watching the debut stream for Artemis of the blue and she has a fairly deep voice. I think it stuck out to me because chat was constantly asking if she was a guy, and there's theories on reddit about her being trans. I personally don't believe it; every Vtuber with a lower non-anime-ish voice (i.e. Risu, Okayu) always gets their gender questioned, so I borrowed this as a plot point.