Ms. Yoshida's innocent smile scared me more than calmed me down as we stood deep in the hallway, far from everyone. I didn't know if it was me, but I could swear she had been silent for far too long.

Finally, she opened her mouth to talk, and I expected to hear the worst threat I could imagine.

"We'd love for Blostars to perform again at our last show."

I remained silent as my brain tried to process what she had just said, yet the only sound I was able to articulate was, "Huh?"

"I'd understand if you don't want to," she still smiled. "It was quite rude on our part to abruptly cancel the rest of your tour with us like that I just hope you understand that we did it to avoid controversies. To be honest, it kind of backfired. We expected fans to be angry, but not that many. It is a good sign, really. It means they were enjoying the collaboration."

Only after shaking my head was I able to think again. "Yeah. No, I understand all of that. What I'm confused about is, why all this secrecy?"

"Ah, because I imagined you'd like to surprise the girls and your staff with the news since you are quite close to them. And I like to surprise my staff as well. Was I wrong?"

Nervous laughter helped me get rid of the nerves. "No, it'll be a nice surprise."

"I'm glad to hear that. So, what do you say? Do you want to perform again at our last show?"

As obvious as the answer might've been in the past, there was one concern I had. "Don't you think fans will lose trust in us if we retract our decision after canceling?"

Her smile disappeared as a sigh came out of her mouth. "Yes, we thought about that. There would definitely be upset fans, but the great majority would be happy. Still, I had planned for Blostars to do something other than opening Aeryx's concert to avoid any discontent."

"What is that?"

"For them to perform the last song of the show along with Aeryx; the song she's recording at this very moment."

All doubts vanished from my head in the blink of an eye. "That's not a bad idea."

"And since the concert will take place a week after your album's release, you could swiftly promote it after performing the song; it'll be a nice push for your sales."

"Are you sure? Is Aeryx okay with it?"

She nodded. "We discussed it already. To be honest, we can't know for sure how the fans will react, but seeing how much they loved Blostars' collaborations in Aeryx's song and throughout the tour, we are pretty confident they'll like it."

"Let's do it, then," I smirked. Out of nowhere, another idea hit my brain. "Ah, I know I'm not in the position to make requests, but could I make one?"

"Of course, you can," she smiled.

"We're currently preparing a tour through the country and we wanted to announce it at the same time as our album's release, but we think it'll still be too soon to do so. Instead, we could say a surprise is coming soon, then announce it at the concert. It'll be a nice window to have, even if it's only one week."

"Congratulations on the tour, first of all. And yes, you absolutely can do that. You can promote anything you want as long as you don't take too long doing so, or the fans will get annoyed."

I smiled, "Don't worry, we won't. Thank you."

"Please don't make it sound like we're doing you a favor, this is a collaboration; we're helping each other."

About to rant about how that wasn't true, I decided to avoid making her uncomfortable. "Alright."

She smiled. "Talking about tours, there's something else I wanted to discuss with you."

My heart started pounding. Oh, no. Here comes the threat.

Luckily for my heart, she didn't take long to continue, "We want Blostars to be the opening group for Aeryx's world tour."

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

My mind went blank as my heart skipped a beat. "Huh? World tour?"

"Yes, Aeryx's world tour. Is that something you're interested in?"

"Are you kidding me? Of course, I am."

"Wonderful," she chuckled. "We should appropriately discuss the terms another day, but they'll be similar to the ones we already worked with during the current tour. However, the main differences would be that we'll now travel to other countries and continents, and that we want to give you a percentage of the ticket sales."

"A percentage of the ticket sales? Are you serious?"

"Why would I lie about something like that?"

"Because it sounds too good to be true," I answered. "But as you said, let's not get ahead of ourselves and discuss the terms appropriately another day."

She smirked, "Well said."

Thinking the conversation had come to an end, I turned around and said, "Let's go back to the studio."

Only a couple of steps later, Ms. Yoshida called me, "Mr. Miyahara."

I turned around again and responded, "Yes?"

She took a peek behind me before saying, "Thank you for keeping our secret."

My mind went blank again, although this time without a chance to even utter a sound.

"Does anyone else know?" she asked.

My heart threatened to burst out of my chest. Fortunately, she continued talking, probably after seeing the absolute terror on my face.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to threaten you or anything like that. We just want to know where we stand regarding the situation."

As much as I didn't want to tell her, nothing told me she was lying. On top of that, there was no reason for me not to trust her, even though she was hiding something huge like Aeryx being a robot.

I sighed and replied, "A… Aki and the driver of our bus during the tour."

"The bus driver?" she frowned. "How…? You know what? It doesn't matter. I imagined that you would've told more of your team."

"Well, the hacker did find out since she was spying through our glasses all the time."

"Oh, that's right, I saw that on the news. I suspected that she had found out, but I didn't have to worry about it since she had just been imprisoned. I can't imagine how stressed you must've been, however."

"Too much," I laughed nervously. "I've been stressed about the incident since it happened. I thought you were going to kill me if the secret became public."

Her jaw dropped, then she immediately bowed in front of me. "I'm very, very sorry. I would've told you it was alright sooner if I knew you were that worried. It's just that we've been in a predicament for years now."

"Predicament?" I wondered.

She stood straight. "Aeryx was… created with the purpose of… experimenting. God, I still hate saying it. I apologize for the terminology I'm using, but it's the only way I can explain it."

"Don't worry, I understand."

"Thank you," she smiled, but the smile quickly disappeared. "We're experimenting with how to create human-like robots with emotions and the musical skills to bring dead artists back to life."

"…What?"

"I know it doesn't sound great, but we won't do that literally, we'll just use as many references as we possibly can to do so."

"Ah, I see."

That doesn't take away how weird it is, but I must admit it's interesting.

Ms. Yoshida continued, "Aeryx was our first successful iteration at creating a robot, even though she's not based on any artist, so we decided to test her skills. Several years and updates later, here we are. We never found the right opportunity to reveal the truth, or, better said, we were scared to. That's why it would've been our fault if the secret became public."

Many thoughts crossed my mind at the same time, making it hard for me to choose what to say next.

"Is it safe for me to know all of this?" I asked.

"It is," she answered. "I trust you, and you don't have to worry if the secret becomes public since you also deserved to have an explanation. I'll be honest, the reason I keep saying we both are doing a favor to each other is that we have been using this opportunity to see how Aeryx would behave in a collaboration. As to the reason why we've been trying really hard to avoid controversies, is to prevent being the center of one, which would lead to the secret becoming public."

"That's smart," I replied. "I didn't expect to be told all of this."

She smiled, "It'll be better if you know. Shall we return to the studio?"

We did so and continued watching Aeryx record the song. Aside from killing it, she politely suggested changes to it, and they definitely made the song even better. I was sure Umi wasn't going to like the changes being made to the song she had made, but she was delighted since the suggestions came from Aeryx.

Even though we had scheduled two hours of recording, Aeryx was practically done in one. Still, she decided to stay for the remaining hour to make the recording as perfect as possible.

Finally, we were listening to the recordings, but Aeryx would frown every time we did so. Thinking she wasn't pleased with her performance, she promptly made us know it wasn't that.

"It sounds good enough," she said, "but are you sure this is the quality you want for an album?"