He wasn’t sure whether she was dead or alive and he didn’t care either. His potential status as a murderer was not of any concern to him whilst the adrenaline pulsing through his veins was piloting his body, charging him through the streets of Seoul like a rabid beast, steering him around shadowy corners where a couple of suspicious onlookers furrowed their eyebrows at him like he was strange one.

At the time, he hadn’t thought himself strong enough to deliver a blow powerful enough to kill. On the other hand, he’d been in the midst of an adrenaline rush then too, and he had struck her on the back of the head hard enough to knock her to the floor. She hadn’t got up either, at least not straight away. He’d thrown himself out the door so unbelievably quickly he hadn’t had the chance to turn around and check to make sure she was alright. He wasn’t sure he cared if she was alright, anyway. She deserved it, didn’t she?

But when the adrenaline in his veins died out, Luhan was left wondering about the consequences of his drastic actions and ended up arriving at the conclusion that what he’d done made him just as bad as her, and that he should probably run back to her, get her to a hospital (not that she’d ever done that for him) and beg for her forgiveness. He had, however, already arrived at the nearest hotel and so he thought it only right that he went inside and booked a room, just in case he needed somewhere to stay for the night. Of course, any woman who had just been attacked by her boyfriend would not want to sleep in the same apartment as him that very night, so it was likely that he’d be turned away - though he’d never had the option to turn her away.

As his luck would have it, the attendant at the desk in the hotel lobby regrettably informed him that there were no available rooms and suggested he tried another hotel. Luhan muttered a reluctant “thank you” under his breath and turned away, sighing heavily at the thought of returning to his abusive girlfriend who he may or may not have murdered just twenty minutes beforehand.

Without realising what he was doing, he soon found himself running in the opposite direction of the apartment he and his girlfriend - Suji, a twenty one year old Korean-American he’d met whilst chasing a golden retriever that had stolen the book he’d been reading - had been living in together for several months. They’d been together for over a year and things were getting serious between them. He didn’t want to go back quite yet. He knew what she’d say to him if she was in fact still alive: that he’d ruined everything and that he deserved everything he got. And she’d be right, of course.

The precise coordinates of his location were a mystery to him, but he knew it was dark and late at night - midnight, in fact - and that the air was cold even though his body was hot and his palms were sweaty.

Then he hit the ground - face first. His eyes snapped shut. His hands grabbed wildly at the mossy earth but he couldn’t cling on. The rest of his body fell down and hung there in the gap where the ground should have been. He swung his legs frantically from side to side in an attempt to climb back up but it was already too late.

He was already falling.

The bottom of a grubby ditch was what Luhan was expecting to wake up to, but when he gained consciousness after stumbling down a dark hole in the ground of a place he’d never come across before, he found himself lying in the middle of a rather busy town square instead. It might have even been the noise of the villagers that woke him up and in a way, it was a wonder that none of them had trampled on him yet.

Before he’d been given the chance to fully take in his surroundings, a hand appeared in front of his face and a voice instructed him to get up, so he did. He took the hand and it pulled him up to his feet, but then he was swept away by the force of the hand pulling him into the direction in which he had already been facing the very moment he got to his feet.

After a short while they finally stopped at the front door of a quaint little cottage with grey stone walls, a white wooden door and old-fashioned window frames. He hadn’t a clue where he was, but he already loved it much more than the cruel, unforgiving world he was used to living in.

“Go on then,” the voice said, making him look back at the door and realise the young man who’d brought him there had opened the door and was waiting for him to join him inside the cottage. He cautiously stepped through the door and smiled gratefully at the stranger, thanking him for his kindness. “You’d better be careful,” the man warned him as he closed the door and led him into the living room. “People aren’t so accepting of your kind around here.” Luhan frowned at him in confusion, prompting him to elaborate. “You’re human.”

That explanation only confused Luhan even more.

“They don’t educate your kind on history much, do they?” the stranger sighed. “Look, down here, we’re not… not human. Some of us - like me, for example - may look it, but really…” he trailed off, seemingly getting distracted by a bowl of water sitting on the coffee table. Walking over to it and crouching down beside the coffee table, he instructed Luhan to watch him as he dipped his fingers into the bowl, dowsing them in the clear crystal water. As his skin touched the water, it began to mutate and within a few seconds, the smooth skin that had once covered his fingers was gone and in its place was an aquamarine mosaic composed of hundreds of tiny scales. “We’re monsters.”

That didn’t make much sense, but it made just as much sense to Luhan as falling down a hole and winding up in some underground city, and at least it provided an explanation as to why the stranger’s skin had fallen off and been replaced with the scales of a sea creature. Apparently it only happened when he touched water. Luhan hoped he never saw him touch water again.

It wasn’t long before he found out that the stranger’s name was Junmyeon and that two other so-called monsters lived with him in the cottage: Jongdae and Yixing. Of these, one of them most certainly didn’t look human. Whilst Jongdae still had two arms, two legs and was generally humanoid, the fact that instead of skin his body was covered in glistening emerald scales and that his tongue was long and forked like a snake’s, it was pretty obvious upon glancing at him that he was most certainly not human. Fortunately, Luhan had been warned about his unusual appearance prior to their meeting, so he was prepared for a shock.

It was a shame Junmyeon hadn’t told him anything about the other resident, Yixing, as if Luhan had been warned about him beforehand, he probably wouldn’t have been stupid enough as to mistake the ring of enormous brightly coloured petals encircling his face like a lion’s mane as a rather odd and eccentric fashion statement. It was embarrassing for both him and Yixing, but the other two residents seemed to find his mistake alarmingly amusing.

“No-one’s ever said that to me before,” Yixing commented, smiling, regarding Luhan’s compliment on his “bold fashion choice”. “It’s actually part of my body,” he explained. “I assume Junmyeon’s told you about our… er… well, that we’re monsters.”

“Yixing!” Jongdae hissed, gasping playfully. “You actually said the m word?” Yixing’s jaw dropped but Jongdae just laughed at him while Luhan stood there gazing at the two of them, utterly clueless. Yixing looked absolutely devastated with himself until Junmyeon quietly explained to him that there was no such thing as the m word and that saying the word “monster” wasn’t a big deal, that it was even a commonly used word - pointing out that his best friend worked in a restaurant whose name included such word.

After they’d all been introduced to one another, Junmyeon led his newest guest to the room he would be staying in for the duration of his visit - not that this guest had been aware he would be staying in the cottage. He just wanted to go home. Now that he’d landed in an underground world he wasn’t even sure really existed, he cared less about his girlfriend abusing him and more about simply getting home. It didn’t matter that he often ended up with bruises and the occasional fracture or broken bone. What mattered was that he got back to where he truly belonged as quickly as possible.

But Junmyeon was being such a gracious host, especially considering the fact that they were strangers and that he was of a species particularly disliked among the citizens of the underground world, there was no way he could reject his hospitality. And the room Junmyeon showed him to was so beautiful - just like the rest of the cottage - he saw no harm in staying for a couple of days.

The walls were painted ivory and the carpeted floor was candyfloss pink with a beige rug laid out in front of the door. In the centre of the room was one small bed, with a pillow and blanket that matched the walls and the carpet. There was a window on the wall behind the bed - adorned with pastel blue curtains - and a golden-framed mirror attached the wall above the dressing table. A mahogany-coloured wardrobe stood next to the dressing table and an old-fashioned writing desk stood across from it, on the other side of the room, and hanging on the wall above that was dainty watercolour painting of a swan sitting delicately on a lake.

“You can stay here as long you need,” Junmyeon told him, leading him inside the room. “Of course, we’d be happy to show you around the underground, but just… be careful, okay? We’ll help you as much as we can, but we can’t defend you against the monarch if the royal guards find you. Most people down here don’t really mind humans that much - just as long as you can prove to them you’re not a threat.”

“But he’s got battle scars,” Jongdae interrupted, poking his head out from behind the half-closed door and pointing at the scratch above Luhan’s right eye. The two monsters stared at him, awaiting an explanation, but Luhan just shrugged at them shyly. He wasn’t ready to tell them such intimate details about his life, nor did he want to even remember how he got the scar. It had been his own fault anyway. It always was.

After waiting for a few moments and receiving no explanation, Junmyeon diffused the situation by instructing Jongdae to leave him alone for a while. The two of them returned downstairs to the living room where Yixing had been waiting for them, leaving Luhan alone in his new, temporary bedroom.

He splayed out on the bed, sighing heavily to himself, before rolling over onto his side and curling up into the foetal position. He thought of Suji and the scratch above his eye started to hurt. It was a recent injury, and not the only one. There were several others - bruises, cuts, grazes and scratches - some of which were minor and some of which he’d needed medical treatment for, that he’d managed to keep hidden under his clothes. The scratch on his face, however, was one that he couldn’t hide. As of yet, nobody but Jongdae had asked him about it, and he planned on keeping it that way. Nobody needed to know how clumsy he’d been, how stupid he’d been to spill red wine on his girlfriend’s new white dress. It was expensive, too, so really she’d been kind to stop hitting him when she did. As far as Luhan was concerned, he’d deserved much worse.

He was so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he barely noticed when he fell asleep, curled up on top of the blanket, cold but too tired to do anything about it.

And by the time he woke up the following morning, he was starving - not literally, of course, though he felt like he was. When he climbed out of the bed and headed towards the door, he found that Junmyeon had beaten him to it and was already waiting for him carrying a silver tray full of various delicious yet slightly odd-looking breakfast foods. “You have Yixing to thank for this,” he told the human, ing the metallic tray at him. “Here, eat it in bed, and come downstairs whenever you’re ready. Take your time.” With that, he his heel and walked off, presumably to wake up Jongdae, who he could hear snoring loudly in the next room.

Luhan spent the next two days living in exactly the same way, doing exactly the same at almost exactly the same time. And he didn’t do much at that. The food tasted strange and felt weird, though it wasn’t unpleasant (not all of it, anyway). The rest of the time he spent wandering about the house and talking to the three other residents.

So far, he found Jongdae quite annoying though he was glad to be around someone with a good sense of humour (Suji was unbelievably serious most of the time so he didn’t dare joke around her). Junmyeon’s seriousness seemed to balance out the comedic relief brought by Jongdae, but he too was no stranger to the odd joke. Yixing was perhaps his favourite out of the three. He was kind and gentle, much like Junmyeon, he wasn’t stupid but he was certainly no genius, and he was just… innocent. And he slept a lot, always falling asleep in the most inconvenient places at the most inconvenient times.

The third day was when his routine suddenly changed. He’d made up his mind the day before: if they wouldn’t take him outside, he’d go on his own. He had no intention of going very far away from the cottage, and he stayed true to that intention. Junmyeon and the others had been reluctant to take him outside of the cottage even when they needed to go somewhere anyway for a reason Luhan didn’t really understand. They simply told him he was safer where he was, but Luhan couldn’t help fixating on the fact that where he was wasn’t home. It may have been safer but it wasn’t where he belonged. He was a grown man who saw no reason to let them keep him captive there, so on the third day, when no-one was round, he snuck out the door and explored the underground, never straying too far away from the cottage.

There wasn’t much to look at - just a few other rustic-looking houses and cottages, each one completely detached from the others, and an alleyway that looked very much like the ones he was used to seeing on the service. Up above him was a light blue sky with a few static, unmoving white clouds scattered around it. He frowned at it, confused because if he really was deep underground, why would there be a sky several metres above him? Something else that he was confused about was where the light was coming from, because it can’t have been the sun if he was really underground.

As he turned away from the alley, about to head back in the direction of the cottage, he saw something drop from the roof of the house on his right out the corner of his eye and he turned to see what it was.

That was a mistake.

If he’d run towards the cottage and never looked back, he probably would have been safe.