By the end of Monday evening, Yeonhee had succumbed and found herself on a Zenyu super-monarchist blog that practically worshipped the ground Prince Yixing stood on.  She normally would never have ventured into such depths of the internet, but after the conversation with the prince’s bodyguard over the weekend, she was anxious to know when the prince would be back in internet range and therefore when he’d be able to see her apology picture, and so she’d stooped to trying to discover something of his movements and timetable.

The prince, it turned out, was an exceptionally busy young man.  Yeonhee had spent a full twenty minutes staring at the schedule he’d had for the past few months, which the blog admins had apologised for it not being totally accurate since they didn’t know where he was all the time and no official schedule with everything on it was ever issued, only statements here and there about what events the prince or other members of the royal family would be attending, and then newspaper or online announcements from various events and companies that were pleased to welcome the royals for this, that or the other.  The projected schedule that the admins had pieced together for the next few months looked almost as bad.

To be fair, Yeonhee wasn’t sure how many of them were actual hard work as opposed to eating a lot of good food and snipping a ribbon here or there (or smashing champagne against the side of a ship) to declare something open, but between that and the stretches of dates marked out in blue with ABROAD (followed by the country), he barely seemed to have a day where he wasn’t doing anything.  In fact, the Saturday he’d tipped up in her room was the only day apart from one Sunday at the beginning of the month that had nothing on it in November, and he only had three days in October which appeared to have been completely free, too.

The level of obsession from the admins running the blog was quite something else, as well.  Yeonhee suspected that they were mostly girls, but also that they would give the paparazzi a good run for their money, because she had only seen this level of stalking when it came to celebrities, and it was actually quite scary.  She felt pretty sorry for the prince after seeing all the super-high-quality photographs, a good number of which looked like they weren’t official ones from official events, or had been taken on the sly (if you could do that with a massive camera lens), especially the close-ups of his face, almost all of which linked to another page on the blog dissecting his “look” for the day, what his clothes were made of, how expensive they were, whether his hairstyle suited him and so on.

There also seemed to be a bit of a fanclub for his bodyguards, which amused Yeonhee no end until she realised she’d just wasted away an entire hour and a half jumping from photo to photo of Junmyeon (and one or two of Min as well) and she guiltily closed the window.  It turned out that Junmyeon was the favourite bodyguard of most of the blog-goers, no doubt because of his good looks, and because of his position and because he was Hanmi, they’d dubbed him Suho, or, literally, guardian.  Min, she discovered, was half Hanmi and half Zenyu, and the blog largely referred to him as Xiumin.  The entire detail of bodyguards appeared to be around ten or so, with a good number of them either Hanmi or mixed, and there was one (which did actually make Yeonhee laugh at the level of effort and frustration that had gone in to discovering more about him) who had never been seen without his sunglasses and whose name (and anything else about him) they were still trying to find out.  Because literally nothing was known about him, he was just referred to as “Agent X”.  Something about his build looked a little familiar, but then he was likely one of the bodyguards Yeonhee had seen in the prince’s entourage.

The trip to Europe was supposedly a week-long summit, the prince having left the country the previous Wednesday evening and due back the next Friday morning, and so Yeonhee relaxed.  He’d see the apology when he came back, which Junmyeon would no doubt make sure of, and in the meantime she could stare at images of his Zenyu secretary Luhan and try to work out how on earth a man could be so ethereally beautiful.

“Yooooooooo!”

Her bedroom door smashed open to reveal Baekhyun and she hastily closed the window and turned to face him.

“We’ve got a gig!  Come and listen!”

Yeonhee was left with no choice but to allow herself to be dragged along to a rather unusual frat party to mark the beginning of December (except that it was a Monday a few days in when the Friday, Saturday and Sunday would all have been better choices for a party both from the point of view of the date and the day of the week) that only had live music and banned alcohol and revolved around some kind of pine cone fight that Jongin turned out to be incredibly good at.  After declining more requests to dance than she could count, Yeonhee finally found Sehun on the ground floor of the fraternity building and collapsed into the couch beside him.  He was busy eating a pot of yoghurt with a spoon made from the folded up foil top as he scrolled through his tablet.

“You can’t possibly be working,” she complained.

“I’m not.  I’m looking through the Prime Minister’s bill of integration.”

“Is it any good?”

Sehun screwed up his face.  “Meh.  Most of it’s sh*t, but there are one or two good things.  There’s some quite controversial stuff.”

Yeonhee scooped out a fingerful of yoghurt.  “Such as?  Ugh, Sehun, mango yoghurt?  Seriously?”

“I like mango yoghurt,” he muttered as he moved the pot out of her reach.  “Well, one of the main issues of controversy is that he wants to raise taxes by three percent in economically advanced areas and for families earning above a certain threshold, which basically a tacit we’re going to raise taxes on Zenyu people and the Zenyu naturally have spotted this and aren’t very happy about it—”

“What does he want to do with the money raised?”

“That’s the thing.  He wants to put it into education in ten of the most deprived areas of the country, nine of which are Hanmi.”

“That’s good, surely?”

“Except that his proposed education bill stresses the importance of all Hanmi children learning Zenyu in school to raise their job prospects, and pe