When Yeonhee started getting calls from the press half an hour after the prince had left asking for an updated statement on the prince’s visit and speech, she was still rattled enough to palm them all off to Sowon instead with the excuse that the other girl had actually been in the room.  Previously, she would have made a statement whether or not she’d attended the event she was protesting, but something told her that Prince Yixing and his bodyguard Min would sit there laughing as they read through articles where she said something about an event she’d not even been able to get in through the door for, and she had no desire to give him another reason to feel vindicated in taking the moral high ground.

Eventually, she logged into Easyl to select the final prompt she was going to use that month, deliberately didn’t tell the person that she was using their idea for a modern re-imagining of the Fall in case it turned out to be the Prime Minister, and set about sketching.  Forty-five minutes later, she realised that the serpent looked unforgivably similar to the prince, and she crumpled the piece of paper up and scrapped it.  She shouldn’t be entertaining his presence even in her thoughts.

Before she could start again, she got a call from Sowon.

“Yeonheeeeeeeeee!” the girl whined, sounding flustered.  “They want me to go on TV!  What do I do?  What do I even write for an updated statement for them to release?”

“TV?” asked Yeonhee.  “When?  Which station?”

“The national news show at six.  What do I saaaaaaaaaay?”

“Well. . .”  Yeonhee tried not to sound like she was wondering the exact same thing. “Start off with all our usual points about why a monarchy isn’t suitable to this day and age—”

“But Yeonhee, you don’t understand!” Sowon wailed.  “His speech yesterday was really good!  Really, really, really good!”

“You can even say that if you want.  It still doesn’t mean the country ought to have a privileged family lording it over the rest of us.”

“This is too difficult for me,” Sowon protested.  Yeonhee wasn’t sure whether it was in response to what she’d just said or if Sowon was ignoring her.  “Can I just do the written statements and send someone else?”

Yeonhee shrugged, then remembered Sowon couldn’t see her.  “If you’d be more comfortable with that, by all means.”

“You think they’ll say yes to that?”

“If they want a segment, they will.”

It took another twenty minutes to calm Sowon down and to assure her that yes, she did have some autonomy in this, and yes, it was all going to be fine.  That sorted, Yeonhee decided she needed a break from her room and her computer and rang Mihae to go out for a walk.

They actually ended up going to the gym, since Mihae wanted to train up for a varsity netball match.  As far as Yeonhee was concerned, the levels for fitness required for netball compared to, say, football or cheerleading were absolutely negligible, but Mihae was a bit of a fitness freak and for some reason she’d missed her early morning workout.  Mihae was also very surprised that Yeonhee had agreed to accompany her, because Yeonhee usually stayed far, far away from the gym.

“Is something bugging you?” Mihae asked, wiping sweat from her face with a hand towel as they walked back to the dorms.

Yeonhee shook her head.  “I was feeling ill earlier and I just needed some exercise.”

The treadmills, she had to admit, had been a great distraction from Prince Yixing, but then, she supposed, feeling like you were dying from lack of breath was probably a great distraction from anything unpleasant.  Mihae left it at that, but as they parted ways on the first floor to go to their respective rooms and shower, she called back over her shoulder, “by the way, movie night tonight?  We haven’t gathered for one in a while and apparently Baekhyun has popcorn!”

Baekhyun did have popcorn.  The intention had been to take over the common room on his floor, which didn’t have the best TV screen but did have the comfiest sofas (and beanbags), but a group of second years were using the only Wii in the building with it for a Dance Revolution competition and they hastily backtracked before Sehun could catch up with them and insist they joined in.

“Change of plan,” Baekhyun murmured out loud as he typed a message to Sehun, “we are going to common room on top floor.  Bring chocolate.”

“Scavenger,” Mihae snorted.

“I’m just using open doors of opportunity,” he replied distractedly, scrolling through messages on his phone screen.  “Chanyeol’s asking if he can invited Kyungsoo along.  That cool with everyone?”

Yeonhee could see that he’d already sent a yes in response, but everybody was cool with it anyway and so they trekked up to the top floor common room.  Chanyeol joined them half way up with a gigantic bowl of still-steaming pasta that he was trying to mix pesto into while he walked, Kyungsoo hovering beside him and determinedly grating Parmesan into the mix.  It wasn’t the easiest thing for him to do since Chanyeol was so much taller and was cradling the plastic bowl in the crook of his arm, which was almost as high as Kyungsoo’s shoulders.

“What are we watching?” Chanyeol asked as he settled into the sofa directly opposite the TV and finally gave Kyungsoo access to the bowl.

Baekhyun made a beeline for the DVD rack.  “I was thinking The Exorcist or The Exorcism of Emily Rose for a nice evening in.”

Everybody except Kyungsoo and Sehun, who was busy fiddling with the remote to get the TV screen on, shot him looks of alarm.

All Kyungsoo did was raise an eyebrow.  “With popcorn?” he asked.

That stumped Baekhyun.  “Salted popcorn?” he suggested.  “I mean, you and Yeol are eating pasta.”

“Just no,” the drummer said.  Baekhyun continued rummaging through the action and adventures movie section, having not even touched horror in the first place.

The TV blared into life when Sehun finally checked the batteries for the remote and discovered that somebody had put them in the wrong way up, and the theme for the six o’clock news blared out so loudly that everybody in the room jumped.

“Wait a second,” Kyungsoo said as Sehun scrambled to turn the volume down and switch onto the correct AVI.  “Wasn’t Prime Minister Huang supposed to be announcing something today about a bill for ethnic interaction?”

“It won’t be today – today’s Saturday,” Sehun pointed out, but he left the news on nonetheless.  “Besides, the government’s never going to let any kind of bill like that through.”

Chanyeol perked up around a mouthful of pestoed pasta.  “Wait, what bill?”

“Nobody’s exactly sure,” said Mihae as she settled herself on the floor with a stolen beanbag from the common room downstairs.  “Apparently he has this big integration plan he’s been touting around but neither of the main political parties likes it and if it’s actually going to materially help us Hanmi then you can be sure it’ll be overturned as soon as possible when some bitter Zenyu person with too much money decides to sue it up the court system.”

“I don’t know who he thinks he is to be cooking up a bill like that in the first place,” mumbled Sehun.  “I mean, he was the leader of the prototype One Nationers when he was at university a decade ago.  Granted, nothing like as bad as any of them are now, but the protos are the reason the One Nationers are currently mainstream.  You can’t just ignore that background.”

Yeonhee felt an uneasy change of sometimes people change, but she ignored it, only to jumped when a very familiar name was announced by the news presenter on screen, having already finished reeling off the main news titles they were going to talk about.

“. . . Joined in the studio today by Kim Taehyung, who is representing the student chapter of Republicans at our prestigious national university.  Thank you for being here tonight, Taehyung—”

Yeonhee missed the first question because she was absolutely frozen in shock.  Wasn’t Sowon supposed to be there?  Where was Sowon?  Wait, had Sowon actually chickened out?

Everybody in the room turned to look at her in confusion, clearly baffled as to why she wasn’t the one on screen.  It was well known that Yeonhee was the face of the Republican student movement nationally as well as at the university; she was the spokesperson and she always gave the interviews.

“. . . Wasn’t a bad speech, from what I understand,” Taehyung was saying.  “We’re not protesting the content of the speech.  That would be shooting ourselves in the foot.  But anybody could have made that speech.  I could have made that speech.  And to be honest, it didn’t really go far enough.  Prince Yixing touched on some of the issues facing the Hanmi community, but he didn’t actually go into them and lay them bare and call for proper change, which is what we really wanted to see.  And the thing is, if it weren’t for his position, he wouldn’t have been making the speech in the first place.  He’s coming from a position of privilege where—”

“The idiot,” Sehun exclaimed, loud enough to drown Taehyung’s voice out.  “He’s conflating republicanism with Hanmi suppression – that’s not what our movement is about!”

“And at the end of the day,” Taehyung continued, still talking in a very reasonable tone, “a good speech doesn’t rectify all the problems our ethnic group has struggled with for the past—”

“This is bullsh*t,” Sehun declared angrily, switching over to the AVI and cutting Taehyung off as he continued to complain about the ethnic tensions in the country.  “If he keeps talking like that, he’s going to get us associated with the radicals.  We have a couple of Zenyu students working with us – is he even considering how he’s alienating them?”

“You have to admit he’s kind of right on some of the stuff, though,” Mihae mumbled.

“Yes, but that’s not the point!” Sehun shot back.  “Sure, there’s still a lot of ethnic discord we could do without, and sure, the Zenyu have done some horrible things to us in the past and that absolutely shouldn’t be forgotten, but what our movement is focussed on is that we don’t feel a predominantly Zenyu royal family represents us – as in, the people, whether we’re Hanmi or Zenyu – and we don’t think that birth gives an automatic right to govern!  Kim Taehyung has just hijacked a movement the country’s only just beginning to respect for his own purposes and it could well undo years of hard work!”  He rounded on Yeonhee.  “Why did you let Kim Taehyung do the int