She came home empty-handed, having not actually bought anything from the mall. She had fun accompanying Min Hee and helping her choose clothes, along with talking to each other about all sorts of random things on the way but she hadn't seen anything she desperately needed and if she didn't need it, there was little point in buying it. According to the rules she had set herself, wasting money on useless products was illegal and she tried her best to never go against this. After all, there were very important rationales behind all her rules...

"Oppa, where's dad?" Su Hyun asked her elder brother as she headed into the living room, seeing him sprawled out on the sofa, busy texting on the phone.

"Still at work, of course. It's Thursday. He'll only be coming back at 9." Her brother replied, eyes still glued to the phone screen.

"Oh..." Su Hyun said. She'd forgotten that his second job required him to work till that late. She wondered if he would have time to eat dinner.

As she dragged her school bag towards her bedroom, she found herself pausing in the middle of the corridor to stare at the family photos hanged on the wall. Part of her didn't quite want to look at it again, didn't want to be reminded of the past. Yet she couldn't really help it. She'd been trying hard to forget that day ever since it had happened but the recent nightmare had pulled the memory out again. Little photographs, some black and white, some coloured, some moving and animated even... They floated across the surface of her mind, like white flowers gently blown onto a lake, barely touching the water as they moved along, directed by the breath of the cold wind... And as the flowers had glided across the lake, she remembered that the water had rippled, distorting her reflection as she stared into it after the wake, hiding the red eyes and tear-stained cheeks... Blinking away a potential tear, she hurried into her bedroom and shut the door quickly behind her.

-

Kwangmin sighed, resting his head on the table and mindlessly spinning the top in his hand, "I hope she comes again...At least it'll be something interesting and different..." He said, then sighed again and closed his eyes, letting the toy top fall. It was such a boring life to live stuck in there.

"You could go and watch the mirrors, if you want. " Hyunseong suggested, "Minwoo seems to be intrigued by it today. My guess is someone dreamt up a ual fantasy..."

"Hyung!" Minwoo protested. From his angle, Kwangmin couldn't see what dream Minwoo was actually looking at through the mirrors but from the time spent with him, Kwangmin had learnt that there were many different sides and layers to this boy so he really couldn't be sure if Hyunseong was joking. Not that it mattered, anyway. Kwangmin had had his own brief experience viewing the R-rated, though in all honesty, he found it disgusting and terribly artificial. He might have committed big moral faults in the past but at least he could pride himself in the fact that he had never dirtied it with anything ual. Not that couldn't be pure...but the way his friends had viewed it and had viewed girls had definitely been wrong, horribly wrong on many levels.

There was a flash and suddenly a girl appeared, lying flat on the ground beside him. Kwangmin immediately stood up from his seat, staring at the girl and biting back a loud exclamation of shock. She, in turn, stared back, looking absolutely terrified.

"Where- Wait, it's the same place!...What do you want? What-what's happening?" she exclaimed, getting into a sitting position and backing up against the wall. All 6 boys looked at her shocked expressions and the room was silent for a while as noticed why the girl looked so familiar.

"You're- you came here before, didn't you? Recently? Are you the same girl?" Kwangmin asked.

"Last...last night, I think. I...dreamt of this place. And all six of you. Now I'm back here again...” Su Hyun stuttered nervously, “Is this…A dream then?” She felt like she was both asking the boys and herself. If it truly was a dream, well... It sure didn't feel like one.

"So you're the same girl? How did you get here?" Minwoo asked. If the same girl could come here twice…it meant that there was something special about her arrival, didn’t it? It wasn’t a fluke. The mirror breaking under the small force of the thrown book…It must have happened for…for something.

"How should I know?" she exclaimed, "My last memory was of me lying on the bed, trying to fall asleep and suddenly I find myself here. I don't know how I got here! And who are you guys? And you still haven’t told me where this is! And…and what was with the making a knife come out of thin air thing? Oh my gosh, what’s happening…” Su Hyun refused to look at them and stared at the ground instead. Last night, she hadn’t had enough time to fully absorb the situation and proceed to freak out, as the whole I-can-make-a-knife-appear-out-of-thin-air-and-most-likely-I’m-going-to-kill-you-with-it thing done by the guy had made her faint. But now that she had, she really was freaking out. Really, really freaking out. There was the possibility that all of it was a dream, of course but it really didn’t feel like one. The floor felt real. The coldness of the room felt real. The- She looked at her hand, which was trembling slightly and then she pinched herself hard, resulting in her yelping in pain. She noticed one of the boys was attempting to stifle a laugh and she glared at him. Somehow, in the midst of her shock and fear about how she had gotten there and where she was and who these boys were in the first place, she’d actually mustered up the courage to glare at him. Wonderful.

“What?” The boy protested, his hands unconsciously combing through his brown hair as he said this, “Even when they’re trying to test reality, people don’t usually pinch themselves that hard…”

Su Hyun groaned. It wasn’t her fault she had such a low pain tolerance…

“So…Erm…Who are you, again?” The blonde one asked, hoping the girl would reply this time.

She bit her lip as she reconsidered the situation. She didn’t know them and they didn’t know her. She got the feeling they didn’t know how she had gotten there, either. All she knew was that she’d somehow ended up in this room after falling asleep and that it wasn’t the first time that had happened. Last night, she’d fainted in this room and found herself back in her bedroom in the morning. Was that the only she could escape? Did they have to make her lose unconsciousness if she wanted to leave? The thought of all this made her slightly dizzy.

“I’m…Su Hyun. Park Su Hyun. How about you guys?” She asked, looking up at them. She realized that even if she had stood up from the floor, she would still have had to tilt her head up slightly to look them in the eyes. She was of average height so that made the boys quite tall, then. A random thought – that they were actually rather cute, as well – suddenly popped into her mind. Pushing it away, she silently blamed its appearance on the fact that she was semi-hysterical. Semi-hysterical people think of all sorts of nonsense. It was normal, all normal…To find yourself transported to a room with 6 young strangers in it after you fell asleep and to have freaked out about it, pinched yourself hard, been made fun of and then to have the random notion to call these 6 male strangers cute and good-looking even though you have no idea who they were and for all you knew, they don’t even exist and you’re just dreaming and after a while you’ll wake up and ponder about whether or not it was real just to maybe dream about this again the next time you fall asleep...Yeah. That was normal too. Woe to the semi-hysterical.

The guys looked at each other, dumbfounded. Here was a girl they’d never met before, brought into this room with no knowledge of how she’d been brought here in the first place. Was there any harm in telling her who they were? Or at least to tell her their names? Minwoo considered this, then shrugged. “I’m Minwoo.”

“I’m Youngmin.” The blonde one said.  “Kwangmin.” His brunette twin followed.

“Donghyun.” He looked the oldest, along with the most cold. “Hyunseong.” He was the one who’d laughed at her. Sigh.

“I’m Jeongmin.” The one with the knife and the pretty eyes.

Pretty eyes? Su Hyun thought. You’re going insane. That’s the one who wanted to kill you, remember? Ahh, maybe they all want to kill me…

“So…any idea how you popped in here? Any idea at all?” Hyunseong asked.

She shook her head. She was clueless about what was happening here, apparently as clueless as they were.

“Could you guys first tell me where I am? Where this is? I’ll…I’ll really like to know…” Su Hyun asked, staring at the floor and avoiding their gazes again. Her shock had subsided now but the leftover fear still made her heart pound against the ribcage. Did someone kidnap her while she was fast asleep? But according to what had happened the previous night, arriving at this room had all just part of a dream, a possible nightmare…Though it’d never actually felt like a dream but she’d woken up the previous morning, hadn’t she? So that made it a dream. That made all this a dream. But once again, it didn’t feel like one. Ahh, how did one tell dream and reality apart, anyway? Her school’s philosophy teacher had once questioned the class on how real their lives actually were and how they were supposed to know the life they led was actually real, that it wasn’t just a…fragment of their imagination, or a dream.

Su Hyun bit her lip. The only answer she’d come up to answer her teacher’s question then was that it didn’t feel like a dream. That the life she led, waking up, going to school, meeting her friends… It didn’t feel like a dream. Her teacher had told her it wasn’t logical to base her argument for the question of her existence on feelings but she really couldn’t think of anything else to base it on at that moment. But now she was left in the terrible situation where she had to figure out what was real and what wasn’t and if she was to base it on her feelings once again…Then it was real. It felt real. All of it. It wasn't logical but it was real. Horribly real.

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Thank you so much for subscribing and reading! <3 I made a cover image for this story last night. I hope you like it~

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