3:27 pm

“I can see that. This entire painting seems to be about a king falling.” He shook his head.

“-------, don’t you see? KING, the number one player in NIGHTMARE died. He has been replaced by JACK, whose new name is now MASTER. After 597 rounds of playing this wicked game, the King has fallen. The man’s real name was Jason Chan. He died at the age of thirty-five. He had been playing for almost seven years. I think he holds some clues to surviving this game. If we study how he was able to live for so long then we could live to play just as many levels as he did, maybe even more.”

You sighed. Did you really want to play that stupid game for seven tiresome years? Death seemed like a fantastic thing to you. You wanted to give up. It was a pointless fight that couldn’t be won. Sure, you felt like a worthless piece of , like you had no point in existing unless you were surviving, but each nightmare was taking a toll on you. Your wrist glittered with the LXVIII. Sixty-eight trips to NIGHTMARE. Almost ten months of agony fighting against unknown monsters. Living and torture, or peace and death? “That is a nice painting Yoochun, but I would rather join Yunho in the player graveyard.”

“Would you really? Do you want to die the same way? Suddenly becoming paralyzed thanks to poison entering your blood stream doesn’t sound like the way to go. Wouldn’t you rather go out in glory? I’m not trying to seem too eager, but Jaejoong and I both agree on this, you need to be interesting to stay alive.”

“Yoochun, I am already in the top fifty players. I have enough glory to go around. Even Dae is in the top 150. Anybody above level ten is famous among the newbie players. All those level ones blog about how they want to do some of the amazing things we do. They talk like their first nightmares weren’t terrifying. They don’t know how quickly they will die, and they are the lucky ones. They don’t have to wait for death to meet them. It is kind and saves them from this agonizing game. I don’t want to continue.”

“Well, I can’t change your mind, but I can try. All I can say is wish me luck.” You grabbed onto his shoulder and silently asked him why. “I’m going to be leaving Korea for a month. I’ll be in Europe to see the art galleries there. In England I plan on visiting Erika’s grave, even though there isn’t a body inside. I will of course see the museums in France and Italy. I’ll also be in Russia for a short period of time to visit some historic buildings. In that month, I very may die.”

You slowly closed your eyes and let your hand drop. It was difficult to think of one of your closest friends dying. You treated each member of your group as your own family, and almost as your own self. Yoochun was taking a risky move. “Oh, well then, good luck.” It was so hard you started to walk away from him. It was done unconsciously. When things became difficult you ran. That was how you had become.

“------! Don’t you want to see the rest of the paintings?” You didn’t even want to see one. Your exit was silent.

1:36 pm

She didn’t want to be there. “Dae, you have been a serious bummer lately! We are here to have fun. Like, when do we even have time to relax with all the exams we have been having? Are you really going to ruin our good time?” Dae revealed a fake smile. She wasn’t trying to depress them, but she never felt happy anymore. NIGHTMARE was always on her mind, and that wasn’t really a bright subject. Even when she was with her ‘friends’ she kept a distant attitude.

“Dae had been embracing her inner Lolita too deeply. The angelic Lolita Dae has been replaced with this weird demonic Lolita.” But Dae wasn’t even into that. She had lost all desire to entertain herself with fashion. Her friends had respected her for a few months, but then they insisted she keep up her cute style.

Dae was a disappointment. Her dresses lacked the cuteness they needed. They were simple, lacking detail, plain, boring. Very smoothly, she was showing her lack of interest. “I don’t treat this the same way as you guys.”

“Oh Dae, we are your friends, we know how good you are at this.” They didn’t know the pain she was in. “Once these ty tests end you will back into our wonderful world.” She never wanted to be stuck in a single world again.

“Back in our little world?!? Does it look like I want to do this for the next thirty years? How do each of you expect to really live on your own dressed like little girls? Are you planning on getting a job wearing those frills? Are you going to continue buying dresses, or are you going to make them yourselves? I don’t want to be trapped in this fashion when there are so many more important things to deal with. You are all idiots!”

Her small cluster of friends backed off. The building tension between them had been growing ever since she first canceled on them. After that they realized that she was hiding something from them, and she had no intention of telling them about it. They each lost trust in her, and their friendship had been crumbling. By inviting her out they tried to include her, but she was always secluding herself. She was no longer an exciting person to hang out with. She didn’t make jokes or pull pranks. She had lost character.

“Dae, just go home.” She was close to crying. Her mind was too stressed out to handle another things. Her arms flew up in a flurry and she spun around.

“Fine! I think you are fools for doing things like this. I am a bigger Pabo for doing it with you. I have moved on, you should all do the same.” Her back disappeared into the streets. None of them stopped her.

Dae had been lying to her friends the moment she hid her nightmares from them. She pretended that nothing was wrong and that she was perfectly fine. She acted like she still wanted to be with them, like she was still interested in the things they did. But everything had mushed together and she couldn’t tell the difference between likes and dislikes. It was an almost instantaneous change. Her love for the fashion, the great accessorizing and designing turned into a necessary need to dress up to fool others. She wasn’t Dae, she was FAKER.

************************************

I did say that I was no longer going to write the nightmares right? You'll just have to pay attention because I might have killed someone off without really mentioning it. Like Yunho, and Erika, and Junsu. I wish someone had told me that I had messed up big time. I said in the second chapter or so that Yoochun had lived in America at one point, but later on I said that he had never left the country. I really wish someone had pointed that out to me after I put it up! I'm not changing it, but I should say that I know it is wrong. Oh, and now we know why Dae is FAKER. I thought it would have been more 'interesting', for lack of a better word, but I just don't have the will to write.

comments are motivation~♥