It was the newspaper that finally convinced Chunhee. They were all crowded around her kitchen table, when Dongwoo wandered off for a moment, drawing curious stares. He returned shortly and set the daily paper down in front of her, pointing at the date. It was three days since the last day she could remember.

“So I was in that state for three days?” she asked. “Which means you guys were in my mind for three days? How did that work?” Now that she was looking at everyone’s faces more closely, they all looked tired.

“We managed,” Woohyun sighed. “We were lucky that it was a weekend…though we did have to skip a day of class. It was basically going without stopping. The only breaks we took were to eat. I mean, although your own mind actually did a lot of the work for us once we took care of the beginning steps, we still had to keep track of everything and monitor your progress. Sunggyu and Juri probably had it hardest of all, their jobs meant they had to stay alert constantly. Once Sunggyu recovered your memories, he had to hold onto them so that they didn’t get scattered by your mind again. Juri had to maintain the worldspace’s current state, like I said before.”

“We took a risk and turned off our sleep mechanism,” said Sunggyu. “Otherwise there was basically no way we could keep ourselves going for that long.”

“It was worse than pulling an all-nighter,” Juri contributed, yawning.

“I’m sorry…”

“No need to be,” Sungyeol said. “It was for a good cause.”

Then, Chunhee realized she had almost forgotten something. “Where’s my dad?” she asked. He hadn’t come to see her even though she was conscious again, back from the living dead.

All of a sudden nobody was meeting her eyes. “About that…” Woohyun began.

She peered at them, confused and also suspicious. “Wait, don’t tell me you did something to him? Where is he?” Panic rose inside her, and she made a move to get up.

Woohyun grabbed her hands. “Calm down. He’s in his room, sleeping. We had to put him under, otherwise he wouldn’t have gone along with what we’re doing.”

“So you didn’t screw around with his mind?”

“We promise we didn’t,” said Sungjong, smiling reassuringly at her.

“Good. Can I go see him?”

“Of course.”

Chunhee got up, as did Woohyun, and the two of them went to her dad’s bedroom together, leaving the others to talk amongst themselves.

When she entered the room, she found her dad resting on his bed, breathing deeply and evenly, fast asleep, just as they had said. She was about to reach out to shake him when Woohyun stopped her.

“This isn’t normal sleep, so I’ll have to go bring him out first,” he explained. That said, he closed his eyes for a few seconds, concentrating hard on something.

Moments after he opened his eyes, her dad stirred.

“Dad!” Chunhee exclaimed, jumping forward to kneel beside the bed.

“Chunhee?” he mumbled. With one hand on his temple, he sat up. “You’re alright?” He reached out his arms, and she threw herself at him in a bear hug. She hadn’t hugged him far too long.

“Yes, dad. Thanks to a little help from some friends.”

***

A few days later Chunhee met up with Sungyeol, just the two of them, to reconnect. Unlike in her dream, it wasn’t that awkward. They seemed to fall into their earlier pattern pretty easily.

“How did you manage to meet Woohyun?” she asked. “I started dating him after we’d lost contact. You didn’t know him before you knew me, right?”

“No, I didn’t. It was completely by chance, actually. And you wouldn’t believe the weird things that have happened to us since, though.”

“What, you mean like mind powers?” She pressed her fingers to her temples and glared at him like she was going to blast mind waves at him or something.

He laughed. “Yeah, definitely.” Then, his eyes came to rest on her neck, and the golden chain around it. “Wait, you still have that thing?”

She lifted the necklace out from underneath her shirt, running a finger over it. “Of course. It was your special gift.”

“Oh, so you did what I told you to do,” he concluded, grinning.

“Yeah, I did.” She fumbled with locket, trying to open it.

“You don’t have to show me. I already see him all the time, anyway.”

She stopped trying. He was right. They both knew what lay inside.

It was a picture, of course. A picture of a man with many identities: the conductor, the king, a man with psychic power who still had a lot of explaining to do, her boyfriend…

Woohyun.