Late 2016, S.M. Research Facility #52, Exodeux Containment Hall
 

Flames rise all around you, embers stinging at your face and singeing your lab coat. The tongues of fire ever higher.

You didn’t know that there was enough flammable material in the containment hall to create a fire this large, violent, or tall, but you’d been around long enough to know that this was all due to Chanyeøl’s unbridled power.

His tank had been flaring up recently, reaching temperatures hot enough to boil water in a matter of seconds. Additional layers of heat-resistant material had been added to the containment cylinder, but analyses run by the various monitors attached to the device had alerted your team that the heat inside was only increasing.

Still, it had been enough to keep things under control. Or so you thought.

You don’t give this much more of your time as you’ve a much more pressing issue on your hand: ensuring the safety of the original EXO beings.

Your eyes sting with the smoke, but you dark between the few spots on the floor that have yet to set on fire. You press a dampened rag over your mouth to prevent as much smoke inhalation as possible, but you can still feel the abrasiveness irritating your lungs. Through your squinted eyes you can make out a few toned, bodies staggering away from the fire and towards the door. Other staff scurry around, faces partially obstructed by their elbows, as they try to usher the humanoid EXO beings to safety.

“Hey!” You try to shout, but your voice is thin from the air quality and the sound of chaos around you is louder. “Baekhyun! Sehun!” You shout again, fighting valiantly to get to the end of the hall where the last inhabited tanks usually are.

It does strike you that these men -- whatever they are; male-looking Beings at least -- probably don’t know they’ve been given names by the researchers. They don’t speak Korean, and they aren’t human. They might not understand your screaming.

None of that matters.

A tall, broad-shouldered man runs past you, fear in his eyes apparent. Out of the corner of your eye, you see some of the lab staff reaching out to him and draping a flame-retardant blanket over his shoulders.

“Baekhyun!” You scream, batting desperately at an ember singeing your sleeve. He’s the last of the EXO men you need to account for.

A blinding light flashes, and you wince before crumbling to the floor. You immediately lift the wet cloth from your nose to your eyes, anything to try to salve the piercing pain in your skull.

But you feel something. Another set of hands covers your eyes for you, and behind them you can see the bright orange behind your eyelids subside somewhat. You don’t have time to waste; no time to stay and try to recover your senses. The fire, you can feel, is going to kill you if you don’t get out, NOW. So you scurry to your feet, fingers scrabbling wherever you can, and they find the body of a person before you.

The pressure over your eyes lift, and the light you can sense from behind your closed eyelids seems much less intense than the flash before. You brave a look, squinting as best you can, and finally open your eyes wide when you realize the room is of an acceptable (if fiery) brightness.

Baekhyun stands before you, eyes wide open. The intensity of his gaze catches you off guard; it’s the most contact you’ve had with any of the EXO specimens since joining the project, and there’s something familiarly human in his eyes. But you grab his hand and sprint, ignoring the weird feeling of being seen that trickles down your back like a drop of ice cold water. You know it’s an impossible sensation, certainly in a giant hall that is aflame like a destructive wildfire, but you know it means something.

First things first. Save EXO.

You heave, hands dropping to your knees as you bend over to catch your breath. The reinforced metal door slams behind you, and the world shuffles around you as a lab staff member hands Baekhyun a blanket with which to cover himself. You’re all pushed towards a giant freight elevator, and BoA james her thumb into the first-floor button like there’s no tomorrow.

Honestly, there might not have been a tomorrow. You barely made it to the rest of the team with Baekhyun -- you might have escaped with your life by inches.

The elevator rises at an exceptional pace. It dings one, a sharp sound that spikes your heartbeat, before opening to the hangar.

People shout and you sprint off in all manner of odd directions. BoA shoves EXO beings and staff alike into whatever helicopters have been waiting for emergency extraction. You and Baekhyun are pushed into one before BoA jumps in, eyes scanning the rest of the hangar wildly  to check that the others are safely in their aircraft.

The blades whip with a steady thud, and the top of the hanger yawns open to a starry night sky.

You lift off, but not before your eyes are drawn to a pillar of flame erupting from the earth where your research wing would normally be hidden several stories underground. You didn’t know fires could do that -- destroy buildings so quickly, and so vertically -- but then again, you knew this was no natural fire.

“Who are they?” You ask, voice raspy from the smoke. You cough, gasping for fresh oxygen, but you gesture at dark figures running across the deserted field that hid your research facility. Each dark figure accompanied what you could tell were the six clones, at least judging by the contained lightning energy coming from one pair of escapees and the trail of fire left behind by another pair.

“I don’t know,” BoA pants beside you, gaze following yours. “But whoever they are, they’re out for blood.”

Baekhyun sits between you both, totally silent. You quiet, sitting back and fighting the instinct to speak to him like a regular person -- to ask him if he’s okay, to ask if he needs anything. But the way he sits, calm but somewhat shaken by the day’s events, unsettles you. It’s very human behavior, very natural, very instinctual. He’s wrapped the blanket around his body like any homo sapien would do, and you truly wonder what he is and where he’s from.

The emotion in his eyes catches you off guard. If you didn’t know he was an extraterrestrial, supernatural being, you might be inclined to call it gratitude.

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2012, an undisclosed location near the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea

The thin plastic of the bag rustled, sliding against the tightly foiled rolls inside. The rolls bounced with every step, gravity doing its work. Fingers wrapped around the handle dropped the bag onto the counter. Pens bounced slightly at the sudden shock, but the dust settled quickly.
 

“Kimbap?” The previous bearer-of-the-bag took his seat and posited the question to the man next to him.
 

“Oh god, yeah, are they the ones your mom makes?”
 

Security contractor Jung Jaehyun nodded, a smile spreading across his face. “You bet, hyung.”
 

Fellow security contractor, Lee Taeyong, all but dove into the bag, procuring the first foil cylinder. For a heartbeat, both pairs of eyes lifted off the alarmingly large number of flickering security camera monitors before them, and instead focused on on the vibrant colors of the kimbap slices.
 

And then the earth shook. Two pairs of eyes met, pupils blown wide in panic. Their room was several floors beneath ground level -- meaning there existed only a very limited set of reasons for their overhead lights to be swinging and their water glasses to be splashing.
 

Their eyes fixed onto the nuclear threat alert signal, but the letters in the box weren’t flashing.

Jaehyun jumped up, feet shifting side to side as he leant over the desk to get as close a look as possible at the screens before him. He craned up to see the top row -- nothing out of the ordinary there. He peered at the screens for the next few rows, and again -- more of the same. But as he began to process information from the last row, a hand on his shoulder stopped him.

“What?”

Taeyong lifted his hand from the younger man’s shoulder and wordlessly pointed at the above-ground feeds. Jaehyun’s spine straightened, and he struggled to register what he saw.

“Is that… vehicle... flickering?”

“Hyung, I think we should instead ask... Are those.. Are those figures… people?”

The two men glanced at each other once more, and then the alarm sirens finally blared.

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“Noona, be careful!”

BoA wrapped her lab coat around herself tighter, ignoring Jaehyun’s warning as she trudged over the landscape. Her boots sunk into wet patches of mud, and it took knee-jerking efforts across the terrain for her to finally come reasonably close to the… whatever it was.

She stared at the pile of wreckage, scanning the field for other pieces of material, and nodded at staffers to begin collecting the items for future study.

“BoA, what’s the situation?” Her handheld radio receiver crackled, and she gritted her teeth.

“I just got within ten meters of the crash site, Yunho, you’d think you’d have a little more patience than that, no?” Her cold fingers jammed down on the peeling rubber button, and she squinted at the biggest chunk of the structure.

A grainy chuckle came in through the receiver. “Alright, alright, no need to bite.”

“Tell me one thing, though,” she asked, hesitantly. Silence on the other end told her that Yunho had, indeed, begun to practice the art of patience.

“Is the thing on your screen glitching?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.”

BoA pocketed the radio. It made complete sense for something on a video feed to flicker faintly; there was only so much a low-quality drone camera could capture. But she knew she had perfect vision, and her biological lenses processed images in real-time.

So why was the metal -- or what she thought was metal -- of the unidentified vehicle flickering before her eyes now?

Summoning all the bravery she had left (in truth, her heart was hammering against the walls of her chest, and threatening to break out), BoA took one step forward. Then another. And then she saw the first Being.

“MEDIC!” She screamed, turning just enough for her voice to carry backwards. Then she reached into her pocket for a pair of gloves and crouched by the Being. She could see a few more, lying on the field around her, and she surveyed the scene as other staff members courageously came forward to ease the other Beings onto stretchers.

She extended one latex-covered finger and brushed the Being’s fringe off of his forehead. Honestly, if she didn’t know any better, she would have thought that the Beings were just extremely handsome and otherwise very men. But the footage showed a giant, metallic vehicle crashing into the demilitarized zone at incredible speeds. No ordinary mortal would have survived.

She let this Being’s white locks fall back over his forehead, and a crew came with a stretcher to take him away.

“Be careful!” She barked at them. These were the most important specimens the lab had ever encountered. Extraterrestrial or not, they needed to be treated carefully.

BoA looked back, searching for her research partner. His eyes weren’t searching hers; rather, the man sat back in the Jeep and kept his gaze on the crews moving the Beings into the trucks. She squinted, trying to get a better look at his expression, but she found she couldn’t quite enjoy the fiercely determined glint in his eyes.

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“Don’t you see, BoA?” Yunho paced up and down the empty corridor, surveying the tanks inside which each of the Beings lay. Twelve cylinders were all lined up, with sensors spidering from each of them. “They’re our ticket against the North Korean threat. Indestructible humans! If we can clone them and figure out their biological technology, we’ll have the most armored army in the world.”

“We don’t know if they’re human at all,” BoA warned, walking up to a tank and patting her hand on the metal.

The preservation tanks were the only ones they could pull together in so short a time frame; designed for all manner of extraterrestrial life, they were made decades ago by a particularly space-interested president but never used.

BoA crossed her arms and peered into the small glass window in front of where the Beings’ face would show.

Then she jumped back, hands clapped over .

“What is it?” Yunho rushed over, hands slapping against the metal and his torso leaning over the curve of the tank to peer in. He gasped, but held his stance.

The Being inside the tank was suspended in nearly a foot of water, face totally submerged. But it was breathing, looking as serene as it had when other research staff brought the Being in and placed him in the tank The flawlessly handsome face looked completed unbothered, and beared resemblance to a man in deep rest.

“Drain it, drain it!” BoA cried, mind racing. She dashed over to the tank’s attached monitoring devices, but not a single apparatus beeped in alarm. Yunho gave her a wary look, and they both summoned up the bravery to look closer through the glass.