As soon as the nauseating feeling had vanished, Junmyeon opened his eyes. The first thing he perceived were the painfully loud noises that surrounded him.

"Hey! You! Can't you move? Are you suicidal?"

Upon hearing a person's voice, he searched for its owner. There was somebody - it had to be a person - dressed completely in thick, dark clothes. He had a huge, black, shiny round thing around his head. But what was that he was sitting on? If he had to compare it to something, he would say it resembled a bicycle, but there were no pedals. It was far broader than one, and the way it roared at Junmyeon made him believe it was maybe alive.

"Are you deaf?" The loud noises surrounding him were even more annoying now. He looked down.

He was lying on a grey, flat ground with white lines on it. Behind the man, there were... yes, what were they? They were made of the same shiny material as the person's bicycle, but more in a box - like shape and there were people sitting in them.

One of them now opened the door to her device and came towards Junmyeon.

"Can't you see where you are?" the woman asked him angrily. What had he done wrong?

Slowly, a headache started building up. Was he dreaming? Where had these people come from? Where was he?

The woman sighed and dragged him with her.

"No! Please don't!" Junmyeon screamed, flashes of people dragging him somewhere playing before his eyes. The woman stopped and the loud noises ceased. Now, the air was filled with roaring sounds like the one the black thing had made and the boxes moved.

"Why would you lay down in the middle of the street? You got there so quickly, no one saw you before you stopped walking. Don't do that from now on, okay?" Her voice became more friendly when she saw how he was clutching his head in pain. "Are you alright?"

He only shook his head and the woman sighed. "You should go see a doctor. I just told my friend to drive on without me, but she must already be waiting for me. And... is that blood?" Her sudden wide - eyed expression made Junmyeon lower his gaze at his clothes. He was still wearing the clothes he had worn during the torture and in the prison. They were ripped, dirty and there was a lot of his own blood on them. Embarrassed, Junmyeon didn't meet the woman's gaze.

"That won't do. You should go to the hospital."

"Could you show me the way?" Junmyeon asked, as politely as he could. She stared at him.

"It's not hard to find, I could explain the way to you -"

"My head hurts," Junmyeon explained with a weak voice. "I’ve been passing out quite often lately. I don't want to waste your time, I really don't, but I'm scared of fainting somewhere without anyone who can help."

The woman gave in and Junmyeon started to feel guilty, but he brushed that feeling off quickly. He couldn't lose consciousness here. There was only one possibility where he was now, and if he didn't get off the street quickly, the Red Force would find him. They had probably sent troops everywhere in the city to search for them. Just what had Jongin done? And where were the others?

There were too many things in the city that he had never even dreamed of to try to understand them. The signs of the shops were glowing in colours that hurt his eyes. There were far more people than he had ever seen in one place and most of them were staring at the same small, flat device in their hands. It reminded him of the other electronic devices he had encountered, and he quickly looked away whenever he saw one.

They were walking beside the street he had stood on and the loud metallic boxes and the noises they made were really intimidating. Junmyeon didn't want to imagine what would have happened if these things hadn't stopped as soon as the people had noticed him.

The houses were even taller than he had imagined them from Baekhyun's stories, and sometimes there were huge, flat plates attached to their walls. On these things, different pictures were shown, sometimes there were even people in them and what they said was shown in characters that appeared on the bottom of the plate. Defeated by his curiosity, he stopped in front of one to read what the person was saying.

'... the citizens are encouraged only to go outside if it is really necessary during these days. As it is reported by various weather stations across the country, the average temperature has risen by one degree during the last ten years. On days with temperatures over 45 degrees Celsius, please do not...'

"Hey! Are you coming?" Junmyeon reluctantly looked away from the talking person and continued to follow the woman. On their way, they passed a lot of grey, high buildings and they had to cross a few streets like the one he had appeared on. He was a bit reluctant, but soon noticed that when they saw a red light, the creepy boxes would stop and then the green light for the people walking across the street would light up.

"You're not scared of cars, are you?" Of what? Junmyeon figured she might have seen him looking at the boxes warily. What did she call them? Cars?

"I'm just... careful." he muttered. Not being noticed would be hard. The city was so different from everything he had ever encountered before, he couldn't just quietly hope to understand all of these things without asking.

The building which the woman led him to was huge. There were a lot of people walking in and out of it and the doors opened automatically. There were many people inside, but the woman walked directly towards a long, high desk at the end of the room.

The young woman behind it blushed when she met Junmyeon's gaze, but covered in shock as soon as she noticed his state. The two women were talking while he looked around carefully. He felt like a complete idiot, admiring the things that had to be normal for these people, but he just couldn't help it.

"What happened?" When Junmyeon looked at the woman behind the desk, he noticed that she was staring at him. How often had she asked him already? Now it was his turn to blush out of embarrassment.

"I -" He hesitated. "I lost my memory." The women’s eyes widened.

"Are you serious?"

When he only stared at the ground, the woman behind the desk sighed. "Alright. Room 143. Someone will be there shortly."

"It's the second floor." The woman pointed at a plan on the wall. "Where's the elevator - ah."

When a pair of heavy metallic doors opened, Junmyeon froze. Was he supposed to go in there? What did it do? Why was it so small?

"The staircase is right there," the woman said when she noticed his hesitation. "If you're claustrophobic..."

"No, it's alright," Junmyeon assured her quickly. They might suspect something if he didn't behave like a normal citizen. How many could there be who feared narrow places without a story like his?

They entered and the woman pressed a button with the number '2' on it. The thing shot upwards and he grabbed the handle on the wall for support. The walls were coming closer and his breathing became faster. If he closed his eyes, there shouldn't be a problem. He would just imagine...

Alright. The unsettling feeling in his stomach had just doubled. He exhaled and shakily crouched down, his hand still grabbing the handle for support. It was alright. Nothing could happen to him.

But without any warning, the memories hit him like a wave, sweeping him away from reality and twirling him around violently. They were just brief pictures, gone after milliseconds, only to be replaced by another, worse one.

The torture. The tube. The tub with the water.

Every memory he had tried to suppress resurfaced with an enormous power and would have swept his feet from underneath him, hadn't he already gone down before.

The next thing he perceived was that he was lying somewhere. His heart started racing and he tried to move his hands. Not again.

When he was able to stretch them out, a breath of relief left his lips. But where was he?

"You fainted in the elevator," a friendly voice told him.

There was a young man standing in front of him, wearing a white coat and a face mask that was pulled under his chin. He smiled at Junmyeon. "Why would you take the elevator if you're claustrophobic?"

He felt the heat creeping up in his face. In his fear of making a mistake, he had just made everything worse. "I'm... sorry?"

The man shook his head, but his expression turned serious at once. "This could've worsened your state significantly. I'm not sure I'm even allowed to ask you this, but... you really can't remember anything?" He stared at Junmyeon as if he were about to tell him something really terrifying. He stiffened. How much were they able to tell? He slowly shook his head.

The man pulled out a chair from under the bed and sat down on it, not breaking eye contact.

"You... you have various injuries all over your body. There is nothing broken, but you had multiple internal bleedings... it's a miracle you survived for this long. All of these injuries... this wasn't an accident."

Junmyeon averted his gaze and looked at his hands. So they knew.

That was when he noticed a small, transparent tube coming out of his arm. It was connected to a metallic device next to the bed, as tall as a person, and ended in a bag with a liquid in it. Hurriedly, he tried to pull it out, but the man laid his hand on it protectively.

"Don't worry. This is to suppress the pain."

Junmyeon stopped pulling. The man sighed and looked at the piece of paper in his hand. "The state of your clothes and your body... it looks like you were tortured." He didn't answer. "It's natural for your brain to suppress traumatic experiences, but... I've never heard of something like this. If I had found an animal like this, I would've said someone experimented on it."

Junmyeon stayed silent. The man sighed again.

"We had to do several surgeries, but miraculously, everything went well. You will have to stay here for quite a while, though, to give everything time to heal. Ah, right," added the young doctor, his gaze wandering back to Junmyeon's arm. "When you arrived, you had a kind of metallic ring around your wrist. It was a kind of technology I've never encountered before. Someone was able to send electric shocks through it, and there were other mechanisms included, too, but no one has been able to find out what they are for so far."

"How did you get it off?" Junmyeon marvelled. He had completely forgotten about that thing as soon as it had stopped functioning. But now that he thought about it, it had been proof of him being the Red Force's property, so no matter what they would do with it, he was just glad that it wasn't there anymore.

"It was a tricky task," admitted the man. "You can be lucky you weren't conscious." He pulled out a thin, black device with many buttons on it and Junmyeon winced. Then he remembered that without the cuff, that thing couldn't harm him. The doctor, however, hadn't noticed his reaction.

"If you want to watch TV, just feel free. You won't get a roommate, as of the next few weeks at least, so don't hesitate if you're bored."

He asked Junmyeon a few questions about insurance and money as well, but he held on to his story of complete memory loss. The doctor finally left him, his disheartened look nearly making Junmyeon feel guilty.

How were the others doing? Finally left alone with his thoughts, Junmyeon recalled the very last moments before they had teleported. Had the others managed to get out of the city? Were they together? But he couldn't shake off the thought that something might have gone completely wrong and the others were still in here as well. How was he supposed to find them?

The most important thing right now was to heal and get out of this place as soon as possible. Anyone here could tell the Red Force about him. He actually wondered why they had acted as if they didn't know about his origins already. Were the scientists really able to keep their human experiments hidden this well?

His headache got stronger again and a whimper left his mouth before he could suppress it. There was a black, shiny plate on the wall of his room, much like the ones he had seen on the street. If these things with the buttons were made to switch devices on and off, maybe this 'TV', if it was the thing the doctor had talked about, would work like that too.

Very carefully, he took the black device and turned it around in his hands. There were a few buttons on it, but a green and a red one on top caught his attention. He had never liked the colour red, so he pressed the other one.

Within a second, the screen was flooded with colours and voices filled the room. The man on the other TV hadn't had a voice. Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sudden change, Junmyeon started searching for a way to switch it off again, but when he looked back at the screen, he froze.

The guy who was talking was around his age, maybe a bit older. His hair stood up in black spikes and he smiled warmly, as if he couldn't hurt a fly. Junmyeon knew he could do way more than that.

He found himself wanting to crawl into the corner of the room, curl up and start crying, like he had done before whenever this exact man would enter his room. Breathing became difficult again and his hand gripped the black device so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

Breathe. Slowly. You are safe, he told himself. For the moment.

His eyes didn't return to the man; but he tried his best to understand what he was talking about.

"- and as you know, climate change has immensely affected our world over the past few years. As the world leading science organization, it is the goal of Chronos to develop plants that are more effective in their photosynthesis than ours. For years, we have been doing research in secluded areas all over the world and I am very proud to be able to tell you that we have recently made great achievements. Our research facilities are working continuously to improve the situation of the people."

When a woman started speaking, Junmyeon raised his head carefully. She was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was a picture of a rotating sphere filling the screen. It was mostly blue, with brown and green shapes on it. There were areas which were blinking in red and the TV abruptly neared one of them. The marked shape was awfully familiar to Junmyeon and right underneath it, a small spot appeared, followed by some characters.

"During the past decades," the woman's voice continued, "Chronos has established its status as the world-leading science group, setting up secluded areas all over the world to widen their research on plants. As you know, Ladies and Gentlemen, their South Korean test area, due to its status of being the oldest and biggest one also known as Area One, is located just a few miles north of Seoul. Entire governments rely completely on this organization, as it holds the key to slowing down global warming-"

Junmyeon finally found the energy to press the red button, which made the surface go black and mute again. He stared at it a while longer. What had he just seen?

What was the meaning of that globe? And why was the place he had grown up in, the place everyone had believed to be their entire world, just such a small spot on it?

A terrifying thought came over him, one that made his head spin. He had been completely scared at the thought of still being in the city, but what if he wasn't? He could be anywhere on this sphere, and judging by its size, he would never be able to return home.

When the doctor from earlier came back a few hours later, Junmyeon was still staring at the black TV.

"If you want to, we can now lessen the pain suppressants- what are you doing?" He had stopped in his tracks, one hand still on the handle of the door. He frowned at Junmyeon, closed the door and came closer to look at a few electronic devices beside the bed. "Are you not feeling well?"

"Where am I?" Junmyeon asked quietly, swallowing the fear that washed over him wave after wave.

The guy gave him a perplexed look, but realization soon hit his face. "Oh, I'm sorry! Of course. You're in Seoul. Gwangju Hospital."

'A few miles north of Seoul', the woman had said. This wasn't as bad as he had feared. Junmyeon sighed in relief. But then a way more important question crossed his mind and it took him some time to gather the courage to ask it.

"What about the Red Force?"

The doctor paused a few seconds, his concerned look only intensifying. "The Red Force? Is that some kind of video game?"

Feeling lightheaded all of a sudden, Junmyeon slowly sank back into his bed.

"Are you not feeling well?" the doctor asked again, closing the distance between them. "Are you in pain?"

The picture of the rotating sphere didn't want to leave his thoughts. It was burned into his mind like a brand on an animal. Something had gone terribly wrong. His prior assumptions had been false. Jongin had really teleported them out. This was just much farther outside than they had intended.