“Kerry Davis?”

Kari sighed and raised her hand.  “It’s Kari.  Kah-ri.” 

“Oh.  Sorry.”  Her professor scribbled a note on the class roster and moved on to the next name on the list.  Kari was perfectly used to this routine.  As a freshman in college, she had been correcting teachers, students, and pretty much anyone else who saw her name for almost 13 years.  It occurred to her that she had spent a great deal of her 18 years of life in some kind of school.  Why had her parents given her a Japanese name?  They weren’t even Japanese, or even Asian.  And neither was she.

“Alright.  As you all may know, I’m Dr. Mann.  This is Calculus 2.  If that’s not what class you’re here for, I suggest you leave now.”  No one moved, but a few people snickered at his name.  Dr. Mann didn’t seem deterred by that.  “Okay.  Let’s get started.” 

Looking back after three years, Dr. Mann’s Calculus 2 class was the catalyst that led to Kari changing her major to math.  She was really glad she did.  Biology was just plain boring to her.  She was brought out of her reminiscing most abruptly by the door into the university’s main building.  It was an automatic door that didn’t like to open as quickly as it should.  So, of course she had run straight into it.  Ow. 

Her friends laughed.  “See, I told you that you didn’t have a soul.  Everyone knows automatic doors only open for people who have souls.”  David loved to about that. 

“Yeah.  I sold her soul on E-bay for manga money.”  That was Rachel.  She had been a physics major in another state before transferring into the math program at Kari’s university. 

“At least I didn’t jump off a building like Henry.” 

“It was only a six foot drop.”  Henry liked to tell people that Kari had thrown him off the building.  But, in reality, he had jumped of his own accord.  And then had to use crutches for the next six weeks.  She shook her head.  Why did she hang out with these people?  Oh yeah.  Because they were all math majors.  They pretty much lived on the top floor of the engineering and science building.  That kind of forced them to hang out.  Kari sighed, walked inside the building and blinked.  This was not the university center. 

“Umm…where are we?”  Henry asked the rest of them, as if they would know. 

“I don’t know.  Didn’t we prove that the chances of teleporting are so tiny that it was, for all intent and purposes, impossible?”  Kari closed her eyes, thinking she must’ve been dreaming.  Yeah, that was it.  All those nights with too little sleep were finally getting to her and she was hallucinating.  But why would her friends be sharing in her hallucination?  Not that they weren’t all in the same state of exhaustion she was, but they should all have different hallucinations.  Right?  She opened her eyes again.  Nope.  They still weren’t in the university center.  They were in a huge cavern of some kind with several roped off sections.  Apparently, they weren’t the only ones who had just been teleported to the cavern.  Kari saw a bunch of people of all nationalities in the different sectioned off areas and heard a lot of different people lamenting in different languages.  From what she heard of the other English speakers, she guessed that they had all just been brought to the cavern against their will, just like her and her friends. 

“What’s going on here?”  Rachel and the others were discussing amongst themselves how this could have happened and how they might get back.  Kari opened to join the conversation, but was distracted by a group of guys several sections away.  No, it couldn’t be.  She walked over to the edge of her section to get a better look.  It was.  No way. 

“Guys, guys.  Come here!”  She turned back to her friends and motioned them over.

“What?”  David didn’t move.  They saw how excited she was.  They didn’t really trust her once she got excited.

“It’s my band.  You know, DBSK.  They’re here, just a few sections over.”

“Great.  As if we didn’t hear enough of the Korean boybands at school, now she’s going to bore us to death with them here.”  That wasn’t fair.  She didn’t only talk about DBSK at school.  Just a little…okay, a lot.  But not all the time.  And, they were here.  They were only about forty feet away.  She could hear them freaking out about what had just happened to them.  Kari had to figure out a way to meet them.  Before she could even start planning, a bright light lit up one end of the cavern.  There was a raised area, kind of like a stage.  As they watched, a man in long white and silver robes appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the stage and raised his hands for silence.  Remarkably, all talking in the room ceased.

“Young men and women.  You are probably wondering why you have been brought here.  You will just have to wonder a little longer.  Before you learn why you are here, you must all travel to another place, not too far away from here.  Some of you may be sent home along the way.  Do not be alarmed.  None of you will be hurt.  If you are sent back to your home, you will not remember that anything odd has occurred.”  He paused to let that sink in for a moment.  “Now.  When the door to your right opens, please exit in an orderly manner.  You will merely need to follow the group in front of you.  You will know the way.”  With that, he vanished.  Kari felt hanging open.  What? 

The groups nearest to the far right wall of the cavern started moving.  Kari strained her eyes.  There was a fairly small door everyone was leaving through.  It was going to take a while before her group could move, though. 

“So what do you think that was all about?”  Henry looked more than a little perturbed at this turn of events. 

“I don’t know.  Guess we’ll find out when we get wherever we’re going.  As long as Kari doesn’t talk us to death about her band, first.”  David always thought he was so funny. 

“Hey.  The line’s moving.”  Kari pointed to the opening in the red velvet ropes that had separated them from the other people.  The group in the section in front of them had already left.  She and her friends glanced at each other, then followed.  There really was nothing else they could do.

The first few days of walking were really boring.  There was nothing but red velvet ropes and rough-hewn tunnel walls to look at, and Kari thought her feet were going to fall off.  They hurt so badly.  So did the rest of her.  At first, she had complained to the others; but after the first day, Kari realized that they all hurt just as badly as she did.  Complaining did nothing but put them all in a bad mood.  After five days of walking through a single long tunnel, they found themselves in a really strange obstacle course.  It reminded Kari of those blow-up obstacle courses that she had played in at parties as a child.  Except, this one was forever long and made mostly of rock.  Kari scrambled over the obstacles as quickly as she could, not wanting to get left behind by her friends.

The people from the different sections didn’t mingle at all as far as Kari could tell.  Though, she did start to notice that some of the people in the groups nearest hers were disappearing, presumably to go home.  She hoped she would be next.  She wasn’t.  One by one, however, her friends disappeared.  Henry and Rachel vanished on the first day of the obstacle course.  David, on the third.  That left her all alone.  Joy.  That was what she wanted to be: alone.  About an hour after David vanished, Kari made her decision.  She was going to try to catch up to DBSK’s group.

It took her the better part of the afternoon to do it.  They hadn’t been that far ahead of her, but she had been extremely tired.  Sleeping on the ground at night and meals of bread, cheese, and water didn’t lend themselves well to physical exertion. 

No one noticed her at the back of the group.  She followed for several hours before Yunho looked back and saw her stumble and fall down one of the obstacles.  He went back for her.

“You okay?”  Kari was almost too tired to notice how cute his English accent was.  She nodded, physically and emotionally exhausted.  He offered her a hand, which she accepted gladly.  Praise the Lord, they were about to stop for the day.  Kari didn’t think they she could go on much longer.

As it was, the lights dimmed as soon as she made it over the obstacle.  That was their signal that they could stop for the night.  Not that any of them could tell whether or not it was really night.  They had been inside for so many days that no one knew if the sun was up or not.  For all they knew, they might not have even been on Earth.  However, they were kept to a roughly 24-hour schedule that was supposed to be routine.

Kari sank to the ground, her legs unable to hold her up any longer.  Yunho sat in front of her.

“You from another group?”  Since he pointed behind her, she assumed he was asking if she was from one of the groups of people behind them.  She nodded.  Technically, she was.

“They’re gone.”  She was so tired; she just wanted to lay down right where she was and sleep, never mind food.

“Gone?”  How was she going to explain that they had vanished like so many others?  Luckily she didn’t have to.  Changmin walked over.

“They vanished right?”  She nodded.  He translated it for Yunho. 

“Oh.  I’m sorry.”  She wasn’t.  They were the lucky ones.  They got to go home. 

“Are you alone, now?”  That was Changmin. 

“Yes.  I’m alone, now.” 

“What’s your name?”  Junsu had seen Yunho and Changmin talking to her and had come over to investigate. 

“Kari Davis.” 

“Kari?  That’s a pretty name.” 

“Thanks.”

“You thirsty?”  Yunho pointed to the barrel of water that had just appeared a few feet away.  She nodded and he got up and ladled some water into one of the ten cups that had appeared with the barrel.  He handed it to her.

“Thank you.”  She tried really hard not to gulp it down all at once.  Kari knew they only had a limited supply of water for the night.

Someone else walked over to them.  She didn’t know who it was.  But, apparently the members of DBSK weren’t the only ones in their group.  So, that was why there were ten cups.  They were always given enough water, food, and cups for the number of people in the group. 

From the tone of the conversation the new person was having with Yunho, Changmin, and Junsu, Kari could tell they were not happy about someone from another group using their precious supplies.  There was a brief argument, at the end Yunho put his foot down.  They had seen that others who were the last ones in their groups didn’t get any food or water until they joined another group.  After the first night with their group, she would start getting rations with the rest of them. 

And so, the days passed.  Kari spent as much time as she could with Junsu (he was her bias in the group, after all).  He helped her with Korean, and she helped him with English.  She had to admit: he did much better learning English than she did learning Korean.  Most of her day, however, was spent trying not to die of exhaustion as she made her way through the obstacle course.  The guys helped her as much as they could, but they were tired too.  And the guy who had argued with Yunho the first night she had been in the group kept pestering them to get rid of her.  He was still mad that she had used some of their precious rations and caused them to go with less.  He got the non-DBSK people to turn against her.  Yunho did his best to keep everyone together, but it put a lot of extra strain on him. 

One night (at least what passed for night), Yunho got fed up with the arguing and went for a walk.  They had made it to a relatively obstacle-free area and there was small tunnel leading away from the main one not too far from where they had stopped for the night.  Kari was a little worried for him.  The others shrugged it off and said he needed to be alone for a while. 

She sighed and mumbled something along the lines of wanting to talk a short walk.  Junsu gave her a strange look as she walked off in the same direction as Yunho. 

A little ways in, the tunnel Yunho had taken opened into a small cavern with a large crevice in the middle of the floor.  Kari was surprised to see he wasn’t alone.  The man in the silver robes from the first day was talking to him in some strange language she didn’t recognize.  She stayed just outside the cavern, not wanting to draw attention to herself.  It didn’t work.  The man looked directly at her and motioned for her to join them.

“Ah, Kari.  You have impeccable timing.  I was just about to send for you.”

“What?” 

“You see.  Everything you have been through in the past week has been a test.  Yunho here has passed.  So have you.”  So did that mean that everyone else failed?  What were the criteria for passing, anyway?  “You will be transported to your new home shortly.  Just know that if you fail in your task, others will be forced to go through these trials and leave their families and friends behind as well.  Farewell.”

The last thing she saw before she fell unconscious was the robed man extended a glowing hand towards her with a sad smile on his face.