The girl peered around the corner. She withdrew her head and stared at the dirty bowl and chopsticks she held in her hand. Wanting to clean them, she had set out towards the kitchen and was now at its doorway but she paused at seeing Kibum in the room with grass green rubber gloves on, scrubbing away at his own dishes. Shifting her weight from foot to foot, she wondered if she should go back to her room and wash her dishes later. She started to turn back but stiffened when she heard his voice addressing her.

“You can put those on the table. I’ll wash them for you since I’m already doing the dishes anyway.” He said it without looking up from his work.

Besides the clinking of dishes, no other sound was heard for a short while.

“Really. It isn’t a problem. Don’t want to waste water twice right?” The Almighty Key scrubbed at a particularly stubborn stuck on piece of food.

He turned around and saw a lonely bowl set on the table with chopsticks set on top. The girl wasn’t in sight, but he saw Luna leaving the room, pausing to look at Kibum with amber eyes before sneezing and exiting the kitchen.

As she was walking down the hall, the girl suddenly jumped and held her hand to her too fast beating heart. Luna bristled and growled audibly at Jonghyun who had just opened the door next to her, intending to exit the music room but not knowing the girl happened to be walking past at that very moment.

His eyes were wide in surprise, but his expression turned apologetic. “Sorry,” he said quietly before scooting past the two as close to the opposite wall as possible with a wolf driving him away.

Luna was just about to take a piece of Jonghyun’s pant leg off, just for the fun of it, but the girl called her off. “Luna, come on,” she quietly said as she started off in the opposite direction of Jonghyun.

She walked while looking behind her every so often and so didn’t notice when she passed Jinki’s open door. The boy was sitting on his bed, reviewing the rough script for the next variety show for which he was scheduled.

She paused for the smallest amount of time after noticing him, enough time for him to wave at her with a friendly smile on his tired face. She frowned slightly as she passed by, but he just shook his head and continued reading. Hey, it was a better reaction than retreating to a corner and rocking back and forth with her hands over her ears.

In one of the deeper levels of the SHINee mansion, the groundwater dripped rhythmically from a pointed rock that made up part of the unrefined ceiling. The mansion had many lower levels. The ones closer to the surface were more finished, having finished floors, furniture, paneled or at least smooth stone walls. As you descended further, the chambers that still held some homeyness to them turned a little more cold and unrefined. Dirt floors, jagged rocks jutting from the walls, no plumbing, older lighting sources such as places to attach torches or hang oil lamps. Here, there were old dungeons. Hardly used back then and definitely not used now. Why keep enemies as prisoners that you have to give attention to when you can just kill them right away? Even if they were feeling extra sadistic, they wouldn’t play with the victim for so long that they would need to hold them in the cave-like dungeons. They had other, more furnished rooms just a few levels higher that could satisfy their sadistic imaginations. Those rooms haven’t been opened in the last century and the group couldn’t really fancy using them for their original purposes any time soon. Maybe they could remodel them for more humane entertainment purposes?

Lower still, past the dungeon levels, were pathways that the boys have only stepped in once since moving in. Kibum, whose family originally built the mansion (thus all the mirrors), hadn’t gone down there since he was a small child no more than half a meter tall. He had went exploring and got lost in the depths of the dirt and rock tunnels that led nowhere. There weren’t even mirrors down there for him to communicate with anyone, and so he had to wait for somebody to find him. After that unpleasant experience, the boy hadn’t stepped foot past the dungeon levels.

In a pitch black chamber that held nothing, not even cobwebs or dust, just dirt, rock, and dampness, the ground slowly raised up. The mound of dirt transformed into the form of a head. A body and limbs rose up after it. The form was a blob of brown, no features visible even if there was light down there. Around the first mud man, four more bodies rose from the earth. As they came up slowly, the loose dirt of the first form packed down and smoothed out, slowly giving into details of facial features, fingers, and even clothes. Once the first form looked completely human and healthy, he brushed off the dirt from his clothes and looked around, seeing perfectly in a room of no light. Well, he wasn’t really seeing but more like feeling the dirt underneath his bare feet and smelling its composition. It brought comfort to him. His companions solidified completely also and followed the first man as he walked towards a tunnel that he just knew led to the upper regions of this foreign place.

Those demons. How dare they murder his human companions! He fit in with that group and thought them to be his good friends. Hell. He liked them better than his ugly mud people family (not that he would admit it since they were beside him right now). In his family, once the offspring reached a certain age, they were left to explore the world through the dirt. Literally. It could be considered a coming of age thing of sorts. His people thrived on dirt and soil. Once the youngins got their fill of exploring the world, traveling via the underground, they usually went back to their family and settled down. However, he had started hanging out for extended periods of time in the aboveground. He found himself included in a group of humans who partied and lived life however they wanted. And while at one of their monthly outdoor camping trips, they had a girl stumble upon them. Unfortunately for her, they were all a little tipsy, but he didn’t have any real qualms about human females. Unfortunately for him, they had chosen the wrong girl to try to .

Before the first demon who came upon their campsite or the second one who had abruptly joined in could take the time to turn their wrath towards him, he had stepped back into the shadows and melted into the ground. Yes, he had run away and he was a coward. However, he panicked and didn’t know what to do! He had never met up with such kinds of demons before! How does a dirt person fight five demons, each with either a powerful ability or just fighting skills that were beyond his capabilitites at the moment? Underneath their very feet, he witnessed the chaos and shivered as blood seeped through the ground and passed through his very being. He stayed there, a part of the dirt, throughout the whole massacre. He had hoped some of his crew would survive, and he could emerge later once the demons left to help the the lucky ones. But there were no survivors. They got every last man and woman and burned or devoured the bodies!

While sifting and slipping through the soil back to his family, he catalogued each of their abilities and powers as much as he could with that one encounter. Somehow, his pitiful, but enraged, speech to a few of the members of his family convinced them to aid him in his revenge.

“To think that SHINee are actually demons. Wow...,” whistled his younger brother.

“Shush.” an older girl, a cousin, scolded. “You want them to discover us?”

“Don’t worry nuna. We’ve got to be like fifty meters below ground level. Nobody has stepped on this dirt in years.” A spiky, red haired guy replied loudly. “Right Gyou?”

“Be quiet man.” Gyou from the campsite muttered as he shuffled through the tunnels with unnatural surety.

“Ahhhh! I can’t wait to see Choi Minho is person. He looks sooo hot! I would’ve never thought he’d be an ice demon!” Gyou’s younger sister swooned.

“Yeah. You can say hi to him, ask for his autograph, and then kill him.” Gyou said.

“Mohhh...,” whined the preteen looking female. “So I guess if I married him, you’d be mad?”

Gyou said seriously, “I will disown you if you marry that son of a .”

“Ugh. You’re so selfish Oppa.” But the little girl didn’t complain too much. Dirt people weren’t really aggressive by nature but this little girl always held some curiosity about killing. Yeah, this was a naughty little girl.

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Thea's Corner <3

I'm sorry for all the false alarms I gave people!
So I keep this fic on a usb drive and my life like flashed before my eyes because I thought I lost it. I have a lot of important stuff on there, but the first thing I thought of was this fic. But I found it ^^

Okay so I updated this particular chapter twice and was like, 'Nobody commented.... :( ' and then 'Why isn't it showing up on the updated fanfics section?!?!?!' I FINALLY discovered that I checked the 'save as draft' box and forgot to uncheck it. I was wondering why the link for chapter 32 was in a different font color...Wow...total fail... >.<

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Posted: 16 Jan 2010 (today's my bday! ^^)
Word count: 1530