"Where are the singers? Back stage now!"

"Get the next set of outfits ready!"

"Jongdae! Stop playing with your hair!"

"Sorry -"

"And Baekhyun, that's enough eyeliner already!"

"But -"

"Tao! Why the hell are you crying!?"

"I'm n-nervo-ous.."

"You'll be fine! Now man up! Where's Yixing? Don't tell me he forgot again! The other dancers are already here!"

"He dances?"

"What kind of a friend are you, Jongdae? Get someone to fetch Yixing! Oh, it's starting! It's starting! Positions everyone!"

"The guy's hopeless," Jongdae muttered under his breath.

"Yeah. Good luck, man. I'll go look for Yixing. That dancing machine's got a lot of explaining to do." I wedged out a frantic throng of people in the dressing room and into the cool evening air. Finally.

It was the first week of January and the campus was packed with students and outsiders alike, all giddy to greet the One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Founding Anniversary Opening Night with a blast.

At the center of the soccer field, the very heart of the campus, stood the disc-like stage. Stretched on either side of it were elevated walkways, dotted with bulb lights on both edges. Underneath the circular stage was the backstage - though I believed underground cavern would've been a more appropriate term - that extended beneath the walkways until it connected to two makeshift dressing rooms. Imagine a rectangular table with a very long and thick strip of bacon cutting the middle, then at the very center intersecting the bacon lay a huge can of fruit cocktail. I was never good at analogy but you get the picture, and whoever designed such a stage was a brilliant lunatic.

I searched around for Yixing, asking a few Juniors along the way but gained nothing. I moved deeper inside the campus until I reached the Great Hall, but the place wouldn't be operational until the next day so I rounded back on my route and moved towards the other end of the campus where the entrance was. My quest was slowly becoming hopeless, not to mention pointless, what with all people swarming the premises.

I persisted anyway and besides, I wanted to see again the tricky open space where the outsiders would first walk into upon entering. The naughty quadrangle and its tricky features.

The school's main quadrangle had been transformed into a ruined battlefield. Black worn-out cloths draped the surrounding buildings to silhouette the man-made dead trees lining the quad's perimeter. A combination of clay soil, grass and gravel canopied the once smooth pavement, with a few manequin soldiers lying slain around unmanned tanks and cannons. A burrow of hollow blocks, haphazardly stealthed by dried palm tree leaves, stood on one corner.

The scenery would have been incredibly genuine and eerie, like an actual war footage mounted to life straight from a history book, if not for the modern-day humans strolling around, wide-eyed and openmouthed in sheer awe.

The battlefield's most striking attribute were the half dozen landmines that, once stepped upon, triggered the giant stereos disguised as three shack wreckages booming to life in a mixture of rifle gunshots, cannon fires and men shouting indistinct military orders.

It was plain hilarious witnessing the visitors duck down and yell in hysterics whenever the landmines worked their trick. The prank's element of surprise died down eventually but there were always the new groups of awestruck, unsuspecting outsiders, and the cycle repeated itself.

Still no Yixing. That unicorn, I swear -

"Luhan!"

I looked around for the source of the voice. It sounded very familiar but - man, these people were annoying!

"Luhan, over here!"

"Where are you?"

"Eight o'clock, Sergeant Lu!"

I faced the instructed direction and found a distraught Sojin manacled against a steel bar of railing. "What the.." I fumbled for the right key amongst the dozen or so that were hung around my neck. "How'd you even.. steady your hand."

"Senior pranks," she explained. "Hate it when they do that. They're all so haughty, they think they own the place just because they're the oldest in the herd."

The shackles clinked open.

"Thank you, Luhan. What were you doing?"

"Looking for Zhang Yixing, have you seen him?"

"No, not really." She shook her head, massaging her wrists.

"Do they hurt? Are you alright?"

She dropped her hands instantly. "Yeah, I'm fine. I just don't like being.. trapped or something." I thought I saw her shiver at the word 'trapped' but whatever gesture it was, it was gone in a second. "Do you want to look for him together?"

I had planned on just giving up. Dance numbers weren't until the second segment of the program anyway, which was still at around ten o'clock later. If Yixing did forget he had a performance to appear at, he still had two full hours to whack his brains and finally remember.

But Sojin's proposals at being together were highly seasonal. I couldn't just walk out when an opportunity presented itself, could I?

"Yeah, sure," I agreed nonchalantly. I figured now would be the perfect time to update myself regarding her Christmas break. Since we'd immediately been put to work when classes resumed last Monday, we hadn't had any idle time for casual talk.

We started off from the entrance, stripping all corners, and proceeded slowly towards the leisure benches scattered around the lobbies that connected one adorned hall or open space to another. We skinned both indoors and outdoors but still no sign of Yixing.

I discovered, in the hints beneath our fragmented conversation, that Sojin had spent her Christmas break with her family in their ancestral home in the province. She didn't say where in particular and I didn't bother prying further.

We hadn't found ourselves pressed in a crowd until we ventured towards the roofless foyer that opened into the soccer field. As I passed Sojin covert glances, she looked rather palpitant; the condensing mob seemed to unnerve her.

One or two people stood between us as we advanced, and when five minutes later the horde didn't seem to make considerable progress, I opted to maneuver the path my way.

I stretched my arm behind the two people separating me from Sojin and felt for her hand. Her fingers twirled around mine almost instantly - her palm was sweating big time! I squeezed tighter and raised the whistle chained around my belt loop and blew hard. The surrounding people parted at once.

"Excuse us a little, just an emergency. Excuse me. Excuse please.." The breeze that greeted us at the edge of the field was revitalizing. I looked down at Sojin, beads of sweat framing her small face. "Let's try and not get you into another stampede, deal?"

She breathed deeply before nodding. "Okay, deal."

For the rest of the hunt, Sojin seemed a lot more composed but her clutch of my hand never slackened. I suppre