Chapter Text
Do not choose the third option.
Kim Soleum blinked down at the notebook on his desk, very aware of the cheap plastic pen in his hand. The words were written in his own handwriting, a little wobbly, a little too fast, the strokes blending together slightly from his habit of not lifting the pen off the paper high enough between characters.
Above him, the office lights felt a little too bright, and there was a steady ticking of the clock on the wall. The sound and brightness felt a little too much, like the edge of a budding headache, or the cooldown of one. His skin felt a little itchy, and the room a little too warm.
He felt like he just had a train of thought interrupted, like walking into another room and immediately forgetting what he went there for.
He wondered if he had a spare herbal tonic in his desk. Daydream provided the best of care to their employees and offered regular check-ups in their on-site clinic, but those were limited to after turning in their Dream Essence Collectors, and Kim Soleum was used to stocking up on herbal tonics for the extra immune system boost.
He looked up from the notebook in front of him, only squinting slightly in the bright light, to Supervisor Park Minseong who was slouched over his desk reading a paper report, a furrow between his brows.
Kim Soleum looked toward the windows of the office.
“Why are the shutters down?” He questioned, his own voice feeling loud and unnatural in the previous near-silence. He glanced around, noting that all the windows were tightly covered, not by mere blinds but actual metal shutters.
That’s why the lights in the room felt overwhelming. There wasn’t a hint of natural sunlight shining in.
“Routine lockdown drill,” Park Minseong answered, and then blinked and rubbed at his glabella for a moment. Not only was his jacket slung over the back of his chair, his tie was loose and the first two buttons of his shirt were undone.
Soleum looked down at himself. He was also dressed down in his white dress shirt, although it was fully buttoned up and his tie was still tight around his neck, reminding him of a noose.
His suit jacket had been thrown onto his desk, partially covering his computer mouse.
“I didn’t know we had such tight containment procedures,” Kim Soleum said, turning his eyes to stare at the metal shutters.
“Daydream is registered as a pharmaceutical company experimenting with new and improved medicine of unknown chemical composition.” Park Minseong answered him, the furrow between his brows slowly easing out as he spoke. “So even our cover story requires strict protocol in case something goes wrong. And with our delving into Darknesses, our government contracts entail that those protocols be doubly reinforced. Don’t worry too much about it, Roe! We get these drills twice a year to make sure all the safety measures work as intended!”
Oh. That made sense.
“Are we supposed to… evacuate somewhere for these drills?”
Park Minseong let out an amused breath of air, almost a mocking raspberry.
“Ha! Us? No, the lockdown is checked to the letter, but Daydream won’t waste time clearing all of us from the building. These drills are meant to be random, and there are always field and research officers in the middle of something that can’t be disturbed. No, we just sit tight and continue doing what we’re doing until a member of the Security Team comes and gives us the all clear. Don’t worry, it usually only takes an hour or two! At most, we’ll likely take a late lunch.”
Speaking of lunch, Kim Soleum felt his stomach grumble.
When had he eaten breakfast…?
He stared down at the words on the page, and slowly forced himself to put down the plastic pen, feeling an ache in his fingers from how tightly his grasp had been. He was getting a little too out of practice with pens, it seemed. The perils of an age of typing and swipe texts. But that was fine. He practiced his writing to perfection while in school, and then on a whim decided to do the same with his non-dominant hand…
His nightmares and lack of sleep must be getting to him.
The lights were too bright, and the clock was too loud, yet did nothing against the tinnitus of silence in the room.
Kim Soleum turned to the next page of his notebook and pushed back from the desk, stretching his arms up over his head. Maybe he should take a painkiller for the headache? Washed down with a health tonic, for sure. His immune system would need all the help it could get without enough sleep to keep it fighting.
But where were… the others…?
No, he didn’t have to worry about that. What veteran Daydream officers did during lockdown drills had nothing to do with an employee who only joined the company two weeks ago.
He was curious, though.
“Supervisor Park?” Kim Soleum called out with some hesitation.
The man in question hummed in response from where he was still frowning over the stack of papers.
“Is the lockdown done by rooms?” Soleum asked, a thought niggling at the back of his mind. “Is it by floors, or the entire building at once?”
“Both?” Park Minseong looked up from his papers again. “All? The research floors above us and the basement levels are the most heavily fortified, so every lab and storage unit has strict protocols that I’m not really sure about… it’s a little lighter for the field exploration units, so we’re just confined to our floors. The ground level and first two stories are the most lenient for civilian receptionists and administrative contractors. However, that doesn’t mean anyone can get out once the lockdown starts.”
Kim Soleum noticed something else. “And our phones…?”
“Signals are jammed until the all-clear— as in signals can come in but can’t get out. We’re on a closed circuit loop when that happens. No one wants a panicked employee to accidentally spill secrets they’re not supposed to spill when something happens, after all! At the same time, we don’t want to be cut off from news of the outside world, or each other.”
No… his phone was actually glitching .
Like a broken television, his phone screen flashed with colours and static, which made no sense considering the incompatibility of technology. Phones don’t have static . That didn’t make any sense.
He pulled away from his phone slowly, the tinnitus in his ears growing louder. His heart was starting to pound, hard enough for him to feel, and there was a distant cloying taste of fear on the back of his tongue. It tasted like metal, like blood.
“Supervisor Park?” Kim Soleum asked again, feeling as if his voice was a thousand meters away, echoing back at him. The phone’s static was overwhelming, and it loomed ever closer over him even as he pulled away, and something was wrong, wrong —
“Roe Deer?”
A hand on his shoulder.
Kim Soleum jolted violently, gasping as he finally tore his eyes away from the phone static and met the concerned gaze of Park Minseong.
“Hey, it’s okay,” the man soothed, his worry apparent. “It’s just a drill. Even if anything did happen, it’d be up on the R&D floors. We’re pretty far away from them.”
“...Yes,” Kim Soleum agreed around the lump in his throat.
His eyes darted back to his phone involuntarily, but now it was just sitting there.
Dark.
Silent.
Even the earlier tinnitus was gone, leaving only the soft ticking of the wall clock.
He couldn’t help but tremble.
“Roe?”
“Yes!” Soleum startled yet again. He couldn’t believe how unbalanced he felt at the moment, like the room was spinning around him. Was he actually claustrophobic? Was this yet another thing he had to hide from Daydream?
Park Minseong’s expression was kind as he said, “The air is a bit stuffy in here without the windows open, isn’t it? It’s not much, but I have a desk fan. I think I need a breeze as well. And my desk is somewhat of a mess right now. Mind if you help me look for it?”
It was a kind gesture, one to distract Soleum from whatever thoughts must be bothering him. Soleum let himself be distracted, relieved by the kindness.
Except as he leaned over to Park Minseong’s desk, there was…
Only the bare bones. It didn’t look messy at all. A keyboard, a mouse, a monitor… there wasn’t anything personal there. Not even a candy wrapper to indicate that this might be someone’s station.
“It’s the weirdest thing…” Park Minseong muttered to himself.
Kim Soleum did not think this lockdown drill was very normal at all. What was it about Daydream that he had read before—?
There were the sounds of footsteps, of someone running down the hall. While Park Minseong only looked up curiously, Kim Soleum tensed, ready to leap from his chair and bolt toward wherever he might hide in the office.
His brain felt so slow, but he was starting to recall— outside of drills, Daydream lockdowns were very serious things! The excuses told to regular employees were naught but sweet nothings, because lockdowns meant one thing.
A containment breach.
A Darkness that became active within the area and had to be found and contained.
Usually a monster that somehow escaped, sometimes a fully contaminated person who brought it back, and other times it was—
He needed to check his phone.
There were sounds of the doorknob of their office being manhandled, and then urgent curses before someone pounded on the door.
“Open up!” Eun Haje’s voice echoed from outside. “It’s me!”
It’s me.
No, this was strange, it felt almost like deja vu—
“Did we lock the door?” Park Minseong wondered aloud before he stood from his chair, stepping over before Kim Soleum grabbed his arm in an iron grip. The D-squad supervisor gazed down in surprise at Soleum's ducked head.
“What if…” Kim Soleum gritted his teeth against the taste of fear on his tongue. “What if it’s not her? What if this lockdown isn’t a drill?”
It was as if a pen had scratched out bits and pieces of his thoughts, like there were things covered underneath a kaleidoscope of ink and static. An unfathomable ocean he feared to delve into, carefully boarded up with the thinnest veneer of plastic wrap to keep him sane.
It felt like something underneath the surface was watching him.
This just felt so familiar , somehow.
“Are you guys in there? Did you lock me out!”
There was the sound of rustling, and then the clink of keys.
Then the knob turned, and the door opened.
Eun Haje stood at the doorway, unimpressed and frowning, with a set of silver keys in her hand and her suit jacket slung over her shoulders as usual.
“I’m the Assistant Manager of this team,” she told the two of them dryly. She shook her keys at them. “If you were trying to lock me out, you’ll have to do better than that.”
“We weren’t!” Park Minseong protested, with the furrow back between his brows. “I don’t even know why the door was locked?”
Kim Soleum felt like he was going to go crazy. Weren’t they in lockdown? Of course the door should be locked! He tensed when Eun Haje stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind her.
Why hadn’t she been here in the first place?
(Oh. He said that out loud.)
“Obviously because I—” Eun Haje frowned, lowering her keys. Looking closer, she seemed rather tired. Her skin was pale and slightly flushed, and her eyes red at the edges. “...I was looking for something. I found it, and I came back.”
Her eyes skimmed over the two of them, and then toward her desk, where she finally scowled.
“What did you guys do to my desk?” She demanded, stomping over.
“Nothing? Why would we— hey!”
Eun Haje ignored Park Minseong’s protests and shoved him out of the way with a hip, leaning over her desk to first lift the keyboard, and then the mouse, before turning the monitor around to reveal that there was absolutely nothing behind there as well.
A perfectly empty desk.
She pulled open the drawers and grimaced before looking up at Park Minseong.
“Okay, where is it?” She demanded, stepping closer to the taller man even as he backed slowly right into Soleum’s chair. “Where did you put my stuff? This prank isn’t funny, Park Minseong!”
“I didn’t touch your things!” The man protested, arms raised in surrender. “I even— look! Look, my stuff disappeared, too!”
On the other side of the grouped together table, Park Minseong’s desk was equally squeaky clean.
They both turned their attention toward Kim Soleum, still pale and seated in front of his own desk, which at least had his suit jacket thrown atop haphazardly, and his phone next to it. He had a dark mousepad underneath his computer mouse, and a cup full of cheap plastic pens. There was an open notebook under his keyboard at the edge of the desk.
And a small potted plant that peeked out from behind the monitor.
Besides the team leader’s desk, Kim Soleum was the only other person to not have his things— stolen?
Distracted from his previous paranoia, Soleum blurted out, “It really wasn’t me.”
How could he even do something like that? Why would he do that? There was no motivation, and Soleum wasn’t the type to create waves in his first few weeks. Or ever, if he could help it. He glanced over at the D-squad’s team leader desk, and felt his heart sink seeing the small plush lizard sitting there.
From the perspective of the other members, he did seem very suspicious.
Ahh, he was really starting to feel that headache. And his entire body was so sore.
Eun Haje let out an aggrieved breath and massaged her temple. “I don’t have time for pranks, I have an… important…?”
Her voice dropped off slowly, confusion entering her tone. She looked up again, gaze scanning the room. “Why are the shutters down?”
“Lockdown drill.” Park Minseong provided helpfully.
“Urg, I hate those.” Eun Haje sniffled delicately, sitting down at her chair with a heavy sigh. “They always give me the creeps somehow. Hey Minseong, what’s wrong with your jacket?”
Park Minseong also retreated to his seat, and rubbed at his eyes. “I took it off because it’s warm in here. I’m not the only one to think it’s warm in here, right?”
“I don’t think the air conditioning is working,” Kim Soleum said, a little in a daze.
Eun Haje was staring hard at the metal shutters over the windows. Kim Soleum and Park Minseong looked at each other, both concerned for the mental state of their teammate.
Her brows furrowed, and her hands clawed into her pants, knuckles white. There was sweat starting to dot the top of her forehead under her bangs, and her posture was stiff as she glared at the metal shutters. Soleum could see the whites of her eyes from how wide they were.
Several awkward seconds of silence later, she breathed out and relaxed, repeating, “I hate these drills.”
They quickly steadied back into their normal routine, until Kim Soleum was once again staring down at the blank page of his notebook.
The clock ticked on.
What was he trying to do…?
The room suddenly felt suffocating with the shutters down. He was starting to understand why Eun Haje was staring at it. It was frightening, somehow. Kim Soleum felt as if the lockdown could be something other than a drill, something terrifying, if only because there were so many possibilities of things going wrong…
He stood from his chair suddenly, arms braced against the desk for leverage.
He swayed from dizziness for a moment.
Oh.
He was quite hungry.
“Hey,” he called out, drawing the attention of the two other D-squad members, “do you know what time it is?”
When would this lockdown end?
“Time?” Park Minseong echoed, and then said, “Can’t you just look it up yourself?”
As if in unison, all three of them glanced over to the ticking wall clock.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
White .
—
Kim Soleum was standing at his office desk, arms braced against a sudden wave of dizziness. The lights of the office felt overwhelmingly bright, and there was a loud ringing of tinnitus in his ears, drowning everything out for a few seconds as his legs slowly regained their strength.
It felt a little too warm in the room. That must be why his jacket was thrown over his desk, with his phone besides it.
Soleum picked up his phone and slipped it into his pocket in its usual spot.
The tinnitus slowly died down, and he could now hear the voices of his teammates talking next to him.
“—lockdown again?”
“Yeah. I guess it’s that time of year. I can never get used to these things.”
As Kim Soleum looked up, he startled over the metal shutters covering every inch of the previously large and welcoming office windows.
“Wha—?”
“Don’t worry too much about it, Roe.” Park Minseong said from where he was sitting in his office chair, using one leg to push himself left and right in a soothing, rocking manner. The first two buttons of his shirt were undone and his tie loosened to accommodate that, with his jacket tossed over the back of the chair. “It’s just a drill. Since Daydream is registered as a pharmaceutical company, there are certain… regulations…”
He cut himself off, and then said, “Whoa. Deja vu. I’m having a weird feeling right now.”
“Is it working?” Eun Haje asked, strangely intent.
“Is what working?” Park Minseong asked back.
“What?” Eun Haje looked confused.
Kim Soleum was starting to get a headache. He ducked his head to carefully breathe through the distracting pain, and then leaned down slightly to pull open his top desk drawer. He was sure that he put some herbal tonics in—
He froze.
There were so many things inside the drawer. Files, paperclips, snuck-in snacks, messy receipts shoved haphazardly, pens, and even an extra tie.
There were three small bottles of herbal tonics, caffeinated, all of them already opened. One was leaking slightly onto the papers underneath it.
While he wouldn’t claim to be the most organised person, Kim Soleum was not a slob, either. He was also fairly sure he didn’t have that much stuff here! He’d only been here a week, after all, and—
A…. week…?
He slammed the drawer shut and pushed himself away from his desk, walking with wobbly legs over to the wall where there were large cabinets for file storage. Next to the cabinets was a small trash can. As he braced against the cabinets, he looked down into the trash.
There were nearly a dozen of the same herbal tonics he would normally purchase, all of them open and empty.
His stomach churned.
Yes… he really did have a habit of buying those in bulk and squirreling them away at work. It helped to not have to worry about restocking after the long hours and overtime shifts.
“There’s something wrong,” he intoned, his voice feeling like it wasn’t his own. His heart was pounding now that he could acknowledge it. A mixture of caffeine overdose and his own natural anxieties. His limbs were trembling, skin tense and warm underneath his clothes like the feeling of sunburns after a day at the beach. He thought he was going to throw up.
He turned to face his teammates again, the two of them watching him with obvious worry.
He opened his mouth to speak. Shut it again. His jaw was tense, and he didn’t think— no, he just had a hard time thinking in general.
“How long,” Kim Soleum choked out, “has it been since the lockdown started?”
His thoughts were starting to clear.
“Since it started? Hmm…” Park Minseong looked like he was thinking hard about it. “A few minutes ago…? No, an hour?”
Kim Soleum turned to Eun Haje, who was looking at him blankly.
“Assistant Manager Eun,” he addressed her politely, feeling a pressure behind his eyes, “have you… been in this room the whole time?”
She smiled. “Where else would I be during a lockdown drill?”
“If it’s been a few minutes… or an hour, and you’ve been here the entire time… why are you only commenting on it now?” He frowned, eyes defocusing in thought. “Why am I only questioning it now?”
There was an open notebook on his desk, the page entirely blank.
Daydream Inc. was under a lockdown.
Things in the office were… not adding up.
His mind came to one easy conclusion, a dread with the weight of bricks pulling him down.
“We’ve been here far, far longer than an hour.”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The clock on the wall, normally nothing more than background noise, sounded as loud as thunder when the room fell to silence.
Kim Soleum was someone who normally checked the outside sky for the time before he reached for his phone. The wide expanse of the sky was soothing on his nerves, even when it was covered up with storm clouds. Other buildings, trees with branches blowing in the wind, the traffic underneath them… It was a blessing to have such wide windows in the office. The natural light was a warmth taken for granted while working in this nightmarish company.
Now, both his teammates looked stunned. Eun Haje, especially, had her eyes down and a hand to her chin as she thought.
“...That’s true,” she agreed slowly. “Why would I ask…?”
Kim Soleum did not remember drinking all those tonics. He could only hope he hadn’t drunk them all within a short period of time. If he was very lucky, then he had given some to the other two as well.
Park Minseong was less convinced.
“We were just talking about it,” he said easily. His eyes were darker than they were a moment ago, and he smiled, “that’s all. Roe, are you okay? You look a bit flushed. Did you have a bad night?”
He didn’t remember what he did the previous night. He pulled his phone from his pocket and turned it on, showing the last thing he was looking at—
Ḷ̴̝̓̾̀̓̈́͂̈ ̸̢̤̘̙̘̓O̸̟̻̖̗̊̈́͒̅͊̈́̕ ̶̠͓̮̩̊O̶͇͋͗͋ ̸͍͛K̵̦̯̮͕̝̙̇͑͋͐̋̾
—and dropped the phone, watching with numb fingers as it clattered loudly onto the ground.
It was on a page from the <Dark Exploration Records>, but all the lines were blacked out. Redacted.
Deleting itself even in the brief moment he saw it.
Already, the image was frozen in his mind’s eye.
Qterw-A-████
███████████████████████████████████████████
███████████████████████████████████████████
███████████████████████████████████████████
██████████████████████████████████—
His throat locked up.
“Roe?”
He felt like— he felt—
The space behind his eyes felt like fire , and there was a crawling sensation up his throat, a if a long legged spider was slowly and deliberately forcing its way up his esophagus. His organs were churning, and his skin felt tight, tight across his body as if holding in something much larger than physically possible, like it was trying hard to jail his very being, confine him down into a human shape, pushing, pulsing—
“Roe Deer!”
It was too much! His fingers felt like they were tingling, swelling—
Ĺ̸̨̩̣͇̠̣͕̱͙̎́͐͊͒͐́͂̋̉͂̈́͒͊̕̚ ̸̡̛͎̰̺̪̖̺̟̩̠͖͖̙̯͓̓͗͒̓́͆͌̆̌͘O̵̢̩͖̟̮̯̦̘̰̱̰̙̍̐̈̐͋̾̆̽̄̑̎͜ͅ ̶̬͈̺͓̯̦̮̣̳̂̀̈́̇̌́͝O̶̤̳̪͈̗̣͎̻̝̞͔͈̱̓̑ͅ ̷̛͉̓̇̏̽̈̆͆͘͝K̷̮̩̣̯̦̻̖̹̖͔̻͛
Kim Soleum fell to his knees, choking, looking anywhere but toward his phone, only to see his teammates dashing for him, throwing themselves out of their seats in a vain attempt to catch him, even as he landed face down on the ground, eyes still darting about.
The ringing in his ears was back, and it was so l o u d . It was all encompassing, it was his entire world, and he was going to explode—!
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
With a sharp inhale, Kim Soleum looked at the clock on the wall.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
White.
—
“Ow,” Soleum intoned from where he fell onto the ground. His knees ached as he pushed himself up, and he reached to rub at the cheek that had scraped against the floor.
It was lucky that their office was pretty clean.
Above him, Eun Haje laughed, her hands hovering over his form as if she tried to catch him before the fall.
“You alright there, Roe Deer?” She asked, patting his shoulder as he pushed himself into a sitting position. “That looked like a nasty tumble. What did you even trip over?”
He looked around, and saw that his phone had fallen out of his pocket as well. Kim Soleum picked it up with a grimace, glad that he hadn’t accidentally cracked the screen.
“Nothing, probably,” he mumbled to himself, feeling a flush of embarrassment. This was not the type of impression that he wanted to leave on his new team! It had been a long time since his years of stumbling around with awkward limbs and tripping over his own feet.
“Well, come on, then,” she said, helping him up by pulling at his arm. “Anything hurt? Broken? Should we send you down to the infirmary?”
“No, I’m fine,” Kim Soleum responded, although he felt a bit of a headache besides the bruised knees and aching hip and ribs. Everything else would subside within a few minutes, but he probably hit his head going down as well. He lifted a hand to the side of his head, and grimaced.
Half-kneeling next to them, Park Minseong stared at the both of them with wide eyes and a pale face. He looked like he had just seen a monster.
“Hey Minseong, did you fall too?” Eun Haje joked. “You look worse than our rookie here.”
“I just saw—” The man looked between the two of them, frowning, “Didn’t you just see—?”
He shut his jaw with an audible click, breathing in shakily before raising a hand to rub at his jaw.
“Roe Deer,” Park Minseong said to Kim Soleum in a surprisingly serious tone. “Soleum. Something’s not right, we need to get you to the infirmary despite the lockdown—”
“Lockdown?” Eun Haje sounded surprised. She then looked over at the windows, which were covered by metal shutters. “Today? Damn it, I had plans…”
“Assistant Manager, this isn’t a joke,” Park Minseong interrupted her, and he helped pull Soleum up on his other side. Kim Soleum inched away from the upset man, unsure of how to react. What did he mean by lockdown—? No, of course Soleum knew what Daydream’s lockdowns were like, but didn’t that mean something was wrong—?
“Oh, it’s just a drill, relax,” Eun Haje said, loosening her grip so that Soleum had more breathing room. “I’m sure they’ll let us out if we say there’s an emergency. It’s too warm in here, anyway… is the air conditioning broken?”
She glanced up toward the ceiling, and then frowned. “...It’s not.”
“Isn’t it?” Kim Soleum asked, feeling a little loopy. His stomach was queasy, and there was a loud ringing in his ears. It must have been a bad fall. He felt like there was something he was missing as he tugged at his collar. “...Then why is it so hot?”
“Probably because there is something wrong ,” Park Minseong insisted. “You were just— there’s something— Roe Deer, I think you might be contamin—”
Both Kim Soleum and Eun Haje stared at him with darkened eyes, and he flinched back. He drew back away from Soleum, and then raised both arms to push against his eyes with the heel of his palms for a moment, breathing in and out until he calmed seconds later.
“Okay. Okay.” He pulled his hands away from his eyes, and this time his expression was composed. Determined. “Let’s do this one step at a time. We won’t manage to get to the isolation units, so let’s just… clinic. Infirmary. Hey Roe Deer, how are you feeling after that fall?”
Kim Soleum merely frowned at him. “...I’m fine.”
“I think you should get checked out just in case,” Park Minseong soothed, and turned his attention to Eun Haje. “Don’t you agree, Assistant Manager? We can’t let our rookie be hurt before he even steps into a Darkness. What will people think?”
“You don’t have to convince me,” Eun Haje said lightly, “Better to be safe than sorry, after all. And this containment protocol is such a farce. Why not just check the equipment floor by floor instead of locking down the entire building? It’s not like they even want us to follow evacuation procedures…”
As they started to herd Kim Soleum toward the door, he frowned and tried to squirm away.
“Um,” Soleum said, feeling tongue-tied. He glanced back at his suit jacket still on his desk. “I said I’m feeling fine, really.”
“You’re not,” Park Minseong insisted, with only the barest of tremors in his voice. Kim Soleum was starting to believe that there was something wrong with the supervisor instead, from how he was acting. “You fell pretty hard. Enough that we should check if you concussed yourself. We have to time it, right? It was at—”
The man looked toward the wall and froze, limbs suddenly falling limp. His head fell forward slightly, eyes glazed.
“Supervisor Park?” Kim Soleum startled, now moving to brace the man just in case he fell as well. The previous irritation he felt at Park Minseong’s actions vanished.
Eun Haje cursed and also lunged forward in case her other teammate had another awful spill. “Minseong? Hey Minseong, snap out of it!”
Park Minseong swayed in place, and then slowly lifted his head to blink blearily at them.
“Whoa,” he muttered, and rubbed his eyes. “I think I just nodded off there. I really need to stop putting in overtime. What a headache .”
“Okay,” Eun Haje was less amused this time as she looked between her teammates. “You are both going to the infirmary. The lockdown drill can go screw itself. C’mon.”
“Lockdown drill?” Park Minseong muttered, even as he was pulled along by the Assistant Manager. “That was today? That sucks. I like those. We get to just sit around and do nothing. Roe, you’ve never experienced one, right? You can just take a nap and no one would care—”
Crossing the threshold of their office out into the hallway felt like stepping into another dimension. Kim Soleum, with one hand on Park Minseong’s elbow and the other pulled by Eun Haje, froze in shock.
It was the same hallways he had gotten used to, bland as every other office building. Thanks to Daydream being a wealthy and highly sought after company, however, the interiors were clean and bright, interspaced with floor to ceiling glass panels that looked into various offices and meeting rooms. Half the rooms had their blinds down for privacy, while the other half showed clean and spacious areas with sleek furniture. The walls were white and bare, with recessed lights hidden alongside the top and bottom.
No, it wasn’t the actual environment that made the scene so strange.
“What the fuck ,” Eun Haje whispered under breath, and Kim Soleum couldn’t help but agree.
Outside in the hallway of the thirteenth floor of Daydream, Inc, there were more than a dozen people standing listless, swaying slightly on their feet and gazing into nothingness in different directions.
“Oh,” Park Minseong breathed out next to Kim Soleum. He was close enough that his breath tickled Soleum's ear. “Um. I don’t think it’s a drill.”