🏆 THE AMBY AWARDS 2023 TOP PICK - DIVERSE LIT 🏆
It's Rin and Hye-jin against the world. Or so it should have been.
Nagara Rin and Joon Hye-jin, college sweethearts and passionate gamers, have lived a fairytale marriage. Not even a decade after did...
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I was zipping my travel satchel when I heard a distinct knock on the door. I knitted my eyebrows. Didn't I leave it open to air out my room for a few minutes? Why would they need to knock?
"I hope I'm not interrupting something," Mirani said behind me. I turned and I found her leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed with a smirk plastered on her rounded face.
I straightened, chucking my satchel on my bed. The mattress, being that soft, made it bob upside down in its attempt to settle the sudden weight imposed on it. "No, not interrupting," I said, showing her my palms in a surrendering gesture. "I was just finishing."
Mirani hummed, eyes already roaming on the inside of my room. "I didn't exactly put you up for the sentimental type but this is..." she circled a finger in the vague direction of my genius interior design. "It's too empty."
Oh. Was that what she was referring to? I thought she's going to comment about how I pushed the bed into the corner to give the room a wider floor space. In fact, I switched things around inside the room so much that none of the original arrangement remained. Well, discounting the rotary phone I used to call meals up to my room.
I rolled my shoulders, relishing the cracking in my joints as I did. "Collecting things isn't my forte," I said, and it's true. That's more of a Hye-jin thing. I've always moped about the growing collection of things around the house because she's always on her phone, ordering things online she didn't even need. "What brings you here?"
Mirani perked up, a grateful look passing across her face as if she's relieved the conversation flowed past what she was trying to say to me. I didn't need to be a mind-reader to have an inkling of what she's going to say if I didn't change the subject. She'd perhaps comment about my lack of personal things in my own room, and how it might come across as me not thinking I'd stay here for long.
She'd mostly be right. I wasn't planning to spend a long time in this place, wherever this was. I would just get my rank up, get into that hidden archive, search for a way home, and take said way. Besides, after spending a whole lot of years decorating a house and knowing people would eventually leave their figurative nests depending on the flow of life, it seemed like a waste of time. Plus, the amount of clean-up work it would take, to erase any traces of you in that place—it's too much.
"Can I...?" Mirani gestured to the floor, swinging her arms this way and that.
I raised an eyebrow and jerked my chin at her. "Sure," I said. "Step right up."
She muttered her excuses and ducked past my doorway. "Here," she said, holding up a sheathed dagger to me. "Thought you might have more use with it."
I stared at the weapon, tracing the hand holding to an arm before eventually letting my gaze rest on the face smiling at me. "Why me?" I tilted my head to one side. "Also, this is the second weapon you've given me. Why?"
Mirani shrugged. "Maybe because I've seen you fight with a sword. While you're good with it, I think you'll be able to refine your techniques if you have something like this," she said. "And this dagger was given to me by Yaora just to spite me. He likes doing that—giving us gears that aren't the right fit. I think because I ate the newarb liver skewers he had been saving up for three days now."
