Against Time | k.th. ✔

十四: cloud nine

"Yuna, help me out with this new story, no?" Yeseul propounded, grabbing Yuna's arm instantaneously and hauling her by it to get her seated next to herself. She slid the bunch of papers in which she had been scrawling scenarios until then, and motioned Yuna with her eyes to scour through the matter quickly.

Yuna initially skimmed her gaze rather hastily to render a perfunctory reading. However, the interesting part soon came into play when she got herself jammed over a particular portion of Yeseul's work in the process, for she ended up reviewing it repeatedly despite the innumerable attempts she had already made. Yeseul— who was by then picturing herself roaming about in her own Cloud Nine for comparatively longer than this— mindlessly furrowed her brows, acquiring the other female's attention in a snap.

"Is something wrong? Why are you going over the same paragraph again and again?" Yeseul quizzed with confusion underlying her voice.

"Nothing's wrong..." Yuna responded rather prudently, for she didn't want to upset Yeseul either, "Except for your writing, to be honest. The alphabets look like walking sticks. If you could just give me a crux, that would prove to be much, much better—"

"Ah, okay. Why didn't you say that before?" Yeseul rolled her eyes in amusement, collecting the pages that Yuna held earlier, swiftly, prior to mentally preparing herself for reciting the tale comprehensibly.

"So it goes like this... the protagonist here is a female, who accidentally winds up meeting a strange man one day. He knows nothing— has absolutely zero knowledge about how the world works today, and keeps on uttering legit obsolete words and phrases which I— Er, the female lead finds extremely unhelpful... since she wants to know more about him." Yeseul's eyes twinkled endearingly when she noticed Yuna gradually immersing into her story recital.

"After a day filled with petty arguments and what not, the man finally tells the woman everything that he had inferred from their exchange of information. Both of them agree on this particular theory that he belongs to a different world, or timeline... truthfully, I don't know anymore. I'm yet to figure that out." Yeseul elicited a weary sigh, continuing, "Alright, so this theory actually turns out to be true for the tunnel which he had been talking about tirelessly, materializes before them— Well, kinda also because when he goes into it, he just vanishes like, poof! Like he never existed and they never met." She had supposedly finished her briefing, for the strained vocal cords visible in her neck all this while started to relapse into comfort.

Yuna was impressed, the affirmative hum that she had produced substantiated so. Albeit, after bobbing her head under the same influence for quite a couple of minutes, she spoke up, "So, this is how it ends, an open ending? Don't take it the wrong way Yeseul, but even an open ending like this sounds a bit... incomplete? You get what I'm saying, right?"

"About that..." Yeseul dragged her words to suffice for the silence that her being occupied with rearranging her script would have caused, resuming the very moment she was done with the task, "What if I send the lead into that tunnel, and make her act according to how circumstances unfold before her? How does that sound?" She leaned in, her intentions of keeping her idea confidential at all costs showing blatantly.