#pa.app

[paranoiakrp]

       CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: DO NARI …

STATS

name / do nari d.o.b. / may 2nd, 1992 age / 27  pronouns / she/her job / : raven’s desk - photographer societies / n/a groups / : raven’s desk - photographer

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

the eyes are the window to the soul.

nari’s considered a strange girl. she moves like a ghost. if you’re lucky, you’ll catch in the center of town with a camera around her neck. but it’s the way she can sneak up on you mid-conversation. the way she hears the whispers around her but she’ll only smile in return. but it’s the eyes that get people.

the way she stares at someone. if they’re not looking at her they might feel her eyes on their back. and when they turn around, nari is there. staring. the fact that she’s a girl with such direct eye contact. other’s shy away but she continues to stare. as if she’s looking into the very depths of you. it’s simple. she’s looking and learning. nari learned very early on that the lies don’t lie. in fact they tell you everything, even your secrets. she studies. looking forward to seeing how someone takes her in. when they want to run away from her stare but they can’t. it’s like they’re trapped. naked. even if she cant, it’s the feeling that she is. the fact that her eyes are a little red sometimes, as if she was crying. ( and she won’t tell them that the redness comes from a completely natural reason. )  

or the fact that people see her head to the forest and they’ll see her leave hours later. camera in tow. the fact that now they don’t know what an interaction with her will be like. if she’ll keep that same blank face. if a slightly manic grin will appear before she’s blank again. the fact that she lives for reactions. the fact that her interest run dark and she has no problem with sharing them. by all accounts, nari should be seen as a normal woman.

something’s just off. it’s unsettling. something you can’t pin-point or find a reason. the fact that there shouldn’t be a reason to feel slightly uncomfortable around her.

it’s just something about her. and she doesn’t mind letting you think it.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

“didn’t you hear…”

“ran away…”

“i heard the child wasn’t his.”

“it wouldn’t be a surprise..you know.”

and then sixteen year old nari would come around the corner and the towns people would rush to shut up. she didn’t fault them, not when she was so used too it. there wasn’t much to do but gossip. and there was pity, plenty of pity. nari got it as soon as she stepped foot in junae. poor nari. her mother ran off with another man. most likely pregnant with another man’s son. poor nari, her father. it was a shame. maybe he’s happier now. she had managed to hear it all.

no one had the full story but that didn’t matter. they had enough of the truth. her mother did have an affair, her parents had never been in love. some would be shocked that nari saw it coming. things had slowly started to become different. her talks with her mother had become shorter and a life time’s worth of advice would pour from her lips.

and it was true enough about her father. he didn’t see it coming. he was blind-sided. it broke him, nari could see it. his eyes showed he had given up. and she was the first see him when it happened. and they lied about that too, he passed in his sleep. a family that lived as long as hers in junae were bound to have a few secrets. some lingering whispers and this would become one of them.

and nari had been left alone.

but they had both left her something. her mother’s love to photography that soon turned into nari’s. photographs could capture those good moments. the ones that would become hard to remember. and her father left his deep love of junae’s lore. he had always been a tad in love with more of the darker things in life. he loved the idea’s of ghost and witches and power. and loved nature.

it was only right that she did too. it what’s got her through the rest of her high school life. as soon as school was out, she’d head into the forest. into the edges of junae. she fell in love with it. just like him. it leads her to knowing what she wanted most. to capture everything she could with her camera.

in those last years, the towns people think she’s a ghost. they never see her but it was okay that she wasn’t around. nari had always been a little creepy. people would whisper about the blank lot on her face, the way she hardly spoke. she didn’t come to town events. and she never bothered to correct them. nari lived inside her head, inside her forest.

waiting.

after graduation she leaves for seoul. she wants to go to school there, she wants to learn more about photography. maybe she wants to find her mother. she isn’t sure why. but she goes.

and seoul teaches her a lot. nari learns about herself, how to express herself. she learns more about non-verbal communication. four years to explore, four years of leaving junae behind. the gossip, the rumors, the whispers and the looks. they can’t find her in seoul. no one knows her here, they don’t care.

and when the end of her schooling comes, her heart yearns or travel. she wants to take photos of the world and learn about the urban legends of the world. to capture the places left forgotten or avoided. even if she’s on in junae, the feel of the town never left her. neither did her taste for the things that were slightly erie and macabre.

it towards the end of her travels that she sets her sight back on junae. she missed the nature, the deafening silence at night. the way it felt like there was always something lingering in the darkness. it started to feel like her small visits weren’t enough.

so she returns.

and it’s exciting. she comes at night. heading straight to the forest and pulling out her camera. and her return to town isn’t realized at first. she’s a ghost again, moving in the shadows. a few people spot her here and there but nothing’s confirmed. not until she gets her job. she’s forced to be around the public. and when she steps out that day, the whispers return. no one knew why she left but they knew she was back.

this nari is slightly different, people slowly come to realize. she’s rather blase about things, indifferent. her dry humor doesn’t mess with the blunt towns people. her interest turn a few off. but she is unpredictable, out there, slightly strange. they can’t grasp it. before, nari never spoke. you had to pull conversation out of her. but now, she’s direct.

a little too direct.

she’s learned to express herself in the moment. and in the fast pace city, it was okay. traveling, it was okay. but in junae, she’s odd. happy one moment, over sharing, eyes dazzling. and in the next, she’s queit. moody even. she was hot and cold, never giving other’s a chance to settle.

and they’ll never get it. they won’t get her. the fact that she likes to see their reaction. to see the way they can’t quit process the information she’s given. the way the realization hits and then they’re left awkwardly trying to fit back into the conversations. for a group of people who pride themselves on being the masters to subtlety. the one’s who can whisper behind someone’s back but smile a few moments later.

this new nari talks quickly or not all. she moves as if her feet never touch the ground. you can’t tell what she’s thinking or how she might react.

she see’s they like the old nari better. teenage nari is predictable, a little strange but predictable. but this nari is different. they learn to take it in stride. they learn to adapt because they see her more often now. she’s hanging around town with a camera around her neck. if you look close enough, there might be a ghost of a smile on her lips.

there’s a chance you know nothing for sure but there’s one thing that’s always clear. nari’s always watching.

[paranoiakrp]

          CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: PARK BONHWA ...

STATS

name / park bonhwa d.o.b. / 07.12.97 age / 22 pronouns / he/him job / waiter societies / monstrous › psychometry groups / n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

A simple touch, and he’s immersed in whatever imprint is left behind, be it a person or object. He doesn’t know what to call it, or why it happens to him, but it’s something he knows he has to hide, something he can’t just tell people about. Sometimes he thinks he really is crazy, when his fingers brush a cup or chair and suddenly he filled with a deep sorrow or sees a flash of a person’s face, like a snap shot image pushed into his head. It doesn’t happen all of the time, but it does happen enough for him to have to control his reactions tightly, to reign in his messy mind and pretend like everything is perfectly normal. Sometimes it’s more, like a whisper of a thought or spoken words, and still even more rare, a vision. 

He acts like he doesn’t know what he knows or that he feels what he feels, instead continuing on with the smile everyone expects of him and hiding behind his carefully carved mask.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

Park Chanri was never made for child rearing. She was a free spirit, a wandering soul that never wanted to tie herself down with the burden of a child or husband. It was unfortunate that she fell into the bed of a man passing through town, even more unfortunate that the night of passion resulted in an unwanted pregnancy.

She very nearly terminated the pregnancy. All it would take was a discreet trip out of town for a night, then her burden would be gone, but something in Chanri resisted. Despite the odds, despite the feeling of utter panic and terror at the thought of having a child caring for their every need, she decided to at least give this baby a chance.

When Bonhwa was born, his mother was alone in the hospital, crying endlessly in an odd mixture of happiness and fear for the tiny little baby she brought into this cruel world. He was chubby and pink and everything she never knew she wanted out of life. Chanri knew though, quite early on that her baby was different. He was sweet as pie, the gentlest little child, but he also knew and said very odd things. It was strange to watch when he was a toddler, the way he would touch things or people sometimes and go through a surprising mood swing. From happy and giggly to tears, anger, shock, and so on, she feared he had some sort of mental illness. It wasn’t until he could talk that Chanri realized her baby was a little more special than she thought.

It was an evening that Chanri went to pick him up from his babysitter after her work at the local bar, tired and upset over something her boss did that night before she left. He had been scolding her on customer etiquette, using the opportunity to proposition her as a means of letting the incident slide.

She was jobless (after slapping her boss) and terrified about trying to find a new one.

As he did every time she picked him up, Bonhwa came sprinted out to his mom and clung to her, happily folding himself into her arms. Except this time his face crumpled, a look of worry too mature for his young face looking up at her. “Everything will be okay.” He spoke softly, “you’ll find a new job mommy.”

And then suddenly it became so clear. It happened again and again over the course of a few years, Bonhwa touched something or someone and something happened. Sometimes, he told her, it was just a feeling imprinted on him, like one time he touched an old toy she brought home from a thrift store and he burst into tears, overwhelmed with a feeling of sadness while holding the toy. Other times it was images, people, places, things, but then sometimes, less frequently, it would be thoughts or words, a thin stream of a whisper connected to whatever or whoever he had touched. Most rare of all, something Chanri knew had only happened once, were visions. Bonhwa helped her set the table one holiday, barely four but so eager to help his mom. She pulled out the nice china she took after her parents both passed away, the kind only used for special occasions, warning him to be very gentle with it. Bonhwa’s tiny hands curled around two of the china plates, but they never fully closed. The plates hit the floor with an echoing sound of broken glass, Bonhwa’s eyes wide in shock.

After she calmed him down and gently got him to talk about it, Bonhwa explained what he saw with his lacking vocabulary. He said it was like a movie playing, one where his mother was barely a teenage as she watched her father slap her mother across the face, the fine china clutched in her mother’s hands. It was a brief vision, there and then gone, but it left Bonhwa feeling weak and tired, his tears slowly dripping down his face for hours afterward.

When it came time for him to start school, Chanri felt terrified for her child all over again. She felt that frantic feeling she felt at his birth, the sense to protect her baby at all costs from the cruelty of the outside world. She sternly told him never to speak about what he saw and felt to other people, to keep his secret locked deep down. She was nearly hysterical as she held his shoulders, making him promise it to himself.

He promised her, but Bonhwa was only a small child, and small children slip up. The worst of it was his early grade school years where he really had trouble reining in his reactions. Sometimes he would cry randomly in class or become angry and throw fits over seemingly nothing. It took a long time for Bonhwa to learn how to live behind a mask, cutting off himself every time he touched something or someone and felt a rush of emotion or a flash of an image. It got easier, but he felt restrained, closed in.

Once he was relatively more in control of himself, though slip ups still occasionally happened, Bonhwa’s school life wasn’t too difficult. He was a very friendly and sweet kid, quick to makes friends and endear others to him with his genuine happiness. He was kind to a fault.

In high school he started working after school and on weekends to help his mom out. He worked at a little hole in the wall food place after school, then the gas station on weekends when he could take the graveyard shifts. It was tough to balance, between his school work, social life, and jobs, but it paid off when he and his mom could finally afford to move into a two bedroom apartment that was slightly better than before.

After graduation he stayed at the gas station and food place for a few months more until he could manage to get a full time job at a diner. He’s been there for a few years, putting any extra money he makes towards helping out his mother and keeping them afloat.

[paranoiakrp]

         CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: KANG SEOLMI …

STATS

name / kang seolmi d.o.b. / 05.24.97 age / 22 pronouns / she/her job / shop worker societies / n/a groups / n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

the mannequin that sits still in the window front of her mother’s wedding dress boutique has been the center of her attention in school for years. it all started with a rumor that had spread back when her mother had first opened it some odd years ago; kids in her class had said that as they walked by the mannequin on the street holding their parents’ hands, they would swear they would see the mannequin’s eyes follow them down the street. the story blossomed into much more, erupting into something along the lines of an urban legend.

but even as the years have progressed and seolmi has grown out of her initial amusements with the mannequin’s place in junae folklore, she’s begun to have second thoughts of the matter. the same year her mother had brought the mannequin to the boutique was only a few months before seolmi’s first time winning a local beauty pageant — but from that point forward, she could’ve sworn the porcelain model began to glare at her jealously. the times when she was alone at the store soon felt stiff and uncomfortable; seolmi thought for awhile that maybe she’d just let herself get too hyper fixated on the rumors kids spread at school that stopped her from thinking rationally.

and then there was the time that she could’ve sworn she’d looked away for one moment and saw the mannequin change her position to face her — but she could never tell anyone she’d seen that happen. they’d all think she was crazy.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

kim eunja was a mother who loved her daughter, but her obsession with beauty cast too much envy and vain in their relationship.

seolmi was raised by a talented seamstress, arguably the town’s finest — seolmi never wore anything outside of what her mother wanted; that was fine, because seolmi had quickly become known for her home-sewn outfits that could never just be worn, they had to be seen. the only daughter of three, and also the youngest, seolmi was showered with the most tender affection from her mother that left her father to take care of the other two. but with putting seolmi on a pedestal also brought the brunt of the expectations her mother set upon her when she was introduced to the pageant world early on. a competitive spirit was set ablaze, bright in every aspect of her life, whether it was during a football game between classes or being at the top of her class. seolmi soon realized the benefit of being tall, pretty, and everything that could get her whatever she wanted in life — she was a complete package that she knew most other people weren’t lucky being gifted all the same.

seolmi was, at heart, a small town girl who knew she could never see herself navigating the scary city streets alone. what did she need that was already in junae anyway? the people in town (so she thought) adored her, she was fairly well known in the neighboring towns for being a top local pageant winner, and most importantly, she had her mother’s boutique she needed to help run. her two brothers would be capable of handling the nitty gritty real working world, so why would it ever cross her mind to be her responsibility to support the family?

some family friends saw it as a pity that seolmi chose to stay when she graduated high school — but for many of her classmates, seolmi noticed, wound up sticking around, too. there was something about the town itself that felt petty, malicious, like it was there to seek revenge on those that tried to go against it.

and everyday as she sat behind the boutique counter, staring at the curvature of the mannequin’s graceful posed, porcelain limbs glistening to those that passed by, seolmi never once considered putting two and two together, even if the variables had been so obvious before, even to her.

[paranoiakrp]

         CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: NAM BITNA ...

STATS

name / nam bitna d.o.b. / 11.11.94 age / 24 pronouns / she/her job / freelance audio technician & psychic shop receptionist societies / here groups / vlog › audio tech

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

the sound.

growing up is loud.

it’s a cramped house full of three generations worth of people and it’s racing to fill your plate at dinner because there might not be enough for everyone; it’s creaking floorboards and thin walls and screaming in the night and - swearing to every god and deity that you weren’t making it up when you told the story of the night before over breakfast. it’s a glowering black figure in the corner of her room that keeps her up at night. it’s crying herself to sleep when the bills are overdue and her night light doesn’t shine and her only source of light is the glow of the moon. “shh,” says her father, tells her to cover her ears and shut her eyes, count backwards from ninety; that things are never as bad as they seem.

when she’s ten, her dad scrapes together enough to buy her a walkman at a pawn shop during an obligatory trip into town. the first song she hears through the clunky headphones that go with it, on a blank cassette that she can’t pry out, is something beautiful. it’s in old korean and she doesn’t understand a word of it but she plays it to the end and then again and again, stares into the corner where the black blob lives and watches it move. she stares and she stares, but it’s not half as scary when she can’t hear the groan of the house and the brush of wind on the trees outside her window, the big empty whispers of the souls that live in the walls. she feels safe. it’s the first time she sleeps through the night and from that point forward bitna is never seen without it - her walkman, black and bulky and covered in residue from stickers stuck on and scraped away by its previous owner, the cassette that doesn’t budge. the songs, sometimes voices, that never end, the batteries that never seem to need a change.

everyone other than bitna and her father that’s ever tried to take a listen says one thing -

it’s quiet.

“shh,” says her father.

he dies. she doesn’t listen to it much anymore. she’s scared of what she’ll hear.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

TAPE #001, TRACK 0:

seven wonders, fleetwood mac.

bitna’s mother, songhee, is the daughter of a politician, she’s well-off and high up in the hierarchy of junae’s youth. she’s beautiful, intelligent, the kind of girl who can have any man she set her sights on but she throws it all away to become a poor man’s wife. enter romeo. bitna’s father, hanbin, who comes from rags, a long line of workers that struggle to make ends meet and keep food on the table; he makes extra pocket money on his own by busking around the town with his homegrown magic tricks that he never shares the secrets to but lacks drive and ambition. he never leaves the library once he’s in it, rarely even to shower. he bites the peels off his oranges, hands sticky with juice and filthy with dust and residue.

they’re not supposed to meet, should’ve never crossed paths to begin with, but in true romeo and juliet form: they do anyway. it starts as a run-in near town hall and turns into them meeting weekly, in the outskirts of town when the night is pitch black and inky enough that their shadows don’t give them away. they trade secrets and the little bit of knowledge they possess to the tune of cicadas and festival excitement.

bitna: is conceived on a fallen log in the forest, fitted with a discolored gingham blanket, the scene lit by fireflies and the stars in the sky. her mother always makes it sound more romantic than the thrust-and-go it’d really been, a rushed moment of passion after they’d promised to run away together - into the horizon, over the mountains and beyond. it’s funny then, that bitna’s born where they both had been raised: in the quiet, sheltered middle of bumfuck nowhere.

they get married young and they struggle, make empty, endless promises to make it out and somewhere bigger for bitna’s sake, but they never do.

god, they never do.

TAPE #015, TRACK 6:

boogie shoes, kc & the sunshine band.

she grows up in a house packed full with her grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and her mom and dad, and it’s an overwhelm of sound.

she picks up on every shift in tone and pitch, catches every impact and imbalance. she thrives on sound, the way it feels when it’s low and rumbling, the shrillness of it when it’s so high you can only feel the rattle of it in your eardrums and the air. she’s born screaming her head off, says her first words early and loves the sound of her granddad’s vinyl records when it’s close to bedtime and she’s slow to soothe.

it’s a cruel kind of irony then that, with how sensitive she is to the audio of the world around her, she’s born deaf in one ear.

they can’t afford a hearing aid, least of all when she’s still growing, so she finds other ways to hear with clarity, certainty. it starts with sitting in her grandparents’ lounge room and pressing her tiny hands against the speaker of their well-loved record player and evolves into her learning how to use audio software and watching the fluctuations of the waves on the screen of the family’s brick computer with a carelessly (and excruciatingly) torrented program that did, in fact, have a virus just like her older cousin had told her it would and did (in fact) crash the system altogether. she takes thrifted speakers apart to see what’s inside and follows her dad to junk sales to find scrap pieces of old electronics to make them better. she hates junk sales but it almost feels worth it for the way her hair stands up on end around certain items, certain homes and alleyways, when neighbors ask her for help with fixing their set-ups, when she’s known as a mini audio tech guru as young as she is, despite her disability. almost worth the voices, the noises again. almost.

kids are rude about it sometimes and, when they’re old enough to know better and not care, make a show of walking around to her left side to talk shit. (about her daddy being weird and her mama being a peach that fell real far from the orchard - it’s all things they’ve heard their parents say about them, things that keep them from having playdates with bitna, things that make her cousins walk ahead of her on the way home. things.)

her fist serves as a decent reminder that she can still hear with her right ear and manages to shut up the terrible few before it becomes a bigger problem, but she drowns it out with her headphones and the eerie, nameless music her walkman plays, anyway. she doesn’t hear much else. she doesn’t need them.

(she doesn’t.)

but bitna, a natural sponge, collects friends and enemies with every breath she takes - unapologetic and ambitious and deluded into thinking that she’s better somehow. (she goes to the same school (church, doctor, grocer, park, lake) that everyone else goes to, looks nowhere but up and wonders what better is,) keeps mostly to her work and her plans - anticipates, really, to be the exception to the frightening notion that nobody in junae makes it very far away from town. her grandmother tells her that people almost always come back, that there’s something in the water and the air. ask your daddy, she always says. bitna never finds the time.

but she is one of a hefty handful who make it out. she goes to college in the big city long enough to start a life and get a degree but winds up right back where she’d started when her dad dies.

it’s sudden. loud.

she gives up a tech job opportunity in seoul to help her mother pick up the pieces of her heart and plan a tasteful sendoff; watches her cousins move out of the stupid house they’d all grown up in at their own leisure, starting their lives as functioning members of the community - seemingly content with going absolutely nowhere.

her mother reconnects with her parents in her agony, old and retired and withered down by life and then she’s gone, too - in the middle of the night on a patch of grass in the forest. bitna doesn’t waste time wondering what she’d been doing that far out of town in the first place and grieves the loss of both her parents in such close proximity. it doesn’t make any sense.

she could leave but she stays behind to keep her father’s parents company. it’s what she tells herself, at least, when she struggles to find a place for herself in the home she’d worked so hard to leave, lost without the anchors she’d always counted on being there. poor and thrust into independence, really, with no net.

it makes her angry, bitter. she simmers and - she ponders. the lack of surprise surrounding her parents’ deaths from anyone else rattles her: the way her father’s best friend can’t look her in the eyes; the way her maternal grandparents screw their mouths up at the mention of how her parents had met, don’t dare to look at bitna lest they be reminded of what she represents; her uncle burns her daddy’s journals in the backyard, locks his foggy glass jars in the attic and nails the door shut.

they’d known, then.

she finally finds the voice to ask the questions she’s always been meaning to ask and the answers are gone, buried with her parents in junae’s cemetery. or, kept, rather, by the only other people they’d dared to tell.

she wishes she’d been one of them.

TAPE #054, TRACK 9

soda city funk, tim legend.

it’s two years of this.

bitna, though a typically optimistic (read: fatalistic) and (mostly) (sometimes) (tries-to-be) warm individual, falls into a depression perpetuated by the lack of forward movement in her career, which serves as a convenient cloak for her anxiety over a lack of closure. her simmering bubbles into a boil and she wallows in the heat of it. her wallowing leads to drinking alone and late nights out, drunken wandering around the library for a window to sneak in through, making it as far as the rusted back door before she falls asleep on the steps. other times it’s waking up in the middle of the night and wandering to where her mother’s body had been found. she explores in the cover of the night until she loses her nerve.

she takes odd jobs to keep bills paid and food on the table, lengthy repairs and school assemblies, music for birthday gigs when the going gets tough, a wealthy man’s lap when she’s desperate. it’s all a means to an end.

between job interviews (and bad decisions), she takes a trip to the tarot shop for a reading. she finds herself in this position a lot, lingering in front of the heavily draped doorway with words hanging off the tip of her tongue. usually, she walks away, but something compels her to stay. she goes in with the intention of asking about her parents’ deaths but chickens out and asks for help instead.

it’s two parts desperation for a raft to hold onto and one part curiosity that pulls her in, it costs her a coffee but she feels vindicated when the first card she touches when they begin is death upright.

change and transformation, the woman at the helm assures her, and maybe bitna should be more embarrassed that it takes a woman in a dusty robe and tacky jewelry telling her to let go of her worldly woes to get her to unclench but it works.

in fact, it resonates with her on such a personal level that she starts working there as a receptionist, letting go of the notion of her dream job falling face first into her lap and holding onto a new belief. the cards become law; she cleanses her aura with funky teas and yoga, sits with her worn down walkman and listens until hours turn into days when she feels the need to be on her own. she waits and works and doesn’t stress over the future. (except maybe she does, just more quietly and mostly in her journal,) but it’s the first time in her life that she lets life happen and explores the town she’d never truly given a chance and - it’s almost fate that the like-minded vlog squad opportunity arises when it does. when she’s faced with all of these questions that she doesn’t have the answers to and a desire to find them.  

(it rumbles.)

[paranoiakrp]

     CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: KWON JUNHO…

STATS

name / kwon junho d.o.b. / october 4, 1995 age / 23  pronouns / he/him job / : engineer societies / n/a groups / : n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

rather than spending his time looking forward, junho spends it looking up.

and rather than choosing to follow along with the many who reside in junae who believe the stories and fables of what lurks in the dark, in the hills and mountains that adorn the backdrop of the town that eternally gazes down on the innocent and not so innocent people that reside within it — he remains a skeptic.

even the day he receives a call from his mother when he’s in seoul that his father had mysteriously and suddenly passed away, junho can’t find evidence once he’s back in town besides the fact that all of it was just one mere isolated incident. nothing more.

junho believes in science, not hearsay. he refuses to believe the rumors that spread about something more; he pretends to take the words of the town’s shaman when she looks himself and his mother in the eye, telling them something greater had taken his father and her wife from them both — his mother cries, junho consoles her. he nods, but in his mind, this is all too ridiculous. 

there can’t be any other explanation for any of this.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

in junae, junho always felt suffocated.

the air was always too thick for his own good. he never noticed how tight it made his throat feel until he’d left the town for university in seoul where suddenly he’d felt he’d exhaled for the first time in his life. it came as a surprise, though he’d never bothered to put much thought into it afterward — not until the death of his father came unexpectedly.

his parents always considered junho to be a bright child, though they, like many parents from junae, never expected their children to make it in the outside world. being born in junae was an unspoken curse. he was like any other boy; he showed ambition, interest, motivation — but even those qualities couldn’t convince his parents otherwise. they’d been through the same small town lifestyles as well; his mother was a stay at home mom and his father a gold miner. the two never had much to amount to past high school, his father enlisting directly in the military to guarantee him some sort of job once he’d be finished, only to find himself back at square one in his hometown again.

at fourteen years old, junho watches alongside the rest of his town the space telescope hubble cross over the starry horizon of junae on a warm, july evening. it was only momentary for some, pausing to gawk at the small speck in the sky cross from one end to the other before returning back to their normal lives, but for junho, something sparked inside him. suddenly, he felt compelled to get out of junae, to find something better for himself in the real world. he became interested in aerospace and satellites in particular. he spent extra time after school talking with his physics teachers whom his parents began to form a dislike with due to them ‘taking away’ junho’s time studying at home. junho began crafting rockets in the hills below the mountains, sometimes alone, sometimes with his friends who wanted to watch the finished results. more often than not would they witness the rocket fizzle out on its podium before falling sideways to the ground; but in the later instances, once junho’s calculations began to refine themselves, would watch in fascination as his rockets would blast into the october sky, far, far away from their ghost town.

just like his father, junho enlisted in the military following his graduation from high school. his college entrance exams proved him quite well, but the boy thought he could gain even more engineering experience from his two years in the air force. by then, his father was confident junho had proved him wrong and was going to never come back to junae. his son had landed himself a good university following leaving the military, was doing well in his studies —

and suddenly, he died.

the doctors initially thought it was an infection of lungs from the years of coal. the autopsy showed his father’s lungs had only minor coal exposure (the man was always proud of the extra precautions he took, knowing the field of work he was in), and for weeks, his cause of death was ruled unknown. junho was called home immediately, and his mother couldn’t take his death well. even after his burial no cause was determined, and with that, his mother, under immense post-stress and grief from losing her husband so suddenly, asked junho to come back home indefinitely.

only two and a half years into his engineering program with no other option, junho moved home. junae had raged its horns at the one who had almost slipped away, took one of the things that meant the most to him, and forced him back. his mother was almost sixty years old now, and having lived nearly her entire life as a stay at him mother, could only find a few part time jobs in town. she settled for some work at the town’s post office where she surprisingly enjoyed organizing the packages and envelopes and taking people’s orders. the addresses she saw sometimes on the mail that came in interested in, especially from the places she knew she’d never get to go. by now, her mindset from now compared to her younger years had changed. she hoped with everything that her son would be able to make it out again — but this time, for good.

junho considered signing his own life away to the mines, but his mother talked him out of it. instead, he found a job as an engineer working at a power plant on the outskirts of town. it isn’t what he wants, nor what he sees himself doing within the next five years. but until he’s able to scrape together enough to save for an apartment closer to the city and afford being able to go back to school, junae has shackled the genius it created back down to the very grounds he’d first found his footing on, destined to never leave.

[paranoiakrp]

      CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: RYU KIHWAN…

STATS

name / ryu kihwan d.o.b. / november 13th, 1994 age / 24  pronouns / he/him job / : raven’s desk - photographer societies / necronomicon groups / : n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

kihwan’s always hidden himself in flights of fantasy.

it’s easy to do in a town as boring as junae. it’s even easier to do in a town as cryptic as junae — in towns where whispers of ghosts and the howling of wolves ran loud and clear on the wind, even if outright acknowledging such was deemed, quite frankly, stupid. though he was never a reader, kihwan was the epitome of a dreamer for better or worse.

the old, decrepit house at the end of the street wasn’t a house to kihwan; rather, he fancied it as a front for a secret society, sharing drinks and laughs and blood in a silver goblet passed from hand to hand. circles of mushrooms in the woods became bridges to other realms in his mind. by the time he was older, of course, he kept all of this to himself. he could only take so much laughter from his peers, so many silent sighs from the adults around him, and when he got even older he stopped believing, himself.

suffice to say, a small part of kihwan was incredibly revitalized when he found a part of a book, deep in the library. he was only there to pass the time; he didn’t want to go home quite yet, but he didn’t want to stay at his job either. he expected to possibly run into a friend, cracking into a dusty, thick book that seemed impossible to ignore. instead of finding some magical tale in the tome like he expected from the title — who calls a book something like the necronomicon, anyway? — he found pages upon pages on rituals. specifically, rituals to summon demons, objects, who knows what else — things like that, along with the counterpart skills of banishing. kihwan tried to dismiss it at first, of course. who wanted a ghost running amok, especially at the cost of cremation ashes, or blood, or teeth, or tears or flame? still, he could hardly ignore the call for very long, reading and reading for the first time since high school, etching his notes in the margins, ignoring the protests he could still hear from his teachers about putting ink to such a book.

one new moon, he found himself hidden in the woods. far from civilization, far from the town, far from the safety of his home. he etched the runes he was told, drew his circle of blood; the scar from a shaking hand raking a knife against the flesh of his palm was still there. once all was said and done, he spoke his words of power aloud. the creature he was trying to summon was nothing too out of the ordinary, only a feather to see if it would work, something not out of place but not dangerous either, something he wouldn’t be able to mistake if it appeared. 

suffice to say, he got his answer, and a hunger for more knowledge along with it.

if you were to ask him where he went that night, kihwan would just give you a devilish smile and put his hands back in his stupid leather pockets, a hastily scrawled message to the other side pressing into his palm, burning him with the reminder of his plans. “oh,” he’d say to you, nonchalant as he could be. “just a little visit to the wild side.”

WHATS YOUR STORY?

chilly november, 1994: kihwan is born, an extraordinary event for quite the uneventful family. his father, dongwook, was a lawyer. his mother, miyoung, a florist. the two had been trying for a long time, so when kihwan’s cries rung throughout the night sky, neither of them could hold back their tears from joy. he was almost a spoiled child, the only one they had. despite the dreary town, they gave him all the love in the world, sheltered him from all the dangers they could. no going out past sundown, especially not alone, and kihwan had learned that he better savor the time he had to play with the others while it was there.

schooling for kihwan was a little difficult, especially at first. it was incredibly difficult, near impossible, for the young boy to sit down and focus on his work, talking animatedly to the children around him or doodling under his multiplication tables instead. he made his friends and held the bestest games of pretend on the playground — if you asked him, at least. he was loyal, standing up for his closer pals quite a bit, especially as everybody got older and more cruel.

they teased kihwan quite a bit as well. who the hell still believed in dragons during middle school? kihwan pouted, gave them their just desserts, though towards the end of puberty he withdrew quite a bit. he spoke only to those he trusted, keeping his headphones in during the commute to high school and lunch, and any classes where he was actually allowed. even though he had matured, and no longer believed in those stupid fairytales, he didn’t want to give anybody the chance.

when he graduated, his grades were so so; not great but not awful. his father was upset, but he understood, and his mother helped him find jobs around the town. they both wanted the best for him, but kihwan was certain college would only hurt him in the long run. reluctantly, his father agreed, and soon after he found a job as a waiter and built his savings. within a year, he had found a real job — working at a music shop, dull but the discounts were incredible, the tell tale heart radio station playing quietly through the speakers, especially in the later hours once business was slow.

the monotony of kihwan’s life continued thus for a few years. work, work, going out drinking or hanging out with friends on occasion, work, work, visit his family…not much changed until around four months ago, a quiet visit to the library — unassuming, but lifechanging.

a discovery of a book, the necronomicon, and later a group of friends. kihwan’s always been a romantic when it comes to life, it’s true, though part of him feels like even if he wasn’t he’d still call it fate. none of them had spoken outright about the mysterious book; the idea of telling someone you were out in the woods collecting bones like a lunatic, summoning imps, cursing your enemies was laughable, and yet despite their enormous differences in walks of life they still grew close, and closer still, woven together with the common red thread of secrecy and knowledge.

[paranoiakrp]

       CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: CHOI RION ...

STATS

name / choi rion d.o.b. / 09.01.96 age / 23 pronouns / he/him job / florist societies / necronomicon groups / n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

if anyone were to ask rion’s parents, they’d say he’s the perfect son. he’s dependable (read: obedient), agrees with all of their decisions (read: a spineless pushover), doesn’t get into trouble (read: boring, also see: friendless). 

as a kid, he was curious and imaginative. he didn’t understand the definition of boundaries, fed to the brim with love and support from his parents who wanted the world ofr him. and so he learned to take it, spoke his mind and questioned everything. 

but as he grew older, time and betrayal made him reserved, taught him to take his words and swallow them, choking on them on their way down. he goes through his teenage years in a haze, punctured with moments of pain, of fury that burned so wildly before being quickly extinguished. 

it’s with the discovery of something new, of the necronomicon, that he changes. with fury as his driving force, he focuses on learning. using circles of blood and ash, rion creates his own punishment, his own revenge, in the form of hexes and jinxs, of bad luck at the long list of targets he keeps in his pocket. the payment is worth it, knows that everything he dishes out always come back to him in the same form but double, and more intense. he learns hard the first time, starts simple intending to trip a lesser victim on his sheet, and finds himself losing his footing on the steps the next day and breaking his ankle as a result. he almost chalks the first time up to coincidence, but he quickly learns there’s nothing like that now in his world.

he knows next to nothing, knows he has a long way to go but he’s prepared to pay in blood and bone to get every name crossed on that list, inflicting more pain the higher he climbs. 

WHATS YOUR STORY?

i. the choi house sits on the outskirts of town, it’s a delicate house with it’s white paint and bright blue shutters. the town talks about it looks like something out of a painting with wind chimes on the front porch, the ivy crawling up the lattice and spreading out to the side of the house, and the giant greenhouse bursting at the brim with flowers year round. 

the choi family itself has been around junae for a very long time, could trace it’s roots back generations, all living and thriving in junae. and in public, all of the members of the family are nice and polite, seemingly the image of the perfect family. 

but inside, well that’s a different story. 

ii. his early memories are filled with nothing but love. from warm hands carding through his hair as he naps on the floors in the summer heat to playing hide and seek with his father in the green house, his giggles filling the air. there’s was a house filled with love and affection and rion felt like he was invincible. 

iii. but things sometimes change slowly, infecting those affected, poisoning them with fear and worries until they begin to turn sour. and just like that it begins to spread. 

as the years passed and rion grew in height and age, the family business began to slow down, until it was left at nothing but a crawl. the passing of his grandparents meant the family obligations fell onto the shoulder of his parents, his father especially. gone were the cheery mornings and warm filled evenings, instead an air of irritation fell over the house like a fog, turning his father from loving man into a monster. 

and the picturesque house on the outskirts of the town with its perfect shutters and beautiful greenhouse, grew into a nightmare. the sound of unintentionally heavy footsteps, of doors shut a bit too hard, of curfews broken by a matter of seconds, of questions and the sound of voices, ended in a collage of blues and purples carefully hidden beneath the fabric of t-shirts and school uniforms. 

a tide of fear and betrayal cascaded over rion, swallowing him whole and leaving him gasping for air, slowly drowning. 

iv. like the warming of the spring sun on winter frozen flowers, the family business slowly picked back up. the fog lifted over the house but the battles never ended, the water at the back of his throat never stopped, leaving him gasping for breath. 

school was as much of a warzone as his homelife. his father’s anger had left him more with just bruises and split lips, it had caused rifts in his personal life. his friends, the same ones he’s had for as long as he can remember, now steadily avoided his eyes after a slew of harshly rejected invitations with a vice grip on the back of his neck. they took a hint he never intended to give and no matter how many times he apologized, the damage was done. 

but he couldn’t blame them, hoped eventually they would forgive him, they just needed sometime. but rion was so naive. he thought school was safe, a place where he’d have a chance to finally breathe. but he was wrong, oh so wrong. he thought he was invisible, untouchable, ignored by most of his classmates and teachers. but he soon learned that the pain of anger and heavy hands was so different than the pain inflicted by strangers. 

it must have been something that he did. maybe said something mean, looked at someone the wrong way, cut off someone in the hallway, ate the wrong lunch. but they never told him, no matter how many times he asked (no matter how many times he begged). instead they tormented him everyway possible, pinches hard enough to bruise, freezing water so cold that it drenched him from head to toe leaving him shivering in a puddle of ice cubes, and the list goes on. 

v. he grows older, he learns that nothing ever changes. no matter how hard he works out, how many videos he watches or lessons he attends to defend himself, it’s useless against the assault of so many classmates against one. 

he learns that no matter how many times he visits the teachers, they’ll never do anything. you must have done something wrong, they say so many times that rion struggles against believing it. he graduates and expects everything to just right itself, but it never does. 

vi. he grows quieter, angrier, a fuse just waiting to blow. he expects the anger to fade away but it never does. it plants roots in his stomach, grows up through his chest, and waits, bides its time and more importantly it never forgets, anything. 

he takes up shifts at his family’s florist shop, spends evenings pulling roots in the green house, and weekends with his nose buried in a book at the library. he spends as much time as he can away from the house, avoids crossing paths with strangers and familiar faces alike. lost and waiting at the same time. maybe it’s luck, or maybe it’s fate, that on a warm and rainy afternoon, he finds himself buried in the stacks, looking for something new to bury himself in. fingers skimming the worn covers of hardback books, lost in the musky smell of paper and ink, his eyes catch on a book with an interesting cover but as he pulls it out, a part of an unbound book topples to the ground with a resound thud, it’s binding thread loose and tattered.  curious, he doesn’t hesitates, simple hides it in a larger book and takes it home with him. 

vii. he doesn’t know how to explain it, but he knows that it’s a book that brought them all together. drawn in like moths to the flames, each with missing pieces of the puzzle, with a clear desire to put it back together. and suddenly for the first time in a long time, he feels more than anger and less like he’s drowning. instead he feels, curious, alive and found, like some part of him was tucked away in that library just waiting for something to happen. 

and the more they learn, some unknown feeling unfurls in his chest, another flower this with another purpose that he struggles to understand. and the more he does, hands stained in ash and blood, the more he uncovers the truth, finds himself staring into the darkness and coming back with a name for the delicate deadly floral, revenge. 

[paranoiakrp]

        CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: HAN GOEUN ...

STATS

name / han goeun d.o.b. / 05.08.93 age / 26 pronouns / she/her job / convenience store clerk societies / monstrous › visions groups / n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

at this age, she’s too old to excuse what she sees as a childish fantasy, though the alarming conclusions of her youth still soak into her adolescence and later life like a plague. demons. holy shit there are demons in my room.  

shadows indent themselves into her walls as remnants of a monstrous existence which escaped her dreams. they dilate and pulse while scaling the length; the rise of dawn steering them towards her window, but some escape through her door too. she wonders over the tinnitus ringing in her ears if her father sees them in the halls as he prepares to leave for work. if he’s ever peered close enough and realized — my shadow isn’t mine. 

religious influence has never been the cause of her explanations. halmeoni was too wretched to believe in a god, and appa is a drunkard. no holy influence spurred from his inebriated late-night preaching. 

but still, the idea gnaws at her brain, dissolves into the fissures of her thoughts and the walls of her skull. that she’s cursed, and not entirely her own. in her depictions, monsters are always partially human — through their system of lungs, the coils of hair or the bite of their teeth. but these are intangible creations and she’s a vessel used as their escape.  

goeun’s aware that even if she leaves, the invisible mark which stretches upon her chest and lurches her toward the center of this spiraling chaos will never let her go. not entirely at least. maybe as pieces of insanity and insomnia.  

WHATS YOUR STORY?

she’s born in junae. it’s obvious in the kind of gaze she enforces. like dead foliage, a wet morning, the dewy rise of dawn circling the black pits of her eyes. the idea of the town swells in its bitter taste through the bite of her growing molars; the pith of intelligence blossoming with the ravenous flavor. it’s intoxicating truly. living here, being here, existing among all the rumors and vibes that define it into the town of a thriller setting and sad sound. it’s like they’re born gutted. empty of the reasoning to leave. just void shadows lingering in the background of the world as it parades forward. 

—-

sept. 2008. — and goeun, baby, i miss you much. i’m so sorry i had to go. just know i love you.  oct. 2008. — i miss you too. are you coming back?

eomma tells her there are two modes to life. there are those who do and those who don’t. and one is never without the other.

the latter kinda looks like this. an abominable design. certainty — like something planned out, written in neat lines. a dichotomous blend between cowardice and intelligence. it’s never sudden. always half a beat late. always somewhat expected, such as this: eomma spends eleven years meticulously planning her escape and cutting free of the roots that have planted her here. she can’t stay, won’t. goeun and junae are pliable parts of herself she will peel off and chuck. 

the former is sort of rugged. you can see it one of two ways: brave or reckless. this is impulse and the sensation of being caught after a long chase. it’s the brazen look after a rush of adrenaline. her mother arrives in junae with a desire to escape and thinks she’s found love. a sense of permanence keeps her cemented to the small town she’d wandered off to, and she does it all; the dutiful wife, the kind mother. then it wears off, and she finds herself paying penance each day until she flees. 

three letters await goeun. the last is from sometime in january of 2010, seven months after she stopped replying. she looks at them, gives them vile satisfaction to fill an ugly void in herself and then shoves them under her bed. fuck that bitch. fuck her. fuck her. the mantra repeats until she’s found a stable distraction.

halmeoni finds them one evening. she gazes at her with haggard eyes and mumbles something incoherent. goeun is reckless ambivalence as she is calculated thought. eomma left years ago, she’s not coming back. there are rumors that she’s not doing so good out there, and others that proclaim she’s married now. properly. and has a kid. 

then halmeoni takes the shoebox with her and goeun cries herself to sleep.

—-

the first thing he says to her is hardly offensive. it’s funny. you’re becoming your father, goeun. and she’d agree if her visits here were more recurrent. ha! as if. instead, it shifts like clockwork. a ritualistic friday rendezvous. some excuse to see him, maybe, or seek an odd sort of solace in the debonair build of his cozy bar. but then his teasing turns into chiding, and his chiding becomes her burdening annoyance that makes the drinks sit heavy. 

“you know this tab can’t go on forever.” (she mutters something distractedly in response.) “goeun, im serious.” (she’s aware, really, of how serious he can get. how midnight confessions turn into booty calls. sweet smiles curled into this impish smirk she’s all too familiar with. friends. sure, if fucking is what it means to be friends. what about when i’m being serious? hey, what are we?)

she stares at him with a jaded glint to her glare. it’s the kind of exhaustion she remembers from being a child. when she’d trip up and lean against her father’s leg, eyes half-open, heart already steadied to the pace of a sleeping body. appa. appa, i’m tired. it’s sometimes a painful memory. how small she was, face round, swollen cheeks. it’s like her childhood features have been grafted on her present skeleton. goeun looks too much the same. she guesses she’ll never grow out of it like she’ll never grow out of this.

“okay, geez. i’ll pay your tab.” “when.” (goeun doesn’t give him a clear cut answer, she never actually does.) “you know, if this is about the weird shit your halmeoni said, you gotta understand that it’s not real.” (halmeoni grabs her arm one morning. “do you see it? do you see them? they’re in the shadows.” she was recently diagnosed with dementia, still goeun’s breath chokes up and she recoils from her hold.) “she was crazy.”  (she feels the unasked question in the way he shapes that last word. goeun, are you crazy?) “i know, right?”

he gives up with a dramatic sigh and stands straighter to move away. “go home, your nightmares aren’t real.” for a moment again she regrets confiding in him, only to throw her head back, swallow, and ignore the lack of options she’s got. junae’s a small pond full of the same kind of people she’s grown sick of. 

[paranoiakrp]

         CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: DO ROMI ...

STATS

name / do romi d.o.b. / 12.02.91 age / 27 pronouns / she/her job / promotions manager at a theater societies / necronomicon groups / n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

power comes with a price. that’s what everyone says, right?

power comes with a price, and discovering the worn pages of the necronomicon only proved this to romi. a power in the form of mysticism. a demand for something in return. something born from brutality. what she read spun out stories, teachings of bones and predictions. actions in exchange for remains. 

the problem with bones is that they’re hard to come by.

she had to get a bit creative. exploring the thick woods, combing through overgrown vines on a hunt for old bones. snake’s vertebrae, the cycle of life spun through. but it’s hard. and, eventually, romi realized that human bones produce more power than anything animal. had gone through a socked away collection of her own baby teeth.

and, undoubtedly, others were more powerful than teeth.

it led her to the graveyard late at night. a shovel in hand, an overlarge sweatshirt with the hood pulled high to obfuscate. 

but now she has a thirst for it, that power. she feeds of hatred. something vile that lives in her. resentful and filled with spite. she wants to lash out. and she doesn’t really care if she hurts herself in the process. 

WHATS YOUR STORY?

there’s a way about small towns.

a way to do things. a subdued culture to follow. traditions, and expectations. something ingrained into a bubble of society. because without tradition and an expectation for the similar, what left is there? a monotonous plodding toward the future. a future that is often assumed should be exactly the same as the now.

a backwards sort of thinking as far as romi is concerned. as far as her father was concerned, too. contrary to what might be assumed now, looking at how the town interacts with the do family now, they have lived in the town for quite some time. her grandparents themselves having roots settle into the foundation of the town.

but why let thing settle and stagnate? why not go against the grain? that was the kind of sentiment that floated around her house growing up. her mother always seemed neutral about it, her father’s mindset. not that romi could discern that when she was young. but as she got older, it became apparent. she put up with his whims. 

those whims turned into plans though. and eventually, that neutrality turned into resentment. that came later though, after everything collapsed.

it started when romi was a child. tucked in pretty dresses with ribbons in her hair. scolded when she turned up late with dirt smudges and tangled knots. her father would laugh, and her mother would shake her head when he did. but her reaction was more aghast when, one day, her father told her that he was planning to run for mayor.

preposterous. junae had theirs for as long as anyone could remember. had anyone ever ran against him, even? her mother had said as much.

romi hadn’t really understood the severity of the situation at the time. a situation that likely shouldn’t have been severe in the first place. but it was. he wanted a change, and he ran. 

he was, summarily, rejected. he lost in an obvious landslide. predictable. but the animosity that cam packaged with it was perhaps less so. maybe if he could have forseen that, he wouldn’t have bothered. would’ve kep his head down, kept his dream locked up. spared his family from the domino effect of his decision.

but he hadn’t, and so everything spun out of control.

they became a stain to the town. dark sheep that roamed the outskirts of an insular society. romi didn’t have the capacity to understand why birthday party invites from her classmates no longer extended to her, or why there was a ripple of hushed whispers whenever they went into town together.

but as she grew, it became more apparent. they all learned to cope and adapt in the own ways. her father tried to ignore it. the fact that his reputation was damaged. try to make the most out of his life. but it was hard to make ends meet and contemplate moving when they were being somewhat shunned. her mother grew bitter and resentful. blamed her father for his mistakes and how their lives ended up. despite knowing they couldn’t, she constantly referenced moving. eventually, romi’s father made a permanent relocation to the couch.

romi herself went through a myriad of emotions, phases as she grew.at first, she was shy, during that awkward period that spans childhood through those awkward pre-teen years. it morphed. briefly attention seeking with reckless behavior. and then that classic teenage solution of become as promiscuous as possible. a phase that her mother detested. but it continued on, eventually spanning to a forced disattachment. trying to distance herself from her life, into a space where nothing mattered.

like he mother, she bred resentment. but not toward her father. no, she’d always been closer to him. instead it was for the town itself. the people that lived there. a vendetta formed. something she clutched and held tight to, even when the scandal somewhat lessened. an act not forgiven, but somewhat looked over. not entirely. never entirely. they’re still an outcast family, to some extent. 

not that romi was involved in it, and it gives her some more room than her father might. she got a job. she got an apartment of her own even – if only to distance her somewhat from her immediate history. but it’s still there, all that history. it can’t be escaped while she’s still lodged inside of this snowglobe of a town. and it’s hard to save up enough money to move on a small town movie theater’s managerial budget. it’s hard to tout herself as much of anything when her work experience is lacking, and her degree comes from a small college, one that most would need to look up to declare it’s real. 

so she’s resentful. of them. for the possibilities and what if’s. so it’s made her vicious. hidden rows of teeth behind her smile, hoping to rend and make bleed. perhaps that’s why a piece of the necronomicon made its way into her hands. or perhaps it was all just coincidence. luck.

but she wants to use it to her own advantage. wants to fulfill grudges. wants to make the town in its entirety pay. it shouldn’t exist to continue the path of old traditions. maybe it shouldn’t exist at all. 

maybe she could’ve been more. or maybe it would’ve been the same. a resentful girl filled with anger and loathing. something she hides just out of view. volatile, and looking toward a potential destruction. cruelties hidden behind those plastered on sorts of smiles.darkening slowly, easily turned toward the corrupt. 

a nice enough girl, if only her father hadn’t…well. it’s a shame. she’s pretty, maybe someone will marry her.

and that’s the gossip of the town.

but romi isn’t particularly nice, or pleasant despite the airs she puts on. she tries to tuck it away. but it’s been bleeding out lately. goaded on by a book that brings out the worst in her. she doesn’t mind the rumors. they’ve surrounded her like white noise for her entire life.

[paranoiakrp]

         CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: KIM SOL ...

STATS

name / kim sol d.o.b. / 01.03.95 age / 24 pronouns / she/her job / town hall employee societies / n/a groups / town hall

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

There once was a man who lived like a king.  Who had built a throne for himself out of blood and sweat, made sacrifices along the way if only to have a taste of glory.  He’d always yearned to be like the mighty ones who looked down on him and sneered in his face, calling him names.  He wanted it so badly he’d do anything.  Even if it meant lying, stealing, backstabbing.  Of course it would have to come with a price.

But the price was more than he could even begin to comprehend.

He was banished, and so he took his family and fled to a land far, far away, where no one so much as glanced in their direction. They were nothing here.  Invisible.  

And he despised it.

On one of his drunken outings, he was told stories of a mountain that held inexplicable forces, of a forest encompassing its rocky terrain.  Of great bacchanals held in secret, and women– no, witches who lured people there.  Of incomprehensible transformations and bouts of euphoria.  He would hear no further, because he knew.  Wanted desperately to do something to change this insufferable fate of his.

So he went.

The first few times he had not been welcome.  The third, he’d failed to experience anything other than a terrible headache.  He was missing something, but the witches refused to tell him.  If he didn’t know it himself, he didn’t deserve it at all, they told him.  And that angered him.  They looked down on him too.  He would love nothing more than to throttle them with his bare hands, but he resisted the impulse.  He needed them.

But one day he realized what he lacked.  What he had lacked all this time- belief. And complete, utter surrender.  And finally, finally he gave himself to the forest, and the forest to him. He couldn’t even begin to explain what he experienced, only that he found himself in primal ecstasy, detached from reality and consciousness.  

When he came to, he realized he’d done something horrible.  Something unforgivable.  He took one look at his tattered clothes and dirtied hands, then another at the crumpled body beneath him.

He had killed one of the witches.

And he would pay.

It’s just folklore though, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

WOMAN VIOLENTLY MURDERED SEVERAL MILES FROM LOCAL TEMPLE, SUSPECT PRESUMED TO HAVE BEEN ON NARCOTICS.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

As all fucked-up adults can attest to, it begins with a shitty childhood.

For Sol, it begins even before that.

Condoms are 98% effective at preventing pregnancies.  That leaves 2% for some pitiful, unsuspecting couple– in this case, Kim Minsu and Choi Sookyung.  The unexpected addition of a child marks the beginning of the end of their relationship, polluted with screaming contests and slamming doors.  Thankfully, Sungchul turns out alright, and Minsu gets promoted by the time he turns four.  They’re no longer country bumpkins, but new residents of an upscale neighborhood in Gangnam.  The old rickety house by the corn fields is traded for a sleek, modern apartment and maids with foreign accents.  

And then Sol is born.

There had always been speculation.  No one had bothered to pursue it much further than that, so for years it remained petty local gossip.  If you were filthy rich you had nothing better to do, anyways.  It was dinner talk.  But soon the speculations intensified– soon, doubt began to circulate.  Something was foul.  

“Collusion”.  That’s what the lawyers called it.

The company goes down, and with it, its twenty-three executives.  The image they’d worked so hard to build destroyed.  Everywhere they go, people stare and whisper.  Beggars.  Thieves.  Poor people will do anything for money, won’t they?  Within a week, the maids had all fled.  By the end of the month, the apartment had been gutted clean.  

Junae is the ideal move back to their roots and a chance for them to start anew.  To rebuild that damned image, to look down on people instead of being looked down on.  But Minsu’s changed– he smells less and less like expensive aftershave and more like cheap soju and cigarettes, eyes rimmed red when he stumbles home.  Boots caked with mud.  He brushes off his wife’s interrogations with a grumble until the arguments escalate.  Something’s always thrown.  Something shattered.  

“Fucking pathetic,” Sungchul tells her, hunched over on the sidewalk with a lighter in one upturned palm.  At 3am, their house is the only one on the block that’s illuminated.  She makes out the scowl on his face by the feeble glow of the flame with each flick.

“Yeah,” she just replies.

Fucking pathetic.

“You’re smart, but you’re not street-smart.” Minah stares at the red 100 inscribed at the top of her exam.  “Not enough for Junae.  You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“You talk too much.” They all do.  They’re all so dense, with their bulging eyes and bullshit stories.  Their witches and ghosts.  So what if there’s the occasional sweeping chill in the middle of summer?  Or wails in the middle of the night, more animalistic than human?  What annoys her the most, though, is that they truly believe it.

Even Minsu.

He comes home one night, banging down the front door, wild-eyed and haggard.  Sookyung takes one look at him and screams.  Sungchul and Sol just stare at their father, half-naked, dirt caking his nails.  Covered in blood.  Muttering deliriously about that damned mountain and those damn witches. “I’m not the animal.  Not the animal.” Not the animal, he continues on and on, as Sookyung backs away with her children in tow.  

They find the body the next morning, and the police arrive on their doorsteps two days after.  She doesn’t see Minsu after that, only in articles and on the news.  He goes insane shortly after the arrest, as if he’d been possessed by something horrible.  Not that it matters to anyone in particular.  Somehow, like any other shocking revelation, it blows over and people lose interest.  He might as well have died, too.  Should have.

(Thank god they don’t find Sookyung’s body.  It’s the cops that do again.  The cops that tell her that there had been something off about the whole thing, that it’d looked like she’d fought with the devil and lost.  What a fucked-up way to say I told you so.)

Sol graduates at the top of her class.  Becomes a lawyer.  She’s just Sol.  

Minsu’s just pathetic.

[paranoiakrp]

         CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: JO INHO ...

STATS

name / jo inho d.o.b. / 01.11.93 age / 26 pronouns / he/him job / journalist societies / n/a groups / raven’s desk › journalist one

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

there’s a comfort found in the dark. in the quiet. shadows shrugged on like a cloak and reality fades. inho has always enjoyed that space. has used it, even. as a way to hide, or run, or watch. most people seek the sun, that haloed vision and attention. seeking out bonds and relationships. standing out, isn’t that what most everyone wants?

but that had never been in inho’s nature.

he’s a wallflower. one of those innate personality traits to fade quietly into the backdrop. an unassuming sort of person. the kind that can loom over a shoulder and startle, an unknowing of how they got there. finding a home in the midst of darkness and shadow, eyes skating over him. unimportant, nothing standout. 

inho likes it that way. that choice of isolation. a camouflage build up from a lack of light. that void of nothing an embrace. it’s easy to see people for who they are from behind that curtain. it’s easier to pick up information or eavesdrop on conversation when they don’t know he might be listening. easier to avoid the world and pretend like he might not exist when he can place himself into a curious location of nothingness. 

a habit of fading into the backdrop, presence somewhat glanced over. an unassuming side character to the story of the world, scared of the burn from a spotlight. 

inho prefers to hide in the dark. he’s never been scared of monsters that might lurk there.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

TW: cancer, death, religious cult

ONE.

religion defines the world. guides those who are lost and looking.

religion can be recreated, reinterpreted. carved into something small and niche. something gripping and toxic. something that can border on dangerous. can cause delusions of grandeur, until everyone’s sipping back poison in search of divinity. 

that’s the world that inho grew up in. something confusing and forced. a belief funneled into his skull. a consumption of his life. parents who were key figures in a overzealous religious cult, and older brother, inseok, whose future apparently contained divinity on a grand scale. 

he grew up indoctrinated. a follower. beliefs instilled to him at birth. prophethetical notions and a strange belief in omnision. magic that enshrouded them all. medicine that was useless. he grew up in a city, but was so far removed from the culture of it all that it hardly mattered.

TWO.

inho’s brother was meant to become a lawyer. someone to defend their newly constructed religion. to protect them all from sin in the political and monetary realm. inho’s brother was a beacon, a leader. was smart. their parents adored him.

for all that inho admitted that he didn’t really care, there was some amount of jealousy there. deep rooted and lodged inside of him. it wears on a person, after all. being glanced right over. relegated to the background. a side character, unimportant. a follower to up their count. often, inho didn’t feel much like a son. didn’t feel loved.

but he didn’t really care.

an emotional disconnect carved out as a defence mechanism in his youth.

THREE.

and then inseok got sick. a terrible kind, cancerous and vicious. 

but all wasn’t lost. after all, they were gifted. god had bestowed up them, the true followers, a power in healing. they rejected the thought of bringing him to a hospital, and they healed them their own way.

healing, they said. though it didn’t match the definition of the word.

god works in mysterious ways, but they were devout. and eventually they would prove their faith. inseok would be healed after his test was completed. after he proved himself, and then he would transcend. would become the next leader. a visionary. a prophet.

inseok believed it too.

believed it right up until the point that he died. 

inho mourned. mourned the loss of a brother that didn’t feel like one. mourned a pseudo-god who’d fallen off a pedestal they’d all placed him upon.

FOUR.

for his entire life, inho had been an afterthought. a clumsy follow-up sentence to inseok’s being that nobody bothered to read. and suddenly, he was their parents’ only child. suddenly, he mattered. 

though he learned, as time rolled on, that he mattered as a body, and not as  a person.

they’d always looked alike, him and inseok. though their paths diverged. inho wasn’t a terrible student. he was studious enough, self-taught himself eccentricities. but he wasn’t quite so outgoing. tended to pull back in on himself, even if it didn’t read as shy. more morose. he certainly didn’t want to become a lawyer. 

but after inseok’s death, in his final year of high school, his parents started pushing it on him. it was something that they needed (for their cult, but they didn’t word it that way).

inho knew nothing but the life before him. begrudgingly, he studied. begrudgingly, he applied to programs that would lead to law for higher education. begrudgingly, he stepped into the shoes his brother left behind.

it was after he got accepted that his mother started to slip. would call inseok’s name down the hall when she’d finished dinner. sighed out memories of when they were children, only she’d recall something from inseok’s past and wind the recollection around inho’s shoulders. 

it was after he started going to school that inho felt like his entire existence was being scrubbed from reality. replaced with inseok. like his parents wanted to shove his brother’s soul, being, into his body. replace it. the unwanted child changed with the prodigal one.

it was after he finished his undergraduate degree, when he had started the process of beginning law school in earnest, that his mother got drunk. ranting and raving, mostly about school. choices. how he looked. how he needed a haircut (one suspiciously similar looking to the style they’d buried inseok in). 

nho was frustrated. sick of it. he wasn’t his brother. didn’t want to be his brother. it was starting to cause a division in him. a confusion. had a habit now of answering back to his brother’s name.

he snapped, and she snapped back.

“you should’ve been the one to die.”

there had been a pause. inho stared, and his mother stared back. this is where the regret is supposed to come. ushered in on grief, heavy-sobbed apologies. but she didn’t care, he could see it in her face. her eyes. she didn’t.

inho brought it up, later. with his father.

“what do you want me to say?”

a crackled out sigh, long-suffering and tired from carrying that burden of a truth.

so inho didn’t go to law school. inho broke away from his religion, his family, his home. inho let himself be consumed by that nothingness he’d been living in.

FIVE.

with a limited amount of money to his name, a degree, and a resume that included work at his university’s school paper, inho traversed outside of seoul. to where apartments were cheap to belie the stagnant towns that nobody wanted to live in.

this is how he ends up in junae, with barely enough savings for key money. shoving his resume out until he gets a hit. a small time columnist for the paper. it pays in scraps, but he takes it. he’d always enjoyed writing. forming opinions.

inho learned, as he lived there, that junae was a curious town. not entirely off. and his stories were often benign enough. but he feels as if there’s more. something undiscovered. he wants to turn stones until he finds a secret. something that can be cracked open, written out in ink. a damning expose. 

but it’s just a feeling.

he works himself up anyway. until he’s writing full sized pieces, a cog in their bare-boned staff. an outsider among those who’d lived there their whole lives. but unassuming. nothing to arouse suspicions. just a man who fades pleasantly enough into the background. a supporting role he’d stepped into when he first started walking.

but maybe that’s not a terrible thing in a town like junae.

[paranoiakrp]

         CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: HEO MINYOUNG ...

STATS

name / heo minyoung d.o.b. / 12.04.93 age / 25 pronouns / she/her job / assistant at a law firm societies / n/a groups / n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

minyoung is as mundane as they get, but in terms of human nature, she is anything but normal.

a charismatic mix of narcissism and sociopathy makes a woman that does not care for anyone but herself, nor who she hurts in the process of getting what she wants. she is bitter about being forced back to junae, but determined to make the best of the situation.

on the outside she’s a helpful and kind individual, always fighting for what she believes in and willing to help those that ask. it’s an image she spent years carefully cultivating, to ensure that anyone that tried to do opposition research on her would come up with nothing. she never built any proper relationship with anyone in junae, as she didn’t have any plans to come back, which she is desperately trying to rectify at the moment. connections is what gets you forward in life, more so than hard work or talent.

all in all this makes a girl that seem perfectly normal on the outside, but the shell hides a set of morals that makes supervillains seem just. minyoung is not planning to settle down in junae permanently, but mayor would look good when she runs for a higher office. when it comes to the strange and weird things of junae, minyoung can be considered a sceptic at best. anything that is not quantifiable nor useful to her is immediately discarded from her mind, and stories of magic and demons certainly don’t fit either of those criteria. if it did though, she would stop at nothing to get that power for her own use.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

the heo family has been a part of junae for a long time, but at the start it was known as the choi family.

they’re known as a hard-working family with a long time of woodworkers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers and the like. the only thing maring the otherwise pristine family history is an old ghost story - the oldest son of the choi family, back in the olden days, was not satisfied with his humble lot. to fix this, he attempted to make a deal with a demon. it went about as horrible as deals can go, and the neighbors awoke the next morning to find the house splattered in blood and the family members missing. of course that raises the question of how the family could continue when everyone was dead, but such details are not the concern of ghost stories. 

the reality of it is very vague, as there are no records of anything like this actually happening. still, when the family moved from their ancestral and slightly rundown home to a more modern one, the head of the family - minyoung’s great-grandfather - choose to have them known as the heo family instead. with minyoung’s grandfather pursuing academics instead of the traditional family professions, it can be seen as a fresh start, or the lifting of an old curse. what’s more likely though is that an old family was too set in its way and refused to change with the times, until it almost led to their ruination.

as for minyoung, well, she’s the youngest of three - destined for greatness according to the stories. she’s the first of her family to pursue law and politics, as well the second to attend university. the first was her older sister. it wasn’t the most prestigious university - hard to get into that when you come from a high school in junae - but that suited minyoung better anyways. it ensured she was on top of the social food chain, as well as the academic one.

there’s not much to be said about minyoung’s time at university. she focused a lot on her studies, wanting to be done with the whole school thing as soon as possible, but she also spent a lot of time building connections that might be useful in the future. after all, her plan had been to stay in the city and leave little junae behind. in the end things changed though, as her older sister went overseas and with her older brother deciding he should get a better education as well, someone need to be back home and help out their parents. image is everything to minyoung, and not wanting to seem unfilial is definitely important. so when she graduated and she moved straight back to junae, the place she had longed to leave behind.

the fact that her fuckbuddy and occasional make-up artist had wanted to come out of the closet and make things official had absolutely nothing to do with the decision.

in junae, things were both the same and strange at the same time. it looked the same as when minyoung had left, but people had grown up, gotten married, carried on with their own lives. it all made minyoung feel uncomfortable, almost wishing she’d stayed in the city. with her background in law and family name, getting a job at the local law firm was easy. her official title is paralegal, but it really means assistant, secretary, investigator, or whatever else is needed. it’s not the stepping stone that minyoung imagined would be her first job, but it pays and that’s more than what can be said for other parts of junae.

while minyoung is laying low for now, she has big plans for the future. her goal is the mayor’s seat, and she’s not above dishonest means to get it. recently she has been doing research into the history of the town and it’s various families, hoping to dig up dark secrets to be used for leverage. she also hopes to learn the truth about where the ghost story came from, and what the truth behind it is. slander is common, but something so macabre has to have some sliver of truth involved, right?

[paranoiakrp]

         CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: AHN HYEIN ...

STATS

name / ahn hyein d.o.b. / 04.13.87 age / 33 pronouns / she/her job / editor societies / n/a groups / raven’s desk › editor

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

The morning after her husband’s funeral is the first time Hyein sees herself in days.

The reflection does not feel like hers. The person in the mirror looks withered, hollow around the eyes. It takes a considerable amount of effort to remember the woman she had been just weeks before: content, elated…happily married.

Memories of Junae spring from the crevices of Hyein’s mind. Her grandmother, mute with grief, spending the remainder of her days alone in the dusty attic. During the cleanup after her death, Hyein finds a picture of her grandfather on her bed, frame glass stained with teardrops. There are stories about her great-uncle, too, whose existence was a rarity. Before him, every woman in their family had only given birth to one child, and all daughters. In the end, he died childless, widowed, and in an asylum.

She remembers her mother’s words.

We can be happy in life, but not in love.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

Rumors about the Ahn family and the curse on their women date back to as far as the era of the Three Kingdoms, though no one can say for sure. The family has lived in the mountains for as long as anyone can remember, in a dilapidated manor said to predate the occupation.

The details often vary. Older generations like to tell the story of a noblewoman who struck a deal with the old gods, praying that she could wed her true soulmate. What the gods asked for in exchange remains unclear, but the tale always ends with them enacting vengeance by killing her husband and dooming her descendants to suffer the same punishment.

Ahn Hyein finds herself bound by this very same fate: Widowed at thirty-two, riddled with grief. Her entire life unravels at breakneck speed—she loses her job after weeks of radio silence, and terminates her apartment contract not long after. The day she leaves Seoul is marked by terrible weather, rain pouring overhead as she waits for the next bus to Junae. The sendoff is oddly fitting for someone whose dreams have all gone down the drain.

“What do you want to write about?” He asks, caressing the curve of her cheek with his knuckles. Hyein smiles.

“I want to write about love,” she presses a tender kiss on the inside of his wrist. She can smell the last notes of his perfume, hints of amber and musk. “I want to write about us.”

“Will you write about us growing old?”

His question is simple, and yet she hesitates. “Let’s do that first,” she whispers, taking his hands in hers. He looks so beautiful like this, with half-lidded eyes and a sated smile playing on his lips. She wants to be with him forever. “And then I’ll see what I can do.”

Her return is met with little fanfare, as expected. Nobody has heard from her in over a decade. She would have kept it that way, too. This town is her birthplace, but it has never felt like home. In Junae, everyone holds their breath, waiting for the next of her family to fulfill the curse, the next irretrievable slipping. And when it comes they say, I told you so, because they had known all along. Of course, they have.

In Junae, she feels like a wild animal.

She never truly comes home. Instead, she happens upon an abandoned house, the tall structure looking more ivy than brick. There are signs of abandonment everywhere. The old path that winds past the tree line is completely indiscernible beneath the overgrowth; monstrous bushes, immaculately trimmed in the distant past, now obstruct the entryway. There is a note at the front door that says, in bold bright red: PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT.

The owner of the pension house at the foot of Doryeongsan watches her with suspicious eyes, but draws up a contract in the end. It is too far from the town center to attract many potential tenants, and Hyein is more likely to be turned away the closer she is to the heart of Junae. Beggars can’t be choosers, the man mutters. That goes for both of us.

She repeats those very same words every day, imagines them threading through the coils of her brain, weaving in and out, in and out…

Beggars can’t be choosers.

[paranoiakrp]

         CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: MAE HANJAE ...

STATS

name / mae hanjae d.o.b. / 11.01.92 age / 26 pronouns / he/him job / lawyer societies / monstrous › feral anger groups / town hall

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

trigger warnings: violence, mention of self-harm

NAVER SEARCH:

multiple personality disorder

hanjae reads the first article that shows up as an awful, all-encompassing feeling of anxiety rises in his chest. he bites on his fingers and for a second there he almost tastes blood. he looks down, terrified, inspects every corner, every inch of the skin of his hand, around his nail. it’s clean, pristine. there’s no blood, and yet he can taste it. hanjae closes his eyes, and he can feel his hands shaking. the words of the article don’t fit, not completely. it talks about blackouts, about voices. that’s not it. hanjae doesn’t blackout, though he wishes he did. he remembers everything he does while in one of his episodes. he remembers every word, every second. 

fuck, he breathes out and stands up. the only light in his room is the light of the computer screen. hanjae walks from one corner of his room the other, scared of waking up his mother. he takes a look at the clock, and it’s 4am. he should sleep. there’s school tomorrow. but he can’t. he can’t sleep. because when he sleeps the nightmares come.

and in his nightmares, he always turns. something feral, terrible. and in nightmares what he wishes to do during the day comes to life. in his dreams hanjae tastes blood, he rips skin apart, he breaks things, bones, people he kills. 

but the worst part is how much he enjoys it. in his dreams, when he’s free of judgment, his own judgment. how much he wants it. how much this side of him wants to destroy even the things he loves the most. 

hanjae sits by the computer again, starts typing.

NAVER SEARCH:

symptoms: feeling like there’s someone else inside you

Top Results:

Are You Possessed?

In this article…

“what? no,” he shakes his head, types something else. there are a million answers. bipolar disorder, sociopathy. every site tells him one thing, but nothing fits, not really. hanjae bites down on the back of his hand, and he wants to scream. he wants to throw himself out of his window. he wants to run somewhere far away and never come back. he wants to be cured. fuck, he wants to be cured so bad. 

he turns off his computer, lies down. he doesn’t know what is wrong with him. how can someone be liked this, that torn? he’s not like that. he’s a good person, isn’t he? he has friends. he has people he cares about. he has a family he’s terrified of hurting even further. he’s good. he’s good. he has to be good. 

please god, make me good. 

he sleeps.

and he dreams of blood. 

WHATS YOUR STORY?

trigger warnings: violence

mae hanjae has a secret:

there’s something wrong with him.

something deep. something that eats and gnaws at the edge of his soul, plays with threads and pieces of him. it’s something that isn’t always there, not always. not all the time. it’s like a face that hides underneath his skin, like a small voice that sometimes speaks in lower tones and sometimes screams. he wonders, from time to time, when did that start happening? when was it? there was a time when he was fine, wasn’t it? he is sure there was. 

here’s what he remembers:

hanjae remembers the church, mostly. where else did he spend most of his childhood days and then his teenage days? if not in church, at the back of it, some girl on his arms, the taste of first times holier than any mass. but he remembers the church, and he remembers peace. hanjae remembers prayer the way he remembers rainy afternoons, sitting on his mother’s lap as she read to him. he remembers something close to nirvana, a quietness as deep as the ocean inside of him as he closed his eyes and let it take over. 

but he remembers the first time that it happened. the first time he felt it. 

it was a foreign feeling and yet too familiar. like something that had always been there, but not really. his little brother was playing by his side, the two of them on their backyard. his little brother reached out and took the toy he was playing with out of his hand, something that happened more often than not. they’d fight for it, his mother would come and ground them. but it wasn’t what happened on that day. 

his little brother took his toy away from him.

and hanjae choked him. 

his vision went red. something inside of him roared, took over his limbs, his mind. hanjae knew little but the fact that he hated, and that he wanted to kill him. so he wrapped his hands around his little brother’s throat, pushed him on the ground and choked him.

next thing he knew his mother was trying to take him away. next thing he knew they were in the hospital.

his brother was fine. physically at least. all he got from it were purple bruises around his neck and a whole life of leverage on hanjae. it didn’t affect their relationship at the moment, they were kids, hanjae couldn’t have been older than ten but it was something his little brother would never allow him to forget. 

his family wasn’t fine, though. 

it changed them. the way his mother looked at him changed. she’d be closer whenever he was around his little brother, they didn’t allow them in closed doors anymore. it hurt, at first. and hanjae had apologized time and time again, cried himself to sleep with guilt and hurt. i didn’t mean to, mom, he’d say and she’d nod and cry and he didn’t know what to do. and he really didn’t know what to do. at the time, hanjae could barely understand what happened. all he knew was that when his brother touched his toy, took it away, he felt angry. he was angry. in the literal sense of being, it was all he was. 

but it didn’t happen anymore and after a while everyone willingly forgot it. it was a one-time thing, they said. hanjae became more careful around his brother, his mother. even when he did get annoyed he would suppress it, smile, cried whenever he was by himself. his mother allowed him to be alone with his brother again. things were fine. 

and then they were not anymore.

waiting in the principal’s office that afternoon was probably one of the most nerve-wracking moments of hanjae’s life. he waited and waited and when his parents arrived he couldn’t even look them in the eye. the whole meeting went by like some sort of gray daze. 

“did you really do that?” his mother asked after the principal’s description of the situation. he didn’t know if it relieved him that his mother still doubted he was capable of such a thing, or if that hurt him even more.

“yes,” he replied and his mother looked away. he didn’t blame her. yes. your fourteen-year-old son punched this boy for talking shit to his friend. and then he kicked him on the ground. and then three other boys tried to stop him, and he fucked them all up too. one of them had to go to the hospital. 

the fight at school got him into suspension, sure, which wasn’t good for his image. rumors about the fight spread around school, though his father did make some phone calls to get things under control. some money here for the family to the kid in the hospital, some nice donor to the school. corruption ran deep in junae as it ran anywhere else and for the first time hanjae took a good look at it. he was made to apologize to all of them. 

after that, everything definitely changed. 

they sent hanjae to a therapist, to doctors. they tried to understand what was wrong. he’s such a good boy, he heard her mother telling doctor after doctor in seoul. he has amazing grades, he’s in the baseball team. everyone looks up to him, he’s so well-liked. 

hanjae himself didn’t know what was wrong with him. this is what he knew:

in one moment he was fine. in the other he was rage. 

and this is the other thing he knew: 

it was getting worse.

because at first it would be triggered. hanjae was fine, but something would make him pop-off, rile him up to the point that violence was the only answer. but not anymore. now it was like it was getting mixed to his core, twisting with his insides, changing the way he was made. every wire, every single cell started to shift blent with it and there was nowhere else for him to go. 

it wasn’t that hanjae was angry all the time, no. but he was just one step away from it. he felt it inside, boiling, burning. he was at school, and one single comment was enough to make him pause, breathe deeply. he had dreams every night. he dreamt of violence. he dreamt of rage. his dreams were red, and angry, and he’d wake up every morning drenched in sweat, palms bleeding by how deeply he craved his nails in them. 

so he hid it, as best as he could. therapy helped to some extent. the breathing exercises he learned. he threw himself into exercises, learned how to best cope with it. even if it came to rise from time to time. hanjae learned how to lock it, even if it now was him. 

and he got good at it. because he wasn’t pretending. it wasn’t that hanjae wore a mask for the world to see. he was, indeed, the bright boy that he always showed at school, he was friendly, nice, proactive. he was a good person. 

but again,

he had a secret. 

one that he still carries.

once he goes to college, things get easier. for whatever reason in seoul his anger doesn’t show as much, it gets calmer, easier to deal with. almost normal, really. for a second there, it almost made hanjae believe he was cured. he got fine. it was a puberty thing, maybe. the woes o being a teenager. hormones that got way out of control. and once he gets a internship at seoul, an important law firm, he decides he’s not going back. he can stay. he can make a life in seoul. why would he go back anyway? he’s top of his class, his professors are always telling him how well he can make it. and he can make it, he knows it.

but family is family, his father tells him one day. they helped him through college. he owes them. he can’t simply leave. 

“your father already got you a place in the town hall and all,” his mother tells him over the phone one day and hanjae closes his eyes, feels a tight rope around his neck. and he feels angry, so fucking angry. but not like before. here, it’s never like before.

“but i have a good job here, mom,” he says. “and i’m fine here.”

“i know,” she says. “you’re still going to your therapist?”

“no. i stopped a year ago, he said i’m fine.”

“okay,” she says, and he can hear her relieved sigh. “so you can come home, sweetheart.”

and hanjae does.

maybe because he feels guilty. after all he did, after all his family went through thanks to him. once he’s done with college, once it’s over, he packs his things and leaves. he packs his apartment, he leaves the big city behind and drives home. he rents a nice apartment around downtown and he tries not to notice how every inch of it, how every aspect of it it’s not as good as what he had. hanjae doesn’t want to come back but he does, because it’s his duty. and he’s a good son, isn’t he?

around the second week, the nightmares start again. around the third week, he beats a man on the back alley, behind the bar. he beats him bloody over something stupid. he feels his veins popping on his neck, he feels ravenous. for blood. for violence. for decay. 

the man is found the next day but people don’t seem to mind it much. junae is a city mostly free of crime, but the man wasn’t known, some good for nothing. the police rule it out as a bar fight and they’re done with it. the man was too drunk to remember anything that happened. 

hanjae almost goes to the hospital. he almost goes to the police station. it was me, he wants to say. i did it. lock me up. do something. get me out of here. 

but he doesn’t. what hanjae does is:

he suits up, looks at himself in the mirror. he looks for traces of the monster, something that people can see, find. there’s none. he’s good for another day. 

he closes his eyes, makes a silent prayer.

may god protect us all from evil.  from me.

and hanjae is off to work. 

[paranoiakrp]

          CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: YUTHAKON CHAICHANATHAM ...

STATS

name / yuthakon “yutha” chachanatham d.o.b. / 06.25.96 age / 23 pronouns / he/him job / radio host societies / n/a  groups / tell tale heart › host two

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

skeptical. the only way you can accurately describe yutha is by saying that he’s pretty much skeptical to everything that according to him lacks ‘veracity’ and the ability to be remotely real. no matter how hard you try to make him believe in the occult that goes on in junae, he will deny it, entirely. it’s in his nature to be right, a being so prideful he rather chop off a limb than admit that in the end, someone else was right. and even so, underneath all of the pride and ego that he carries, he knows and is fully aware that in the end, something might be happening in this hellish town.

will he admit it? of course not.

but when whatever force tries to tamper with his work, that’s when he thinks that fighting for his personal interests might be worth the hassle. a man that can be equally dismissive as he is dedicated to his craft, to what he’s passionate about. a seeker of the truth, of the actual and only truth. chaotic neutral, if you will. ‘do what’s right if it’s right and if it benefits me’, it’s what he always says.

charming, funny, yet ready to throw sarcastic and mean comments your way if you say something he’s not too fond of. never one to keep his thoughts to himself, never one to back down from standing up to someone. yuthakon has grown to love fiercely, because despite not being loved as he had always wanted to, he has so much love to give, he can’t help but give himself entirely to the people he loves. a man that can be equally rough as he is soft with those he loves. yet, an individual who can hate and fight just as fiercely as he loves. passionate, intense, it might even deceive the people who believe he’s simply aloof.

his ability to feel and deny, it’s that simple. a walking contradiction, in basic words. loves hard, hates hard, believes all, believes nothing. in essence, the dedication to portray and show what’s more convenient for him at all times shines through everyday. he is, after all, the son of an actress (yet, can’t bring himself to love money and fame as much as she does), the son of a firefighter (yet, can’t bring himself to love fighting for others) and the step-son of a woman who’s way too eccentrically crazy (yet, being rational is much more mature than being eccentric and believing whatever people say about this town). isn’t it just weird? a bit odd? that the skeptical and dismissive yuthakon chaichanatham, who spent many years of his life in this town supposedly believes all of junae’s stories are glorified bullshit?

is it conviction? or is it cover-up denial? 

that’s up to people to find out.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

“we’re getting close to the end of this lovely evening, so thank you everyone for allowing me, your host; none other but your always charming-expresso driven-widely awake yutha, to be with you on this quiet night with your favorite songs, stories, and everything else your heart wants to share with all of us. we have one last song for all of you, it was a suggestion by an anonymous caller and it’s… oh, come on, you guys! really? thriller?! we’re not even close to halloween! if you want a good 1984 hit song, here’s ‘what’s love got to do with it’, by the amazing and incomparable tina turner.”

‘you must understand, though the touch of your hand, makes my pulse react…’

his mother cradles the tiny, warm baby against her chest, there’s a smile on her face as she looks up to her husband. handsome, as always, and a happy, joyful grin on his features as he admires the woman he loves and now, the newest addition to their small family. she has fought so hard, between her quickly rising acting career and her husband’s demanding work as a firefighter, having a family together wasn’t an easy task at all; sacrifices were made, and in the end everything worked out in their favor.

that is, of course, until life gets in the way. pride. ego. aren’t those the usual things that create an irreparable breach between families? between love? that’s certainly what created distance in the chaichanatham marriage. a father too prideful to leave his job behind, too prideful to allow his wife to cover all expenses. a wife too in love with her job, with money, luxury and fame. everyone thinks about the things they love, the things they want, the things that will make them happier. but they don’t think about little yuthakon, not when the fights started, certainly not when the divorce papers were signed.

‘…that it’s only the thrill, of boy meeting girl, opposites attract…’

all week with mom, or rather all week with mom’s assistant. weekend with dad, or rather, weekends with a nanny. his parents insist that they love him, they kiss his forehead goodbye when they leave, they promise that they love him and they promise that they work so hard so he can have a promising future, the best future he can have. the problem is, that yuthakon is only a baby, a three year old toddler who can’t understand why mom isn’t home, instead her assistant is, eagerly trying to fill the void his mother has left in his life. a three year old toddler who can’t understand why dad isn’t home, instead a nanny is, also trying to eagerly fill the void his father has left in his life.

when yuthakon turns six years old, his father wants him to meet a new person. kwon kyungmi, a warm-hearted lady hailing from the mysterious and intriguing (in her words) town of junae. she is, everything his mother isn’t. warm, welcoming, sweet, willing to give him all of the attention, tucks him in bed at night and tells him stories about her birthplace, the corners, the murmurs, the buildings, the rumors, and he’s in complete awe. it is no wonder that when his father announces an imminent marriage, yuthakon expresses his desire to live with him, to stick with him. of course, he believes he must be doing an amazing job as a parent if his son is pretty much begging him to take him with him. in reality, yuthakon found the love of a parent in kyungmi that he couldn’t find in his own parents. his mother is shocked, which is rather idiotic. for how long can you neglect your child until he wants to look for love somewhere else? yet, she doesn’t fight it. his parents come to an agreement, he takes yutha with him, his mother continues her acting career and his step-mother decides it would be nice to move to junae. yuthakon is thrilled.

‘..it’s physical, only logical…y-o-u MuSt t-r-y to igNorE…that it m-e-aNs more than ʇɐɥʇ…’

life in junae isn’t as fun as he thought it would be. the seven year old boy gets there and realizes that all of the mental pictures his step-mother painted for him aren’t exactly perfect depictions of what this town looks like. this town is… boring. but he’s only seven years old, how exactly can a seven year old determine what’s thrilling and what isn’t regarding his surroundings? not much, or at least that’s what his father says when kyungmi expresses disappointment when she realizes her step-son isn’t too thrilled about the move. her husband reassures her though, that she has to give him time.

and time she gives him, to no avail. she feeds his child many stories, all of them exaggerated but fun, makes sure he sees the frightening side of the rumors going around, takes him to places, makes sure to wake up that starry-eyed feeling she saw in him when they met years ago in bangkok. nothing changes. it feels as if yuthakon had lost all ability to attach himself sentimentally to something, to a place, to a dream, to an idea. they don’t understand why, he seemed like such a lively kid years ago. his step-mother starts to wonder if so many years of emotional neglect had finally caught up to him. to improve this, she goes overboard. stories, theories, rumors, the whispers of town are being told by her in the most expressive, most exaggerated way that she can and as yuthakon grows older, he starts getting more and more sick of it.

until he calls bullshit. he calls bullshit on the rumors, on the story of this town, on whatever people say, he calls bullshit on the possible idea of any sort of paranormal activity going on. he calls bullshit on everything because the idea of it is completely ridiculous. ‘maybe that kind of stupid magic doesn’t work on foreigners like me’, he told kyungmi once. to be expected, really, she had fed the kid so many stories as a child, and even as a teenager, that her step-son now simply believes she had lied to him several times, and she takes full blame.

‘…oh what’s lOvE got to do, got tO Do with it, what’s ǝʌol ʇnq a :::::::!!:::!!::::::…hnnng… thriller! thriller night and no one’s gonna save you from the ʇsɐǝq about to ǝʞᴉɹʇs…’

by the time he turns fifteen years old, he’s had enough. he’s had enough of the town, of the people, of the whatever talk around town goes around, about his step-mother now showing an insane fascination for the supposed paranormal of junae. it’s stupid, it’s ridiculous and he’s had it. he tells his father it’s now time for him to go back to bangkok, to his mother. it breaks his heart. it breaks his step-mother’s heart, but if that’s what he wants? so be it.

life away from junae is… the same. except with less love. without a caring mother to love him, but with the same lack of a father and the same lack of interest from his actress mother. it’s whatever, he tells himself, detachment is easy, he’s learned to do this plenty of times before. he knows he’s loved, of course. he receives letters from his parents and friends back in junae and he makes sure to write them back, promises that he will visit them someday. there’s always a pretty special emphasis on ‘visit’, because there’s no way he will go back to live there. just no way.

‘…you hear the door ɯɐls and realize there’s ::::!!::::::…nowhere left to unɹ you feel the cold hand and wOndEr if you’ll ever see the sUn…’

growing up isolated from the rest of the world goes surprisingly well. with so many years of practice, it was only meant for that to happen. his new venture comes in the name of attending one of thailand’s most prestigious universities, where he decides to major in journalism. choosing that was, once again, surprisingly easy. with so many years he spent allowing people to feed him bullshit regarding the care and love his parents felt for him and the deluded stories of his step-mother; yuthakon wants to seek the truth. the truth of life, the veracity of the corners of the world. he’s not obsessed, that’s for sure, but he’s certain he wants to dedicate himself to finding the truth, to always looking at the rational side of things, the reality of the world as he knows it. paranormal activity and it’s various definitions? ridiculous.

university life changes plenty of things about him. besides the fact he becomes much more social, he realizes he has a special charm plenty of people feel deeply attracted to. perhaps his mysterious, yet approachable appearance. some even deemed him as the kind of person you can’t really reach, until you talk to them and realize they’re just like you and like me, that he’s nice, approachable and most of the times funny due to his innate way to throw ironic, sardonic and sarcastic comments here and there. he’s the good kind of ‘crude’, if such thing exists. people are, to put it simply, fascinated.

‘…you close your eyes and hOpE that tHIs is just imAginaTIon…::::!::::… hnnng… heeelp::::!ǝɯ:::!:::… second hand emotion, what’s love got to do, got to do with it…’

he graduates with honors and his mother offers to get him in touch with whatever companies he desires. he’s grateful, but turns her down. it’s not like he doesn’t appreciate his mother’s help, but a, he knows she’s doing it to try and redeem herself and b, he doesn’t need anyone’s help to thrive. sure enough, it takes him only four months to get a job at a tv channel. it’s not the biggest deal, certainly at all, considering the young boy is now the assistant of a tv producer. coffee runs? he’s on it. making sure the producer’s meal is ready and on time when he gets hungry? he’s on it. this is not the perfect idea that he had upon graduation, but he understands that good things come to those who wait (and work hard).

there’s not much that he can do (and saying ‘no’ isn’t an option) when kyungmi calls to inform him his father went missing. ‘it’s been three days, he hasn’t been home. i’m worried about him’ and upon questioning if police had gotten involved by now, she simply said ‘of course not! i know he’s missing, but he’s somewhere in this town, we have to find him’. yuthakon is skeptical, and naturally so. his step-mother being eccentrically ominous once again? of course she is. the fact she’s now gotten his father involved is definitely low, but at the same time, yuthakon decides to humor them. perhaps they miss him, so why not give them the pleasure?

so to off to junae, he goes.

‘…who needs a ʇɹɐǝɥ, when a thriller, thriLLer night! …heart CAn be brOken…’

he finds his father two days after he arrived to the old, boring town of junae. turns out, he was actually missing, just as it also turns that no, the “spirits” (as his step-mother came up with) didn’t take him. what actually happened is that his father had gotten drunk, so drunk he completely forgot the way back home and all because he had gotten fired from his job; that and the salary of his step-mother’s job as a teacher wasn’t enough.

this is the first time kyungmi talks to him without any sort of tricks or eccentricities, this is the first time his step-mother has a heart-to-heart with him and explains that his father, as years had passed by, felt more and more lost regarding him. he misses him. he wants to make things right. he wants to make up for all of those wasted years that he spent with his head dipped so deep in his work that he completely forgot he had a son. yuthakon gets it, but he refuses to stay. there’s no way.

still, he chooses to stick around for a couple of days.

then a couple of weeks.

then a couple of months.

‘you’re fighting for your life inside a ɹǝllᴉʞ, thriller… p-please::::!ʎpoqǝɯos!::::heeelp!::::m-e-e-e:::!…i’ve been thINKIng about my oWn protECtion, it sǝɹɐɔs me to feel this WAY… tonight!’

he should’ve known his father was going to make him feel weak enough to stick around. now, it feels too late to leave. bills are accumulating, his father still has that lost, deeply nostalgic look in his eyes every time he looks at him, meanwhile his step-mother stares at him with so much sadness and love. he can’t quite leave. he wants to, he can, but he won’t. it’s clear that his father needs him, and it’s clear that kyungmi thinks so too. so he stays. for now.

getting a new job a the town’s radio station was something he never thought would happen. so used to the stay behind the scenes agenda, this job was kind of similar to that, except he was actually relevant now, not just some boy running around delivering lattes. despite the small, shitty town (as he so endearingly describes it), he thinks the job is okay and far much, much better than what he had back home.

his mother doesn’t need him to come back, his father does need him to stay and he can’t do much but show that he has an actual warm heart his beloved parents can squeeze inside their hands and beg for silent forgiveness. he has forgiven them already. a man with a rough exterior after all, but the softness of an angel on the inside. it’s just so easy to convince him.

skeptical as he is, he still calls bullshit on everything. on the stories, on the rumors, on the lore surrounding town. he still believes everything are just fabricated stories to scare children. that is, of course, until telltale heart gets tampered with. he doesn’t know what. why. how and certainly not “who”, but he knows, just as everybody else, that someone or “something” is messing with their beloved station.

he, of course, won’t say it out loud, prideful after all, and admit that there is definitely something off about things. he will look for the rational explanation, like maybe some weirdo trying to mess with things, or some idiot trying to just scare them for fun. but deep down, deep, deep, deep down he’s starting to believe that perhaps all those stories his step-mother supposedly came up with all of those years ago might be true. might.

“…i, i’m really sorry about that. looks like our console didn’t want to play ‘what’s love got to do with it’ after all and tried to give us a funny uh… remix of that and ‘thriller’. my apologies again, for that very spooky rendition. but it’s now my time to go, until we meet again lovely night owls, don’t let the monsters under your bed get you! see ya!”

[paranoiakrp]

         CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: AHN KIHA …

STATS

name / ahn kiha d.o.b. / 11.29.97 age / 22 pronouns / he/him job / bartender societies / necronomicon groups / n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

tw: self harm.

loneliness makes monsters of us all, and this is no less true for boys wandering through too-silent libraries, searching for spaces to fold selves into; origami with paper-cut blood staining corners carefully creased before being thrown into some pyre burning into the afterlife.

the tome is thick, heavy in his hands. he curls the title around his tongue, slow like bladepoint around teeth. necronomicon.

it tastes half-acidic, burns his mouth. there’s his grandmother’s voice, reminding him of demon-things and the different kinds of hellfire awaiting him.  

grief makes fools of us all, and this is no less true for boys flipping thick covers open, minutes turned to hours turned to days of visits, of stays poring over pages with scripts spiralling.

the first time he draws blood, it is almost too easy. the red slides across wrists and runes look almost beautiful, even with clumsy fingertips.

blood sacrifices are nothing if not greedy. it demands vein, asks for arteries, pleads for the rivulets of self spilled in library back-tables, shaking hands turned steady with the years of practice.

it allows you to be the same – what do you wish for, boy?

at first: the return of parents. they always come back hanging, swinging from rafters and tree branches, howling. begging for necks snapped, for hellfire or purgatory; anything but this half-being he so greedily asks them to relive, again and again.

( keep the screams, the spells in back-pockets for rainy days. he asks them every variation of why and they never answer; string them back out of bitter anger rather than answer at this point )

and now: for grandmother’s tonics to be as magic as she claims, for the company ghosts, for the flame-touch of another in secret, for always-full tip jars, for the fraying edges of his grandmother’s sanity to unravel under his red-stained fingertips –

claim that it is well-deserved, that bloodied runes drawn at dusk are mere shortcuts for endings he was to reach anyways – there are worse ways to be using blood, worse ways to have to explain the scars that mars wrists, forearms, chests.

stare at it too long and it becomes beautiful, becomes him; red worn too well, too worn against skin.

practice it for too long and knifepoints become familiar, becomes a comfort a body shouldn’t know.

magic demands an intimacy that is nothing if not invasive and he is nothing if not bared open for a harvesting.

WHATS YOUR STORY?

tw: implied suicide mention

childhood is smothered in sage and burnt lichen; grandmother’s houses and mobiles made of animal bone and playthings of berries he crushed into bowls but was told never to eat. heels are mud-slicked in the summer, palms red-purple-green stained and trekking water into small houses by mountainsides.

easier memories. they become jagged-toothed when he remembers the bedtime stories grandmothers used to tell him; devils at one’s doors and the smiles they wear when they ask to come in; skin-wearers that prowl the forest at night; witches and their greed for human flesh between their teeth –

( how much of it has become him? )

perhaps concerning, parents consider, how the little boy runs not home at the end of each school day, but chooses instead to trapeze forest paths to reach grandmother’s cabins. knows to wait outside should she be seeing another client; rewarded by the tussle of hair when she bids them farewell and welcomes him in.

perhaps concerning, but there are worse things for boys to be playing with. they laugh at dinners, proclaim that perhaps junae has a new medicine man in the making, at the rate in which he follows his grandmother’s footsteps – it won’t be long before the townspeople make the trek to the edge of junae to see him for the sicknesses that city medicine does little to aid.

it is as much of an ideal as one would get in a town like this.

a luxury, still, to dream of such. junae demands blood and bone for dreams, don’t you know?

it’s a tuesday evening when the normalcy of elementary school / grandmother’s place / home for dinner / fairytales before bed / repeat / repeat / repeat is quickly halted.

he claims to not remember the bodies hanging. no one asks if he does or not.

what he does recall: the hems of his mother’s skirt as he reaches up to tug it, the cold hands of his father, how broken necks angle faces downwards so that he has the perfect view of glassy eyes looking back at him.

( does it last hours or minutes, this staring contest? it might have been twilight or midnight by the time he dials the only number he can remember )

his grandmother calls the police. it’s almost dawn by the time the bodies are removed from the living room.

it takes weeks before the smell begins to dissipate again.

-

little is considered unusual in junae, but whispers are inevitable in a town as small as this. it is the only way it knows how to stay alive.

the case is open-and-close, but still, the whispers are quick to question what has a couple coming into work one day just like any other, only to return home to take their own lives – what has them leaving a son behind, why there was no note, why the front doors were left unlocked and chairs tucked neatly to the side –

kiha pretends he does not hear the words staged or murder when his grandmother picks him up after school now.

make it easier; boy leaving classes earlier and earlier in the day, knocking on his grandmother’s door and receiving nothing but open arms despite the too-soon hour in which he returns.

they follow like ghosts, quietly into adulthood. the whispers simmer, but it still lingers behind backs, in memory; forests housing gravestones murmuring a dissent he doesn’t quite make out the words for.

( so we spill blood for answer, as we always do. the ghosts remain stubbornly silent )

grandmothers still whisper hushed reminders of fairy-stories; the spirits in the mountain that took parents’ breath, the beast in the underground that eats their buried bodies, limb by limb.

careful, dear child. she smells of rosemary and mint, stringing amulets to windows; protective. secrets are always hungry.

he wears long sleeves in the summer, hiding scars, hiding runes until he takes the corners of her vision to see him only as the memory of a purer thing, before all the blood spilled.

my baby boy, i fear only that this town will take you away from me too. listen to your grandmother’s warnings carefully, won’t you?

he’s almost sorry for all he’s yet to do.