Han Nayeon works as a ghostwriter in Hermes Tower, a prestigious company that offers solutions to problems. Choi Junhyub is the man she meets the day she arrives late for work for the first time, the man she's attracted to but has never met before...
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What is human is ghastly; what is ghastly is human. Meeting Yook Chan told Junhyub this statement contained some truth. In a Venn diagram, the area that's "human" and the area that's "ghost" had a huge overlap, for the living and the dead were more similar than different. The denial to admit these shared traits sprouted each other's fears. Antropophobia, the fear of humans, and phasmophobia, the fear of ghosts, fitted into the narrow spaces, fearful that the intersection would give rise to new heights of irrationality. This notion was irrational enough.
In this moment of reconciliation and reckoning, a Venn diagram appeared in the crypt, the human side consisting Nayeon, the ghosts' side including M and N, Steffie and Ramiel (his was an ambiguous classification), and the intersection unravelled its knots upon the encounter of friends. The imbalance of the diagram was awfully apparent, even with Junhyub's words of assurance.
Still, the degree of antropophobia and phasmophobia in the crypt was nothing, not when Hermes Tower was erected on this foundation of fear. Every inhabitant of Hermes Tower, the phrase made possible since it was a "home where a found family works together for the world" as Chairperson Seo proposed, housed both fears. Humans pitted against humans effortlessly in this family and shared a repulsion of the supernatural. Hermes Tower was supposedly the thinktank for the most rational, yet rightly filled with the utterly irrational.
One of them was Alice Montgomery. She expressed her fervent disdain for humanity wherever she went and sought to correct society one client at a time. She fell in love with the supernatural, the paranormal, when she was six, during a trip to Seoul where she got a dokkaebi keychain from a prize claw machine in an isolated arcade. She found the Korean goblin interesting, loved and hated their duality, and also found a way to lose the keychain before her flight back to America. Under the wing of a religious family, she grew superstitious, which meant she uncovered countless worries about nonhuman entities and sinister happenings. Her superstitious heart, however, brought her to Hermes Tower where she became the executive secretary to Seo Mi-eun and learned of the crypt's existence.
Twelve years ago, she and Mi-eun met Ramiel at a coffee shop opposite Hermes Tower after receiving a strange call from the telecom company that their cellular data usage had skyrocketed. Even Jeoseung Saja needed to keep up with the times, Ramiel told them before revealing he was from the crypt under the tower. Back then, the Hermes statue hadn't arrived. Back then, Hermes Tower was a struggling company met with public confusion and scepticism. Ramiel proposed a human sacrifice as a win-win situation, that any office nuisances would be exchanged for four years of the company's success.
Of course, they sealed the deal.
Self-centred Steffie Kim, whom Alice felt a tinge of jealousy towards for being Taek-min's girlfriend, was sent to Seocheon as an experiment. Hermes Tower saw an immediate expansion of clientele base. This was only made known to Mi-eun after some probing. Steffie's mysterious death dealt a blow to Taek-min and made him fear the supernatural more, as did his sister. Alice, on the other hand, found humans petty and unkind, the case study being her boss who blamed her for her reckless decision.
