𝐋𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞 ✸ deserted lies the city

how deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
how like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!
she who was a queen among the provinces
has now become a slave. 
- ʟᴀᴍᴇɴᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴꜱ 1:1

The hiss of a slashed pipe filled the metallic walls, ringing off aluminium and steel. Gas poured from the walls, filling the room with a smokey haze, obscuring beeping lights and muffling the incessant sounds of the Blue Alert. Under the flickering emergency lights, everything looked flat and dull.

"天真無邪 難道一眼到老." So naive and innocent, but will you grow dull as I stare?

Delicate footsteps pattered down the main hallway. A girl, dressed in layers of harsh white, scrambled down towards the atrium, breath coming in short pants as she sang. Sweat soaked her hair, dampening the collar of her dress. Something under her feet was slippery.

"撤回祈禱 心願請勿預告" Take back your dreams, don't pierce my soft heart there.

She could barely get enough air to power the song, but they could layer over it with the recording audio. The girl picked her way blindly through the fog, stirring the air around her as she pushed forward, lights blurring around her. A woman half-possessed, her eyes remained blank, even as her body went through motions of panic and song.

"黑屏來電 轉身不敢逃跑..."

She burst into the atrium, the hallways opening to wide open glass, expanding into space. Stars glittered outside, winking in the darkness, points on a plane of eternal void. Space didn't scare her, she was unsettled by very little. She wasn't sure why, but she was used to floating in isolation.

The power goes out, our film shuts down, a void I cannot bare...

But the massacre before her caused her steps to falter, her practiced posture chipping slowly. The hallways had been coated in streaks of blood, smears of guts and gore, as was custom for music video sets. But the cartoonish way that bodies lay atop each other, hands reaching for hands, felt so much more real this time.

Her lips moved soundlessly, finishing the last line. 無數虛實場景

...and a movie of endless frames passes by, both real and not there.

She shut her eyes against the wideness, for a brief moment, swallowing. She gave herself two seconds to panic.

And action!—

She made to run, or move, or something that her body told her to do, but her foot caught on something small, soft, and slowly atrophying. She crashed to the ground, landing on bodies, ignoring the hot wet soaking up her legs as she slid against the metal floor. Her arm pushed against something soft and fleshy, her head landed on something hairy and blonde.

Her eyes flew open. She was face to face with a child, blond hair matted with red to his scalp, brown eyes wide open and glassy. A cut split his skull from forehead to neck, and pink ropes of brains slithered out. She inhaled shallowly, ignoring the tang of copper in her nostrils, trying to push herself up. Her hand kept slipping in the wet of the blood around them, and she fell, crashing back into the little boy's dead body. This was just a set. It was just a set. It was just a—

A hand stabbed out from the piles of dead, punching through the tapestry of greying limbs. Sumin finally found purchase, pushing herself up from the bodies.

"Help," the hand trembled, reaching. The voice was frail, rusted, and barely a whisper. "Someone please—"

This is part of the video, Sumin reassured herself as she stumbled over what were surely actors playing dead. She was careful not to tread on their fingers. It was probably Nini or Eunju under there, whom Sumin would pull free from the pile of props, and they would join Imim at overhead bridge and burn the place down. Was this for "Distort"? Or "Roulette"? She couldn't remember.