When the Extra Takes Centre Stage

Chapter 2

It wasn't snowing the morning Yuha woke up, but it smelled like it might.

The chill instantly attacked her body as she jolted up. Oxygen flushed into her lungs.

I can breathe? I can breathe-

Was there ever as wonderful a feeling as breathing?

She barely registered the thump as she teetered onto the rickety floorboards. She had barely registered that she was on the brink of losing her balance just then. And she was only barely registering her surroundings just now.

Where am I? Where is this...?

Definitely not the streets of South Korea, that was for sure. Was she dead? Had she passed out? She must have only passed out, right? Otherwise she wouldn't be conscious. I couldn't breathe just then. Oh, thank goodness she could breathe. What kind of place was this? And why was everything around her so big? The window in between her bed and the next felt too tall. The ceiling felt too high, too far away. And even the bed she'd tumbled from, with its unsteady wooden frame and headboard, appeared too large.

She shifted into a kneeling position, and looked down at her hands.

No, my hands are small.

What is this...?

It was dawn, pale daylight bleeding into the room. She could see the dust dancing in the rays from the curtains. Standing up straight and rubbing her eyes, just to make sure this was real, just to make sure she was real, Yuha looked around the room, trying to get a grip.

Could this be some kind of orphanage? It looked like it. There were rows of identical beds – pallets, really – on either side of the room, each cramped with a sleeping figure, all of which were huddled under thin blankets.

But that doesn't make sense. I... there were so many people... crushing... what even is this?

She felt herself shivering. Her ears ached from the cold.

She knew one thing, though. She was not Bang Yuha any more. This height, this weight, the way her flesh sat on her bones, the clumsy way her limbs acted when she moved them, they all felt foreign, unfamiliar. It felt like she had crawled into someone else and sat in the midst of their anatomy, and now was relearning how the world worked through their eyes. This was not her body. A chill scampered up her spine like a mouse.

She probed at her explanations.

Afterlife? Definitely not the afterlife. It can't be. If this is the afterlife, I'm personally going to tear whatever gods there are from their thrones and throttle them to wisps.

Part of her was in denial, because if this were the afterlife... the thought sent a pounding through her blood. This was too cruel. Yuha had been so close to the top of the acting industry. So close to that golden pedestal. Failure after failure. Almost. She was almost there.

Almost. What a brutal word.

If she had died, and this was the afterlife, then...

She grit her teeth and clenched her fists.

But the other part of her knew that it just wasn't. It felt too real. When she'd fallen, it had hurt. For all her life (all her past-life?), pain was the most grounding thing she knew. So a fundamental part of her knew that this was some pocket of reality, even if she couldn't come to terms with it right then.

Yuha clambered back into her bed, with some effort, and threw the blanket over herself. It was thin, coarse, grainy. It offered no reprieve from the chill.

Leaning over, she drew back the curtain a little. Light spilled onto her lap. Rubbing at the fog blurring the window, she squinted to look outside.

The first thing she saw was an unevenly cobbled street, twisting through buildings huddled so close together it seemed they hardly had room to breathe. Some had gabled roofs with red shingles, some had thatched roofs, most had windows, and most houses were half-timbered. Even at this sleepy morning hour, there were a considerable amount of people out and about. One woman was hauling a dirty sack of vegetables over her back. A portly man in spiffed-up attire trotted by whilst hurriedly running his finger down a brown sheet of paper. There was the distinct clack of hooves on sett, and the rattle of a wooden wagon.

Where the hell is this?

Yuha's breath came out in shuddering huffs as she slowly brought her hands up to her eyes again. So small.

...Did I turn into a fucking gnome?

All things considered, it was a logical conclusion. Everything was so impossibly big, high up, and far away, because her perspective was low. And her surroundings looked like they were dropped right out of the set for some European mediaeval fantasy movie. Worst-case scenario, she was in the body of a gnome.

No, that's irrational...  She had to stay sane.

Yuha let loose a long, low breath. She realised, through the churning confusion, that these were the hands of a child.

She was a child.

She glanced at the bed next to her.

There, huddled with the meagre blanket tucked under her nose, lay a tiny girl, fast asleep. She could not be much older than five years old. A sense of familiarity wriggled at the back of Yuha's head. Why did she look familiar?

Her hair. What a soft shade of pink, she thought, just mindlessly staring. Nobody in the world could possibly have hair that colour.

Unless this was not her world.

The realisation clicked and Yuha felt like she'd been slapped in the face with a whale's tail.

Oh my god.

Could this be...?

Her train of thought was blasted to bits with the discordant clang of a ladle against metal.

Yuha nearly jumped out of her skin, and her head jerked to look at the now-wide-open door, where watery morning light washed into the room.

There stood a stout, ample woman, donning a coif and an apron over layers of faded winter skirts. Yuha grimaced and instinctively covered her ears as she, armed with a wooden ladle and a metal pot in either hand, continued to bang them together. Around her, those in their beds began to stir.

"Time to rise, children!" she squawked, her voice rough and coarse, like gravel against pavement. "Get yourselves washed and ready. Be quick, else you'll do without breakfast. Time to rise, time to rise!"

With unprecedented swiftness, the kids sprung from their beds, throwing on garments and stuffing their feet into shoes, if they had them. The atmosphere immediately filled with noise. Yuha glimpsed an older boy snatch the scarf right out of a younger girl's hands, and a little boy grabbing a pair of boots that had been carelessly discarded in the aisle separating the two rows of pallets. They must have been twice too big for him, but Yuha quickly understood that this was a place barren of decency where at least something was better than nothing.

She had to learn fast. Most of the kids seemed bigger than her. Almost instinctively, she swiped the pair of boots lined up by the side of the pink-haired girl's bed. Before her neighbour had even finished yawning, Yuha was in the corner of the room, pulling on her battered smock and stockings, her new treasure guarded greedily behind her.

So this is how I live now, Yuha thought, the grim onset of reality dawning on her. Some kind of shitty orphanage where everything is a fight.

Couldn't say she'd ever been there before.

Well. I'm in the world of a webnovel I've just wrapped up reading, and I think I know which one.

What now?