BYUN BAEKHYUN: BEYOND DETECTIVE ▷ EXO GAMEBOOK

The Tale of Byun Baekhyun, and Some Thievery

THE TALE OF BYUN BAEKHYUN, AND SOME THIEVERY

 

EARTH DATE: XX APRIL 2114

EVERDREAM INDUSTRIES, EXO PLANET

Luckless Byun Baekhyun turned to the skies to look for a good sign.

You, as our future detective’s fate, had arrived on the other side of the window glass. You were studying. You were watching. He was just oblivious. You can’t blame him, though. There were too many things happening outside, and the skies were as busy as ever.

Here, the skies are brown, dirty, unblessed. Calling them ‘heavens’ would be too high a regard while they were no different than the dusty earth. The pale white twins in the sky were in their gibbous phase. Some time had passed since the last Two Moons Festival. In their full illumination, they would have ruled the skies together. But here, nothing bright stays. Nothing perfect stays. The skies despaired, the moons paled, the sun shrank.

The only area suitable for life to exist is in the day-night terminator: the twilight zone between the frozen evernight and the scorching daylight. Here, the sun is put on a limbo, unable to fall and forbidden to rise. Her blood-red glare is nothing more than a moist terracotta gleam.

Tall mountains of prehistoric times spiked up like desperate hands praying for mercy. From what? These mountains were whipped for millions of years by one-way winds that what were left of them were only thin, skeletal rock formations. Beams of sunlight were filtered between them and descend as parallel streaks.

The strong winds carried all sorts of dust and detritus with them. Baekhyun had to squint his small-but-suddenly-got-bigger-all-thanks-to-the-eyeliner eyes in order to see clearly. Green curtains of light glided through the air. Auroras, he whispered to himself. When he was four, his grandmother would tell him that auroras will appear every time the Tree of Life battle the wrath of the angry sun. When he grew up, he discovered that auroras are only deflections of solar flares by EXO Planet’s magnetic field. Two branched structures on each pole of EXO Planet beam out a strong magnetic field. But the naïve ancestors called them ‘The Tree of Life’, divided into halves.

On Earth, the spectacular auroras are a rare sight. In EXO Planet, it’s an everyday occurrence.

Nothing special to tell.

The scenery was dead but his surroundings were lively. Convivial, merry, noisy with the output of twelve people combined. There was a celebration in a small room in a city-sized factory on EXO Planet—where the windows were large enough to stretch from the floor to the ceiling. Luckily, the glass was sound-proof, or else, unwanted pollutions would leak out to the already dense air. The room became saturated with sounds—of Tao shrill squeals, of Suho popped balloons, of Luhan keyboard click-clacks, of Chanyeol off-key singing, of Chen wild laughter, of Kris hitched breaths and too-audible heartbeats and of Baekhyun ‘I Got A Boy’.

Baekhyun felt something being thrown to the back of his head. He picked it up. It was an empty box of podo juice. And more of them were littered on the floor. “Baekhyun-ssi~” A tall boy swayed his large, bony body around in a failed dance. His springy orange hair bounced atop his head. “What are you staring at?” he asked, finishing a whole box in one gulp. Another crumpled box was dropped to the floor.

“Ah, nothing, Chanyeol—I’ve had enough podos for a day…” Baekhyun replied. He cringed at the podo cemetery surrounding him.