Asylum (NCT fanfic)

Log 4, phase 2: chewing gum

Have you ever been on a rollercoaster? Or a drop slide at a water park? Then you know the feeling of going through the closet. I felt as though every part of me was being sucked downward at an uncontrollable rate. That's when I felt everything stop, the smell of something sweet like candy filled my nose. It was almost sweet enough to make me gag. I felt like the wind had then been knocked out of me. I was all of a sudden on a hard wooden floor, wincing from the pain of being thrown from what felt like several feet. There was quite a lot of loud talking around me, my vision was blurry, but I could make out blue tennis shoes, almost like the ones many asylum kids wore if they were going around the building or experimented on. The shoes were connected to tube socks and pale, skinny legs. "Hey! Hey!" One of the voices shouted. The hands flipped me from my stomach to my back and flashed a light in my eyes. To this I groaned, but this seemed to only make the voice more urgent to get a response from me. "Hey! How many fingers am I holding up?" At this point, my vision had cleared enough to see a boy with short, dusty pink hair and odd circle glasses holding three fingers in front of my face. He looked worried, but I was more worried about the fact that we seemed to be back in the asylum, except the pink walls seemed to have bunked beds with blue blankets instead of medicine polls and large clothing racks. "Where are we?!" The boy tried to keep me down when I tried to raise myself up. "Stay down. That thing disorients people when they first come out. How many fingers am I holding up?" He repeated his question, he looked more relieved that I was talking now. "Three. Now answer my question." He sighed and looked behind me. "Is anyone else coming through?" a panicked voice behind me shouted over the loud room, "Was there anyone else with you?" "The girls.....I HAD THREE GIRLS WITH ME!!!!" The pink haired boy looked extremely worried now. "CLOSE IT!!!" He screamed, this seemed to panic him now. There was another set of hands grabbing me, attempting to pull me away from where I had landed. "GET BACK!" This set of hands tried to turn my hand so I couldn't look behind me, but it was too late. Behind me was four boys attempting to close an old, square, and blue wardrobe. The pink haired boy stood in front of me, and the next thing I saw scared me. He split into four other boys. Each with a different hair color from what I could see. The lead one ran first to close the doors, the other four hurried and mirrored him. They finally got the door closed, which caused the clones to turn back into the pink haired one. He looked exhausted now.

When everything finally calmed down a little, I finally spoke. "What happened?" My head hurt, and I felt sick from the 'ride'. "Well, to be put lightly, this thing separated you all, but I am assuming that the other girls with you were just dropped into different timelines." My head wasn't wrapping around any of this, so what he was trying to say made no sense to me. "Sorry, can you just explain where we are? And why are we in the asylum? And none of you are freaking out because we could get caught and killed? Infact, why is an Asylum B kid even IN this building?" That's when one of the boys from the back walked over to me, and I felt relaxed all of a sudden. "It's okay, I know how to use mine, so I won't hurt you, okay?" He had a genuine smile, and sat next to me, holding my hand finally. "Okay, Jaemin, stop using that, it's violating. Renjun, just try to explain everything to her. Jeno, Jisung, and Chenle, I need your help in the main rooms. We need to figure out where we are and what timeline this is, and how to leave it." The three boys who had been trying to shut the wardrobe by themselves earlier, looked at me with weak smiles, then followed pink hair out of the room. "Okay, basically, there is this group called 'EXO' and-" "What does that have to do with us?" "Let me finish." He glared at me impatiently, but the boy holding my hand gave me a small squeeze of comfort. "Basically, this group is the whole reason any of us have powers, as well as why the other timeline is so messed up. We were originally made in order to stop them. But, EXO wasn't really a bad group of people, just initial aliens who landed in our timeline: The Asylum timeline. It's called that because of what the government did to us." He paused to let some of this sink in. "But Tao, you might have met him before you were thrown into the wardrobe, decided he would try and send certain kids into the timelines to try and change what was happening within our own. This means we basically are existing before the original EXO planet, and need to get there before they were formed and protect them from the EXO planet. However, when Tao sent the first 10 into the timeline, something happened.But I guess Tao didn't know. Somehow we, nct Dream, landed in the past, while the other units landed in the future. Meaning we basically exist in both planes." We have to try and find the other doors to get to the main two groups. But, because you are here, that means our transmission can't reach the Asylum timeline. You came through right when we arrived, luckily however, Mark detected you on his phone." There was one boy with black-ish hair behind him, but something seemed off. For some odd reason, he had almost auburn red eyes instead of brown. "Okay, so basically, he can interact with people who aren't in this timeline through his phone?" I knew for a fact that meant that this was strange, but the other two boys nodded. "Yes, we are assuming we are in the late 2010s at the latest, as the Asylum wasn't built until 2015, and the bunked beds were utilised until 2017, a year after I was admitted." This part confused me as the youngest person allowed to be enrolled in the era he was talking about was 16. But, he seemed younger. "Wait, when were yo-" "NCT wasn't deployed until 2016, and I was the second wave months later, so yes, I was admitted in 2016, and I have no idea how old I would be in the Asylum timeline. Haechan was sent through right in 2016, but was 15 at the time. Jaemin, the one holding your hand, was 16 as well as Jeno. The third wave, the one that brought the kid with the bowl cut, and the light blonde one, they were both 14 and 15." I nodded. "Well, it's been 4 years since 2016. I was admitted in the fall of 2018, and I am 16 now. You would all be 4 years older from your ages when you went through." I informed them quietly, but they all looked like I had just told them they had to go back to the Asylum timeline. "It only felt like we had been gone for a few days. Not a few years..." The black haired one finally murmured, he looked the most distraught by the news.

The boys explained that we should try to find files in order to figure out which year it was. It would probably help explain where we should go next, as well as some information we would need in order to get to the EXO planet. "This is a place some of EXO have been before, but when?" Renjun muttered as we passed a window. That's when I looked outside. This looked nothing like the Asylum.