mycallalillies
Picture It: In A Nut(s)hell
In an alternate Southeast Asian country fondly - and more often mockingly - known as the Red Dot, where football rarely raises anyone's pulse and "fine country" refers less to praise and more to the terrifying amount of summonses one can collect, lives a group of people who never got the memo that ordinary life should stay ordinary.
Sakina "Kina" Solihin
A year has passed since Kina woke from a two-year coma and reluctantly returned to normal life - or whatever passes for normal when your family is secretly carrying genetically enhanced abilities triggered by trauma and near-death experiences.
Armed with a PhD in sarcasm and very little patience, the soon-to-be 29-year-old believes her biggest problem is keeping the gahmen from discovering her family secret.
Unfortunately, Abah has other priorities.
Namely: the dreaded M-word.
Marriage.
And after winning one argument too many, Kina finds herself suffering the consequences of victory:
getting chased out of the house.
Emotional Status: Emotionally unavailable.
Benedict "Ben" Song
A Chinese-Thai SPR with a lineage better left unexplained, Ben possesses the emotional equivalent of Spotify Premium - the ability to manipulate the emotional atmosphere around him like a dangerously moody soundboard.
A gifted Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner known to patients as Dr. Ben or Master Song, he is known to Kina by a far less respectable title:
Apek.
Not only is Kina now reluctantly boarding at his shophouse, the two of them are also co-parents to Primrose, the cat they absolutely do not share custody of emotionally.
Emotional Status: Classified information.
Twelve years of accidental proximity.
One shared cat.
One mythic realm they thought had finally released them.
Unfortunately, Hikayat is not done with them yet.
And this time, it is dragging them back toward the truth behind an old curse, a forgotten summoning, and a love story neither of them asked for.