Cherem - Chapter 1
Title: Cherem
Chapter: 1/?
Rating: PG
Genre: Fantasy, AU
Characters: Taemin (SHINee), Hyunjoong (SS501), the rest of SHINee, cameos from other SS501 members and many other K-pop groups like SNSD and SUJU
Pairing(s): TBA
Warning: Rating will go up in later chapters
Summary: When Lee Taemin gets deported down from his comfortable position in the weather division to a strange division known only to most as ‘the Store’, he gets tangled up in the stuff that should stay safely in his daydreams. Three difficult house-spirits, plenty of strange, needy customers, one clumsy but strangely mysterious store-keeper, and one particularly curious customer who seems to keep coming back only when Taemin is around.
~*~
[ 0 ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ]
~*~
~*~
Cherem - something removed from common use and set apart for a special purpose, usually the best ten percent.
~*~
It was one of moments in which creatures of habits are revealed - when they move through the familiar habits which they always do, before they pause when they realize that something is wrong. That what they are doing is silly out of the context of habit, and then the embarrassment comes regardless of it being done in a public space or no.
Taemin was such a creature of habit, revealed in his action of reaching out for an alarm clock that wasn’t there, slamming his hand painfully down onto hard oak wood instead. It was one sure way to wake up certainly, and he spent a few minutes cursing and wondering where his alarm clock had gone. It was only when his brain began to process that his neck hurt from a crick, and the fact that no, he didn’t own any of this stuff that cluttered most of the room in a most haphazard way, that he realized, with a jolt, that this wasn’t his home.
It all came rushing back to him then. Well, okay, it didn’t. It was more like the clearing of the fog, remembering clear bits and pieces with the foggy rest. But it was enough to get a sense of where and when he was. The store. Customers. Lost things. Ah, yes, he remembered now.
He had fallen asleep, probably while filing one of the many requests he had cleared yesterday. He’d found out much later, as he was looking through the databases in a lull period, that the lost things, after having been given back to their rightful owners, had to be re-classified and moved. And so, Taemin had done so, and with the dryness of the task and the extensive work that bordered on philanthropy, it was no wonder that he’d passed out without any knowledge of it.
It had taken him a pretty decent time to have all that run through his head, which was why it came as a shock to him when he realized that, holy shit, someone was squatting beside him, looking at him like some sort of curiosity, and generally just staring.
After the initial shock (and getting over the pain of falling over from his chair), Taemin managed to gather his wits enough to ask. “W-who are you?”
The curious brown eyes tilted to the side with a perplexed expression. “That should be my question to ask really, because, you don’t exactly belong here, and I do. But since you asked first, so I shall answer. I’m the owner of this establishment.”
“Oh.” Taemin replied in his most intelligent way. For that really was the only way one of civil society could reply.
“Oh indeed.” It seemed to Taemin that the man might have been smiling in amusement, but his face was so mild it was rather hard to tell. “Maybe you could tell me who you are? Since I have already done so for you.”
“Ah.” Taemin blinked and introduced himself as Taemin. From the weather division. Tiffany sent me and you weren’t here yesterday so I-
“Tiffany?” a flash of understanding seemed to settle into the mild man’s eyes before there was tug of his lips Taemin convinced himself was a definite smile. “Is that so? Well, you don’t need to say anymore. What work have you done?”
Taemin realized in that moment that this man was quite the easy-going guy. No, wait, that wasn’t the main realization - it was that manner that told him that this was not the first time his supervisor had sent down an intern that displeased her. And he quite understood - the work they did here at the Store was quite hectic.
“Ah well.” Taemin nodded towards the computer, gesturing in some sort of manner. “I cleared quite a bit of work, returning some of the lost things and then I was filing them when I… well I fell asleep… and I can continue to do so if…”
Taemin trailed off as he spotted the look of mild bemusement on the man’s face. Although it wasn’t really that obvious on such a vanilla ice-cream face, working under Tiffany had given him honed senses for this sort of thing.
“Uh…” Taemin wondered if perhaps they had jargonified lingo for this ‘lost items’ line and tried to explain things slowly. “Well, a lot of customers came in yesterday for their lost things. I managed to clear quite a lot of them, and finally got-”
“No. Wait. Lost things?” Now Taemin was bemused as well. What was the problem with that?
“Isn’t lost things what this place deals with?” Taemin asked, despite the question feeling a little dumb to him, just to fill in the painful silence that followed. But it seemed like that question wasn’t really that dumb after all.
“Lost things? Oh no.” The mild-mannered man shook his head. “No, the nature of this store isn’t in lost things, it’s in - oh… Oh. I know what’s going on now.”
But before Taemin could ask as to what. The mild-mannered man turned and said in a voice that should have been a shout, but was not as loud, yet had the same authority as one. “Onew, Jonghyun, Key. Come on out. Just what have you three been doing to this poor young lad here?”
The names sounded sort of familiar, but before Taemin could place them together with memories, three familiar faces stepped out from nowhere, each wearing different expressions on their face - one sheepish, one unrepentant, and one mischievous.
“Ah! You guys!” Taemin pointed in a way, that under normal circumstances, he would have considered himself extremely rude. But he thought that he could be excused a little here, since if what he was guessing was true, then he had been pulled along for a (very tedious) ride. “You’re yesterday’s customers... Lee Jinki? And Kim Kibum! And you… Kim Jonghyun!”
Taemin almost thought there was a sharp look on the mild-mannered man’s face, and there almost seemed to be a rebuke on those lips, but it was all gone within the second and the mild-mannered face returned to being… well, mild-mannered. “Well, it seems like these three trouble-makers have caused you a bit of trouble. My guess is that they pulled some sort of prank on you in order to get you to do their work without you knowing.”
Taemin’s eyes traveled towards the three boys. Now that he wasn’t hard-pressed with requests, he could easily tell that they really weren’t human. They were like him, just that they were of a different profession.
“Well, he was sent down to help anyway!” the one named Kibum, or Key as the mild-mannered man had called him, protested at the way he was being critically looked at. Jinki, or Onew, had the decency to look embarrassed, and proceeded to nudge Key gently in the ribs. Jonghyun only continued to grin at Taemin, as if he was expecting Taemin to understand and be good-humored enough to treat all that headache and work yesterday as a joke.
“And help he would have. Not do all your work for you.” Taemin was mollified that at least the owner and what he guessed was the supervisor of the three offenders was redressing the grievances he’d faced.
There was a moment of grumbling, before the mild-mannered man sent all three off onto whatever their tasks really were. Then as Taemin was about to ask what he was supposed to do now, the man began to reply, and Taemin hazarded the guess that perhaps there was a telepathic thread in his genetic make-up somewhere.
“Well, for all your trouble, I think I could already let you go… But… uh…” Taemin bit back a mental sigh, knowing already what was going to be asked of him. “Well, I hazard that you did a lot of work, and I really hope you can stay a while to explain to me what you did...”
Taemin was about to make some excuse to go - like Tiffany expecting him, or some work waiting, or something of that nature. But he made the mistake of looking into the mild-mannered man’s eyes, which were somehow so guileless and so compelling at the same time without being overtly so.
It was two minutes later, as the man was looking through the database, which seemed to have mysteriously been modified into something that was definitely not about ‘lost things’, that Taemin realized what he’d done.
~*~
As Taemin expected, he ended up staying for more than just explaining the course of events that happened yesterday. Explaining had turned to showing them exactly where he’d placed some of the things, and that itself had led to him helping to carry some things when he was about to leave and saw Onew struggling with a couple of chairs. And soon, that had translated into rolled up sleeves, sweat, and a good load of elbow-greased hard work.
Staying behind was not without benefits though. Taemin found out a lot of things about the place which was generally unknown by others, and he thought that, in a way, this was an apology for being roped into what he felt was a hell lot of categorization work for stock-taking.
The store-owner’s name is Hyunjoong. Taemin found himself taking a great liking to the mild-mannered man despite having been somewhat coerced into doing extra work. Hyunjoong moved at his own pace - which was somewhat slow and stately. But yet, he was not what one considered stuck-up, as most were when they could afford moved at such a pace and did not have bodies which were centuries old. Taemin thought that maybe the pace he went at was more practical that metaphorical, for Taemin had rarely seen someone trip over the exact same thing some many times in succession before. (In all fairness though, he seemed to trip less the cleaner the place got.)
He found out that, no, the Store wasn’t really behind their work schedule. They were on time, actually, although Taemin noticed that nothing was really mentioned about what their work really was. Just that because Hyunjoong traveled quite extensively for what seemed like errands related to the work of the store, most of the things were taken care of by the three house-spirits when he wasn’t around.
And these three house-spirits, as Taemin had found out first hand, weren’t exactly all excited about documentation of their work being done. That had led to the workload reports being sent only report work actually done before Hyunjoong went on whatever trips he went on. The mess was however, due to the scheduled stocktaking the three spirits were in the middle in when Taemin arrived.
“It’s so boring.” Key complained loudly, earning a roll of eyes and a scandalized look.
“It really is though. And tiring.” Onew admitted after a while, and Taemin could imagine, with all the things in the room which seem to be payment for the Store’s services. Although Taemin wondered what sort of services required some of the payments to be ’10 industrial sized punchers, black, Japanese make’ or ‘100 bottled ills, assorted, particularly nasty’.
They didn’t reveal what their heritage was though, so Taemin didn’t either (although he supposed the ‘weather division’ part was a bit of a giveaway), but Taemin was pretty sure that Jonghyun had some connection to Loki, the Nordic trickster, because Jonghyun was too much of a prankster not to be.
“I did most of the replicated characters.” He related to Taemin proudly while they began to key in the ‘Os’ after shifting them around into what seemed like a small room designed for an upscale apartment. “I’m very good at those. I know just enough to make huge bulks of people that form a crowd.”
He jabbed a thumb at Key, who had just came in as well. There must have been some of Hades in Key, for when Jonghyun commented on Key being extremely good at recognizing human vices because he had every bit of one inside him, the glare Key had given Jonghyun had sent shivers crawling down Taemin’s spine like Death had just danced through the room.
However, it was more fun than Taemin ever anticipated from a supposed punishment. The work was time-consuming and hard, but good company had made things bearable like it always did. And Taemin was even a little sad when Hyunjoong announced that, after recovering from having tripped over thin air, it was time for Taemin to leave. Going back to Tiffany and his boring but comfortable job, after having worked with the carefree, flexible yet without being ineffective Hyunjoong, was a little depressing.
But he knew his place, and he knew he’d grow skittish if he didn’t go back to his place of habit soon. Like all things, novelty was attractive, but Taemin wasn’t so naïve with youth that he’d think that novelty would last forever.
So, with a last bid of goodbye, he stepped out of the sliding doors, and made his way back home.
~*~
Or at least, he tried to.
It was odd, but he just couldn’t seem to get out of the place. He walked down the corridor he’d thought he came in by, but it seemed that he was wrong. The door that he’d thought would lead him to the outside world led him to yet another corridor instead, one that seemed to be of a 16th century castle, all dank and dark stones. And blinking, he turned back, trying to retrace his steps. It seemed that running all around everywhere placing things had confused his memory of the place.
But it seemed that even his memory was worst than he thought, and instead of ending up at the room where he’d left Hyunjoong and his three assistants so that he could ask for directions, he found himself walking through a Victorian nursery filled with toys and opening the heavy oak door into a simple wooden storeroom filled with cheese.
He didn’t know for how long he walked, only that it felt like a long time. He passed through all sorts of rooms filled with all sorts of things.
Some of them made sense, like a vault filled with precious things of gold and glitter; and yet some other didn’t - like a drain filled with dirty things and filth and things usually unwanted. And yet there were places which seemed like it couldn’t belong to a house, like a night sky filled with constellations that Taemin knew shouldn’t exist. But as he walked through it, he knew this was not a real sky, but a room meant to keep the things it kept like all the other rooms in this place.
It was with a start that he realized that he was in a corridor that was all too familiar and much less out of a fantasy as it was normal. Sliding doors, sleek polished wood floors, old-fashion rice-paper window screens. Doubling back, he sighed in relief, thinking that his long deserved return to home would now finally come, only to pause just as his hand touched the wooden frame of the entrance.
It was the sound of a vaguely familiar voice that was yet not familiar - like the voice of someone in a far off memory now being heard again. But that explanation wasn’t plausible.
For this was the voice of someone Taemin had just met today, and was also someone whom he’d just last seen maybe twenty, thirty minutes ago. Yet that unfamiliarty was still there, like Taemin was listening to someone else speak out of the voice-piece of the store-keeper Hyunjoong.
“So, even after hearing the terms, do you still wish to go ahead with the contract?”
“Yes! I’ll give anything! Everything! Just please…”
There was desperation in that soft voice, and for some strange reason, it left Taemin’s spine curling, his sweat cold.
But not colder than when he heard the smile in Hyunjoong’s voice, which felt like welcome warmth and telling a joke at a funeral. “No need for everything. Just ten percent of it.”
Despite his youth, and never having had an interest in anything that involved dry book studying and the methods unorthodox, Taemin knew what the curdling in his blood and the chill in his soul was - wrong.
Whatever was going behind that door was wrong.
Perhaps he should have run in straightaway, to stop whatever was going on. And he would have, feet toeing forward before a single thought kept him rooted to the spot.
What if… this was what Tiffany and Sunny sent him here for?
It was a little irrational, but not that so under the abnormal circumstance. And Taemin wondered if this was the punishment - to get caught up in someone dangerous and unsavory, to get into trouble with authority, to get kicked out of his job, ostracized by society, alone and misunderstood. It was certainly more punishment than simply being tricked by house-spirits and made to do some manual work.
But that thought had no time to develop further as, in that moment, there was a scream. And Taemin didn’t know why he was galvanized into action; for it was counter-intuitive for him to gain courage from someone else’s fear - he was just not made that way. But push open the sliding door he did, with a shout of protest, and insides made of adrenaline coated jelly.
Not that he processed anything much after he stepped in - for no sooner than he had, three pairs of ridiculously strong arms wrapped around his arms and torso, preventing him from moving any further.
“You may proceed no further.” Were the words whispered into his ear, and Taemin froze - not from the threat, but from the fact that it was said without humor, and that they fell from the lips of the prankster Jonghyun.
Taemin began to turn around in fatalistic way, needing to confirm that the words had not been said in jest, and that there really wasn’t a playful grin on the face despite the tone. But a moan from the floor caught his attention, and he found himself struggling to break free from his restraints to help the person lying on the floor.
For a strange sight it was he saw - Hyunjoong bending over a fallen woman, his hand extended over her prone back and a warmth-colored sphere of mist twisting into a glass-like ball suspended in between. And he would not have suspected this to be anything wrong, save for the tortured expression on the woman’s pretty features as the mist extracted and wove into that glass-ball above.
But Taemin’s shouts for the woman to be left alone were ignored - the strong grips that held him back only grew yet stronger, and Hyunjoong never looked away from his task. Although, in hindsight, Taemin supposed that was a good thing - for an unorthodox spell had the tendency to become even worse if not done properly.
Still, somewhere amidst his struggling, he thought he heard a pleading voice whisper out the reassurance that, “This is not what you think, Taemin-sshi. Please calm down.” And he thought it might have been Onew and that it mollified him a little bit so that his cries were not so harsh and struggles not so desperate. But what could be sure here in this unnatural environment?
But finally, when the uneasy feelings died down, and the air became clear once again with the barest inklings that something of the dark had happened there, the arms around Taemin loosened their grip, releasing him slowly so that he could get used to standing up on his own and not fall flat onto his own face.
He didn’t care for the courtesy, only wanted to know what the hell was going on.
Nothing was said for a while, Hyunjoong still staring at his handiwork in the form of the collapsed, unconscious woman; and Taemin, who felt that his expression was enough of an indication to his demand. The silent stretched like thin fabric this close to being ripped into a half and a million, then Hyunjoong looked up, and Taemin was perplexed to find his demanding expression relaxing.
“I thought you left.” Were the words that first spilled out of the store-keeper’s mouth, and Taemin’s fierce expression gained its fuel again at the dispassionate expression at the wrong it had done.
“Well I didn’t.” Taemin’s voice was venom, or the injured voice of a cat after a bath. “Sorry for raining on your party.”
Taemin only became more irritated as the only change of the store-keeper’s expression was one to mild puzzlement, and not to shame, or anger, or something strong which Taemin was trying to stir up. “You weren’t unwelcome here, it was just dangerous was someone who did not know what was going on to participate in the proceedings.”
“So what exactly did ‘proceedings’ entailed?” Taemin knew he sounded someone like a petulant child, but then again, there was but a thin line between that and righteous anger.
“The granting of a wish.” The simple, factual tone that Hyunjoong used left Taemin reeling, thrown from righteous anger to stunned amazement. The quiet that followed was filled with Taemin’s unsaid thoughts of confusion.
The granting of a wish. Hyunjoong had said it like it was a simple task, as if there weren’t copious amounts of magic, red-tape and sticky pit-falls involved. He had said it like he did it everyday, as if it wasn’t the envy of everyone - humans and angels alike, the ability to grant wishes.
Then, he remembered the murmurs he heard sometimes, in a muffled bathroom conversation, or a joke at the table said to tease, or children’s bedtime story of morals - of a place which existed for the sole reason of this. The sole reason of granting wishes. But the name of the place had never been mentioned, and those who seemed to know never did say, as if the name was a taboo - as if it tempted anyone who wanted their wish granted (and who didn’t really?). And so, Taemin hadn’t connected the mysterious ‘Store’ with that place of the wish-granting.
“Then…” Taemin’s voice finally deigned to show itself. “…that glass ball… the price?”
“Yes.” Hyunjoong seemed somewhat pleased, as if in approval of Taemin’s educated guess. “The price for her wish, supposedly willingly given if you must know.”
“Supposedly?”
A sad smile, and a token glance down at the pained expression still on the unconscious woman’s face. “She didn’t want to let it go. That’s why…”
It was so painful for her. Taemin filled the words in his head as Hyunjoong trailed off.
“Well, now that you understand.” Hyunjoong brushed off an invisible spot of dust on plain brown suit as he straightened. “I appreciate you not telling everyone you know of this shop. We’re already quite hard-pressed to deal with our current number of customers, and frankly, I’m sure you can understand why I want to keep the numbers down.”
Taemin did understand, and he nodded mutely, still staring at the woman, wondering what her wish was.
“Fame.” Hyunjoong answered, although Taemin was sure he didn’t voice his question out loud. “A common wish, to which the common price is privacy.” He held out the glass ball just as Key stepped forward to take it carefully. There was that sheepish, carefree smile again. “I always get someone else to help me put it away, I’m always so careless and clumsy.”
Taemin nodded, as if in understanding, and as if he wasn’t disconcerted by the way Hyunjoong was still behaving in such a harmless, mild manner. Perhaps, some people were just that way. And Taemin wasn’t that against accepting such a fact.
“Anyway, why did you not leave?” Hyunjoong asked, watching Key take the sphere of privacy away to be stored and numbered and noted.
“I tried.” Taemin shrugged helplessly. “But I got lost. Walked everywhere before managing to find this room again. May I ask for directions?”
“You may ask, but we may not answer!” Was the mischievous call from behind, and Taemin half turned, somewhat relieved to see the trickster smile back on Jonghyun’s face.
“Now, stop teasing him, Jonghyun.” Taemin felt a hand on his shoulder, guiding him forward. “Of course you can have directions. I’ll even guide you out myself!”
And so it was in this way that Taemin was guided out of the door. There was an odd moment when he thought Hyunjoong had gone down the way he first had, but he must have been mistaken.
Following someone is a rather brainless task, especially if that other is not one for conversation. And so Taemin’s mind drifted - he thought about the work he needed to do when he went back, about how he was going to answer Tiffany and her predictable questions about his ‘punishment’, but most of all, he thought of how he was going to have to be careful about answering questions about the Store, and to be cautious about leaking out its secrets.
It was five minutes later that he realized he was all alone in a room filled with rubber chickens.
“Eh?” Taemin blinked in surprise, hadn’t he just been following Hyunjoong? He began to check around the room, opening the doors to the other rooms, looking for the brown-haired store-keeper. But Hyunjoong was nowhere in sight.
Had he been that lost in his thoughts that he had lost Hyunjoong as well? Well, in such a situation, the best course of action was to stay put and hope that those who knew he was missing would come and find him.
It didn’t take too long really, five minutes at most before a bemused-looking Hyunjoong poked his head into the room, finding Taemin poking at one of the rubber chickens. “Was that what distracted you from following me?”
“No.” Taemin ignored the might-be jibe (seriously, with all his skill in reading emotions, it was really hard to tell with Hyunjoong). “I think I got lost in my thoughts. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Hyunjoong waved the apology away. “Just try not to do it again. I don’t really mind finding you, but this place is a little big, and I don’t want you to die from hunger because you went too deep and we couldn’t find you.”
Taemin hoped that he was reading that joking smile right, and shrugged. Then Hyunjoong crooked a finger at him, and Taemin obliged, obediently following him out of the room and down the corridor.
He made sure to pay attention this time. He kept his eyes trained on Hyunjoong the whole time, and for a while, everything was fine. Then, as they passed the room that contained the mysterious wooden boxes, the door Hyunjoong pushed open to reveal what looked like an otaku heaven of anime figurines slammed close just as Taemin was about to go through.
Jumping back, Taemin thought that it might have been the design of the door, or wind, or Hyunjoong accidentally slamming the door behind him out of habit. That is, until he opened the door and found that it contained not anime figurines, but water bottles. And that Hyunjoong was nowhere in sight.
More than a little confused and frightened, Taemin walked forward into the room, and in a bout of inspiration, closed the door behind him before opening it up again. To his horror, his gut-feeling had been right. Instead of wooden boxes, what now filled the room were stone statues, and Taemin was sure that his memory really wasn’t that bad.
The rooms were being switched around as Taemin moved through them. Someone, or something, didn’t want Taemin to leave.
~*~
[ Chapter 2 ]
Chapter: 1/?
Rating: PG
Genre: Fantasy, AU
Characters: Taemin (SHINee), Hyunjoong (SS501), the rest of SHINee, cameos from other SS501 members and many other K-pop groups like SNSD and SUJU
Pairing(s): TBA
Warning: Rating will go up in later chapters
Summary: When Lee Taemin gets deported down from his comfortable position in the weather division to a strange division known only to most as ‘the Store’, he gets tangled up in the stuff that should stay safely in his daydreams. Three difficult house-spirits, plenty of strange, needy customers, one clumsy but strangely mysterious store-keeper, and one particularly curious customer who seems to keep coming back only when Taemin is around.
~*~
[ 0 ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ]
~*~
~*~
Cherem - something removed from common use and set apart for a special purpose, usually the best ten percent.
~*~
It was one of moments in which creatures of habits are revealed - when they move through the familiar habits which they always do, before they pause when they realize that something is wrong. That what they are doing is silly out of the context of habit, and then the embarrassment comes regardless of it being done in a public space or no.
Taemin was such a creature of habit, revealed in his action of reaching out for an alarm clock that wasn’t there, slamming his hand painfully down onto hard oak wood instead. It was one sure way to wake up certainly, and he spent a few minutes cursing and wondering where his alarm clock had gone. It was only when his brain began to process that his neck hurt from a crick, and the fact that no, he didn’t own any of this stuff that cluttered most of the room in a most haphazard way, that he realized, with a jolt, that this wasn’t his home.
It all came rushing back to him then. Well, okay, it didn’t. It was more like the clearing of the fog, remembering clear bits and pieces with the foggy rest. But it was enough to get a sense of where and when he was. The store. Customers. Lost things. Ah, yes, he remembered now.
He had fallen asleep, probably while filing one of the many requests he had cleared yesterday. He’d found out much later, as he was looking through the databases in a lull period, that the lost things, after having been given back to their rightful owners, had to be re-classified and moved. And so, Taemin had done so, and with the dryness of the task and the extensive work that bordered on philanthropy, it was no wonder that he’d passed out without any knowledge of it.
It had taken him a pretty decent time to have all that run through his head, which was why it came as a shock to him when he realized that, holy shit, someone was squatting beside him, looking at him like some sort of curiosity, and generally just staring.
After the initial shock (and getting over the pain of falling over from his chair), Taemin managed to gather his wits enough to ask. “W-who are you?”
The curious brown eyes tilted to the side with a perplexed expression. “That should be my question to ask really, because, you don’t exactly belong here, and I do. But since you asked first, so I shall answer. I’m the owner of this establishment.”
“Oh.” Taemin replied in his most intelligent way. For that really was the only way one of civil society could reply.
“Oh indeed.” It seemed to Taemin that the man might have been smiling in amusement, but his face was so mild it was rather hard to tell. “Maybe you could tell me who you are? Since I have already done so for you.”
“Ah.” Taemin blinked and introduced himself as Taemin. From the weather division. Tiffany sent me and you weren’t here yesterday so I-
“Tiffany?” a flash of understanding seemed to settle into the mild man’s eyes before there was tug of his lips Taemin convinced himself was a definite smile. “Is that so? Well, you don’t need to say anymore. What work have you done?”
Taemin realized in that moment that this man was quite the easy-going guy. No, wait, that wasn’t the main realization - it was that manner that told him that this was not the first time his supervisor had sent down an intern that displeased her. And he quite understood - the work they did here at the Store was quite hectic.
“Ah well.” Taemin nodded towards the computer, gesturing in some sort of manner. “I cleared quite a bit of work, returning some of the lost things and then I was filing them when I… well I fell asleep… and I can continue to do so if…”
Taemin trailed off as he spotted the look of mild bemusement on the man’s face. Although it wasn’t really that obvious on such a vanilla ice-cream face, working under Tiffany had given him honed senses for this sort of thing.
“Uh…” Taemin wondered if perhaps they had jargonified lingo for this ‘lost items’ line and tried to explain things slowly. “Well, a lot of customers came in yesterday for their lost things. I managed to clear quite a lot of them, and finally got-”
“No. Wait. Lost things?” Now Taemin was bemused as well. What was the problem with that?
“Isn’t lost things what this place deals with?” Taemin asked, despite the question feeling a little dumb to him, just to fill in the painful silence that followed. But it seemed like that question wasn’t really that dumb after all.
“Lost things? Oh no.” The mild-mannered man shook his head. “No, the nature of this store isn’t in lost things, it’s in - oh… Oh. I know what’s going on now.”
But before Taemin could ask as to what. The mild-mannered man turned and said in a voice that should have been a shout, but was not as loud, yet had the same authority as one. “Onew, Jonghyun, Key. Come on out. Just what have you three been doing to this poor young lad here?”
The names sounded sort of familiar, but before Taemin could place them together with memories, three familiar faces stepped out from nowhere, each wearing different expressions on their face - one sheepish, one unrepentant, and one mischievous.
“Ah! You guys!” Taemin pointed in a way, that under normal circumstances, he would have considered himself extremely rude. But he thought that he could be excused a little here, since if what he was guessing was true, then he had been pulled along for a (very tedious) ride. “You’re yesterday’s customers... Lee Jinki? And Kim Kibum! And you… Kim Jonghyun!”
Taemin almost thought there was a sharp look on the mild-mannered man’s face, and there almost seemed to be a rebuke on those lips, but it was all gone within the second and the mild-mannered face returned to being… well, mild-mannered. “Well, it seems like these three trouble-makers have caused you a bit of trouble. My guess is that they pulled some sort of prank on you in order to get you to do their work without you knowing.”
Taemin’s eyes traveled towards the three boys. Now that he wasn’t hard-pressed with requests, he could easily tell that they really weren’t human. They were like him, just that they were of a different profession.
“Well, he was sent down to help anyway!” the one named Kibum, or Key as the mild-mannered man had called him, protested at the way he was being critically looked at. Jinki, or Onew, had the decency to look embarrassed, and proceeded to nudge Key gently in the ribs. Jonghyun only continued to grin at Taemin, as if he was expecting Taemin to understand and be good-humored enough to treat all that headache and work yesterday as a joke.
“And help he would have. Not do all your work for you.” Taemin was mollified that at least the owner and what he guessed was the supervisor of the three offenders was redressing the grievances he’d faced.
There was a moment of grumbling, before the mild-mannered man sent all three off onto whatever their tasks really were. Then as Taemin was about to ask what he was supposed to do now, the man began to reply, and Taemin hazarded the guess that perhaps there was a telepathic thread in his genetic make-up somewhere.
“Well, for all your trouble, I think I could already let you go… But… uh…” Taemin bit back a mental sigh, knowing already what was going to be asked of him. “Well, I hazard that you did a lot of work, and I really hope you can stay a while to explain to me what you did...”
Taemin was about to make some excuse to go - like Tiffany expecting him, or some work waiting, or something of that nature. But he made the mistake of looking into the mild-mannered man’s eyes, which were somehow so guileless and so compelling at the same time without being overtly so.
It was two minutes later, as the man was looking through the database, which seemed to have mysteriously been modified into something that was definitely not about ‘lost things’, that Taemin realized what he’d done.
~*~
As Taemin expected, he ended up staying for more than just explaining the course of events that happened yesterday. Explaining had turned to showing them exactly where he’d placed some of the things, and that itself had led to him helping to carry some things when he was about to leave and saw Onew struggling with a couple of chairs. And soon, that had translated into rolled up sleeves, sweat, and a good load of elbow-greased hard work.
Staying behind was not without benefits though. Taemin found out a lot of things about the place which was generally unknown by others, and he thought that, in a way, this was an apology for being roped into what he felt was a hell lot of categorization work for stock-taking.
The store-owner’s name is Hyunjoong. Taemin found himself taking a great liking to the mild-mannered man despite having been somewhat coerced into doing extra work. Hyunjoong moved at his own pace - which was somewhat slow and stately. But yet, he was not what one considered stuck-up, as most were when they could afford moved at such a pace and did not have bodies which were centuries old. Taemin thought that maybe the pace he went at was more practical that metaphorical, for Taemin had rarely seen someone trip over the exact same thing some many times in succession before. (In all fairness though, he seemed to trip less the cleaner the place got.)
He found out that, no, the Store wasn’t really behind their work schedule. They were on time, actually, although Taemin noticed that nothing was really mentioned about what their work really was. Just that because Hyunjoong traveled quite extensively for what seemed like errands related to the work of the store, most of the things were taken care of by the three house-spirits when he wasn’t around.
And these three house-spirits, as Taemin had found out first hand, weren’t exactly all excited about documentation of their work being done. That had led to the workload reports being sent only report work actually done before Hyunjoong went on whatever trips he went on. The mess was however, due to the scheduled stocktaking the three spirits were in the middle in when Taemin arrived.
“It’s so boring.” Key complained loudly, earning a roll of eyes and a scandalized look.
“It really is though. And tiring.” Onew admitted after a while, and Taemin could imagine, with all the things in the room which seem to be payment for the Store’s services. Although Taemin wondered what sort of services required some of the payments to be ’10 industrial sized punchers, black, Japanese make’ or ‘100 bottled ills, assorted, particularly nasty’.
They didn’t reveal what their heritage was though, so Taemin didn’t either (although he supposed the ‘weather division’ part was a bit of a giveaway), but Taemin was pretty sure that Jonghyun had some connection to Loki, the Nordic trickster, because Jonghyun was too much of a prankster not to be.
“I did most of the replicated characters.” He related to Taemin proudly while they began to key in the ‘Os’ after shifting them around into what seemed like a small room designed for an upscale apartment. “I’m very good at those. I know just enough to make huge bulks of people that form a crowd.”
He jabbed a thumb at Key, who had just came in as well. There must have been some of Hades in Key, for when Jonghyun commented on Key being extremely good at recognizing human vices because he had every bit of one inside him, the glare Key had given Jonghyun had sent shivers crawling down Taemin’s spine like Death had just danced through the room.
However, it was more fun than Taemin ever anticipated from a supposed punishment. The work was time-consuming and hard, but good company had made things bearable like it always did. And Taemin was even a little sad when Hyunjoong announced that, after recovering from having tripped over thin air, it was time for Taemin to leave. Going back to Tiffany and his boring but comfortable job, after having worked with the carefree, flexible yet without being ineffective Hyunjoong, was a little depressing.
But he knew his place, and he knew he’d grow skittish if he didn’t go back to his place of habit soon. Like all things, novelty was attractive, but Taemin wasn’t so naïve with youth that he’d think that novelty would last forever.
So, with a last bid of goodbye, he stepped out of the sliding doors, and made his way back home.
~*~
Or at least, he tried to.
It was odd, but he just couldn’t seem to get out of the place. He walked down the corridor he’d thought he came in by, but it seemed that he was wrong. The door that he’d thought would lead him to the outside world led him to yet another corridor instead, one that seemed to be of a 16th century castle, all dank and dark stones. And blinking, he turned back, trying to retrace his steps. It seemed that running all around everywhere placing things had confused his memory of the place.
But it seemed that even his memory was worst than he thought, and instead of ending up at the room where he’d left Hyunjoong and his three assistants so that he could ask for directions, he found himself walking through a Victorian nursery filled with toys and opening the heavy oak door into a simple wooden storeroom filled with cheese.
He didn’t know for how long he walked, only that it felt like a long time. He passed through all sorts of rooms filled with all sorts of things.
Some of them made sense, like a vault filled with precious things of gold and glitter; and yet some other didn’t - like a drain filled with dirty things and filth and things usually unwanted. And yet there were places which seemed like it couldn’t belong to a house, like a night sky filled with constellations that Taemin knew shouldn’t exist. But as he walked through it, he knew this was not a real sky, but a room meant to keep the things it kept like all the other rooms in this place.
It was with a start that he realized that he was in a corridor that was all too familiar and much less out of a fantasy as it was normal. Sliding doors, sleek polished wood floors, old-fashion rice-paper window screens. Doubling back, he sighed in relief, thinking that his long deserved return to home would now finally come, only to pause just as his hand touched the wooden frame of the entrance.
It was the sound of a vaguely familiar voice that was yet not familiar - like the voice of someone in a far off memory now being heard again. But that explanation wasn’t plausible.
For this was the voice of someone Taemin had just met today, and was also someone whom he’d just last seen maybe twenty, thirty minutes ago. Yet that unfamiliarty was still there, like Taemin was listening to someone else speak out of the voice-piece of the store-keeper Hyunjoong.
“So, even after hearing the terms, do you still wish to go ahead with the contract?”
“Yes! I’ll give anything! Everything! Just please…”
There was desperation in that soft voice, and for some strange reason, it left Taemin’s spine curling, his sweat cold.
But not colder than when he heard the smile in Hyunjoong’s voice, which felt like welcome warmth and telling a joke at a funeral. “No need for everything. Just ten percent of it.”
Despite his youth, and never having had an interest in anything that involved dry book studying and the methods unorthodox, Taemin knew what the curdling in his blood and the chill in his soul was - wrong.
Whatever was going behind that door was wrong.
Perhaps he should have run in straightaway, to stop whatever was going on. And he would have, feet toeing forward before a single thought kept him rooted to the spot.
What if… this was what Tiffany and Sunny sent him here for?
It was a little irrational, but not that so under the abnormal circumstance. And Taemin wondered if this was the punishment - to get caught up in someone dangerous and unsavory, to get into trouble with authority, to get kicked out of his job, ostracized by society, alone and misunderstood. It was certainly more punishment than simply being tricked by house-spirits and made to do some manual work.
But that thought had no time to develop further as, in that moment, there was a scream. And Taemin didn’t know why he was galvanized into action; for it was counter-intuitive for him to gain courage from someone else’s fear - he was just not made that way. But push open the sliding door he did, with a shout of protest, and insides made of adrenaline coated jelly.
Not that he processed anything much after he stepped in - for no sooner than he had, three pairs of ridiculously strong arms wrapped around his arms and torso, preventing him from moving any further.
“You may proceed no further.” Were the words whispered into his ear, and Taemin froze - not from the threat, but from the fact that it was said without humor, and that they fell from the lips of the prankster Jonghyun.
Taemin began to turn around in fatalistic way, needing to confirm that the words had not been said in jest, and that there really wasn’t a playful grin on the face despite the tone. But a moan from the floor caught his attention, and he found himself struggling to break free from his restraints to help the person lying on the floor.
For a strange sight it was he saw - Hyunjoong bending over a fallen woman, his hand extended over her prone back and a warmth-colored sphere of mist twisting into a glass-like ball suspended in between. And he would not have suspected this to be anything wrong, save for the tortured expression on the woman’s pretty features as the mist extracted and wove into that glass-ball above.
But Taemin’s shouts for the woman to be left alone were ignored - the strong grips that held him back only grew yet stronger, and Hyunjoong never looked away from his task. Although, in hindsight, Taemin supposed that was a good thing - for an unorthodox spell had the tendency to become even worse if not done properly.
Still, somewhere amidst his struggling, he thought he heard a pleading voice whisper out the reassurance that, “This is not what you think, Taemin-sshi. Please calm down.” And he thought it might have been Onew and that it mollified him a little bit so that his cries were not so harsh and struggles not so desperate. But what could be sure here in this unnatural environment?
But finally, when the uneasy feelings died down, and the air became clear once again with the barest inklings that something of the dark had happened there, the arms around Taemin loosened their grip, releasing him slowly so that he could get used to standing up on his own and not fall flat onto his own face.
He didn’t care for the courtesy, only wanted to know what the hell was going on.
Nothing was said for a while, Hyunjoong still staring at his handiwork in the form of the collapsed, unconscious woman; and Taemin, who felt that his expression was enough of an indication to his demand. The silent stretched like thin fabric this close to being ripped into a half and a million, then Hyunjoong looked up, and Taemin was perplexed to find his demanding expression relaxing.
“I thought you left.” Were the words that first spilled out of the store-keeper’s mouth, and Taemin’s fierce expression gained its fuel again at the dispassionate expression at the wrong it had done.
“Well I didn’t.” Taemin’s voice was venom, or the injured voice of a cat after a bath. “Sorry for raining on your party.”
Taemin only became more irritated as the only change of the store-keeper’s expression was one to mild puzzlement, and not to shame, or anger, or something strong which Taemin was trying to stir up. “You weren’t unwelcome here, it was just dangerous was someone who did not know what was going on to participate in the proceedings.”
“So what exactly did ‘proceedings’ entailed?” Taemin knew he sounded someone like a petulant child, but then again, there was but a thin line between that and righteous anger.
“The granting of a wish.” The simple, factual tone that Hyunjoong used left Taemin reeling, thrown from righteous anger to stunned amazement. The quiet that followed was filled with Taemin’s unsaid thoughts of confusion.
The granting of a wish. Hyunjoong had said it like it was a simple task, as if there weren’t copious amounts of magic, red-tape and sticky pit-falls involved. He had said it like he did it everyday, as if it wasn’t the envy of everyone - humans and angels alike, the ability to grant wishes.
Then, he remembered the murmurs he heard sometimes, in a muffled bathroom conversation, or a joke at the table said to tease, or children’s bedtime story of morals - of a place which existed for the sole reason of this. The sole reason of granting wishes. But the name of the place had never been mentioned, and those who seemed to know never did say, as if the name was a taboo - as if it tempted anyone who wanted their wish granted (and who didn’t really?). And so, Taemin hadn’t connected the mysterious ‘Store’ with that place of the wish-granting.
“Then…” Taemin’s voice finally deigned to show itself. “…that glass ball… the price?”
“Yes.” Hyunjoong seemed somewhat pleased, as if in approval of Taemin’s educated guess. “The price for her wish, supposedly willingly given if you must know.”
“Supposedly?”
A sad smile, and a token glance down at the pained expression still on the unconscious woman’s face. “She didn’t want to let it go. That’s why…”
It was so painful for her. Taemin filled the words in his head as Hyunjoong trailed off.
“Well, now that you understand.” Hyunjoong brushed off an invisible spot of dust on plain brown suit as he straightened. “I appreciate you not telling everyone you know of this shop. We’re already quite hard-pressed to deal with our current number of customers, and frankly, I’m sure you can understand why I want to keep the numbers down.”
Taemin did understand, and he nodded mutely, still staring at the woman, wondering what her wish was.
“Fame.” Hyunjoong answered, although Taemin was sure he didn’t voice his question out loud. “A common wish, to which the common price is privacy.” He held out the glass ball just as Key stepped forward to take it carefully. There was that sheepish, carefree smile again. “I always get someone else to help me put it away, I’m always so careless and clumsy.”
Taemin nodded, as if in understanding, and as if he wasn’t disconcerted by the way Hyunjoong was still behaving in such a harmless, mild manner. Perhaps, some people were just that way. And Taemin wasn’t that against accepting such a fact.
“Anyway, why did you not leave?” Hyunjoong asked, watching Key take the sphere of privacy away to be stored and numbered and noted.
“I tried.” Taemin shrugged helplessly. “But I got lost. Walked everywhere before managing to find this room again. May I ask for directions?”
“You may ask, but we may not answer!” Was the mischievous call from behind, and Taemin half turned, somewhat relieved to see the trickster smile back on Jonghyun’s face.
“Now, stop teasing him, Jonghyun.” Taemin felt a hand on his shoulder, guiding him forward. “Of course you can have directions. I’ll even guide you out myself!”
And so it was in this way that Taemin was guided out of the door. There was an odd moment when he thought Hyunjoong had gone down the way he first had, but he must have been mistaken.
Following someone is a rather brainless task, especially if that other is not one for conversation. And so Taemin’s mind drifted - he thought about the work he needed to do when he went back, about how he was going to answer Tiffany and her predictable questions about his ‘punishment’, but most of all, he thought of how he was going to have to be careful about answering questions about the Store, and to be cautious about leaking out its secrets.
It was five minutes later that he realized he was all alone in a room filled with rubber chickens.
“Eh?” Taemin blinked in surprise, hadn’t he just been following Hyunjoong? He began to check around the room, opening the doors to the other rooms, looking for the brown-haired store-keeper. But Hyunjoong was nowhere in sight.
Had he been that lost in his thoughts that he had lost Hyunjoong as well? Well, in such a situation, the best course of action was to stay put and hope that those who knew he was missing would come and find him.
It didn’t take too long really, five minutes at most before a bemused-looking Hyunjoong poked his head into the room, finding Taemin poking at one of the rubber chickens. “Was that what distracted you from following me?”
“No.” Taemin ignored the might-be jibe (seriously, with all his skill in reading emotions, it was really hard to tell with Hyunjoong). “I think I got lost in my thoughts. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Hyunjoong waved the apology away. “Just try not to do it again. I don’t really mind finding you, but this place is a little big, and I don’t want you to die from hunger because you went too deep and we couldn’t find you.”
Taemin hoped that he was reading that joking smile right, and shrugged. Then Hyunjoong crooked a finger at him, and Taemin obliged, obediently following him out of the room and down the corridor.
He made sure to pay attention this time. He kept his eyes trained on Hyunjoong the whole time, and for a while, everything was fine. Then, as they passed the room that contained the mysterious wooden boxes, the door Hyunjoong pushed open to reveal what looked like an otaku heaven of anime figurines slammed close just as Taemin was about to go through.
Jumping back, Taemin thought that it might have been the design of the door, or wind, or Hyunjoong accidentally slamming the door behind him out of habit. That is, until he opened the door and found that it contained not anime figurines, but water bottles. And that Hyunjoong was nowhere in sight.
More than a little confused and frightened, Taemin walked forward into the room, and in a bout of inspiration, closed the door behind him before opening it up again. To his horror, his gut-feeling had been right. Instead of wooden boxes, what now filled the room were stone statues, and Taemin was sure that his memory really wasn’t that bad.
The rooms were being switched around as Taemin moved through them. Someone, or something, didn’t want Taemin to leave.
~*~
[ Chapter 2 ]