DELIVERED WITH LOVE (AND NO RETURN POLICY)
Pairing: Wang Nicholas x Byeon Mirae(Byeon meaning:border or margin. Mirae meaning future or the time yet to come), Mirae friends: Malakai, Jisoo, Yuri
Genre: fantasy
Warning:none for now
Note: hope you like this, if you like i can also draft how the character look like:)
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Prologue
Β· Seoul, South Korea Β· 8:00 AM
Her friends had many questionable ideas. This was the most questionable of all.Β
The first thing Byeon Mirae noticed when she turned twenty-two was that her apartment smelled like the banana milk she'd left open on the counter overnight.
The second thing she noticed was the knock at her door.
She peeled herself off the couch,still in yesterday's oversized Odyssey translation hoodie, hair doing something architecturally ambitious on top of her head and shuffled to the entrance. It was eight in the morning. On her birthday. On a Saturday. Anyone knocking at this hour deserved to be met with maximum hostility.
She opened the door.
A delivery man stood in her hallway, clipboard in hand, looking profoundly unbothered by the size of the thing behind him. Which was enormous. A box, matte white, almost taller than her doorframe, sat on a wheeled platform, sealed with a single black ribbon like someone had giftwrapped a wardrobe.
"Byeon Mirae-ssi?" the man said, already holding out the clipboard.
"...Yes?"
"Sign here."
She signed. In a daze. Because the box had little air holes punched along its sides, and there was a small panel near the top that read, in both Korean and English:
UNIT IN STANDBY MODE. DO NOT TILT.
Mirae stared at it.
The delivery man was already walking away.
"Wait.." she started, but he was gone, disappearing around the corner of the hallway with the empty platform, leaving her alone with a box the size of a small refrigerator that apparently contained something alive.
Her phone buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then erupted into a group notification cascade that could only mean one thing.
The chat was called "Mirae's Happiness Task Force " a name she had never agreed to.
Malakai : HAPPY BIRTHDAY PICCOLA
Malakai : did it arrive
Malakai : DID IT ARRIVE
Jisoo: omg she's been online for 3 mins and hasn't said anything she's either dead or crying
Yuri : MIRAE OPEN THE CHAT
Malakai : YN OPEN THE DOOR (the box)
She typed with one hand, the other still pressed flat against the mysterious white monolith in her hallway.
Mirae: What is in this box, Malakai.
Malakai : your birthday present bestie
Mirae: There are AIR HOLES.
Jisoo : lmaoooo she found the air holes
Mirae: It says DO NOT TILT.
Yuri : yeah don't tilt it
Mirae: WHAT IS IN THE BOX
Malakai : okay so
Malakai: you know how we've been saying for literally two years that you need to date someone
Malakai: and you always say "I'm busy" or "Greek tragedy is more interesting than real men" (which fair, but still)
Malakai: so we got you a solution
Mirae: Malakai.
Malakai: we got you a BOYFRIEND
Jisoo: a HUMANOID boyfriend
Yuri: customized!! We picked everything!!
Mirae: You did WHAT.
She pulled up her browser before she even finished typing. It took approximately forty-five seconds to find it β HarmonyUnitβ’, Korea's premier humanoid companionship service, with a sleek website that looked like a cross between a luxury skincare brand and a tech startup. The homepage banner read: Designed for connection. Built for you.
There was a "Track Your Order" button.
She clicked it with the energy of someone defusing a bomb.
Order: #MH-2024-1107
Unit: Nicholas
Status: Delivered
Configuration: Standard Companion:English- Korean- Japanese-Chinese, warm personality, adaptive learning mode enabled.
Nicholas.
She looked at the box. The box did not respond, on account of being a box.
Her phone rang. Malakai's contact photo. Him grinning at the Acropolis last summer, ouzo in hand, a solid two heads taller than everyone around him lit up the screen.
She answered. "You bought me a person."
"A humanoid," Malakai corrected, sounding deeply pleased with himself. His Greek accent got thicker when he was excited, which it clearly was. "Completely different. Legal. Very advanced. YN, we literally went on the website and built him. Jisoo spent forty minutes on the personality settings alone..."
"You spent forty minutes on a man's personality settings."
"She's very thorough!" He paused. "Also he's very tall. I made sure of that. You're welcome."
Mirae pressed her forehead against the cool surface of the box. From inside ,faint, barely there, she could hear the soft hum of something electronic. Like a server room. Or a very quiet heart.
"How do I turn him on?" she said, and then immediately: "I can't believe I just said that sentence."
Malakai laughed so hard she had to hold the phone away from her ear. "There's a panel on the left side! Small button, hold it for three seconds. Oh, and YN."
She stiffened slightly at her real name. He only used it when he was being sincere.
"Happy birthday," he said, softer now. "You've been alone in that apartment translating other people's love stories for two years. You deserve one of your own. Even if it starts with a box."
She didn't say anything for a moment.
"...He'd better not be weird," she finally muttered.
"He's wonderful. We made sure." A grin crept back into his voice. "Now go press the button. And put him somewhere with good lighting, he's very..."
She hung up.
She stood in the hallway of her Seoul apartment, banana milk slowly going stickier in the kitchen, morning light cutting pale gold lines across the floor. She found the panel on the left side of the box. small matte black, a single circular button with a soft ring of white light around its edge.
Mirae Byeon, age twenty-two, trilingual book translator, sworn avoider of romantic entanglement, pressed it.
Three seconds.
From inside the box came a low, smooth sound, somewhere between a breath and a boot sequence, and then the front panel clicked open on its own, slow and deliberate, like a door that had been waiting a long time to be opened.
