yuki's room

The people in Mirae corner

Prologue

Btw if someone wants to be tagged, if the story is interesting leave a comment. :)

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Malakai Papadimitriou — 22

Greek, impossibly tall, and constitutionally incapable of entering a room quietly. Malakai has a philosophy degree he uses daily, that he use in the way he approaches everything: with the particular brand of considered certainty that makes you feel like you've just been Socratically reasoned into agreeing with him before you noticed it happening. He works at the same translation company as YN, which is either a coincidence or the universe's idea of a joke, and he taught her Greek with the patient enthusiasm of someone sharing a religion. Which, given that he carries himself like a minor sun deity(warm, radiant, the kind of person other people orbit without meaning to) is not entirely a metaphor. His father is the kind of man who opens doors that weren't previously doors. Malakai is the kind of man who walks through them like he always knew they were there.

Best described as: Apollo in a translation office. Worst at keeping secret: he sees everything, says nothing, and is always right about it.

Relationship to YN: best friend, sun to her moon, the one who bought Nicholas on a website and has never once apologised for it.

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Kim Jisoo — 26

An architect by training and a strategist by nature. Jisoo approaches everything the way she approaches a building, structurally with strong opinions about load-bearing walls and zero tolerance for anything that looks stable but isn't. She plays Go, the Korean board game, and she plays it the way she does everything: three moves ahead, quietly devastatingly. She was the one who spent forty minutes on Nicholas's personality settings, which she considers one of her finest design projects to date. She and YN have the kind of friendship that doesn't require constant maintenance because the foundation was laid correctly the first time.

Relationship to YN: the one who noticed everything about Nicholas and YN before either of them did, and had the restraint not to say so out loud. Mostly.

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Shin Yuri — 24

Half Japanese, half Korean, entirely herself. Yuri is a makeup artist with the specific superpower of being able to look at a face and understand it. Not just the structure of it, but the story it's telling, the version of themselves the person is trying to present and the version underneath. She does face analysis the way YN does translation: finding what's really being said beneath the surface. When things get emotionally complicated she stress-cooks, which means the people around her are consistently very well fed during crises. Her tteokbokki is, by general consensus, the best in Mapo-gu. She loves makeup not as performance but as language. She says that ~a colour or a line can say something a word can't quite reach~.

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

· Seoul, South Korea · 8:00 AM

Her friends had many questionable ideas. This was the most questionable of all. 

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 — HarmonyUnit™, 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.

other times i think there’s something wrong with me that makes me not likable and if i could somehow fix it then everything will be okay

but i’ve changed myself so many times to make people like me and it’s never worked