NPC's

We are static characters. We are pixilated snails leaving trails of slime for no one to follow. We want someone to come along and acknowledge our existence. We want to be used for her needs, to provide her with experiences that will enhance her journey, this beautiful stranger. We live in some town or city or country with a name unimportant to you, where it is suggested that things are happening. That foods are being purchased even though the supermarket clerk stands mute and ignored and lonely. That buildings are being built even though no progress is made to the incomplete ones and the sounds of hammers hammering and drills drilling are illusions of progress. We all walk the same, dress the same, have the same hairstyles, the same cadence. Our conversations are brief, maybe a sentence or two long. Witty one-liners meant to be heard in passing, to suggest we are more engaged in this reality than we really are. 

We cheat on each other unwittingly yet often, and theoretically our babies would look, sound, and act the same and have interchangeable parents, if anyone would get pregnant. 

The beautiful stranger comes to us on her own, as if by fate, as we walk about the outdoor market, holding bags of purchased goods but not visibly buying anything. We realize that we have been discovered, and places discovered before us now recognize our sovereignty. Anything she does that involves us will validate us, make us real. 

We play it cool. 

Suho bumps shoulders with the stranger. “Watch it, you idiot!” he cries. We don’t see who bumped into who, but Suho is an unagreeable man and is likely at fault somehow. The stranger turns to him in a combative stance, and Suho pulls out his pistol from an invisible holster—many of us have one. 

The beautiful stranger zaps him with a ray of white light from her hand. Suho grunts, then falls, then dies. We tend to make grunting or crying sounds when we die, but it happens sparingly enough to where it’s still off putting to hear. Then we disappear, as Suho does, clothes and all. No blood or gore. Just fade out of existence. People are supposed to decompose overtime, become one with the earth. But we are soulless, or at least this is a good argument for us being soulless. Not that we’re losing sleep over it.

So Suho is dead and we start to scream and panic and run about. The stranger starts shooting rays of light from her hands, killing us randomly. Killing of killing’s sake. It’s awful. It’s exactly what we didn’t want to happen, which is the reason for our screaming and running about. She gets Baekhyun, and Kim Jong, and Seo Joo, and Park Chan, and she don’t even aim for Xiumin, who keeps walking as if oblivious to everything around him like a fucking bastard. Which means she’s only after our collective suffering. 

If we knew we’d be discovered by a damn bruja, we would have said “No, let us remain undiscovered. Let us live in obscurity for all of eternity. We don’t mind.” The stranger, still a beautiful redhead despite the massacre, swirls her hands over a ball of light and throughs the ball at Jung Soo-yeon. Jung Soo-jeon starts expanding like a balloon. And she grows and grows until she pops, accompanied by a popping sound, and in her place confetti drifts downward. This confirms there is a confetti afterlife and Jung Soo-yeon is now in it. 

Some of us, like Chen and Sehun, fire at her with our guns from our invisible holsters, but our bullets do night slow her, and our efforts result in her turning us into sandwiches for her to consume. (The type, quality, and tastes of these sandwiches are unknown. Yet taste is something we have words for but generally don’t experience. Still, she eats us so fast, and off the dirty ground no less, that it’s a surprise she doesn’t choke, let alone taste what she’s consuming.) Then the police show up from out of nowhere. We hate that about the police, for we all commit a crime once in a while. Even if someone steals a loaf of bread, one or two cops would spawn from the air and shoots to kill, despite us having a judicial system in place and petty theft is not considered a crime punishable by death. It is frustrating. If we weren’t already caught up in the panic of the stranger’s witchcraft, we would be frustrated by the police’s promptness to the scene. 

Police guns do more damage than regular people guns, even though all handguns look the same no matter who holds them. We do not question this since the police have to be effective at their job in order to function properly anyway. The stranger still manages to kill off a decent number of them. She doesn’t run away. She must realize the more she kills police, the more police appear to attack her. We do not count the loss of police because we do not consider any of them to be one of us. They multiply regardless, until they surround the stranger from all sides. She cannot eat the ones she turns to sandwiches fast enough before she grunts and falls and dies.

The beautiful stranger enters our town, a town that is mostly an outdoor market, with more distinct buildings serving more as wallpaper than actual, inhabitable structures, but we don’t acknowledge this. Suho walks past her. “I sure hope my wife doesn’t find out what I’m doing here,” he says to himself loud enough for the stranger and anyone else within earshot to hear. 

We ignore her presence without so much as a single query as to why her hair is red and her clothes outrageously goth. We don’t even care why she’s running everywhere when the rest of us walk like normal people.

She walks up to one of the market clerks named Do-yoon, who sells watermelons. “Ah, I see you’re checking out my melons,” he says. She says she’s looking for Rhee Syng-man. Rhee Syng-man rules our town/city/country, and taxes us terribly to fund the police—who do his dirty work—and the construction of his black castle, which looms over everything else here. And while Rhee Syng-man lives like a king, we live in poverty, only able to afford to walk around the market instead of buy anything. It’s a miserable existence.

But then something magical happens. Suddenly, we cease to be pixelated blobs with little care for our appearance. We become 3d models, closer to humans, as real as we want to be but more than we think we deserve. 

Do-yoon takes the stranger to meet Rhee Syng-man. Why it had to be Do-yoon, we don’t know, but we do know that something is about to happen, that change is about to occur, that we are about to become relevant in some way. 

We play it cool. 

Three hours later, or three days in our time, we learn that Rhee Syng-man, his right-hand man, Kim Dae-jung, and even Do-yoon (a spy for Syng-man, we later learn), are all dead, killed by some liberating, benevolent, nameless hero. The castle that casted a shadow over us is crumbled to the ground. Now we can see the sky and the sun and the clouds and the birds flying in the distance. And the air is fresher, as if some smog polluting it has been notably blown away. We have hope for our future for the first time in our lives, all of a sudden. It’s crazy, really. And we still carry that hope even though the only notable change to our daily life is that there is no one around to sell watermelons anymore. 

The beautiful stranger returns to us, to the outdoor market. We ignore her, like before, except Geoff, who comes up to her and tells her she is beautiful. This is not surprising, for Geoff is a flirt and a pervert. However, her goth outfit is now gold and shiny, which is an improvement. The stranger thanks Geoff, then kills him. Kills him for no reason. We know Geoff comes off as creepy sometimes but killing him is unnecessary. Her new gold outfit even warrants a compliment, for goodness’ sake. But then she starts killing everyone around her unprovoked. Randomly she shoots at us with rays of light from her hands until we grunt, fall, and die. And those of us surviving scream and panic and run about. Some of us, like Yoona and Huong Zitao, pull out guns from our invisible holsters to fight back, yet die in vain from her witchcraft.

The police appear out of nowhere to attack the stranger. If we weren’t in a state of panic, we would be surprised, for with Rhee Syng-man dead there is no one to heavily tax us to pay them enough to respond to a crisis so quickly. But perhaps such details can be ignored. 

The beautiful stranger is killing a lot of us as well as a lot of police. We do not keep up with how many of us die. There is no official population count to keep track off. We don’t even know if the population is decreasing.