"You truly are a confounding creature," she said. "Thanks," I said, smirking.
"I get that a lot." Then I blinked, brows pulling together, because something had been sitting at the back of my head since she showed up and I'd finally decided to just say it.
"But for real though— why are you talking like… that? And why am I not?"
She paused mid float. Completely. Like someone had reached into the dream and hit a pause button somewhere behind her eyes.
"I beg your pardon?" She said. One brow rose with the kind of elegance that took either years of practice or centuries of existing.
I cleared my throat and dropped my voice into something approximating her… uh, language… "Thou shalt not tease mine patience, young mortal— or whatever… It's hard"
Her cheeks puffed up immediately. "I do not sound like that!"
"You absolutely do," I said. "Like, genuinely, word for word."
She crossed her arms, hair drifting around her shoulders like a black silk ina slow water, and lifted her chin. "This manner of speech is simply how I have always conversed. It is not some… affectation."
"Righ, right… affectation…" I said. "Meanwhile I sound like I just walked out of a convenience store in Seoul."
She stared at me. Then, carefully, like she was approaching something fragile: "A… con-vee-nyense store?"
"Oh no." I looked at her face. "Oh lord. You genuinely don't know what that is."
She leaned in slightly, curiosity winning out over pride, eyes a little brighter. "Pray tell… is it some kind of magical marketplace?"
I thought about it for a second. Fluorescent lighting, triangle kimbap, ramyeon at two in the morning. "Honestly? Sure. Let's go with that."
She sighed, and the air around her shimmered faintly with it, like even her exhales had atmosphere. "Dreams weave oddly," she said, quieter now. "The tongue thou speakest reflects thy era… as mine reflects my own."
I stared at her. Processed that. My eye twitched once, involuntarily. What. The. Actual. Fu—
"So," I said anyway… slowly, "you're from the past." It wasn't really a question.
Her gaze softened— just barely, just at the edges. "A distant age, young man. One long buried by time."
I looked at her for a moment, floating there in the middle of a void in a dream that smelled faintly of oregano and old paper, completely unbothered by her own impossibility.
"That's… actually kind of cool." She blinked. Twice. The composure flickered.
"C-cool…?"
"Yep." I straightened up a little, deciding it was probably time to handle this like a person. "Since you already know my name— Si Hon, right— mind telling me yours?"
The question caught her off guard in a way the teasing hadn't. Something shifted in her expression, softer and more genuine, and a faint glow shimmered around her as she lifted one delicate hand to her chest.
"I am called Vesper." Her voice landed like a bell— soft, clear, carrying further than it should. "It is a name bestowed upon me long ago… in an age now forgotten… and… I don't know your name, you just said it."
"Did you just talk normally!?"
"No." She responded fast.
I sigh, I let it sit for a second. "Vesper," I said instead. "Kinda sounds like a perfume. Fancy~"
Her eye twitched. Just slightly, just once, controlled. "It is not a perfume," she muttered, with great dignity.
"Sorry."
She raised an eyebrow, something almost amused flickering underneath the composure. "Sorry? A miracle, that word coming from you."
She straightened, recollected herself, and cleared her throat with the energy of someone reassembling their entire personality in real time.
Then she looked at me with something approaching genuine consideration. "And thou art Si Hon. A curious name to mine ears."
A pause.
"Sounds like someone made it on the spot." She said, then she giggled— small, quick, like it escaped before she could catch it.
"Hey," I said, pointing at her. "Your name isn't exactly normal either."
Vesper's cheeks went pink— not the offended kind this time, the embarrassed kind, which was a new and interesting development.
"I… suppose neither of us are quite ordinary," she said, looking away with something that wanted to be dignified and wasn't quite making it.
A silence settled between us after that— strange and oddly comfortable, the kind that didn't feel like it needed filling, just two very different people from very different eras standing in a void together like that was a reasonable thing to be doing.
"So," I said, scratching the back of my neck. "Now that we're introduced… what do you actually want from me?"
And just like that, the lightness dropped out of her face. Her eyes sharpened, and something serious moved through them— the kind of serious that had been waiting patiently behind the whole conversation, biding its time.
"To warn you," she breathed. "For though this realm is but dream stuff… the peril approaching your waking life is all too real."
I laughed once, soft and short— and then it hit me that she hadn't laughed with me, and my throat went dry… and. (I don't know what she said.)
"Okay." I said instead.
"A tragedy shall befall you," she said quietly. "Your world… is thinning."
"Woah— what?"
She lifted her hand, and the dream responded instantly… shimmering images unfolded in the air around us like pages being torn from a burning book.
Cities I recognized going dark. The sky splitting open along seams that had no business existing. Something massive and patient pushing through from the other side, too large to look at directly, the kind of wrong that made your eyes slide away from it.
I watched it and felt something cold settle at the base of my spine.
"Soon, in three days, gates shall appear across the earth," she said. "Doors to realms not meant for mortal eyes. Labyrinths. Dungeons. Prisons built for beasts beyond your comprehension— and when they open, those beasts will not stay inside."
The images kept moving— streets warping, people running, the sky the wrong color over every city simultaneously.
"Mortals will be forced into trials. Games of survival, governed by rules you do not yet know. Power shall be given… but so too shall countless souls perish."
I exhaled slowly. "Okay. That sounds horrifying."
"Your world will adapt," she continued, voice urgent but steady. "A system will emerge— abilities, skills, strength, speed, the endurance of your spirit— all of it quantified. Measured. Assigned."
I stared at the burning images in the air. "Like a video game?"
She hesitated, clearly unfamiliar with the term, turning it over— and then nodded slowly. "Yes. Stats and parameters. Advantages and consequences. Your entire species will be… graded."
"Graded?! What are we, homew#rk?!" She ignored that completely, which was fair.
"Many shall rise," she said. "More shall fall."
I looked at my hands for a second. Flexed them. Tried to feel whether anything about them had changed yet and found nothing.
"Then why are you telling me now? Why not everyone?" Her eyes met mine, steady and certain.
"To prepare you. Even three days of practice may mean the difference between life and death. Others will awaken confused, disoriented— scrambling to understand rules mid crisis. You…" she paused, "will awaken ready."
I managed a short, slightly shaky laugh. "So I'm like a beta tester."
She blinked. "A… what?"
"Never mind."
She sighed with the full weight of someone who had crossed centuries to deliver important information and was being genuinely tested right now— and then she extended her hand, palm up, luminous symbols spiraling slowly in the air above it like they'd always been there waiting.
"Place thy hand upon mine," she said. "I shall bestow the System Call into your soul. Three days early— yours alone to use before the gates open."
I looked at her hand. Then at the symbols. "This won't hurt, right?"
"Mm." She considered this with more thought than I was comfortable with. "Probably not."
"PROBABLY?!" But before I could take a single step back, her fingers brushed mine—
FLASH.
White. Everything white. And then cascading lines of glowing text falling through the white like rain, and a sound like the whole world rebooting from somewhere very far inside my chest.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING…]
My heart was hammering. I stood in the brightness with my hand still outstretched and my mouth open and something humming in my bones that hadn't been there before— warm and electric and deeply strange, like a key turning in a lock I hadn't known existed.
"Woah," I whispered.
Vesper's voice came from somewhere further away now, echoing like she was calling from the other end of a very long hall, the dream already pulling apart at the edges around her. "Remember, Si Hon… you have three days. Train. Grow. Survive."
The black was coming back, dissolving the white, the void unraveling into something warmer and softer and closer to morning.
"When the gates appear… the world shall never be the same." Her form was flickering now, that long dark hair dissolving at the ends, the glow around her dimming. "I pray you do not fall."
"Wait!" I reached toward her before I'd decided to, one half step forward onto nothing. "If all that's going to happen… will we meet again?"
She stilled. Looked at me.
"You're kinda fun to talk to," I added, which was maybe the most honest thing I'd said all night.
Something moved across her face— complicated and quiet and layered in a way I didn't have the vocabulary for yet. Sad, maybe. Hopeful. Afraid of something specific.
She reached her hand toward mine across the dissolving space between us, and her mouth opened. "When the time comes… you will—"
***
I woke up with a sharp breath, like surfacing from water.
Something poked my cheek. Firm, deliberate, with the focused energy of someone who had been at this for a while and was not planning to stop.
I opened my eyes and found a small face approximately four inches from mine, one finger extended, expression caught somewhere between concern and scientific curiosity.
"Mister?" A little girl said. I blinked at her. Blinked at the ceiling. Lay there for exactly two seconds processing the fact that I was in my bed, in my room, in the normal world, with a child inspecting my face like I was a suspicious rock she'd found on a walk.
"That was weird," I muttered.
"Thank God it was just a dream—" And then my gaze drifted upward, past the kid head, past the ceiling, to the familiar blue translucent window hovering in the air above us both, glowing with its usual cheerful energy and absolutely zero self-awareness.
「READY FOR A QUEST?
ACCEPT / DECLINE 」
I stared at it. It glowed back. "…Nevermind," I said.