It's been hours. I'm so glad I sleep in my clothes. It's weird enough being in a foreign hospital, nevermind being here in pajamas. Particularly bloody clothes. The knees of my jeans are blood red from the carpet, and probably there's a lot more blood on me too. Add to that my mess of hair, and I must look like a psycho.

None of that mattered. Cheonha's still in surgery. We got to her pretty fast, and apparently a hospital wasn't too far back, but she was stabbed more than once. It's the worst mental image, but so hard to stop thinking about. Worse still was Suha's. She was in worse condition than her daughter when me and that other person I don't know arrived.

The nausea I felt on Aldaris' ship was starting to come back, and I sank down in my chair, head between my knees. I tried to pray that Cheonha would live, but it's been a struggle. It's been hours, like I said, and that time made me a zombie.

That one girl who was with me disappeared after we got Cheonha to the hospital. I didn't know who she was, but she followed me to the place Cheonha was staying for some reason. Eh, convenient, because even if I'd had my cell phone on me, pretty sure it can't get coverage in Korea. But...if only Aldaris had been faster. I mean, it was a silly premonition for me to have come here in the first place, but...if only...

A chair moved, but I didn't. I stared at the speckled tiles without registering them. It was only a few seconds later when a voice said something. In korean. Again, I'm a noob, and hearing the language from a real person is a little different from hearing it from a slow-speaking "learn korean" cd. Whoever was talking, she had to repeat it a couple times before my head went up. Oh, it was that girl again. She'd come back.

"Are you talking to me?" I asked. "Uh, hangungmal chalmot malyo. Yongo-rul araseyo?"

"Yes, I know english," she said, frowning at me. "Who are you?"

Seeing no reason to answer dishonestly, I answered, "Bethany Beverly, American. And you?"

"I'm Eunha Choi."

I gave a faint, half smile. "Go ahead and say 'Choi Eunha.' The normal Korean way is cuter."

Eunha didn't smile. Her face remained entirely dispassionate. "How long have you known Cheonha?"

I blinked. "Um, maybe a few months. Something like that. We're internet friends."

"Have you been to Korea before?"

"Yeah, I was here back in 2008. Did some touring. Went to Seoraksan."

"And any time since? This isn't the first time you've been back, is it?"

"Uh..." I scratched the back of my neck. "Any reason why I'm being interrogated? I mean heck, how long have you known Cheonha?"

"I have known her for six months," Eunha replied. "Ever since I was assigned to her case."

My eyebrows raised. "Case?"

"Of course. She came into a police station in Seoul one day six months ago with the pathetic story that she'd been rescued by strangers whose names she could not reveal, and she always refused to say who it was. She wouldn't talk about her rescue except in vague, noncommittal answers. We take the safety of our nation very seriously, Ms. Beverly. This wouldn't be the first time the north has sent spies."

Red alert! Shields up! Danger! I suddenly regretted telling her my real name. But I let the shock hit my face anyway. After all, at this point it'd be more suspicious if I didn't look surprised.

"Cheonha...Cheonha isn't a spy," I said. "At least, I don't think she is."

"We came to that conclusion too." Eunha answered. "Which is why we have let her live in Seoul normally. But then we encountered other suspicious activity."

The major benefit of being a huge doofus is that you're really good about making people think you're completely guileless. I do it all the time...without trying.

"Oh? What activity?"

"For one," Eunha narrowed her eyes. "She's suddenly internet friends with three people from different parts of the world."

"Uh...is that really all that suspicious?" I asked. "I mean, I want to learn korean, she wants to learn english, that sort of thing."

"Yes, it's suspicious. Especially when the person in question randomly appeared in the middle of Seoul, with no record of passing through any cities on the edge of South Korea, or traveling by boat, taxi, or airplane. Then her mother appeared, also without any travel records."

"That's...well, I don't know anything about that," I answered. "I couldn't tell you if it's possible to get from North Korea to Seoul without somebody hearing about it."

"You were not involved in her rescue?"

"No, I didn't rescue her."

"Then have you heard of a man named Charlie? Did Cheonha ever tell you about him?"

I tried to think. Did I actually know anyone named Charlie? Not counting a certain alien reptile, of course, because my dear Aldaris isn't named Charlie, just nicknamed. In that case, the only one I'd heard of was one of my dad's friends. "Charlie" isn't exactly a modern name.

"No, I don't know Charlie. Cheonha never described him to me."

Because she never had to. I'm getting too good at fake-truthing.

Eunha narrowed her eyes. "There was also an incident at the Bang Bang clothing store in Namdaemun. Employees there claim that Cheonha entered the store in shabby clothes, accompanied by a soggy American woman. Was that woman you?"

Oh crap, danger zone. Fortunately, my face was already dumbfounded, so I left it in dumbfounded mode. "What? Um, look, I really don't know who you are. If I'm going to be answering weird questions like this, I want to see some identification."

Without another word, she pulled out her ID. National Intelligence Service, Choi Eunha. Mm'kay. This is the point my mind starts racing. If something has caught the attention of South Korea's FBI, then they know something. How much do they know? Who have they been talking to? Well, fortunately, all they can know is about Cheonha's sudden appearance. Right?

Eunha pulled her ID back, and I continued to look dumbfounded. Better start talking so she doesn't ask me that Bang Bang question again.

"Um, so this is really serious, isn't it?"

"Yes it is." Eunha slumped back into her chair. "I've known Cheonha for a while now, and whatever she's been through, she isn't malicious. She doesn't deserve everything that's happened. But now we know the north is serious about dealing with her. They wouldn't bother trying to kill her if she didn't mean anything to them."

"Wait, what?" I frowned. "You're telling me it was North Korea behind this? You're sure about that?"

"Cheonha spent all her time in her apartment or at the PC Bang. She never spoke to anyone she didn't have to and was almost never out late at night. It's impossible for her to have offended anyone enough to want to kill her." Eunha glanced askance at me. "Unless you know something."

I shook my head. "I don't. Cheonha never told me anything like that, or what she was before she left North Korea. I didn't want to ask, because it seemed too painful to her. But the doesn't seem like the kind of person who would know any, like, military secrets or something like that. She would have already told you if she did."

"Not if she wouldn't even mention how she got to Seoul."

"Good point."

I thought about it for a second. Yeah, Cheonha was from a poor village, but how do I know she'd always been there? Was she really involved in stuff we didn't know about? ...Nah, I doubt it. Probably the North Koreans were just freaked out about Charlie. It's the most likely answer.

"So..." Eunha continued. "Why were you running to Cheonha's apartment?"

It took me a second to snap back to reality because I'd been deep in thought. "What?"

"I said, why were you running to Cheonha's apartment?" Eunha's eyes took on all the steely gaze of a police officer. "Why did you tell me to call the police, before you even kicked down the door and saw what happened to Cheonha? You were running directly there, so you must know something."

"I...I had a hunch."

"A hunch?"

"Yes. A premonition." I rubbed my head as though a sensible explanation were caught in my hair. Unforunately, my hair was explanation-free, not tangle-free, and it took a second to dislodge my fingers. "I get these...impulses, and I know I have to act on them immediately when they come to me. When I can't sleep, I know something is wrong."

"You were sleeping in the middle of the day?"

"Uh..."

Oh snap. I was sleeping in the middle of the Korean day, but the American night. Time zone shenanigans. So it's not lying if I answer in the affirmative, right?

"Yes. I was."

"Okay..." Eunha eyed me strangely. "So why are you in Korea in the first place? Do you go to school here? Do you have a job?"

I tried not to freeze with tension. Holy crap, this was bad. I almost said that I was going to school, but that's a dumb thing to say to someone who can investigate government records. Probably I could have thought of some decent excuse if I had enough time, but I only had a few short seconds with Eunha staring directly at me to come up with something logical.

"Choi Eunha?"

A doctor, stern and a bit scruffy looking, walked up to where Eunha sat. I pricked up my ears, but it was useless. They were talking too fast, and not in english. I caught "Cheonha," so he was clearly talking about her. Eunha got paler, but maintained her cool. I sat there, waiting intently for them to stop so that I could find out what was going on.

"Bethany." Oh, there goes Aldaris, talking to me in my brain again. "Leave this place at once. You are in a perilous position, and you should leave while they remain distracted."

Aldaris was right. It would look less suspicious if I waited for Eunha to stop and explain, but if I did, she'd be more likely to take me in for questioning, or something like that. Without saying anything, I got up and went for the nearest exit.

"Where are you going?"

Eunha's curt voice stopped me my tracks, but I only halfway turned my head towards her.

"I have to make a phone call."

"Don't leave the hospital. If you care about Cheonha at all, you need to stay."

What a loaded sentence. Which was probably true. I sighed. "I'll be back."

Well crap. I've been hanging with Charlie for months, and only now give in to my first bald-faced lie. I walked away. There's cameras in hospitals, and I wasn't sure if there was some sort of alleyway nearby where I could duck and get out of sight. Well, all modern buildings these days have stairs, and I'd be pretty shocked if there was a camera in there. I went into the stairwell, letting a few Koreans pass me by - probably a visiting family, or something. As soon as they were out of sight, I slumped against the wall.

Any time you're ready, Charlie.

I closed my eyes as the blue took hold of me and put me back in Aldaris' ship. He was still there, face in one hand as the other impatiently did something at the console. I only dared approach him a couple of steps, as his aura of bad feeling extended out pretty far. But I had to know.

"You were looking to see what happened to Cheonha, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"How is she?"

"Barely alive." Aldaris put both hands on the console before him, uneasily clenching his fingers. "Bethany, what chance is there that my activity resulted in this outcome?"

"Basically 100%," I retorted. "Eunha, that girl I was talking to, she said that the only people who would be motivated to kill Cheonha are North Koreans. The only reason we can be sure that North Korea would bother trying to kill her is because an alien from outer space and a Miguk randomly poked around a dirt village. Seems weird that they would try to kill her, though. It must have been that they were trying to get her and her mother back for interrogation, and then something went wrong."

All of a sudden, my head felt heavy. I was getting tired. Too tired, at least, to bug Aldaris about his decision-making. For his part, Aldaris did seem to care. The light of his eyes dimmed, and he stared with a dull expression at the front viewscreen. Only Protoss letters appeared on it, not an image I could see. Not that I wanted to see anything going on at the hospital.

"Well," I muttered. "No one can do anything good for North Korea without screwing something up. Anything good you give might be stolen, or used as 'evidence' that someone's a spy. It's a messed up nation, and...who even knows how to fix it?"

That little comment earned me a one-way ticket back to Earth. Either that, or Aldaris already had my return coordinates loaded in. Bah, whatever. I didn't care. I was too tired. Just barely before I tossed myself onto the bed, I remembered that I was covered in dried blood. Well, into the laundry bin with my clothes, then to the shower. Only then did it really hit me. This was Cheonha's blood, and she was fighting for her life in a hospital. I threw up, barely making it to the toilet in time.

It was an hour later before I considered myself clean enough to go to bed, and even then the first birds of the morning were starting to chirp. I fell onto the pillows, hoping to fall asleep before the sun was fully up.

It was a workday. My brain knows to get me up when I stress about time, so I ended up awake just before noon. Blergh. Slowly I went through my morning routine, including coffee and whatever I could make on my electric griddle. I definitely didn't want to stay in the house until it was time to walk to work. I started gathering my things, then grabbed my phone and started texting the guys. Toby and Statkus had to know about Cheonha and Suha.

Bang, bang, bang!

"Aagh!" I fell out of my chair. "I mean, just a minute!"

It was somebody knocking on the door. Sheesh, the apartment isn't that big. What were they knocking so loud for? Outside stood two official looking people, a man and a woman. Once I'd opened the door, the man let drop an ID.

"Michael Carter, FBI," he said. "Bethany Beverly, I'm going to have to ask you to come with me."

"Me...?" I was looking like I'd never seen a face before. "...What for?"

"For questioning," the woman answered, showing her own ID. "Elaine Bradley."

"Nice to meet you. I'm not under arrest, am I?"

"Not at the moment."

"Uh, I have work today. ...Should I call and tell them that I won't make it?"

"Yes," the woman answered. "You should."

Here we go now, let's slide in through the open door. Hoping to God that they weren't kidnappers with fake IDs, I followed them to their car. The man let me into the back door, and I entered.

It was over an hour before they started questioning me. They drove me to a local police station (as opposed to somewhere outside my home city), where I was told to go sit in one of those questioning rooms. Y'know, the ones that are really two rooms, and there's a two-way mirror between them. My side was just like in the movies: a big, concrete room empty of anything but a large, rectangular table, a few chairs, and a camera hanging ominiously from the ceiling. They let me stew a while in there, but since I'm not...okay, fine, I'm guilty of stuff. Leave me alone, already. I sat there and thought about pretty dresses, okay?

It wasn't terribly long before the FBI agents came back in. Good. I was hoping that they wouldn't leave me to sit for several hours. Michael and Elaine sat down in front of me, pulled out some papers, and looked to me, heavy with expectation. Michael started things off with the questioning.

"Were you or were you not in South Korea this morning from about 1:15 am to 5:45 am, Eastern Standard Time?"

"Uh...that's kinda impossible," I answered. "It takes like, 18 hours to fly to Korea, not counting prep time and getting to the airport and stuff, and y'all picked me up around noon."

"Exactly," Michael said. "Ms. Beverly, we'll be honest with you. We've noticed strange activity in your area for about six months. It all began with a strange anomaly in space, one that NASA still has yet to explain."

I kept my face blank. That's when Charlie arrived at Earth.

"Ever since then," Michael continued, still holding my gaze. "We've tracked strange signals to and from certain areas of the planet that are similar to the initial phenomena. These signals tended to concentrate on California, North Carolina, London, and various places on the Korean peninsula. We learned to track these signals, and because of that, we were able to get satellite images of the location of one such signal."

Michael put a folder on the table and opened it. He pushed a picture towards me. I leaned forward and looked. The picture was sort of blurry on one side, for some reason, but the other half was clearly a human. Me. I recognized enough of the background to know that it was in North Korea. The folder held other pictures, some blurry, some not. I appeared in some of the non-blurry parts, and in a few Cheonha also appeared. Aldaris did not, however. He must have been the blur. Were these people hiding him from me on purpose, or did something Aldaris owns do this?

"Ms. Beverly, please explain these photographs."

I stared at the picture, lost. It was all over, and I knew it. Sorry, Charlie. I took a deep breath.

"Okay, so I can explain everything," I said, leaning back in my chair, because I heard that that makes your body relax. "These, uh, signals, you see, are actually teleporter landings."

"Are you claiming to have teleported to North Korea?" Elaine asked.

"Yes, because that's the truth." I thought for a second. "Okay, so like, here we go. The person responsible for these teleports is an alien. This alien looks to be around ten feet tall, and has reptile-like skin. No hair, and he has these tendril-like things sticking out the back of his head-"

"You mean like a Protoss?"

I winced, scrunching my eyes tight. "Urg...I didn't just want to come out and say it, because I didn't want to sound like a crackhead. But yes, he's a Protoss from the game Starcraft. Aldaris is his name." I peeked open my eyes, and neither agent looked at me as if I were crazy. They seemed mildly surprised, but not weirded out. "Wait, have you heard this before?"

"Yes," Elaine replied. "John Statkus has already been questioned. We know of Toby Collins and Cheonha Lee as well."

I screamed inside my head a few times. Outside my head, I stared at the table before me, trying to gather my senses. With a few deep breaths, I managed to get myself somewhat together.

"Before I begin, let me make something clear," I leaned forward over the table in desperate sincerity. "Cheonha can't be blamed for what happened. She didn't understand what was going on. I'm not sure she even understands now. Not to mention she was stabbed just a few hours ago, so whatever happens, don't do anything to her. I mean, try and convince the South Korean government not to do anything to her."

"We can't promise anything," Elaine answered, still sitting straight as a Victorian matron. "But we'll judge that by what parts of your testimony that we can confirm."

"Uh...okay, but just bear in mind that Cheonha, because she doesn't really know english, we couldn't tell her what was going on. What happened was...the four of us were accidentally abducted by an alien." Despite the seriousness of the situation, I choked down a laugh. Who among us really has been kidnapped by aliens? Either it really is funny, or I'm losing my mind. "And it really was an accident, because he looked pretty pissed off when we saw him. Well, here, let me start at the beginning..."

\\\\\\

Author's Notes:

- Handepone means cell phone - literally it's "hand phone," just like it looks. Il il ku is "one, one, nine," or Korean 911. Yes, theirs is 119, if you're ever over there (England's is 999, for the record). Chonwa means "phone" and -haeyo is the polite suffix for "to do." When used without haeyo, chonwa is a noun. Lots of words in korean are like that, as in, they're a noun when by themselves, but a verb when put with the -ha suffix (which converts to -hae in certain circumstances, like when paired with polite style -yo). Kinda convenient, really.

In the sentence above, I put -hasaeyo, because a polite way to tell someone to do something adds the -sae honorific modifier, which is -shi in other circumstances. An even more formal command would make the sentence end in -hashimsheeyo. However, honorifics are complicated, so don't use them based on what I say alone.

- Seoraksan is a mountain in eastern South Korea, and is a great place to visit, especially in the winter when they have these amazing snow sculptures up.

- I've decided to make my chapters bigger. I don't update that often due to computer issues, and I can't afford a replacement until they send me my tax refund check. I filed the refund in February. It is June now, and I haven't seen a cent. Apparently the problem with my refund didn't require them to notify me. Because they suck. In any case, longer chapters! It's a bit less dramatic that way, as I'd intended that this chapter be two. However, I don't want to have a huge number of chapters. The best stories on fanfiction net tend to be more succinct.

- I didn't mean to make all the Korean girls have "ha" names. That's just how it turned out. I mean, Suha gave her daughter a similar name because she thought it was cute, but Eunha's just a coincidence.

- Yeah, even though it's been years since I started this story, timewise it all takes place in six months. Slow updates don't mean time in the story passes as quickly. It just means I need to stop slacking.

Author's Notes New:

- I'm rewriting a lot of the later chapters, so I don't promise the longer chapters above. That was with my original update. I'm also considering adding some plot that I had intended for part three to come up at the end of part 2. Lol, I probably should quit this story and work on something publishable, but my heart won't let me. I'm working on other stuff at the same time, so I don't quite feel like a complete slacker.