𝐒𝐊𝐘𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐄𝐒 & 𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐒. - stardew valley.

PROLOGUE.

✦

IT BEGINS innocently, as all things do.

He is five years old the first time he declares that he wants to be a journalist. He practices his penmanship every day until it is polished - or at least until he can write "Park Hyun" in the nicest lettering anyone has ever seen - and in grade three demands that his parents help him learn to use the computer for typing. By the end of his primary education, he is a master of the keyboard and has helped out with the school newspaper by conducting and typing up interviews with parents for their special column. At age fourteen he is gifted his first laptop, and he spends each night working on blog posts that he hopes will someday serve as part of a portfolio for him to get into university. At age eighteen, he graduates secondary school as the head of the yearbook club, and he is awarded a special tassel for being one of the top students in his class.

University comes and goes, and with it, an internship. He graduates at age twenty-four, all smiles on the stage when he accepts his diploma, and lands a job at a minor journalism group just months after leaving campus. All the while, the buzz and churn of the city chews him up and spits him out, day after day, month after month. Work is all pieces on crumbling businesses or liquidations, obituaries and paid advertising. Nothing that changes anything. Nothing that puts a smile on his face.

Student debt lingers over his shoulder like a dreadful omen, and the biweekly pay he earns is barely enough to cover apartment rent and groceries. He lives alone, goes to work alone, and returns home alone. The best break he can get is a night of drinking with his best friend, but even then, it's not enough. Hyun hasn't seen a vacation since secondary school. He's forgotten what the air outside of the city smells like - surely it isn't as smoggy and dense as it is by his office. He wonders - is the ocean still there? Is it still magical in the way it was when he was little? Does anything exist outside of Zuzu City?

There's no guarantee, so he stays put. He puts out articles like his life depends on it, and he gets in far better shape than he ever anticipated by running around the city blocks, carrying coffees, chasing down witnesses, hunting for evidence. It's tiring work. Sometimes too tiring. He wonders if working at Joja would provide for him better than his current job. He talks it over with himself in front of the television as reruns of old shows drone away, calls up his best friend and asks for advice. Never, he is told, and I repeat - never - sell your life away to Joja. They take and take and take until you have nothing left to give. And then, they'll still try to ask for more.

So he continues to write. And he catches himself thinking one night, as he writes and rewrites and drinks until his fingers go numb, that, maybe, this thing that had begun so innocently...

...was going to drain the life from him after all.