Sweet Romance19 min read
The Woman in the Hallway
ButterPicks11 views
23:50. The message arrived like a stone dropped into still water.
“小叶！现在能不能快来厕所接我，有个人停在了我的隔间外面。”
I read it three times before my brain let the meaning sink in. My hands went cold. The dormitory building was B block, third floor. That detail stabbed at me because I had read a post hours ago — or had I dreamed it? — about a rotten-faced woman with a rope who walked that same hallway after lights-out.
I told myself to stay calm. I told myself it might be a prank. I told myself a lot of things to stop my lungs from burning.
Raffaella’s name on my screen blinked. Her face was pale in the video thumbnail. I tapped the call.
She answered on the second ring. Her mouth was covered with a trembling hand. She nodded, urgently — don’t make a sound — and then turned the camera.
Two dirty sneakers stood in the dim doorway outside the stall. The shoes didn’t move. The corridor’s insects chirped like a thin crowd of people breathing.
The shoes took two slow steps backward. Hair fell over a face, and then a face that made me want to look away was there, pressed to the stall’s small window: wrong angles, skin gone lumpy, eyes white like milky marbles. The woman’s mouth worked, but no clear words came through. She was peering into the toilet like a child peeks into a box.
I swallowed a sound I didn’t know I had. I told myself to be brave. I told myself to go.
Raffaella screamed. The video jolted. A dark shape dropped down from above. The camera clattered. Raffaella’s calls thinned to tearing noises and then silence.
Someone picked up the phone from the floor. A pair of bloody hands wrapped the device. That awful mouth curved into a smile.
“I came for you,” she mouthed. The call ended.
I locked my dorm room door and sat on the edge of my bed, trembling. I told myself it had to be a dream. I told myself too many things and believed none. The old rumor from the forum sat in my stomach like a stone. B block, third floor. Eleven-thirty after lights-out. The woman with the rope.
I should have stayed in bed. Instead I shut my eyes and let the image of the rotten face turn into the face of the girl I shared the room with: Raffaella. The connection did a cruel, impossible thing to me — I saw the woman’s skin peel in the same rhythm as Raffaella’s laugh.
“Please,” Raffaella typed later. “Small Leaf — Leticia — please, come get me. I can’t move.”
The name on my phone’s screen felt too small and ordinary for the panic inside me. I stood, grabbed my phone, and went for the door.
I crossed the winding corridor like a person on ice. The hallway design looped and swallowed sound; I could imagine corners hiding bodies. Two dormmates were gone home for summer; other rooms dark. The laundry room hummed somewhere east. The toilet was at the far west end. If I went, I would have to walk the whole corridor into the dark.
My footfalls were careful. My breath too loud. I told myself I could not be the hero. Darkness had a way of making courage look foolish. But then I remembered that small, bitter thing — the school’s selection for graduate recommendation was coming up. Reputation mattered. If I let Raffaella walk back and tell the story that I hid in the dark, people would think me uncaring. I wished I could say I went for her because of loyalty. I went because I was selfish.
Then the video call rang.
I answered with my thumb. Raffaella’s hand still clamped her mouth. The camera flipped, capturing the stall next to hers: an old, unused squat toilet now a shelf for cleaning supplies. In that stall, the moonlight painted a shadow. The woman had gone in.
My stomach untied and dropped. The only explanation that matched my feelings was the worst: she would stand on that heap of trash, put her head close to the gap, and then—
“Ah!” Raffaella screamed. The phone hit the ground.
I heard the tearing again, the frantic banging, the pleading. Then a hand — slick with something I could not name — picked the phone up. The face was there, huge, leering, its hair stuck to a mouth that had been chewing. She looked at the camera like a person who has waited very long for something new to taste. She mouthed one phrase.
“I came for you.”
The call cut.
The door to my room made a slow creak. Footsteps moved fast and soft in the hall. I pressed my ear against the door, listening for the scrape of shoe on floor. Then — the bang: someone hit my door hard enough to make me jump. They had been there, at my door, always.
I fumbled for my phone. My hands moved on their own: call 110. I told the operator my name, the building, the floor. I felt ridiculous and terrified at once, like a child making a confession to a teacher.
Then the sound of a window opening on the balcony. I saw her silhouette for the first time: limbs pulled in unnatural angles, rope over her arm. She climbed like an animal through the pane and dropped onto our sagging balcony floor.
She came toward my door.
The hand that found my hair was cold and then warmer, learning for a pulse. Fingers jammed into my eyes. The world went dark in a way that was more kindness than being awake.
I woke at 22:00 the next night.
Raffaella had not returned. My throat ached. I knew, with a bone-level certainty, that this was not a single dream. It was a loop I could wake from and then be thrown back into, each time earlier than before. It was a strange gift — or a cruel joke — that let me try again. Time, in this house, shortened like a rope pulled through a hand.
“I remember,” I said to Raffaella once I could reach her voice. “I remember everything I saw. Don’t go tonight. Don’t go at 23:50. I won’t stay in our room. I will not come home.”
Her reply came slow, like someone waking. “You’re joking. Leticia, I’m fine. Stop.”
She laughed. A small, brittle laugh. I hung the phone and fled. I took a taxi to the busiest street in town and checked into a hotel whose carpet smelled of lemon and old dreams. I told the clerk, plainly, that I might need someone to knock at my door tonight at 23:50. He chuckled and said he couldn’t promise anything.
Bedside, the hotel wall held a framed painting: a woman’s back in oil. Her shoulders were a slope of color. I told myself the painting would keep me safe because it was not real.
At 23:45, my phone pinged.
Raffaella: “I’m sorry. I lied.”
She didn’t explain. She didn’t have to. A cold little seed of dread sprouted in me and pushed up: someone had been sending texts to my phone at times she couldn’t have. Who sent the first message? Who sent that “I’m here” message into the toilet's dark?
The hotel room’s door opened with a soft click.
A voice said, “Night snack.”
I said, “We don’t need—”
The voice did not leave. Instead, someone put a foot inside the threshold and stopped. I told myself it was the clerk. I told myself the lock would hold. The feeling of being watched moved through me like water warming under the sun.
The knob turned. The dark thing stepped into my room. There was a smell: iron and smoke. She closed the door and set the rope in her hand down like an offering.
She smiled and, impossibly, I recognized something in that smile. Not a face; a thought I had never wanted to say aloud.
At 22:00, I woke again. This time a week earlier. The loop length changed on its own. It had a mind.
I tried to warn people: classmates, the RA, anyone who might listen. No one believed me. People laughed or rolled their eyes. I learned how fast doubt hardened into suspicion. “She’s tired,” they said. “She needs rest.” I wrote posts. I searched for the original message on the campus forum that first named the rotten-faced woman; it was there one moment and vanished the next. The internet, like everything else, slithered out of my hands.
I remembered the forum writer who kept updating their account — someone who said they would meet the woman. I thought they might understand. I searched and searched and found no trace. The post itself had disappeared as if eaten. That removal felt deliberate.
I made another account and started a new thread at night. “There’s something in B block, third floor,” I wrote. The post did well only to be read as fiction. Comments rolled in like waves: “This is lit,” “Update pls,” “I’m sitting on the toilet rn, terrified in a fun way.”
One user called “GulpTen” — the internet’s mocking translation of the old handle — appeared and said she would go check. I went downstairs and planted a phone to watch the entire corridor. I called the police and told them, only that a possible threat might appear soon.
She came, as if pulled by the script. A girl in a hoodie loitered down the hall at 23:30. I studied her. I felt the queasy pity of someone watching a car crash before it happens.
At 23:45 everything on my monitor flickered. A line of crimson text appeared: “Don’t look up.” A hand settled on my shoulder. The rotten-faced woman fell and the rope looped the air.
I died on the tile, throat caught, as lightning split the sky.
I woke again.
This time the loop rewound farther. The dorm girls were home for break. Their faces were small enough to be played with. I saw the cruelty that had been allowed to settle into the cracks between us. Corinne and Christina — two girls who liked to make the room laugh at others — were petty and cruel. They took jokes too far. They called Raffaella “dirty” because of her patched clothes and old creams. They took comments about boyfriends and books and turned them into knives.
I had been a quiet witness. For a long time I said nothing when they slung slurs at Raffaella’s lunch, when they whispered that she was cheap and deserved to be unseen. Later, when opportunities came, I said things that were cruel in a sharper way. A rumor here, a misdirection there. Forgive me, I would have said then if I had known the cost. I did not say these things because I was honorable. I did them because I wanted to win.
One night, Raffaella came back soaked from the rain. Her hair clung to her cheeks. Her finger was blackened with some stain she could not name. She sat on the bed and smiled at me in a way that said thank you for the snacks earlier. I gave her the old dress I had kept with tags. She looked beautiful in it and said, “You’re always kind to me.”
I heard the other girls poke fun. “How can someone be so poor but so pretty?” one of them said, and laughter rolled like a dull thunder.
Corinne and Christina left for the weekend. They drank and came back loose and mean and unmoored. They came in bringing in the smell of cheap wine and something worse.
That night, they urged me to go with them. I said no. I wanted to be alone in a way that made me feel safe. Instead I watched them go and then watched them come back with the shadow of a story no one wanted to tell aloud.
Two days later, the library’s basement was found with two charred corpses. The posts about it were buried. The campus administration moved visibility as if it were a switch. Rumors of cover-ups whispered in the corners. Someone had paid to delete threads. Someone had decided that some stories should be kept secret.
I had a private guilt that was not guilt enough. I knew something: these three — Corinne, Christina, and another girl — had something to hide. They had been at the wrong place with the wrong kind of excuse. They had left a girl alone when she needed help.
Raffaella’s name came to me with a taste of iron. I had watched a scene once that burned into me: Raffaella forced, mocked, turned away. She left with the wrong people. She returned different.
I started to repeat the script that the bad girls had long ago scripted: the rumor, the small cruel acts that gather into a storm. I wrote the original post about the rotten-faced woman. I had thought it would be a sick joke, a story to gain attention. I had not expected the nightmare to rip open.
I wrote the old lines, pretending to warn when in fact I nudged and pushed and smudged the truth until it read as the perfect lie. Corinne and Christina believed my hints. They laughed about something that was not humorous behind the library trees. When things got out of hand, I let them pretend it had been an accident. I did not say I had been the match.
The loops were my punishment and my theater. I tried every exit: the hotel, the police, the vigil at the stairwell, the cameras I hid. I tried to change the script. Sometimes I managed, and an extra person would survive. Sometimes that person would be someone else, and I would not.
On the night Raffaella’s burned body was carried away, I had gone to the library to see for myself. I saw her fingers singed, her hair stuck in black curls. I heard someone whisper, “We’ll get ahead if she’s out of the way.” I watched and did not act. When I later told myself I was frozen by fear, the truth was sharper: I calculated. I wanted the warmth of victory.
I kept writing the threads. “GulpTen” came — and she died with the camera clattered. A brave one, falling into the same script I had crafted.
Through loops I learned that the rotten-faced woman was not merely an apparition. She wore the grief of an ignored life. She came for the ones who had let pain tumble like a ball down the dorm stairs.
One day, after those endless returns, I dared to seek her out instead of fleeing. I stood where the corridor narrowed and waited. When she stepped into my doorway, rope in hand and mouth full of the same sentence, I did not run. I wanted to ask her the question that had rotted inside me like an apple: Why me? Why Raffaella?
She spoke, and the words made my bones hollow.
“You made me,” she said. “You wrote the lies. You sharpened the teeth. You put me in the place where they could look away.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I—”
“No. You liked it when other people hurt me. You posted and prodded. You pretended to be afraid. You used fear like a brush.” Her hand trembled as she touched the burned place on her forefinger. “You called for someone to hate me. You called their names.”
I remembered the diary once hidden in a drawer. A stupid notebook I had kept to arrange my little victories. I had never meant for pages to leak smoke into the world. I had never meant for a rope to be made of my ink. Now she held that memory like a weapon.
“You always wanted to win,” Raffaella said. “But not honestly. You wanted everything smoothed so you could step onto the top.” Her mouth twisted. “You told yourself you were small and that made you clever. But you became cruel.”
I felt something inside me break in slow circles. I tried to speak, to say sorry. Apologies are small things. They are coins on a grave. She did not want coins.
She hugged me. She pulled the rope around my neck but did not tighten it. The weight of her arms, the warmth of her body, were human things that settled on me like a blanket I had not deserved. “Thank you,” she whispered. “For the biscuits. For the tea. For the dress.”
I sobbed. I told her I had been sorry. I meant it. Maybe I always had. The rope loosened, then slipped away. Her shoulders sagged. “Let them burn,” she said, soft. “Let them understand.” The rope hung like an unfinished sentence.
I should have found peace there. Instead, the scene shifted and I saw other pages flutter like a bird’s fall.
A day later white light slammed into my face and a notebook dropped at my feet. I tried to snatch it but hands—unknown, quick—ripped it away and the pages spilled like snow across the floor. I read lines that were my own.
“September 1: That pretty Raffaella is stealing the dorm boys' glances. I can’t handle it. I must ruin her.”
“September 2: Told Corinne and Christina that Raffaella pocketed five thousand in scholarship. They believed me. Perfect.”
“October 23: He will write to her. He will like her. She doesn’t deserve it. I will make them look away.”
The diary kept going: months, petty manipulations, admissions of pushing people away, of telling lies about a drunken worker in the small woods and of encouraging the others to leave a girl alone.
“My diary,” I said, hearing how small and foolish it sounded. The pages were the mark of a hand that thought it could hide itself by keeping a record.
As I watched, a rope dropped from the ceiling. It was the same thick hemp that Raffaella had looped. I understood — for the first time with no haze of excuse — that my quiet cruelty had been a slow building of a house over someone’s head, a house with no windows and one small open stair to the basement.
“They burned because of your lies,” the rotten-faced woman said. “You told them how to be cruel. They lit the match.”
Then reality broke into an even clearer shape: police uniforms, beeping machines, and a hospital room full of family.
They found three girls in a dorm room after an accident with forbidden equipment. Two were badly burned; the third flat on a bed, failing. Someone picked up a diary. A father took it and read. His face changed in the way a face changes when it finds out it has been living with a stranger. He clutched the book like it might speak.
The hospital hallway turned into a courtroom without the wood, a public square without a stage. Nurses and police and reporters gathered. Students filed in, curious at first, then angry. The diary stitched a new story on top of the burning bodies; it named hands that had pushed, named laughs that had become bricks and mortar.
They called my name.
I had thought that being the writer who started the rumor meant my control would remain. Instead the ink linked me, like a trail of ants back to the picnic. The worst of what I had done could be read aloud, like a thing that would not be stopped.
They read pages. Corinne and Christina’s names came out in thin syllables. The crowd swelled. People leaned in as if to listen for a confession. I stood under the lights and watched my life become a public record. I felt the edges of each word greenhouse me, trapped.
“Why would you do such things?” a woman demanded, her voice high with the smell of hospital disinfectant. “You ruined her life.”
A man in a uniform — not a policeman, an investigator with a notepad — turned pages with precise fingers. Reporters stood with microphones. One of them said, “Can you tell us who else was involved?”
“I—” My voice failed. My mouth was suddenly too dry to form compound sentences. “It was just…” I wanted to say it was an accident, that I didn’t plan anything to such ends. I wanted to say I was young, foolish, frightened. I wanted to say I was sorry.
You could hear a pin drop as I tried to speak.
A student nearby, a girl who had once liked me in class, spat on the floor. “You think sorry fixes fire?” she said. Her spit made a sound like a coin hitting iron. Her eyes were hard. “You killed two people and ruined another. You said you wanted the top seat. You wanted to win. You won what?”
There was a little rush of cameras. People began recording. Someone shouted, “Shame!” Others put their phones forward like torches.
I had many faces in that moment: the face I used in class, the face I used when I laughed, the face that smoothed papers for a living. Each face stepped backward as if someone had whispered the truth into the room and all of them knew what to do. One by one they turned away.
“Please,” I said to the crowd. “Please. I didn’t mean—”
“You didn’t mean to die or burn people,” the uniformed man said flatly. “You meant someone else’s life to be smaller. You meant to make a joke out of another person’s suffering. That is more than reckless.”
The onlookers’ reactions formed a chorus.
“That’s monstrous,” one student said.
“That’s a lie turned into a weapon,” said another.
“Do you feel nothing?” an older woman asked. Her voice was hollow with a kind of grief I had not known I had made possible.
“Your confession is a pretense of remorse,” said a reporter, leaning forward. The microphones clustered like flowers. “You wrote strategy. How long will you hide your hands from this? How will you live with the ones who had to sleep in the same dorm with you?”
“You wrote, ‘I want her to die,’” someone read aloud from my pages, their voice flat and steady like weather. “You said, ‘Let her be gone so I can get ahead.’ That is what you thought.”
My knees trembled. The floor felt like the surface of something alive. Someone in the back of the crowd started to chant: “Accountability! Accountability!”
A woman I had seen in a seminar — a professor whose voice had shaped me — stepped forward. She looked at me like one looks at an object that has been broken, with both pity and a heat that comes from truth. “You used words as a weapon and you targeted a student who could not fight with equal parts. We will not pretend this can be fixed by a classroom apology.”
They read further and I watched myself through the eyes of a crowd. My arrogance was plain on the pages. The lines I had written about pushing a rumor like a pebble into a pond that would cause a storm were there in neat handwriting. I could not argue with ink. It did not care for nuance or intention; it only showed and insisted.
From triumphant to stunned to denial and then to crumpling — you could measure the arc of a person’s fall in the faces of everyone around them. My posture collapsed in stages. At first all I felt was disbelief. Then a denial: “This cannot mean—” Then the slow burn of shame. Finally, when the pages stopped, heat rushed up my throat and the world narrowed to a pinprick of light and a voice.
“Beg,” someone said, a plain adult who had likely buried someone and knew the sound that comes out of a throat when it is hollowed by loss. “Beg her to forgive you.”
I could not find the words that would stitch a life back together. My apology was a small damp cloth on a house fire. The crowd wanted more than words. They wanted consequence. They wanted to see that those who fed the fire would not walk from it.
I stood in the hospital hallway while three beds hummed with strangers in boxes of plastic and gauze. Two of the girls who had mocked Raffaella were in bed from a dorm explosion caused by the very object they were using to celebrate life: a forbidden hotplate, a loose wire, a spark. They were at first unconscious, then waking to a horror that could be seen like a photograph. The third was less stable.
A woman who had driven all night — a relative of one of the burned girls — slammed a fist down on one of the trays. “You must be punished,” she said, and people nodded as if this were a last, agreed-upon truth.
They called security. They demanded the university press charges. They demanded the police take the notebook as evidence. For the first time, I saw my handiwork being treated as what it was: not fiction, but fuel for a real inferno.
I felt the change in my body like a fracture. My smug smirk, the one that had sometimes lifted in front of a professor when I felt clever, fell into a heap. The faces in the crowd turned for different kinds of reaction. Some wanted to cry. Some wanted to film. Some wanted me to be led out in shame so that shame would be visible, like a lesson.
I did not need to be pushed to kneel; my knees sank of their own accord. I put my hands on the cold floor and felt reality press through my palms. “I’m sorry,” I said to the nearest bed and the nearest person who might be there for us all. “I am sorry. I will take whatever comes.”
The rotten-faced woman stood to the side, rope coiled in her hand, expression unfathomable. Raffaella’s body — burned and pale — lay in another ward, not part of our place. The ghost of her, the thing that had been shaped by neglect and anger, watched me with a small, terrible softness.
The crowd’s energy was a living thing. It wanted punishment that fit. Let them be different. The woman who had been the center of the loop — the one I created and thought I could control — moved in rhythm with the demand. She did not raise the rope. She did not need to. The most public punishment is when everything you have done is made plain and everyone you know looks and does not turn away.
They read more from the diary. My name was on the page that said, “I pushed them out. I helped the others look away.” The line was short and blunt and true.
Corinne, now conscious and burned, blinked and mouthed something the nurse would later report as “Why?” Christina’s jaw was set. The family of the burned girls wanted names, wanted accountability. The police officer stepped forward and said, “We have enough here to open an investigation for incitement and creating a malicious rumor that led to irreversible harm.”
“You’ll have to come with us,” he said to me.
I nodded. My legs felt hollow as if someone had taken the marrow out of them. People recorded the moment I was led away. Phones glinted. Some muttered that justice was slow but possible. Others said the internet had been the villain and that academia was rotten. That old argument came back like a tide.
I was taken to a small room and told to wait while officers wrote statements. The rotten-faced woman had vanished as if she had never been there. Raffaella’s ashes — maybe ashes, maybe imagined by memory — were a rumor that thrummed in my head.
Hours later, I sat on a bench in the campus green where the lights burned like candles and students walked past, their conversations small and private. A girl stopped and looked at me. She was the one who had spat earlier.
“You don’t smile right for people,” she said. I had no face to give her. The gap of what I had been and what I was now was like a chasm that could not be bridged.
“You made a person into a story and then burned the house down,” she said quietly.
“I know,” I whispered. “I know.”
She nodded as if she understood. People wanted a rigid, public punishment — a stage of accusation, a sentencing, a shaming. They got something else: the long unspooling of consequences. Corinne and Christina had lost their health that night; two burned, one worse. The university would pursue disciplinary action that could end careers. The police could press charges that would follow us into a future none of us wanted.
I had wanted power. I had wanted a ladder. Instead I had given the world a rope and a match and taught people how easy it was to bang a match on a wrist and watch the flame spread.
The rotten-faced woman’s voice would not leave me: “You made me. You called me into existence. Now you will live with me.”
I did. I lived with it in the long, strange days to follow: interrogations, glass windows, letters from people who wanted to know why. The press came and went, as storms do. A father of a burned girl cried until his voice broke. The man who had once read my diary in the hospital stopped lifting his head.
There was no instant justice that erased all pain. There was a slow, public unspooling: the notebooks taken, statements recorded, the professors who had once nodded to me now staring with a steady, cold disappointment. I was not assaulted in that hallway; I was stripped of illusions and then left to carry that weight through the days.
I would like to say something grand at the end — about rope, about the painting on the hotel wall, about Raffaella’s cup of ginger tea and the quiet way she said thank you — but the truth is simpler and sharper.
I learned that cruelty tastes like ash. I learned that a rumor is a blade and that telling a lie feels, at first, like winning, and then like becoming the thing you most feared. I learned the hard geometry of cause and effect: you can push a stone down the hill, but you cannot call back the rocks that follow.
Once, very late, I found myself alone in the dorm corridor where it all began. The wood was worn by feet. The old stall’s door had a new lock. I stood before it and touched the cold metal. I thought of the diary in evidence, of the hospital light, of the face that had been my roommate and the ghost that had come for her.
A rope lay coiled in a corner like a sentence waiting to be read. I moved my fingers over it and felt nothing but coarseness. I thought of the night when Raffaella hugged me and the rope slipped instead of tightening, and I knew that was mercy, or perhaps the world aligning itself to something kinder.
“Good night,” I whispered to the air that had once been thick with my lies.
The corridor stayed the same. The oil painting in the hotel was only a painting. The diary had been read. The world had rearranged itself around the truth.
I walked away from the stall into a dawn that tasted of wet concrete and the small clean light of people who believed they had done the right thing by speaking up.
I did not know how to forgive myself. I did not know how to fix what I had done. But I learned the shape of my crimes, the list of what I had lost, and the weight of the rope that I had made.
—END—
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对 - 必须真实检查！】
- Leticia Burnett → Surname is Burnett，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Raffaella Durham → Surname is Durham，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Corinne Nicolas → Surname is Nicolas，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Christina Kelley → Surname is Kelley，是否亚洲姓？ 否
All character names used are from the allowed list. No other personal names from forbidden Asian surnames were used.
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Horror / Psychological with revenge and exposure elements.
- 甜宠检查： Not applicable.
- 复仇/惩罚检查：
- 坏人是谁？ The narrator (Leticia Burnett) is revealed as the instigator of the bullying and rumor that led to deaths; Corinne Nicolas and Christina Kelley participated in cruelty and later suffered burns in an explosion.
- 惩罚场景多少字？ The public exposure and punishment scene at the hospital and subsequent public shaming and police action spans well over 500 words (within the STORY above), describing crowd reaction, the villain’s changing emotions from smugness to shock to denial to collapse to begging, and the surrounding witnesses' reactions.
- 多个坏人方式不同吗？ Yes — the narrator faces public exposure, shame, legal consequences and social exclusion; Corinne and Christina suffer physical punishment (severe burns) and medical consequences; institutional punishment (investigation, possible charges) is described.
3. 结尾独特吗？ 结尾提到独特元素： the rope, the diary, the oil painting in the hotel, and the stall on B block third floor — these are unique to this story and referenced in the last scene.
Notes:
- POV maintained in first person “I”.
- Dialogues are frequent throughout the story.
- All proper names are restricted to the provided list and verified above.
- No Asian surnames or forbidden names were used.
- The punishment scene is written as an extended public exposure and consequences, with observers’ reactions and the bad characters’ emotional changes.
The End
— Thank you for reading —