Haneul was a sacrifice. From where, from when, nobody knows, least of all her. Whether she arrived before Tokki or after or alongside her is a question the Dungeon's relationship with time makes unanswerable. She does not remember the world she came from. She does not appear to miss it.

What she became instead was this: the first face people see, the warmth at the threshold of something ancient and indifferent, the cheerfulness that calcified over so long it stopped being a coping mechanism and just became her. She cannot exist outside the Dungeon anymore. Her echo is woven into it deeply enough that she may manifest at entrances Yobi never touched, greeting arrivals the Dungeon itself would otherwise swallow without ceremony.

She has been here longer than the contract system, longer than the illusion of the manor, longer than any structure Yobi built. She was here when the Dungeon was still just what it is underneath all of that. Somehow she came out of that cheerful. That is either the most resilient thing in the Dungeon or the strangest.

Haneul is the welcome. Not officially, not by any arrangement with Yobi, just by nature of what she has become after aeons at the threshold. New arrivals find her first. She is disarming in a place designed to be the opposite, and whether that serves Yobi's operation or simply serves Haneul's own undiminished instinct to connect with people is not a distinction she would understand or care about.

The other thing she is, less visibly, is the reason Tokki has not become completely unreachable. That is not a small thing in a place like this.