Noodz at the Actor's Hideout

chapter 1

Seraphim has kind of a lame but interesting secret. No, it isn't about the two hotdog sandwiches she stole from the steamer before cleaning it last week. And no, it isn't about how she called in "sick" to binge-watch a K-drama to pacify her guilt for stealing hotdogs at work.

It's a person, and she has been keeping it, holding the information for four days and thirteen hours with tight lips.

Just oh my... like... wow. Can she just...? Oh fuck, she'll explode. Frankly, even for someone who isn't naturally nosy like her, it's starting to become unbearable.

She wants to tell someone—even just her best friend, please—that Yuan Shen, China's superstar and now Hollywood actor, eats at the convenience store she works at every two in the morning.

Yes. Damn, yes, he does.

At first, she wasn't sure. The second time, she tried to confirm but failed. On the third night, she thought she was hallucinating. But this time, it's different. After hours of labor-intensive searching and surfing, she went to work armed with information. Seraphim de la Cruz can finally put an end to the confusion. It is Yuan, and he always eats a cup of warm noodles and drinks a cold bottle of lemonade at two in the morning. No fail, constantly, regularly and every synonym there is (at least for four consecutive days).

It's the kind of secret that makes Seraphim's arms itch, and damn, it does itch beyond scratch-repair.

Make-up artist by day, and a local convenience store clerk by night, Sera already has a sufficient number of reasons to keep herself up at night. She has a growing TikTok account with impatient followers and a blooming Instagram page.

With the speed that her followers are growing, it's safe to say that things are, well, looking up. She has chores, too! Chores are not easy especially when your roommate and best friend is always in a coma from food or law school.

So does she have any business looking up Yuan Shen's Instagram and Twitter at seven in the morning on her way home from her shift? Or at lunch when she wakes up while munching on her cold sandwich?

Exactly, she doesn't. Yet, she can't help it.

The quaint town of Ollary is near Los Angeles, about a two-hour drive. Usually, the people who frequent the commercial strip she works at are tourists who are headed to California or people running away from it. And as one of Pete's Mini Mart's three employees, she usually welcomes them or observes them as they buy snacks for the trip.

They're usually excited when they're headed out; like a kid on their first trip to Disneyland. Seraphim gets the allure, really. The town is quiet (except for the ruckus that some tourists bring or the buzz of their local pie-making contest). It wasn't as boisterous and flamboyant as the Los Angeles. It was a regular town with occasional fun festivities. Oh, and did she mention pie?

Yup. Pies. Ollary is the town of pies. Name a pie and they got it. Fresh from the brick oven or a fancy mom's stainless oven, as long as it has Ollary's signature Valley Pastry Cut, then, it's surely one of the best.

Or so the local folks say.

Nestled in between two mountain ranges that are known for hikes, here in Ollary, you'd mostly see... land. Yeah, not really exciting. But oh, there's a lake. She thinks that actually adds character to their town, or you know, cements its small-town persona because every quiet town needs to have a lake.

So what does a hot-shot, A-list celebrity doing at their near-bankruptcy-has-a-poor-location-with-being-the-last-stall-in-the-commercial-strip convenience store?