Lamb to the Slaughter || Lookism

011

Life as a Crystal Choi [1/2].

There were many things in her life as Crystal Choi that at first were overlooked. Between having two bodies – that had very distinct purposes and all the insanity associated with that – beginning her training to inherit to a large conglomerate company, and the overall absurdity that was living in a webtoon... made it easy to overlook that one point she'd have to interact with characters associated with the CEO. Or rather, people, they were people now – they were people just like her and she had to start thinking of them as such.

Part of her believed that it wouldn't be as hard as she thought – she did have a penchant for thinking of the worst-case scenario and to overthink. After all, she interacted with DG and Gun just fine... didn't she? She tried very hard to convince herself that the people were not exactly as she had seen. Weren't Gun and DG more complex? The others would also have more dimension to themselves. While it wouldn't be easy, she was probably making it out far worse than it would be. Besides, she'd have so much time to prepare herself, right? It wasn't like the webtoon plot was starting now... Years, she had years. It would be fine... She had loads of time to prepare herself.

Instead of those pep talks, where she tried to convince herself that she couldn't have such a pessimistic outlook, Soo Jung perhaps should have been more concerned with the fact that her constant focus on how much time she still had could develop and turn into an avoidance issue. It was almost as if she was trying to delude herself, after all, pushing the issue to the future didn't help. And no matter how much time she had, or didn't, if she didn't think about what she should do... it would catch her unprepared. Hadn't this happened before? Hadn't she at points in time convinced herself that everything would be fine only to have it backfire on her? Usually, when she thought that everything was fine (or would be fine), things escalated to a point where she was on the verge of a mental breakdown.

While she had known that at some point she'd have to interact with the characters people of the webtoon, she wasn't prepared for when it actually happened. Hell, she hadn't expected that some would become part of her life so soon – the so-called geniuses under her father's wing.

The first headache came in the form of a 178 cm tall, blond teenager who wore glasses, brightly colored clothes, always had a shit eating grin and brought chaos with him. Kim Joon Goo was the first real taste at what living in the Lookism universe was really like: violence, strange events and overall defiance of rules and norms. With him she was confronted with the fact that even if she was used to Gun, the Gun she knew and the one that others knew were different – she wasn't used to their Gun. With Goo waltzing into her life, regardless of her wishes, she had been forced to accept it. While she had always known – what she had seen in the webtoon and her experiences with him where undoubtedly different – she could no longer force herself not to acknowledge it. Her friend Gun was the Jong Gun that plenty were afraid of because of how dangerous he was.

It wasn't just because of that that Kim Joon Goo was a headache to her. While it was harsh for her to be reminded that Gun was dangerous like Goo, that terrible things were going on the background that she didn't want to think about... it was even harder to deal with his presence. Not just because it was like he was a reminder of everything she didn't want to think about but because Goo was the personification of chaos. In one day, he'd appear and everything would be laughs and ridiculous stories and in the other, it would be unadulterated violence that would mark her so much that it would make her question if Goo and Gun were human. Because even if they bled and got hurt, they didn't react to pain as anyone else she knew. It was always as if it was a mere inconvenience and not something debilitating.

Kim Joon Goo, to her, was a chaotic event that no matter how hard she tried, she was never prepared to deal with.

"Uh, Miss Choi?"