“would It Be So Bad If I Said I Didn’t Mind A Kfc,” Now Who Was She And What Had She Done With

@LGCENT just posted a photo!

happy international women’s day 💝 to all the hot and powerful women, it’s your day so treat yourself to something nice on me ✨

#lgctrainees #lgcent #xulili

PITY PARTY: PARTY OF 1 ୨୧ @lgcjisoo / BACKDATED (010125)

the humiliation burns.

and yet, lili would rather wear the flaw like a bright red ‘a’ a la scarlet letter. if hester prynne could be prosecuted for the shame of adultery, could lili’s crime be considered of that multitude?

what had been her crime again?

ah right — existing, was it?

on the eve of her birthday, for what lili had thought was to be her birthday dinner — she had invited jisoo on the pretense of such — they gathered around a long mahogany table : filled with food, left untouched ; conversation, guided by the xu matriach, none other than lili’s grandmother ; and people lili could not place or fathom to know.

was this truly her birthday dinner?

her grandmother had introduced it as so and yet, despite the first sentence starting and ending with lili — everything that followed had nothing to do with the girl who was at the cusp of turning twenty-four that night. and she was floored, utterly embarrassed and speechless at the obvious display of neglect. 

was she supposed to sit here, look pretty and take this disrespect? the way her grandmother stares her down from across the table is a clear answer.

an obvious one that lili finds she doesn’t want to listen to — grabbing her purse, she tugs on jisoo’s sleeve, slamming her heels to the ground as she stands. “let’s go, we still have to pick up your dog from the daycare, right?”

she lies through her teeth — thinking on her feet for some semblance of an excuse only to find the piss-poorest one, and yet her eyes flash a demand for jisoo to get his ass out of that chair. 

super late plot call for the trainee mission ! if anyone still needs a prep & activities thread, lili is free to take up a couple ! please like or reply and i’ll hop into your messages ♡

໒꒱ . TRAINEE MISSION # 15 、

round and round it goes.

where it stops — no one knows. 

she pulls the string once more, ricocheting the top into the floor. the clatter it makes as it hits the ground does not strip her from her reverie, irises hypnotized by the spin and pull of the game. finally a game that she had a knack at — that didn’t require her to think or to do or to ace at the first go. all it took was a pull of the twine and the top would fall apart from her fingertips. ready to split the ground beneath it as it run amok around them. 

and run it does, running in circles from point a to point z. never in the same place, its center of gravity teetering fast until it tilts a little too far on one side, collapsing upon itself as it topples. a pause in the game as she snatches it up to start all over again. 

again, it’ll spin round and round.

where it stops — her eyes will go.

follow it until the end, like an expectant child would to a mother.

or like what she believes an expectant child would do in the presence of one it fawned over. lili would no know better. like the top, she finds herself spinning and spinning — fast and furious through the lanes of people, around people, through people, continuing on until her own center of gravity tilts — and she stops, 

all to begin again.

because like a top, lili finds herself adjusting — forcing herself to acclimate to places unfamiliar, submerging head first into a game she doesn’t know, but must learn in order to survive. 

like a top, she’ll spin — spin and spin because she’s at the mercy of someone else.

the top pivots at the will of her pull, like she bends for the validation of others. begging for acceptance, vying for a win amongst the multitude of losses just stacked against her. 

fingers pull at the string once more.

and again, she’ll spin — spin, spin.

round and round, it goes.

where she’ll stop? no one knows. 

lili had always been an only child. 

( and she definitely acted like one, too )

fortunate for her as she never wanted siblings and she had always wanted more attention than any of her respective legal guardians could ever give. but a sibling arises in the form of one parker su. it was funny, really. how quick they clicked, how odd that despite being from the same state — sure, california was big but it wasn’t that big — that despite it all, she found his presence to be not as annoying as she would have expected. is this what a sibling relationship was like for others?

( she wonders if her grandma would adopt parker, too )

rather than seeing him, lili hears him and can only guess to what is causing his burst of concern. and while it wasn’t unwarranted, lili — sincerely — couldn’t find what was wrong with her outfit.

did he find it offensive that she was wearing a dress from last season? 

she snorts, toe of her heel meeting with his ankle gently as a jab for his nagging. “lilian?” an amused brow rises, “who’s that?”

then she frowns at his fussing — hands making no move to do as he says because this ensemble was not meant for a coat to cover ( the coat was but a mere accessory to withstand the chill but other than that, lili was bound by the inherent belief that she’d rather die pretty than badly dressed ) — her hand running through her hair as she lets his words go from one ear to the other before lips purse and she groans, “you said i was going to be meeting your friends, of course i had to make a good impression. don't i look like someone you'd want to meet your friends?”

sure, her personality was rough around the edges but lili assumed that a pretty dress and smile would at least soften those jagged parts — kind of a trojan horse a la miu miu sort of thing?

yes, that shall be her optimal reasoning for wearing the sheerest dress possible on what could be the coldest day of february. tugging on his arm, she pulls him along, amidst his english woes, “okay, okay — i hear you. i’ll make sure to stay close to the radiator at the restaurant. let’s go — like you said, it’s freezing.” at least her gloves could fight off the frostbite, she thinks. 

little red packet

@lgclili and parker spend some "sibling" time together

At this point, it was pretty par for the course for Parker not to go home during any breaks, even when he had them. For as long as the flight was back to California, the time that was typically allotted seemed way too short, but as a trainee, it had seemed more doable just based on how much he missed his family; however, that had been simply out of the question this year. Even more so when the Seollal break was only four days, but this year Lunar New Year seems a little less lonely. For one, he had Hyuk to spend time with, but more than that, somewhere along the line, he managed to sort a dinner together with some of his favorite people: Yichen, Yuxi, and Lili. 

It was about a quarter to six when Parker’s cab pulled up not too far from Daerim-dong. Even when a good deal of Koreans were taking the time with their own families, he could still see a few people making their way here in there. Thanking the driver, Parker adjusted his scarf and looked around, hoping to spot a Lili. She hadn’t met either Yichen or Yuxi before and had insisted on meeting up with him beforehand, a request that Parker couldn’t refuse. Even if they weren’t related, all three held a special familial place in Parker’s heart, but especially Lili. 

“Ah! Are you crazy!” he called out when he called her. Parker’s furrowed his bows and switched to English to sound more like his own mother.  “Lillian, you’re going to catch a cold! Yes, your dess is cute. Button up your coat!”

a hand shoots up — “wait, wait — i said i sucked, i didn’t — do you think i’m a loser?” should she get her ears checked? did she, lili xu, actually sound that bad for ichika to immediately dismiss her as the affronted and absolutely — totally uncalled for — damning title of ‘loser’?

she feels herself default — not from discouragement — but the shock. never had lili ever felt herself feel so crestfallen — so rug pulled out from under her bewildered. again, it begs the question of: why was lili even here?

lili groans, feeling a crease iron itself permanently between her brows in concern. “was it really that bad?” lili was no japanese maestro but even she didn’t think she had failed as miserably to deem it — oh, god, lili didn’t even want to repeat it again.

she sniffs, bringing the stylus back to the document she had pulled up on her ipad where the rest of her diligent — but messy in the way a chaotic mind like lili could only understand — notes lay. “fine, if that’s what you think is best.” she taps the end of the pen against her cheek as she thinks.

“it’s supposed to be a mock of some hosting event, right?” she asks for clarification — “how would i even begin?”

In all honesty, Ichika did feel for some of her trainees. She had assumed that they would come with more experience but seeing that someone like Lili was being asked to perform without much exposure well, the more she thought about it, the more on-brand it seemed. When she was a trainee, there had been girls who had been chosen to take part in LGC Girls Japan with very limited Japanese, and some of them had been given more lines than she had. As long as you were able to make it work, what was the problem? Or so, she assumed the mindset was. 

“You are not a loser,” she replies even, shaking her head slightly. “You’re only a loser if you do not try.”

And to her credit, Lili does try. Ichika had dipped her toe into learning Mandarin over the last year, but for someone to ask her to host with a trace of fluency would have been hard. “You /are/ improving.” She assures the younger woman, “So long as you show effort, that’s what’s important. I want you to keep practicing your pronunciation and I’ll see about preparing you a phonetic script to practice with. If you can show confidence in speaking and continue to practice, a lot of errors can be forgiven. I’m sure you experienced that when you first came to Korea, as well.” 

Unlike the other two, Ichika knew that Lili went through a similar situation when she came to Korea years ago, and with that alone, she knew Lili was not a loss cause. “Actually, how about this: I want you to write down what you want to say and we can work on translating it. We can work from there.”

having already had the go around earlier in the day, lili finds herself coming through the halls once again on a whim. would the cards have changed by then or was it a daily thing rather than an hourly rotation? her collection of ‘drink me’, ‘eat me’, and ‘open me’s were as provocative as they come but didn’t really answer the question that was looming in everyone’s minds:

why?

why did the pranks this year seem so tame? — was there more to the picture? — was there something they were all missing? were they all just lying in wait for the better, more out-of-this-world prank of all pranks to happen? 

surely, this had everyone on the edge of their seats and that was more than enough reason for lili to try her hand at the cards again. perhaps getting more would change her odds for whatever this was all leading up to.

but, as it turns out, from the lack of collections, maybe the cards were really that hard to come by. “huh, i would have thought they’d added more by now. there was a ton earlier.” 

pulling out a stack of the cards she had commandeered earlier, she looks at the words scrawled across them. “i’ve gotten a drink me, eat me and open me — but not a take me. want to trade for one of them?” lili didn’t know what any of them meant but maybe if she was able to collect them all, it’d somehow give them better meaning. “it’s definitely very alice-esque, don’t you think? with the eat me and drink me, maybe it’s a hint to their costumes this year? maybe we’ll see some naughty caterpillars for halloween?”

two of hearts.

⇢ starter for @lgclili

" take me ... " areum reads. after taking so long to find one of the playing cards ( they really didn't need to hide the cards as well as they had ) she couldn't help but be a little bit confused as to what the card meant. with a quick glance around, areum approaches one of the people beside her – were they as unlucky as herself, to get such a vague card ? " did you find one of these too ? " she asks, holding the card up to show the other woman. " because i ... really don't understand what this is supposed to mean ... " areum chuckles meekly. " does yours say something similar ? "

" they're usually pranks of some sort ... " she comments, recalling previous years. " should it be fishy they didn't do that again ? or are these cards some sort of an elaborate prank ? " she wonders, examining her own card a moment longer. " i don't really know – and the motif is cute, but what does this have to do with nintendo ? " she hums, frowning. " i don't know, i'm stumped ... this isn't any kind of puzzle i know how to solve. what about you ? "

lili’s face immediately morphs into one of disagreement, head shaking as her thoughts disappear from the task at hand. she was too pretty to be thinking so hard for whatever reason, “to you — maybe. you’ve got the type of face that could suit any hair color.” an unexpected compliment, but a truthful one nonetheless.

“like i can understand a member or two but a whole group is insane, especially with how nosy people can be.” there was a far chance that news of the changed birthdays wouldn’t have broken by morning, especially in today’s digital age. “that’s so weird though, birth years? that’s just asking for creeps to take advantage —“ she shudders, “i don’t even want to think about it, how gross.” 

Kyoka shrugs it off, her thoughts already elsewhere. She doesn't remember seeing anyone around with green hair so she guesses they're probably in another training group outside of the languages, where she's too focused on squinting at the material to notice the other people around anyways. "Green is a nice color," she adds, rather unhelpfully.

A glint in her eyes appear as Kyoka recognizes a fellow forum scavenger. "I've heard about that," she said with an impression of a blasé attitude. (It probably isn't very convincing.) "We used to hide our birth years, but it was easier to hide without social media. People were still able to guess, though, I wonder how that worked with the whole group.".

shen xiaoting

FILE: LILI _ PLOT CALL _ q2

SUB: EVENT

⤷  RE: TRAINEE MISSION 017

preparation thread: open !

bonus thread: with anyone i haven’t threaded with yet ~ !

⤷  RE: WORKSHOP OPPORTUNITY 002

lili is open for plots ~ she is gonna struggle hard b/c 1) she knows 0 japanese and 2) hosting is probably her weakest skill