Face-Slapping15 min read
My Lucky Koi: From Broken Set to Peach-Tree Fame
ButterPicks15 views
The whip cracked across my cheek like a bell. Pain spattered across my face; a warm seam of salt and iron filled my mouth. I tasted humiliation before I tasted blood.
"How dare you seduce the Emperor!" the woman in the phoenix robe shrieked. "Drag her out. Beat her until she forgets her name!"
My hands were tied. My knees were burning where I knelt on cold flagstone. The light came in through a stubborn little window high above—like a coin of sun that belonged somewhere else. I blinked and found that the memory of being me had been crowded by other people's memories: someone else's lab, another planet's rain, the sharp clinical smell of an old hospital lab, and then darkness.
"Wake!" a cold voice commanded me from inside my head. Then: "Ding."
A soft, almost cheerful system voice translated into words I could understand.
[Congratulations, host. You are now bound to the Human Lucky Koi System. Complete tasks. Claim rewards. Everything you want will be within reach.]
I had been a special-drug researcher on a strange planet called Polo. I had volunteered to test a drug no one else would try. One swallow into the unknown, my world flickered—then the world I woke into was someone else's.
They called her Elliana Palmer. I tasted the name as if it were new to me. She was eighteen lines down the fame ladder, a washed-out supporting actress who refused to bend to the industry's ugliest rules. She was the kind of woman people chewed on and spat out, blamed for her own bruises. She had been in the wrong place when powerful people in the production crew decided to make a mockery out of her.
"Smug little servant," the queen-of-the-set hissed, her painted fingernails curled around my jaw. "I will ruin this face."
I flinched when the whip raised. The system offered two choices in a small, bright bubble inside my head.
[Option One: Take the blows, finish the scene. Reward: Acting +100.]
[Option Two: Give them back double. Reward: Unlock Combat Attribute.]
"Don't you move!" she snarled, and the whip swung.
I decided before I fully realized I had decided. My hands tore at the ropes that bound me like a drowning person surfacing, and I caught the whip mid-arc. The set fell silent as if someone had paused the world.
"She broke the ropes with her bare hands," someone whispered.
I looked at the queen, and something new and foreign rose in my chest. She had been beating me with a bar of meanness for so long I had forgotten what it was to be allowed to strike back. I struck. I struck the face that had struck mine. The whip became mine. The queen screamed, clutched her own painted cheek, and then she went still—eyes wide as moons—and then she fainted clean to the floor.
"Call an ambulance!" a man barked.
"Cut!" Broderick Alvarado—director and petty tyrant—stormed over, his face a thunderhead of rage. "You broke the script! You assaulted an actress! Get her out of here. We won't use you."
"I was in the script," I said. It wasn't a question. My voice was calm like the strike of a metronome.
Broderick's face had gone a strange white. He took the script from my hands and waved it as if it were proof he could still be the one in control.
"You damaged our actor. You must compensate. We will sue—"
I smiled, which was perhaps the most dangerous thing I could do to him. "You might want to check who your actor's been sleeping with," I said. "Her son looks very like her brother."
He turned to me with a face that had always suggested he'd be the one to sign people's destinies. That color left his cheeks.
"You—" Broderick's voice cracked. "You're lying."
I had lied twice, long before this body was mine. But lies have teeth in them when you know which bones they will hit. I tore off my costume and walked out with my head high.
"You're crazy," Lori Green, my manager, told me later as we sat in the narrow living room of my rented apartment. "You can't do that and expect to keep working."
"Maybe I don't want to keep working like that," I said, and for a strange, satisfying second Lori didn't know which Elliana she'd promised to protect: the one under the old weight or the new one who'd tasted the sting of retaliation and liked it.
The system chimed, cheerful in my skull.
[Host, you have been offered a skill. Choose.]
I could feel the new body—her old hurts and her old strength. The system's options were strange and delicious: acting points or power. I clicked for power, because the whip had tasted like insult and the thought of feeling small again made my teeth ache.
[Combat Attribute: Unlocked.]
The industry smelled different after that. One hit and an entire narrative changed. The video from the set went viral. They made me villain and hero both. Fans and trolls screamed into the same void.
"She beat Jade Murray!" one headline read. "Eighteen-line actress knocks out new flower of the screen!"
"She staged it! She's a faker," someone else wrote.
"You were brilliant," Lori said, and what she didn't say was that the only thing standing between me and everything was the very chaos I had caused.
My life moved uphill on a new current. Broderick fired me, yes, and the internet turned the incident into a thousand hot takes. But heat melts ice in strange ways. A week later, my name trended for the wrong reasons and then, suddenly, it trended for any reason at all.
Lori dug through offers like a person on an errand for treasure, and one came with my name on it bigger than the others: a dating-variety show called Love Magnet. It promised exposure, and my manager said exposure would wash the blood of the old story away.
"Trust me," she said. "If you do this right, they'll stop looking at that one clip and start looking at you."
Greyson Faure—my eldest brother—called that evening from a house I hadn't seen in two years. He sounded like the kind of man who always thought he should be in charge.
"You're coming home tonight," he told me. "You took something from us. It's time to stop hiding."
I agreed because family is sometimes a port and sometimes just a pier. That night, sitting at our old table with the people who said they still loved me, I learned something else: Grace had teeth and could clench when she needed to.
The show flew me to a filming camp in the mountains—eight little cottages painted the color of late peaches. The other guests were a mix of comfortable and dangerous: Jade Murray, the woman who'd wound up on the wrong side of my fist and then into my upward spiral; Logan Golubev, my old boyfriend who had made promises like paper boats and watched them sink; Eliseo Griffin, the impossibly composed movie star who had once told an interviewer he refused to do variety; Zachariah Fernandez, a singer with a kind face; Knox Chen, a dancer who moved like an answering phrase.
Broderick, who had turned on me, wasn't the only director with a chip on his shoulder; the show's director smelled of something less theatrical and more like a new chance. He'd booked me as a guest because my story was a headline. Greyson had influence—he smiled while he scratched my face like an owner of the world might—and he sat in the back, inscrutable as always.
"You're the leader of our team," someone said the morning we arrived. A producer offered me a pink card. "You'll be deciding a lot. Treat it like a dress rehearsal for life."
"Fine," I said. "I'll be the captain of this circus."
We had early mornings, and the show was merciless. Cameras followed breath and boredom alike. My first task: wake all the other stars and capture their bare faces on live TV. In the early light, chemistry can either sparkle or curdle into something ugly, and the internet loves a reveal.
"Pick them up gently," the producer whispered. "They won't be thrilled."
When Jade opened the door with her face red and raw, she tried to braid shame and hurt into the same word I had once worn.
"You low—" she began.
"Wake up," I said, handing her the card. "Live starts now."
It wasn't mercy. It was theatre.
The morning turned into an odd kind of work day. Eliseo—Eliseo Griffin—arrived like a wave of calm. He did not usually do these shows. When he stepped into frame, he refused any illusion of being anything but competent. He walked like an actor who was used to people looking.
"You're here," I said when I passed him. "Why join this?"
"For the village," he answered plainly. "When I first started, they helped me when I was hurt. This is a chance to give something back."
"You don't usually do shows, do you?" I asked.
"Not usually," he agreed. "But sometimes the right cause can lift a man from his habits."
I watched him because the way he held himself was the kind of quiet that does not ask for attention but collects it anyway. He would later become my partner—both in teams and in the long strange gravity of cameras and hearts.
We were assigned tasks in the local peach orchard: pick fruit, understand the harvest, and then—brutally modern—sell them by livestream in the evening. Our group—me and Eliseo—were to be judged on orders. The producers wanted a spectacle where charity met commerce and celebrities met old earth.
My head kept buzzing with the system's tiny chirps.
[Task: Pick 100 pounds this morning. Option: Unlock Endurance.]
[I choose: Endurance. Reward: Chicken Drumsticks ×10.]
I chose the work option because when a system asks you to pick between comfort and strength, comfort is often the same old chain dressed in velvet. The app gifted me ten virtual chicken drumsticks—odd rewards, but the system loved to be literal about hunger and the things that satisfy it.
I moved like a machine whose gears had been oiled by decision. The orchard became my proving ground. I picked until my hands were a map of insect kisses. People joked that romance shows never showed the real labor; I'd already wasted a year being ideal for anyone but myself. The system's endurance attribute meant I did not feel tired; I felt efficient.
Around noon Eliseo and I sat under the trees and ate our packages with the kind of apology I think city folk hand out to the earth when they take more than they give.
"My hands are all wrong for acting sometimes," I told him. "I grew up on sets where being small was an instruction."
"Then be big now," he said. He had a way of speaking that made complicated things simple. "Grow."
When we went live that evening, the orders came like summer storms. Two thousand, then ten thousand. The chat was a living thing, screaming for more peaches. My family's small kitchen in the livestream showed me the way people will sometimes buy hope if it smells of sweet fruit. My brothers—Greyson and Leon—were in the private chat like two generals with thumbs, clicking orders like votes.
The producers were ecstatic. The villagers, who'd watched fruit go unsold for years, were stunned. We sold five thousand pounds in one afternoon. The orchard, which had been the place of honest labor, became suddenly a trading floor for compassion.
But then the old world reasserted itself. Trucks loaded with other fruit—the melons and plums villagers had sent to buyers—rolled back into town: rejected. Buyers had returned their shipments saying the fruit was too sour, not ripe, too costly. The villagers' faces folded like letters.
"All of it?" Eliseo whispered.
"Half," the boy said. "Half rotten, half fine."
"We'll fix it," Eliseo said. "There must be buyers. There must be people who will taste and know."
We walked to the village and in the chaos I did the only thing I know how to do: I tried things. I tasted. I walked and tried, and then, because I knew cameras liked flesh and truth, I ate a melon I should have hesitated to touch.
"Not clean," Eliseo warned.
I chewed and smiled, and cameras loved it.
"He's eating unwashed fruit," someone screamed in the live chat, and then sold out for more.
"You're a provocateur," Eliseo said with a laugh, but there was a softness that could be mistaken for admiration.
We sold the rest of the orchard's fruit too. Our small staging of earnest labor and honest hunger had become a cause, and causes always attract attention—and money.
But the world did not forget Logan Golubev. Logan arrived like a bullet—hot, gleaming, still wrapped in the bad habits of the beloved and the entitled. He wanted to be the hero in every one of his own stories.
"I thought you'd be nicer now that you have a following," he said when he saw me, the air around him a perfume of arrogance. He had been my boyfriend once, a boy who promised ownership disguised as love. He had left me for Jade and power. Now he wanted to play savior.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"I came to help," he said, smooth as lacquer. "Also to see if you needed—" he waved to cameras, "—a rescue."
It was not enough that he had hurt me. He wanted credit for being present during my recovery.
"You betrayed me," I said.
"No," he said easily. "You made it about you."
The producers—ever hungry for narrative—saw tension and leaned in. The live comment section buzzed.
"You two need to talk," Broderick said, slipping from man to director with frightening speed. "We could stage an honest reconciliation."
I didn't want a staged anything. I wanted truth.
He smiled with a face that had once consoled me, and with the same face he began to spin the threads that had betrayed me. The cameras loved him because he still had the look of a top star. The crowd loved brands; brands loved him. But the world is small on the internet. Scandals have bedrooms like maps, and messages as their roads.
The ledger of him was not empty.
"Show it," I said into the microphone one evening during a charity gala when the live audience had been primed and the lights were bright and phones were already recording.
"Show what?" Logan asked with a slow smile. He smelled of expensive aftershave and cheap courage.
I didn't answer. I hit a button and the giant screen behind the stage blinked into life. The room dimmed.
"Broderick," I said softly. "Do you remember who you hired to handle set continuity? Do you remember who chose to stage scenes with no consent? Do you remember who told Jade to 'play the lover'?" I turned my head and met Broderick's eyes. He sweat like a man who'd been sitting in the sun too long.
On the screen, a tide of messages and snippets rolled like a confession. Texts sent in private became a public verdict: "My wife is just a paycheck," "Waiting until I get the money then she's out of the picture," "Keep her in her place; the producers know how to make her cry on cue"—and then, the worst for Logan: a string of messages that didn't shrink from accusation.
"You think you can run away from what you did," my voice was steady in the microphone. "You think your charm will clean you."
Logan's smile fell. The audience leaned in. Phones rose like a forest. The city press and gossip columns were sitting in the front row. Everyone had a device, a camera, a hungry face.
He laughed at first, the laugh of someone who thinks charisma is a shield. "This is fabricated," he said. "Photoshop. Fake accounts."
A clip snapped: someone on stage projected a recorded conversation. The sound was crisp—the crackle of guilt. "She only ever paid me because I needed money. She was a means to an end," Logan's voice hissed from a recorded call, older and darker than his present charm.
The room's atmosphere shifted. His eyes fixed on me.
"That isn't—" he tried to speak. Denial still wrapped his mouth like bad candy.
"We have copies," I said. "All of it. The messages, the photos, your words. You told producers you would 'get what you needed' from me. You used me when I refused your conditions. You left me in the cold."
He stepped forward like a man who wanted the upper hand back. "Elliana—"
"Don't," I said. My voice had the small, terrible calm of someone who knows their consequence.
Logan was suddenly stripped of the fancy adjectives that had once attached to him. His face changed violently: first the arrogant curl, then a blink of confusion, then color draining like paint washed from a statue. He looked like someone watching a house burn from the inside, struck by the unnatural speed of the flames.
"No," he said. "This—this isn't true. I never—"
The first reaction was denial. Then, as proof stacked like bricks, his face crumbled into shock. "You're lying," he hissed. He tried to laugh, to shuck the accusation, but the laughter shook and cracked.
People around us murmured. Phones recorded. A woman in the third row stood and shouted, "I knew he wasn't faithful!" A man held up a phone and began live-streaming; comments streamed like a river. Someone applauded. A child in a white dress clapped, mistaking the adult collapse for theatre.
Logan's voice became thinner. "You put me up to this. You doctored the messages. You made these videos."
A rustle. A dozen people looked down at their own devices, comparing time-stamps and metadata. Broderick's face was a study: first regret, then anger, then the hollow panic of a man who realizes his leverage is melting.
"How can you do this in front of everyone?" Logan begged, the first time his voice rose into the small space where humanity lives: shock had unstitched his arrogance. "You're ruining me!"
My chest tightened. I had been the one who had lost, once. I had been the one to sit and take the lash. Now the lash returned to the man who'd wielded it. The rule in my head—the small, precise law the system liked—was satisfied: face slapping in the public square.
"Get off the stage," someone called. But Logan stumbled forward, and then, in a move that had the grotesque timing of bad stagecraft, his knees buckled.
"I didn't—" he choked. He tried to keep up the performance of denial, but there was nowhere for it to rest. "I love—"
"Save it," I said, and the audience hummed like an acknowledgement.
Then he fell to his knees right at the microphone, his tuxedo already creased from flailing. He lowered his face and tried to beg, which was a strange motion from someone who had once told me to behave. His voice was ragged; his hands shook.
"Please," he said. "Please, Elliana. I didn't mean to hurt you. I—"
Silence lined the room for a second, as if the world were holding its breath to hear if mercy would change the script. Phones were up everywhere. People made videos and some wept. There were calls from the press: "Did you see? Logan Golubev in tears?" Others recorded the moment for their own social capital. Someone turned on applause. Others shouted "Shame!"
He crawled forward and then—because theatre loves the gesture—he dropped fully to the marble and clutched at my shoes. The cameras wanted a spectacle and he gave it to them: all of his pride delivered in a hand pressing against the hem of my dress.
"Please forgive me," he said, and a hundred people replayed his regret, judged its depth, and sent it out into the world.
He had moved through smug to shock, then to denial and collapse, and finally to begging. The crowd reacted the way crowds always do: some with the cruel satisfaction of a wound avenged, some with pity, some with instant attention-seeking, phones held high to capture the downfall.
No one touched him. I could have asked to have him arrested; I could have made a speech a thousand lawyers would later analyze. Instead I turned toward the cameras and said two sentences.
"What you saw are messages. And actions," I said. "Don't confuse charm for virtue. Choose the stories you want to follow carefully."
There was a great racket as people chewed on the finale. Some cheered. Some recorded. The streaming numbers spiked like a fever chart.
Logan's pleas became softer until he was simply a man in a tuxedo clutching at the floor. Someone in the crowd murmured, "He's a coward." Someone else said, "Maybe he finally understands."
The world would keep telling the story for months. Tabloids would write editorials about responsibility and power. Logan's public humiliation did not erase the past, but it made space for me to breathe.
After that night, the system rewarded me in small ways. The show's livestream sold out pallets of peaches and melons. Villagers started getting checks. My ten chicken drumsticks had been a joke; now they were a memory of hunger satiated.
Eliseo and I found ourselves standing together more often. He was quiet but affectionate in a way that made quiet things loud. We laughed about small things and defended each other in bigger ones. The cameras fed on us like bees on sugar, but we tried sometimes to be private.
"I don't intend to be a headline," he said once, looking at a string of comments that praised our teamwork.
"Neither did I," I said. "But there are worse things than being seen."
I learned the mechanics of staying visible without being owned. I learned the ins and outs of performance, how to be generous without being exploited, and how to let the system be a tool rather than a chain.
Weeks passed. The system remained a tiny watch at the corner of my vision—the lucky koi swimming in a circle of light. It offered rewards when I chose the harder work: stamina for the orchard, a spike of luck before a shot, an odd little charm that made people click "buy." Not every choice was noble, but the choices were mine.
On the last night of the show's first arc, when cameras were low and moonlight laid silvery down on the peach trees, Eliseo and I walked past where the villagers had set out a small feast. The system pinged me one last time in a voice that felt almost fond.
[Host, you have completed notable tasks. Bonus: There will be trial and reward. Choose what you will keep.]
"I keep the peaches," I said aloud, feeling childish. "And a pair of drumsticks."
Eliseo laughed. "You and your chicken."
"You said less than noble," I said, smiling at him.
He hooked an arm around my shoulder like someone who had been carrying himself for too long and finally found a good reason to rest.
"You've earned it," he said.
The cameras watched quietly in the distance like polite moths. People had their phones out. Some had tears. Some had popcorn. We both knew the show would cycle around again, that more episodes would bring more challenges and more viewers. We also both knew the quiet truth: we had each other’s hands.
Later, alone in my bed, I wound the small, ridiculous koi charm in my palm—the system's icon—and listened to its soft ticking as if it were a heart. Outside, the peach orchard slept. The village had sold its fruit and bought its small glories. Logan had learned something about the exposed heart.
From the other planet I'd come from, my old life felt like a dream of some other body's nights. Here, in this body and this new life, I had built a small citadel of choices: to be useful, to be loud, to be kind without losing myself. I had my brothers who bought peaches under assumed names and my manager who still thought in contracts. I had my system that loved odd rewards, ten chicken drumsticks and a charm that ticked.
"Tomorrow we'll sell more peaches," I told the koi charm, and the system ticked back like a very small, very content fish.
It was a peculiar kind of happy—one baked with equal parts grime and glory, with bruises turned into stories and drumsticks turned into small, stubborn protests against being powerless. I rolled the charm between my fingers until the koi's tiny eye seemed to wink.
"Good night," I whispered to the peach orchard and to the little fish that had decided to call me lucky.
The End
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