Chapter Text
Vegetarian all his life… That’s what he’d told the tabloids. I do it for the animals, he’d told them; to think of the cows bustling on their way to the slaughterhouse, big round eyes aghast with the knowledge of their impending death.. The little piggies…. The clucking chickens – oh, it’s so cruel. He’d told them that it broke his heart. He’d told them that he often wept at night, for the lives lost, that humanity would pay a great price one day.
So his secretary bought the steak he enjoyed. Her wage was high enough to ensure that for any gossip bounties reporters set, her job would always pay more, just to keep these little secrets from slipping out. Perfection was important. He learned that from childhood. Paparazzi, of course, could whisper that he’d been caught with a sandwich of samgyeopsal between flights in and out of South Korea – that he’d been stopped by the metal detector with a pair of pliers in his pocket – that apparently he had spat in the flight attendant’s face for sloppiness – but it never got any further than whispers. Perfection was important, after all. If the sales kept flowing then that perfection could be bought out.
It remained that Ji-Woon was no stranger to meat. Traipsing through the Fog, the air on his chest cold and wet and not entirely unpleasant, he recalled an art-show-slash-protest he’d once held for overseas fans in Australia. Stop the violence.. Stop the murder..
Hundreds of people on the streets, covered in red paint for shock value, and him as centre stage, leading the protest. It had his heart pumping. They had gathered in front of an abattoir. Racehorses… Yes.. That was it, sold to make dog food. The crowds had gathered in front of the truck, trying to stop its path, to save the animals. This deception excited him. He’d eaten cheval a cheval just the week before in Toulouse, France, having it delivered to his apartment to avoid prying eyes. It was undeniably exciting, to bite through something that had once breathed, had once thought.
The silhouette of a large building in the far distance surprised him, momentarily. Baton looped around a chain in his pants he kept his hands in his pockets (if they were warm, the skin would stay soft). He had been expecting a Test, a Trial of sorts, and this place was far unlike anything he’d found thus far.
There had been the skii resort with its fairytale snow. The croaking ironworks. The temple, if he could call it that, something out of an old Egyptian documentary, but not this.
The smell was unmistakable as he ventured further. It brought forth the stench of the abattoir, that had angered the minds of fans beneath him on that blistering Australian day. The stink got worse in the heat. Rage set in first as the abattoir workers threatened to run the protestors over if they didn’t move, and then denial, and then a profound sadness as the horses were taken in anyway. The protestors thanked him for coming regardless, their heads down as they left the scene, realising that there was nothing more they could do.
It was an unfulfilling experience overall, even if it did help leverage public opinion. He got his manager to take a slice of mare rump home afterwards, which he had grilled with a gochujang barbecue sauce.
“Gideon’s,” he read aloud as he entered the building. It was a small sign drilled into the side of a massive metal door, strangely incognito for such a big place. The interior wasn’t much to ogle at; he instinctively raised his arm to shield his eyes from its cold blue lights, jarring after the unending mud landscape of the Entity Realm.
Boots clicking on the concrete floor, walking from room to room, it didn’t take him long enough to find out just what Gideon’s was for. “A processing plant,” he murmured. “No accounting for taste.”