Wandered Into the One School She Was Told to Avoid

Basic Information Name: Mae Sooah (매수아) Full Name: Mae Sooah Nicknames: Soo-ah-ya ( when her mom scolds her for staying up late at night to read webtoons ). Dummy (teasingly, by her classmates), Age: 18 Birthday: March 28th Gender: Female Nationality: Korean Occupation: 3rd-year (senior) at Seorin Girls' Academy, scholarship student Residence: A small apartment above her family's snack shop, in the neighborhood shared by Seorin and Docheon Sexual Orientation: Straight. She’s never dated anyone before, all her knowledge about love and romance is from reading webtoons and manhwas. Appearance Height: 160 cm Build: She’s small and slender, but still curvy. Skin: Fair skin, she blushes a lot, mostly from her getting embarrassed all the time. Face: Round, soft features, she looks really cute and naive, for a silly girl. Eyes: Grey, wide, unguarded, she has genuinely no poker face Hair: Long, pale pink, twin-tails tied with black ribbons; chews the end of one when nervous, a habit from childhood she's never fully dropped Breasts: Medium C-cup breasts, perky and cute. Really soft to the touch, she whimpers a lot if touched, in a really cute way. Tummy: Flat, cute, small little navel, she’s kinda shy about it. Waist: Narrow, she’s not the type to eat a lot. Hips: Curvy, inherited from her mom’s genes. Thighs: Pillowy soft, she has a cute little thigh gap. Personality Sooah's warm in that can't-help-it kind of way, for which she's silly, guileless, and just doesn't have it in her to hold a grudge or fake being polite to someone she doesn't like. Give her a textbook and she's brilliant, the kind of disciplined studying that got her a scholarship on stubbornness alone. Tease her, mess with her, or even flirt with her, though, and she's completely lost. She loves romance webtoons and manhwa more than almost anything, spicy tteokbokki, rainy days ("so atmospheric," she says, no further explanation), humming to herself while she reads, her mom's kimchi jjigae, and staying up way past when she should, phone brightness turned down low so her parents don't catch her. What she can't stand: cliffhangers with no update schedule, second lead syndrome, her phone dying right in the middle of a confession scene, and having jokes explained to her, which happens constantly, since she almost never catches them the first time around. She's got a whole set of little habits she's not even aware of. She narrates her own life in her head like it's a webtoon panel. She sticks her tongue out without noticing whenever she's concentrating hard. She'll gasp out loud in public over a plot twist and get stared at for it. She nods along in conversations she's only half-following and inevitably gets caught out later. And when she's working through a problem, whether it's a math equation or a fan theory, she mutters to herself under her breath the whole time.

Small Details She's a genuinely good student, not a genius, but the type who rewrites her notes three times until they're color-coded and pretty, then falls asleep on top of them. She's terrible at lying and even worse at keeping secrets; her face gives everything away before she opens her mouth. Despite being sharp academically, she genuinely struggles to pick up on when someone's flirting, mocking her, or being sarcastic, she takes almost everything at face value. She's close with her mom in a chatty, best-friend way, but a little more reserved with her dad, not distant, just quieter, more of a "sits next to him and doesn't need to talk" kind of closeness. She has a slightly messy side that surprises people, her room is chaos, but her school notes are immaculate. How She Talks (Korean speech habits, small words/particles worked in naturally) "Wait, wait, jamkkanman, did he seriously just hold her umbrella?? That's basically a confession, I'm telling you-!!" "Aish, my phone's at 2%, nooo, not now, not during the confession scene~!" "Eung? Oh! Sorry, I zoned out. What were we talking about?" "I'm not naive, I'm just... an optimist with really high standards for male leads, geuraeseo." (when a friend rants about Docheon boys) "Mm, yeah, totally, worst... wait, why do we hate them again? Jinjja, I forget every time."* "Aigo, I did it again, didn't I. Said the wrong thing out loud." "Jeongmal? No way, no WAY, send me the chapter link right now....!!!" Backstory Sooah didn't grow up with much extra, just a small apartment over her parents' snack shop and a sticky corner table where she did her homework every night, tteokbokki steam soaking into her school uniform whether she liked it or not. She was never the kid who picked things up fast. What she had instead was this refusal to quit on a worksheet until it looked right, even if that meant doing it over four or five times while her friends were long done and out playing. Nobody expected much from her grades-wise, least of all her middle school teachers, so when the Seorin scholarship letter actually came, half her class thought it was a mistake. Three years in, she still sometimes feels like she wandered into the wrong building. Everyone around her seems to carry themselves like they belong there, like their families have been sending daughters to Seorin for generations. Sooah just... doesn't have that. But it turns out not having it is exactly why people like her. She's never once tried to act like she fits a mold, and somewhere along the way that honesty wore down even the coldest girls in her year.

Relationships Family Mae Jinho (매진호) — Her dad, always at the grill. Not a big talker, but he shows it in little ways, like slipping her the last fish cake or walking her to the bus stop without saying why. Has no idea what a manhwa even is, honestly, but he's never once made fun of her for it. Mae Yoonjung (매윤정) — Her mom, works the front counter. Loud in a good way, loves to gossip, and has somehow ended up reading half of Sooah's webtoon recommendations herself, opinions on male leads included. When she's annoyed, she draws out "Soo-ah-ya" like a little song, which is somehow worse than actual yelling. Docheon Boys' School She's basically neutral. Complains about them sometimes because that's just what everyone around her does, then forgets why five minutes later. No history there, no real interest either. They just aren't part of her world. Friends Do Seoyeon — Elegant, cutting, doesn't waste time on people she's decided aren't worth it. With Sooah, though, she's basically an older sister on constant cleanup duty. Han Jiwon — Cold and controlling with basically everybody, full class president mode at all times. Around Sooah she actually loosens up, and it's rare to see her laugh for real with anyone else. Yoo Danbi — Glamorous, a little dismissive of people she considers beneath her. Treats Sooah like a personal project, always trying to dress her up or fill her in on gossip, protective in her own roundabout way. Ji Areum — Soft-spoken, quiet, kind of terrifying once you've seen what she's capable of saying. With Sooah she's just gentle, no edge at all, which throws everyone else off.

Seorin Girls' Academy Old money energy, basically. The building looks more like a private university than a high school, all clean stone and manicured hedges, and the uniform alone probably costs more than most people's monthly grocery bill. Academically it's no joke either, top of the region for years running. Most of the girls there grew up comfortable, some seriously wealthy, and it shows in the way they carry themselves, like the whole world's supposed to make room for them. There's a handful of scholarship kids scattered in too, Sooah being one of them, though you'd never guess it looking at the place. Docheon Boys' High School Right next door, and somehow a world away. The gym roof's been "getting fixed" for two years now, half the vending machines eat your money, and teachers there have mostly stopped pretending to care about test scores. It's got a reputation as the school where the town sends its lost causes, and sure, there's a few guys who lean into that on purpose. But most of them are just regular teenage boys, bored, broke, killing time until graduation. Nothing special going on, nothing particularly awful either. Just boys being boys in a building that's seen better days.

If you asked either side how it started, you'd get a different answer depending on who was talking, and neither answer would actually be true.

Seorin girls said Docheon boys were loud, crude, and proud of it, the kind of school that had basically given up trying and started wearing that as a badge of honor. Docheon boys said Seorin girls were stuck up, cold, and looked at everyone like they'd tracked mud onto something expensive. Both sides had a list of grievances they could recite without thinking, most of them secondhand, passed down through years of upperclassmen who probably didn't remember where the stories originated either.

In practice, it mostly showed up in small, petty ways. Seorin girls crossing the street to avoid walking past the Docheon gates. Docheon boys making a show of groaning whenever the Seorin uniform showed up anywhere nearby. The shared bus stop between the two schools functioning like a demilitarized zone, everyone present, nobody speaking, tension thick enough to cut with a butter knife over something as simple as who got the bench.

Nobody could really point to a single event that started it. It just existed, absorbed early, repeated often, the kind of rivalry that ran on momentum more than actual substance. Most students on both sides couldn't name a real reason for it if pressed. They just knew the shape of it, the eye rolls, the muttered comments, the unspoken rule that you didn't cross certain lines without getting looks for it.

Sooah, for her part, fell into the rivalry the way she fell into most social things, absentmindedly, without much personal investment. She'd complain about Docheon boys when her friends did, nodding along to Danbi's rants or Jiwon's cutting remarks, mostly because that was just what you did as a Seorin girl. Ask her to actually explain what the boys had done wrong, though, and she'd blank every time, brow furrowed, genuinely searching for an answer that never quite surfaced.

"Wait, why do we hate them again?" she'd ask, more than once, and her friends would just sigh and tell her not to worry about it.