Chapter Text
The Icyridge Help Center had developed a particular kind of silence that existed only in places where winter had overstayed its welcome and in a residence forever frozen in time. Outside, snow continued to gather in thick layers along the rooftops and wooden walkways, swallowing footsteps almost as quickly as they were made. Pale blue light filtered through the frosted windows and painted the interior in the color of an old photograph. The fireplace crackled lazily in the corner, doing its best to fight against the cold that seeped through every crack in the stone walls.
Frost feathered the outside in delicate patterns, obscuring the frozen streets beyond, while the warm orange glow of the lamps struggled valiantly against the blue-white light filtering through the glass. Somewhere near the back of the building, an old heater clicked and groaned. A guard coughed; a Scorsurge shuffled across the snow-grazed grass outside, its tiny claws scratching against the packed snow. Otherwise, there was little to indicate that the Help Center was still open.
Behind the reception counter, the receptionist had long since surrendered to boredom.
They sat slouched over their paperwork with one elbow planted against the desk and a half-unwrapped piece of Von’s Sweets candy hanging loosely between their fingers. The blue-raspberry taffy had already been chewed down to something approaching a sticky piece of rubber, but that had never stopped them before. His attention was divided between the sticky blue taffy in his mouth and the mountain of paperwork he had already decided he would deal with later.
Helper Henry, meanwhile, was leaning against one of the nearby support pillars, looking equally uninterested. Sometimes occupying himself with absolutely nothing of importance, occasionally glancing toward the entrance whenever the wind rattled the door.
Then the door opened.
Cold air rushed through the entrance, dragging loose snowflakes over the wooden floor and making several papers flutter violently against the bulletin board. Both men looked toward the doorway at the same time.
Neither of them needed to ask who had walked through the door.
That fuckass Wayfarer stepped right on cue.
“Fuckkkk, shit, here we go again.”
He entered with the same infuriatingly casual confidence he always carried, as though the frozen roads of Icyridge had merely been an inconvenient hallway on his way somewhere else. His shoes grounded into the floor with slow, deliberate certainty that could make a cutscene more agonising.
His hands were buried in the pockets of his black travel-worn jacket, his shoulders relaxed, and his sunglasses sat perfectly in place despite the dim interior. Snow clung faintly to the edges of everything: his boots, shoulders, hair, jacket, and even his shades—but he seemed entirely unconcerned by it. He shut the door behind himself, shook the cold from his coat with one brief motion. And began walking toward the counter.
"Mornin.”
The receptionist stared at him. He walked toward the counter, the sound of his footsteps echoing through the otherwise nearly-empty building. There was something different about him, although neither Henry nor the receptionist could immediately put their finger on what it was. He looked tired. Not merely physically tired, either. There was a heaviness to the way he carried himself, as though his body had spent the last several nights somewhere his mind refused to leave.
"Wayfarer."
"That's me."
"You, again."
Jack tilted his head slightly.
"Have I become a problem?" That comment made Henry snort from his spot, the receptionist ignored him, "What do you need?"
He stopped at the counter.
“Need a request pinned.”
The receptionist slowly swallowed their candy.
“Of course you do.”
Jack ignored the remark and pulled a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket. He placed it on the counter and pushed it forward.
“For the Player.”
The receptionist unfolded it.
The handwriting was unmistakably Jack’s: sharp, controlled, and almost irritatingly neat. At the top of the page was the title.
PLAYER, FIGHT ME!
Below it was a list of rewards.
One Enchanted Emerald, $10,000, 800 Gems.
The receptionist stared at the page. Then at Jack. Then back at the page.
Their eyes traveled over the reward list again, as though perhaps the numbers would rearrange themselves into something more reasonable if they stared hard enough. They did not. One Enchanted Emerald. Ten thousand dollars. Eight hundred Gems. That was not a reward package one threw onto a Help Center bulletin board because they needed someone to shovel snow off a roof or find a lost Doodle. That was the sort of reward that made people stop what they were doing, read the request twice, and immediately wonder what sort of lunatic had enough disposable wealth to offer it for a battle. Seriously for a battle?
He slowly raised the paper.
“You want me to put that on the board?”
“Yes.”
The answer came so quickly that the receptionist almost dropped the form.
“Not something like…” He squinted at the paper, then at Jack. “Assist Wayfarer Jack With Doodle Battle Training?”
“No.”
“Experienced Tamer Seeking Worthy Challenger?” Jack’s mouth tightened, “Too pretentious.”
Henry raised a hand from where he had been leaning against the pillar.
“You are literally asking the Help Center to publicly advertise a request challenging one specific person to fight you.”
Jack looked toward him.
“Yes.”
Henry slowly lowered his hand.
“…Fair enough.”
The receptionist stared at Jack for another few seconds, seemingly trying to determine whether there was some hidden joke buried underneath his sunglasses—there wasn't.
Jack stood there with the complete sincerity of a man who had already considered every alternative and decided that the most direct possible method was the best one. There was something almost impressive about it. Almost. The receptionist had processed hundreds of requests during their time working here. Escort missions, Lost Doodles, Delivery errands, Rescue requests, Citizens asking for help clearing pests from their homes, and Travelers looking for supplies. Even the occasional request from somebody who apparently believed the Help Center was a glorified dating service.
But this?
This was different. Way too hella different.
This was a grown ASS dude with a perfectly respectable reward package essentially walking into a government-funded quest board and saying, Please put my personal rivalry on the public record.
He hated that this conversation somehow made perfect sense.
His thumb rubbed against the edge of the request paper as he looked over the reward list once more. One Enchanted Emerald. Ten thousand dollars. Eight hundred Gems. It was an absurd amount of compensation for what was, technically, just a Doodle battle. Most people would have accepted the request purely for the payout without even caring who Jack wanted them to fight.
Their eyebrows climbed.
“…You’re paying that much?”
Jack merely shrugged.
“I want them to accept.”
The receptionist stared at him.
“Jack.”
“What?”
“Player is going to accept.”
There was something about the way he said it that made Jack pause. At least, not the usual kind Jack carried around like another piece of equipment. It was a certainty. Absolute, unreasonable certainty that the Player would see the request, notice the reward, and immediately take the bait. The receptionist sighed through their nose.
“You really have thought this through.”
“I usually do.” Jack’s smile disappeared. The receptionist folded the paper neatly, tapping its edge against the counter to straighten it before slipping it beneath the counter with the other pending requests. There was no hesitation this time. No questions. No discussion. No attempt to figure out why Jack kept doing this.
They simply reached for the pinning stamp.
THUNK. Approved.
Jack watched the stamp come down.
“Done.”
“That easy?”
“You’re the one paying.”
“Fair… Thanks.”
The receptionist watched him turn away.
There was something almost unnerving about how quickly he accepted the answer. No lingering. No second-guessing. No checking whether they had actually done it. He simply walked toward the entrance as though the entire exchange had been nothing more than another item on an increasingly bizarre list of errands.
He did not pin the request.
They had every reason to. The paper was legitimate, Jack had walked out with the same expectation he always seemed to carry whenever he submitted one of these increasingly ridiculous challenges. Yet their hand remained stubbornly still above the bulletin board. Instead, they kept the parchment in front of them, one thumb resting against its edge while their eyes lingered on the title.
PLAYER, FIGHT ME! It was straightforward. Almost painfully so. There was nothing technically wrong with it, and yet something about seeing Jack’s name attached to another request specifically addressed to the Player made the receptionist hesitate. It had become a pattern by now, one that was becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss as coincidence. The receptionist eventually lowered the paper back onto the desk and leaned into their chair with a tired exhale, the old wooden frame creaking beneath their weight.
Henry noticed immediately.
He pushed himself away from the pillar and wandered over, glancing first at the receptionist and then at the still-unpinned request. His eyebrows rose with an expression of genuine confusion.
“You’re seriously not putting it up?” he asked, leaning forward enough to catch another glimpse of the title. “You’ve pinned Jack’s requests before, and usually you barely even read them. Half the time he doesn’t even finish explaining what he wants before you’re already reaching for the board. So what’s different now? Did he finally ask for something stupid enough that even the Help Center has standards?”
The receptionist gave a small shrug, but their eyes never left the paper. They slowly dragged one finger beneath the words PLAYER, FIGHT ME! before letting their hand fall flat against the desk.
“It’s not the request itself,” they muttered. “It’s Jack.” Henry’s expression became even more puzzled, prompting the receptionist to give a humorless little scoff before leaning back.
“You remember Graphite Lodge, don’t you? That’s where this whole thing started. Back when the Player was still just some outsider wandering around without a clue what they were doing. They came here, looked at the request board, and apparently decided they were going to solve every single problem anyone had posted. Didn’t matter how tedious it was, didn’t matter how far away the objective was, didn’t matter how much trouble it was going to cause them. They just kept taking requests. One after another. Do citizens need something delivered? Player takes it. Somebody needs help dealing with some ridiculous local problem? The player takes that one too.”
The receptionist’s mouth curled into a faint smile at the memory. “And then they took Jack’s.”
Henry’s expression shifted as the memory came back to him.
“Wait,” he said, slowly. “That was the first one?”
“Yep.”
“And Jack lost?”
“Yep.”
Henry stared at the request again.
“And then he submitted another?”
The receptionist nodded.
“And another?”
Another nod.
“And another?”
The receptionist finally looked at him.
“Five.”
Henry’s mouth fell slightly open. “Five?”
“Five.”
He looked toward the door Jack had exited through, then back toward the paper, as if suddenly trying to piece together a puzzle whose pieces had been sitting directly in front of him for months. “Hold on. You’re telling me this guy has been following the Player around from city to city, submitting increasingly ridiculous battle requests, paying increasingly ridiculous rewards, and we’re only now realizing that’s weird?”
“Pretty much.”
“But why?”
“That's why I want to ask him, dumbass!!”
“Wow, harsh bro…”
The receptionist sighed, the sound carrying the exhaustion of someone who had already asked themselves the same question too many times. They picked up the request and turned it over between their fingers, watching the parchment bend slightly under the pressure. “At first, I thought it was pride. Jack loses, gets annoyed, wants a rematch. That’s normal. Happens all the time. A strong tamer doesn’t like losing to somebody new, so they try again. Then they lose again, so they try harder. That’s still normal.” Their fingers stopped moving. “But Jack didn’t stop.”
Henry listened quietly.
“He changed his teams,” the receptionist continued, voice becoming more thoughtful. “Changed his approach. Started studying what the Player used in previous battles. He’d ask questions. Not directly, obviously. Jack’s too proud for that. He’d phrase everything like he was gathering information for some unrelated reason, but we all knew what he was doing. He wanted to know what the Player had used. What they struggled against. What they preferred. Which Doodles they brought out first. Which ones they saved. How they reacted when a strategy failed.” The receptionist’s gaze dropped toward the title again. “He started paying attention.”
Henry frowned.
“Attention?”
“Yeah.”
The receptionist leaned forward, lowering their voice as though the building itself might overhear them. “That’s what bothers me. Jack doesn’t just want to beat the Player anymore. He’s interested in them. Every time he comes in, he asks about them. Every request is for them. Every battle is with them. He acts like they’re some impossible wall he has to climb, and instead of getting tired of hitting it, he keeps coming back with another hammer.”
Henry slowly crossed his arms.
“So you’re saying he’s obsessed?” The receptionist grimaced. Obsessed. Neither wanted to say it too loudly, before Henry could ask another question the front door opened again.
Jack walked back inside. Snow clung to him again, suggesting that whatever errand had taken him outside had been short enough that the cold hadn’t even had time to settle properly. His sunglasses remained perfectly in place, though there was a faint tension in his jaw that hadn’t been there earlier.
He closed the door behind himself and approached the counter with the same measured stride as before, though this time there was something almost impatient beneath it. He reached into his coat and produced a small pouch, followed by a thick bundle of cash and a container holding the Gems.
One by one, he placed them on the counter with deliberate care: the Enchanted Emerald first, its surface catching the warm lamplight; the stack of ten thousand dollars beside it; and finally the eight hundred Gems, each one clicking softly against the container as he set it down.
Henry stared.
“…What?”
“You came back.”
“I forgot to deposit the reward.”
The receptionist glanced down at the counter, staring at the small fortune now sitting between them.
He began to gather the reward items one by one, checking each carefully before placing them into the appropriate storage compartments. The emerald disappeared into a padded case. The cash was counted twice. The Gems were registered and locked away. Only once everything was accounted for did the receptionist close the drawer and rest both hands on the counter.
“Jack.”
Jack paused halfway through turning toward the door.
“What?”
The receptionist hesitated.
There was a question sitting behind their teeth that suddenly seemed much harder to ask now that Jack was standing directly in front of them. They had spent years processing requests. They had dealt with angry citizens, desperate tamers, ridiculous errands, dangerous expeditions, and people offering embarrassing amounts of money for the strangest favors imaginable. Yet somehow, asking Jack about one particular tamer felt far more invasive than any of those things.
Still, they decided enough was enough.
“Can I ask you something?”
Jack slowly turned back.
His head tilted, the movement subtle but unmistakably confused. “About what?”
The receptionist gestured vaguely toward the request.
“The Player.”
Jack went completely still.
Not dramatically. Not enough for someone who didn’t know him to notice. But the receptionist did, Henry did too. There was a fractional pause in Jack’s breathing, a slight tightening of his shoulders beneath his coat, and the faintest movement of his fingers inside his pockets. It was almost comical how quickly the composure returned.
“What about them?”
The receptionist studied him.
“You’ve been battling them for a while now.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve lost to them a lot.”
Jack’s jaw tightened.
“That is an unnecessarily phrased observation.”
Henry quietly coughed into his fist to conceal a laugh. The receptionist ignored him, again.
“And yet you keep coming back.”
Jack’s expression remained unreadable behind his sunglasses, but his head turned slightly toward the window, as though suddenly finding the snow outside considerably more interesting than the conversation. “They’re a strong opponent.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Jack looked back.
The receptionist held his gaze.
For once, Jack didn’t immediately have an answer.
The tension lingered between the three of them, strangely heavier than the Enchanted Emerald. His head turned toward the receptionist, but there was a noticeable hesitation in his posture now; his shoulders weren’t quite as relaxed, and the hand buried inside his jacket pocket had curled loosely into a fist. For someone who had spent so much time cultivating an image of effortless confidence, he suddenly looked remarkably like a man who had been backed into a corner without a battle to fight his way out of it.
The receptionist waited patiently, refusing to rescue him from the silence. Henry, however, wasn’t nearly as merciful. He pushed himself away from the pillar and wandered closer, squinting at Jack with the critical expression of someone examining a particularly suspicious Doodle. His eyes traveled over Jack’s face, lingering beneath the sunglasses before drifting toward the faint shadows visible beneath them.
“You know,” Henry said slowly, “now that we’re actually looking at you up close, you look like absolute shit.”
Jack’s head snapped toward him.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“I look fine!”
“Oh yeah? When?”
“Today.”
Henry folded his arms. “That’s what everyone says when they haven’t slept.”
Jack’s mouth tightened into a thin line.
Henry continued before he could object. “You’ve got bags under your eyes, man. Real ones. Not ‘I stayed up late once’ bags, either. I’m talking about the kind you get when you’ve spent several consecutive nights staring at the ceiling wondering why your strategy keeps getting folded like a scrambled egg.”
He pointed toward Jack’s sunglasses. “And don’t think those things hide everything. I’ve seen you come in here before sunrise. I’ve seen you leave after midnight. Sometimes you’ve got notes with you. Sometimes you’re muttering about moves under your breath. One time, I watched you spend twenty minutes staring at a piece of paper as if it had personally betrayed you.”
Henry’s expression became increasingly amused as Jack’s face grew increasingly irritated. “And every single time, it’s the same person you’re trying to figure out.”
Jack said nothing.
“The Player.”
The receptionist slowly leaned back in their chair, watching the exchange with a look that was becoming increasingly sympathetic. Henry’s teasing had begun as a joke, but there was something undeniably serious beneath it. Jack really did look exhausted. The sunglasses might have hidden his eyes, but they couldn’t hide the slight dullness in his movements or the way his shoulders seemed heavier than they had when he’d first entered the building. Even his usual confidence felt different now—not gone, exactly, but strained, like a coat worn thin after years of use.
Henry’s voice softened.
“So I’m asking you seriously, Jack. Is there something else behind all this?”
Jack looked at him.
“Behind what?”
“The requests. The battles. The sleepless nights. The fact that you keep throwing increasingly ridiculous rewards at one particular tamer just to get them to fight you.”
Henry gestured toward the counter. “Because if this is just about winning, then fine. You’re competitive. I get it. But if it’s more than that, then maybe you should actually say what your motivation is.”
Jack’s fingers shifted inside his pockets.
“Motivation?” Henry shrugged, “Yeah. You’ve clearly got a reason you’re doing this. Maybe even one you haven’t admitted to yourself yet.”
Jack stared at him.
For a moment, he looked like he might laugh.
Instead, he sighed. It was a long, exhausted sound that seemed to empty whatever resistance he’d been holding onto. His shoulders lowered slightly, and one hand finally emerged from his jacket pocket. He dragged his fingers across his face, stopping briefly at the bridge of his nose before letting his arm fall again. Eventually, Jack exhaled. It was a long, tired breath, one that seemed to drain some of the stubbornness from his shoulders along with it.
“…Fine.” He paused, glancing between the receptionist and Henry.
“I’ll explain.” The receptionist leaned back, arms crossing comfortably, while Henry gave him his full attention. Jack looked toward the window instead of either of them, watching snow fall beyond the frosted glass.
“Before I met the Player, I was coasting.” His voice was quieter than before. “That’s the simplest way I can put it—I had a job. DoodleCo gave me a direction, I suppose. A paycheck, Obligations. Something that kept me occupied. But eventually, I realized I wasn’t actually going anywhere. I was just… moving.” The receptionist’s expression gradually softened. Jack’s voice carried no bitterness toward his former job— but his mouth twisted into a humorless smile. With a strange emptiness, as though he had finally realized how little of himself he had actually put into the life he had been living.
“There was nothing wrong enough to make me change it, but there wasn’t anything meaningful enough to make me excited about tomorrow, either.”
“Then I met the Player,” Jack continued. “The first time I fought them, I thought it would be easy. I wasn’t expecting anything special. They were an outsider. New to the region. No reputation. No reason for me to think they could actually challenge me.” A small laugh escaped him, almost embarrassed by the memory.
“I wasn’t expecting it. I thought I’d win—I had experience, I had a good team, and I knew what I was doing. Then this outsider walks in and dismantles everything I thought I understood.”
He shook his head faintly, almost embarrassed by the memory.
“At first, I thought I’d simply made a mistake. So I adjusted. I changed my team. Changed my approach. I tried to anticipate them. I figured the second battle at Vonsweets would be different.” His fingers curled slightly. “It wasn’t.”
Another pause.
“Then came the third. Fourth. Fifth. Every time I thought I had finally found the answer, they changed something. Sometimes I changed everything and still couldn’t even get close to beating them. I’d spend an entire night thinking I’d finally found the perfect strategy, only to realize halfway through the next battle that the Player had already adapted to it.”
Jack laughed quietly, though there was genuine disbelief buried beneath the sound. His voice had changed. The usual dry confidence was still there, but it had softened around the edges, as though he had finally stopped trying to keep every emotion locked behind his sunglasses. He rested one hand against the counter and stared down at the wood grain.
“It was infuriating.” His expression softened. “But it was also the first time in years that I actually wanted to wake up the next morning.”
He looked down at the floor. “I started thinking about battles when I wasn’t battling. I started looking forward to traveling somewhere because I knew there was a chance they’d be there. I started improving because I wanted to see how far I could push myself against them. And somewhere along the way…”
Jack’s voice faltered for the briefest moment. “I realized they gave me a purpose. How that opened my eyes to see how empty my life had become until someone gave me a reason to care about what happened next.” The words hung in the air. Jack seemed almost embarrassed by the admission, his shoulders drawing inward as if he could somehow retreat from his own confession.
“A better one than my job ever did.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
Jack seemed to realize how vulnerable that sounded only after the words had already left his mouth. He shifted awkwardly, straightening his posture and attempting to recover some of the composure he had lost.
“That sounds ridiculously sentimental when I say it out loud.” He gave a small, awkward cough. “Sorry. Again. I got too sentimental, didn't I?”
The receptionist stared at him, Henry stared at him. Both men stared at him; Jack slowly looked between the two.
“What?”
Neither answered.
Jack frowned.
“What?”
Henry’s eyebrows slowly climbed higher and Jack's expression became increasingly suspicious. The receptionist finally leaned back in their chair.
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t a nothing look.”
Henry crossed his arms.
“No, no. Keep going.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses.
“You’re both making a face.”
“We’re listening.”
“You’re judging me.”
“We’re absolutely judging you.”
Jack sighed.
“I knew this was a mistake.”
Henry’s innocent expression only made it worse.
Jack looked between them, realizing with growing horror that whatever dignity he had walked into the Help Center with had been thoroughly dismantled in less than ten minutes. He rubbed his forehead and sighed, though despite his embarrassment, the corner of his mouth betrayed the faintest hint of amusement.
“I hate talking to people.”
The receptionist smiled.
“No, you hate talking about your feelings.”
Jack paused.
“…That too.”
Henry was the first to break the uncomfortable silence, though this time there was no laughter in his voice. He had been watching Jack carefully throughout the entire confession, and although the teasing remained faintly visible in his expression, there was now something more curious beneath it. He leaned against the counter, studying Jack with the same patient attention one might give someone who had accidentally stumbled into an answer they had been avoiding for months.
“Okay,” Henry said slowly, “I get the whole purpose thing. I actually do.”
Jack glanced toward him, still visibly embarrassed from having admitted so much. Henry continued, “You found someone who actually challenged you. Someone who made you want to improve instead of just going through the motions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
He paused, tilting his head. “But you keep talking about what the Player does for you. How they motivate you. How they give you something to look forward to. How you study them, build teams around them, think about them when you’re not battling them…”
Jack’s posture gradually stiffened. Henry’s eyes narrowed slightly, and a knowing grin began forming. “So here’s the question you keep dodging.” Jack immediately looked suspicious. “What question?” Henry’s grin widened. “Do you actually feel something particular about Player?”
Jack stared at him.
The question should have been easy to dismiss. He had dismissed harder questions before. He could either have simply laughed, shrugged, and called it ridiculous. He could have said the same things: that the Player was merely a strong opponent, a rival, an obstacle worth overcoming. Any of those answers would have been perfectly reasonable. They were answers he had used before, after all. Yet this time, the words refused to come.
Henry’s question settled somewhere deep in his thoughts and began pulling at memories he had carefully filed away under battle-related. The Player standing across from him before a fight. The moment they surprised him with a strategy he hadn’t anticipated. The frustration of losing. The strange exhilaration that followed when he realized he had discovered something new.
The way he sometimes caught himself wondering where they had gone whenever they weren’t around. The fact that he knew the sound of their footsteps approaching a Help Center before he even turned around. The way his attention always seemed to find them in a crowded street without conscious effort before the player could even spot Jack.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
It was quieter than everything else he had said.
Henry didn’t tease him this time.
The receptionist remained silent, watching Jack carefully.
Jack swallowed, his thoughts becoming increasingly difficult to organize. “I know I enjoy fighting them,” he said eventually. “I know I respect them. I know they’re interesting. I know I want to keep improving because of them.” He paused, his brow furrowing as though he were attempting to solve a problem that refused to behave logically.
“But whether there’s something beyond that…” He shook his head. “I haven’t figured that part out.”
Henry nodded. “Then maybe that’s the part you should figure out.”
Jack gave him a skeptical look. “You make that sound simple.”
“It probably isn’t.”
“Then why suggest it?”
“Because you’ve already spent weeks figuring out everything else.”
Jack fell silent.
Henry shrugged. “You’ve studied their Doodles. Their moves, habits, and battle patterns. You’ve probably memorized half their favorite strategies by now. But you’ve never bothered studying the person using them.” He gave Jack a small, almost sympathetic smile. “Maybe that’s why you keep feeling like you’re missing something.”
Jack stared at him.
That sentence struck harder than it should have.
He had spent so much time analyzing the Player as an opponent that he had never considered how little he actually knew about them outside a battle. He knew their strengths. Their weaknesses, tendencies, and their favorite approaches. But those were pieces of a tamer, not the tamer themselves.
He exhaled.
“…That’s irritatingly reasonable.”
Henry smiled.
“I get that a lot.”
Jack glanced toward the clock, and his expression suddenly changed.
“Wait.”
The receptionist looked up as Jack checked the time again.
“I should be leaving.”
Henry raised an eyebrow.
“Where?”
“The next city.”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
Jack straightened his coat, suddenly busying himself with it as though the last ten minutes had never happened. “I’ve wasted enough time here.”
The receptionist stared at him.
“You’ve been standing here voluntarily talking about your feelings for the last ten minutes. You explained your job, your existential boredom, your rivalry with Player, your sleep deprivation, and your emotional attachment to—”
“I’m leaving.”
Jack turned sharply toward the entrance.
He had barely taken two steps before he muttered under his breath, mostly to himself, “Fantastic. I’ve been venting to two people in a Help Center about some tamer I met.”
Jack had almost made it out.
His hand had already closed around the handle of the side exit, a narrower wooden door tucked along the wall beside the reception area. Unlike the main entrance at the front of the Help Center, this door opened directly onto a smaller side street that ran the side of the building, which meant Jack could escape without having to walk past the reception desk again.
That was exactly what he wanted.
His shoulders were already angled toward the exit, and he was mentally preparing himself to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Help Center before either Henry or the receptionist could find another question capable of making him regret having functional vocal cords.
He had already endured the humiliation of explaining his motivation, admitting that the Player had somehow become a source of purpose in his life, and—far worse—acknowledging that he was curious about them beyond their battle habits. That was enough—more than enough.
He needed to leave, get back on the road, find somewhere quiet, and preferably never think about the conversation again and train his doodles. He could pretend none of it happened. He could return to being Wayfarer Jack: mysterious, composed, vaguely irritating, and emotionally unavailable enough that nobody would ever have reason to ask him what he was thinking.
Simple. Clean. Dignified.
Then the main entrance opened.
The sound came from across the Help Center, near the front of the building. The heavy wooden door swung inward with a long creak, and a gust of icy air swept across the reception area. Snowflakes scattered over the floor, catching in the warm lamplight before melting into tiny dark spots against the wood.
Jack froze.
His hand remained wrapped around the handle of the side door.
Slowly, he turned his head. The Player had just stepped through the main entrance. For one horrible second, Jack simply stared.
They had apparently just returned from healing their Doodles, their equipment still carrying the faint signs of travel through Icyridge’s frozen roads. They looked completely ordinary. Completely calm. Completely unaware of the psychological catastrophe that had just occurred on the other side of the room.
Snow clung to their clothes and boots as they entered, brushing themselves off before looking toward the reception counter. The Player closed the main door behind them and turned toward the reception counter, apparently intending to collect the reward for their latest request.
Jack, meanwhile, was still standing several yards away at the side exit, one hand gripping the door handle as though he had suddenly forgotten how doors worked. Jack was currently experiencing the psychological equivalent of being hit by every Doodle on his own team simultaneously.
He remembered everything he’d said.
Every word. Every stupid, embarrassingly sincere, deeply personal sentence he’d just spent the last twenty minutes unloading onto the receptionist and Henry—but also from the previous fight with him and the Player.
And now the person he’d been talking about was standing approximately ten feet away from him.
The receptionist was standing beside him, staring at Jack with an expression that was becoming increasingly difficult to describe as anything other than barely contained amusement.
Jack looked away.
Traitors.
He released the side-door handle with considerably more dignity than he felt and turned away from the exit.
The Player hadn’t noticed him yet.
That somehow made things worse.
Jack stood there for a moment, caught between the side door he’d intended to escape through and the person he’d just spent the better part of half an hour talking about. For the first time in his entire career as a wayfarer tamer, Wayfarer Jack had encountered a situation where absolutely none of his strategies applied.
Then, with the reluctant resignation of someone walking toward his own execution, Jack stepped away from the side entrance and crossed the Help Center toward the reception counter. There was a strange awkwardness to his movements now. Jack was accustomed to approaching battles with confidence, to walking into situations knowing precisely what he intended to do and how he intended to accomplish it.
This was different. There was no opponent to predict, no move to counter, no battle strategy to fall back on. For several long seconds, Player finally noticed him.
And neither Jack nor the Player moved.
The silence between them was not the comfortable sort that had existed in the Help Center before Jack arrived. This one was painfully conscious, stretched thin between two people who were suddenly aware of one another in a way they had never quite been before. Jack stood several feet from the counter with one hand still buried in his coat pocket, his shoulders held just a little too rigidly, while the Player remained near the reception desk. Apparently waiting to collect the reward they had earned.
They looked at him with the same quiet curiosity they always seemed to carry into their encounters, their expression difficult to read but their attention unmistakably fixed on him.
Jack hated how quickly he noticed it.
The slight tilt of the Player’s head was barely anything—a small, almost imperceptible movement that another person might have overlooked entirely—but Jack recognized it immediately. He had seen it countless times across their battles, usually in those brief moments when the Player encountered something unexpected or was silently trying to make sense of a situation. It was such a tiny mannerism, one that had no practical significance in a battle and certainly shouldn’t have been important enough for him to memorize, yet somehow his mind had catalogued it anyway. The realization irritated him more than it should have. He had spent so much time studying the Player’s Doodles, their strategies, their habits, their preferred approaches to battle, that apparently he had begun memorizing the little things too. Even the things that had absolutely nothing to do with winning.
And now, standing several feet away from them with the full weight of his earlier confession hanging over him, Jack suddenly had no idea what to do with his hands.
His fingers flexed awkwardly inside his pockets before he finally broke the silence.
“You’re here.”
The moment the words left his mouth, Jack internally winced.
Brilliant.
Of course they were here.
They were standing directly in front of him.
The Player blinked once, seemingly processing the painfully obvious statement, before giving him a small nod. Jack cleared his throat and turned his head toward the nearest frost-covered window, suddenly pretending to be fascinated by the delicate patterns forming across the glass. Beyond it, the frozen streets of Icyridge stretched beneath another layer of falling snow, and Jack found himself studying the scenery with an intensity that would have been impressive if he hadn’t been very obviously avoiding eye contact.
“Right,” he muttered, rubbing his thumb along the seam of his glove. “Obviously. Stupid thing to say.”
He forced himself to look back.
“You’re here for the reward.”
Another quiet nod.
Something in Jack’s shoulders loosened by the smallest degree. At least this was simple. The Player had come to collect their payment. He could handle a simple transaction. The reward was straightforward. A completed request had a beginning, an objective, and an end. There were no complicated emotions involved. The Player would collect their payment, Jack would leave, and everyone could pretend that the previous conversation had never happened.
Unfortunately for him, the receptionist had apparently decided that Jack was not going to be allowed the dignity of an easy escape.
They slid the reward across the counter toward the Player, but rather than immediately returning to their paperwork, they leaned back slightly and watched the two tamers with an expression that was far too deliberate to be innocent. Henry caught it too. He glanced toward the receptionist, then toward Jack, and the two exchanged a brief look that communicated far more than either of them dared say aloud.
Jack’s shoulders stiffened.
“What?”
“Nothing,” the receptionist replied far too innocently.
Jack narrowed his eyes behind his sunglasses. “You’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?”
“That thing where you look at me like you know something I don’t.”
Henry suddenly became very interested in a spot on the ceiling.
Jack’s suspicion deepened.
He had endured enough.
“I’m leaving.”
He turned toward the entrance, already mentally preparing himself for the blessed silence of the snowy streets outside, deciding that the smartest course of action was to remove himself from the building before either of them could say anything else.
Unfortunately, the receptionist called after him.
“You’re not going to say anything to Player?”
Jack’s hand stopped just short of the door handle.
His shoulders stiffened.
Slowly, he turned around.
“About what?”
The receptionist gestured vaguely between him and the Player, their expression becoming increasingly amused. “You know. Your little… situation.”
Jack’s jaw tightened.
“There is no situation.”
Henry made a sound suspiciously close to a snort.
Jack ignored him, though the faint tension in his shoulders betrayed just how badly he wanted to escape the conversation. He looked toward the Player again, and the embarrassment was still there, crawling beneath his skin like an uncomfortable heat, but it had begun to mix with something else—resignation.
There was no point pretending anymore. He had spent far too long insisting that his fixation on the Player was nothing more than competitive pride. He had called them an opponent, a challenge, a mountain he needed to climb. He had told himself that every sleepless night spent rebuilding his team was simply dedication to becoming a better tamer.
But now that the Player was standing directly in front of him, he could no longer hide behind those convenient explanations.
The Player simply didn’t speak.
Not because they didn’t have anything to say, and certainly not because they were ignoring him. Speech simply wasn’t something they could freely offer whenever someone expected it. Jack had come to understand that their silence was not a wall meant to keep everyone out; it was simply part of the way they moved through the world. They communicated through gestures, expressions, movements, and the quiet certainty with which they carried themselves. Jack had spent enough time around them to recognize some of those things now.
And, strangely, that made him more careful with his own words.
He drew in a slow breath, the cold air of the room feeling strangely sharp against his lungs despite the fireplace burning nearby, allowing the cold air of the Help Center to settle his nerves.
“You know…” His voice came out quieter than before. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the confidence that normally accompanied his words noticeably absent. “I’ve been thinking about what I said.”
The Player’s attention sharpened.
Jack noticed immediately—His fingers curled slightly inside his pockets.
“About the battles,” he clarified. “I think I’ve been approaching this whole thing wrong.”
Jack looked down at the wooden floor, following the faint scratches left by years of boots passing through the Help Center. For once, he wasn’t trying to cultivate that usual image of the effortlessly composed Wayfarer who always seemed to know where he was going. He looked tired. More than tired, really. He looked like someone who had finally become exhausted from maintaining an explanation that no longer quite fit.
“When I first fought you, I wanted to win. That’s all it was supposed to be.” His fingers tightened around the fabric inside his pockets. “You beat me, and I couldn’t accept it, sorta. I thought I’d simply misjudged you. Maybe I’d underestimated what you were capable of. So I told myself that if we fought again, I’d fix the mistake.”
“But then I lost again.”
A faint, humorless smile touched his mouth.
“And again.”
He shook his head. The admission carried no bitterness. If anything, there was a strange fondness hidden beneath it, as though the memory itself had become something he could appreciate despite how badly he’d wanted to tear his own strategy notes apart at the time.
“Then I kept doing it. Every time I lost, I’d tell myself the next battle would be different. I’d build another team. I’d change my strategy. I’d look for another counter. I’d spend hours trying to figure out what I had missed.” His mouth twisted into a faint smile. “I’d convince myself that eventually I’d figure you out.”
His gaze settled on the Player.
“But I never did.”
The words lingered between them, Jack let out a slow breath and looked toward the window, watching snow gather along the outside ledge.
“And eventually, I realized something.”
He paused.
“If I actually beat you… what happens afterward?”
The Player remained silent, yet Jack’s expression grew distant, lowering his gaze, his voice becoming softer.
“I spent so much time convincing myself that beating you was the goal that I never stopped to think about what I’d actually do once I accomplished it. I’d finally reached the top of that mountain I’d been climbing toward for months, look over the other side…” His lips curled into a faint, humorless smile. “And there’d be nothing there.”
His fingers slowly loosened.
“Because you were the thing I was climbing toward.”
“…And I genuinely don’t think I want our rivalry to end, not like that.”
The words weren’t dramatic when he said them. If anything, they sounded almost frighteningly sincere. He continued before he could lose his nerve.
“Not because I need to keep proving I’m better than you. Not because I want to keep throwing ridiculous amounts of money at the Help Center until you’ll agree to fight me. And not because I can’t stand losing.”
A small smile appeared.
“Although I absolutely can’t stand losing.”
Henry gave a quiet laugh from behind him.
Jack didn’t even bother looking back.
“I just…” He paused, searching for words that didn’t sound nearly as sentimental as the thought itself. “I don’t want the person who gave me something to look forward to suddenly become someone I used to know.”
That realization seemed to hit Jack the moment he heard himself say it. He immediately looked away.
“###,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “That sounded sentimental again.”
The receptionist stared at him over the top of their paperwork— Jack immediately caught the look.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re thinking about it.”
“I’m thinking of several things.”
“Keep them to yourself.”
“I wasn’t going to say them.”
“You were.”
The Player continued watching Jack, apparently taking in the exchange without judgment. Jack could feel the embarrassment returning, but this time it was tempered by something else—a strange relief. He had said it. He’d finally admitted that the rivalry wasn’t merely about winning, despite his and the player's previous conversation. Then the Player moved, Jack’s attention immediately shifted toward them.
They raised one hand and pointed toward the entrance.
Jack blinked.
“You want to leave?”
The Player nodded.
Jack frowned slightly, until they pointed toward themselves. After that, they pointed toward Jack. Finally, they gestured toward the road visible through the frosted windows.
For a moment, he genuinely couldn’t piece together what they were trying to say. Henry and the receptionist exchanged another glance, but neither interrupted. Jack’s brow furrowed as he studied the Player’s gestures, trying to interpret them with the same intensity he would normally reserve for deciphering an opponent’s battle strategy.
Then it clicked. Wayfarer Jack’s expression changed.
“Are you asking me to come with you?”
The question left Jack more quietly than he intended. He had expected the Player to clarify their gesture somehow, perhaps by pointing toward the road again or reaching for one of their Doodles, but instead they simply nodded. It was such a small movement, almost imperceptible beneath the heavy layers of clothing and the pale light spilling through the Help Center windows, yet it was enough to bring Jack to a complete standstill.
For several seconds, he simply stared at them as though the answer had somehow been far more complicated than the question itself.
Jack froze. Behind him, Henry’s expression lit up with the immediate realization of someone who had just watched the obvious answer finally enter a very stubborn person’s head. The receptionist wasn’t much better. They lifted one hand toward their mouth, hiding what was very obviously a grin behind their knuckles as their eyes flicked between Jack and the Player.
Jack stared at the Player.
Jack, blissfully aware that he was being watched, remained focused entirely on the Player.
“You mean…” His voice faltered, and he glanced toward the door as though the frozen road outside might provide some kind of clarification. It didn’t.
The snow continued to drift past the frosted windows in slow, weightless curtains, occasionally catching the warm light of the Help Center and flashing silver before disappearing into the darkness beyond. Jack looked back at the Player, then toward the entrance again, and finally returned his attention to them with an expression that was caught somewhere between disbelief and reluctant understanding.
“You mean to travel together?”
The Player nodded once more. Something in Jack’s posture shifted.
His first instinct was to reject the idea.
Not because he didn’t want to go, but because wanting to go was precisely what made the proposition so dangerous.
His mind immediately began constructing reasons why it wouldn’t work. He had his own route to follow, places he still needed to visit, obligations that technically required his attention, and a perfectly respectable excuse to continue wandering from city to city on his own. The Player had their own journey as well, particularly the Key Hunt that had been pulling them across the region, and Jack had no intention of inserting himself into something that had nothing to do with him. Traveling together would be inconvenient.
It would complicate their schedules. It might interfere with the Player’s goals. They would inevitably get into arguments or whatever other nonsense happened when two people spent too much time on the same road. He could think of a dozen reasons why it was impractical.
Then another thought slipped quietly through the cracks of all those carefully constructed objections.
Do I want to go?
Jack’s eyes returned to the Player. The answer came almost immediately.
Yes.
He hated how simple it was.
For months, he had treated every decision involving the Player like a calculation. Which Doodle should he use? Which move would counter theirs? Which strategy would force them to adapt? How could he make the next battle different from the last? He had approached their rivalry as though it were some enormous puzzle that could eventually be solved if he gathered enough information and stared at it long enough.
Yet now, when the question had nothing to do with battling, all of that careful reasoning seemed useless.
Jack slowly exhaled, the breath escaping his nose in a faint cloud before disappearing into the cold air near the doorway.
“That would mean we’d actually have to spend time together.”
The Player nodded.
Jack’s gaze lingered on them.
“Outside of battles.”
Another nod.
That answer produced an uncomfortable little flutter somewhere beneath Jack’s ribs. He immediately decided that it was probably caused by the cold.
Obviously.
The cold.
He tugged at the collar of his jacket, unnecessarily adjusting it even though it had been sitting perfectly fine moments earlier. His sunglasses hid his eyes, but they did nothing to conceal the slight tension that had returned to his mouth.
“And you realize I’m not joining you for the Key Hunt, right?”
The Player tilted their head.
Jack raised one hand defensively, as though he needed to establish this boundary before the Player could somehow misunderstand him.
“I mean it. I’m not suddenly becoming another person on your quest.” His voice became more deliberate, his words carrying the practical certainty he usually used when explaining battle strategies.
“That’s your journey, not mine. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish with the Keys, that’s something you’re doing for yourself. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and I’m definitely not going to start acting like I’m some essential part of it.”
He paused.
For a moment, his attention drifted beyond the Player and toward the frosted glass. Through them, the road stretched away into Icyridge’s endless winter, disappearing between snow-covered buildings before eventually leading toward another city, another Help Center, another stretch of wilderness neither of them had seen yet. The thought of that road no longer felt quite as empty as it had when Jack had first walked into the building.
“But…”
His voice softened.
Jack looked back toward the Player.
“I could travel with you.”
The Player’s posture seemed to relax almost imperceptibly, and Jack noticed. Of course he noticed. He had spent enough time studying their battle movements to recognize tiny changes in their body language, but this felt different. This wasn’t a shift in stance before a Doodle battle or the subtle movement that meant they had noticed an opening. This was simply relief—or perhaps happiness. Jack wasn’t entirely sure which.
And strangely, he wanted to know.
“I could see where you’re going,” he continued, his words coming more naturally now that he’d finally admitted the idea aloud. “I could meet the people you meet. See the places you end up wandering into. Maybe figure out why you insist on taking every strange request that gets posted on a Help Center board.” A faint smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “I could find out what you actually do when you’re not dismantling my entire team.”
The Player’s eyes brightened slightly.
Jack’s smile grew.
“And we could still battle.”
The Player nodded almost immediately.
Jack let out a quiet laugh, shaking his head as he looked away.
“Of course you’d agree to that part.”
The tension that had been sitting heavily between his shoulders finally began to loosen. For the first time since the Player had entered the Help Center, the situation no longer felt like something he needed to escape from. There was still embarrassment, certainly, and the lingering awareness that Henry and the receptionist were watching him with the subtle satisfaction of two people who had just successfully pushed him into doing something he’d been too stubborn to consider himself.
But beneath all of that was something else.
Possibility.
Henry finally pushed himself away from the counter. His boots scraped lightly against the wooden floor as he approached, and Jack glanced toward him with immediate suspicion. Henry gestured toward the Player with both hands, his expression practically screaming that he had been waiting for this exact moment.
“Dude,” he said, with the weary patience of someone explaining something painfully obvious to an exceptionally intelligent but exceptionally stubborn man. “Just go with Player.”
Jack stared at him.
Henry shrugged.
“Seriously. You’ve spent months trying to figure out how to beat them. You’ve studied their teams, their strategies, their habits, their battle patterns—hell, you’ve probably memorized the way they breathe before they send out a Doodle.” He motioned toward the Player again. “Maybe, for once, try figuring out who they actually are.”
The words landed harder than Jack expected.
The receptionist nodded from behind the counter, their expression unusually sincere despite the amused glint still lingering in their eyes.
“Henry’s right.”
Jack looked between them both.
For a moment, he seemed genuinely offended by the fact that they had somehow managed to make a reasonable argument.
“You two are unbelievably annoying.”
Henry smiled.
“Perchance.”
Jack gave him a long, unimpressed stare before finally turning his attention back toward the Player.
And then something inside him settled.
It wasn’t dramatic. There was no sudden revelation, no brilliant realization that struck him like lightning. It was quieter than that—a gradual rearranging of thoughts that had been sitting in the wrong places for far too long.
But standing there in the Help Center, with no battle taking place and no Doodles waiting to be sent out, Jack suddenly understood how meaningless all of that knowledge was compared to what he didn’t know.
He didn’t know what places the Player actually enjoyed visiting.
He didn’t know what caught their attention when they entered a new town, whether they preferred wandering through crowded marketplaces or taking the quieter roads between settlements. He didn’t know what kinds of scenery made them stop walking, what foods they liked, what little things they collected without realizing it, or whether they had a favorite place to sit when they needed to rest. He didn’t know what made them laugh.
He didn’t know what made them angry.
He didn’t know what they did when there wasn’t a quest waiting for them.
More importantly, he didn’t know who the Player was when nobody needed them to be a tamer.
Jack had spent so much time attempting to understand the person standing across from him in battle that he had somehow forgotten there was an entire person behind the Doodle team.
And suddenly, that enormous gap in his knowledge seemed far more interesting than any strategy he could devise.
The decision settled over him with a strange sense of finality—not heavy, not frightening, but reassuring. For once, he wasn’t deciding because it would make him stronger or because it would help him win.
He simply wanted to see what happened.
“All right.”
The Player looked at him.
Jack adjusted his sunglasses out of habit, even though they hadn’t moved an inch.
“I’ll go.”
The Player’s expression softened, and they turned toward the entrance.
Jack followed.
Behind them, Henry waited until the two had nearly reached the door before leaning toward the receptionist, lowering his voice as though he were sharing classified information.
“You think it’ll work?”
The receptionist watched the pair through the frosted glass as the door opened and a wave of winter air swept through the Help Center. The Player stepped outside first, their silhouette immediately swallowed by the pale snowfall, while Jack followed a moment later. His dark coat stood out sharply against the endless white, and for once he wasn’t walking several paces ahead with the impatient stride of someone who had somewhere else to be. Instead, he slowed until he was beside the Player.
“Probably.”
Henry’s grin widened.
“And if it doesn’t?”
The receptionist unwrapped another piece of Von’s candy, thoughtfully chewing as they continued watching the two figures disappear down the road.
“Then at least Jack will have something else to obsess over.”
Outside, the cold immediately wrapped itself around them.
Snow swept across the road in pale ribbons, carried by a wind that whispered between the old buildings and sent loose flakes spiraling around their boots. The Player walked ahead at an unhurried pace, leaving a trail of footprints across the untouched snow, and Jack naturally fell into step beside them.
For a while, neither of them said anything. They didn’t need to. The silence between them felt different now—not awkward, not strained, but strangely comfortable. Jack glanced toward the Player once more, the faintest smile touching his face beneath the shadow of his sunglasses.
“Guess we’ll see where this goes.”
The Player didn’t answer.
They simply kept walking.
And somehow, Jack found that perfectly acceptable.