Somewhere in Australia.

The tour group that'd grown over the day like a tumbleweed rolling across the nation's desertous interior left the Egyptian restaurant with their bellies full and their hearts sated. Staff and students exchanged farewells and warm quips about future congregations, before being swifted away for the evening one taxi after another.

Henry turned down several invitations, and he saw the minimalist professor off last. He asked the balding man to apologise on his behalf to the others for needing to skip out on tomorrow's workshops - business matters were calling him back home. Ray inquired what 'business matters' a seventeen-year-old could have; Henry answered cryptically that they'd all find out soon enough. The professor departed with an entreaty for him to at least try being open with the page.

Afterwards, Henry lingered a while outside the restaurant under a bronze plaque with his guild's emblem of a sun on fire. The emptiness after everyone had left was calming. The afternoon sun felt nice baking the bare skin of his forearms and his legs. A gang of ducks that'd been waiting to harass them for left-overs were waddling to the nearby lake, stopping on occasion to give him and his bag of snacks an expectant glance. Henry, ignoring these avian beggars, split a can of a local brand of seaweed-o-nade with Little Liu.

A young woman's head popped gingerly out of the restaurant entrance.

"Yo," Henry waved without bothering to look in her direction. "If your afternoon's free, want to go on a fun date?"

He'd planned to pack his afternoon with laid-back retirement activities regardless of the love campaign's outcome. There was no additional cost or harm in offering this chick a chance to join them. One last shot.

The young woman studied him warily, her caution rising now that they were alone. "…no."

"How about an unfun date?"

"No."

"Sweet as. Sorry for being a dick. Bye." Henry gave another wave, of apology and farewell.

With that, his asinine assault on love truly came to an end.

At least in regards to this chick. He might resume his training soon and search for other targets to flail against. It would depend on his mood.

At the beep of a prioritised message, he checked his e-assistant. Caramel had sent him the latest update on Senior Director Okai Van and the other conspirators in the arms smuggling ring. It was almost time for him to execute them.

His digital twin had anticipated that Karnon might show up to complicate matters. The Trickster God would likely blow up the Trading Post where Henry would be conducting the execution, kill everyone in the surroundings, including Caramel's character, who'd lose the Legendary rapier, Worldpiercer, Henry'd lent her. After Karnon stole the artifact and refused to return it, Alex, obsessed with Ortheerian swords, would have The Company retaliate by annexing part of the God's homeland of Togavi in compensation.

Or not. There were hundreds of other possibilities. That scenario was actually a positive one, although Alex would be displeased by the final outcome when Karnon stole his zweihander, Worlddevourer, too.

Reading the message, he motioned the chick he'd been harassing—stuck inside the restaurant out of fear of walking past him—towards a taxi idling by the side of the road. "Take it if you want. I've been summoned for a teleconference call soon, so I'll be loitering here a while longer. Don't feel anxious about tomorrow's workshops; we're flying out in the morning." He took a sip of his seaweed-o-nade, his tongue bathing in the refreshing citrusy-salt flavour of a lemon tree sprouting from a tropical atoll, and he sighed. "So seaweed also has things it's not compatible with…Little Larry, this tastes horrendous."

Little Liu nodded but nevertheless grabbed the can back due to a fiendish sugar addiction spiked up by the day of constant bribes.

The young woman dawdled a moment, attempting to solve the succession of non-sequiturs for whatever dangers might be hinted at inside of them. She found nothing. Henry appeared to have given up.

Carefully, the young woman stepped into the open and inched towards the taxi, retaining the danger all the while in her peripheral vision until she'd moved beyond h—

She span around to catch him!

Henry was showing Little Liu a slideshow on his e-assistant.

The young woman creased her lips in doubt. Very suspicious. He must be instructing the toddler in the steps of the next play, tricking another innocent into the next exhibition of his shamelessness. What a manipulative arsehole.

Snorting in dismissal, she sped on before the trap could be laid, the taxi ahead swinging open its door—she froze.

Not daring to approach the vehicle closer, she examined the backseat from afar, checking for the shape of a location tracker, the sparkles of a ring. It seemed to be clea—her head snapped towards a flash of colour in her peripheral visi—

It was a duck.

The young woman, sweat beading on her brow, examined the bird for attached gifts, for mechanical mechanisms, for a trained trick.

The duck, realising this human had no left-overs, quacked in annoyance and waddled off after its departing kin.

The young woman continued to observe the waddling animal with caution. However, nothing seemed to happen. Beside the quacking and the creaking of furniture being arranged in the restaurant, the world was quiet.

Too quiet…

She snapped back around again.

Henry still hadn't budged.

"Paragliding?" Henry said. "Dude, do you understand what that is?"

The toddler mimed holding the lines of a paraglider and swerving while being buffeted about on the high-altitude winds.

"Hmm…it seems harmless to me, but we'll have to get Mrs Withers' approval. She wasn't happy with the snake-handling class."

The young woman listening to the conversation frowned. Surely, Henry couldn't be dumb enough to take a two-year—no, she stopped herself. This was obvious bait.

Snorting derisively, she leapt into the taxi—

Sighing, she got out of the vehicle and reapproached the pair, coughing to churn back up the gravel of her fake voice. "Excuse me."

The pair stopped in unison, looking up from the slideshow in confusion.

Henry was clueless. "Oh, are you broke? Taxi, I'll pay for the lady!" His e-assistant buzzed with a confirmation.

The young woman winced. "I'm financially stable. Before leaving, I just wanted to suggest, as a bit of food for thought, that paragliding might not be the wisest activity for a toddler."

"Why not?"

"Well..."

In a strange back and forth, the young woman explained to Henry why he shouldn't take his nephew paragliding. It hadn't occurred to him that it could be potentially traumatic if the kid freaked out mid-way and wanted to stop but couldn't due to being suspended a thousand metres in the air without a quick method to descend. Eventually, after an exchange between him and the toddler, in which the toddler mimed the number of hours he'd accumulated in high-altitude adventures and Henry pointed out the flaw of this lie due to his 'immature spacetime-sense' before offering pointers for covering this weakness in the future, the pair devised a compromise of hot-air ballooning. With hot-air ballooning, they reasoned, the rise would be gradual enough to abort in case the toddler had an unaccounted for discomfort with heights.

Henry flicked a thumbs up. "Have the fare as thanks. Don't worry. I'm filthy rich. Ride straight to London if you want."

The young woman, taking a while to settle on hot air ballooning actually being a compromise, realised that this hadn't seemed to be a scheme and he was genuinely discussing an itinerary with the toddler while being socially inept. Giving them a farewell nod, she resumed her flight from—she glanced back.

The pair had returned to the slideshow, picking out another activity.

"Relax," Henry assured her. "I had planned to check that off with the kid's nanny first. The rest, too."

"Right..." The young woman replied, having indeed heard that.

Lingering for another uneventful moment, the young woman turned around for good, walked away, and hopped in the taxi.

It seemed to be over, the young woman thought.

The young woman had survived…the young woman had gotten away with it…

Candace McGrath, better known to her family as Caddy, her online friends and the world as Silver Wolf, finally dropped the anonymity she'd been maintaining externally and internally. Her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses exploded with a day's worth of suppressed shock.

Holy dog crap on fire! What the hell was that? Why was Henry here? Why was he hitting on her so aggressively? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

Why?

Was this hell? Did she have an aneurism on the flight and end up landing in hell? Had Satan dressed up as Henry to enact her divine punishment through a nightmarish circus of humiliations?

Ugh. What an abomination of a day! Ugh! Each event had become a bug crawling under her skin, infiltrating the fibres of her neurons, refusing to leave! Ugh! Why was he so cringe?! Why was she so cringe?! Her voice, her acting…Ugh. Hiding in the bathr—oh no. Ugh. Feigning ignorance of popcorn—Ughh!

After this, she would never ever lie again for the rest of her life. The devil could stop now; she'd learned her lesson. No lying ever again.

That's what all her troubles had begun with: a tiny, insignificant white lie.

It began over a year ago now, at a gathering for their writing circle. They'd been discussing one the member's latest novel, a romance inspired by the Virtual Realist movement and the drama of players falling in love using their inauthentic online presentations. This conversation evolved into members sharing their modifications to their own avatars, leading to the question being asked of herself.

Her? She used her real appearance.

Well, to be precise, she'd used her real appearance – she had at a previous point.

Buying the game, she'd been committed to bucking the trend of the vapid girls at school who'd based their characters off of celebrities or beautified their genuine appearances to the point of unrecognisability. She wasn't like the other girls. Confident in her own skin, immune to peer pressure, she rose above vanity and uploaded her natural self, pimples and all.

But the issue, she soon realised, wasn't how you looked but how everyone else looked. When every player in Saana had made herself into these long-legged beauties with shiny hair and flawless skin tone and delicate barbie-doll profiles, standing beside them turned you, an average Jane Public, into Gollum from The Lord of The Rings. If the camera added ten pounds, the VR unit added a hundred. In group photos, in videos, in any reflective surface, you would be assaulted by the image of your short, cretinous form, sticking out amongst these impossibly-proportioned Amazonians like a painfully-ugly thumb. The experience crushed the soul.

In the end, she admitted defeat. Lacking the stomach for transmogrification surgery, she deleted her character, restarted with a new one. To preserve her ego a little, she let the system randomise her avatar and performed the humiliating beautification on it instead of herself.

So what? Everyone else who was normal had done the same.

At their writing circle meeting, when she'd been tasked to list her aesthetic alterations, she was just about to without any embarrassment when she caught a certain pretentious arsehole eavesdropping off to the side. Of course, Henry, the absolute psycho, did use his real appearance. In a sanctimonious Buddha act, he waltzed around their bookstore in the rags of his own ordinary skin, condemning through his humble example the rest of them who'd succumbed to their fickle vanity. 'Oh, you guys changed your avatar? Why? What's the reasoning for that? Is it a pleb thing? [Insert monologue somehow relating this to their writing skill].' He never said that explicitly, but the accusation was there, in the eyes. Thus, with this pompous, pious Buddha analysing her over his lowered book, his shifty eyes absorbing the twitches of her face for signs of admittance, she'd felt her heart swelling with resistance. She recalled her past shame. She could hear the extra smugness in his next berating speech. 'Silver, you wolf in pleb's clothing, even if you haven't got an authentic bone in 'your' body, at least tryyyy to give one to your characters.' What an arse! So that's why, in that moment, her heart knowing not to hand him the dagger with which he'd stab it, she'd told the tiny white lie.

'Me? I used my real appearance.'

Ugh.

Before she knew it, without her ever again explicitly corroborating it, that small, one-off fib had grown beyond her control. Scumbags in their writing circle were falling in love, her PR agent was begging her to guest-star on television shows, crazy fans to whom the 'truth' had leaked began to inundate her with viler messages. Her e-mail inbox contained multiple offers from seedy websites counting down the days until her next birthday. Humanity was so gross...

And of them all, Henry was the grossest for forcing this curse upon her with his holier-than-thou Buddha performance.

But that was the past.

Going to university, now, changing her environment, she'd decided to leave this one-off mistake behind her. Her first act of cleansing had been listing her novels in her college application. She put them on the front page of her resume alongside her non-Silver-Wolf portrait. In doing so, she'd accepted that the truth would soon be leaked, that she would have to clarify the silly misunderstanding and endure a torrent of public hate by dudes angry at being tricked. Having steeled her nerves, though, nothing happened. The university—maybe staffed by old zoomers who didn't quite understand the gravity of her crimes—failed to comment on her charade and sent her an invitation for a private tour.

She'd seemed to be in the clear for now.

The first professor who welcomed her mentioned another invited student. He was an author, HL, notorious in their circle for transforming Wolfgang Plattner's wonderful novella Leaves into an unreadable 2000-page 'Post-Maximalist' monstrosity. To the faculty's astonishment, the author turned out to be a random kid from New Zealand – coincidentally, he was the same age as herself! She, the fool who'd had the audacity to imagine getting away with it, was struck by an immediate sense of dread, her stomach rising into her ribs like before the drop on a rollercoaster she had unwittingly been strapped into. As she poured over the pages of the professor's copy of 'HL's' doorstopper, she was beset in the text's wordy, multi-lingual, neologism-dense prose by a familiar impression. Pretentious - his writing style outside the game, somehow, was even more pretentious.

That's when he appeared.

That should have, in her new pledge to openness and truth, been when she'd come clean. She should have laughed it off in embarrassment. 'Henry! Hey, it's me. You know, the 'alpha-pleb'? Haha. The avatar? Funny that. Actually, I meant used my real appearance – I did, but now I don't. Oh? You'd been listening to that statement in a different language without the tense ambiguity? Haha. Well, that's humiliating…yeah, I straight up lied. Haha. Silly me. Insecurity! Hahaha.' And with anyone else, she could have, maybe, put herself through this degrading disclosure. But not with him.

Confronted by him in the flesh, the very architect of her predicament...bearing witness to his unadjusted pompous Buddha face…reminded by his pretentious smile of last night's travesty, the hours and hours of the festival in which Henry, the lecher, had encouraged his 'stalker-fan' to flaunt her own stupidly pretty real appearance by buying her dresses and jewellery…fixed upon by the invasive studying of his eyes, the prying questioning. 'What genres do you dabble in?' Under this mounting, choking pressure, Candace discovered a comically deep voice escaping from her lips, masking the one traceable aspect of herself that'd carried over in-game. 'Me?'

One word. That one word, that one instant of vulnerability, set her on the path of continued doom.

Ugh.

Why?

Why was Henry so manipulative?

And why couldn't that have been the conclusion? Their tour had only been scheduled for a few hours. Keeping her head low, she should have been able to reach the end without igniting any of his suspicions, Henry's atrocious people-reading skills detecting nothing. Then, quietly, she could apply for a different university in a different continent and, if possible, a different universe. It should have been fine.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

How could she have anticipated that he would start hitting on her that aggressively? And persistently – on and on, constant corny lines, constant startles, constant trials little and large thrown at her, each threatening, at any microsecond lapse of her vigilance, to expose her for that one white lie. One digging attack followed another, his random concert where he basically tried to eye-fuck her while goofing off on the piano, his myriad of romantic 'accidents' pulled out of the 'pleberature' he was always trashing, his invitation to Young-Jae—apparently also a smug Buddha—to share in witnessing her humiliating commitment to maintaining the lie, the popcorn...the popcorn! Agh! Henry was like that liquid guy from the old terminator movie. Whenever she rejected him and smashed his heart to pieces, he effortlessly recomposed himself and resumed the chase, his liquid limbs morphing into his next cruel scheme. What the fuck?! How could she have possibly known he'd turn out to be like that? The Henry of her acquaintance may have talked infinite crap, but, outwardly, he was well behaved. He was a normal, shy guy. He didn't even allow himself to be fully drawn in their group photos.

Ugh. She groaned at another wave of negative emotion diffusing through her nerves at the remembrance of their library encounter, the colour of her feelings moving from embarrassment and confusion towards anger.

What a pretentious lying cheating disloyal arsehole! She would never forgive him for putting her through this ordeal!

And, make no mistake, HE had put her through this! His subjection of her to this demonic torture was definitely intentional, even if she hadn't quite fathomed his rationale.

Today, throughout her fight for survival, she'd been contemplating this a lot. What exactly was Henry's game plan in stalking and harassing her? What was the fucking motivation?

Her most sensible guess was that, with his conniving, over-observative snake gaze, he'd already deduced her secret. Then, having used the same network of his guildmates hired throughout these obnoxious romantic events, he'd caught the news of her, the troll, venturing out from her cavern, and he'd detected a ripe opportunity to strike. He inserted himself into the tour to tease her. He constructed a thousand elaborate trials to piss her off, sarcastically complimenting her features all the way through in a deranged vendetta to break her will, to force her to confess that one small white lie she'd once told because he was an arse.

'Hey, that's not sensible at all', you might say, 'that would be insane.' No. No, it isn't. Look at Henry's insane Cripple antics. In those, hadn't he always been performing these deceptive, elaborate schemes in order to vanquish his enemies? It could make logical sense, within the illogical universe of Henry's warped idiot mind, for him to employ these mad designs on his current archnemesis, the 'alpha-pleb'. There'd certainly been moments today when his behaviour had felt more like fighting than flirting.

What an infantile stinky slimy craphead. God, she hated him. She was not the pleb. He was the pleb! He was just jealous she sold more in an hour than he would ever in a lifetime. Pretentious loser idiot!

But if only his idiocy was that simple.

At other times today, she'd been convinced that he was actually attempting to seduce her, a stranger. Why? Because he'd committed far too many self-owns. Who, for example, should be embarrassed most by him proposing with the popcorn? Not her. It wasn't as though she would have entertained the offer seriously. The sole buffoon in that scenario had to be him. It really seemed that his crippled social brain had been miscalculating that these tactics would be effective in seducing a stranger and—as was evident by his shamelessness last night with the 'stalker-fan’—Henry, like a tapeworm, didn't have a bone in his body capable of experiencing embarrassment. Maybe, he habitually hounds every woman he encounters?

In which case, also, fuck him.

Idiot!

Between those two positions, she'd been vacillating, struggling to decide how specifically she should be offended.

Then, on rare occasions, she felt this behaviour might be explained by a bizarro fusion of these two points. Henry, knowing her secret, had purposefully arranged to join her tour AND he was hitting on her - her, in the sense of Silver Wolf, the 'alpha-pleb'. He could be conducting an insane, multi-dimensional romantic gesture, where he displayed indifference to the discrepancy between herself and her avatar by aggressively hitting on her anyway and simultaneously shared unfamiliar aspects of himself, culminating in what he misassumed would be a grand, romantic revelation about her career.

In that case, she supposed she should feel…

...

Still furious.

Idiot.

An impartial observer would probably here call her mad for doubting, for wasting so much of her psychic energy trying to comprehend the deranged rationale of a blatant, anti-social idiot. But the thing is...the thing is they would never have read Henry's weird, weird novel.

His novel, the 'ultimate pleb bait', was weird...

When she'd confronted him about being put in a ridiculous love triangle, she wasn't only referencing the contents of his story.

She was not the sole real figure who'd been transported into his book.

One male lead, the twelve-thousand-year-old rich jock musician alien vampire, was roughly modelled after an American friend of hers, Indy, the leader of the group she adventured with.

As for the other male lead, the wild jacked horse-riding barbarian NPC, despite the total dissimilarity in lifestyle and physique, that'd been Henry himself - the Henry she knew, someone quiet, pensive, distant, someone normally selfish and pathetic, someone occasionally magnanimous and strong.

And this Henry'd written himself into a love triangle. Into a love triangle with her. He'd made an entire story, plotted it, drafted it, edited it, invested into it a mental labour of thousands of hours, in order to create an account of them being in love.

How else should she interpret this?

Well, first you'd conclude that's incredibly cringe and narcissistic. But, after that, wasn't it a confession?

Henry, a perplexing blend of genius and moron, might believe that sharing his feelings in the form of an entire book parodying her was romantic. Filtering affection through his alien thought processes, he'd considered writing in first-person, after berating the use of the technique, a show of humbleness and reform. The replication of her narrative voice was a compliment, a monstrous proof of how intimately he'd been listening to her.

It was a confession…wasn't it?

The more she'd read, though, the less accurate this first assumption seemed. It became apparent to her that his character, the jacked barbarian, was his story's second-leading man. An NPC incapable of escaping into the physical world, allocated far fewer pages than the first-leading man for the forming of attachments with both the reader and her character, his character had no genuine hope. His single function within Henry's narrative was to provide a foil for the first-leading man. This arrangement, this relegation of himself to the position of the eventual loser, had made her doubt whether his story was intended to be a confession. Instead, Henry might be under the false belief that the guy she'd been moronic enough to like was her adventure-mate, then, bitter about that, he'd decided to pen an apparently four-volume parody of her to get his revenge. This, returning to his Cripple methods, also seemed within the realm of possibilities.

Unable to decide between these two interpretations, she sailed to Suchi and demanded an explanation from him directly. Explain! Explain! Explain and apologise!

What did he say? 'Her voice is not a parody, nor is any other aspect of my ultimate pleb-bait - it's a pastiche of pleberature, a sincere homage to accessibility.' And then he delivered a jerk-off monologue about defeating her with his superimposed plot writing technique.

That'd all sounded like bullcrap to her. But, when she re-read his novel more critically, his boast had turned out to be true – kind of. The parody remained, but overlayed onto it was a distinct pastiche plot. Every scene, every page was laden with references to the popular fiction of their age, including some written by the other authors of their circle.

More crucially, wedged between his parody and his pastiche was another plot, a tragicomedy. This one coincidentally centred around Henry's barbarian self-insert. His character being relegated to the second lead was, in fact, not merely a product of a conventional Romance-genre narrative bias. Instead, the self-insert had been conducting many subtle exploits of self-sabotage to stifle the development of its part of the love triangle. At times, it succeeded in this endeavour, remaining in the background; at others, its attraction to her character won out and, within the superficial structure of the story, it entered the scene. By the end of the first volume that she'd read, his character's motivation for holding back had not been explained, but there were a ton of allusions to shadows and duty.

After she'd recognised his tragicomedy plot, the two competing interpretations she'd had of his story had been surpassed by a new one. By giving her this to edit, Henry wasn't confessing to her or insulting her. He was explaining, through the absurdly tangential route of a narrative, his reasoning for not confessing. And when she compared this plot with that of their past interactions, it'd been much congruent than the superficial events of his absurd love triangle. It was as if she were reading an uncanny allegory of themselves, a translation of his perspective of them. His revelation today of having played her 'daddy-long-legs' had confirmed this in a way. Both himself and his book-double possessed a hidden layer of agency that both she and her character had been totally blind to.

In which case, she felt…

...

...

She felt she was probably reading too much into it?

Hadn't he emphasised in his pretentious advocacy for third-person POVs that his characters and hers should always be viewed as separate, distinct entities? 'Even when based on actual people, they should be freed by the author from the grey bondages of fact to flourish in the vibrant hyper-colouration of fiction.' It was possible then that he'd cloned the two of them and invented a romantic connection simply because he was a total psychopath who considered these characters only in regards to their utility as plot devices. He may have given her his manuscript without once fathoming how she, the person cloned and subjected to this offensive love triangle, with his clone, might misinterpret its meaning. He could, in fact, be that psychopathic. His shameless displays today certainly illustrated multiple such brain defects.

But, then again, were they shameless displays? Maybe, as with his bizarre story, that deeper sincerity operated in the background?

God damn it…

Could he be more of an arsehole? What kind of wretched dick insisted on everything having multiple layers? Was he half onion? Was that the problem? He'd bragged about mutations. Could he be the result of a diabolical genetic fusion experiment? Half Einstein, half onion?

For heaven's sake. For once, please, couldn't he—ugh.

No, it didn't matter anymore. Regardless of his motivations, Henry was certifiably a pretentious arse if no other reason than subjecting her to this perverse multi-dimensional gaslighting. Today had only solidified her opinion of him. Whenever she next saw his smug face, she would be sure to kill him. Just a couple dozen times. Just enough to vent this anger. With her level advantage, that disloyal pig would be singing his death squeal before the slow reaction speed he always whinged about as if it was a severe handicap instead of one minor flaw could register the threat.

Hahaha!

Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die!

Caddy aka Silver Wolf, during this lengthy inner out-pouring, had been wildly emoting through her confusion and anger and grief in the back of the taxi, which was idling with its door open until she named a destination. She jumped at a tap on her shoulder.

Cadd—the young woman stared up at Henry. "Yes?" she intoned deeply. "Can I help you?"

Henry, pretending not to have witnessed this chick's schizophrenic flailing, gave an apologetic smile. "Possibly. As I mentioned, I have a teleconference call to attend. It'd take about eleven and a half minutes. I'd planned to have the restaurant staff watch my nephew, but he kept arguing that he'd prefer to hang out with you. Something about a commonality of speech difficulties. I did explain to him that's a laughable request after what I put you through, but he still wanted to me to ask in repayment for his compliance in today's antics. Hence, I am asking. Please confirm to him that you're not interested."

He lifted up and displayed Little Liu, who was smiling with a toddler's naive hope.

The young woman glanced from the mute kid—blatantly too young to make such a request—to Henry, the scumbag. So this manipulative arsehole WAS exploiting the toddler—

"I'm not exploiting the toddler again." Henry clarified in a deadpan. "He's not mentally retarded; he just doesn't communicate with words. The request is entirely his. I promise you, I might be a bit slow to recognise a lost situation, but once I do, I divert my resources instantly. In love or any other endeavour, this isn't exactly my first time having to raise a white flag." His eyes went for glassy for a fleeting moment, before, returning to his senses, he noticed that the harassed chick had frozen up. "Little Larry, there's your answer. Don't be like Uncle. When in doubt, the absence of an explicit yes is a declarative no."

Henry span around and—

The young woman clutched the back of his shirt. "Wait."

"Oh, you're fine with the arrangement?" Henry was astonished. "Wow. Thanks! Little Larry, take care of the pretty lady. Candace, dump him with the chef if he misbehaves."

"In love…" the young woman echoed his earlier remark with a careful handling of each word, "it's not your first time...giving up?"

"Love?" Henry plopped Little Larry on her lap. "Did I say that? Ah. Don't tell anyone."

"Before…what happened?"

"I'm not a serial harasser if that's what you're worried about." He tossed the daycare bag beside her. "With that one…well, nothing much happened at all. I identified the incompatibility before any progress had been made, cancelled the campaign on the spot, and moved on."

"Incompatibility?"

"The inability of two chemical substances to maintain a stable, safe state when mixed. Snacks in the bag - stick to the main compartment unless you fancy getting spooked by a second engagement ring. Cheers!" Henry, departing abruptly, sprinted back to the restaurant and disappeared through the doors. "Yo, Suzy, lend me your VR unit! Guild business!"

"All yours, Romeo!" The voice of the chef responded.

Caddy stared after him, her gaze lingering on the door through which he'd made his exit.

'That one', she thought, this past love he'd given up on…that was her…

Wasn't it?

It was her.

He might never express it, he might put on this front of disinterest and unavailability, but the tells had always been there. She sensed it in everything. It was there in his childlike insults. It was there in his pretentious criticisms, in him treating her like a 'project'. It was there in the background yearning of these for her to strive beyond her current state and engage in his same indefatigable climb.

In his bizarre love triangle featuring himself and her, it was irrefutably there.

The other day, when she'd been down by the docks in Chayoka and he'd finally coughed up his location, she'd heard it louder than ever. 'The trashest zone in this trashest of games...where else would this shit keep happening?' She'd never heard him speak that way, Henry habitually talking in either a deadpan or an insincere banter, neither of which shared any genuine feeling. In that moment, though, affected by whatever private ordeal he'd been going through, he'd let slip his guard. In the quiet suffering in his voice, in his stifled cry for help, it'd been resoundingly clear.

It'd been there last night, too, in the desperation with which he'd squeezed her hand as he'd dragged her out of that mess with Karnon and Nerin.

And, although once again evading her attempts to apprehend it, she'd sensed it throughout today, somewhere in the layers of his relentless, bewildering pursuit. Maybe he hadn't recognised her explicitly, but at another, unconscious level, he might have. Her gut instinct told her he'd been sincere in his corny lines about her being a heaven-sent beauty. Which she genuinely wasn't - otherwise, would she have changed her avatar? Nevertheless, during the events he'd contrived with his guildmates, there'd been much nicer-looking and much friendlier women observing from the sidelines who'd for god knows what reason had been impressed by his antics and had tried to flirt with him - the make-up artist, for example. Yet Henry, with his liquid-terminator-guy determination, had swept each of these contenders aside like stalks of corn in a field as he continued to chase singularly after her screaming, fleeing self. Wasn't this blind devotion an obvious sign of it?

And hadn't it also been there in that ridiculous offer to become herself? Buried within the offensiveness, the deceptiveness, and the sleazebaggery was a remarkable fact that, in Henry's mind, the grandest path to romance, after all the other showy crap, had simply been to recreate the circumstances between him and herself. When he pictured what love looked like, he was seeing her.

It was there.

Wasn't it?

It was there.

It was there.

So why hadn't he ever acted upon it? Not once. See, this is what had infuriated her most today. After everything she'd seen, he could no longer hide behind his false excuses. He'd proven that, when he wanted to, he was not obliged to be evasive, he was capable of expressing his feelings, of summoning the confidence to make a move. He'd made hundreds of moves today. For a total stranger. Within twenty minutes of meeting them, he'd had the gall to propose. To a stranger! So where was the move for herself?! Where was her premature proposal? Obviously, as she had been going to do earlier before he rudely interrupted her, she would instantly reject him, such an offer being preposterous at their age and insane and weird. But after witnessing how gross he was IRL, she would extra reject him. She would laugh at his dumb idiot disloyal stupid pig pleb face. But, first, he had to give her that opportunity. He had to make his move. After the torture she'd endured, was she not owed at least one move? Where was her move? Why had he not made the move?

Why? Why? Why?!

'Incompatibility' - don't give her this bullcrap. Give her an explanation. And, if you can't, then give her the move.

Caddy threw away her stupid sunglasses and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

Deciding she'd wasted enough energy on this idiot, for today and forever, she had the taxi take her—a toddler was silently sitting on her lap.

Little Liu, who'd been studying the aunty's struggle on her face, dramatically mirrored the gesture of tossing aside his sunglasses. Thereby, he revealed two shimmering toddler eyes, each shooting an upwards beam of encouragement. You can do it!

"For heaven's sake..." Caddy swore.

Stuck in place, she felt the sinking despair of this hell continuing, felt her thighs begin to shake.

"Huh?"

Glancing down, she saw the toddler with his head fixed in the direction of the restaurant and his body, tensed up, trembling with increasingly more vigour, as though an earthquake was rumbling from inside of him, his face flushing red.

"Ah…kid? Are you okay?"

Little Liu, unresponsive, had entered his own inner struggle.

At the code-word of 'Heaven' signalling the transition from the uncle-nephew to father-son mode, he'd found himself in a dire quandary. With his fake father having disappeared into the restaurant, the methods for portraying his role as an illegitimate son had been instantly rendered ineffectual. Unwilling to leave the side of this aunty crying due to her inability to state out-loud how much his uncle had annoyed her, he could not adjust his proximity to indicate the few centimetres closer according to which a son stood. Likewise, the pouty contortions of his face according to the mild sorrow of a temporary familial separation could not be detected by the fake father's retreating back.

To continue this mission, there was only that single path forward. When the parent and child were too far away from each other to pass their feelings by hand, when the chasm between them was not traversed by the projection of a mutual gaze, the child had but one method to communicate the depth of the parent-child bond.

That path, that method - it was precisely the one that'd been unavailable to Little Liu since birth.

To arrange and linearise the whirlwind of thought-images, to translate them into the wind of the lungs that vibrated the vocal cords and to use the tongue and the lips to shape the exerted air into phonemes of syllables of words of sentences…talking. Such a simple action. There should be no challenge behind it all. Even the infants of man's ancestor apes carried out this rudimentary operation when needing to summon the attention of their parents separated by the dense foliage of the jungle. Yet not him. No, Little Liu had never had the dexterity or magnitude of spirit to surmount this challenge. For countless centuries of anguish, stretching back into the murky past before the world had solidified around him, he'd been envisioning, researching, training, and trying, but the simplistic twistings of the tongue had never been his to tame. On and on, verbal communication had evaded his capture as this speech-impaired aunty had evaded his socially-retarded uncle. Time and time again, Little Liu had butted his head against the prison bars of his own silence only to be repelled with nothing but a sore skull. And this time, too, he could hear it: the approach of the cruel jailor who'd kept him locked in this cell, the shadow of himself whose taunting mockery would smother the words that he could not utter.

This time, however, that jailor would find the cell empty, the prisoner absent. Little Larry had been too weak before, but he'd since discovered a new source of strength. No longer was he fighting this desperate battle against the quiet by his lonesome. He had the example of this aunty who survived between silence and sound, and he had his uncle who, depending on the authenticity of the performance, would slip him extra snacks.

This oppressive quiet would not deprive him of sweet success!

Caddy was confused, wondering whether 2-year-olds could develop tremors from sugar withdrawal or whether Henry'd done a switch-a-roo to slip her an animatronic bomb in a final measure of vengeance. "Hey, kid, are you—"

Little Liu opened his mouth, and the air stagnating in his lungs finally burst forth in a leonine roar. "FATHER!"

Father...Father........Father................Father................................onwards Little Liu's mighty shout travelled, roaming beyond this restaurant, spreading out across the world to cracks the continents and part the seas.

In reality, the emitted sound was barely a squeak, falling on no ears but those of the aunty holding him. Nevertheless, Little Liu—no, Little Larry, the fake son, felt content.

The aunty no doubt impressed by his feat, his moral duty to the keeper of snacks fulfilled, his remaining stores of mental energy depleted in shattering through his power limiter, Little Liu, like a former prisoner admiring their first free dawn while a wound acquired during the night's escape bled out, happily let his body slump, and his cheek fell to rest against the warm earth of this aunty's bosom.

Caddy, with the call echoing in her inner ear, slowly lifted the sleeping toddler to her eye-level. She stared hard at...at him, many fragmentary ideas coagulating, many past mysteries connecting to answers.

There was no apparent physical resemblance...but the haircut was the same, the attire matched...

The coordinated scheming…a fake silence - a prevention against blabbing…

Duty.

The 'incompatibility'.

She stared hard at...at the child, and, finally, in one last piece of proof, the backwards slogan on the toddler's inside-out shirt popped out to her, word by incriminating word.

'tsekciS'…Sickest…

'nos'…son…

'ni'…in…

'eht'…the…

'!esrevinu'…universe!

Sickest son in the universe…

"Oh…"