He'd named it 'Ny.'

One of the special 'rules' in the game was that you had to name every creature you caught to forge a bond with it. Fysarius thought that was ridiculous, because these were pixels on a computer monitor, and not living, breathing things. But he'd naturally wanted to prove that he was good and useful at something. If rude-a** Ethan could play the game on 'hard,' Fysarius could too. Any of these human activities would probably be easy for him, anyway.

So he'd named his first little monster Ny. It was a little blue, round, penguin thing that made a cute little noise and hopped around when he sent it into combat. Creativity wasn't his strong suit, and he'd never come up with unique names for much of anything, but he knew people with names, and that seemed like a good place to start. Maybe they'd come easier later.

But this was the first one he received.

It would be with him through the entire journey. Ny was just a fitting and reasonable name for it.

Because of the nature of this particular challenge, he wasn't actually allowed to collect all the little monsters, as he'd prefer to do. He could only have a few, and they were all supposed to be special. A little gray bird was Fae-Fae. A fluffy brown fox was Andreiya. A stripey orange dog was Cypher. The names he was familiar with, the little creatures less so, but they felt familiar, when he named them after his friends. There were other monsters (quite a few, actually. Fysarius was starting to doubt he'd have enough names for all of them, but maybe if he mixed in their human names like 'Henley' and 'Alyssum,' then he'd have enough), all with the names of his friends.

Easy game, right?

It wasn't until he'd successfully bypassed the first city that Fysarius started to have doubts. Both his little green plant-frog, Itztenoch, and his little fire monkey, Valnyr died. He'd been directing them in combat against his rival, Earth, and they'd both been killed. But they were both just pixels and it definitely shouldn't be important. It should make him feel absolutely nothing to hover his cursor over their twitchy little reded-out pixel corpses and move them to the dead box, helpfully titled 'coffin.'

They wouldn't hear him whisper "sorry" to his computer monitor as he abandoned them there. And that was all it took for Fysarius to become immediately on edge. He did not want to put Cypher or Ny into the coffin box. That would be unacceptable. So, he had to be careful, and he had to be smart. All the information was out there, and he could definitely do this with enough planning.

He wouldn't lose any other Vanguard.

Turner had warned him that it was a difficult challenge, and Ethan had certainly doubted Weaver's ability, but from here, he could persist with the knowledge that he knew what to expect, now. He was prepared, and this would absolutely not hold him back from being more competent at a ridiculous game than some rude human.

But he'd never played before, and it seemed like even once he'd gotten into the swing of the mechanics, things were destined to not go his way.

By the third gym, (third out of eight, mind, not even halfway through the program), they were all gone. Fysarius had done every single thing in his power to preserve Ny. He'd sacrificed others, left her too weak for fear of losing her during training, played even once his team had dwindled down to just a few partners, and then, the rest were taken out.

It felt a little anticlimactic to have a team of ghosts unceremoniously blow through and wreck what was left of his monsters, only for the little Fysarius trainer to appear uninjured in front of a center, but it still hurt in a peculiarly indescribable way that he was sure none of the other Vanguard could relate to. Even Ny wasn't likely to understand why it stung him so, to take the little pixel Ny and declare her 'dead,' to admit that he'd failed this mission program.

Ethan was better at it than he was, and Fysarius had just hung back and watched all his friends be mercilessly slaughtered while they fought under his direction. Even Ny, who'd he'd been so careful with, who he'd done everything to protect... She was just no match.

Fysarius sat at the desk in his bedroom, staring blankly at his computer screen while upbeat music chimed through the speakers. The little boy on the screen didn't look any different, despite being alone and having no allies to go into battle with. His life was essentially over, being that there was nothing left he could accomplish by himself. It would be an easy task to restart: to use what he'd learned this time to make it farther next time. He'd put a few hours into it, but nothing like what Ethan had sunk in already.

Fysarius could just... delete his progress files and begin again.

How difficult would that be, honestly?

Maybe that would stop him from feeling this weird sense of misery. Or maybe it would compound it. Maybe he would lose Cypher or Ny again, and he would just be left alone again on this stupid rock, trapped forever in this cycle of not being good enough to accomplish anything. Losing, losing, losing to Ethan, Earth, or whatever random-a** ghost girl happened to get in his path.

Fysarius swallowed and clicked the lid shut on his laptop. Of course he didn't want to give up. It wasn't real. It wasn't important in the way his comrades actual lives and actual mission were. But he couldn't even do some stupid game. He'd spent hours of now-wasted time on it and gotten absolutely nowhere. Not completely different to how he felt about being on this planet in general. Days, weeks, months, and what did anyone have to show for it? Nothing positive, as far as Fysarius understood it.

He slid the computer away from him across the desk, and went to go see if the real, living and breathing Ny had anything she wanted help with.