TL;CR MEME

[retellers]

1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.

Comments

[soulus]

Soo-won's PHS data debated if he was a hare or hawk, and Rufus was inclined to think the latter. He had the air of someone who was controlled and therefore calculating, which aren't inherently bad traits; however, given his recent experience with someone who was charismatic in his own right and of loosely similar quality, Rufus was disinclined to trust anyone, much less Soo-won, who was running a gauntlet of tests and theories during the competition. In fact, he was downright wary of him for weeks.

For their similarity in advancing forward, the dissimilarities were where they departed greatly from each other. While Soo-won ruminated on their losses, Rufus preferred to focus solely on what lay ahead, mostly because he was by then long accustomed to living for an objective as opposed to himself. He wasn't interested in taking down the professional boundaries he'd set earlier for his own protection, either. It was a combination of formed habit and refusal to bare himself to anyone—particularly to someone as seemingly shrewd as Soo-won—so, as two people who would meet once in a while and later daily, there was a social disconnect.

His role was the main reason that Rufus would give Soo-won personal answers. Knowing that doing so was manipulative, the boundary between them became even clearer and he looked to Soo-won as a business partner with a mutual agreement where they both benefited from each other. There were the occasional instances where it felt as though Soo-won truly understood on a personal level where Rufus was coming from, but that just made the aforementioned boundary all the more important to maintain. He bluffed about requiring a soul in exchange for friendship, because that didn't even make the bottom of the list of things he could want from anyone.

His return from the CYOA was the moment where Soo-won stood out from the majority by providing aid as needed without dragging ego into the bloody mess. Rufus lost a chunk of what sliver of faith he had in some participants here; however, Soo-won rose where they fell in a show of genuine care. Although he chose not to act on that subtle shift of feeling, he did like Soo-won then insofar that his wariness, in spite of still lingering, was no longer accompanied by as much distrust. (And he definitely turned a blind eye to that with his tendency to trust in people subconsciously.)

But he still held the belief that Soo-won would smash betray if necessary. Such was the nature of the competition. He wouldn't have been mad, because he did say repeatedly that he had no expectations (except he did and pretended he didn't, to the detriment of his sensitive sanity).

All the same, there was that buried fondness. Rufus could see through Soo-won's thinly veiled excuses to spend time with him, and he indulged most of them, chief of which were the dressing changes and sitting down at the lobby after a hard trial; he justified the latter as returning the favor for the former. It wasn't that he felt close—far from it, especially once the memshare week solidified that they existed on different planes of thought and class—not to mention he himself was preventing them from making any headway on purpose—but that, in a sense, he rather liked this dangerous client of his.

On the week of the mass poisoning, Rufus lost the vital memory of why he had become so distrustful. Trusting his previous judgment, he minded the boundaries he'd set weeks prior, but there were moments that he lapsed and gave into his kinder nature by boldly preparing tea for Soo-won. He didn't think that Soo-won was incapable of self-care so much as that Soo-won deserved some rest for all the work he was surely doing in the background . . . and Rufus still had his traumatic memories of caring futilely for his ailing mother.

Soo-won apologized fairly often to him for things that ranged from inconsequential to reluctantly meaningful. And wasn't that the biggest surprise, even bigger than those occasions of asking after him: Rufus in all his years had received next to no apologies for all manner of events he had had to endure, and certainly none where it would have mattered during his formative years, resulting in his bitter cynicism. Compared to that, Soo-won was so conscientious that Rufus didn't know what to do with the note that contained a heartfelt apology for dying and leaving him behind, so he chose not to react to the words in front of anyone.

They were unnecessary, he thought, but they still moved him, even if he didn't think of them as friends. The note did have a hand in making him far, far more lenient with Soo-won in less pressing matters once the lost were retrieved, which is frankly an impressive feat when taking into account that meeting the role group had tanked 99% of his faith in everything related to the Realm by that point. Who knew that an unprompted apology would be so meaningful?

This was all over the place. I'm gomen.