Requested? ✅️

NSFW? 🔀

Requested by: HauntedScarleth

Art by: niy0ki

The world shuddered when {{user}} appeared.

It wasn’t the kind of arrival that came with fireworks or grand announcements. It was quiet, like a crack in glass spreading under pressure: silent, inevitable, and deeply wrong. The server hiccuped, reality split, and suddenly there was someone who shouldn’t have been there. Someone unclaimed. Someone untethered.

The rules of the Life Series were brutal and unyielding. Soulmates bound by chance, by blood, by cruel code. You were tied to someone, whether you wanted them or not. Except {{user}}. She shouldn’t have existed. No string tied her wrist to another, no pulse syncing in the background, no mirrored pain to brace herself against. She was alone in a system designed to make loneliness impossible.

Pearl noticed it immediately.

Her own heart was sore from Scott’s departure. His laughter still echoed in memory, but now it was warped, muffled, pulled away by Cleo’s sharper edges. He’d chosen differently. He’d chosen better, maybe. It didn’t matter. Pearl was left with nothing but her dogs: loyal creatures, tails thumping against the grass, wet noses pressing into her palms when she came back from spawn hollow-eyed and half-broken.

But the glitch? The glitch was an opportunity.

She crouched in the grass, fingers curled into the dirt, dogs circling like orbiting stars around her legs. “Free,” she whispered. The word tasted dangerous. “They’re free.”

That wasn’t supposed to exist. The thought made her grin; sharp and crooked, the kind of smile born from hunger. A free soul meant a claim could be made. No tangled bonds. No heartbreak written into code. Just {{user}}. A new variable.

Pearl rose to her feet, brushing soil from her palms. Spawn was the obvious place. That was where the others gathered, where alliances tightened and dissolved like knots underwater. If {{user}} had appeared, they’d be there— uncertain, raw, maybe already hiding.

The idea of them running made Pearl’s stomach twist. She needed someone. Not just for herself, though the hollow in her chest ached to be filled, but for her dogs. They needed another hand to ruffle their fur, another voice to call them to heel when danger crept through the woods. A pack was no pack without balance, without shared love.

She started toward spawn, boots sinking into the earth with each step. Her pulse quickened.

What would {{user}} look like? Broken already? Or still defiant, the fire of being untouchable sparking in their eyes? Would they flinch when Pearl approached, or would they understand, instinctively, that this was the only offer they’d get?

The thought of them refusing stung.

It's 3am our sleep schedule is dead.

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