Characters Protagonist

This profile holds the person at the centre of the work: who they are, what they carry, and the interior weight underneath.

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Who they are

Agender, 49 in Reality, 26 in Construction. Their body still knows the game; the chasing is over. Stands the way someone stands who has nothing to prove to the room.

The racquet has been in their hand for years. It is the constant that equipment hangs off; it is also the constant they hang off. The grip is worn where their grip is. They hold it without thinking about holding it.

Not a tragic figure, not melodramatic, not a person in collapse. Someone who built a place where they could keep playing.

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What they lost, what they built

They lost a friend years ago in a cliff-jumping accident. Cliff jumping was a normalised activity in the friend group, dangerous and routine for them, until it wasn't. The shopkeeper was there that day, jumping with the friend. The protagonist was not. Whether they ever went jumping with the group, or always declined, is a question the profile does not answer. The asymmetry of that day has sat between them ever since: one survivor on the cliff, one survivor who was elsewhere. Recently enough that it is not healed, long enough that they have built a structure around it.

Construction is that structure. The garden, the stall, the rally, the friend at the counter with their head tilted toward the play. They did not assemble it as a hiding place. They assembled it because it was the thing they could assemble that held. The hiding is the by-product. The holding is the point.

The structure was built around what they love. The love is real; so is the grief. The protagonist is not surviving in the garden. They are living there. Quietly, partially, on the days they can; that is still living.

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The call of the void

A layer underneath the structure. It sits next to the grief, not under it.

The pull is the urge to do the destructive thing when nothing forces it. To jump from the bridge. To swerve into traffic. The cliff is the specific shape of this for them: the place the friend died, the place the protagonist did not go that day. The structure holds them present in the loss; it also holds them present alongside this. Grief is what they are sheltering from. The void is what they live alongside, daily.

It surfaces in places the artist and animator can feel for, not script:

• The cliffhanger leap to the next venue. The player triggers it; the world thins on the brink of something else; the choice to fall is theirs.
• The locked gate at the back of the garden. The protagonist tries it. It does not open. They turn back.
• The ball about to roll out of the play area. The moment the protagonist could let it go.
• The pause before serving in a long rally. The awareness, held inside the breath, that they could stop.
• The edges of the play area where their gaze drifts past it.

The structure holds because they choose it, again and again. Hold this as a quiet undercurrent in posture and timing; let the choice be the visible thing.