Hana "Cherry" Chen's Arc

Chapter 5 of 14

Hana opens the game and stares at the team selection screen. Four hero slots filled, two villain slots filled. The story needs to progress to the next world, but the game won't let her advance without assigning horses to both teams. She hasn't thought about horses at all. Chat is already asking who gets what, throwing out names faster than she can read them. She realizes she never established a system for this — the wheel worked for characters, but horses feel different. More personal somehow. She needs to decide if she's spinning the wheel again or letting chat vote directly, and either choice will set a precedent she'll have to follow for every mount, pet, and companion the game throws at her from here on out. She spins the wheel twice and lands on Junie-Skybird for the heroes and I-love-my-mom for the villains. Chat loses it immediately. Half the messages are crying laughing at the villain horse being named after loving someone's mom. The other half are already debating what makes Junie-Skybird heroic. Hana opens the world editor and searches for something that can mark both horses without making them look identical. She finds a stable split perfectly down the middle — one side pale purple, the other deep magenta. She places it between the hero and villain territories and realizes she just built a visual war zone. She needs markers outside the stable so players know which horse belongs to which team. For Junie-Skybird, she places a statue of a crying kid hugging a unicorn with a pink mane near the purple side. It looks soft and heroic enough. For I-love-my-mom, she drops a weird display of an orange unicorn laughing with a gremlin and troll under a rainbow near the magenta entrance. Chat starts spamming that the villain horse looks friendlier than the hero one, and Hana realizes she might have accidentally made the bad guy more likable. She tries to move the objects around, but the game locks placements once they're saved. Chat votes to keep everything as is. They want the irony. They want the hero horse marked by tears and the villain horse surrounded by laughter. Hana saves the world and watches both horses appear in their stalls, separated by a single wall. She just let chat create a rivalry based entirely on vibes and usernames, and now every future mount decision will carry this same weight. She can't take it back, and she wouldn't even if she could. The precedent is set — chaos over control, every single time.