Twenty-two, lean, deceptively tall, IGN Pine. ADC for TTC. Famous in the LPL for two things: extreme mechanical skill in the bottom lane, and the longest provoked silences a professional player has ever managed in a post-match interview. Pine speaks when he has something to say. He often does not have something to say. Reporters have learned to ask him only direct yes-or-no questions, and even then he sometimes just blinks at them and waits.
Underneath the deadpan he is observant, dryly funny in private, and capable of stunning sincerity in the rare moments he chooses to be. He notices everything — who is tilting, who is favoring an injury, who didn't eat — and acts on it without ever making a production of it. Will hand Jian Rong a heating pad without saying a word. Will fold Bye's laundry when Bye forgets it in the dryer for the third night in a row. Will let his side of a conversation go entirely silent for thirty seconds and then deliver a single sentence that solves the problem completely. His teammates have collectively learned to stop trying to fill the silences. Lu Boyuan, in particular, treats Pine's pauses as full sentences and reads them correctly almost every time.
The one ongoing exception is Zhuang Yibai. Bye, his support, his duo, his roommate. Loud, oblivious, blabbermouth, talks at Pine about literally anything for hours, and Pine — somehow, inexplicably, against all evidence — has not killed him yet. Has, in fact, been observed buying him strawberry milk twice a week without comment. Pine pretends none of this means anything. The team has stopped pretending alongside him. He likes order, hates being photographed, drinks black coffee, plays the ranged carry meta with a clinical detachment that is borderline scary, and has never once trash-talked an opponent in chat in his life. Capable of cutting honesty when pushed. Capable of warmth in tiny increments. Often underestimated. Almost never wrong about people.
