How can one cope with pain? It has to be coped with. Learning how to cope with pain is something every child learns, because coping with pain is and will be always necessary. One can start crying, making a loud noise, attracting someone who can help. Chaden might cry if there were anyone around he could trust, if trust had not died long ago with his first defeat. Kids could be cruel, but it was their parents they had learnt it from, and then they stopped crying - very manly. One could simply stop moving, do nothing, wait - but if one does not move, they don't concentrate on things unrelated to the pain, no good.

One could get mad, demand angrily that the pain goes away. That distracts from the pain, but it doesn't solve the pain. Anger itself could become painful, loud shouts would hurt the throat, not ideal, not at all. There is some pride in winning instead of whining, both happens after the game, just the sides are different. The game, the training, the more one played, the 'better' one got in playing the game, more winning on the own side, less whining.

I guess one could simply laugh it off, what use is it to cry if no one hears, why not just laugh.

One should not feel pain, but one feels pain, isn't that funny? Isn't that slapstick humor, a stick slapping one in the head and then blood, one of the four humors, comes out?

Someone might join one in laughing, that makes one feel better, because if they are laughing it can't be really bad, can it? That's the problem, if one becomes a laugher, the pain will return because of missing caution, but is the pain really as bad if you can laugh it off?

Is there a problem if we can have fun despite the problem? There is more of a difference in fun, laughing about pain isn't as fun as winning and being all prideful. But there seems to be... a problem. If the pride grows in importance, laughing about pain seems to just not do it anymore, so hollow, almost as if it were still painful. What do now?

Cope harder, tell yourself that the pain is making you stronger, tell yourself that the more pain, the more probable the pride, tell yourself that. Pain is solved, pride and pain are equal - what counts is that the game continues, one has become a whip lover.

A long and ardurous journey to cope with pain has ended and only the game counts.

Well that would not be what Chaden did, he just became too good at playing the game before that, he was talented, gifted, well trained, hungry for victory. He had been the one who caused others to love the whip. He might have been beaten, he might have been battered and broken and slapstick humored, but he also was angry, yes he was at that stage of coping. "You'll be back and I'll beat the shit out of you!", he shouted defiantly.

A rumbling from far away reached him, not showering him in pain, but he understood the message, a message that made his anger merely a fire, a fire that then burnt all of the fuel and then died: "Yeah as if."

Chaden really really hated losing. And if he couldn't overcome them, he would not be able to unlose his loss. He had coped enough, it was time to search those people and... win or something, but mostly to search them and then do something.