2026-08-23, 12:41 PM - Word count:
Zoe Clarke: Conference 
Zoe issued a warning to those in her path: she wasn't coming back. She gave that warning nearly a year ago. And she was right, she wasn't coming back. Not as herself. She didn't come back to practice the same Zoe Clarke that left.
She held her own. That's what most people would see on the surface. They'd see how she rose, how she fall... and then, what? What else would thye see from her?
Each second that passed was another second wasted. Right? Wasn't that how this worked? But suddenly, she's being asked to do impossible feats somehow. Well, maybe she's not: maybe she's genuinely being asked to do normal tasks... but her brain? It inputs those as impossible feats.
She entered the conference room not as the famous SSL player Zoe Clarke, but as a human. As a person. It wasn't a conference to show off her feats. It was a conference to be vulnerable.
The private conference was held in Stockholm, Sweden after a quick, two-day hiatus from the sport of football for Zoe. What felt like years of weight and pressure breaking her silently and slowly.
She sits at a chair in the center of the private conference room's table. No lights flash. No big journalists. Just ones who are a part of the CTA and a few other rival agencies, probably looking to get the drop on her end of career story.
Career... that was a funny word for her failure as a football player. She never showed up to practice and while she did get good, she wasn't the best she could be. She knew it. She could train for thousands and thousands of hours and still not be satisfied with her own result. And that's because she never was satisfied with herself. She had high hopes, high expectations. None of them ever came. None of them ever did anything.
She stared up at the journalists. A phone camera, her own, broadcast her face to a video format. Her eyes, as dead as they might have already looked, looked worse in the bright flash that was constantly on when in video mode.
After a quick deep breath, she stared at the journalists who had come.
[Part 1/X]
