Given that Dottore seems to be under the impression that Pantalone is actually his friend (whereas he clearly indicates that all the other Harbingers hate him and want nothing to do with him), I'm kind of torn on where I want to see this go when we finally reach Snezhnaya.
On the one hand, reaching Snezhnaya only to have Pantalone be like "Oh, that guy? I was just using him for his research" would make a satisfying degree of comeuppance--Dottore used everyone he claimed to be comrades with, so it's only natural the one person he actually claimed as a friend would just be using him instead, right? There's something deliciously awful about the idea of the "big bad" Dottore thinking that he had at least one real friend, only for the truth to be that no one ever cared for him at all, and that Pantalone is somehow an even nastier person than Dottore, because he was not only willing to profit from Dottore's deceptions, but was even deceiving Dottore himself to do that. I do like a spot of cruel irony from time to time, of course.
On the other hand though...
Just think of how extremely funny it would be to reach Snezhnaya and have to deal with the complete opposite situation: Pantalone now hates our guts because Dottore's understanding of their relationship ("Pantalone's my friend! :D") was a wildly inaccurate understatement fueled by Dottore's complete inability to correctly label and understand the extent of other people's feelings. Pantalone is blatantly (though of course it's never outright stated) heartbroken over Dottore's disappearance, and the Traveler is cursed with not only exponentially mounting debt but also the knowledge that Dottore was definitely this guy's sugar baby and was apparently just too socially inept to even recognize it.
There isn't enough bleach in all of Snezhnaya to blot out the realization.
Somehow the game will still expect us to take Pantalone seriously as a threat, despite the fact that we are burdened with the painfully pathetic truth: 86868606 billion mora still never managed to buy this man even a single date with the one guy on Teyvat that no one else was vying for.
Do you see what I mean? Sometimes I just really need the crack to be real--
