When a Ranch Becomes a Home (pt 1???)
Tango, despite his best effort, dies. Unfortunately, he has a lot more than just death to deal with after.
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CW: Depictions of anxiety, minor panic attacks, and tango gets blown up.
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Tango was just thankful this game happened during the summer.
His body was still cold, and when the wind picked up, he felt the fire on his head fight for its life to stay alive. But all in all, it was better than last time. The cold winter air and stormy rainy nights made it almost impossible for the blaze born to function properly, but this time it was different.
He felt good. He had armor, he had food, he joked with his friends and made some new ones. But behind all of the it, there was a little nagging thing in the back of his mind.
It took Tango a while to realize it was anxiety.
He didn't really get anxiety, which is probably why he didn't realize it at first. He was a man on practicality, a man of smarts. He knew he could talk himself out of any anxiety he found himself clouded in, so he had never really felt the hollowness in his stomach like he did now, or the way his heart jumped when he thought about it.
It was faint though, like it wasn't really there at all. That is, of course, when Tango realized it actually wasn't there. That is was his soulmates. Whoever his soulmate was was really stressing out, and only when Tango realized it did it start to actually effect him. Like when he was talking to Bdubs and Impulse, he had to stop for a moment to breath, his soulmate had fallen off something and it hurt his ankles, but the pain in his stomach from the anxiety his soulmate felt was somehow worse. He needed to find them, whoever they were.
It got worse as he was going deeper in the cave, it started creeping into his own thoughts as well. Maybe his soulmate had a reason for being this anxious, maybe they were in trouble. Maybe he was in trouble.
An arrow shot right through his arm, and it took a minute for Tango to register the pain. He turned around quick, but there were too many monsters coming after him to process what was happening. He swung his sword with one hand, making sure to step back with each swing. He was getting through them one by one, if he just brought them to a choke point-
That's when the creeper dropped, and thats when everything went black.
~
"Common..." Jimmy found that muttering under his breath as he scaled the mountain to actually be quite helpful. His arms and legs hurt like hell though, and he was having a difficult time breathing.
He felt a shattering pain rip through his left arm, but he just shook it out and continued to climb, "Don't. Even. Think about it." Finally, he got to the top, and he looked out over the sky as he tried to catch his breath.
He felt another jab in his side, and then he felt a sharp snap in his ankle. He winced and clutched his stomach, the random bursts of pain were not helping his anxiety.
He would not be a burden to his soulmate. He would not damn them the way he had already damned himself.
He felt a few more jabs in various places around his body, and as he was thinking what on earth his soulmate was doing, he felt a searing pain ripple up his back, and he fell to the ground to die.
He wakes up sweating, he didn't think he was sweating before, but he certainly was now. Sitting up from the grass, he pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes, his breath coming in short, uneven huffs that made him feel like he wanted to throw up. The place on his back that hurt the most was pulsing, and he felt paralyzed.
Suddenly, he heard a tree branch crack, and a voice coming from above. Was it God? Was it Them? No. Jimmy shook his head to clear the fog that clouded his brain, looking up to see what was happening.
He saw a man in the trees. Well, calling him a man was maybe a stretch. He had seen him around. Tango if he remembered correctly. He was the blaze born that hung out with Impulse and Etho. Redstoner maybe? Wasn't this the guy with cows in the first game? Jimmy's head started throbbing along with his back, he tried to ignore it.
"Oh no...." He heard the man mutter under his breath. The flames in his hair were big and wild, and yet they didn't set the tree on fire when they jumped up to meet the bark.
"What happened, Tango?" His voice was tough, and he fliched at his tone. When he looked up, he noticed that Tango did too.
"I'm- I'm so sorry." Tango leaned over and put his head between his knees, his legs dangling off the branch. "I'm so sorry."
Jimmy took a deep breath, and then another, "What happened?" His voice was softer then, and he was satified.
Tango sniffed, and ran a hand through his flaming hair, "I was caving, and there were about 500 mobs coming at me from one side and while I was worrying about them-" He looked up, and the two soulmates made eye contact for the first time. Jimmy smiled, maybe it would ease Tango's mind. It must have, because the man in the tree paused to give Jimmy a small smile of his own, "You know, the old creeper-from-behind trick."
Jimmy nodded, looking around spawn where just a few hours ago, was filled with everyone. He realized with a jolt that he was yellow, the first yellow. He quickly took out his communicator and read the chat, every joke and taunt making the hole in his stomach grow bigger and bigger.
~
Jimmy's anxiety was just getting worse. Tango watched in silence as he watched his soulmate read the comms messages about their death. He wasn't completely oblivious, he knew the jokes that were said about him.
Cursed. Stupid. Careless. Jimmy's friends would always say they were taunting him in good fun, but Tango never felt comfortable enough to go along with it.
"Jimmy, right?" Tango hopped down a couple branches before landing on the ground, his back was still stinging, and he didn't need broken ankles on top of that.
He watched Jimmy come out of a trance in real time, his eyes going from little glossy things to wide alert oceans. “What?”
Tango shook his head and held out his hand, “I’m Tango….” after a pause, he awkwardly added, “of the Tek variety.”
Jimmy, despite it all, chuckled softly. “I’m Jimmy.” He thought for a moment, and Tango could see the gears turning behind his eyes, “of the…. Solidarity variety?” He shook his head in disapproval. “Doesn’t have the same ring to it.”
“Good enough for me.”
Jimmy smiled, and Tango felt the anxiety lift just a bit. Until it came crashing down again, and Jimmy ripped his hand away from Tango to run it over his hair. “I have no idea where I was.” He looked back at Tango, and his wide eyes were filled with worry, “All my stuff is gone.”
Tango sighed, “Yeah. I have no idea where my stuff is either.” He thought for a moment, watching Jimmy as he began to pace around the top of the hill. He wanted to shake him, tell him to breathe and calm down.
Instead, he started picking up sticks, “Let’s make a chest here, then we can go find out stuff and meet back up.”
Jimmy turned and watched Tango, his arms were crossed and one of his hands was up near his face, and Tango raised an eyebrow while he watched Jimmy bite on his fingernail.
Tango sighed, “I’m really sorry for killing us. It’s one thing for me to explodificate myself but I didn’t want to take you down with me.”
Tango saw Jimmy smile behind his hand, and the tightening of his chest had nothing to do with the anxiety, “Explodificate?”
Tango smiled and threw some materials at Jimmy. He didn’t catch it. “Common, let’s go hide our bits in a tree.”
This time Jimmy’s head tilted back in laughter, and Tango wanted to bottle up the sound.
The anxiety didn’t come back as strong after that, and Tango was happy for it to stay that way.
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i should be working on Problem of Etho and my other 24lsmp fics and yet here i am writing about a dead ship from a 10 month old smp …. oops?
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I heard about that one au. With Grian who knows Minecraft mechanics but nobody else does-
Sounds interesting. Please give
(If you still wanna share it)
Boy am I glad you asked!!!!!
So the premise is that grian’s a watcher and kind of a god? Sorta? At least partially. And he’s been building on a private server of his (as one does) for a few millennia, and he starts to get a little bored, and decides to join a multiplayer server, because player interaction is good every once in a while. And it’s been forever since he’s seen kristen (the goddess of death) so he joins her server!
But when he joins, he notices that everything’s a little. Strange? He didn’t get a communicator on login (which always happens, so he’s very confused) and when he asks some players walking by they look at him weird and ask if he means a ‘phone’ (which he has no clue what that is). Plus, everything’s just kinda… odd. Off. The lighting’s too dim for a place with that many people (which, wow), there are barely any trees and no one’s punching any (even when some say they need wood for a project they just walk past), and no one’s using their inventories.
So grian checks out the details of the server, and hardcore is on. He’s confused at how this many people are still playing with hardcore on, especially with skipping nights by sleeping off, and with such poor lighting. And there’s a huge death count to something called ‘old age’, which he’s never heard of before, and the server-wide pain reception is set to max, and apparently no one had logged in and all of them were bred like passive mobs??? And the only reason he could join like normal was because he was a god and kristen had whitelisted him before the changes were made?????? At least it’s on peaceful mode???
As grian has a very minor meltdown on a bench a chunk away from the empty lot of land that is spawn (which was even more confusing because there’s always some sort of welcome at spawn) and this very polite man with a lovely mustache who introduces himself as mumbo (though grian can see that, since even though name tags are turned off too, he can still see it due to watcher/god) asks if he’s alright, then offers to house grian until he finds a job and can get his own place.
Grian, while at first a little confused at having to buy a house (why not just build one?), he does quickly come to learn that the land costs ‘money’ (why not just use diamonds as currency, like everyone on every server ever??), so the next day (mumbo insisted that he sleep for some reason) he announced that he was going mining a thousand blocks out or so, and left to find a relatively untouched piece of land (leaving a very confused mumbo jumbo in his wake).
He mines for most of the day, and due to the server being on peaceful mode, he is unbothered by monsters, and though he’d assumed that there wouldn’t be anything valuable left to mine due to all the players, all the recourses were practically untouched! Which is also worrying, but he won’t complain if it makes him wealthy! So he returns to mumbo’s home, already having forgotten that land costs ‘money’, and asks mumbo where and how he should build, as the city has a general cohesiveness that he doesn’t want to interfere with.
So mumbo reminds his new friend(?) about the cost of land, and the existence of money, and takes grian to a place that would buy his numerous diamonds, all of which are carbon copies of each other, to a place that would buy them for a fair price, and not ask how he got his hands on them, or how they’re all indistinguishable from one another.
Thus, mumbo whisks grian away to a pawn shop that is admittedly quite seedy, and run by a man named quackity. At first, the man seems to think he’s being targeted by a shabbily-made scam, but once mumbo convinces him to test the diamond’s validity, he becomes thrilled to buy each and every one, his grin somehow widening with every diamond confirmed real. He didn’t ask where the diamonds came from (in a literal sense, as grian brought them out of his inventory one-by-one), and mumbo didn’t ask how buying all these diamonds wasn’t making him bankrupt. A fair trade in many ways.
So grian then uses his new money to buy the largest adjacent plots of land available (which is quite a few, in the richest-people section of the city, where very few people live, which is on the edge of the city and pretty much the middle of nowhere), and he gives half of the rest of the money to mumbo as thanks for helping him out, then sets off to build his new home!
~visual signal that the rest of this is no longer part of the story~
At present, I have 10,761 word of bullet notes of plot points, so I have a full plan for what will probably end up being ~50k words at minimum to the most recent events I have planned, since I tend to drabble on, plus I’ll have to be less vague for… everything! Even what I’ve written here’ll be expanded on a lot when I write it for real, I’m just really excited to talk about it :D
Thank you so much for the ask!! I’ve been wanting an excuse to talk about it for a while, and I’ve only now realized that talking about the stuff I really want to would be spoiling it. But I have so much planned, and it includes so many things!!! I’ll want a beta reader to make sure my plan is coherent first, but even without one, I’ll get it done eventually.
:)
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