#i actually did my squiddo research to write this

[derww]

Loosely inspired by this headcanon by anon. Thanks, anon.

It takes Ash a little less than a week to discover that Squiddo... is not just one person.

The second Squiddo looked like the first Squiddo and fell on his head during nether travelling. She, however, did not seem to know him personally, referring to him as "Funny Purple Guy" and complained that the portals refused to extinguish the damage from the fall. 

She gave him a strange-looking turquoise spear and an obviously living mushroom, which did not stop giggling and trying to hit him with its forehead. While he has not yet moved away from the stage where he swears and asks stupid questions, she said goodbye and was about to run off into the sunset, but fell off a cliff right into a lava lake. She had no death message. 

The spear was equally likely to either pass through objects or leave very unpleasant itchy burns, and the mushroom was called an Idiot and ran around spawn for almost a month until it turned over in the water and drowned.

This Squiddo – Ash started keeping a list after he met the third one, and in this set of squiggles, crooked drawings and blurred text, she was called the "Tourist" – she consistently looked in once a month, falling out of various types of portals, sometimes right in front of him.

She was always full of enthusiasm and desire to tell him the next story of her own adventure, she loved to bring some absolutely random things and died a lot and absurdly, managing to die even in the most harmless circumstances.

Another Squiddo – Squiddo the Wanderer, as he signed, adding a bunch of question marks and outlining in ink a strange squiggle of snaking holes in the wall – took it into the habit of teleporting straight to him. 

Once she scared him so much that he swung his sword, but it just went through her, as if she were not even here. This did not prevent her from dying in a surreal way – she was in the top 3 among all Squiddos in terms of the number of deaths.

Squiddo the Wanderer didn't remember much, so she got to know him over and over again every time. "Hi, I'm Squiddo," she said. "I don't know what I'm doing here. I usually explore the most remote places in Minecraft. I think I know you, but I do not know who you are." She never remembered who he was.

Next Squiddo, however, knew him all too well. "What's up, Ashswag?" she said when she appeared for the first time, coming out of a door that appeared in the middle of nowhere. "It was a hot minute, right? How are you?".

Then she mentioned a bunch of their adventures together, in which Ash had never actually participated, but for some reason she stood her ground.

It turned out they were hunting ghosts together. And they were running away from monsters. And they were surviving an apocalypse. "For some reason, it seemed to me that even different you would remember," this squiddo said. He called her the Ghost Hunter. "But at least you know me. This is already good."

She was the most calm Squiddo he had ever met. She weighed her decisions, almost did not die, and walked with her dog. She was plagued by oddities, glitches, and one (1) Herobrine, but was surprisingly calm about all of them.

Ghost Hunter sent him polaroids with all kinds of monsters and silly signatures painted with markers. He was present in the photo three times. Once, he had a human face. In another time, he had a gun.

Scientist Squiddo was the strangest of them all, because she could count to ten and knew what pronouns were. She always carried a wooden tablet and papers with her and wrote down anything. She was interested in everything about the server. Much more than she needed to know.

He began to seriously worry about her safety when she began to deconstruct the revive process in order to revive the local Squiddo if she died. He called her an idiot and said she had no idea what she was getting into and that she was risking everything she had, including her life. She grinned and said: "Bet."

At one point, he was seriously expecting admins on his own doorstep every fucking day – Scientist Squiddo, of course, settled in the same place where he lived. They never came. He couldn't decide if this was good news.

With all this, this Squiddo, Lifesteal Squiddo, did not go anywhere – she was like her other versions, constantly disappearing somewhere, but unlike them, she did not travel between worlds. She got lost, disappeared, and died a lot.

Lifesteal Squiddo didn't seem to be affected by the consequences of the deaths of all the other Squiddos; she was doing a great job of dying herself. And, among all the people, it seems that even Squiddo herself was on the list of those who did not know that there were many versions of herself on the server.

Zam fed apples to the Tourist and once even went on a trip with her, Planet communicated with the Wanderer using a language consisting of clicks and whistles, Spoke explored the mysteries following the Ghost Hunter with great enthusiasm, and Ro supplied the Scientist with calculations and data. 

Of course, Ash tried to tell Squiddo that there was a lot of her. She wrinkled her nose, giggled, and asked if he thought she was Sans from Underdale, clearly thinking he was joking. He didn't know what an Undertale was.

And then Lifesteal Squiddo got a call and disappeared. And he, surrounded by the reflections of her wandering around, wondered what kind of disaster it would lead to this time. But it was Squiddo. She was going to be alright. He would just visit her one day and ask how she was.

And when he tries to figure out where Squiddo is now, when they have only half an hour and an orbital cannon is aimed at spawn, alter Squiddo, whom he has not seen before, comes to him.

They look surreally like him. Their body is unstable, disintegrating into black smoke every now and then, and even through the usual orange glasses, an abyss seeps through.

"What are you doing here?" He tries, and they slowly, as if every movement was an effort, again and again stratified and coming together, point first at him, and then to the side.

Ash is staring at them. With hissing and gurgling gestures, Suiddo shows several numbers. Quadrant. Height. Limit. Corner. It clicks in his head.

– Thank you,– he says sincerely, and Squiddo, with a ceremonial bow, turns into a voidfog. He stares at the empty space for another moment, then takes off and calls the Foundation.