@theminecraftbee ‘s ficlets about Decked Out eating Tango have been living in my head rent free so here’s a little post-do thing of my own.
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“The server resets tonight.”
It’s been just over two months since Decked Out finished. Just over two months since anyone has seen or heard from Tango.
Zed knows what happened. Not the details. And he certainly couldn’t explain it to anyone else. But he knows.
And the gnawing feeling of guilt has kept him coming back to the dungeon. Every day.
Decked Out is asleep. Zed can walk through the citadel without a desperate need to throw himself to the ravengers. He can even wander below, into the redstone, without being electrocuted to death. Maybe it’s dead, but Zed doubts it. He knows it’s just sleeping. Eventually, it will wake up. It will be hungry and will lure whoever enters this world into its depths.
Maybe that’s when Tango will wake up too.
Zed won’t be here to see it.
“Who knows when you’ll be able to eat again?”
His voice is quiet but he knows the whole dungeon can hear him. He plays with the clasp on his gas mask. Tango’s storage room, where he lays on the dusty floor, has enough oxygen flowing through it still to allow him to breathe without the mask, though he’s already getting a bit of a headache. He’ll put the mask back on soon. Eventually.
“One last snack?”
He’s offered the dungeon himself hundreds of times these past few months. As a player, when it was live, hoping to spark a bit of his friend’s life back into him. Then after. Hoping for something. For a glimpse of flickering blue flame and wide eyes that had long since given up pretending to see.
There’s quiet.
There’s so much guilt in the quiet.
Don’t worry, Zed. Just a few months. Not too big of a project.
All good here. With level one done, the rest will go a lot quicker.
Yeah, level three got away from me a bit. Level four will be smaller, don’t worry.
Audio needed to be reworked, you know how it is. Soon.
Just tired, lost track of time last night.
Not too much longer now.
Don’t worry, I’ll be back to normal when the game’s done. Promise.
Did Tango know he was lying?
Zed is well aware that what he’s doing isn’t good for him. It’s ironic, how Tango pulled away from everyone, to eventually disappear in this cave. And now Zed’s doing the same thing.
It was always Tango pulling Zed out. Into the sun for a stupid game or a ridiculous project. So it makes sense that without him, Zed can’t bring himself to leave the hole.
“I could break more redstone.” Zed offers the dungeon. “Really get you mad.”
He’d done that. About two weeks after Decked Out went dormant. He hadn’t gotten a reaction at the time. But the next day, everything was repaired.
That had spurred Zed into doing a stakeout. Break some stuff, sit and wait until the dungeon brought Tango out to fix it.
Zed had died down in the redstone, waiting. It hadn’t been a pleasant death.
That’s when Impulse had stepped in, staging his own intervention. But all it had done is make Zed feel more guilty.
An intervention for the guy who failed to do an intervention when Tango needed it most.
See? Ironic.
His head is starting to pound. He puts his mask back on.
“I want my friend back, you stupid castle,” He says through the mask. The dungeon understands him anyways.
He won’t be getting Tango back. He’s known that for much longer than he can admit.
Time passes. His phone dings a few times. It’s just the others. Making preparations. The server resets in just a few hours.
“Was it worth it?” Zed asks. “Not you, dumb dungeon. I’m asking Tango. Was it worth it? Did you make this choice? Did you know the consequences?”
Silence.
“Did you ever consider saying goodbye?”
The thing is? Tango was saying goodbye. In the only way he could. It was in the heartfelt artifacts crafted for each hermit. It was in his own voice, echoing words throughout the dungeon long after his own voice left him. It was in every ounce of the game.
None of them saw it until it was too late.
Zed stands. He has to be at spawn soon. He has stuff to pack. He has his own hole in the ground to say goodbye to.
He takes the long way out. Up into the main room of the citadel.
There’s a small part of him that hopes to see a glint of Tango. That’s what’s supposed to happen, right? A little wisp of blue fire. A soft voice. A gust of wind blowing a loose piece of paper across the floor. Something he can look at and be comforted by.
Nothing happens.
Zed knows that Tango’s gone.
He stands at the door. It’s open just a crack, just like he left it.
The night is clear.
“Goodbye, Tango.”
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idk if this is still the case but when i was really In It in animorphs feelings a couple years ago because i was unemployed for the first time in my adult life / temporarily living alone in the last house my family lived in / freaking out about climate change / generally Going Through It, and like poking around the animorphs scene on tumblr, there was this notion commonly expressed that rachel and tobias were "toxic," the major piece of evidence for which was the scene in 33 where she "tries to trap him in human morph." which like first of all i'm SOOOOOO SORRRY that the fucking fifteen-year-olds secretly fighting a guerrilla war in which their greatest threat is the mind-controlling slugs they're trying to save humanity from but their second greatest threat is the diminishing hourglass of their collective sanity as they all have to work steadily harder and more desperately to not just completely lose their shit entirely from all the violence and literal 24/7 constant threat and murder that is happening, like i'm sorry two literal children who have managed in this ongoing horror show to forge a bond of loyalty and affection and care and attraction and understanding that can act as a kind of solace neither of them have any other way to access, sorry those actual murder babies sometimes have some communication problems. lmao. but also it's insane to me that people read that scene (in which they're dancing to, i'm not making this up, iris by the goo goo dolls - i mean they don't tell us the song but it's a slow goo goo dolls number that even tobias knows, so - they're dancing to iris by the goo goo dolls at a school dance that is not going well because they are both awkward about the newfound public Officialness of their relationship and rachel who is the only one of them who has ever been capable of socializing like a normal person is in a particularly bad mood because of the emotional hangover of her starfish adventure [great concept executed terribly in the previous book], and then like after two entire minutes of letting himself feel some nice emotions tobias spots the clock and starts leaving to go demorph and then rachel runs after to him to awkwardly attempt to share that she is very fucked up about how insane she has become and she wants to hold on to things like school dances and also this is all happening in a hallway by a student poster on red tailed hawks that states their lifespan of a handful of years in the wild, it's so good) as rachel trying to trap tobias in morph, when like, first of all, "good thing happening -> time to punish myself for feeling nice for 5 whole seconds " is like THEE tobias thought pattern because he's the number one kidlit trauma baby of all time, like truly the first time i dove back into the series i was struck by how well his narrative voice captures Child Of Insane Family Dysfunctionality, he is NOT a reliable narrator on this, but also second, and more saliently, like, believing this scene is rachel attempting to trap tobias in morph requires that you believe rachel, all by herself, made a plan in advance and then attempted to execute it, which is a skill we literally never see her demonstrate even one fucking time outside of the comfortingly familiar hunting ground of the mall
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