Chapter Text
“Woah.. so this is..?”
“Pogtopia.”
“Yeah. Wow, I’ve actually never really been here before. Was it always this dark?”
Ranboo looks down the ravine, marveling at how there was signs of humanity though it was scarce of any now. Stone blocks were traded out for andesite and gravel, stone stairs placed beneath ledges to make it less of a hazard. Little puddles littered the ground, Ranboo minded his step as he walked around.
There was an abandoned fireplace. Wood for a campfire was still set up properly, and a stake nearby with dried blood on it showed evidence for an old kill. Perhaps a spider or something stole it since then. It was pitiful in a way that stabs you right through the heart, as though roasting meat over the campfire was a nightly routine. It never continued since the night before these logs were placed.
“No,” a raspy, deep voice said.
Old redstone blocks, humming lowly with dying energy, were shoved into random holes in the wall and floor. Bits of redstone dust laid nearby, with pistons pushed out by force. Ranboo had half a mind to take them. He shoves his pickaxe deep into his inventory, keeping his hot bar clear as he wandered down Pogtopia’s main ravine.
Creaky old ladders were placed up to an enchantment table. The table’s book floated just centimeters above the tablecloth, dust coated the pages. Ranboo reaches out a hand and flips the pages with an invisible force. Dust shoots out of the book upon impact, and the half enderman sneezes.
In the center of the ravine was a little groove. A few furnaces, double chests, and a crafting table. The chests were bare, except for a few less than half stacks of raw potatoes and three poisonous ones. Ranboo’s nose wrinkles at the smell; the other items within the chests were miscellaneous, though none had any marketable value.
Adjacent to the groove was a hallway that led to a semi-automated farm, by the looks of it. All of the farmland was still wet, looking like it was used just yesterday. Ranboo checks one of the droppers; it was licked clean. He closes the lid, standing up. He has to bend and shy from the low hanging roof. Ranboo doesn’t step on the hoed dirt.
“It used to be so alive.”
“Wilbur, let me out now!” Tommy shouts indignantly from where he was trapped beneath three pistons, the redstone blocks that surrounded him vibrating with raw power. Wilbur was leaning against a nearby wall, wiping eyes from his eyes as he gripped at his stomach while laughing. His fingertips were obsidian black. Tubbo was making faces at his trapped best friend, his suit all dusty and dirty. Technoblade chuckled nearby as he sharpened his diamond sword, clad in iron armor, as Philza joined in Wilbur’s laughter over a collective comm call.
Wilbur wrapping a bandage a wound on Tubbo’s bicep, bags underneath his eyes, though he still managed to force a smile on his face. “Be careful next time, you two,” he had lightly scolded, no anger behind his words. Tommy sat next to Tubbo, waiting to be patched up as well, after the two took a tumble while building Tommy’s atrocious tower. The two teenagers were talking animatedly to each other after acknowledging the older, Tommy’s lanky fingers loosely circled around Tubbo’s wrist.
Technoblade eating one of his baked potatoes with a sleeping Tommy pushed up into his side closest to the fireplace. The flames licked and leapt towards the piglin and the human boy. Those same flames danced untamed in Wilbur’s eyes, who sat across from his two companions. Sat on a thin plate next to his brown, wool coat was a cold baked potato. It was quiet, late, and peaceful, as a low breeze blew through the ravines.
“Oh yeah?” Ranboo calls back, ducking to enter the main ravine again. Technoblade was down staring into a six by six hole off towards the left, and the piglin grips his sword tighter. “Used to?” Ranboo adds, peeking over Technoblade’s shoulders to see the pit. There didn’t seem to be anything special.
“Fuck you!” Tommy screamed, thick tears rolling from his eyes as he held a bloody nose. The teenager was pressed up against one of the pit’s walls, his white-red shirt now largely red. The rest of his outfit was dusty, bloody, bits of human shit sticking to the bottom of his shoes after he stormed the stage.
Technoblade’s ears rung from past firework explosions still. He brandished a snarl as he looked down upon Tommy, the piglin’s ears flat against his head. No words were exchanged as Wilbur clapped his hands, watching from aside a horrified Nihachu. Tubbo was leaning against the back wall behind the two adults, grinding his teeth together with a gloss over his eyes. The lower right side of his face was a bubbling landscape of burnt skin thanks to CGI.
Wilbur reaches out a blackened hand towards Technoblade, helping the behemoth out of the pit with a yank. Technoblade turns around, facing the frail human boy with an ego too big for his own good. There was an exchange of some award-worthy lines, underlined with a grunt. Wilbur smiled sinisterly behind the piglin, as though he had been planning for this long before the event that morning had commenced.
Technoblade swept his cape away from the rebels, a sea of unparting red as he escaped from the ravine, off to his own base. Wilbur watched him go, ignoring the fact that Tommy still laid in a defensive position in the pit; ignoring the fact that Tubbo was still whimpering and whining from pure agony; ignoring the look that Nihachu gave him, one of horror and conflicting anger.
Wilbur’s hands grew colder, the color of charcoal by moon’s high.
Technoblade casts his eyes down at his own hands, burly large things that were scarred from holding the blades of knives and chains of the past. He shakes them out of impulse, clenching and unclenching his three fingers as he studied the muscle movements. The raw muscle he possessed as a piglin brute flexed in the barely ample light that came from the stairway down.
Two new hands, each a different color than the other, enter his vision. Ranboo wiggles his thin fingers around, his thin claws a severe contrast to the stubby, sharp ones Technoblade possessed. One of his hands was a quartz white with blemishes of gray while the other was obsidian black.
Technoblade’s fingers ghost over the black hand, reminiscent of the color. They fade away as swiftly as they came, Technoblade dropping his hands and swiveling his head away from the half enderman. “We should go try that spawner.”
“O-oh, alright,” Ranboo stumbles over his words, reaching up to scratch at his neck. That was the real reason why they were in Pogtopia to begin with; it was silly of them to loiter too long, with creepers and spiders lurking right around the corner.
Technoblade grabs his axe from his inventory, using it to dig into the perpendicular ravine’s side to help him down. Ranboo tosses an enderpearl down, shoving the rest of his supply to his offhand. The two friends dip below an overhang, heading straight for a small tunnel Technoblade easily spotted.
A hollow laugh echoed through the main ravine. Obsidian black hands, plural, grip the enchantment book and force it wide open. Dust doesn’t fly up as it did for Ranboo when those hands pass through the material. The laughter continues, gliding up the stairs and up to the small base that resided within a hill of dirt. The wall of dirt that once blocked escape was gone. The laughter carried out of Pogtopia, making a beeline for the only other place he knew people would be.
Ranboo ignored the fact that two diamonds and a stick were missing from one of the chests on the top level when the pair readied to leave the rebel outpost.