Chapter Text
It took Mumbo an embarrassing amount of time to realize he was dead. Though, in his defense he was already sort of undead in his daily life so it wasn’t much of a change.
He didn’t want to join in on the fight at first, but he always was a rather reckless red name. He swore up and down that whatever sense of blood lust that possessed red names really clashed with his vampiric nature. The whole effect resulted in Mumbo losing any semblance of self preservation or self control. Though, it sounded much more like an excuse for his poor performance in the games than anything.
Either way, he was rushing into a fight against eldritch beasts.
Much of the battle was a blur to him. Most of the server had been drawn to the scene. Everyone was running around, swinging swords and flinging arrows at the fearsome creatures. It was the first time in the nearly two months of animosity that everyone on the server was working together. In that sense, the fight was a relief. No one was trying to trick him or sneak around, there was nothing to worry about but the task at hand.
He felt himself run into the fence posts he had placed as a joke. The Warden had darkened his vision, he couldn’t see his own hands in front of him. Mumbo called out to his friends and they answered, though he couldn’t remember what they said. He felt the explosion of wither skulls at his back. There was an aching, nauseating stiffness to his joints -familiar signs of being withered. He had squeezed his eyes shut and cried out in pain. He squirmed and struggled against the fences, trying to squeeze his lanky frame through the thin gap between them. And then he was suddenly moving forward again.
He heard the boom of thunder and lightning directly behind him, though at the time it registered as more blasts from the wither. His ears were ringing but the darkness that shrouded him had finally subsided. He saw people looking his way, saw his name form on their lips in concern. He smiled victoriously and kept moving, dodging and weaving, jumping over holes made by the monsters, ready to keep fighting alongside his friends.
Mumbo felt lighter than before, his nausea and the stiffness in his bones subsided. The pain of the explosion was barely registering anymore. If anything the blast had only propelled him forwards into battle. He attributed all of this to adrenaline. He kept moving.
He called out to his friends, warning them of holes and the monsters they were fighting, but they did not answer him. At the time he thought his words were simply getting lost in all the commotion. But as the battle came to an end it became harder to believe his voice was being drowned out.
“I can’t believe we actually killed the wither in the games!” Mumbo exclaimed to his friends, he asked the group “whose idea was this anyways?”
No one answered him.
“Guys?” Mumbo raised his voice, trying to get the attention of his friends. Out of everyone gathered there, not one person reacted to his speaking at all. No heads turned and no one looked to him.
“Pearl?” Mumbo approached her, a fellow Mounder and ally, he’d expect her to at least acknowledge his presence.
She did no such thing. Instead she turned away from Mumbo completely, caught up in conversation with Bdubs.
“Bdubs?” And this time Mumbo reached out to put his hand on the man’s shoulder. Only when he should’ve made contact his fingers slipped straight through. Bdubs unconsciously shifted his weight away from where Mumbo tried to touch but made no other reaction.
“Mumbo?” A voice, light and concerned, with a familiar accent to his own.
He turned to see Lizzie. Pale, ghostly Lizzie. Her limbs stained with the indisputable inky blackness of the void, a stark contrast against her pink hair. It finally dawned on him.
“Oh.” Mumbo realized it.
Lizzie gave him a half hearted hint of a smile and a nod.
“Oh! Aw-“ he groaned loudly in annoyance, gripping his hair and pacing, “no! No, no, no! This can’t be it!”
He groaned again and went on rambling. The gears and redstone contraptions in his head were running through everything he had done, trying to uncover what caused his death. It was then, as he walked in circles in front of her, that Lizzie noticed the open wound on his back where shrapnel had torn through his suit and imbedded itself in pale flesh. She grimaced at the sight and decided not to mention it until after they discussed the Jimmy situation.
“Gosh, I can’t believe I-“
“-Mumbo” Lizzie finally cut him off.
He stopped in his tracks, the cogs in his brain halted, he looked back at her.
“It’s Jimmy- he… he’s not okay,” she finally broached the subject.
“Oh?” He was filled with concern and dread.
“I don’t know what to do,” she gestured to Jimmy who was only a few meters away from them. The blonde didn’t react to the conversation. He looked broken, his face was streaked with tears. There was half-dried blood dripping from his ears, though it was unlikely he had noticed it. He sat motionless, staring into the place where the first version of himself was, where he saw himself lying dead on the grass.
Mumbo couldn’t help but cringe at the sight of the body. Lizzie was very pointedly not looking directly at it. They didn’t want to see their friend like that. Moreover it was fundamentally inhumane for a server to allow a player to see their own corpse. It was a line that even most anarchy servers didn’t cross. Any moderator that allowed it would be hard pressed to find any player willing to join their server. And yet, Jimmy was hunched over staring into his own eyes.
“I tried to stop him from turning around but he didn’t hear me- or maybe he couldn’t hear me- but he’s been frozen like that since he saw it…” She was uncharacteristically unsure of herself.
Mumbo swallowed and turned back to face her, though it was mostly to avoid looking at the body, “don’t beat yourself up over it- it’s not your fault- this- this shouldn’t even be a possibility-“ he was wracking his brain again trying to understand why this was happening. He was moments away from beginning to pace again but restrained himself.
“I know it’s not my fault. I just don’t know how to help him- I don’t know what to do at all! I don’t think he’s going to hear anything we say and he hasn’t moved an inch. He’s just completely shut off,” again concern laced its way through her words.
Mumbo went on, sharing his stream of consciousness, “maybe if he goes home to Empires? He can get more support than just the two of us -talk to a professional or something? He should get away from the game completely.”
Lizzie moved to agree but stopped herself, looking uncomfortable.
“That’s the thing…” the nervousness in her voice was replaced with an overwhelming feeling of dread, “I don’t think he can? I… I’ve been trying to but I can’t leave the server.” Her tone was becoming panicked, “at first I thought it was just lagging somehow, not giving me permissions immediately after my death but, I still can’t- you should check right now, maybe it’s just me!” A spark of hope lifted her words.
Mumbo pulled out his comm and tapped through a few menus, when he came to his server list every single one was grayed out except for Secret Life. His heart sank. Everything she had theorized was true, they couldn’t leave the server. He looked up and gave her a somber shake of his head.
“I was really hoping it was just me…”
“Let’s just try to think this through? We can’t leave the server, and we can’t send messages to outside players without permissions. You died before Jimmy, and now that he’s dead his body didn’t auto despawn. And because we’re dead, Grian won’t see our messages while he’s in the game…” Mumbo continued the train of thought, Lizzie nodded along.
“And no one still alive is going to bother checking their permissions or the player list so they won’t notice anything’s wrong until they’re stuck here with us.”
Mumbo looked uneasy, “I’m not too familiar with server management but I don’t think this is a normal glitch… it all feels way too intentional when you put it all together.”
“That’s what I thought, but is there anything we can do about it?”
“Gosh, I don’t know… we could try to do something to show everyone that we’re still here? But I doubt we can interact with much of anything…”
Normally, Mumbo loved a good puzzle. He loved when the redstone gears and pistons in his brain were firing on all cylinders trying to think of a solution. He loved to look at something and figure out exactly how it worked, the intricate design that made it possible. But this was not a puzzle he knew how to solve. There were no wires he could follow back to the power source or flashing lights that told him his machine was working. This puzzle had no leads and no gears for him to turn.
“Mumbo?” Lizzie broke him out of his thoughts.
“I need to think about this…”
“Alright.” Lizzie glanced back at Jimmy, still in shock, “but we need to be here for Jimmy whenever he wakes up. I don’t know what we can say to him about all this, but he should have us there with him.”
“Right.”
Lizzie and Mumbo made their way over to the blonde man hunched over his slowly fading body. They sat down on either side of him. Lizzie wrapped an arm around him and rested her head on his shoulder. Mumbo sat a few inches away mumbling to himself and drawing in the dirt as he tried to think of a way out.