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The forest is calling to him again.
Ranboo knows that it makes no sense, he really does. That’s why he hasn’t told anyone about it - not even Niki, who’d never call him crazy, even when he thinks it about himself - but the more he ignores it, the louder it gets.
“Louder” is hyperbole. It’s not a sound, it’s the space where sound should be. Something’s reached into his brain and scooped a piece out, left it longing for the shrubbery just past the dead-grass parking lot across from his apartment.
Whatever it is could’ve at least taken the fog in his mind with it. Miracle cure for mental health, brain scoop.
Actually no. They tried that in, like, the 80’s. Bad idea.
Still, Ranboo drums his fingers against his windowsill and it’s to a tempo he can’t place, knows he didn’t make up, pours out of his skin anyway. He bounces on his heels as he tries to resist the pull - he’s been able to up until now - but the sunlight glints off of a car roof and his bones feel like they’re ready to peel off his skin and make their way over there themselves, so he scrubs off the nothing on his palms with a sort of unnecessary dignity - no one’s watching his tiny home, at least he hopes not - and grabs his keys before rushing out the door.
Ranboo’s never been normal, not really. He looks older than he is thanks to the extreme amount of height - which helped keep him from getting scammed when he moved out with very little sense of what it meant to have rent - but it got him more complaints than praise as a kid and his friends have been far and few in between.
God, imagine if he’d heard weird forest-pull-things when he was younger. Immediate social exile right there.
The rational part of him is saying obviously it’s heatstroke, or frostbite, or something; there’s gotta be some kind of hotline for this, but it isn’t and there’s not. He knows a lot about illnesses, both mental and physical, after a phase he had at like, 12. The most this could be is a hallucination, but he’s not prone to those and he’s not actually sleep deprived at all.
Which is kind of shocking, since his procrastination habit extends to sleeping at night, but he’d made sure after a week of the pull, just in case.
This is not anything he knows. It’s, well, the forest. Calling to him. For some reason.
Maybe he’s been cursed. There was that time he awkwardly ducked his head and shuffled past a woman on the street. He stole a mechanical pencil from a kid once.
What are the odds that one of the people he’s pissed off had surprise magical powers? That would be just his luck.
Ranboo can feel the heat of the pavement through his worn-sole shoes as he weaves through the car park. It’s mostly abandoned, only occupied by the odd slightly-creepy visitor and people who live in one of the apartment complexes, but he has to pause at one intersection of stopped silver as a truck rumbles by and beelines back onto the road. Wrong turn.
The grid gives way to gravel on the far end and Ranboo pushes through the overgrown raspberry bushes by the mouth of the path. The sound’s only getting louder, the tug a physical tether somewhere in his stomach.
He pauses to breathe in, waiting for some kind of peace to descend now that he’s actually in the area, but all he gets is the sharp buzz of a bug by his ear that he tries and fails to bat away.
Lush greenery covers every inch in front of him - it’s less of a forest and more a tangle of trees that lean and twist - so he steps forward cautiously, careful to avoid treading on any plant life and hoping so badly that there’s not any spiders hanging overhead because he really doesn’t feel like running away screaming after coming this far.
As he goes further in, between the rustle of leaves and the faint hum of the highway to his left, he starts to hear… voices. Weird, warped, something about them is off - like the fact that they’re tucked into the woods, thank you, very observant - but he can hear them more clearly as he walks and they turn crisp as he hits some kind of nook.
Branches and vines form an oval, like a natural entryway, and just past that stretches a wide, grassy clearing. The dappled canopy gives way overhead and bright sunlight beams down two figures, both sat in the field’s very center. Ranboo presses a hand against smooth bark and leans in, straining to hear.
“You’re so boring.”
Gravely and petulant in one, they drag the last word out into a whine. Ranboo tries to catch a glimpse of their face as they turn, but all he can see is a mess of blond that floats down gold under the open sky.
The retort they get is dry. “You can leave.”
“Yeah,” sarcasm drips from the first speaker’s words like dew. “I’ll just go home alone and say ‘hey Wilbur, I abandoned Tubbo on the other side because he wouldn’t stop trying to talk to some weird, ugly human.’”
“Why do you hate him? You’ve never even met him.”
“You’ve never even met him either.”
Ranboo can feel the sound that dragged him here stir and settle in his chest, but he hardly gets to register it because his grip on the outside of the ring begins to slip. He tries to adjust, but instead ends up tumbling through the gap, hitting his hip against a rock and landing awkwardly on his side.
He scrambles up, ready to apologize for eavesdropping, only to lock eyes with… something.
Brown hair sweeps down over their brow, almost to the point of obscuring their vision. They’re awfully dressed for the summer, wearing a heavy-looking overcoat with fur around the edges, and they shuffle a little as he stares.
But most importantly - most relevantly, most surprisingly, most a-lot-to-deal-with, maybe this is a hallucination, maybe he should’ve told Niki - are the horns, protruding out of their head.
Which could be dismissed as a part of some kind of weird cosplay troupe, probably, if not for the other guy. Who has wings. Wings that flutter and flap and lift him a couple inches off of the ground as he tugs at the brown-haired one’s sleeve.
“We’re in so much trouble,” the floating one murmurs.
The other rushes forward and Ranboo doesn’t even have time to panic or recoil or attempt to escape before he realises that the sound - that desperate hum of intrigue he’s been living with for so long - is coming straight from the thing in front of him.
“Hi,” he chokes out.
Because he was raised polite. Because it feels appropriate. Because there’s not much else to do when there’s some goat-person-spirit-thing in front of you, pushing their hair out of their eyes and looking at you expectantly.
They grin just as the other one hisses. “Hello, boss man. I’ve been waiting for you.”