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Quackity had told him about limbo. It was in one of his many rants about the sooty guy, or the green guy, or maybe something else entirely that he was barely paying attention to. You can only see it when you die. When Slime offhandedly said he would like to see his own limbo, Quackity backtracked hard and told him he didn’t and he shouldn’t be worrying about anything like that. That it apparently sucked. In order to go to limbo, you’d have to die. Slime had never died before. Quackity said it was best if it stayed that way.
When Slime fell into the lava, he knew his time was up. He’s lived for a long time. He wondered what his limbo would be like.
He wondered for a long time if this was it. It was dark, and cold, and reminded him too much of the caves he spent most of his life under, except this time he couldn’t move. He didn’t want this to be it, he didn’t want to go back there. He started hearing Quackity’s voice. It felt like this for a while. Quackity said he left him books to read. Fundy had been teaching him to do that. When Quackity talked to him, it always sounded so solemn. Slime craved to crack a joke or two.
Slime was able to move, barely. He wrote in a book, as frantically as he could. He felt like he didn’t have much time. Part of him didn’t want to let go. Part of him knew he had to.
When Quackity came around next, he found the book Slime- no, Charlie left him. Charlie… He liked it.
Charlie could see again. And his nose felt weird. He scrunched it up instinctively. He… Had no idea where he was. It looked like a battlefield, craters in the ground that could only have been made by TNT. Charlie’s mind would flash back to talks of limbo. It seemed like such a distant memory now. The thing he had watched the members of the SMP do time and time again, like all their problems could be solved with a bit of TNT. It was laughable.
In another life, he stupidly thought the same thing.
“Hello?” Two voices choroused from behind him. Charlie saw three people, sitting in boats in a river, flowing from a much bigger body of water. One stood out more than the others, the name just on the tip of the goop that would be his tongue.
“Hey,” Slime waved back happily. At least he wasn’t alone. How torturous it would be to go back to being alone after a lifetime of it!
“What’re you doing here?” One asks, his voice wispy and echoey.
“He’s obviously fucking dead, dude. Keep up,” The other speaks before Charlie can, much ruder. The horns on his head are small, but noticeable. He shows them off proudly, unlike Charlie who would hide his slimy bits away from the world. Humans feared slimes. Did they not fear this horned guy?
“Do you guys.. Know where I am?” Charlie asks, carefully.
“Limbo.” The horned one speaks flatly. He doesn’t put much care into his words like Quackity did.
“...Huh.” Charlie takes another look around. So this massive crater, still smouldering, is his limbo? Why? He doesn’t even know what this place is. Certainly not L’manberg. The flag wasn’t here. The walls were different. There was no lava. Something repressed starts to wiggle its way out, but Charlie shoves it back down without much thought.
“Are you there?” Charlie hears, his eyes refocusing on the concerned stares of the people he was just talking to. The wispy voiced one waving his hand out, trying to catch Charlie’s attention.
“What are your names?” He blurts out.
“Oh! I’m Ghostbur, this is Schlatt, and that’s Mexican Dream. We just call him MD though.”
The horned one, Schlatt, barely waves. MD still hasn’t moved.
“What about you?”
“Charlie.”
“Nice to meet you Charlie! Care to join us?”
“Uh… I can’t touch water.”
“That’s fine, you can just sit where you are.”
Hold your ground against authority
Charlie sits. He decides he likes Ghostbur. He reminds Charlie of the sooty guy, but less cynical. He wonders if Quackity’s lessons of losing attachments still ring true here, where you can’t lose people because they’re already dead.
“What’s your limbo look like?” Schlatt asks, after a few moments of silence.
“Exploded.”
“Like L’manberg?” Ghostbur asks, which Schlatt laughs at.
“No, L’manberg has less.. water.” Spouts of water cropped up everywhere. From his small patch of land he can still see TNT, unexploded. Some of it sat uncomfortably close to lava. Charlie was sure he was out of range, at least. A small part of him wanted to see it explode. This land deserved every bit of TNT that came to it. He couldn’t rationalize why he thought that.
“You get used to it,” Schlatt says, idly picking something out of his teeth. “The limbo stuff, I mean. I’ve been here longer than anyone else. It sucks but, at least we’ve got company, yknow?” Ghostbur nods enthusiastically.
Create no emotional attachments to anything.
Everything gets destroyed.
Charlie lets himself forget about Quackity’s lessons of attachment. And he talks to Schlatt and Ghostbur for a while.
Charlie learns a lot while he’s in Limbo. He learns what Schlatt did and why Quackity hated him so much. He learns about the aspirations that died with Ghostbur, and it makes him wonder if the things he taught Quackity also died. He learns about their limbos. Ghostbur is in a train station. It’s always dark and cloudy, and sometimes it rains, even though he’s sure he’s underground where the rain shouldn’t touch him. He claims water burns him. Charlie sympathizes with him. Schlatt’s limbo is the insides of a large tree, only illuminated by the glow of a nether portal. He says it’s from a previous server he was in. Schlatt doesn’t explain much else, though. Charlie eventually remembers his limbo is a place called Bungerburg, though he doesn’t know why this is his limbo. This wasn’t a place on the SMP. He doesn’t ask Schlatt or Ghostbur about it. He doubts they know any more than him.
He asks about MD, eventually. He hadn’t moved much since Charlie got here. He isn’t sure how long he’s been here. The moon stays fixated in the sky. Ghostbur explains his limbo is working retail.
“What’s.. ree tail?”
“It’s uh,” Ghostbur tries to explain, but he’s at a loss for words. “Well it’s like..” Explanations die on his tongue, the words never reaching his lips.
“It’s hell, man.” Was all MD said, before suddenly startling and disappearing completely.
He sounded so much like Quackity. Charlie almost wanted to cry.
“He- he does that sometimes. don’t worry!” Ghostbur explained. “It just happens randomly, he’ll be back soon.”
Charlie pushed down his tears, his thoughts of Quackity, and waited for MD to return. Charlie wanted to say it was only a few minutes, but his sense of time is skewed.
MD does eventually return, muttering things that Charlie does not understand. Schlatt seems to understand, and chats with him. Charlie and Ghostbur make eye contact, and Ghostbur shrugs helplessly.
Charlie starts to notice poppies growing where he’s sitting. They’re a nice pop of color where grays and blues and pale greens start to blend together, and Ghostbur seems just as excited as he is when he talks about them. He wonders if this is all Limbo has to offer. New lessons and peace. Despite the battlefield laid out in front of him, Charlie feels peace. He would never feel this on the SMP, always whisked away into things larger than him. It was all so trivial, but he did anything to make his best friend smile. He would do anything to see Quackity’s smile again.
Seek successful revenge, because if you fail,
the consequences are going to be bitter.
Slime remembers a little more about Bungerburg.
He remembers that he blew it up. He remembers that the people that lived here were assholes, and they wouldn’t let him see his friend again. He doesn’t remember names. There’s a hole in his nonexistent heart that aches to remember.
The talks between Schlatt, MD, and Ghostbur become few and far between. They exhausted a lot of talking points early on, and MD doesn’t stay awake long enough to have decent conversations with. He thought limbo was peaceful, but now it’s just boring and sad. Sometimes it rains. He sits underneath the roof of a blown up wall, barely standing. Sometimes he can faintly hear yells. Sometimes his eyes lock with the TNT and his entire body feels like it’s been dunked in lava again. Limbo only gets worse.
Trust nobody
Forgetting Quackity’s lessons comes back to bite Charlie in the ass, it seems. Ghostbur had disappeared a while ago, and Schlatt said he’ll be back.
Ghostbur steps off the train to find a shouting match.
Charlie and Schlatt started yelling at each other, and it grinds against his ears. He turns to head back onto the train, to get away from the yelling, but the train’s already left him behind.
Ghostbur can’t tell what it’s about, because they’re both trying to over each other, clamoring to be heard. He hears a few things. Bunger, Swag, TNT, deserved. Words that have little meaning to him. Ghostbur just curls in on himself.
The shouting stops eventually, Ghostbur’s ears are ringing too loud to hear what’s said, but the pair storm off to opposite sides of the train station. Ghostbur and Schlatt make eye contact, but Schlatt’s cold gaze turns Ghostbur in Charlie’s direction instead.
“Charlie? Are you alright?” Ghostbur asks, his voice low, because he isn’t sure if he’ll say something that’ll set off Charlie. Charlie doesn’t respond, instead curling in on himself further. So, Ghostbur sits. He silently wonders what Charlie’s limbo looks like. Are they sitting on concrete flooring there? On the cold stone in a crater down to bedrock? Or maybe on soft grass, untouched by the explosions Charlie mentioned on his first day.
Ghostbur offers a grounding presence while Charlie sorts out several lifetimes worth of memories. And through everything, he finally remembers a name.
“Ted…” Charlie mutters.
“Hm?” Ghostbur turns to Charlie.
“One of my best friends, his name’s Ted. We- we got split up, at one point, and then eventually I ended up on the Dream SMP. I miss him.”
“What was he like?”
Charlie chuckles, remembering when they set off together towards Epic SMP. He recounts old memories to Ghostbur, who just sits and listens. Remembering comes easier to him as he talks. He talks for way longer than he should, going off on mini tangents about other people he’s met in his travels around other SMPs. He feels bad for blowing up Meowriza and Bordie, he should have warned them. He talks about the palcove, and all the things he couldn’t tell Ted before setting off that TNT.
He talks about his time on the Dream SMP. How lonely he was in dark, cold caves before finally wandering into the Greater SMP, right when it was starting. He watched from afar, hid in plain sight. Had anyone seen his slime form, he would’ve been killed. Which is funny to think about, because most slimes wouldn’t actually die from the swing of a sword or axe. They turn into little slime balls until they can fully reform again, which can take years to do if they’re just left in a chest to rot. Ghostbur seemed interested in how slimes worked, and Charlie was more than happy to talk about it. Their anatomy, their shapeshifting, their amazing memory. Anything that came to mind.
When he’s exhausted everything he knows about slimes, he moves on to Las Nevadas itself. He talks about how pretty its lights are. He talks about the water feature he jumped into on his first day. He talks about the members, and the blind trust he left in them. How that might have been a mistake, but he doesn’t regret it at all. Then he talks about Quackity. And maybe there’s a slimy part of him that lingers, because all he can think of are good things about “Quackity from Las Nevadas''. The man who’s built so much from the ground up. The man who gambled everything away. The house always wins, he would say. Quackity must not have been the house. He doesn’t say that out loud. Maybe it’s too morbid a thought.
Charlie thinks about the lessons. He really lets them sink in, now that he has the knowledge to. It makes him wonder if Quackity will ever open up his heart again, like he did for the starry eyed slime that understood too much and yet nothing at all.
Legacy is all you leave behind in this world.
Charlie has seen libraries filled to the brim with stories. He's watched what takes years to build up be burned down in an instant. He’s watched the rise and fall of kingdoms, of empires. So many stories worth telling that will never be more than the ash and dust it left behind. He mourns these stories. And he wonders what will become of his own story.