Chapter Text
Lizzie was the first ghost of the server. Her fall into the void cemented her last place status for the Secret Life games. Which in itself, was surprising. Everyone knew that Jim was cursed, he was their canary. And yet, for some reason, he wasn’t the first to go.
Maybe that was why Lizzie wasn’t being so cautious in the end. Some part of her thought that there was no way she could die at that point. Jim was still alive, albeit on his red life. Jimmy would be taken before her, as he always was.
Or maybe it was the red bloodlust that had been coursing through her that made her reckless. She was so focused on her prize, on knocking Scott off of the island, that she forgot to mind her own feet and gaze.
Trading jabs with her friend on a thin strip of end stone wasn’t a wise decision. She tried to lure Scott closer to the edge. She looked at an enderman in the distance. Lizzie stepped back. Her foot found nothing behind her.
She had fallen into the inky black of the void before on other series and servers. It was one of her least favorite ways to go, even without limited respawns on. There was a loneliness to the end that never sat right with her and falling into the void was isolating by its very nature.
The worst part was always looking up at the end islands. Watching them get smaller and smaller until they’re gone completely. Then there is only the darkness and you, tiny insignificant you.
Lizzie was flailing and screaming out to Scott. Though there was nothing he could do, she disappeared from his view within seconds along with her screams. Lizzie vaguely remembered to throw an ender pearl to save herself but the thought came far too late. The distance was too great or her throw was too weak and the pearl never made contact.
The vast, dark nothingness that stretched onwards and outwards to infinity. That was where her fear came from. What everyone knew to be wary of.
She kicked and clawed and screamed and fought with the nothing. Though there was nothing to contend with. The air was thin and Lizzie was isolated to a degree that players rarely saw.
Slowly the nothingness somehow turned suffocating and oppressive. It filled her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. She gasped for air and instead nothing clogged her throat.
It was not long before she died.
And yet, just as soon as it was over, Lizzie woke up. Gasping for air and clutching her chest she sat up in bed. Touching her face and wiping away tears she grounded herself. Eventually she calmed enough to take in her surroundings. She was home, in her pink pumpkin house with unused bunk beds hastily pushed to the sides of the room and a dirty platter that once belonged to her birthday cake. For a moment she was confused.
That was my third death, right?
She recounted, there was the skeleton on Joel’s helter skelter, Jimmy and Martyn hitting her while she was invisible on her horse, and falling into the void. Three deaths.
Then what am I doing here?
She got out of bed upon hearing footsteps and someone humming to themselves like they were off to work. The person was tanned and wore a ripped suit, they immediately let themselves in.
“Skizz? What are you doing in my house?” She asked, her nose scrunched up when she was confused.
Skizz didn’t reply, instead he began opening her chests and looking through the contents.
“Hey! Get out of my chests!” Lizzie protested.
Again, he did not respond. He only oohed and ahhed at particularly good loot, especially her little stash of ancient debris.
“Aw man, I really wish I could just keep this for myself,” he inspected the valuable Nether material. “What I wouldn’t do for some sick armor like that… but who needs that when you’ve got plot armor!”
“Wait- what?” She muttered. “Skizz?” Lizzie waved her hands in front of his face.
She finally noticed some strange changes that had occurred. The first was that from the tips of her fingers to her elbows had turned an inky black that echoed the darkness of the void.The second was the transparency of her limbs.
A third she found was that when she reached to touch Skizz’s hands, her own went straight through his. At this realization, Lizzie screamed.
Skizz, for his part, only reacted when she pulled her hand away and a wave of shivers ran through him.
“Yeesh- it’s like this place is already haunted,” he chuckled to himself and headed out the door, “sorry, Lizzie!”
It took Lizzie a moment to compose herself again. She was definitely dead, she’d proved that much. It was strange that she had woken up in her house, though it felt strange that she had died in the first place. She had been doing well after all, in perfect health and getting through her tasks with ease. And yet it all fell apart the instant she stepped back into the void.
All things considered, Lizzie wasn’t all that angry about her death. She had made a series of mistakes and she could accept that. But she did feel cheated, going from perfect health to instantly dead was particularly cruel. She saw the connection between her death and how her season had been going. She died as she lived, alone.
In some sense, her death felt calculated. Like it was out of her control. Like they were using her to make a point. Everyone knew that the games weren’t really all in good fun. They pretended they were, but they could see the dread written on one another’s faces.
Lizzie told her friends on Empires that she would be playing a game with old friends for a few months. She had joked that they would be hearing from her last as she planned to win the series. Everyone on Empires knew that the Life Series contestants hated talking about the games. Whenever the subject came up, the players would shift the conversation away, so much so that outsiders could barely piece together the premise of the games. Still, it was common knowledge that the Life Series players were prone to nightmares, though they’d never share what happened in them. Lizzie assumed this was the case on Hermitcraft as well, but of course no one ever discussed this either.
After the first set of games nobody really wanted to compete anymore. Things got ugly and people got hurt. Grian said he didnt want to arrange them again. And yet when they each received a letter with a strange symbol embossed in the wax seal, beckoning them to compete, they couldn’t say no. The games brought fear, but denying whatever power that called for them was all the more terrifying.
There were always strange things happening within the games as well. Besides the obvious gimmicks, everyone’s emotions ran high, lifelong friends would turn on one another in an instant, even the most gentle hearted red names and boogeymen were filled with an insatiable bloodlust. And after contestants were eliminated, they were given a choice to go home or to spectate the rest of the games, a permission rarely granted to players. But this time Lizzie wasn’t offered a choice.
Checking her communicator, she saw that she was still blocked from leaving the server. There was a chance it was only a glitch, that her permissions hadn’t changed from when she was alive yet, but everything else about her status had changed. This was most definitely purposeful.
But in all honesty, there wasn’t anything she could do. As a ghost, the server blocked her from sending messages to any surviving players so contacting Grian wasn’t an option. And the server in general blocked all communication with the outside world, so she couldn’t call on any of her friends either.
Lizzie made the executive decision not to dwell on the issue for long. She was at a dead end. She would have to wait for other players to join her and then they could problem solve together.
“Right. Well, I’m a ghost now,” she reasoned, “guess I better get haunting.”
Lizzie soon found that she quite liked haunting the server. Though she would much prefer life or to go home, it was admittedly pretty fun to lurk around places she’d never be allowed to go and know everyone’s secrets. She mostly spent her time following Joel around, providing her own running commentary on his actions and poking fun at her husband.
She definitely wasn’t expecting that anyone would join her in her haunting anytime soon, let alone two people barely thirty minutes into her afterlife. At least she wouldn’t be alone anymore.