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Did you know he was the first person to join Green?
A lot had happened since the day that Pangi had abandoned the Kingdom to join up with the guy who had refused to sign his friendship book on the first day they met. Ironically, Badboyhalo had been one of the smartest motherfuckers in the realm on day one, and in his eyes, had already gained his respect. At first he thought he would team up with the rapidly growing Kingdom, with their hastily crowned King, creepy court jester, Clownpierce, and overly cheerful master architect. It didn’t seem worth sticking around for the hotdog, the drunk, and whatever Sneeg was doing.
But there was something about Bad with his shouting, the fact he had killed Foolish on day two, and was willing to stand up against everyone alone that made Pangi want to follow him into battle. Bad was a force of nature, and Pangi was willing to ride that wave to glory or death. Whatever came of it was going to be awesome. And looking back, he wouldn’t change a single thing. At the very least he could say without a doubt that he had never been bored.
It had been an impulsive decision at first, but the more the days progressed the more comfortable he had grown with his choice. Even if Bad didn’t want to be a leader, even if he always listened, always went along with things, and was always willing to be his backup, he was Pangi’s leader. And Bad proved to him day after day that they were a team, and Pangi wasn’t going at it alone.
In the beginning it had seemed like Clown would be Foolish’s champion in battle, so Pangi did his best to work hard to not fall behind too badly. He was never going to outpace Clown. No one was. Bad never seemed to be upset about it though. He took the gap in stride, and seemed to think it wouldn’t matter in the long run. Pangi still tried to grind harder than everyone else. Others were grinding as well, making him push himself harder. But not everyone seemed to be on the same page about levels and power. Over time he noticed that while Foolish was drastically behind Clown in levels, Bad was doing a good job at keeping pace, sometimes even racing ahead of himself. He was proud that his leader wasn’t just some asshole on a throne someone else built. He was an asshole who could fight his own battles and got his own hands dirty.
Bad even killed the King again, then somehow arranged for a Red member to take his third life. He was in awe. Pangi had never expected that Yellow would be so careless with their King. The chaos Bad managed to create in the aftermath was a master class for him. If Bad hadn’t proved he was worthy of being the leader of Green, that whole thing clenched it. He took down their enemy, helped save the new faction, and sent Yellow and Blue spinning while they tried to make sense of it all. He didn’t think there was anything he could do that would measure up, but he was going to try his hardest to be worthy.
That moment also established a set of rules for him that he hadn’t been entirely certain of before, but now it was clear to him. Bad would kill anyone he wanted if he wanted to. And Bad would support Pangi killing anyone if Pangi wanted them dead. Proof of concept when he killed Tubbo and blew up his house with some crystals. Bad had covered him with arrows, and then laughed about it later. He had delighted in the random act of violence, not angry over the collective reaction. Pangi had felt like he always knew that’s how Bad would be, but it had been comforting to see it confirmed for him.
That wasn’t the case with Yellow or Blue. They were dogs on chains, he was free to make his own choices, good or bad. Either way Bad would be there. And with the Red faction around, they used them as cover to make traps and kill people as they pleased. It was liberating. It was exciting. And for a while everything for Green was looking good.
Then a lot of shit happened. And by shit he meant the corruption, and new factions. Oh and he had lost his memory for a while, not important. Green faction had grown a little bit in that time, while they had added several new members, they had also lost one. In the end only Lukey had ended up being a consistent Green member, but that was good enough for him. Yellow, on the other hand, was a mess.
Clown. Missing.
Owen. Kicked out of Yellow. Gone from the Realm entirely.
Sneeg. Missing.
Tango. Hit or miss, mostly miss.
Fit. Allegedly sober, but only showed up for special occasions.
Zam. Mostly gone doing his own thing.
Sausage. Missing
Which left Ros.
He felt sorry for her, at least he did at first.
They had been sent to the Null together with Aimsey, and spent what felt like decades there together, even though in the realm it had only been a few days. They had bonded in that time, but now things were different. Their friendship hadn’t been enough to keep her from targeting Bad. And that meant she had targeted him. In doing so she had killed the good will between them.
She claimed she didn’t understand why. It was one of her new favorite things to throw at him.
When he had been alone with Bad, he had done his part to hold his own. He was often without Bad to back him up and had to carry his half of Green faction on his own shoulders. Most of the time it was like Bad barely existed. Still he kept on going to do his part in their struggle against Yellow. He had built bridges, killed people, set traps, and made sure he was as strong as possible. Even when everyone else in the Realm looked at him like he was a criminal. Even when they were cold or called him a peasant. He kept his head up, and carried forward, because he knew that Bad would show up and stand right by him. Bad would always do his part. Bad would never let him down.
Ros didn’t have that, so she didn’t get it. She didn’t understand, how could she? She had an absent King, who was lazy and unwilling to do the hard work to be strong for his faction, because he had Clown, and then he had Sneeg. Now with them both gone, Ros, despite having Nirvana, had no one to help protect her. She had tried to protect herself, but she was overwhelmed. Foolish certainly wasn’t going to wake up and back her up. He wasn’t going to spend all night while she was asleep building a farm, or brewing a thousand potions. He wasn’t going to do anything for her.
She was alone, dealing with things that felt bigger than they were because no one else was there to shoulder it with her. There were eight people in Yellow. Surely some of them could have taken some of the weight off her shoulders. Instead she had been buckling, and now she had finally broken under the weight of everything on top of her.
She said he didn’t listen to her. He listened. What she wanted was for him to agree with her, and take her side. But that wasn’t going to happen, because her side was the result of her faction.
He was chilling on Green. A little sand, or three hours of draining water wasn’t going to make him blow up Green’s castle, or lab.
Meanwhile, Ros was experiencing Death by a thousand cuts, because no one in that stupid, overly inflated faction was around to take a single cut for her.
Like the castle covered in sand. It would have been easy to clean up, it was only sand after all. He didn’t even necessarily believe that Ros was angry about the sand. It was more that there was no one in Yellow who had seen it. No one was there to say ‘Hey Ros, no problem. I got this for you.’ There was no one there from Yellow who could have chased off Bad to save her from it happening at all. Or someone to clean it up before she had even seen it.
And so in a demented way it DID actually make sense to him that Ros had wanted Bad to suffer, and wanted him to be the only one to do so. Ros wanted to make Bad feel like she felt. She wanted Bad to feel overwhelmed and alone, and Pangi could imagine that for a while Bad might have felt that way.
But he would be damned if he allowed it to stay that way.
So, yes, despite Ros’s insistence that flooding the Cathedral was only to make Bad suffer, Pangi continued cleaning it anyway.
Green suffered together. Always. They had since the day he joined and they would until the Realm ceased to be.
There was literally nothing she could say, or really that anyone could say to stop him. He kept cleaning. He did it for Bad. He did it for Green. It was for their pride. For their image. Green was NOT just a group of disjointed, barely aligned live wires. They were a proper faction, and his leader would not carry the full weight of an assault on the Green Faction alone. Pangi would rather fall on his sword than let that happen.
It’s why Lukey helped finish it up, because he understood it too. He knew the score against Yellow. And if anything this seemed to light a fire in Lukey he had yet to see.
Everyone was on the same page. The three up them needed to hold up their part of Green on their own feet. They needed to be strong and resilient. They would not let the others suffer alone, and so they would not do so. Green would not suffer the plight of Yellow because they were never allowed to be complacent. They couldn’t be comfortable in a hostile world, and it had forged them into a group that could lean on each other when needed.
Ros could never understand, because she HAD been left to suffer alone.
Ros liked to think that she wasn’t heard, and wasn’t respected, but Pangi didn’t see it that way. Pangi knew that Ros felt slighted and targeted, but that was because no one else in Yellow was holding up their part of their faction. No one else was putting in the effort or on the front lines.
Sure they had strong members with high numbers. But what good were they if they were never around to spread the weight and responsibility around?
Ros had Aimsey, but they weren’t in Yellow. They had their own absent faction to chase after at the end of the day.
Ros also didn’t have her leader. Foolish had been gone more and more often, and her recent breakdown seemed to have finally come about because she was finally without that last bit of support. At least that’s what he had observed. He wasn’t a therapist or anything, but it wasn’t a difficult jump to make.
This wasn’t about Bad, or sand. It wasn’t about being heard or not being heard.
It was about how she refused to see that her suffering was the fault of her poor strategy skills in light of the fact that she was alone. If she had any survival instincts at all she would have known to keep her head down until she had gotten backup. At the very least she should have been smarter about picking her fights. Bad wasn’t an easy target. But she was.
Lone wolves got picked off.
She also seemed to be incapable of grasping the concept of proportionate responses. A little sand meant the Cathedral needed to be submerged, and flooded with source blocks?
Insane response. One that she couldn’t back up on her own.
Ros had forgotten Bad wasn’t alone. She was, and so anything she did she was going to have to pay for on her own. No one else was keeping a master list of slights and wrongs done over time. He guessed that she felt like she needed that to help her feel like the victim. In truth it didn’t matter how lopsided things were. The Kingdom was supposed to be powerful, they were the main team in the Realm. To think that they would get away without being targeted was naive. Even in their best case, they were going to be targets. Ros wasn’t just Ros. She was Ros of the Yellow Kingdom. She was their heart. Their symbol. And maybe that was the real issue. Symbols were targets. Symbols stood on their own. Symbols needed to be protected, and Yellow had gotten sloppy on that front.
Ironically, up until the Cathedral, he would have been happy to help Ros out if she had asked him to. He would have happily cleaned sand on the castle five times over, rather than drain the Cathedral once. But she hadn’t reached out. She had lashed out at his faction instead.
And then she made it clear she had no plans to stop lashing out when she said she would do it again. Of all the stupid things she could have said to him at that moment, she picked one of the worst ones, so he snapped.
“But this wasn’t meant to be for you.” She had whined. “Bad was supposed to suffer.”
“You don’t get it.” He had growled at her.
“No I honestly don’t, and I don’t think I ever will.” She snapped and then flew off.
Green suffered together.
Ros suffered for Yellow.
And that was the difference between them.
That was what it came down to. Ros could have her lists of wrongs, her complaints, her feelings, and her claims that she wasn’t respected. All it added up to was that she was alone.
He wondered how she would react if she joined a faction that actually cared about her. Blue or Green were her only good options, and honestly he could make the case for both.
She would fit best with Blue, of course. He didn’t know Scott extremely well, but he imagined they would enjoy building together. Plus she could be peaceful in Blue, but still have a group that believed in getting stronger. There she wouldn’t be targeted. She would have CPK, Piso, Scott, and Aimsey to help her and they would have fun together. The part of him that had been her friend, the part that had experienced the Null with her wished she could let Yellow go and just be happy in Blue. It seemed like it was where she was truly meant to be. She would get her joy and whimsy back in Blue.
But… he could also see her in Green. While Ros a great builder and just wanted to be happy living in peace with everyone, she was also impulsive, retaliatory, proud, and hungry to prove herself. He could see her in full gear, made by Bad, a belt of potions made by Lukey, with the stacks of pipe bombs that he would get her walking into whatever new confrontation one of them had dragged the rest into. The four of them would go crazy, they would run the Realm. She and Lukey would work on the lab, and she would finally be looped into the research that Lukey was doing. Bad and her would build, and prank Yellow’s builds together. And he would hang out with her and Aimsey getting into silly adventures when they weren’t grinding together. It would be sweet. Having her and Lukey be friends too… Damn, it would be perfect. Though she would never agree, Pangi truly could see her being happy in Green. She could find her confidence in Green. Maybe it wasn’t as good as joy and whimsy, but he felt like she could take whatever joy she wanted with the power Green could give her.
It was only her loyalty to Yellow that held her back. A loyalty they hadn’t earned, and in his opinion never deserved. They were holding her back. She was never going to find the happiness she was looking for because what had originally made her happy was her faction. And they had left her to rot.
But that was fine. She wanted to blow up her own castle instead of leaving Yellow. The heart of the Kingdom was gone, and Ros was adrift. The last person left on the sinking ship.
So he didn’t mind it when Aimsey chased him and Lukey off from their real estate and insurance scams.
He didn’t mind rebuilding his bridge.
It was all ok by him, because at the end of the day he knew he hadn’t been alone in taking on those burdens. And so long as Ros kept her actions small he wouldn’t feel the need to react, because that’s what happened when you had real support. You don’t feel slighted by piles of sand. You don’t keep lists of things others had done against you months ago. You don’t hang onto grudges. Little things don’t pile up on you and weigh you down.
Pangi’s shoulders were clean, and his head was held high no matter what came at them.
After all, when you’re the first person to join Green, how else are you supposed to act?