Chapter Text
Diansu walked out of the coliseum in a daze, going over a thousand different possibilities in his head, none of them good.
For some impossible reason, Lux had revived him from the dead (a clearly desperate decision given that their last interaction was her killing him) and tasked him with some kind of vengeance (either for her or generally for the server, and either way it was bad) without leaving anything or anyone to explain the situation for him once he woke up (giving more credibility to vengeance option A).
Sighing, Diansu sat amongst the sunflowers and weighed his options.
Option one, cut his losses and run away to whatever cave Will had holed himself in. He would probably stay alive for the longest amount of time, but it would also probably end in the most painful way. It was obvious that Blake was at least partially at fault for whatever happened to Lux, and it wouldn’t surprise him if Rat hated his synthetic guts for being the reason Lux got involved with Charter, so if either of them caught wind of his existence then he’d be a goner.
Option two, announce his revival to the server. Immediate no, someone would just murder him again. Why did I even THINK of that as an option?
Option three, lay low and gain allies. He may not know any of the details regarding neutrality at the moment (or if there even was such a thing on the server anymore), but he did know that Eight and Talon would never side with Blake, and that they would at least ask for an explanation before trying to kill him. At the very least, he could learn how long he had been dead for and whether or not they knew if Lux was alive.
His destination decided, Diansu picked himself up, wiped the soil from his pants (he REALLY needed some new clothes), and began the trek to the outskirts of Spawn.
— — — — —
His walk to Talon’s base was quiet.
It wasn’t a peaceful kind of quiet. The wind was stagnant, the birds were silent, it was as if the world itself had simply stopped breathing.
It wasn’t a tense quiet, either. Diansu felt uneasy, but it wasn’t building. A silent discomfort blanketed the world like a fog, each moment flowing seamlessly into the last.
It was the quiet that followed after disaster. The quiet of picking through a place made unfamiliar to try and find anything comforting hidden beneath the ashes.
It was the quiet of grief.
It was the quiet of regret.
It was the quiet of death.
Luckily, it wasn’t a quiet Diansu had to exist in for too long. Soon enough, he had arrived at the small spire poking out of the ocean that would (hopefully) take him to some answers.
…And of course the place was locked.
Diansu kicked the metal hatch. “HEY! Mitchell Meyers, open up!”
A periscope rose from a hatch-within-a-hatch, turning every which way to find the disturbance, a voice projecting from a hidden speaker.
“Who’s there? I must warn you, I have drugs and I’m not afraid to use them!”
“Turn around, Talon.”
“Who said-“ the periscope suddenly stopped, lingering on Diansu.
“…did I take something earlier?”
“Just open the damn hatch! I’m not about to wait around for Blake to show up!”
“Whatever you say, hallucination Diansu.”
The hatch popped open, and Diansu jumped down into the repulsers.
The landing was… harder than he had anticipated, but he handled it surprisingly well for someone not wearing armor, and for someone who had been dead all of forty minutes ago.
“Oh, damn. I must’ve taken something REALLY strong for something this cohesive.”
Right. The drug dealer in the room. Talon was up on one of the balconies, staring at Diansu like… okay, the mask made it really hard to discern what Talon was thinking, but he WAS staring.
“I’m not a hallucination, Talon.”
The masked man hopped over the railing.
“Isn’t that just what a hallucina-“
The back-and-forth halted at the sound of shattered porcelain from down the hall. The pair turned to see Eight, frozen in place, standing over the shattered remains of a sandwich.
“Talon,” the slime started, “did you slip something into my food or is Diansu somehow standing in our base?”
Talon looked back and forth from Eight and Diansu, before reality finally caught up to him.
“What the fuck?!”
— — — — —
It took about twenty minutes of back-and-forth exclamations from Eight and Talon before the shock finally faded.
“Okay…” Talon started, “okay… this is real, I’m not hallucinating, Diansu how the fuck are you alive.”
“Well, that part is what I’m trying to figure out, but given that there’s only one necromancer on the server, it seems pretty obvious to me.”
“Right… how long have you been awake for?”
Diansu did the math. “A little over an hour, I think? Might’ve been alive for a bit longer than that, I was pretty disoriented right after I woke up.”
Talon and Eight shared a look before Eight responded.
“That would put you waking up… right after Lux’s death.”
Now it was Diansu’s turn to freeze. It was barely for a second, just enough for a single breath, before his mind started racing again.
“Oh… I suppose that explains why she used the ink to write ‘avenge me’ on the wall of the Coliseum.”
He took a few steps back to lean on the wall before speaking again.
“Stars above and below, that’s fucked. How did it happen?”
Talon shrugged, “nobody knows. The only info we have is that around three hours ago, everything froze and went black and white, then it started raining ink, and when Lux died it suddenly cleared up and all the ink just… vanished.”
Piece by piece, the narrative was starting to fall into place. The only loose thread left…
“…who killed her.”
It wasn’t a question at that point. There was only one person who made any sense to fit into the role. Eight and Talon didn’t even need to say anything for the answer to be clear.
“…right, then I suppose that I have a lot of work to do-”
“Hold on,” Talon interrupted, “you should probably stay hidden for a while. Let things cool down and get geared back up.”
The tone of his voice left a question hanging in the air.
“Are you offering to let me stay?”
“Our place is probably one of the safer places to be right now.”
Diansu sighed, “I suppose it’s better than camping.”
Talon straightened up, gesturing for Diansu to follow.
Initial base of operations, check. Source of information, check. What am I still missing…
The revelation hit him about halfway down the hall.
“Hey, do you have any clothes that I could borrow? This,” he gestured to his ruined uniform, "isn't going to last much longer."
“Oh I got better than that!”
Talon jogged over to a closet, opening it to reveal…
“Talon, why do you have my old clothes?”
“…w-well, you just have a really good style and Oceana was abandoned anyway-”
“You STOLE my clothes?”
“You were already dead by the time I got to them! It’s not like anyone knew that you would come back-”
“You stole a DEAD MAN’S CLOTHES?!”
“And what’s so wrong about that?”
“TALON-”