this is great!
Please take care of yourselves tonight. Please take time for yourself. It's devastating, and it's beyond my scale to deal with, but if this blog can bring you comfort in any way I hope it does. My archive can serve as a fast way to find old posts if you need them.
I care for all of you in this community. I hope you all are safe. I hope you find comfort, and I hope Techno's friends and family find comfort too.
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Uncensored version!! :D
“Joe, I am thinking about death,” Cleo declares, hanging from the teeth of her snake cavern.
“…okay,” Joe says, slowly. He’s still looking through her chests for spare birch for some reason. She’s letting him. She really, really doesn’t need birch.
“Well, I mean, I thought you should know,” she says.
“I don’t mean to put you out by not bein’ suitably dramatic, but you think about death a lot,” Joe says reasonably.
“What? You’re good to talk about it to, what with you also being dead.”
“Am I truly?” Joe says. “I may be a ghost, and also transparent until each sunrise, but does that make me dead when I still speak? When I still dream, and change the people around me, and act?” He picks up a skeleton head from the chest and frowns. “Cleo, did you mean to lose this?”
“See, that’s what I mean—no, give it.” She holds out her hand, and Joe hands over the skull.
“Oh, good. Because if I held this too long talkin’ about mortality, someone might think it’s a bit too on the nose.”
Cleo snorts. “Alas, poor Cleo. I knew her, Joe.”
They’re both companionably silent for a bit.
“Any reason?” Joe says, after seemingly giving up on finding the birch he’d been looking for.
“For the skull? Joe, did you hit your head?”
“No, for talkin’ about death again, and why I don’t think we are.”
“Oh,” Cleo says. “Grian’s doing that game of his again, and I’m playing.”
“Oh! Good luck, have fun, as the kids and gamers say.”
“Thanks Joe. Appreciated.”
“No problem!” He turns to her and beams and she laughs.
“And you basically answered it anyway. What I’d give for everyone else to see it the way you do. We do, I guess. Death, I mean.”
“One day, they will!” Joe says brightly.
“Oh, that was ominous. I’m jealous.”
“With a little luck and also, ideally, some birch logs, you can be exactly as ominous as I am. Just three easy payments of I need those logs so badly Cleo why did you give me false hope—”
Cleo laughs.
What do you mean they all died/lost their memories/left to wander in exile? I’m pretty sure everyone’s just hanging out at a pool party actually~
I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since the first episode of Empires!! I made this as a celebration and I had such a blast with it :DDD Be sure to zoom to spot all the details, and lemme know if you want me to post some closeup shots!