𔘓 Vita, Antecamera Mortis 𔘓

anyways do we think since !lukey's "home" world/dimension was The Realm (he isn't an outworlder, implying he's an in-worlder) when it got corrupted he didn't have anywhere to go? which is why he runs to the closest thing he has to a home– memory lane, his own corner of the null

but he can't stay there, obviously. he tries to leave through the exit, and finds himself in a world covered in corruption. he digs his way out of a sparkling, sickly purple world with his bare hands and when he reaches daylight, knuckles bloody and alive, he finds nothing but a horizon of his failure

and he needs to get out of here– if theres anything !lukey is, its a survivor, the apocolypse came and the cockroach still squirms its little legs. so he finds the abandoned keeper portals from project outworld and chooses the one with a trail of corruption leading towards and through it– Outworlder 13.

and he wakes up in house heir, with a badboyhalo who isn't corrupted and a possible home to be found. theres a chef and a goose who unnerve him– hairs rising on the back of his neck the same way they would when a keeper was about to appear– but nobody else notices, so he says nothing and tries to pretend it's fine. he's sick, of course, from the death of his dimension, and the subsequent escape, but he tries to show up as much as possible. he has fun, he starts to make friends again, and then it ends.

!lukey learns that most realms/dimensions/servers/worlds have planned endings. Which explains why nobody else even tried to stop the corruption from taking everything, he infers. it hurts, a bit, that nobody even thought to tell him that it would be okay, that they'd be okay. (the keepers said they'd escape, but why the fuck would he trust them?) but if bad is here, and he doesn't seem to care that much– only barely acknowledging their past, and certainly nothing to do with the ending or the corruption– lukey decides (hopes) that everybody else made it out safely. that nobody else was left behind.

so house heir ends with a different lucas winning (and something bitter and resentful grows in his chest with that, but he'll be fine), and he's left with only a few stragglers. desperately, he makes up reasons to keep them there, even when the "admins" show up to try and put him back do something to him– he theorizes that this is all just another hallucination, or maybe a simulation since the other players seem real (please he can't be alone it can't be a lie please he's so-) and they find themselves in...

a lab. something in him breaks, and he tries to get out– it's similar enough to the keeper's that it must have a way out, even if "Home" returns No such program and "Null" the same. he tries, god he tries to get the others out but they don't believe him, he's laughing too much and they must have gassed him again he doesn't have time– and they don't get it but maybe they're safe, maybe keepers/admins are only cruel to him to their homeworlders, and they give him a purple stone and he takes it as the escape it is and thanks them because he understands what it's like to be left behind–