forever unfinished

Whump the careful, conscientious, sensible one (Doesn’t even have to be the leader)

At the top of the stairs

In door frames

In the middle of a field

In the middle of a raging storm, without shelter

At the bottom of the stairs as they’re about to start climbing

At the feet of their Whumper

In Caretaker’s arms

In Whumper’s arms

With their back pressed to a locked door

On their stomach, straining up to reach the doorknob

In bed, sitting up too fast and their head goes light and their vision swims black

At the foot of their bed

Trying to get out of bed

Suspended by chains, so they don’t really collapse, they lose consciousness and just. Hang there.

In the middle of a time-sensitive task

Right before finishing a time sensitive task (so close)

Carrying Whumpee 2 to safety

Running from Whumper(s)

Leaning over the bathroom sink

Trying to focus on an approaching figure. Friend or foe? They’ll never know.

On the beach, face first into the waves

Knee deep in the surf. They can’t hold out long enough to make it safely to shore

In the middle of battle, from a blow so fierce that they drop straight down in a rag-dolled heap

who’s ready for more weekly pain excitement suffering just absolute chaos Impactful Occurrences on the 3L series? because I know I am.

miss the red/green alliances from 3rd Life?

love the extra suspense that gameplay additions in Last Life added? want a similar level of novelty and suspense without having the exact same mechanics?

well, I humbly propose

here’s how it works (as far as i’ve been able to consider in the past five minutes):

Like in LL, players get a random number of lives.

Unlike LL, players only get between 2-4 lives.

Here’s the kicker: Players don’t know how many lives they have.

On your first life, the gear you are allowed to use is minimal. (maybe gold armor and wood sword at best)

As you lose lives, each ✨next life✨ opens up permission for better gear for you. But, y’know. Don’t lose too many, or you’ll be out of the series for good.

The highest death tier could be the permission to wear a helmet. That would make seeing a player with a helmet hold some pretty hefty impact.

NOTE: Losing a life and moving up by one death tier does not automatically give a player better gear. Players only get permission to wear/use better upgrades. They still have to collect gear themselves.

You can initiate combat on any life level. Do you want to?

personally, I feel like it would be a cool change to see people with more of an incentive to lose their early lives. (gotta have that sweet sweet inner emotional turmoil amirite?)

and the way losing lives opens up better gear would turn the vibe of the series from “counting down till our final life” to “counting up till we can’t anymore”.

this gives us the opportunity for a red/green equivalent in terms of alliances. not the same, but similar. someone with stacked gear but on the precipice of death, working with someone far less geared up but with a little more wiggle room in terms of lives.

the new mechanics would also cause a shift in battle strategies.

for example, if someone with better gear is attacking you, do you take the fight? if you kill them, you might get them out of the series for good, and score some good stuff for yourself or your allies… or, you might end up with an enemy on an even higher death tier, thus widening the gear differential between you two.

final deaths would be way more abrupt too, because it’s almost impossible to see them coming. I’m sure that will add to the trademark angst which is inherent to the 3L saga.

Is that what I think it is?

—

What an enchanting idea, honestly—that this astronaut who didn’t tell anyone he was leaving, travelling through the loneliness of space with only a skittish animal for company, comes across an isolated relic of the home he left behind. There’s a friend inside. It’s the friend he left behind. And you know that whatever is in there is not that friend, can’t be that friend, not really, but—but wouldn’t it be nice, to have one more conversation? Like they used to, before all this happened?

A convenience store floats through the void, warm and inviting, stocked and ready for whoever might need it.

it’s the standing up and seeing his slippers across the room. he always ran cold, you always ran warm. you want to feel if the slippers are as cold as he was, but it feels like sacrilege to touch anything that was his.

it’s opening the wardrobe and seeing a cloak left behind. he didn’t want to leave. he didn’t plan on leaving.

it’s walking into a silent, silent hallway and wondering if it will ever see life again.

it’s the passing glance at a room full of toys that he never saw his son in. and now he never will.

it’s thinking just a bit to hard about that cloak again while you’re eating breakfast. he didn’t want to leave.

it’s pretending that this is just an exceedingly long trip. maybe he’ll be back soon, you’d always thought. maybe this time he’ll stay a little longer, you’d always hoped.

it’s going about your day like everything’s normal, and then your ring hits against a part of the wall you were trying to build and it’s so so far from normal that you want to scream. but you don’t, because you’re visiting tommy and tommy is already dealing with so much. you want to know what, but you don’t think you could handle asking so instead you listen, blank eyes boring into a wall behind his head as you try to stop your ears from ringing with the sound of metal against obsidian and the ghost of a whispered voice.

it’s going home as the sun sets and making stir fry out of habit, looking at the amount you made too late and realizing you made too much. you feel a stinging pain with every word you write in the footnotes of a scribbled recipe, reminding yourself to cut the amount of each ingredient in half.

it’s the understanding that there’s no more of things once taken for granted. tomorrow is saturday, and he was always home by saturday because on saturday you had rice pudding together. and now you can’t stand the scent of it because it’s too much and you think you want to throw up thinking about the taste. it feels stupid.

it’s those “no mores” that haunt you. the scarf he’d been working on will always be three eighths of the way done, and the stitches in it will never get any cleaner. he’d been improving with each little centimeter, and now his progress will remain stagnant forever. no more knitting. no more days where you’d clip your nails together, and you think you might let them grown long until they break. the sound of cutting might just shatter your soul.

it’s the fact that you haven’t shed a single tear. not one. not until the door opens and you almost say his name and not until— oh. yes. not until you remember that he’s not the one at the door and he’s not going to run to you and lift you up and spin you around. not today, and not ever again. someone says hello and you barely hear it because you’re on the ground and you didn’t know your chest could hurt this bad without being physically stabbed through the heart with a burning sword or shot to death with fireworks.

it’s the fact that someone runs to you, face full of concern and you can’t hear them because your ears ring with his voice instead and you can’t see them because your eyes have gone blurry and you think it looks like his face but it’s not, oh it’s not it’s not it’s not. why did you have to lose him? why do you always lose? wouldn’t it have been better if you had been sacrificed three hundred and twelve (no. now it’s three hundred and thirteen) days ago? maybe then this wouldn’t have been drawn out for so long and losing now wouldn’t hurt quite so much. there would have been less to miss then.

it’s in the thought that maybe ranboo had the right idea in dying.

and it’s in the desire to join him.

but more than that, it’s getting up, wiping away tears and brushing off help.

it’s the need to move on while being forever haunted by those little, little things. the hoping and the slippers and the cloak and the silence and images of empty rooms and the echos of rings against half-built walls and imagined voices. the stir fry recipes and the rice pudding, the scarves and nail clipping.

the little things pin you in place with little needles, and you can’t move. you’re forever trapped by the memories of moments too small and a grief to big.

— — —

Actually Gulfie