The first thing Quackity notices when he wakes up is the intense pain vibrating under his skull. He doesn’t know how long he’s been out or what happened, but he knows when he sits up and looks around, the sun beats down on the green grass and his head pounds.
The second thing he notices is the grass.
Grass?
His last memory was talking to Sam in Las Nevadas with not a blade of green in sight. Where is he, and how did he end up here?
What’s for certain is he’s far from home. As he looks around the wreckage that’s so characteristic of the Dream SMP is nowhere to be seen. There’s not a spot of blood or a sign warning of landmines in sight, and off in the distance, just over the horizon, he can see smoke swirling out of a chimney.
He clambers onto his feet and grips his temples in his hands. Even the slow breeze blowing by is just so loud. He holds a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun, and looks up to the sky, squinting his eyes.
It’s perfectly blue without a cloud in sight.
In Las Nevadas, in L’Manburg, everything is cloudy and polluted. Smoke and ash fills the air wherever he goes, whether it’s the rubble of his first home, or the buzzing industry of his new one. So wherever he’s ended up, it’s far enough away from the SMP that it’s not been corrupted just yet.
There’s a pang of hurt in his heart that he pushes away, and he takes his first few steps into this unknown land on soft grass and fresh topsoil.
He figures his best bet is the smoke and the chimney. Civilization? Or something like it, at least. Whoever lives or works there would surely be able to point him back to Las Nevadas, right? He hopes so at the very least.
As he wanders, bees and butterflies flit past his ears and he tries to slap them away with a furrowed brow and scowl, but they’re persistent. A few butterflies see fit to follow behind him or linger by his head as he walks, coming with him wherever he goes, and no matter how many times he tries to hit them, they dodge.
So he trudges onward, and comes to a worn walking path of beaten down dirt, and goes onto it to follow it to humanity. As he walks further along the path, he treads into a vibrant sparse forest, and stares at the trees with wonder in his eyes, unfamiliar to him after so many years of warfare.
There are pink, purple, blue jacaranda trees lining the forest path, with blossom petals and leaves littering the grass and roots crawling out of the ground where frogs perch happily. Quackity’s not been familiar with this sense of awe and innocent enthrallment since his very first days on the SMP. Before everything.
As much as it feels good to finally be away from the wreckage and feel that joy of new beginnings again, something in his stomach burns at the reminder of what used to be.
So he keeps his head down and eyes the trodden dirt path as he continues forward toward the smoke, the chimney, and whatever house or business contains it.
The sparse forest path fades away and he leaves the jacarandas behind him as the clearing opens up into a well-maintained grassy plain bordered by a whispering creek that flows into a larger river. There’s a small dock into the river with chests on it, and to its right, a quaint log cabin with patches of poppies planted outside the door.
There’s that pain again as Quackity looks on. The smoke curls up out of the chimney calmly and dissipates in the air, and from the inside, Quackity can hear laughter.
He crosses the grassy plain toward the dock and the door with something biting at his heart at the unfettered peace of the scene.
With pained hesitance, he knocks on the door.
