i miss her. the lanterns, the pathways that nobody walked on in favor of the railings next to them, the funny little sewer that that funny little ghost lived in.
i think that sewer was one of my favorite builds in the whole server. he couldn’t just live on the surface of L’Manburg, no. he had to live in the very veins of the place. eerily close to where he died as well.
i miss the lake underneath. nestled in a crater of violence and hatred and despair and mourning, a pool of life slowly built its way up. and it was filled with life. coral and fish and secret tunnels and emergency bunkers and the legs of our fair country and the tears of the land. and the people helped it along! i remember one stream where like five or six residents spent an hour filling every rotting, spiteful, gloomy crack with water. helping them heal and forgive and rest.
i miss the houses, not one of them clean, all alike in appearance but clear indicators of who lived there.
ranboo’s a hodge podge of everything he’s touched, disorganized chests in the middle of the room and on the ceiling and in front of the door and anywhere BUT against the walls. animals on every free space (and some glitched into the spaces that weren’t free), a visual representation of him cramming love into every corner of his life.
philza’s was a little messy but it was comforting, amd nothing was out of place. the chests were unlabeled, but clearly phil knew where everything was. outside his window you could see more of the horizon and the docks than you could l’manburg. he had a bed upstairs for his grandson, and i think i saw more people walk under that doorstep than any other doorstep in the country. home.
ghostbur’s, of course, in the heart of the nation. a small room with every written piece of her history, and some that wasn’t written. brewing stands and books lining the walls, a flag in the corner, many little nooks to hide in despite the tiny amount of space to work with. it felt like the camarvan had fossilized. it felt like a home. for someone dead, he sure brought life to everything he touched.
that little home was so integral to the nation too, even though you couldn’t see it if you didn’t know where to look. pumping blood through the sewers into the nation. everyone ended up there at some point. i think techno even passed it while fleeing his execution.
it was constantly being decorated and added on to. somebody was always lighting lanterns or filling the lake or hanging christmas lights or shoveling snow or building festival games or fixing the chess board or repairing the path. the one time lani visited i’m pretty sure she spent the whole time hanging christmas lights.
the pathways never made sense. they wound back and forth, and you couldn’t get everywhere from them. to get to the top of l’manburg you had to run next to the presidential speeches stage onto the grass behind it, right above the spot wilbur died. do you think the grass yellowed from being trampled so much? it was one of the most highly trafficked parts. what a funny grave to have, even the grass refused to grow where he died. even l’manburg mourned his death.
i like the way it didn’t defy death. it acknowledged it, mourned it, loved it, and let it go. truly the best grave wilbur could ask for, and the second best home it’s residents could want. the lake, l’manburg’s biggest scar, now her proudest feature. no more would skeletons shoot the residents with their arrows of unrest. the lanterns, each a piece of wilbur’s heart. no more would the streets go unlit, the skies go unloved.
nothing was molding or rotting or brewing. there were no secret pockets of hate and spite. even the final control room was buried peacefully, allowed to die without poisoning the ground. every dark corner where malice once grew was either flooded with water or gently washed in lantern-light. even the president’s bunker, by all means a place that should have been full of fear and war, had a silly chair and a silly fish. it was peaceful.
maybe i’m biased because it was the first arc i saw live, but i miss it, and i miss the friendships formed there. i miss fundy trying to get adopted, i miss tubbo and ranboo talking about their future, i miss philza hanging out with everyone else, i miss eret trying to find forgiveness, i miss niki being happy and finding someone who cared, i miss tubbo smiling at everyone even though he carried the weight of the country on his shoulders alone, i miss the camaraderie between quackity and tubbo, the sense of responsibility and understanding for each other, i miss it all.
