Chapter Text
Once again, fWhip’s world is falling down around his ears.
FATAL ERROR. PLEASE RELOG
It’s just a little more literal this time.
fWhip, floating in the space between universes, takes a moment to collect himself. He shouldn’t; as admin, it’s his duty to relog the server, which should be done immediately. This isn’t a safe place to be, and somewhere in this endless void are all of his players, wondering what just happened.
But he needs a moment.
He had gotten out of the house, but not out of quarantine, by the time Jimmy killed Grian. At least, he’s assuming that’s what happened, because he’s not sure how it really could have gone the other way around. Either way, his comm had buzzed with what was almost certainly a death message, though he hadn’t had a chance to check it before the server crashed.
Which means, assuming nothing weird happens with respawn, that he’ll relog outside of Jimmy’s house, where Jimmy just killed his brother. Admins always come back a tick before the rest of the players in server crashes, so combined with what distance he was able to get from Jimmy, he should have enough time to type up a de-op command to slam on his red-life player. And then, with the assurance that there’s no way for Jimmy to hurt him, he can take stock of the quarantine, and the rest of the server.
It’s a good plan. Solid. Never mind that he can still feel the bloodlust in Jimmy’s red eyes, staring out on the world with a vicious intent he’s never experienced before.
He gives the relog command. The second his fingers materialize, he starts typing, taking note of all his players relogging as he does so.
The world is still rendering around him as he sends the command into the universe, and he breathes out a deep, shaky sigh of relief when he feels it go through. As his chat starts to go wild from the other players, he sends out a message asking for status reports and patience, and then he turns his attention first to the quarantine blocks.
The sphere is intact, thank Void. fWhip’s not sure what he’d have done if it was broken or, heaven forbid, completely gone. But the blocks light up red through his admin screens without fault, so he focuses back on the ominously silent house just visible through the flower forest. It’s the middle of the day; the place would look cheery if he didn’t know what had just happened there.
fWhip should… really check on Jimmy.
Voiddammit.
Reminding himself that Jimmy can’t so much as punch a dirt block right now, fWhip forces himself to walk up to the house. It’s weird, hearing the memory of Grian calling it cute, just before he died inside. Though he makes plenty of noise walking up to the porch, the house remains silent; if Jimmy’s in there, he’s not acknowledging fWhip’s approach at all.
fWhip breathes deep, feels his ears pin themselves to the side of his head, and pushes open the door.
Immediately, he wants to slam it shut again. The fight had started by the kitchen, but migrated to the entrance-hall-slash-living-room, where apparently Jimmy dealt his final blow. There’s a horrible spray of red on the disheveled carpet, but most of the blood is on Jimmy himself, huddled in a corner and staring blankly at the scene before him. More specifically, it’s around his mouth, dripping down his chin and onto his shirt, staining the dark blue to a near-black.
fWhip has an awful feeling he knows how Grian died.
“Jimmy?” he calls quietly, stepping into the house but keeping the door open behind him. His hands hover at his sides, showing that they hold no weapons. “Just checking in on you…”
He winces even as he says it. Like anything else he could do right now, it’s wholly inadequate.
Jimmy doesn’t respond, so fWhip pulls up his admin screens and checks him over. Nothing is noticeably out of place—Jimmy’s eyes are even back to brown—and he could, honestly, leave him to go check on the rest of the server.
But he hesitates. They don’t teach admins much—they don’t teach admins anything, actually, it’s kind of a sink-or-swim learning curve unless you’re lucky enough to find someone willing to mentor you—but they especially don’t teach you how to deal with involuntary fratricide. Situations like this, you’re supposed to just use your best judgment, and fWhip’s says it’s wrong to leave Jimmy like this.
Jimmy doesn’t move as he walks into the kitchen to empty the cauldron. While he’s waiting for the thing to refill, he takes a moment to be responsible and check his comm. There is, of course, the expected flood of confusion in world chat from his other players, including a particularly despairing series from Pix, whose redstone didn’t survive the crash. His private messages are overrun with the requested status reports, but the one that most catches his eye is from Lizzie.
LDShadowLady: I think there’s something up with the Rift
LDShadowLady: I’m going to check on it now, will message if I find anything
…Great. Just—fantastic. Because why wouldn’t the Rift, something he has absolutely no control over, choose right now to start acting up. He just hopes it doesn’t trap Grian on this side—
Wait a second.
fWhip tabs over to the player list to take a closer look. When he’d first relogged and checked that everyone made it back safely, he’d counted off his emperors in his head, but he hadn’t thought of Grian. It’s a major oversight, but not one he can dwell on right now; he’s a bit stretched thin at the moment. What’s more important is Jimmy downstairs covered in blood, and Grian’s name nowhere on the player list.
In fact, he discovers as he scrolls back through chat to the error log, Grian doesn’t have a death message. And when he scrolls even further back, Grian’s achievements are gone. Entering the Nether, the few travel achievements he’d earned on the journey across the roof… even the message announcing his entry to the server is gone. It’s like something has scrubbed him from the memory of the universe.
He’s not sure what the implications of that are, but he knows it’s something he needs to look into later. Right now his priorities are Jimmy, then his other players, then the broken pieces of the server that need repairing, like Pix’s redstone. After that comes things that aren’t even on the server anymore.
As the cauldron nears full, a few more messages come through. Shelby talking about the fog again, Pix finding yet another machine that’s died, Scott saying something’s weird with Tumble Town. fWhip glances at that last one, and then puts his comm away to drag the cauldron over to Jimmy, who hasn’t moved from the corner.
fWhip ignores the prickle down his spine and starts to clean the blood from Jimmy’s face. It’s just wrong seeing Jimmy—goofy, animated Jimmy—in this shell-shock.
Thankfully, it doesn’t take long to get Jimmy cleaned up. fWhip gets his face and throat, then his hands, and then takes the rug outside to burn it. Jimmy does react after a minute, but only to squeeze his eyes shut and start breathing raggedly. When fWhip comes back inside, the sheriff has hunched over, burying his head in his hands.
“Just the shirt now,” he says quietly. Jimmy flinches as he lays a hand on his shoulder. “C’mon, up we get—”
LDShadowLady: fWhip get to spawn, it’s the Rift
“Shit,” he groans. “Shit.”
He looks down at Jimmy, still curled in a ball. The only blood left is the stuff staining his shirt; fWhip goes to his bedroom and pulls a spare one out of Jimmy’s chest, leaving it on the newly-cleaned floor next to him.
“I’ll be back,” he promises, not expecting a response. Still, his heart sinks a bit when he doesn’t get one.
Then he rushes back to spawn, deeply grateful he brought his elytra and rockets with him.
Spawn isn’t falling apart when he emerges from the Nether like he feared, but Lizie, waiting for him at the portal, looks like it might as well be. “fWhip!” she yells the second she catches sight of him, in a voice much more panicked than her mask conveys. “Thak heavens you’re here—I’ve been keeping it from collapsing but I don’t—there’s something else—”
As she trips over her words, she grabs his hand and drags him over to the Rift, claws nearly digging deep enough to draw blood. fWhip lets his elytra glide him along faster than his legs can move, and within seconds, they've reached the old campfire site and are standing in front of the massive purple hole in the universe.
It looks exactly the same to fWhip as it did yesterday when Grian came through. Lizzie, though, rushes up to it and plunges a hand into it with a grimace.
“There’s a hole in it,” she explains rapidly. A strange purple glow lines the edges of her mask; fWhip can’t tell if it’s coming from the Rift or somewhere else. “I don’t know why, and I can’t—every time I try to fix it, it’s like something else tears it open, and I should be able to do this because it’s my portal, so I thought maybe it’s the server? And if you could fix that, then I could get this bit sorted, and—”
“There’s a hole?” fWhip repeats, brain swimming through her torrent of words. “There’s a hole, and you can’t close it, so you want me to check the server?”
“Right now, please!”
fWhip throws open every relevant screen he can think of, from freecam to F3. Right at spawn, he notices that even the data that should show Grian had placed a few blocks at spawn is gone. He sorts through the screens, wondering where he could have possible missed being alerted about something as big as what Lizzie’s implying—
Something like the massive hole in speciation, what the hell—
Frantically, fWhip starts typing. Speciation is probably the safest place in the universe to have a hole in it, because what’s going to come through speciation of all places? But even if there wasn’t something happening with the Rift, fWhip takes pride in running his server safely, voiddammit. Never mind the past few weeks with Jimmy; none of that is his own fault, strictly speaking.
Unlike literally everything else that’s happened today, closing the hole goes smoothly. There’s a very strong sensation of being watched, but he chalks it up to Lizzie, who is staring at him anxiously from behind the admin screens with her paw still sunk into the Rift.
He starts to tell her, “There was a hole—”
“On it!” she yells, weirdly loud for the relative quiet of spawn, and turns back to the Rift. “Fair warning, when I’m done with this the server might crash again. The Rift is being really touchy right now—”
“What do you mean, might crash again?!”
“Sorry!”
fWhip has enough time to type out in world chat: second crash imminent—
FATAL ERROR. PLEASE RELOG
Fwhip comes back immediately this time, cursing wildly, as chat explodes again a second later.
He sends out another message to the players, explaining this one was the last and apologizing for the inconveniences caused by the repeated crashes. It’s only after he sends it that he thinks to look over to Lizzie and ask, “That’s all the crashes, right?”
“Uh…”
“Lizzie.”
“No, sorry, we’re good. We’re… yeah. Huh.” She steps closer to the portal, skimming the surface with a paw, then tilts her head to press an ear to it. “Oh, dear.”
“Lizzie, for the love of—”
“It’s not bad!” she rushes to assure him. “I’m… not sure what it is, actually. Something’s in there. I don’t recognize it.” She huffs and steps back from the purple light, arms crossed in a way that tells fWhip her tail is flicking in frustrated intrigue beneath its glamor. “I can’t get a good look at all; the Rift is closed at both ends, though it’s clearly not gone.”
fWhip’s stomach drops suddenly as a horrible idea comes to mind. “Lizzie… oh, no. Lizzie, is there any chance it’s Grian?”
Grian had died, gone to spectation, and then been kicked off-server. Probably the way he came: through the Rift. And if it was collapsed, then he was stuck in there… was the hole in speciation him trying to escape whatever void the Rift counts as? Did fWhip just consign a player to an eternity of purple nothing?
Lizzie laughs incredulously. “Why on earth would it be Grian?”
He stares at her, feeling once again like the universe is crashing. “Who else would it be?”
She shrugs. “Anyone else who tried to come through the other side? Someone else who knows how to open these things, hijacking this one? Maybe that’s what caused the first server crash; I did feel something strange with the Rift right before the crash happened, like something had slammed into it.”
She’s forgotten. How, why, fWhip doesn’t know. Lizzie has forgotten her own brother’s presence on her server, a brother she talked to just yesterday, whose arrival she saw in chat at the same time as fWhip.
And then fWhip remembers Scott, and realizes, it’s story. It’s the voiddamned story; Grian had done his best to avoid making an imprint on it, but Empires is steeped in the stuff and it must have taken offense to his presence anyways. That’s why there’s no record of him in the world chat or anywhere else in the universe; story saw a chance to rid itself of an intruder and took it.
With the lovely side effect that Grian is almost definitely now stuck in the Rift, and the only people who remember he was here at all are fWhip. And, given that he’s in story quarantine, Jimmy, also known as the one person who deserves to forget what happened while Grian was here.
And fWhip probably closed his only escape route.
“No, no, no,” he mutters to himself, and then giggles. He’s maybe starting to lose it a bit. Just a bit. “Oh, fuck, he wouldn’t—I didn’t—”
“fWhip?” Lizzie’s paw lands heavily on his shoulder, shaking him out of the spiral he was settling into. She sounds deeply concerned as she asks, “Why do you think it might be Grian in there?”
And because it’s Lizzie, and the universe loves them all but story can be a cruel mistress, fWhip feels a headache coming on just at the thought of telling Lizzie what’s happened in the past hour. He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you. I’m sorry, I can’t, I just—I just can’t.”
She looks between him and the Rift, worried. “...Well, whatever’s in there, it didn’t feel like it was doing anything,” she offers. It’s meant as a balm, but now fWhip’s just picturing Grian floating there in the state Jimmy left him in. “Maybe just put some barrier blocks on it, so no one tries to go in and crashes us all again.”
“...I’ll do that.”
And then, because he’s admin, he’ll check out Tumble Town. He’ll see what can be salvaged of Pix’s redstone, and stop by Shelby to see if anything’s really happening with the fog, and a hundred other things that need checking up on before returning to Jimmy and seeing if he’s managed to change his shirt yet.
And the whole time, the thought of Grian floating in the Rift—because what else could it be?—will haunt him, and him alone.