Chapter Text
Grian’s less than happy to see Xisuma for serious reasons twice in a single week, considering how infrequently he’s seen his friend and admin all season otherwise. Xisuma, for his part, looks even less pleased about it. There’s a heavy huffing to each helmet-filtered exhale that’s doing a very good job of making Grian feel like a kid who just got caught with a hand in the cookie jar.
Which is stupid, because neither this nor the Rift is his fault. But he’s been the messenger both times, so he’s involved now, and he hates it only slightly less than Xisuma does.
“Explain it again, please,” the admin says.
Pearl, always more patient than Grian, takes it from the top: yesterday she’d come up with a way to advertise her cleaning lady services, and she’d messaged Tango to ask for his help. When he hadn’t responded, she’d gone over the next day and asked in person. They’d gone to Grian’s base first, and Tango had been a little off, but nothing was obviously wrong until his legs suddenly gave out. Pearl helped him, he somehow got hold of the message that Lizzie had sent through the Rift when she opened it, and weirdest of all, read it like it made any sense. The message said Jimmy was in trouble, something to do with Double Life.
Understandably, Pearl had freaked out, and called Grian to figure out what to do about their brother, and somehow that triggered Tango to explode. Which was not something Grian knew he could do.
Apparently it’s not something he’s supposed to be able to do, which is why Xisuma is now combing through various admin folders. It’s a little tricky to read code over someone’s shoulder when you’re sitting across the room from them, but Grian learned early on how to fully look without anyone but Pearl noticing. He closes his eyes to hide the purple and nudges Pearl under the table to let her know what he’s up to.
Xisuma is reading the server’s personalized protections, focusing on Tango’s subsection. There’s something regarding heat distribution, tied to his core blaze rods, and a much more recent addition of cosmetic—
“Grian?” Pearl interrupts loudly. “You awake?”
He pulls back his sight and looks at her irritably. She looks disappointed as she shakes her head, just enough for him to see. Across the table, Xisuma frowns and closes his admin filters, and then clears his throat to get the twins’ attention.
“As far as I can tell, nothing’s wrong with the server’s protections. I’ll have to look at Tango himself to see why the block on his wildfire failed, and also so I can build a new one.” He sounds worried. Grian, as a fellow admin, knows he should be. “But what really concerns me is the bit about the note. May I see it?”
Pearl hesitates. There’s no reason not to hand it over; Xisuma’s been told both the original contents and Tango’s interpretation, and he knows where it comes from. But Grian knows Pearl, and Pearl, like him, is protective of her family.
Still, she sets her jaw and hands over the message. Xisuma handles it delicately, unfolding it to scan with his admin filters open (Grian doesn’t bother fully looking) and to read with his own eyes. “Threefold jolly imbue pub lime,” he sighs. “And Tango just read it like normal?”
“Mhm. Nothing weird about his eyes, not that I could see through the glasses.” Pearl glances over at Grian. “Anything you noticed?”
“Just that he seemed confused,” he offers. It’s a bit of an understatement; Tango seemed like he didn’t recognize Jimmy’s name at all.
There could be a reasonable explanation for Tango not knowing the name of his latest death game partner. Tango has plenty of his own admin experience, and fiddling with his own data, even for dodgier stuff like resetting stats or histories, is easily within his capabilities. In the admittedly few years Grian has known the man, though, repression has never seemed his style, and this is the third Life game he’s participated in, not the first…
But the prior games weren’t like Double Life, didn’t tie you at such a base level to another person. And Jimmy and Tango were particularly close, compared to the average soulbond. Maybe this time was just different.
Somehow, Grian doubts that’s actually the case.
“I’ll head over to the Citadel tomorrow to check Tango’s data,” Xisuma decides. “At the very least, he needs the wildfire block fixed immediately. Impulse is keeping an eye on him for now… he’ll message as soon as anything goes wrong. For now, you should have this back—” He hands the paper back to Pearl. “—and I’d like to take another look at that Rift in your basement, Grian, if you don’t mind.”
He minds very much, but Tango and Jimmy are more important than his territorial pride, so he nods.
Weirdly, there’s a fox in the basement when they arrive. It’s right next to the Rift, and it stares at Grian and Xisuma when they touch down on the basement floor. Before Grian can get within a chunk of it, the thing scampers off and through a hole he didn’t even realize was in the wall, and the moment is gone.
“Okay,” Xisuma says, weirdly loud. “Explain this to me again. You said it just appeared a few days ago?”
“You don’t have to shout,” Grian grumbles. “Right, so—”
Xisuma frowns. “You don’t hear it?”
“Hear what, X.”
“There’s—” Xisuma gestures, and his admin filter opens, broad enough to cover the whole Rift. “There’s Void, just on the other side of the walls of this thing. It’s stable, but it’s really quite weak. I guess it’s a Voidblood thing to hear it so clearly?”
Grian looks at the Rift through the admin filters. It’s not quite as good as full sight, but it admittedly isn’t nearly as cluttered as full sight can be either, and it doesn’t make his eyes change color, which is very much a bonus. Through the filter, it’s clear that the walls of the Rift are only pixels thick in places, strongest just against the wall of Grian’s cave, like they’ve anchored there and stretched thin to connect to Empires. It’s… concerning. Not a threat, but Grian remembers Pearl’s point about not drawing attention by opening and closing the Rift repeatedly. More to the point, he remembers that his brother is in trouble on the other end of this, and that Lizzie had asked Grian for help.
He needs to get Xisuma out of there.
The admin is stepping forwards now, reaching a hand towards the surface of the Rift, and where he touches it, Grian—full sight, Xisuma isn’t looking at him—watches the Rift ripple. Xisuma fiddles with code, and his hand sinks in, just a bit, and
FATAL ERROR. PLEASE RELOG
“Oh, geez,” Xisuma pants as the world regenerates around them.
Grian retches from where he’s collapsed to the ground. Thankfully nothing comes up, because he’s not in any state to handle actually being sick, though if there was ever a time to do so it would be an unexpected server crash. Already his comm is buzzing wildly with messages from the other Hermits, and Xisuma pops his admin filters away to check them.
The floor is nice and cold against Grian’s cheek. He pushes away from it quickly, shivering, and then his comm buzzes with the extra-insistent pattern of an admin alert.
Xisuma [ADMIN]: All Hermits, please refrain from touching the portal in Grian’s basement. It appears that any interaction between the Rift and player code causes the server to crash, though it is otherwise stable. This was the cause of the server crash just now. If you find a part of the world wrongly regenerated or otherwise not working, please message me privately.
“I should pop some barrier blocks up to be safe,” Xisuma worries out loud as he rushes over to Grian. “Oh dear—are you alright? Did the crash hit you extra hard or something?”
“”M fine,” he rasps. Nausea, dry throat, and yep, there’s the weak knees as Xisuma helps him to his feet. He makes sure to focus on the physical above all else. “Nasty crash, don’t worry.”
There’s an odd look in Xisuma’s eye as he looks Grian up and down, though it’s possibly the tint of his visor playing tricks on Grian. “If you’re sure.”
Rather than answer, Grian turns back to the Rift. “If you want, I can just block this whole room off and you can go look over the server. I don’t really use it for anything, it’ll be a lot simpler than setting rows and rows of barrier blocks.”
“It would be… I dunno, I’d really like to make sure this thing is contained.” Xisuma huffs decisively and pulls his admin filters up once more, and this time Grian doesn’t need his full sight to see him command a few stacks of invisible barriers to his inventory. “I appreciate the offer, Grian, truly, but especially if it’s affecting other players like I suspect it’s affecting Tango, I want to be safer rather than sorry.”
Tango. How did he forget—
If Xisuma covers the Rift in barrier blocks, Grian simply won’t be able to get through. Pearl would have a chance, maybe, but it’s Grian who needs to get through, because Lizzie, because Jimmy. Because of the stupid game that he thought didn’t go wrong but apparently did, and Tango doesn’t remember.
He doesn’t know why anything is happening. He has to fix it.
“Wait,” he blurts, as Xisuma places the first few barriers. “Suma, hang on—”
“What is it?” The admin’s voice is gentle, even as he turns sharply away from his work. Grian can read his body, even through the plates of armor: tension at the unknown threats the Rift could pose, tension as he worries about Tango, tension as he wonders what Grian is going to say.
Which is a good fucking question, really. Grian wants to say nothing, to keep the secrets he’s spent so much of his life hiding. Half of them aren’t even his to give away, and Grian’s not that much of a bastard that he’d tell someone else about Pearl’s silver or Martyn’s headband. Not unless he thought they’d tell about his eyes, at least.
What is he going to say?
The Rift, proof of his sister’s terror, looms purple and branchlike above him. Through Xisuma’s admin filters, the red NO ENTRY symbols on the barrier blocks are slowly fading as they turn to solid air, and Grian feels like one has been planted in his lungs, because even if he knew what to say he’s suddenly not sure he could anymore.
“Grian?” Xisuma calls, gentle and worried. A proper admin. He takes a step away from the Rift, towards Grian’s tense indecision—
And the decision is apparently made for him, because it comes from his own body but he sure as hell doesn’t remember actually authorizing his legs to kick off, commanding a hand to flick open his elytra as the other grabs a rocket and fires, the fwhee echoing with Xisuma’s panicked yell around the stone walls of the cave—
Just before he hits the surface, Grian surrounds himself with his wings. The eyespots glow the same purple as the Rift, and right as he starts to wonder what the hell he’s doing the rocket falls from his hand and the elytra rips from his back and—
The Rift swallows him completely, and the server stays standing.