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The Dwarven keep was rather quiet, the only sounds being the rapid taps of his heel into the floor. Impulse had been there long enough for a layer of wither dust to gather underneath his heel.
He had messaged Skizz asking if the memory gaps were caused by the Eyes, and he had yet to get a reply. The longer Skizz went without confirming or denying Impulse’s claim only led him to believe that they were the ones behind all of this.
Impulse had been told to help watch over the server while the other admins went to an admin meeting, and even though they never explicitly said it was about players disappearing, Impulse just knew that was the case. Keralis had avoided mentioning anything further to Impulse, and why else would they hold an admin only meeting, and not a whole mod team one.
All Impulse knew was that he felt left out, and even though he by far wasn’t the greatest in coding abilities, he knew a surprising amount about Eyes from Skizz. Impulse was more than just a little scared of them, but he had every right to be fearful.
His comm buzzed, and Impulse checked the message. I’ll be on Season 10, guaranteed. was the only note written, and even though Impulse was excited about being able to see his best friend whenever he wanted, it also confirmed that Eyes were involved. He knew that Skizz wanted to protect the hermits from this threat, and that he’d only be able to do it from within the server.
***
For once, Skizz’s first move wasn’t to reach for his comm and contact Impulse or Tango, and the feeling was a strange one to experience. Instead he was scrambling for his memory journal and checking the date on his comm while BigB laid on the ground holding his head in pain.
The dates were once again off by a month, and Skizz swore aloud before helping BigB sit up and against a wall. It was bizarre to realize that he remembered the last moment before he had been taken. BigB had just mentioned that Skizz seemed different than the other angels.
“You were right BigB. I am different than the other angels. I believe you when you say it’s the Eyes.”
“You’d be the first.” He groaned as he held his head. “Gods, the moment after is always the worst. They talk so loudly.”
“You mean the Eyes, right? You’re a full Listener?”
BigB opened an eye to squint at him. “If by Eyes you mean Watchers, then yeah. I don’t even know what a Listener is but probably.”
Skizz winced at the term. “We call them Eyes because angels have superstitions that their name…”
“Brings their attention to you, yeah yeah. Heard the spiel both times I went to you in the first place. But me not mentioning them by name didn’t stop them the first time. So I like using their name to piss them off. The voices don’t like me using their name. Watchers.” BigB had visibly relaxed for a moment before he tensed his head again.
“Actually, why are you here like the conversation is picking up where it left off?” he asked.
Skizz gave a heavy sigh. “Because I go missing at the same time you do. Whatever game the Eyes are trying to play affects me and a handful of other players.”
BigB’s eyes widened. “How’d you know it’s a game?” He looked so serious and scared, but he continued, “They’re silent right now.”
“Because that’s what the Eyes do. They play… games… with their food. Oh shit.”
Skizz’s comm buzzed at that moment, and with a brief glance at his comm he saw it was from Impulse, but he couldn’t care about it for a moment. “BigB, I’d like for you to tell me absolutely everything about yourself, from when you left your home server to when you remember the voices starting, everything.”
“Why? What good is that going to get you?”
“Because the Eyes took interest in you and threw you into a game with a bunch of other players from the same server. They must have found you mildly interesting from somewhere, and I’m going to find the overlap between you and them.”
BigB clenched his head again and wriggled in pain. “They don’t like that one bit,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I’m going to find us a firewalled server, hang in there bud.” Skizz hopped to a server that the angels had used for Skizz’s training and checked through firewall protections, not that he understood what he was looking at, that was Tango and Impulse’s expertise. Speaking of which, he checked Impulse’s message and saw what he feared his best friend finding out. If Impulse was able to figure it out, then Skizz wondered how long before the angels were alerted of Watcher activity on hermitcraft and would begin searching for clues, only to find out what happened and turn their noses up at the slander and leave. Watchers didn’t change behavior, and Skizz needed to be the one to change the angels’ minds. His message back said that he’d be on season 10. Hermitcraft 9 will be almost over by the time Skizz is a fully realized angel, and then he’ll be able to do some actual work.
He messaged BigB the new server IP, and he showed up moments later, already looking worlds better than in his private server. “Oh firewalls, my friend, where have you been all my life.” BigB said as he laid on the ground for a moment.
“I’m assuming you can’t hear them now?”
“I can’t and it's absolutely immaculate. I can think without voices in my mind bickering.” BigB relaxed into the grass, shutting his eyes to bask in the sun.
Skizz took a seat next to him, but he began picking at the grass, waiting for BigB to begin talking.
“My childhood friends and I used to play with each other all of the time on my home server but we had briefly drifted apart for a couple years once school became more important. I got a message from one of them to join a unique server that he had just created after getting his admin license. I was hesitant at first, not wanting to be cut off from communications from my family because the server was traveling through different updates, but Pearl had convinced me that her brother worked really hard on this. So I joined Evo at a rather weird time. There were beings messing with the server, giving us challenges. They punished us for cheating or not completing it but rewarded us when we succeeded. Grian was the most fascinated with the beings. I never wanted much to do with them. I always had the feeling of being Watched wherever they were involved. But they never revealed themselves.
“Everything changed when we went to fight the dragon for the first time. We were a couple of updates in at this point, but something went wrong. We were supposed to fight the dragon together, but we were separated. Grian never came back after fighting the dragon, and the rest of us were displaced a couple thousand blocks away from spawn. We had to rebuild at the new place. But Pearl, Jimmy, and Martyn were still a bit hopeful that Grian would return. His comm hadn’t disconnected but the server was starting to fail without its admin, and it became unstable over the next couple of weeks. Martyn urged us to leave, and I packed and left a day after he did. I think Pearl and Jimmy were the last ones on the server, but I wasn’t able to message them because all of my contacts had been deleted.
“My first time hearing the voices came not long after that, though it could have been longer because they were easily disguised as my thoughts. I was back on my home server and was able to easily reconnect with Pearl because she had returned there. She told me that Grian was gone, and we mourned him.
“I started joining some other servers to just enjoy life, and I stayed away from any unstable servers like Evo had been. The voices steadily grew more comfortable and were talking all the time. I still felt like I was being Watched occasionally, that feeling never went away. And then I disappeared for the first time.” BigB sat up at this point. “You should have a pretty extensive record at this point.”
“I didn’t know that you knew Pearlie Pop and G. Some of those other names feel familiar as well. I don’t think anyone really knows that G is an admin though.”
“He’s alive?” BigB asked smally.
“He’s been on Hermitcraft since season 6. I’ve talked with him a couple of times with my best friend Impulse.”
“Pearl hadn’t mentioned that he was alive, but I’ve also not talked with her much since all of this started happening.” BigB’s head fell towards his lap, and Skizz was at a loss for how to comfort the player.
“It appears that the Eyes thought you lived an interesting life to continue watching after all this time. I’m concerned about some of the others from that server also having voices, and Grian going missing does not bode well with Eye movements.”
“What do you think they did to him?”
“Best case scenario, they only did what they had done to you- taking him for the games. A step up from that is that they tried to turn him into an Eye and failed, depositing him on a server after three months, like normal. This is why the angels don’t believe that it was the Eyes that took you. Worst case scenario is that the Eyes succeeded.”
BigB was quiet, “What happens to failed experiments?”
Skizz let out a large sigh. “Well, if they recognize what happened and get to the angels, they go through the Ears cleansing protocols because failed experiments end up very powerful. If they don’t get in right away, we might pick them up later for illegally coding because they have very specific code windows.”
“Grian has the admin windows though,”
“It is not often that the Eyes take interest in admins. They find them vile for coding differently. In fact, I don’t think Eyes have ever interacted with admins because of how ‘awful’ they are.”
“I wish I could ask Pearl about him without seeming suspicious. She doesn’t know about my interactions with the angels.”
“Do you know if anyone else from your server has mentioned voices, or is it just you?”
“None of them have mentioned anything to me, but I don’t reach out often. I think it’d be strange to reach out immediately after a game.”
Skizz hummed. “You’re not wrong, and something tells me that their admins don’t know about both of our disappearances because we aren’t on their servers.” They were in quite a pickle. Even though not being a part of the server allows them more freedom to investigate without suspicion, if they happened to disappear again and not return, no one would know about it. No one other than maybe Impulse, but it could be too late before that. “What do the voices tell you?”
“A lot of it is garbage. They talk about flames and stars and this Xelqua guy.”
“You have a name?”
“A what?”
“You have one of the Eye’s names. They don’t give those out freely.”
“I guess, the Eyes don’t particularly care about keeping this name a secret. They’ve been using it for years at this point.”
Skizz looked up to the sky and cursed silently. “Gods, if only you had recorded what they were saying. We could have figured more out about the games. This Xelqua might be the one in control of it all, and getting rid of them might make the games stop completely.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice.” The wind rustled the grass around them, and Skizz flared his wings out briefly to catch some of the wind. Something didn’t feel right about the whole situation, and Skizz wasn’t able to pinpoint exactly what it was.
“Do the Eyes still Watch on firewalled servers?”
BigB shrugged. “I’ve not been on good servers like this to test it out. We probably should, in case they’ve been Watching us all along.”
“Wouldn’t that put us on a horrible time crunch.”
“I’ll check when I leave,” BigB said. He then mumbled, “I wish I could stay though. No voices are nice.”
“I’d offer it up if I didn’t think you’d get caught. This is an angel only server… or is supposed to be. I shouldn’t even be here.”
“Maybe we’ll sneak on sometimes, converse more if the Eyes can’t Watch us.”
“Maybe.” Skizz smiled afterwards and pulled himself up from the ground. He offered a hand to BigB and pulled the player up.
“Thank you for believing me.”
“I’d be a fool to think otherwise.”
They left to their own servers, Skizz getting ready for a long day of rest. BigB briefly messaged saying the Eyes didn’t know a thing, and Skizz grinned wide. It was nice to know that the firewalls protected against the Eyes.