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Savvy's clearest memory of her time before here is dying. Her memory of dying is this:
She's climbing down a steep cliff in what must be her spawn world. She's nearly at the bottom. She lights a torch so she can see what's there.
The crack goes down to bedrock, and she sees something her brain won't let her process.
She remembers thinking, "What the hell is that thing?"
She remembers thinking, "Oh, shit, is that a glitch?"
And then Savvy takes ten hearts of damage from, apparently, nothing. And dies.
She wakes up in a different world, disoriented and with huge swathes of her memory chewed away to nothing. The world is also wiped clean, like a spawn world right when you open your eyes but without the universe's gentle pushes to and fro to make sure you get all the right information you need to know to make it on your own. Savvy would have assumed she'd just been warped back to the start somehow, except now—
Now, she can ask the world to do things. And it listens.
She can teleport, though she is fucking awful at it. She can ask the world to show her why it does things and it unravels its code in front of her eyes and on her console, even though she doesn't really understand what any of it means. She knows when things spawn in because it pings in her brain. The world is singing to her in a language she doesn't speak. She's desperately trying to keep up.
Savvy's pretty sure she wasn't an admin on her spawn world. But it seems like she—is now.
Okay. Alright. That's...happening. Nothing she can really do about it.
(She's also pretty sure she didn't used to—look like this? Her stomach drops every time she looks in the mirror. She doesn't think her eyes used to be pupil-less or one even blue tone. She doesn't think her ears used to end at a point. She doesn't want to think about it. Mostly, she just avoids mirrors.)
So Savvy spends a lot of time, those first days, bent low over her new console and combing through commands. Trying to figure out what any of it meant. Trying to get find a language she and the world share. The world expects her to already know it inside and out. She's stumbling along miles behind it, trying to put the pieces together.
It's slow going, but—it's going. She's getting somewhere. She thinks she's starting to understand.
And then, suddenly, there are other people, too.
ooodles0fnoooodles has joined the game.
Savvy teleports herself to spawn before she even really processes the alert on her comm. It's like a reflex, like brushing at a fly or flinching from a loud noise; she doesn't even really think about doing it.
A young person is standing there, looking around with bright-eyed interest. He has tightly curled blond hair and thick black glasses. He looks at her and his eye widen, not exactly startled but surprised that there's someone there when there wasn't a moment ago.
"Hello!" he greets, waving and smiling. "My name's Mikko, he/him. Is this an open world? Are you accepting new players?"
"Oh. I'm—Savvy. She/her," she says, and finds the answer to his second question right at the top of her chest, bursting to leave her lips, the world itself speaking through her—"Y-Yes. Yes! For sure, it's open. Welcome!"
She shows Mikko around and helps him figure out a place to set up for now. She gives him some of her extra torches and a bed. For once, the code is going slow enough that she can understand it, and she guides it to wrap around Mikko's edges and anchor him here. The connection takes for sure once he sleeps through the night. It grows deep, like tree roots. She can feel where he is in the world.
Mikko talks very fast and has a lot of big ideas and is very funny. Savvy likes him. She likes that she's not the only one here anymore.
There's a learning curve to this admin thing but she thinks she might be—sort of?—starting to get it. She can understand maybe every tenth word of the world's song, on a good day.
In the meantime, more players arrive. First Keylime, who loves puzzles and word games and it maybe slightly obnoxious, and then Clara, who brings warm hugs and a love of flowers, then the young and ambitious BB and then Tap, an endless fountain of ingenuity and passion, and then finally Vertical, who is older than the rest of them and gets a strange look on his face when Savvy explains her whole thing.
Vertical sits with her and helps fill in the last step she needs to understand how to get a whitelist set up and a basic firewall going. He has scars on his knuckles and the backs of his arms and he's Deaf in one ear. He keeps looking at her strangely.
"I think," says Savvy, hands on her hips once the firewall flickers into place, "I'm starting to get this!"
Vertical stares at her again before saying, "Yeah, Savvy. You're getting there." She smiles at him, and he squeezes her shoulder.
Things settle, after that. They all fall into their routines, their projects. Keylime is trying to make a tunnel network at bedrock. Tap is attempting something with redstone and eggs that Savvy is pretending to ignore. BB is making a soccer field. Vertical goes exploring and tries to teach BB to fight with only mildly disastrous results. ("Bee-vee-pee!" they crow gleefully at first, until Vertical crits them out four times in a row without them landing a single hit back on him.)
Savvy herself likes collecting things. She's set a personal challenge to try and obtain one of every enchanting book. That, and trying to figure out the code the world speaks in, and talking to her (her!!) players take up most of her time, though she's also planning on setting up a scavenger hunt soon. Games are fun.
Often, she bothers Mikko when he builds, watches him plan, teases him to break his concentration. He's been working on a giant chess board and has torn down and rebuilt the knight something like seven times.
"Why does it look like that?" he despairs. Savvy is sitting cross-legged on top of the bishop. "I need to make it stop looking like that. It looks like a seahorse."
"That's a type of horse," says Savvy, helpfully.
"It is not."
"Sure it is. It's got 'horse' in the name and everything." She smiles and hopes she can get him to—
"It's not a horse, it's a lying fish, and not even a lion fish, ha, anyway it has nothing to do with horses and the implication that it does is offensive to me. You're offending my sensibilities, Savvy, my artistic sensibilities. I'm offended. Also—"
There he goes. Rant locked and loaded. She props her chin on her hands and listens.
A different night, Clara gathers everyone together for some kind of celebration, Savvy doesn't remember what for, and an impromptu and rather intense game of chase ends with them all collapsed around a campfire.
"We probably should get around to killing the dragon at some point," says Vertical, reaching his hands over his head as he does. His back pops. "Just to get it over with."
BB makes a cranky noise in the back of their throat. "Noooo, I don't wanna, I suck at combat. I'm going to die a million times and it's going to be embarrassing."
He raises an eyebrow at them. "You know that you'll never get better at it if you don't practice."
"Meh, meh, meh," they mimic back at him. "You sound so old right now, like a stale fortune cookie. Wanna distribute any more wisdom? Tell me to study hard? Should I not do any drugs?"
"What the fuck," says Vertical.
Keylime hums. "They aren't wrong, honestly."
"What the fuck," says Vertical, and everyone starts yelling, and Savvy laughs and laughs and makes sure Tap's inventory doesn't despawn when it all devolves into glorious chaos.
And Savvy knows that, elsewhere in the universe, there are places where wars are fought and won, places that create legends and where those legends play-battle each other for even more infamy. There are places where people build things that defy logic, monuments to creativity and expertise that tower and awe. There are player names that are spoken with wonder, or they're spoken with fear.
Of course she knows those places exist, even with the pieces gone from her memory. But she's very happy right here, collecting full sets of things and setting up silly games for her players. She doesn't want to be a legend—she doesn't think she has the skill set for it. She doesn't think any of her players do, really; maybe Tap, if he achieves his ambition of finding some new way to break the world in his favor; maybe BB, if they learn how to see their high concepts through to completion. (Sometimes, when he gets a certain look in his eyes, Savvy wonders if Vertical used to be something close to it.)
But it's not like any of them are looking for it. They're all content, she thinks. They're having fun.
On the day everything changes, Savvy is very high up, fiddling with the idea of building a giant tree all the way up build height and then maybe...filling it with something? She's still workshopping the concept. She's trying to figure out about how much wood it would require. The answer is already a very, very big number.
She feels Tap reenter the world, which she had been expecting. Tap left a few days ago for some kind of contest-festival thing on a big host world, and he's coming back right when he's due to be back. She feels her comm buzz with the alert to compliment the ping in her brain.
Savvy doesn't think much of it.
Until a nauseating pang of wrongness rolls through her body and she suddenly has absolutely no choice but to think about it. She feels her comm go off again and she gropes for it, blindly.
reluctant_tapdancer has joined the game
Ą̶̢͕̯̥̭̪̜̂̋̇́̊̈́̊n̵̢̳͎̉̋́̍́̐̀̔ö̴̬͙̲́̂̇̂͂̐͂̀͜͝n̷̤̙͇̺̫̞̳͌́̌̄1̸̰͉̣̜̍́̂/̴̰̜̹̺̥͌͛̽͑͠2̵̝͇̺̅̅̃̀̒͠/̵̧̘̹͇̥͈͗̈̌̆́͘3̷͕̠͈̳̻̘̹̀̊̊́͑̿̒̚ͅ/̷̹̻͎͍̱̼͖͐͌̑̈́̒͛̊̐͊4̵̝̲̥̫͚̗͇͔̗͋͂̏̏̐́̆͜͝ has joined the game
[SFXTivBubbleBeam] uhhhh
[cantfindthekeylime] wtf
[reluctant_tapdancer] SPAWN
[Clara_Tea_717] tap?
[reluctant_tapdancer] SPAWN SPWAN SA
[reluctant_tapdancer]VVY SPAWN NOW SMTHS WRO NG
She's moving before she can think. Savvy jumps from her perch and plummets, already pulling the code around her—
/tp dangerpronedangersavvy
[v3rt1caL] NO
[v3rt1caL] SAVVY DONT
[v3rt1caL] PORT OFFWORLD NOW.
She never sees the message. The teleport overtakes her before she hits the ground.
.
Spawn is in chaos.
The first thing Savvy sees is Tap, who is on his knees and curled into a ball with his arms tucked up near his ears. There's something black clamped to the back of his neck like a mouth, and he's shuddering like he's in pain. Like he's being shocked.
There are four players she doesn't know here, all of them decked out in full enchanted gear. She can't read their player tags, which shouldn't be possible, and they're holding weapons she's never seen before.
One of them has some twisted console pierced into the ground and is swiping and tapping at it, calm and unconcerned. Another has her foot planted on Tap's spine, and Savvy feels her body alight with a protective rage she didn't know existed in her.
The other two are locked in combat with Vertical, who is, amazingly, holding his own but quickly being overtaken from the sheer miss-match of gear. Clara must have been working on the spawn garden when they arrived because she's down and restrained, lip bleeding sluggishly, bleary as if hit with a weakness potion.
Savvy strives forward just as Vertical is hit again. Some power ripples through the blade and he staggers as if concussed. He takes a knee, his chest heaving.
Whatever this is, Savvy has had enough.
"You aren't whitelisted," she says, and every single person at spawn's attention snaps to her.
The asshole with her foot on Tap pushes him down further. "Fuck, it's the admin," she spits.
Fuck yeah, she's the admin. "I don't know how the hell you got in here, but it's time for you to leave," says Savvy. The world sings its agreement, and she reaches out to the code.
She kicks the unknown players, and expects that to be the end of that.
Except—they aren't kicked. Savvy is left standing there, fingers splayed and lips parted. Nothing happens.
"Wait," says another one of the anonymous players. A slow, cruel smile crawls up his face. "Wait a second, guys. I think it's a baby admin."
Savvy snaps, "I'm not a baby anything" as she desperately tries to follow the code back and understand why the kick command didn't work, why these players who are not hers are so anchored to her world. Did she input it wrong? Did she say it wrong? Did she—?
On the ground, Vertical makes a high, wounded noise. Savvy's eyes snap to him, and then skim all around her—and it's only then that she realizes that it's four-on-one. It's only then she realizes that they're all circling her.
BB isn't the only one who sucks at PVP. Nevertheless, her fingers find her sword in her hot bar. At least it's diamond?
"Holy shit, I think you're right," says one of the other invaders, who is wearing a blue scarf and has been squinting at her. "What are the odds of that shit? Zell, how many players are here?"
The one on the strange, twisted console checks something on the screen. "Seven, counting that thing."
They shouldn't have that information.
"Anything else interesting?"
"Nah, boss. Most've 'em are pretty baseline. Real boring fucking server."
"Well." Blue Scarf smiles again, and a chill runs down Savvy's spine. She calls her sword to her hand. "A baby admin almost makes up for that, T-B-H." He says the letters individually—Tee-Bee-Aych. "Almost makes this a good haul."
Haul. Oh, no.
Savvy watches Vertical come to the same conclusion, and his face goes white. He tries to surge to his feet, and the invader next to him smashes the pommel of her sword into his temple, almost casually. Vertical crumbles.
Savvy knows that there are people who—take players from servers, and bring them other places. And then the players don't come back.
And it would seem those people are—here. To take her players away to some other place. And then none of them will ever come back.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck—she begs the world to give her a way to make them leave, and it answers her, but she can't understand it.
She's not—good at this. She doesn't understand. She never asked to be an admin.
And before Savvy can try anything else, she has to twist and parry one of them with her sword, and then try to strike at another, and then one of them gets close enough to touch the back of her neck. The one on the twisted console taps something.
It's like an ice pick directly to the top of her spine. Savvy seizes.
It bleeds down her nerves, ice cold and commanding. Locks up her code. Opens up little keyholes where other people can port into her, and it's like being licked by a dozen strangers in public. It's like being scoured with cheese graters. It's like being peeled open like an apple, one perfect curl at the time, and the flesh shredded away to nothing.
Savvy's body locks up because someone else tells it to. She falls to the ground like a sack of cloth.
She's just aware enough to feel them piggyback off her signature and teleport her other three players here, to their doom. Vertical, who somehow still has breath, calls out for BB when they land. Tries to tell them it's alright.
The very last thing Savvy hears before the code lock closes in is Mikko screaming her name.
.
Everyone knows that there are places in the universe where legends live and fight and create, where truth merges with myth and from that is born gods and heroes and folklore. Which is to say that there are gods, and not-quite-gods, and things that can kill gods.
There are players in the universe who could probably hope for rescue, because there are players who would be missed by very powerful things, or are a very powerful thing all on their own, and so is everyone who loves them.
But players like that don't live in places like this.
There are players who could hope for rescue, and everyone on Savvy's server knows that none of them are that type of player.
.
Clara_Tea_017 has left the game
cantfindthekeylime has left the game
SFXTivBubbleBeam has left the game
reluctant_tapdancer has left the game
ooodles0fnooodles has left the game
v3rt1caL has left the game.dangerpronedangersavvy has left the game
Close world? Y/N