Work Text:
Etho’s token worked. It worked. Gem could imagine him scoffing, oh ye of little faith, way to make me feel appreciated, and if she shut her eyes tight she could picture him in minute detail, like she would a custom tree, how she’d have built an Ethoslab if she’d had up to y=320-- his mismatched eyes, his dumb jokes, his crouch when he peered down at redstone lines. She had to hold that picture in her head, because she was probably never going to see him again. She'd only even known him for like two days.
He’d given her a token that’ll get her past any firewall in the known universe, and then he’d gone off and - and hadn’t died, hopefully, because he’d promised her he wouldn’t die, he had to actually show her his test worlds if he was gonna gab about them forever, but he’d played the diversion and she’d kept running. Gem had been running for so long that she might as well have been standing still, for all that she could tell the difference anymore. She’d been whittled down to moments, painful heaving breaths, sweat stinging her eyes.
It wasn’t that organic between servers, though, not exactly. Not a space to run in with your body. Etho had called it a concept space, had told her to think about it like she was data being beamed from one computer to another. This file contained GeminiTay, and it had its own ideas about where it was going, even though there wasn’t an end destination at all or anywhere but nowhere to go and the main objective was getting away.
The file named GeminiTay had to hold herself together. She couldn’t bleed off too much of the important stuff. It was a matter of willpower, and Gem had so much of that, willpower was a renewable resource, that was the magic of it-- you never dug too far and hit bedrock in your mind, right? You could just decide to keep going. She’d been deciding to keep going, and the token had worked and grass was crunching under her feet and she fell to her knees and kind of sobbed, when that happened, she doubled over in the morning dew until the sweat on her skin cooled.
Grass blades poked into her face. Hot emberish light crackled on the other side of her eyelids, two campfires placed on top of stripped dark oak around the village she’d landed in, and as Gem’s senses returned she got more input, almost too much, she was gulping it all down: the mud-sweet scent of crushed hay. Pine logs popping as the sap caught. Villagers mumbling, the little ones hopping on beds and skittering around in their safe little huts, a brewing stand-- a brewing stand! If it was still here at spawn it was being used regularly, someone was coming back a lot or they were so rich they didn’t even need it-- gurgling, cows lowing as mobs hissed in the distance.
“Sound,” Gem mumbles and hey, that was her voice, good job voice. Vocal cords doing their part. “Smell, ugh, could do with less of that, am I next to a paddock or something? Gross-- okay, sight, any moment now. Any moment now. We don’t have time for lollygagging.”
Someone had filled her bones up with iron. If she’d fallen in a lake right then she’d have sunk to the bottom and drowned no matter how she kicked for the surface, air leaving her mouth as water rushed right in. She rolled half-upright, got an elbow under her, felt with numb hands for a calf that wasn’t cooperating and dug her nails in until the pain hit.
Pins and needles erupted as the code flashed behind her eyes, too fast for her to read, initializing, and then the rest of her senses came online--
GeminiTay’s Hotbar Scroll 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
GeminiTay’s Health
GeminiTay’s Hunger Bars
GeminiTay earned the advancement Doing The Best She Can!
GeminiTay earned the advancement Not So Washed Up Now Am I Gem!
GeminiTay earned the advancement All Eyes On You!
GeminiTay earned the ability to stagger to a barn and crawl up a ladder into the rafters. The mud squelched under her bare feet, so she left tracks as she stumbled up there, but the cows barely acknowledged her past a friendly snuffle and she had a whole body again, so she could let the question of how she was gonna stay on this server fall to the wayside for a second.
A new server. One with players, definitely an admin, maybe connections to other servers that hadn’t been hit by the catastrophe yet-- that was all Gem needed . A soft place to land, somewhere to sleep and be a person for a night.
She found a gap in the loft wall and peeked through it. The moon was halfway through its path across the sky, a white bead wobbling on a string above her head, and it was so full it almost hurt to look at, ringed with gleaming silver. Castles lined the horizon like tines on a fancy comb, pillars and spiraling towers and ramparts with vines falling lush over the sides, designs that probably told stories in daylight. The pathway wasn’t lined with glowstone, but someone must have mixed glow dust into the sandy soil, because it sparkled in faint pixie-wing rows leading up to the castle gates.
The air tasted like brine and seaweed, waves roaring somewhere off to her left. Gem's hand went automatically to her side, because in her own world she'd have a turtle helmet there for underwater adventures and she faltered, her fingers brushed different cloth. Her clothes had changed. She’d been wearing a red sweater, but now she had a dress on, bizarrely: silky pink fabric with princess seams and a corset, an embroidered skirt and frilly sleeves. And petticoats that bunched around her thighs, already getting hay in them. She blinked at it kind of blankly.
It was pretty, at least. Etho's token had changed from a bracelet to a pendant around her neck, nestled against her chest, and her hair was braided up in a circle around her head. It was nice to have it out of her face. Gem’s eyes burned, and she swiped the back of her hand across them, sniffled fearlessly and turned away from the gap in the loft wall. Etho had been right when he said she wouldn’t show up on the whitelist, which was good news, but that meant she couldn’t set a spawn, either, so she’d have to be careful about where she slept after tonight. Dying would make her show up to the admin, and she’d end up back at spawn for sure, and then it’d be a hop, skip, and a jump to the admin kicking her off again, back to the void to try her luck on other servers.
But there were no other servers where she came from. That was the problem. Gem wasn’t sure how many other servers were left in the universe.
*
WildBattles SMP changed names like every week, since the admins were trapped in some kind of forever war where one of them would lose a vote and they’d send up minions to break down all the signs and move the minigames around and then literally the next month they’d have a new Overlord Portrait up and the color scheme would change back to pink and green and good lord would they just keep the wars private already, some people were trying to hone their craft--
But it was a great place to get a little socializing in, especially since Gem’s usual world never had anyone on it. She’d been there for probably like a thousand years by now, ferreting out all the achievements her little heart desired and building things she’d never seen, concepts that just came to her in dreams or seemed right, cowboys and hydras and complicated waterfalls of flowers with satin petals. You could count on that when you were a player, floating around in that nebulous always-- that was what Etho said later, when it was just the two of them alone and Gem was having a tiny little breakdown-- you’d always been on your singleplayer world, or you’d always known you wanted to be a cyberpunk rockstar, or you’d always been a redhead, as tall as you were now, with the urge to coordinate colors and make something really unique.
There wasn't anything wrong with that. It wasn't something players needed to question, not unless they wanted to mess around interrogating the laws of reality like some redstoners loved to. The universe was alive and it was dreaming. Those dreams seeped up through the cracks in reality like bubbles in champagne, like the steam that came out when you cracked the crust of a hot pie, and players drank them in.
The player called GeminiTay was wild about build battles and she was wild about painting, and the week that everything ended, she’d cozied up to enough of the admins that they’d given her her own private room on creative mode, to simulate builds to her heart’s content. She had the idea that they wanted to hire her, which was good sense on their part because she was great at pretty much everything.
It was chilly on the server that afternoon. Gray skies, and steady wind that nudged at shop signs and lashed up dead leaves so they whorled into people’s legs, that snatched at coats and braids. Gem had on a red striped sweater. She tucked her hands into her sleeves as she walked to ward off goosebumps. She was working on a build of the inside of a jewelry box, dark oak walls and dim lighting and gold that looked liquid in the gloom, redstone blocks to mimic rubies and lapis for sapphires, fine chains tangling across the floor that a player would have to hop through and a classical diamond ring sparkling to the side, and that was what her brain was full of, those were her thoughts.
How could she organize the metal blocks and the glowstone so the light came at the right angles? How could she approximate the shape of a well-cut diamond at the scale she was working with? Why was her sweater itchy, and could she reach the offending thread without doing a silverfish-in-her-pants dance in front of all these people?
Players swarmed the streets, clamoring in line for snack foods and commemorative T-shirts -- I Lost At Bedwars And All I Got Was This Inescapable Trauma!-- and sitting on curbs with their drinks, ambling along the promenades or chasing each other with swords across the lawn. The minigame plaza had orb-shaped beacons above each helpful armor stand, Build Battles Baby Mode up to Pro Mode and Bedwars and TNT Fighters and Red Rover, and there were a couple players set up around the TNT Fighters armor, playing jacks and bouncing the ball higher, higher, higher at wilder trajectories.
One of them had bright yellow eyes and a horrible neon sweater, like those PVPers who never learned how to dress in their whole lives. Another one had uneven horns, one poking straight up and the other curving in a crescent from his forehead, and he yelped, “Watch out!” a second before Gem’s nice chocolate-drizzled sweet berries got all over her shirt because the stupid ball had hit her at exactly the wrong time, and that was her last memory of seeing another player, before Etho met her eyes and winked at her to give her courage. That was. Because after that she went into her reserved Building Room for a week, and made her stupid jewelry box, and when she came out everyone she’d ever known was dead.
She didn’t know that last part when the player showed up in the room, though. Gem was busy pacing on the carpet when he entered, muttering to herself about proportions, and it wasn’t until he cleared his throat that she snapped out of it and turned around.
He had a Herobrine mask on. That’s what she’ll remember later, when she tries to go back and sear this moment into her brain, look for evidence-- a Herobrine mask and a plain white shirt and black pants. Like a weird mime. His hands were in his pockets and his hair was brown, probably, and he didn’t cast a shadow, or the shadow he cast was like an admin’s, distracted, falling over laughing like all this was his favorite joke-- Gem can’t remember it well. There was a reason witnesses could be misled in court, and part of it was that you could run by something super fast and it could be a block tall and a player would swear up and down it’d been huge, you couldn’t trust your own brain, right--
Her own brain told her this person was normal.
“Uh, hi,” Gem said, and the person in the Herobrine mask raised a hand limply, let it flop on his wrist. “Can I help you somehow? ‘Cause this is a private room, and I kind of have it reserved for the next week, so...”
“I’m just looking around,” the person said. “GeminiTay, right?”
“That’s what my username says,” Gem said.
“You have a nice build going,” the person said, and Gem hadn’t realized before then that he’d left the door swinging open behind him, out into the little hall before the exit, and that the door was off its hinges, but she was noticing it then. The minigame plaza was always full of people, and now there was just a hush like snowfall, a blanket spread across the world that made it all the same peerless static white. She’d never seen the medium before. “Mind if I stay and watch? That won’t interrupt whatever programmed behavior’s going on here, will it?"
“I don’t know what that means like, at all,” Gem said, “but if you’re an admin I guess I have to let you, so sure, whatever. Just don’t talk to me or you’ll interrupt my flow.”
“Yeah, yeah,” the person agreed. He didn’t sit down. The door creaked on its hinges, wind sucking at the corners and letting it go with an exhausted exhale, like someone lifting weights who couldn’t get the block above their waist, and gravel pattered across the sidewalk outside. It was a sound that must’ve happened every day on WildBattles, but Gem had never been able to pick it out before. “I’d hate to do that. Absolutely hate it. You’re a master at work, after all.”
“Yeah, actually, I am, thanks for noticing.”
“Stop noticing me,” the person said, and Gem kept building. She had the room for another three days, and she intended to get all the use she could out of it, so she made her jewelry box and used a cam account to photograph it from all angles, and then she broke it down and made something Christmas-themed, since that holiday put a curl of tinselly delight in her stomach, and then she went back to paint, her old classic. A rainbow of primary-colored carpets on the floor, and a great big easel with a detailed mural, and a sculpture staring down at her, paintbrush in his hand, aesthetically unfinished.
And when she stepped back outside-- when she went outside--
She went outside and there was a man with a Herobrine mask and there was another person with a mask that covered just half his face and he grabbed her hand and said, let's just do what he says and then we'll figure this out, okay? And, uh, yeah, if you could stop shaking that'd help. You're a builder, right? He's been testing a bunch of those guys.
Someone had dropped a bunch of jacks and bouncing balls on the plaza concrete, spilled haphazardly across the blue and turquoise pavement. The wind screamed like a grieving admin.
The whitelist was empty except for two names. Gem could close her eyes, later, and picture that whitelist crystal clear in the back of her mind. Two names and howling wind and nothing else in the universe but quiet.
*
“See, I told Grian we’d use a dungeon,” a cheerful voice said over Gem’s head, over and to the right maybe two blocks away, but when she sent the message to her limbs it bounced off like the ball in a game of Pong, deflected, she stayed down. Cold floor. Bedrock floor, and she was upright, tied to something, and the most she could do was raise her head and that took effort. A pair of wolves lounged in the far doorway, snapping at each other over a bone. “Gotta put miscreants somewhere, after all, otherwise we’d get nowhere as a society. Hello, are you awake yet? I’ve been sitting here for like half an hour, it’s getting boring.”
“You gave me weakness,” Gem managed to accuse, and the woman sitting on the outside of the bars grinned at her, a flash of teeth that made Gem want to flinch. She had ash-blond hair past her shoulders and shimmering enchanted armor, iron modded almost silver and sparkling with constellations. Her username said PearlescentMoon, and she had a shadow. She also had a twig stuck in her hair.
Kind of an obvious twig. Wow, that was embarrassing. Gem was embarrassed for her. She tugged against the bonds with all her strength, felt her chest go tight when they didn't give.
“You’re trespassing,” PearlescentMoon said. "That ain't so bad of a reason to give someone a potion, in my opinion. Keeps the troublemaking down to a fun level. Plus, I'm supposed to be guarding you, but I haven't slept in days, so this makes my job easier."
“I’m stopping by,” Gem said. “Making a rest stop. I'm not trespassing. It’s a hard life wandering the medium, you gotta cut me some slack here.”
“You’re not on the whitelist, and this is a whitelist only server. How’d you get on here, huh? Did you sneak your way in like a little silverfish?”
“You left the door wide open,” Gem lied, like Etho's token wasn't literally still on her body. “You can’t blame a girl for being tired!”
“Yeah, you do look kind of bad,” PearlescentMoon granted her. Gem flexed her arms again, and the chains pressed into her skin. The stupid frilly sleeves itched. She tried to picture herself-- braided hair now, so was her hair clean? Was she healthy and well-fed again? She’d been in the void so long that her wrists had turned thin, it’d been weird feeling them so starkly-- and stumbled on it. She wondered if her eyes were still green. Servers could change a lot about a person, shifting them to match whatever the setting was supposed to be, and edges wore away when you were in the void too long. Everybody knew that. Data got corrupted. Details blurred. Maybe she didn't even have a face anymore. “It’s GeminiTay, right? Do you go by Tay?”
“Gem,” Gem said. “Are you, um, are you Pearl?”
Pearl nodded. Her eyes gleamed a little bit like a wolf's, too. “That’s right."
“Okay.” Gem swallowed. She thought someone who'd seen-- worse things than mobs and the void and other players turning cruel-- would probably be more paranoid than the curious player on the other side of the bars, who'd fidgeted like three times so far and seemed like she was really contemplating standing on the decorative blast furnaces for no good reason. And it was Pearl greeting Gem first, not a furious admin, so trespassing couldn't be that big a deal, right? Some servers would kick you immediately, no questions asked. Some servers, Gem had heard, would like, hurt you first, so you wouldn't do it again. Which was insane, so hopefully these people would at least let her stay the night. “You know, I really don’t mean any harm. Like, I know what it looks like, coming onto your server like this, but-- look, I just couldn’t stay in the void, okay? I had to go somewhere. This was the first place I could get into.”
“We’ve had hackers before,” Pearl said. “Me and Grian, we’ve seen some things, we’re veterans.”
“Okay, so have you seen, like, players who just got freaking lost. Because that’s what happened here. I had to -- I kind of had to run, and then I got lost.”
Pearl tilted her head. “Ran from what?”
In the back of Gem’s head there was a person in a mask, standing in the middle of the street. The street had dropped off after it left her sight, the horizon erased like someone had taken an eraser tool and smeared it white; the players running on the street and the ones in the shops and the friends Gem had liked to compete with in build battles were nowhere. It was just wind left, and the wind pulled at the loose strands from Gem’s braid but it didn’t touch the other person’s clothes, even though his hair was long enough for it.
Silence on the server. Evidence of half-done builds, parkour courses covered in discarded items like people had respawned over and over, and redstone blinking on and off in incomplete circuits-- a person in a Herobrine mask saying, “Two of you out of everyone here? Holy shit, are standards slipping. Back in my day, we’d apply some real principles to our gaming.”
The other player had white hair, black cloth covering the bottom half of his face, and mismatched eyes, and he met Gem’s gaze squarely, kind of beseechingly. She’d never met him before. She doesn’t think she’ll ever have known him for longer than a day.
Her throat felt rough when she swallowed. “WildBattles SMP,” she said. In the back of her head the person in the mask said, I know your username, GeminiTay, how hard would it be to find you again? It’s your fault for being interesting. It didn't feel real. She flinched away from thinking about it like someone had put a buzzer in her brain and pressed a button every time the words came up, you don't understand, please, it wasn't supposed to be like that-- “I didn’t get banned or anything, just. Wasn’t. A good fit, I guess.”
Her personal world gone. Every server she’d ever set foot on or heard of someone setting foot on gone, too, gaps in the medium where hundreds of people had used to live. But Pearl didn’t seem concerned at all about disappearances, or anything, and if Gem started going on about it--
She could probably start going on about it, brain shocks or not. The worst was that PearlescentMoon would think she was crazy, but a lot of players were a little crazy, and maybe she’d just assume it was a really involved game, anyway. Maybe it had been an involved game, and Gem had gotten successfully hazed, and back home everyone was alive and laughing.
Her head hurt. She shivered and pulled her legs a little closer to her body in a rustle of fancy skirts.
“See, that’s like the most suspicious thing you could possibly say,” PearlescentMoon pointed out.
“Good to know,” Gem said, “except it’s not, actually, because you tied me up in a dungeon. Creep."
“Dungeons are perfectly respectable," Pearl said, sounding actually stung. "We’ll just have to see what my admin thinks of you, won't we?” Pearl rose to her feet, and Gem went a little lightheaded. “Tilly, Mailbox, go ahead and guard the prisoner, won’t you? Be good girls for me and guard her, that’s right, you’re just the cutest little monsters, aren’t you?”
Gem ignored the wolves on principle. “Can’t you at least untie me?”
“Nope!” came the cheerful reply, and then Gem was alone.
The torches crackled. She squirmed against the chains again and tried to reach into her inventory and found that it’d been locked away, so she was on adventure mode, so-- so she wouldn’t be able to break blocks, either. That was great. That was fine.
Most admins were honestly pretty chill, or at least the ones she’d met were. Public servers got wild sometimes, so they’d ban people for griefing or repeated rule-breaking or just being mean, sure, but they wanted players to come, they were just managing the flocks that poured in. Customers. New friends. Gem had talked to one of the admins of WildBattles a few times, obviously, and she’d told Gem that it was mostly running around putting out a million fires when you weren’t even allowed to turn off fire tick, but she’d sent her shadow to check up on Gem, once, when she’d been messing with a build for a week. Gotta be careful about growing artists! You idiots would forget how to eat if someone didn't wiggle food under your nose.
Gem wasn’t sure about servers with whitelists, though. She hadn’t really been on one before, and those could get intense. Wars, power tripping, lore that got so detailed that it soaked into players’ lives and defined them, the server became their whole universe-- an admin controlled everything. Gem had been slotted into a position as soon as she landed here, maybe a princess or a noblewoman or something-- if she’d been a servant she would’ve revolted-- and that didn’t necessarily mean good things.
It wouldn’t have been a problem if the other option wasn’t the void, though. Gem had no problem leaving weirdos to their weirdo behaviors, it was just, um.
She hadn’t found any other servers on the way here. She had a feeling she should have, but she hadn’t. And there were so few players in the first place, compared to the size of the universe. She could wander after this and dissolve before the next server came into view, like driftwood being sanded down as it floated between islands. The player who found herself on the next server over might not remember to be Gem at all.
Gem’s eyes burned again. She laid her head against the smooth stone behind her, hugging her legs, and her skirt bunched up around the crease of her knees. She wished Pearl had at least given her a pillow and blanket.
It took a long time for PearlescentMoon to come back. Gem was dozing off against her will by the time she did, forehead pressed into her knees and heaviness pulling her eyelids down, but when she heard the rustle of footsteps she jolted. For a second she expected a white-eyed mask-- I told you I was still thinking you over!-- and then no, it was just two players, Sir Pearl The Jerk and a player with light brown hair and a set of parrot wings, whose face was drawing down into a frown.
He had a hazy shadow, warping in the torchlight and spreading its wings while the admin himself kept them close to his back. The shadow was raising up an hand to bring up a console and check the whitelist, mirroring the administrative processes a normal player couldn't even see. Gem tried really hard not to flinch.
“You could’ve answered me comming you,” Pearl was complaining as they got back in.
The other player-- Grian, his username said Grian, how was that gonna be pronounced-- was saying, “I was in a good flow! Listen, you never interrupt a man while he’s in a flow, that’s progress, and you’re a bad person for messing it up-- oh, this is a shambles, it’s made her a princess already. She's got a base assigned."
"Oh, that's rich, when you haven't even assigned my base," Pearl said indignantly.
"It's not like I meant to! This isn't Wynncraft! There's two of us, we don't need territories!"
"I need a territory," Pearl said, wounded. "I need a room of my own, that's necessary for my development. Having a knight and not so much as giving her a barracks, that's knight abuse, that is. I'll start forgetting to be a feminist or something. I'll be seeking out frogs to kiss next or swearing fealty to the next princess that comes my way. Not this one, though, she's a little too scruffy."
“I’m awake, you know,” Gem snipped out. “Awake and scruffy, apparently, which is not my fault. Hi, I’m Gem.”
“You’re an intruder, is what you are,” Grian said indignantly, which didn’t really bode well, and the chains around Gem’s arms dissolved like sugar in a glass. Her shoulders immediately twinged; she forced herself upright anyway, even though she had to stumble into the wall while the sensation went back to her legs, and stood up straight and glared. Grian wasn’t even really taller than her. “I can’t believe this. All my effort on those firewalls and someone we’ve never even met comes in, what is this world coming to.”
“’S more proof I should’ve been admin,” Pearl suggested.
“No, you’re not, you can’t even do redstone!"
“Right, and you can, for anything but explosions--"
“I’m a special little murder man and you’re a feral animal,” Grian sniffed, “and stop undermining me! You know, as your admin, you really should be calling me some kind of title.”
“You didn’t make anyone on Evo call you a title,” Pearl complained, and paused with a frown. “Well, maybe except Jimmy, did you make Jimmy?”
“Tim has to call me Lord High Elf when he gets here,” Grian said immediately. Tilly the Wolf got up from her place lounging on top of Mailbox's entire beleaguered body and trotted up to him to sniff his shadow, pawing at it like a stick. “Martyn wouldn’t do it, though, so there’s not really a point carrying it on past-- wait, no, hold up, we’re focusing. I’m banning an interloper."
“You could not ban an interloper,” Gem suggested. “I mean, I’m-- I’m a cool person, I have skills.”
Grian narrowed his black eyes at her. Gem wished she could be less aware of his shadow and the ridiculous aura around him, that hint of take a step back that most public server admins wielded as more of a uniform than anything, but she couldn’t stop feeling her skin crawl. She could feel the code access, if she focused on it. The server-level shifts that’d set her to adventure mode, and whatever had forcibly emptied her inventory on arrival so she didn’t have a single keepsake, so she didn’t even have her sweater-- Grian must’ve done that remotely, as soon as he learned she’d shown up. It didn’t matter where a player was on a server; the admin could reach down and root around inside them all the same.
“Unfortunately, we’re not accepting applications, and you’ve broken every law. I’ve only got three of them that apply to players, and you broke all of them by showing up here and not even checking yourself in at the village, and then you broke a hay bale and didn’t fix it, so that’s griefing. I've gone and interviewed each cow individually, and not one of them has offered to be a character reference. Pearl, did we ever finish the courthouse?”
“No, we ran out of smooth stone because of the castle,” Pearl mused. “We could build stocks, though. Or a guillotine.”
“But that’s effort,” Grian whined. “That’ll take all day, and then we’ll still have to have a trial...”
"It's crazy how you can be my admin and still be the laziest player I've ever met," Pearl said, and Grian smacked her with a wing, making her jump back and yelp.
Gem took the gap in conversation to say, forcing it out of her stupid throat, "I'm a good team player."
Her voice came out kind of small. It was hard to keep standing. Her feet were half asleep, and her hunger bars were low, so every little scrape or bruise from the chains didn’t want to heal, and her mouth was dry-- she hated being conscious of every tiny discomfort, she wanted to talk to the manager. She wanted to sleep in a bed and curl up tight and scream into the pillow and let it absorb all the black raging horror inside of her, the rot that kept trying to eat its way out and make her give up. Everyone was gone. Everyone was gone and she wasn't even gonna get to stay here, she wasn't gonna get to be tired and warm. “I-- I’ve never been banned from an SMP before, and I don’t, I mean, I do good on public servers, I do build battles-- I paint, some?”
Grian faltered, staring at her. “Oh, er. I'm afraid we’re both builders already, so I haven't been looking to add strangers."
“Okay," Gem rushed out, "well, um I can do PVP too? Not that I’d have to, like, that’s optional, that’s just an option-- mainly my focus is organics? I’m okay at terraforming but really it’s, it’s big structures, fairy houses and dragons, which I really like, I just don’t have my portfolio here since it was in my world and--”
And her world was gone, and everyone was gone, and if she went back into the medium it’d be fine except for that corrosive edge to the universe, that corruption that wouldn’t stop eating at her. Nobody was supposed to be out there that long. It felt wrong to be out there that long. She wasn’t sure what color her eyes were anymore, just that they were burning, and she tried again, “They were on my world,” like that made any sense by itself, like it didn’t beg the question of why she wasn’t on her world if it was so great, and then water slipped down her cheek and landed on the ridiculous pink skirt and oh, perfect, she was crying.
It was hard to feel anything about it. Gem scrubbed her eyes and said, thicker than she’d hoped for, “Um, crap, sorry, I." Her voice broke. It came out high and humiliating. “Could you just ban me in an hour, like could you just go away. Because that'd be great, if you could do that."
“Oh my goodness,” Grian said, sounding panicked. “Right, yeah, we can do that, unless this is a trick, in which case I’ll hunt you down-- but that's-- that's doable, certainly. One hour time out and then we're back to it, that's fairly standard."
“Wait, no, that's dumb,” Pearl said. “That's not-- Gem, we’re sorry, we’re just playing-- we were just playing, right, Griba? Having a laugh? We weren’t trying to be mean, you don’t have to cry.”
“I’m not crying,” Gem said tearily, because her body apparently just did things now.
Pearl sent her admin an anxious look. "Grian."
“Oh, we’re so scammable,” Grian said in despair. “We're like little old villagers agreeing that zombies should come inside because they've knocked politely on the doors. What if she’s evil, Pearl? What if she’s been sent by our enemies and she’s lying and she’s evil. Hear me out here. She could be here to destroy all we hold dear.”
“Someone here didn’t even finish the back of the village library,” Gem mumbled. “How dear is anything here to you, anyway.”
“Stop saying that while you’re crying,” Grian ordered shrilly, and she got enough of herself together to make a face at him. Grian's shadow fluffed up its wings indignantly. “But you know what, sure! Fine! You’re a builder, you’ve claimed you’ve got an eye for organics, you’re not a redstoner-- which is okay, honestly, I’ve met them and you’d never beat out Mumbo anyway and they’re an odd lot, I’ll tell you that now-- and you’re not here under false pretenses, unless I’m wrong about that token being a one-time buy from someone else.”
Gem's hand flew up to her pendant. “You’re not,” she choked out. “I got it from a friend of mine, I was just-- it was just in case, you know how it is.”
“No?” Pearl said in bewilderment. “How is it, then?”
"Nunya," Gem said. "As in, none of your business, it's private."
“Well, as long as we're ignoring that, I suppose the main thing to declare is finders keepers,” Grian said a little more gently, and Gem’s heart trembled. Okay. Okay, so this was real, this was happening. “But there’s still got to be consequences, so we’re gonna make like Rumpelstiltskin and order you to spin gold.”
“What, like an hour in the Nether? She could pay a piglin for that.”
“I will turn this dungeon around,” Grian gritted out, and Pearl sent him a mournful look. Tilly left his shadow alone and closed her jaws carefully and attentively around Pearl's armored forearm. “What I’m trying to say is you’ve got to do cool builds for us. Three good builds, to be precise, and I’ll warn you that we’re strict judges, so there’ll be no phoning it in. I want a dragon, another wing to the castle, and a fairy village by the end of this month. You’ll be on a trial basis till then, and we’ll decide whether or not to ban you after that.” He paused. “And I suppose you can help with group builds, too, since we need to get on those.”
“Okay,” Gem said blankly. “That’s-- I can do that, that’s reasonably challenging. Do I have to stay on adventure mode the whole time I’m not working, though? Or am I just in this dungeon?”
Pearl hummed. “It’s kind of a bad dungeon,” she drew out. “First thing we built after our starter bases, we didn’t even have mossy cobblestone then... I’ll build you a better one, how’s that. A proper princess tower.”
Something very girly in Gem perked up at that. “Well, if you have to,” she said as reluctantly as she could make herself, “then I accept those terms. Thank you for having me on your server.”
Grian's shadow rippled, the admin's eyes going a little distracted as his fingers twitched by his side. The notification popped up in the corner of Gem's mind, buzzing into their comms at the same moment: cheerful and official, solid enough for Gem to want to wrap herself up in it.
GeminiTay joined the game!
"And now that that's settled," Grian said cheerfully, "I'll be away doing important admin activities, and Pearl, you can handle the dungeon tower. You may submit any and all requests for assistance to my office in my starter base, to be reviewed as soon as time allows."
"You are the worst admin anyone's ever had," Pearl said, already starting to laugh, and Grian teleported out of the room before she'd finished her sentence, air rushing in to fill the gap he left behind. Pearl turned to Gem and grinned. "Well, come on, then. If we want to build this really ominously, we'd better go ahead and get started while it's night."
*
The princess tower spiraled up in quartz brick and moss blocks, accentuated by cherry wood and a spore blossom ceiling that made Gem sneeze, and the floor pattern included crafting tables, so every time Gem stepped wrong she’d have magic surge up and ask her what she wanted to build.
It was cozy. She could work with this. She added some leaves to the outside to make it homier, since apparently she’d be trapped here like a billion years, and narrowed the stairs by a block to make them defensible. Then she went through all the chests, politely furnished with beetroot soup and pumpkin pies and a cake on a table downstairs that said WELCOME TO YOUR DUNGEON TOWER and another smaller trapped chest that said CANDY FOR TRESPASSERS, which Gem didn’t open because she wasn’t a noob, thank you, and after that she got to work.
It was really nice to sink into the rhythms of a server again, the rise and fall of the sun and the lap of the waves. Mining on her own, ensconced safely in the earth where it felt like it'd take anything ages to get through all those y-levels and grab her, and decorating her room to her liking, and fighting off mobs with tipped arrows, because Infinity was a dumb enchantment if you wanted to swap ammo-- she'd missed it. She curled up and shook a little after her first violent respawn, something in her data shocked to bring her back somewhere safe and comfortable, and then after that she was pretty much fine.
Pearl had her own knights' base coming to fruition to the east, forbidding and celestial with a full moon hanging like a diamond pendant off a spindly outcropping at the top. Her death messages popped up in the chat reasonably often-- PearlescentMoon fell into lava, was killed by a Skeleton, got trampled by a horse she was trying to tame at the edge of a cliff like a doofus, all the standard ones-- and she came by every couple days or so to drop off supplies that Gem had requested in the chat, or harass Gem a little bit as she tried to finish her village.
Sometimes Gem stayed up late to watch her with a telescope, a blue-pajamaed figure hopping from wall to wall and placing torches in haphazard diagonals. Unlike the actual moon, Pearl contained neither craters nor, probably, aliens hiding where only the most dedicated scientists could suss them out, but she did have some cool muscles. Long hair that framed her face, a coltish willowy build that gave her almost half a block of height on her admin.
"It's my fourth server," Grian told Gem on one of her planning days, perched in her book nook as she laid out blueprints on the floor. For some reason he consistently dressed in a red jumper and plain work pants, which combined with his armor and the trappings of his fantasy theme to make him look like a lackluster Christmas elf, but he never seemed to mind that Gem mutilated some of her princess dresses and requested work pants from him at times, so Gem guessed she couldn't complain. "I've been on, let's see, there was YHS, that was a mess and a half, and then I was consulting on Wynncraft for some of the building, like you're doing now--"
"What, dungeons included?"
"Salted locked me in an oubliette and fed me seeds through a tube, like a hamster," Grian said at once. "It was awful, Gem, you've never seen anything like it! I'd crawl up to the bars and I'd cry at them to at least give me TNT and they'd throw rotten fruits at me until I scuttled back into my lair."
"Ooh, scary. So did you escape from there like, daringly, or did you have to serve out your whole sentence like a lame nerd?"
"Keep talking like that and I'll change your display name to Gempunzel," Grian threatened, and Gem rolled her eyes. She took her pink colored pencil and shaded some of her cherry blossom trees a little darker, outlined a petal-lined path to wind into the center plaza. "So, there were those, and then I was on Evo, where Pearl was too-- and that was fine, that went fine, and then we-- we came here."
Grian was leaning forward to assess some of the diagrams on Gem's desk, having hopped down to budge her desk chair around and lean on the back of it to peer at the papers, but his shadow had flinched, when he'd said that. It drew wings in and merged back where a shadow should be, a waver of darkness in an otherwise sunny room.
A chill ran down Gem's spine. Her head started to ache. "But you had other players on Evo SMP, right? When you started being an admin?"
"Yeah," Grian said. "They've all gone their separate ways by now, mostly. And some of my friends weren't ever on that server at all, they've been pursuing other opportunities. Mumbo Jumbo, for instance, has been living a very lucrative life as a Hermit."
Gem had heard all about Mumbo Jumbo by this point. She'd heard about Hermitcraft, kind of, and about Evolution SMP in this roundabout way that kind of had her on edge, stories skipping from early game right to and then we beat the Ender Dragon, an inexplicable gap in the middle where Pearl never seemed to have been anywhere near Grian at all, but oh gosh had she heard about Mumbo. The man had a mustache and a suit, apparently. He was a redstone genius, and also massively ridiculous, and he'd like this thing and that thing but would hate being startled by whatever stressful other thing Pearl had just built, which Grian always said gleefully, fluttering with excitement. She could probably draw the guy from memory at this point.
"How'd you get from being admin of a bunch of people to just Pearl, though?"
"I got a bit tired of having an audience," Grian said after a long pause. Gem opened her mouth to make fun of that-- she'd never had trouble with people watching her build, was Grian like okay-- and shut her mouth when she caught sight of Grian's shadow. It had stopped flitting around her workshop so it could curl up and put its head in its hands.
"Besides," Grian said a little more smugly, "I'm on sabbatical. It's the bare minimum for me from now on, Gem, I'm taking it slow."
For an admin who insisted on procrastinating at every turn, though, Grian sure did a lot. If he wasn't propelling himself with rockets all over his castle, he was planting big golden fields of wheat or hassling Pearl with charged creepers aimed directly at her location, which she played along with until she abruptly got bored or just pulled out a sword and murdered him, which Gem was still getting up the nerve to do herself. Sometimes he'd hole up all day at spawn, working on something he called his communications tower-- not a new technology, WildBattles had had one too, just a catch-all for long-range communications from other servers-- and other times he'd disappear to update the firewalls, after sending out messages and fidgeting around anxiously for what Gem assumed were replies.
"Did your friend Jimmy ever get back to you?" Gem asked, once she had that thought. "You were getting photos from him last week, right?"
"Yeah, yeah, he just sent back a frowny face," Grian said. "Which is ridiculous, if you ask me. It's not my fault he never learned to build past the basics. Really anyone would be bullying him if they met him, he can't be shocked that Martyn's making fun of his cabin now."
Gem added shading to an oak, bit the inside of her cheek. "It sounds like it reaches pretty far," she said. "Do you ever get anything from WildBattles? They do a lot of modded minigames."
"It's not got that good of a range," Grian said apologetically. "Basically a glorified receiver, you know how it is."
"Right," Gem said a little quietly. "Right, um. Yeah, I know how it is. What about Ethoslab?"
Grian drew up and stared at her, feathers ruffling in a ruby-sapphire ripple. Gem stared back at him, refusing to cede ground. "D'you mean the celebrity?"
"Uh." This was not a problem that Gem had anticipated. "White hair, face mask, redstone eye, total dork?"
"Ethoslab who invented bud switches and the hopper clock?" Grian demanded, leaping up from her chair, and preempted Gem's next question by adding, "Mumbo's obsessed with him."
"Get your filthy boots off my nice desk," Gem ordered Grian, and he hopped down. "And yes, that Etho, I guess! I don't know, it's not like we swapped life stories. He's the one who gave me my hacking token, and--"
White noise, white eyes on a plain mask, an older player's voice taunting something that had torn through everyone else like a sword through cobwebs--
"I told him I'd get it back to him when I could," Gem finished, weaker. She couldn't make any of her concerns leave her tongue, and the pendant felt cold and heavy around her neck. It had a maple leaf printed in the center of it, stamped into the gold. "So if you have a forwarding address for him or something, that'd be fantastic."
"I could ask around," Grian said. "How about this, I'll do that tonight, and you'll keep working on paying your rent via build and not bother me again until tomorrow."
"Literally," Gem said, "literally you're the one who came to talk to me," but Grian was already gone, his distracted shadow with him. Gem put her head in her hands and tried to be frustrated at that instead of terrified of everything else.
*
It was probably about three months before Gem actually had the supplies and time to finish her fairy village to her liking, since she had to find a good valley to put it in first and it took longer to find firefly bushes, but she multitasked with a three-headed dragon that coiled around the devastated and scorched remains of the western wing of the castle, and after a while Grian agreed that was a cooler option than another facade he wouldn’t finish anyway.
That left her with one more build before she could call herself a full-fledged member of the server, though, and for that she was coming up blank.
Grian had built a downtown district already, ostensibly for other players who were gonna visit at some point, and Pearl had gone on a tear building elaborate futuristic castles, including one that reached up all the way to build limit and cradled the moon at midnight precisely, so Gem couldn’t actually add anything there. It couldn’t be her usual theming, not if she wanted to fulfill the terms of the deal.
She’d just about decided to give up and ask Grian what he’d want tomorrow, even though it felt like kind of a cop-out, when a rock sailed up and pinged sadly against her window. The next one hit with a plink, which was bad news for when the third one probably got like catapulted up there, so Gem groaned and dragged a hand over her face and paced over to shout down, “What, Pearl?”
“Gem! Ge-em. Gem Gem Gem Gem Gem Gem Gem, let down your hair--”
“Good lord, there is a ladder and it’s midnight, go away,” Gem called down, and Pearl looked up at her beseechingly, her eyes shining in the moonlight. This time her wolves weren't playing at her feet, but she had her armor on, still, and a sword hanging casually from her spare hand. Pearl's reach with that thing was insane. “What do you want, Pearl? Why are you tormenting a prisoner?”
“I’m not tormenting you!” Pearl said indignantly. “I’m offering you an opportunity to win your freedom! I’ve got you a third project, but we’ve got to get it done before sunrise. I’m laying a curse on you, you’ll be devoured by wolves in the morning if you fail.”
“Don’t you think I won’t stab Tilly if I have to!”
“What? No you wouldn’t, you love Tilly!”
“She smells!” Gem said, but she went to get on work boots and a proper non-royalty outfit anyway, since the alternative was sitting around brooding like a tool. “What are we even doing?”
“Building a lighthouse!” Pearl shouted back up, and Gem scaled the ladder down, landing on the grass with a dewy thump.
The moon shined bright and full over their heads, orange like a cat’s eye. When Gem had been added to the whitelist initially, the server had been totally vanilla, homey and standard like the first world she could remember, but Grian had gotten antsy over the weeks and added details here and there: a change of the seasons, a fancy kind of apple tree, a few custom enchantments. Right now it was autumn, a harvest moon over fields of wheat and ripe pumpkins, and there was a chill lingering in the air.
“We’ve been meaning to do it for ages, it’ll surprise Grian if we get it done now,” Pearl explained once Gem was down. Tilly plopped herself by Gem’s feet and wagged her tail hopefully until Gem reached and scratched her ears. “I’ve been throwing empty boats at the area for ages, you know, to shame him, but he never gets it done. I swear, as soon as you tell him he’s got a clock to be on, he decides he’s got to be slacking the whole time.”
“Typical,” Gem sighed. Pearl punched her in the shoulder-- “Because I’m guarding you, see, you’re a prisoner here”-- and scampered down the badly lit path to the seaside, to the high sharp cliffs and the outcropping that was just begging for a lighthouse, surrounded on three sides by frothing waves.
Grian complained about the seashore basically every week. Or okay, complain was a strong word, that was just one of Grian's hobbies-- really he rambled about the seashore, and went and tried to breed turtles to make better mob farms, and for like a week of their first experimental summer he'd set up a resort for all three of them to vacation in, Gem included. It'd had a fancy gazebo and a bunch of fantasy-themed drinks, little ones with tiny garnishes of carrot leaves and glowberries, and they'd dressed up as pirates for the occasion, before Grian finally gave up and stripped down to swim trunks and plunged in.
It'd been obnoxiously fun. Gem had never really cared to spend a ton of time living on a server with an admin, since it'd felt so much more convenient to live alone and go visit WildBattles when she really wanted non-tamed-mob company, but there was something kind of magical about playing with the same people for weeks at a time, getting to know all their little quirks. Grian got particular about his work attire, and he got contrary if someone pressed him, so the easiest way to get him to do something was just to visibly have a lot of fun so he felt the need to get involved. Pearl mostly did her own thing except when she was bored, and then she'd make excuses to offer tasks and services, usually alarmingly specific at exorbitant prices-- Gem was never, ever going to need a cleaning lady, okay-- and she liked to change up her aesthetic.
For their pirate getup she'd changed her eyes to red and called herself Scarlet Pearl. Now, for autumn, she'd dyed her hair dark and altered her eyes to a pale, moonlit blue that glowed like a squid in the depths of a cave.
So apparently she had to be emo to build a lighthouse. That was fine, Gem wasn't going to judge. She'd given herself antlers for the same reason, little ones that poked up out of her hair but didn't keep her from sleeping on a pillow, and the change made her feel just plain great.
Pearl had the supplies for the lighthouse laid out in shulker boxes, but the design was up to Gem. She ran her hands along the spectral prismarine, smooth stone and white bricks and seagrass, and looked over the nighttime ocean, trying to arrange her thoughts.
“I’m thinking about bigger ships coming this way,” she said finally. “You know? Like shipwrecks that spawn, but they’re older, they’re the ghosts of those. There’s kelp in the sails, the treasure’s been replaced with shells and sand. Not having a lighthouse is calling those in, but the right kind of lighthouse will let them stick around at a distance, so they can have a hope of land...”
“Keeping them at bay, yeah, I can see that,” Pearl said eagerly. “Could arrange a beacon so it beams sideways, maybe, it’ll have a radius as it goes over the water. Can’t be 360 degrees or it’ll keep us all from sleeping.”
“Since when do you sleep?"
"Since I got those phantoms to ambush Grian," Pearl said, "he's banned me from being a five a.m. Pearlie, it's cruel and unusual."
"Pearl, you've been imprisoning me in a tower," Gem said, though honestly at this point she wasn't super fussed about it. "You're making me build this lighthouse at swordpoint. Which is pretty pathetic, actually, I could totally beat you in a fight."
"No, you couldn't."
"Oh, I absolutely could," Gem said savagely, wanting to grin, "but right now we're focusing, so that'll have to wait. This lighthouse is gonna have to be tall, I've just decided that. It should look like it's been here for a thousand years."
Pearl stayed out with her all night, her wolves darting out to catch skeletons and going after Drowned that came up out of the water, and the lighthouse took shape: darker where the water would’ve worn it away, lighter where the sun would hit it, cracked and broken glass artistically littered across the platform of the room at the top. The beacon swept across the waves in lazy, lambent arcs.
Gem’s pants were soaked through from the knees down. Her hands were scraped up, her hair escaping its braid, and Pearl had fallen in at some point, so she looked like a wet dog. They huddled together at the top of the lighthouse like birds blown off course, salt crusting in their clothes. Gem combed her fingers through Pearl's hair and started braiding that at one point, since otherwise it fell into her face and made her look too emo to function, and Pearl exhaled, leaning back into Gem's touch.
"Gem, can I ask you a question?"
The waves beat against the boulders below them. At this point clouds had crossed over the orange moon, staining them bloody and dull, and the temperature had dropped enough that Gem kind of wanted to craft a cloak or something. Whatever would be thematically appropriate.
"Sure, go ahead," Gem said, and shivered. "Only if I get to ask you one first, though. And if you're about to ask whether I'm cold, the answer's yes and I think we need to go back to my base already. This sucks."
"We can bring my wolves up here to cuddle for warmth," Pearl said hopefully, and Gem elbowed her. "Or okay, fine, yeah, we can go back to your base. Ain't gonna say no to that if it's offered, it's nice and heated there. Lovely fireplaces. You should ask your question first, though, if you're gonna."
"What happened on Evo?" Gem asked, because it'd been bothering her for weeks now. "You're all still in contact, so I always feel like it should be, y'know, a standard friend group going their own ways, but Grian's weird about it. You're weird about it too, if I'm being honest."
"It's a weird story," Pearl said. "I don't know the half of it, really, not like Grian does. That's the thing about admins, you know the thing, the way they get... he wasn't the same on Evo as he was before. It was-- I guess you could call it a crazy project, pushing through updates like we did, trying to hold the server together. Grian did a ton of research for it."
"Did he ask other admins for help or something?"
"Not that I know," Pearl drew out. Gem finished her second braid and tied it off, and Pearl leaned her head against Gem's shoulder. Gem could feel her sides expanding as she breathed, the faint pulse of her heartbeat. "I don't know who he contacted, I haven't got a clue. But they'd give us tasks, a little, and talk to us, and then suddenly they stopped and - we were supposed to fight the Ender Dragon, to finish the server? But we all went to the End and Grian wasn't there. I couldn't track him down for months. And then he was just-- right there where I'd left him, almost, in the last chunk of Evo that'd been left standing. He told me..." Pearl squirmed, fidgeted with her armor. "He told me he wasn't real. He told me I wasn't real, until I hugged him, and then he was fine again. I stuck with him, you see, I fixed Grian up. But his shadow never used to move so much on Evo."
"It's weird," Gem agreed, because it kind of was. WildBattles' admins had had shadows that opened consoles or poked at other players, sometimes even scuffling with each other, but she hadn't seen them express completely opposite emotions. "Okay. Your turn."
"My turn," Pearl echoed, and drew up her long legs to hug them. "Alright. Gem, what were you so scared of that you had to run out here?"
Gem opened her mouth to answer and choked on nothing, doubling over gasping hard, Pearl startling up to smack her several times in the back. The notifications hovered in the corner of her vision, bubbles popping one by one, a warning before the damage ticks built up-- Gem couldn't breathe, oh crap, she couldn't breathe--
She wasn't even sure what she'd been going to say. She'd just-- all she'd done was think about it, her head hurt so bad and all she'd done was let her mind drift back to something she might describe aloud--
"Gem?" Pearl was asking, panicked. "Gem, what is it, did you breathe something in or something? Would a respawn help, 'cause I've got this lovely sword here--"
"Don't stab me," Gem rasped incredulously, and Pearl said, "Stop being so stabbable, then! It's not all on me, you know, you should take some responsibility."
Inhale. Exhale. Gem blinked back reflexive tears and said, "To answer your question, I don't really know if I can say. It might've-- it might've been nothing? But Etho gave me a token to get onto another world, since I couldn't even go back to mine, so. Extrapolate from that. Make of that what you will."
Pearl was silent for a moment. "This Etho guy, then," she said. "Was he in trouble with you?"
"I think everyone was," Gem said, wrapping her arms around herself to smooth out the goosebumps. Pearl stood up and offered her a hand, put a jacket over her shoulders as soon as they were face to face again. Gem tucked the edges of it over each other and wore it like a cape, feeling kind of stupid about the whole situation. It was heavy, but also warm and dry.
"Well," Pearl said, looking troubled, "you're safe from it here. Me and Grian have got hold of you, at this point. Whoever it was would have a heck of a fight going after us both."
*
“Huh, that’s weird,” Grian said, frowning, another month later. Gem was loitering around his communications tower, waiting for one of her messages to Etho to go through-- why did he have so many fan accounts, it was insane, who was worshiping that washed up nerd-- and listening in on evidence that the universe was functioning out of her line of sight.
"What's weird? Something's weird?"
Grian poked at the buttons on the dashboard, strategically tapping a few with actual functions and then finally smacking the Big Red Button That Did Nothing in frustration. Pearl called the extra colorful buttons Grian's fidget toys. "Now, it's not out of the question or anything," he said. "There's all sorts of things that can cause messages to get lost-- interference, incorrect repeater construction, you name it and someone's mucked it up. So that's probably what it is, but that doesn't make it any less strange, considering the skillful crowd he runs with. Usually Mumbo’d have written back by now.”
*
“D’you think Hypixel’s had an outage or something?” Pearl mused, frowning at a screen on her comm. "There's no newsletter this month, that's mighty odd."
*
"I'd send it on to Etho's fan account, but it looks like that address is returning all messages automatically," someone said apologetically over the radio, their voice crackling with static. "It was active a week ago, but the server that it's hosted on... isn't giving us a response yet. I might be able to update you tomorrow."
"That'd be awesome, thanks," Grian said, and Gem squeezed her own wrist tight, heart pounding in her throat. It was fine. She had a watercolor to get to, a collection of orange and red fish thrashing up to protect a Mending book, and she wanted to get it done by the end of next week. That was something she could handle on her own. Communication difficulties with random servers she'd never even heard of weren't something she could do anything about.
*
The end stone in Gem’s inventory ran out way before she reached the next city, but she had fireworks to spare and an elytra at full durability, so she shouted to Grian, “I’m flying for it, see you there,” and kicked off into the void.
The plummet before her elytra caught the air made her stomach swoop. She whooped, doing a pirouette in the air just because she could, and the chill brought up pleasant goosebumps on her skin, a slap of cold wind against her body that lifted her up. This void wasn’t real void, just another boundary a little further off. It was cold like autumn on WildBattles and on Grian's server too, now, a reminder you were entering the darkest months alive, a reminder of what cold felt like so you could contrast it with how warm it was inside the buildings-- laughter bubbled up in her throat as she nosedived, banked to let the elytra catch the air, shot red and white novas into the black that fizzled and pushed her higher. She alighted on the next floating city and Grian landed a minute later, hopping up and down with excitement.
“Now, this is what I call a good place for a shulker farm,” he declared. “I don’t know why we killed all the shulkers at the last one, that was pointless and we’re never doing it again. This time we’ll show mercy and grace.”
“We’ll decimate them,” Gem agreed, mapping the End city in her mind. There'd be a treasure room, probably, and she thought she’d seen a hint of an End ship. Pearl would be join them pretty soon, but her elytra had broken, so she’d have to go back; she was probably heading back to the Stronghold again, unless Grian wanted to fly back and help her out. “One in ten gets to die. Are you gonna go back and take an elytra to Pearl?"
"If I do that, she'll never learn to take responsibility," Grian said, already spreading his wings again. He'd been typing on his comm, and Gem sure hadn't been getting any messages, so she'd been feeling pretty good about her odds of being right. "Right, I'll be back in a jiff. Try not to fall into the void while I'm gone."
"Bye, Grian," Gem said, wiggling her fingers in a mocking wave, and Grian rolled his eyes, and then paused, wings lowering like he'd heard something too high-pitched for Gem's ears. His shadow had been copying him exactly, but now it rippled at the edges and spread its wings wide, drawing the hazy outline of a sword. "Uh, Grian? You doing okay there?"
"Someone's here," Grian said, and a person in a Herobrine mask said beside him, "One in ten? That's rookie numbers, I can beat that any day. How the fuck did you notice I was here?"
Gem yanked up her crossbow and shot at him before he said another word. Grian jerked to the side, a diamond sword appearing in his hand that Gem knew he'd spawned in with a command, and the firework she'd shot slowed down as it approached its target and bounced off his chest, landing on the floor in a puff of gunpowder. The person plucked it up and surveyed it, the little made in the kingdom! sticker on the side and the custom colors, and said, “Cute! I didn’t think you were into those little details, Gem. Weren't you all about working on your builds in private?”
“You watched me build for a couple hours and you think you know my life story?” Gem said, and she wasn’t even sure if she was scared. Her insides felt like jelly, a coagulating mess of thoughts that made it hard to look at the person in the face, and the rest of her was-- falling, it was just falling. She could start crying and begging, maybe. She could lunge and tell Grian to run and watch him be plucked apart like a real parrot, or separated out from the rest of them and told to build, to prove his worth, to be entertaining like Etho had been.
Etho had built contraptions for hours, once it had just been the two of them and the person in the Herobrine mask, surrounded by a server that was already falling apart. He'd talked cheerfully, like he was reading from a script, and he'd barely stammered at all. He'd followed through on a plan that'd let Gem run.
To here. She'd run and ended up here. This might all be her fault.
“What the hell, dude," Gem said, holding onto her courage with both hands. "I contain multitudes, come on."
"You're alright, I'll give you that," the person said. "Entertaining. I knew you couldn't have gotten far, though, and hey, it looks like I was right. You kept all my little suggestions in your head and everything." He inclined his head at her like he was giving her kudos for answering a difficult question. Gem's knuckles went white on her crossbow. "Now, answer my question, birdbrain."
"It's Grian," Grian said tartly, "which you can read above my head, if you please, it's my username and it's not exactly a difficult one. Five letters. A chicken could say it."
"Looks like Brian," the person said. "Or Grain. Are you sure you hadn't just run out of ideas?"
"Gem," Grian said, and Gem expected the next words to be how do you know this dude, a panicky furious accusation, but all he said was, “Come over here with me. He’s not a player.”
“I’m on the whitelist."
“Oh, really?" Grian's shadow writhed at his feet, lost shape and pooled up blacker than black, as dense as a black hole, coalescing into a pinprick as small as a pencil mark. "Do you know what, stranger, I don’t remember putting you there. I can feel you trying to convince me you're on it, but I’m picky about my friends. You couldn’t tell a dormer from a helm roof, and I’m afraid that disqualifies you from membership on my server unless your name is Tim, which it clearly isn’t, because then you’d know better than to try me. Get off my server.”
The person flickered. Grian's shadow shuddered back into shape, contorting like it'd been cut up at the stomach, and Grian went a little bit ashen.
"Nice try," the person said, "but an admin's a player too, you know. That doesn't really do anything."
Gem couldn't see a shadow at his feet at all, not like she'd assume anyone would have one. He stood like he wasn't actually touching the air.
"Wait," Gem said, and her voice came out so small it was hardly there at all, a drop of water hitting the bottom of a well. "Wait, Grian didn't mean that, he's just--"
"No, I absolutely meant it," Grian said, feathers bristling, and the ground changed, a lurch under Gem's feet that made her stumble and almost drop her crossbow. Suddenly they were on different end stone, parts of it blown up and pitted from past battles, and Pearl was startling back, staring between the three of them like she wasn’t sure whether to fight or throw a welcome party. Purple particles sizzled way above their heads, end crystals spawning at the tops of all the towers. Gem scrambled back towards Pearl and raised her crossbow again, just in case she could get off a shot while the person in the mask was distracted. "Pearl, Gem, we've got an intruder. Would you mind finishing off the Ender Dragon for me while I deal with this?"
"Wait, what, right now? I thought we were End busting," Pearl blurted, and Gem hissed, "Pearl, get with the program already--"
And the person in the mask sighed, "Jesus fucking Christ. If I had a nickel for every time one of you leader types tried to do a valiant last stand, I'd be able to buy myself a gaming PC. Stop standing like you think you can challenge me and go to your knees."
Gem's knees almost gave out from under her. Grian collapsed completely, a flicker of his data and a twist of fury on his face and then he was down, his shadow lightening to almost nothing, like he was dying-- his wings were tight against his back, ruffled up big and fearful. The person in the mask was looking at him like a puzzle piece with an unexpected fray on its edges.
Pearl yanked Gem back and drew her axe, like that mattered, like there was anything anyone could do here. "Okay, that's it. Step away from the Grian, please."
“Give it up, I know things you don’t know," the person said, sounding bored. "Drop your weapons.”
“You’re not the boss of me," Pearl snapped. Her gaze flicked down and then up again, almost like she was assessing her options; Gem followed where she'd looked and saw darkness pooling at the edge of her own shadow, faithfully and mindlessly keeping Gem's exact silhouette. Grian's was missing completely. "Actually, you've got a lot of nerve, coming onto our server and threatening our admin like you've done. What gives you the right to do that, eh? How're you getting that authority?"
"I had a keycard," the person said, amused. "What are you, are you supposed to be a scene kid or something?"
"Emo," Pearl said, and she totally was stalling, because that was Grian's shadow creeping up Gem's legs, clinging so tightly to her body that it might as well have been another skin. She hadn't gone to her knees with Grian, but she was shaky and pale, almost as cowed-- she was someone that the shadow could whisper into the ear of, as its hand closed around the pendant at her neck. "It's supposed to be emo. Are you stupid or something?"
Gem, I'm not kidding about the Ender Dragon, Grian's shadow murmured. We've got things to do here, places to be. I'll get the crystals for you if you can take the shot.
“Am I stupid," the person said incredulously. "Am I stupid. Kid, you wouldn’t even be noticing me if I wasn’t letting you. I’m not cornered here, I’m playing with dolls. Confining myself to the rules of the game, so no one can say I’m not playing fair-- but this is getting stupid, you have to see that. At some point watching little jumping spiders wave their arms like they're threats just makes me want to squash them."
"Cover your ears, Pearl, he's monologuing," Grian quipped, and the person closed his hand and--
And Grian screamed, a long drawn out sound like he'd had a sword slashed right through his midsection, it spilled out of him like arterial blood. Gem choked out a scream of her own, lurching forward and feeling Grian's shadow yank her back, shuddering against her like a mirage in a sandstorm; Pearl lunged with her axe and got knocked down for her troubles, on the ground before the person in the mask even moved, redness blooming sourceless across her face.
No. No, no, stop, no, not again--
Grian kept screaming for-- for a while, long enough that his shadow spasmed and flickered, long enough that Gem had it sealed in her mind how it looked when he was writhing on end stone with his muscles out of his control, wings covered in dust, tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes. Too ragged and out of it for coherent words.
It went on long enough that Pearl made an awful sound and finally choked out, "Stop, stop it, I get it," and then it stopped and Grian was breathing raspily on the ground, he had blood flecking foamy at his lips. His hands left sweaty handprints in the dust.
"Can I talk now?" the person said, sounding bored. "I thought you'd like an explanation, Gem, I would've told you back on WildBattles if you hadn't decided to ditch me. I would've let you live, too. I figured, hey, if one of these things can show some creativity, why not reward that? But I've seen a lot of better builders since, and honestly, I'm not sure any of you are worth a second glance. Redstone follows some useful principles, but placing blocks? Let's be real here."
Grian's shadow whispered, Get ready. Grian whimpered, a little bitten-back sound like he was salvaging his pride, and the person in the mask crouched beside him and ruffled his hair like he was petting a dog.
“The thing you don't get is what you are," he said. "Humanity always conceived of other realms. It's a known tendency. We tell stories about gods on top of Mount Olympus-- you ever seen that in a build, Mount Olympus? Where’d you think the name came from?-- even though we can go there and see they aren’t there, because they’re always beyond us, right? You take the sacrificial bull, and humans get the bones and those good prime cuts, that edible fat-- and the gods, well, they get the smoke. That nice little sizzle. Everything ephemeral, and vague, conceptual... we call it being downstream, where I’m from. That means some universes are realer than others. Some of them are just a lot more influential, or a lot more breakable...”
He stood up again, strode over and looked Pearl over. Grian made a furious inhuman sound, a squawking shriek that made Gem’s ears hurt, but the person hardly seemed to notice. “You don’t even question it,” he said, and Gem could see his eyes through the slits in the mask but she couldn’t tell what color they were, or if they caught the light. His boots left no prints in the end dust. “Why you all have different accents. Why you know what a princess is without a feudal system, or what a wizard is when you’re all born with the same kind of magic, or why you say good lord--” He mimicked Gem’s voice so perfectly she jerked back-- “Without having a lord to pray to! You don’t have gods, so why do you swear on them?”
“They’re figures of speech,” Gem spat out, because enough was enough, holy shit. “That’s just how people talk, you creep, we don’t need a reason--
“You’re all so fragile down here,” the hacker said, and Grian’s whole body glitched, a colorless ripple of pixels that split his irises apart, blurred the edges of him into the stone below. This time he didn’t scream, but he gasped raggedly after, huddling into himself, and his shadow flickered out completely. “God. I don’t know how they don’t spend all their time poking you guys around, you're so far away from real. Didn’t any of the devs ever play Sims? Pocket God? The fucking LEGO games?”
“I think you need to let Grian go and get off this server, buddy,” Pearl said, white as the surface of the moon, and stepped forward to hold the edge of her axe under the person's jaw. Grian met Gem’s eyes over her shoulder, resignation crumbling in them like a collapsing dam, and his shadow clenched a fist that exploded all of the end crystals in the circle at once. The person startled, then visibly rolled his eyes; Grian tossed Gem a hundred blocks into the air.
It had to be taking advantage of the same mechanics as being snagged by a fishing line from that high up, flung into the air by an admin's shortcut. Gem felt the invisible hook catch and lift, throwing her like she’d thrown wardens with her friends before, and then she was up so high that the person barely seemed to remember her, he just glanced at her and shrugged his shoulders like he was noting a silverfish he’d have to wander back to and kill later.
The Ender Dragon was above her now, and it wouldn't really be able to heal. Shulker magic sparked under Gem's skin, some other magic that Grian's shadow must have pressed into her skin, and Gem was a coiled-up spring that'd finally been let loose, she had liftoff. She had a bow in her hand and arrows, and when it came down to it she had really good aim.
She saw Pearl stagger and fall way down below her, the hacker crouching beside her like he was chatting to a little animal.
Pearl’s hair had fallen in her face. Her armor glitched in ugly ripples, enchantments guttering out and leaving plain iron behind.
She was small. She was a head taller than Gem and Grian but she was small down there, struggling to her feet as the person in the mask put a hand on her shoulder and nudged her down to the dust. Gem couldn’t see his mouth move. She was so high up that she could barely make out Pearl’s features, even though she thought she knew them by heart by now-- her night blue eyes, her coltish arms and legs, the stubborn sunburns along her collarbone and back from when she spent too long building without any shade.
The Ender Dragon circled, preparing to dive down. It was a program, a constant like piglins in the Nether and wolves in a forest, but it was a symbol, too, probably. The thing that players strove to defeat. The creature that died to open up a direct line to the rest of the universe.
Gem had never been the kind of player to live on a server and like it. There was so much hustle and bustle and distraction, so much reliance on other people, why even bother when living on your own world gave you all the comforts you could imagine-- but she got it now. She was getting to that understanding late, sure, because she’d taken some convincing, but she got it, she did, the universe could let up on her now. It was totally possible to hand over the keys to your happiness, to fold someone else’s fingers over them after you’d placed your heart in their palm. The server itself had keys to Gem, it and the builds on it, extensions of all three of them that mingled even when they were separated, down in the mines or at the edge of the map.
The tiny doll-shape that was Pearl stopped moving. The hacker put a hand on her throat, over her jugular, and when he withdrew it there wasn’t anything of Pearl left where he’d touched. Her body folded in and kicked out in a spasm. Her body stopped having a shadow and then it just stopped. Gem couldn’t tell if it was trying to dissolve.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Etho’s token gleamed around her neck, just as weightless, drilling purple into Gem’s brain. Whatever Grian had done to it was still working, and that meant there was still a chance to do something. What exactly, she had no idea but Etho's token hadn't been purple before like five minutes ago, and Grian was an admin, so Gem's best bet here was to get the ball to the hoop and freaking score.
The shulker magic sucked Gem up higher, and she saw the hacker rise and turn toward Grian again, struggling to his feet. Grian might have been screaming again. Gem couldn’t hear it past the ringing in her ears.
She raised the bow above her head. The arrow in it shined with enchantment, Flame singing through the air in an invisible shimmer of heat, tongues of a fire reaching up to caress her arms, and without anything to brace herself on she had to use all the muscles in her arms just to draw the bow, but her aim was solid. It was usually solid.
She caught the dragon right at the base of its head, and it exploded into a shower of white sparks.
And- the token around Gem's neck started to glow.
Every player knew what happened when you killed the Ender Dragon. It was one of the big accomplishments, the one that opened up parts of the game some players never bothered to get to-- elytras like the ones on Gem’s back, and End cities, and that spiraling perfect moment that nobody ever remembered quite right, when something came down and brushed a hand over your head. Gem’s best recollection of it was as a whisper over the comm, the kind where you could hear the speaker smiling, but she’d met players who called it being anointed with perfume, or wrapped in soft cloth, or given a taste of the best water you’d ever drunk: poetry, perfect harmony. All the chaotic noise in the universe combining in one moment and dropping off, like the heartbeat before the bass dropped.
Gem's fireworks stalled and sputtered out. Her elytra flared, stiff wings tugging at her back through the harness, and the shulker magic let go. That was the best word for it. She’d hit the top of her trajectory, where gravity couldn’t pull her down; her stomach kept floating, all of her stricken light and thoughtless, and below her the end stone dropped away into an expanse of nothing, and the token’s purple glow wreathed her like an aurora--
And something said into the space behind her thoughts, Oh, hey, the player’s looking back?
“Yeah,” Gem choked out. She put a hand around the pendant and thought she felt a whisper of Grian's shadow press its hands over hers. “Yeah, um, hi. My admin sent me up to talk to you."
The words she was hearing weren’t words. They were watercolors, maybe, dropped into a clear pond or into the shallow water off the coast by spawn, where the coral reefs glowed: purples and fuchsias and a blocky homelike gray, clouding out like ink. Forming pictures-- players riding pigs, an armadillo skittering across a mesa, a creaking staring down at her-- and flooding her vision, saying, It's certainly reached a higher level now. This player should be careful.
“I don’t have time to be careful!" Gem snapped hysterically, and the watercolors startled. She was learning all kinds of new color combinations today, apparently. "Someone’s--" No. "One of you is hurting my friends! My admin! He took everyone I knew before, just deleted them, and wow, have you been lying down on the job, what the heck-- just-- just letting that happen-- it's your fault! He's talking like he knows you! How about you jerks get off your asses and fix it already!"
The universe has a policy of noninterference, one of the voices said, and another behind it said, The universe has been distracted, who was in charge of the last update?
We leave players to their private tasks.
The player named Grian had a private task that included discovering how to break another player’s brain with a dream too strong, apparently, unless this isn't a new failure mode, the second voice pointed out, and its irritation was a green man standing in an ancient forest, particles dancing to a quantum melody, synaptic cascades. A person sitting at a screen with a tall black can on the desk beside them, sitting back and pinching their nose. Sometimes if you hooked a radio up you got noise, background interference, and that was what was filling up Gem's brain now, she was pretty sure. She wasn’t sure if the thought was coming from her or not, but she could hear it being thought. Get real. Are we ignoring user requests here?
All right, GeminiTay, player of games, the other part of the universe sighed in response, this is a reasonable complaint, that's irregular. We’ll look into it immediately.
Remember you’re alive, the other voice reminded her, gentler, and Gem threw her arms up to shield her face and finally screamed-
And the universe flipped on its head. And the universe showed Gem a castle far below her, half-finished because Grian never finished the backs of his stupid showy facades, and a rose garden with blossoms hanging dewy off their trellises, and a flock of parrots clustered around a jukebox. And the universe showed her a lighthouse with a bedroom on the top floor, just beneath the circling beacon, and all the detritus of three players’ lives-- Gem’s fancy princess hairbrush, and Grian’s work boots, and Pearl’s wolf army chewing absently on each others’ ears.
And the universe showed her a lighthouse beam casting a net of light across the dark water, and a collection of people on the shore.
They stood shoulder to shoulder, in columns that extended beyond where the lighthouse beam could see. Night-blurred faces, the crest of a nose or shine of an eye peeking out like darting fish in the gloom, broad shoulders or narrow ones, tall skinny people and short stocky ones, bunny ears and antlers and bionic limbs-- arms upraised. A light glowing in each precious palm.
This is how it feels, Gem would remember thinking later. This is how it has to feel, the boundaries of her blurring into every other boundary, unreal, and then her stomach dropped back into her body and the shulker magic wore off and the static rushed in, all of it, the void too cold and too near, there was a portal and she wasn’t close enough to it, there were words on the screen too blurry to read--
And a winged shape crashed into her, a warm body wrapping arms around her torso and shouting, what are you doing, that’s the wrong way-- Gem, that’s the wrong way, turn around, I hate Watchers, they never plan for this part--
They fell, Grian’s wings beating furiously to slow the descent, night splashing out of its bounds to stain the backs of both their eyes, and then there was the End and a tower and a crumbled shape there, and Gem was on the ground, Gem was on the ground still screaming.
There were hands on her face. There were hands in her code, her admin’s shadow overlapping with him like a dark aura, lending her impossible solidity, enveloping her in its wings.
*
Grian joined the game!
PearlescentMoon joined the game!
GeminiTay joined the game!
GeminiTay earned the advancement Hello Human Resources!
GeminiTay earned the advancement Sledgehammer To The Fourth Wall!
GeminiTay earned the advancement Well Excuse Me Princess!
“What the heck,” Gem mumbled, fumbling for her comm to make it stop buzzing, and overshot her mark and fell off the bed. The shock woke her up the rest of the way: she stared at the crafting table floor and then the halls of her base, her princess tower, the leaves wound around its base and the smoke that pumped out of its spindly chimney and the lighthouse in the distance, right next to spawn, beaming against the dusk. “Oh, but-- wait, but-- Grian? Pearl? Pearl!”
She broke the bars on the princess tower with a pickaxe someone had left lying around-- wow, that was bad security, great job Grian-- and scrambled out of the window, catching herself with a water bucket on the way down and rushing to wherever Pearl had set her spawn last, which had to be the lighthouse. They’d all been spending too much time in that lighthouse since they built it.
The sky had its pixels back. Gem’s body felt like a body again, and she stumbled when she hit the ground still, running barefoot over the grass. Pearl met her halfway there, wild-eyed in her pajamas, catching her up and spinning her so her feet left the ground.
“Oh, god, oh my god, I thought you were gone, I thought-- Gem, why didn’t you respawn in the lighthouse, that’s just cruel, that is-- come on, we’re going to the comms tower, Grian’s checking the firewalls.”
“What, right now? Does this man never sleep?”
“He says he’ll go on sabbatical again after,” Pearl said, and Gem scrambled up the ladder behind her, came out into the room she’d spent way too many sleepovers in and got tackled by her admin.
Grian had bags under his eyes. Hands on her shoulders, glancing her over, glancing down at her feet and up again. “Gem,” he said, and swallowed, and said again, “GeminiTay. Do you know who we are? Do you remember what you saw?”
“Yeah, duh, we were--” Gem faltered. “We were in the End. That guy was there, and I killed the dragon... did that beat the game? Like, did beating the game do it? That’s kind of lame for WildBattles, if that’s all it takes.”
Grian stared at her for a long moment. He reached out and touched the cord around her neck, which Gem abruptly realized had nothing attached to it at all, and said, “Well, maybe no one had time to get to the End before it happened, back then. We’re lucky we’d just reset, or who knows how long it might’ve taken before we figured something out.”
His shadow put a hand to her wrist, hesitating, and Gem turned her hand up, let it run his fingers up to her pulse point and open her code there. Numbers and letters flashed across her vision too fast to read, and at the same time it was a comb running through the center of her, a gentle scratching that could turn to pain with a hint of pressure. Gem shivered and sagged into Grian’s hug and he nudged her down into a chair beside his communications dashboard, his dark eyes intent.
“What’s the prognosis, doc?” she croaked after a minute. “Am I gonna live or are you gonna kill me with boredom?”
“I could still kickban you,” Grian threatened, but he withdrew and Pearl grabbed up the hand he let go of, yanked Gem into a hug that made her startle. Pearl smelled like sleep and wet dogs. A little bit like her vanilla shampoo, if Gem really focused on it. “But it’s rest you’ll need, I think, the other things should be good. That hacker’s outta here, at least, and I’m afraid he won’t have a very good time wherever he’s gone back to.”
Right, yeah, the— the hacker. Someone who’d made Grian scream. Someone Gem had been scared of, but now that she thought back to him she couldn’t remember a face or a voice, could barely remember a presence. She shivered again, throat inexplicably tight.
“Sometimes I get the sense you know things we don’t,” Pearl said, and Grian ruffled his feathers, didn’t exactly meet her eyes.
His dashboard was pinging like crazy with messages, a (10) that turned into a (26) from a certain Mumbo Jumbo and a mess of other notifications, channels coming online, message boards swarming with activity.
One of them was from Ethoslab’s fan mail account. Another was from an account that said WildAdmins2.Public, responding to an email Gem had sent months ago, and that was the one that made her heart skip a beat, made her clutch Pearl a little bit tighter. The buttons and indicator lights glimmered like a cloud of galaxies.