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Scar landed in front of Grian’s base, stumbling a bit from a rough landing. They’d been meaning to meet up to talk about the big project they’d been working on for the head games. Something that was guaranteed to help them get the win.
Grian, who had been sitting at the bottom of the Mansion stairs, looked up at him and grinned. Scar noticed he was holding a red sack of some sort. It was definitely full of something, pointy bits and bobs seemed to poke out from the bottom of the bag.
“Hey Scar, what’s up?” The mischievous Hermit asked.
“Oh, you know, same old same old. Just struggling to get heads,” Scar laughs, “might I ask though, what’s that you got there in your hands?”
“Oh, this? Just something an old friend sent me. It’s just some junk from my high school days that I left behind. I was going to throw it away, but I might still look through it to see if there’s anything valuable hidden in here!” Grian said, shaking the bag up and down for emphasis.
Scar let out an “oooooh” as Grian stood up from his seat on the steps.
“By the way,” Grian started, “could you hold this for a second? I need to go back in my base for something real quick and I’d rather not leave this unattended, y’know?”
“Oh! Sure!”
Grian grinned once more and handed the bag over,
“Great, thanks!” He turned around, “I’ll be right out!” He said as he set off a few rockets and flew into the mansion.
Scar sighed and looked down at the red bag in his hands.
Grian was still a pretty new Hermit, so they didn’t know much about his past. Actually, now that he thought about it, they didn’t know anything about his past.
“It’s just some junk from high school. I was going to throw it away.”
Surely Grian wouldn’t mind if he looked inside, right? Like he said, it was filled with old items from his high school days. Stuff that he probably hadn’t looked through in ages. Stuff he didn’t really seem to care for.
Feeling his curiosity get the better of him, Scar opened the red bag with furrowed brows.
The inside of the bag was cluttered with stuff he didn’t recognize. Perhaps the server had special items that were unique to it?
He carefully picked up a flat, rectangular object. It was black, one side more shiny and reflective than the other. And the less shiny side had a silver symbol of a crab that had a bite taken out of it? Odd.
Unable to tell what that was supposed to do (it seemed to have buttons but none of them did anything when he pressed them,) he moved on to the next item.
He picked up a red plastic bag with pictures of orange, triangular shaped things on it. Food, he guessed. The logo read “Toritos” (although the T seemed to be drawn onto the bag in different writing than the rest of the letters.) He briefly wondered if it was still good and if Grian would let him try some, before putting it down.
He spotted another thing that looked like food and picked it up. It was a small box labeled “Pocky” and looked like it was some sort of stick covered in chocolate. Scar almost felt his mouth water from the look of it. He really hoped Grian would let him try this one. As he turned it around, he found the box was covered in a language he couldn’t understand. He placed it back down reluctantly.
He grabbed onto the next thing that caught his attention: a scrapbook.
He bounced slightly, excited as he prayed to the Hermits above that it held pictures of a teenage Grian in it.
Opening the book, the first thing he noticed was a letter wedged inside.
“Hope you don’t mind, Grian, but I also made this scrapbook to put together all those pictures we took during our time in high school! I know you don’t have access to Instacrab on your server, but don’t worry, your buddy Taurtis has your back! >;)”
Ah, so this Taurtis fellow was the friend who sent Grian this stuff? And what was this “Instacrab” thing?
When he flipped to the next page, his eyes immediately fixated on the familiar head of blond (“mousy brown” as Grian liked to call it) hair. That sure was Grian alright!
Although Grian didn’t look particularly old now, you could definitely tell from the softer jawline and slightly bigger eyes that he was certainly younger at the time. He also wore a blue school uniform. Scar almost wanted to “aww” at the photo but it seemed that the Grian in this photo was not as amused.
The photo depicted Grian sitting at his school desk with an irritated look on his face, staring straight ahead angrily at something.
Scar winced. He already knew what it felt like to be under the gaze of Grian’s watchful, void-like eyes, but he couldn’t imagine those same eyes being angry. Annoyed? Sure. Mischievous? Absolutely. Angry? He couldn’t even think of a time he’s seen the guy genuinely mad.
The photo below was not focused on Grian but was rather focused on the very thing Grian was glaring at before. A bug-eyed man with a handlebar mustache wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope. He glared at Grian straight on and pointed at him with a blue gloved hand.
Guess Grian didn’t get along with his teachers then. Scar wondered what happened there. The Grian he knew, while he was a bit of a troublemaker, wouldn’t just cause real problems with people for no reason. He couldn’t really make a fair judgment though, since not only did he not know what that teacher was like but also didn’t know what Grian was like back then.
Scars eyes looked down to a third picture and his eyes widened.
It was a photo of a panicked Grian—still in his school uniform—in a wrestling ring with a fully grown man in a wrestling mask (another teacher?) throwing punches at him. A pale boy with reddish brown hair and a bunny hat could be seen cheering in the background.
He must’ve really not gotten along with the teachers, huh? Was it even legal to do that to one of your students?
His eyes fell onto another picture, one that made him do a double take. It was Grian and two other boys in what looked to be a store of some kind. One of the boys was the same bunny-hat kid from the last picture, the other was pretty tan with black hair and wore a pair of black headphones with a red and blue pattern. All three of them were wearing school uniforms, though this time in a beige color instead of blue.
However the thing that made Scar look twice was what seemed to be a bright red crab man in the background. Scar was no stranger to hybrids, of course. One of his good friends was a creeper hybrid after all. He’d just never seen a crab-man before, and it was certainly a sight to see. Not to mention the disturbing fact that crabs weren’t usually that red unless you boiled them.
He looked down once more and his eyes landed on another strange sight:
A pufferfish-man wearing nothing more than a bathrobe, a white tank top with a stain on the collar and a pair of boxers was attempting to choke what looked to be a very sad looking frog-man who also wore a tan school uniform. The black haired boy with headphones was busy trying to rip the pufferfish off of the frog and Grian was off to the side looking ready to jump in at any moment. It looked like the photo was taken on a train.
What a strange high school experience Grian must’ve had. Several full-on walking talking animals? Multiple accounts of violence? It all sounded very eventful.
He didn’t have time to think when he flipped to the next page and his eyes caught an even more startling image:
It was a picture of the same two boys from earlier, standing outside the entrance of a school and pointing knives towards each other, looking eager to fight. Grian looked very concerned off in the corner and there was a girl with a black ponytail standing next to a pillar, holding up that same flat rectangle he found earlier.
He may not know anything about the server this took place on, but he has heard Grian admit that he used to live in a permadeath world. He could only hope this wasn’t the world he was talking about. If it was, he could understand why he would sometimes be uncomfortable with death, even though he could just respawn. If one of his friends from high school died permanently just from some silly fight, then…
Now that he was thinking about it, he really was invading his friend’s privacy, wasn’t he? He didn’t even ask if he could look through all these personal photos and just let himself in.
Scar immediately closed the book and quickly placed it back in the bag, ashamed of his actions.
As soon as he did he heard someone clear his throat behind him. He froze, realizing with horror that it could only be one person.
He turned around slowly to reveal Grian, standing there with a stern look on his face.
There was silence between the two Hermits.
Then Grian started walking towards Scar slowly, and Scar gulped in response, curling in on himself making himself look smaller.
Grian stopped when he was about a foot away from touching Scar.
“Now, tell me, Scar.”
Suddenly, the shorter Hermit smirked, his eyebrows furrowing.
“How long did you think I was going to be in my base for?” He said incredulously with a giggle slipping out towards the end.
Scar blushed and looked down.
“Ah man, I’m…I’m sorry, G-man. I really should’ve asked if I could look inside before I even tried.”
Grian snorted,
“You think?”
He sat down next to Scar and huffed out a breath, looking at the bag with a thoughtful expression.
“So…any questions about what you saw, then?”
Scar perked up.
“You’re not mad?”
Grian shook his head.
“No, not really. I could be, but I don’t really hold any strong feelings towards that time of my life anymore.”
“Well then…I do have a few questions.”
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“You see, it’s kind of like one of our communicators,” Grian said, holding up that rectangular flat box Scar found when he first opened the bag, “but with more features on it, it’s called an ICrab.”
Scar looked puzzled,
“How do you turn it on though?”
Grian laughed,
“It hasn’t been charged in years so there’s currently no way to turn it on.”
“I see.” Scar said with a thoughtful expression.
Then his eyes widened,
“What about that picture of you glaring at your teacher? Or getting beat up in a wrestling ring?!”
Grian’s eyes widened a bit, lips forming an “o” shape, then he laughed.
“Let’s just say, nobody in that school but me was actually sane.”
They kept talking. Scar asking questions about the photos, Grian answering with amusing and somewhat concerning tales. They never did talk about the head games that day.
Scar also got to try the Pocky and fell in love with it, ultimately getting disappointed when he accidentally ate the entire box. That is until Grian offered to help him recreate it.
Maybe Scar shouldn’t have looked in Grian’s bag without asking, but it was definitely worth it to learn more about the other Hermit.
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Extra:
“What about these?” Scar asked, holding up the red plastic bag of Toritos.
Grian shivered looking at them and held a hand to his stomach.
“Don’t even bother with those.”
“What? Why?”
“Let’s just say eating plastic makes you feel very sick afterwards.”
“Huh?!?!”