Chapter Text
Static. Overwhelming static, in every single sense. Burning tingling in fingertips, buzzing pain behind an eye, the absolute roar of blood in ears.
Hello…?
Not so much heard as it was guessed, the way one pulls shapes from clouds or beats from rain.
It’s not answering… love, wake up.
It was so hard to hear over the static. Through the static. In… the static? Was the static the speaking? Everything started to sting with the bite of cold.
Give it to him.
Something thin like juice, but sweet, almost sickeningly so, with the slightest tinge of sour aftertaste lingering.
Swallow, beloved.
The stinging stops. Then plummeting. A sharp crack. And darkness.
Eyesight had always been Michael’s weakest sense. Uncle Techno had explained once that piglins evolved in the Nether where everything was bright from the lava glow, and so piglins in the Overworld found it dark and hard to focus. Between that and having a hollow bone socket where his other eye would be Michael’s vision would never be one of a sharpshooter, so he didn’t panic when he awoke engulfed in the pitch-blackness of his new environment, the pain of impact and the feeling of stone beneath his fingers being the only things he could really register with any certainty. In the place of panicking at the darkness, he chose leaning into it, leaning back and listening. There was no echo of crumbling rocks like he expected to hear, and the musty smell of neglect and disuse gave him a strange sense of comfort that there might truly be nothing here, no hostile creature to sneak up on him and no poor cave-dweller about to come across the zombie piglin having fallen into their mine.
The peace of the moment was short-lived, though, as when he finally calmed the adrenaline of the sudden fall and opened his eye to take in his surroundings with what little adjustment it had made to the dark, Michael found himself staring up at a creeper. Michael knew well enough to run, on his feet and pressed against the furthest wall from it in seconds. The nasty things often wandered close to the house and farms at night, but they were quickly dealt with by Techno. No hissing or glowing came from the thing, though, and after a moment of panic Michael realized that it wasn’t actually a creeper, but just a creeper head mounted on a wall. Or rather, a few creeper heads and a handful of zombie heads mounted on a wall, the dozens of eyes lifelessly staring him down.
Michael involuntarily shivered, ripping his eye away from the skulls and instead turning to try and feel his way along the wall he now found himself against. Creepers may be dangerous, but their mindlessness had aligned them closer to one of Grandza’s strange machines in his mind. Killing them was a matter of disassembling a threat. Zombies, on the other hand. Michael had never enjoyed encountering. Most of them stayed in the forests under the shade of the trees, but on the rare occasion that one strayed too close to the cabin Uncle Techno would immediately send Michael back inside, where Grandza would bundle him up and tell him not to worry, that most of them were more of an annoyance than a threat and that Techno would take care of it easily. Michael knew the zombies of the overworld were different, that zombified piglins weren’t hostile and most even only partially zombified like him, maintaining varying levels of consciousness and sentience, but just the thought of knowing that the same disease that turned those humans into a rotting, violent shell was the one that lay dormant somewhere in his blood was enough to make Michael’s stomach twist and churn.
So instead of focusing on the wall of eyes, he began to glance over the room. The next place his eye landed on was an empty armor stand, right in the middle of the room, that he had somehow avoided running into during his scramble away from the mob heads. Feeling vindicated in his idea that this must be some sort of storage for an adventurer, Michael carefully began searching for a chest, reasoning to himself that if someone stored mob heads here like hunting trophies they would need chests for weapons or food for the hunt. He strained to take in more and more of the scene until he found a large chest and knelt to dig in it, pushing past books and loose ores until he found his prize of a flint and steel and a torch, instantly sparking it to provide a bit more light to the scene so he could hopefully get some clearer answers as to what he fell into.
The first place Michael’s gaze went was up, looking for his entry. Whatever hole he fell into wasn’t there, the ceiling instead being a pitch black cover of obsidian, unbroken and uniform with no cracks whatsoever. Michael nearly got lost thinking about what a pain it would’ve been to construct, but that train of thought was derailed as he realized with a shudder that he must’ve gotten into the room some other way than falling. Perhaps he wandered into this room in some sort of concussed haze that he couldn’t remember, or worse someone had actually been here and moved him for some reason. Feeling his heart pick up a bit, Michael didn’t let that thought linger in his mind, pushing it down for practicality instead. Whatever the entrance was, there was no going out the way he came in until he found it.
Michael slowly started to turn, taking in everything he could. More mob heads littered the walls, including some skeletons which he noted collected dust and hadn’t been brushed or polished the way he had learned to polish the exposed areas of his own skull. Above and around the mob heads, on every wall except the first one he’d seen, were dozens and dozens of empty frames, some with the outline of a disc imprinted in the leather as if they hung there for a long time and some just empty and crooked.
The chest from earlier also seemed empty of anything worthwhile, the ores mostly scrap metals or useless nuggets and all the books inside mostly blank, save for one scribbled with vague short entries that almost read like a diary. Michael flipped through a bit, scanning over the disconnected sentences with mild confusion until reaching a page where the phrase “I don’t want to remember” was written over and over, sprawled across every corner and every inch of the paper, at which point he decided this place was clearly out of use because whoever it was that lived here drove themselves insane. He couldn’t bring himself to blame them as he tossed the book back into the chest. If he had a room with hundreds of eyes staring at him he’d probably want to forget it about it too.
On the wall by the chest was a bell, positioned on top of a dark grey metal box with two more boxes sunk in to the wall on either side of it. Judging by the gaps below where some other blocks once stood, he guessed these were either too worthless for whoever took those or they simply didn’t have the tools to remove them, and one swipe of his finger across the strange metal surface told him which guess was true. He had only seen netherite once, when Uncle Techno had forgotten to lock the door during his bi-monthly “Weapon Maintenance Day” and Michael walked in to see him sharpening a glistening purple sword that seemed to thrum as it was touched. Michael felt the same thrum under his fingertips, and he almost convinced himself he could feel it reverberate through his bones. No one would leave something as rare and strong as netherite behind, so whoever took the rest of the things from the base must’ve been someone who didn’t come prepared.
Finally, as he stepped away from the bell and towards the middle of the room, his gaze found a point of exit. Three steps, up to a slightly higher floor. Easy enough to get down in a concussed state, Michael reasoned. He could even visualize himself falling and landing where he had woken up. He didn’t remember tripping down any steps, but he didn’t remember being inside a base either, only falling from the rock pile and… static.
The memory of the fall and the overwhelming buzz afterwards reminded Michael of the pain throbbing behind his eye, growing stronger as the adrenaline from the reaction to the creeper head tapered away. Somehow he had forgotten the possibility of a concussion in the curiosity of figuring out his situation, and that those probably hurt like hell.
The awareness of his pain and the realization that he could be injured worse than expected spurred him up the steps, weaving through the room without much investigation for fear of becoming distracted once again. He vaguely registered some sort of overgrown crop and even more mob heads here and there, but it was all forgotten quickly when he saw the means of exit from this room.
A ladder, against the back wall. This wasn’t just a base. It was a multi-layer base. Moreover, the likelihood that he could’ve climbed down a narrow ladder to a whole floor below, then down another set of steps, all after falling End knows how far…
Michael’s stomach plummeted, his feet starting for the ladder before his brain even processed the idea that he didn’t know what he’d find on the floor above. His heart started to beat faster, once more jumping to his throat, but this time the threat wasn’t a pair of eyes looking directly at him but rather an assumption that clawed through rationality. Sure, logic said that he couldn’t be that far away from the cabins, but his fear screamed that he was injured and somewhere no one was around to help him. Logic said that this place was disused and looted, but the terror rattling in his mind ranted that the armor stand was empty because whoever it belonged to was crouching in wait, preparing to attack him and have his head for their gruesome collection too.
He let the fear compel him, pushing his pace up the ladder two rungs at once, and once he arrived on the floor above he hardly glanced at anything but what his eye found first - a door, which he rushed to and threw open, preparing to sprint out before whoever this base belonged to returned for him. But instead he was met with a barricade of rocks, piled high above and set right against the building, the light filtering through the gaps between them giving his only clue - a glimpse of a distant but familiar log cabin.
This base wasn’t somewhere far from the farm. This base wasn’t behind the rock pile. The base was the rock pile.
The relief that Michael felt at discovering he was not, in fact, miles from familiar territory was almost immediately offset by the thought that he was trapped under a rockslide, that screaming wouldn’t break through and any digging would bring the pile above tumbling down on top of him. Hell, the fact that this base wasn’t crushed already was a miracle. The basement level might’ve been obsidian but the rest was nowhere near as sturdy, a fact that Michael became even more sharply aware of when he heard the sound of a loose pebble dropping down a flight of stairs behind him.
Michael instantly spun, catching only the barest glimpse of a shadow as it disappeared up a flight of deteriorating stone steps that he hadn’t clocked during his rush to the door, the only sound being the crumbling rocks left behind.
Now, maybe the smartest thing to do after waking up in a base hidden behind a rockslide a few yards away from his home for who-knows-how-long wouldn’t be immediately running up a collapsing set of stairs after a mysterious figure. But smart be damned, the fear Michael had felt earlier was immediately drowned by annoyance. He was lost, he was alone, he was hurt, and by End he was going to get answers.
What Michael lacked in practical experience he made up for in stability and speed, years of hiding on the roof from Grandza calling him for chores - usually followed by climbing the fence to care for the cows - gave him the confidence to scramble up the stairs without much effort at all. But the thing he chased seemed so much more nimble, so much that Michael couldn’t even hear it, as if its feet made no noise running away. Not to mention it seemed much more familiar with the environment, dodging and weaving around furniture that Michael wouldn’t have thought to look for until the thing dodged and wove. In a pure footrace, there was no doubt that Michael would’ve been faster, but his quarry was just too slippery, easily crossing the room and ducking away into a tunnel, and though Michael gave pursuit, squeezing his bulky shoulders through the hole burrowed through stone, by the time he made it to the other side and out into fresh air, what he was chasing was nowhere to be seen, not even a footprint in the snow to prove anything had been there at all.
Between gasping breaths, Michael quietly cursed whatever it was for outpacing him, the realization that he was no longer in the base only occurring to him when he finally caught his breath again and straightened, head lightly knocking a low hanging branch and dumping powdered snow down onto his shoulders. The pain jolted him back to the situation at hand and he stumbled a bit forward, vaguely registering that he was now on the mountain behind the rock pile, that the room he had chased the thing through must’ve been built into the side of the hill itself and the tunnel had led him out a back entrance, freeing him back into the world that had begun to darken to nighttime while he had been gone.
His head still reeling, Michael clambered his way down the side of the mountain, a fairly easy climb considering he was only a bit above ground level, and started back towards the farm, a slight guilt settling in his stomach when he heard the sounds of Techno calling his name between grunts of effort. He’d left in the early afternoon, and Grandza had to be worried sick. Sure enough, as he approached the cow farm where he had originally been sent to, he saw Grandza perched high on the roof of one of the cabins in the distance, scanning the horizon for him.
Before Michael could call out to him, his grandfather’s eyes snapped right over, his voice following quickly as he called to Techno that he was back and jumped from the roof, running straight to Michael. Techno appeared at the edge of the forest a moment later, sword in hand, and Michael tried to ignore the vague stains around the blade.
Within seconds, Michael was wrapped in Grandza’s arms, listening to him mutter vague annoyances about what a little shit Michael was and how he was driving them to an early grave. Michael knew he meant very little of it, letting his head drop as he slouched forward to lean on Grandza’s shoulder. With Michael clearly safe, Uncle Techno’s pace seemed leisurely as he cleaned his blade and walked over, raising an eyebrow at him but saying nothing as he stopped a few paces away.
“I… I saw a zombie in the forest…” Michael started, stuttering at first as he instantly started to question why he was lying. Surely Grandza and Uncle Techno would want to know about the base buried beneath the rock pile, about the stranger who disappeared into the mountain. But once he’s started, the lie started to get easier, smooth on his tongue. “It scared me and I ran and then tripped and hit my head and-“
Grandza shushed him, moving back from him to tug his chin down so he could survey the damage. “Aw, mate… your skull cracked a little.” His fingers brushed over the exposed bone, making the throbbing pain in the back of Michael’s mind shoot to a sharp stabbing, causing him to flinch away. “Techno, run in and grab a damage pot. I don’t think regen will help but it should take care of the pain.”
Michael watched as Techno nodded and turned away, pretending to ignore the split second of hesitation he saw. Instead, he returned to his place leaning against his grandfather, who cooed gently and starting coaxing him to slowly walk back towards the cabins.
There were less questions than Michael expected that night and nights following. Mostly they focused on his injury, how he was feeling, how far he had fallen, what he had fallen on, and Michael continued to smoothly lie. After a concussion was safely ruled out and salves and soothing words were applied and Michael was shuffled off to bed every night, he still found himself awake, haunted by a realization he didn’t know he had made.
When Techno had walked away, Michael had seen it behind him - the imprint of an impact in the snow in front of the rock pile where he had fallen, dusted by fresh snow but still barely visible, and distinct in its form and shape - no marks of him being dragged or footprints of anyone who came to move him to the base below, and the lack of footprints where whoever he chased out of the basement had fled.