Chapter Text
Another day, another server, another escape.
When Mythrodak opens his eyes and sees oak wood ceilings instead of the cracking spruce logs of his cabin, he knows something’s wrong.
First thing first, before he does anything else, is to wake up.
Despite everything, Mythro is not a morning person. No, he’d much rather sleep in till mid morning or until Shiratori starts pecking him awake. Instead, he’s often pulled out of slumber by his bird’s alarmed chirping, a warning that he’s probably going to be dragged away in chains sooner rather than later to an “inescapable” prison. Shiratori was is a great alarm system.
That being said, Mythro wakes himself up carefully. He clearly isn’t in his home, so he has no idea if someone is watching him or not. Needless to say, waking up in a bed that is decidedly not yours is no way to wake up. On the bright side, this bed feels wrong, different. It’s not his, and he can feel it. That makes it easier to shake his senses into action.
When he’s acclimated to the strange temperatures of a too warm place that feels too humid - a swamp maybe? - Myth listens carefully.
There’s no quiet ticking of observers or the sizzling sound of redstone lines hidden in vents. The air doesn’t feel drafty, like the walls are hollow.
So Mythro swings his legs off the bed and looks around. His mask is still on, just like he’d left it, and he’s fully clothed. He doesn't wear armor to bed - in fact, he rarely wears it outside of escapism purposes - which leaves him naked in a strange place.
The room is not a room, it’s a house. A villager’s house, to be precise. Late morning sunlight streams in through the lone window. That’s not right. He wakes up in a strange place, in a villager’s bed, probably thousands of blocks out from his home. Or on a completely different server, though that’s a bit trickier to do to an unconscious person. Transporting other people is hard, unless you’re just kicking them back out to their home world. Putting them on a different server is a different story.
So Myth checks his world status. And there it is, just like a bee ignoring aviation physics, the text is defying pretty much all laws of Minecraft. He’s not on his own server, aptly named ‘a minecraft server’, but on another world. There’s no option to exit the server. Bright letters announce to him that he’s been on ‘Hermitcraft Eight’ for almost a full day.
Almost a day. He’s been sleeping in a villager’s bed, on someone else’s server, for nearly an entire day. Now, he’s got to give this warden a point for that. But unfortunately for them, psychological screwing around isn’t going to help at all. He’ll break out again, like he always does. It makes him wonder, though, what prison-makers think when they build yet another flawed cell for him. Do they think that maybe they’ve cracked the code, made a place that not even Mythro can escape?
Did Gaia’s Vault teach them nothing?
So this warden, this player who’s someone that managed to get him onto Hermitcraft Eight, wherever that is, is trying to do some screwing around in his mind, maybe to make it easier to catch him. News flash, the problem isn’t capturing Mythrodak, it’s keeping him.
For so many vaults, prisons, towers, Mythro has gone in willingly. This warden is either an over-the-top egomaniac who wants to inconvenience Mythro as much as possible, or just thinks it would be funny to watch him stumble around for a bit before apprehending him and sticking him in an easily-escapable prison.
It’s at this point that Mythro comes to the conclusion that not only has he been sitting in this bed for ten minutes, but that the player tab is open and viewable.
He swipes away from the server name and opens the player tab instead. Listed on the screen of his only partially-broken communicator is twenty-six names. Mythro’s isn’t on there. For whatever reason, he’s glitched on the list and isn’t showing up.
That’s not the problem though. The issue is that this place has 26 people on it. Some are showing as offline, of course, but a staggering number of them have lit names.
Myth doesn’t think he’s ever been in a prison with more than six guards. How many did Gaia’s Vault have? Four, Mythro thinks. It was four.
He slumps back on the yellow bedsheets of the bed. 26 people is a lot more than he’d been anticipating. He can account for ten guards, he’s ran through scenarios like that before, but 26 is different. This warden knows who he is, they have to. They wouldn’t prepare like this otherwise.
Unless this prison has other people locked up. Mythro contemplates that, works it into the skeletal shape of a plan in his mind. Say that six of those 26 are prisoners instead of guards. That leaves 19 guards and one warden. Mythro will have to shift plans around if he wants to get everyone else out along with him. He can’t just pull an Ares’ Vault this time.
Does he care about them, though?
Mythro thinks about that for a long time. It scares him, a little, that he has to sit and think about whether he cares enough about the hypothetical other prisoners enough to risk getting trapped again.
He compartmentalizes the thoughts and stands up, finally, after twenty minutes of hashing out a plan. He knows he can’t fight 26(?) people, but he can hurt them a little, even if they’re stacked.
The first thing he’ll have to do is check whether his enderchest items transferred over. Usually that would be a no. Items don’t stay from world to world, but if he’s not showing up in the player tab - Mythro checks again. He’s still not on the lists - then it’s possible that his items could glitch in from his own server.
Looking around the house again, Mythro double-checks the nooks and crannies, all the crevices. The place looks like a normal villager’s home, but the distinct sounds of a villager’s hums are missing. He’s in a raided village then. A player’s probably gone through and taken all the inhabitants of the place to a trading hall, leaving a ghost town behind. That’s fine, but getting items is just slightly more difficult now.
To the mines, Mythro supposes. It’s not his favorite task, grinding for items, but if it gets him home any faster (and causes some damage to the bastards on the server) then he’ll do it. As much as he enjoys a challenge, he knows nothing about this prison. It’s not safe to limit himself when there could be 20+ guards.
While he knows nothing about the prison itself, some of the names on the player tab sound faintly familiar, but Myth can’t quite grasp from where. It’s likely from when he researched prison-makers and wardens a while back. So the warden and the architect(s) have to be big names. If there’s that many collaborating, then Mythro’s in it for real. It’s like Gaia’s Vault, but if there were five Miningblobs, six DeafCreepers, and two SeenSvens. Maybe an extra Obamaman or two.
Basically, Mythro’s not getting back home anytime soon. And until the glitch that leaves him stranded on Hermitcraft Eight is fixed, all he can do is wait for the inevitable capture and get himself as prepared as possible.
Remind Mythro to never say life is getting dull…
As Mythrodak gathers his items out of the chest and into his inventory, he gives the empty cave one last glance. He’d encountered a couple of snuffed out torches farther south, a crafting table, and a tunnel going straight up that was lined with ladders. He’d made a mental note not to venture south, if that was where someone had been in the past. They might visit again.
He hasn’t got much from the mining trip. A couple of diamonds, enough iron for tools and armor, and piles of redstone dust. He pockets the dust, keeping it in an easy-to-access place in case he encounters any machines later on.
The diamonds he’ll craft into a pickaxe for obsidian to make an enchanting table and use whatever leftovers for armor. He wants to go to the Nether to potentially get netherite, but the risks are high.
Based on his mining expedition, achievements don’t show up in chat for him, so the initial entry into the Nether won’t be a problem. What will be, however, is the issue of people. Surely the players use the Nether, and whoever is far south will be a whole lot closer in the Nether.
Mythro’s not sure how big the map is, but chances are that he’ll run into someone eventually. (He’s also got no TNT for netherite mining. Beds are an option, but he doesn’t have a sheep farm set up and isn’t keen on getting one.) So he stays out of the Nether, for now.
He’d gone straight from the village to the mines, without a further glance at the swamp closeby, and steering clear of the large wooden structure in town. He would have investigated, but he had nothing. So he went to the mines first, to get weapons and armor before he entered the mysterious egg-shaped building.
And now he has it. He has the materials he needs to create enchanted armor and tools, and he’s going to find a way into the building that doesn’t involve the front door. Maybe he’ll steal a little if he feels like it. That is, if there’s anything inside it at all. For all he knows, a player could’ve built the structure and left it hollow when they took all the villagers back with them to a trading hall of sorts.
Mythrodak tries not to think about how a player could have easily just massacred the town instead of taking the villagers home.
The egg is tall, about 25 blocks if he’s guessing from the outside. There’s windows along the sides, and the front is nicely decorated with bushes. It’s a nice building.
He hadn’t gotten closer earlier, steering far away from it when he went into the caves, but now that he’s close up he can see a Nether portal and an enderchest. It makes him wonder why he hadn’t gone in earlier.
This is good, though. He can check if any of his items are there. And it’s a good reminder that he probably shouldn’t venture into the Nether. If there’s a hub here, people probably travel quite a bit to this area.
Mythro will have to make this quick.
He’ll sneak in through the top. That way he can stay out of sight and hopefully see people if and when they enter.
Myth’s careful, making his way to the top of the egg and hacking away at the wood with an iron ax. Once he’s inside, he places the wood right back how it was.
Leave no trace.
Inside of the egg is the portal he saw earlier from the windows. There’s also chests and armor stands and a sign asking “did you get everything you needed?”
It’s enough to set Mythro up for a while, so that he doesn’t have to mine for ages.
Carefully, keeping a close eye on the windows, Mythro jumps down from the ceiling. He lands softly on the wood, still watching the windows.
There’s no one out there.
As quick as possible, Mythro opens the chests and rifles through them, even sneaking a glance into the shulker box. He grabs the armor and an elytra, as well as the rockets in there.
He leaves through the front door. If someone were to come, Mythro was going to put up a fight.
Once he’s back into the hole in the ground where he set up camp, just away from the empty village, Mythro catalogues his earnings.
The armor goes on first. He keeps the old iron set in a chest, just in case. He can’t afford to throw out any resources. The elytra stays in his inventory. If he needs it, he’ll use it, but he doesn’t want to wear out the durability. When he gets the enchanter set up he’ll enchant it with Unbreaking if possible.
Mythro’s set. Not well enough that he’ll be able to evade capture - running away was never his strong suit - but enough that he can hurt someone if they come for him.
He’s fought ravagers alone before, he can take a guard or two in this armor. But if he’s being perfectly honest, he’s a little curious what the prison looks like.
And then Mythro realises. The guards have left armor and tools in a building right by where he woke up.
That’s not right.
Perhaps the guards want some entertainment, something to do? Or maybe this prison is something like Gladiator’s Pit. What if they expect him to gear up so that they can have a bit of fun when they take him in?
There are too many variables, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that this is wrong . That’s not how the warden is supposed to do things, and that’s not how this is supposed to go.
It should go like this:
Mythro will get captured by the guards. Based on the amount of players, there might be around seven or eight guards to take him in. He’ll go along peacefully until he gets within eyesight of the prison. Then, he can decide whether to struggle or whether to go along with what they say.
No matter what he does, he’ll likely end up in the cell anyways. He could break away and try to get inside of the walls, but Mythro knows nothing about the prison. He’ll be going in blind.
The odds certainly aren’t in his favor, and Mythro knows it.
However, the warden isn’t a SeenSven. Mythro doesn’t know who on the list is the warden, but he’d know if someone was better than Sven on there. As much as it relieves him that he won’t have to see Sven again, have to look at him again, it’ll be different to break out of a place not designed and built by Sven.
Because Mythrodak knows Sven. He knows how Sven builds and he knows where Sven’s weaknesses and blindspots are.
It might not be harder to do it, because who knows the skill level of these architects, but it offers a different challenge.
Mythro tackled things built by Miningblob and other people, sure, but most of the vaults he’d been locked into had been built in part by Sven.
It’s new and it’s different.
But it’s wrong . It doesn’t align right, in Myth’s mind, and he can’t figure out this warden. What’s their strategy here?
He stops. It’s working, isn’t it? The warden was trying to screw with his mind earlier, but now- now it’s working.
Maybe on his way out of this prison, he’ll leave a couple of stacks of TNT inside, as a parting gift.
(He’d forgotten about the hypothetical other prisoners already.)
Hm.
Something to consider.