Work Text:
"And I was thinking I might design the next Zedvancement I want to do around- sorry, Tango, are you alright?"
Tango blinks hard, forces his eyes to refocus. They don't seem to want to- like they're watering rather badly, and he has to wipe at them a few times to clear them. "Sorry, Zed, I'm listenin', I promise. The heat's just bugging me, I guess." He feels gross. He can tell he's sweating horribly; his clothes feel wet.
"The heat?" Zed repeats, a confused note in his voice.
"Yeah, isn't it bothering you? I feel like I'm cooking alive."
Zedaph frowns, squints up at the sun. "It's not that warm out, Tango. Twenty-two, maybe? It's been like this all week. I think you might be sick- aren’t you normally good with heat?"
"I'm fine," Tango says, brushing off the concern. "I was feeling fine earlier when I was working on Decked Out! I think it's just that I haven't been out in a bit. Lots of stuff to get done, you know?"
Zedaph pokes at his forehead, and his frown deepens. "Well, you don't have a fever. You actually feel way colder than you usually do- do I have a thermometer somewhere?" he wonders aloud, starting to rummage through his pockets.
"Zed, I'm fine, I promise. I'll head straight home and take a nap, how's that sound?"
"Fine," Zed concedes after a moment. "But if you feel any worse, you should take a break! You've been working nonstop. It feels like I haven't seen you in weeks."
Tango winces. "Yeah... sorry. I've gotten a little caught up in stuff, I know. I'll try to get out more."
"And, uh, if you're feeling hot, you might want to lose the cloak?" Zed suggests, reaching out to tug at a fur-lined flap. "It looks fantastic, but I'm sure it's not exactly helping with staying cool."
A flash of panic snaps up Tango's throat when Zed pulls at the front of the cloak, as too-warm air, moist and hot, immediately presses in, and he takes a quick step back, yanking it shut again. "No!"
Zed blinks at him, looking baffled. "...Tango?"
"No?" Tango repeats, feeling confused by his own reaction now that the spike of inexplicable terror is fading. His chest feels uncomfortable, all soggy and soft in a way that makes breathing feel slightly weird. "Sorry, man, I don't know... maybe I am sick. I'm gonna go take that nap."
"Text me how you're feeling when you wake up," Zedaph says, brow furrowed.
Tango wakes half-buried in a snowbank, little ice crystals caught in his hair like feather-down. He blinks.
Right. He'd stumbled into his dungeon, shucked his cloak off into a neighboring snowbank or possibly the river (ideally, he hopes, the first option; wet cloaks are heavy and things don't exactly dry quickly in Decked Out), and passed out from what he presumes was heat exhaustion. He's never had heat exhaustion before, but the two words do line up to his experience, so that'll have to be the working theory for now. He got exhausted, from the heat, presumably because he is living and working in a massive subterranean refrigerator.
Which means a little nap in the snow was just the thing to fix him right up, and he does feel better now.
Much better, in fact. This must be what redstone circuits feel like, when they've been properly cooled down after overheating. He feels fresh, he feels renewed, he feels solid. He's not going outside for the next week.
Grumbling a little, he levers himself out of the snowbank, brushes unmelted snowflakes off his clothes. First on the list: locate his cloak. He needs that, it's dramatic and imposing. Second: get back to work on the crypt detailing. Third: Something to do with frost ember distribution, he hasn't gotten there yet. Fourth: Something else, probably relating to the front door. He’ll figure that out when he gets there.
Oh, where did he put his phone? Must have fallen into the river or something. He'll grab it later. He has a game to build!
The nether portal is wrong, and Tango can't figure out why.
It's a normal nether portal, a little stylized to fit with the aesthetic of the fortress (obviously). He built it himself, and he's gone through it plenty of times, back and forth to spawn and the shopping district to visit friends or pick up supplies. But today something about it feels... wrong. Threatening.
It's seeping chemically hot air like a geothermal vent. Has it always done that? Tango can't remember ever noticing before, but now he doesn't want to go anywhere near it. He kind of doesn't even want it in his castle. What if it starts melting everything?
Maybe the portal's just gone... unstable or something, somehow. It doesn't make much sense, but it makes more sense than anything else. It's not like he could've suddenly developed an aversion to a perfectly normal nether portal. He's been through them hundreds of times this season alone- he built the entire hub!
He carefully reaches out, and pushes a hand through the wavering purple curtain of the portal, and-
He can't feel his hand he can't feel his hand he can't feel his hand-
He yanks it back through with a startled, bitten-off sound of pain, plunges it immediately into the nearest pile of snow without even looking. He doesn't really want to look. The sheer intensity of the heat, the near-immediate loss of feeling- he really doesn't want to see.
He takes a few deep breaths, scuttling a few more steps back from the portal, before he feels he's ready to assess the damage. He shakes his hand free of the snow, looks down, and-
His hand looks fine. Normal. Pale, maybe? From the cold, surely. There's little bits of ice sticking in the joints of his fingers, but that's normal enough, with the chill in here. His heart is still pounding in his chest, but it eases, little by little, as the lack of permanent damage registers.
Well, one thing's for sure- he's getting rid of this portal.
There's a fire in the Frozen Crypt.
As soon as the thought processes, Tango is palming his bucket of powder snow and a stack of rockets and launching himself directly upward, towards the source of the heat. It radiates outward, billowing, and there's something beneath his panic that's just shocked the entire area hasn't started melting yet. Landing (hard, made awkward by alarm) and stepping forwards is like walking into an oven.
Deliberately, very deliberately, he doesn't look at his extremities. The powder snow will melt into water, at least. That's not a problem in this situation. Water is better than snow for putting out fires.
He walks through the Frozen Crypt, remarkably still frozen despite the heat. He wavers. The air blurs with heat-haze. A witch cackles- Dang, he must have messed up the spawnproofing again. He'll have to fix that. Where is the fire?
He can't see it, but it has to be somewhere- think, think, think. Where's it hottest? Something in him absolutely quails at the idea of walking directly toward the heat, but- well, there's no choice, is there? He has to find the fire, or it'll spread, and spread, and-
He only has to think about the possibility of the fortress collapsing into lukewarm water and rubble for an instant before his mind's made up, and he angles himself towards the worst of the heat and runs.
And he still doesn't see a fire- there's the witch, though, may as well deal with that, his sword is out and lopping its head off with barely a pause as he charges past, and it crumbles to the ground like a pile of rags.
The heat begins to fade.
He stalls in place, confused, and tips his head back towards the corpse. What was once a wall of pure emanating heat is now barely a trace, dying away to nothing as soft, comfortable cold swallows it up.
The...
He guesses the fire's out?
Tango is running low on ice.
This is, technically, a problem with a solution. He has an entire massive semi-automatic ice farm directly above him. It's probably full right now. He could just go up and harvest it for four and a half shulkers' worth of ice that would, admittedly, compress into a much smaller volume of packed and blue ice. It wouldn't be hard.
But it's warm up there, and he's scared to.
Well, maybe scared isn't the right word. Scared shouldn't be the right word. But he can't put any other term to the jittery anxiety that crawls up into his chest when he so much as thinks about leaving the frigid safety of his fortress basement.
It's warm outside, and sticky and humid and horrible, and he doesn't- he just doesn't want to, okay? It's comfortable down in the frozen bones of his castle.
It had been okay at first just going out to restock his building materials at night, when the sun was down and the air cooled, but in the last week or so even that had grown increasingly intolerable, the outside warmth making him feel dizzy and overheated no matter what he tried. Even his cloak, which had originally served him well as an insulator, had lost all effectiveness.
Maybe he can just... message somebody. Yeah, that'll work. He can just work on other stuff for now, and get somebody else to harvest from his farm for him with a promise of beacons or something. That's perfectly sustainable. Normal request to make of another hermit. Yeah.
Everything will be fine.
Someone is knocking at his doors. Tango can hear it all the way down in the sub-basement that will become Level 4, knock knock knock against the inside of his head, and besides that, he can feel their body heat, pressing at his structural integrity like a blistering wildfire.
He considers not answering. He considers it very strongly, wrapped up in thoroughly torching the natural mob spawner of a lush cave he's ended up working with. And then he considers the fact that if he doesn't go get the doors, whoever it is will come inside, which is worse.
"Coming, just a sec!" he calls, trying to locate rockets amid an inventory full of tuff and spider eyes and clay balls. The sound echoes and fades out before it can reach the doors. He always forgets how big this place is. It feels so small.
Comfortable.
The someone at the doors is Zedaph, backlit by the sweltering sun, which must make it afternoon. His skin is pale, and his fingers are tense, and he's radiating so much heat it makes Tango feel queasy- and he's shivering.
Of course. Tango asked him to grab the ice from his farm. Right.
"Hey, Zed!" he says after probably too long of a pause, forcing a grin onto his face over the discomfort crawling down his front. "You got the ice?"
"Yeah," Zed says after a pause, but doesn't reach into his inventory. He frowns, shakes his head hard, takes a step back towards the doors. The retreat of the relentless warmth is a relief, even if it's only by a couple feet.
Tango frowns. "Are you okay?"
Zed buries his hands under his arms. "Fine, fine, just-" he starts before breaking off with a violent chatter of teeth, shoulders tightening. "Just-"
He's cold. The realization comes like a jolt, even though as soon as it does it feels obvious. Of course he's cold. It's freezing in here. Not that it bugs Tango, obviously, he's perfectly comfortable, but-
That's weird, isn't it?
"You're cold," Tango says aloud dumbly, still a little stunned by the fact.
"J-just a bit," Zed says, audibly a little exasperated, finally dipping into his inventory with shaking fingers.
Instead of the requested shulkers of ice, though, he comes out with a thick wool blanket. Tango half-expects him to wrap it around himself, to ward off the cold, but instead Zed takes a few quick steps closer and tosses the blanket around Tango's shoulders, grabs the corners together, and all but drags him out the open doors and into the daytime sun.
Tango squawks indignantly, shouldering at the smothering fabric and trying in vain to duck away from the boiling sunshine. It's already way too hot. He wants his snow back. "Zed- come on, it's hot out there, I can't- I can't-"
"Yes, you can," Zed says, maintaining his beeline path away from Tango's base. "I thought nine seasons in we would've all learned how to take precautions against getting possessed by our bases! Basic safety, Tango!"
"Possessed by- oh."
"So now you're going to come stay at my place until you're normal again." And then, after a pause and reconsideration: "Or at least a different and less immediately worrying kind of weird."
"Do I get a choice in this?" Tango grouses halfheartedly. He’s given up on resistance now that most of his energy is dedicated to keeping him upright. His skin feels like it's melting layers off into the blanket. Everything is wet and warm and unpleasant.
"Nope!" Zed says brightly.
Tango groans, and lets himself be led away from the Deep Frost Citadel.