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“Promise I won’t tell?” Tango’s sitting high up on a balcony in the Mycelium Resistance’s headquarters. Their fake headquarters, to be exact.
Impulse is sitting beside him, sword resting on his lap, eyes narrowed, looking down over the vast bowl of quartz and then back at Tango, and then back down.
Tango isn’t supposed to be here, obviously. Of course, that’s never stopped him before, and Impulse knows it, so he isn’t blinking off respawn under his covers. For now, at least. A little murder is essential to any healthy friendship.
“Tango,” says Impulse. “Can you at least try to play by the rules?”
Tango throws an item-block of cobble and watches it fall, down, down, down. “I’m trying, I’m trying!” he protests. “There’s just a lot of rules!”
Impulse rolls his eyes and elbows him in the ribs. “One of the rules is that you’re not supposed to know where this base is,” he says.
“One of the rules is that Decked Out knows everything that happens underground,” counters Tango, half-listening to the footsteps of ravagers in the distance, the tap of Etho’s feet on blackstone as he swerves towards the Rose Garden.
Impulse makes a noise. Tango adds, “In the interest of full disclosure, I know this isn’t the real base.”
“Tango,” complains Impulse.
“I also know where the real base is.”
“Tango.”
Tango laughs. “Don’t worry, don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.” He gestures at the copy of the mycelium source block, down down down below. “I’ve got an understanding with her; can’t go around breaking my promises. Decked Out stays neutral.”
“I saw you talking to Bdubs,” says Impulse. The usual endless drip of water from his fingers is gone today - he must be arguing with his sea pyramid - but his nails are quartz-white, or maybe mushroom stem-white. His voice is as mild as it ever is. “I wouldn’t call joining HEP an act of neutrality, exactly."
"HEP's a Tango thing, not a Decked Out thing," disagrees Tango. "Decked Out doesn't take sides. And it's Decked Out who knows about the Mother Spore's bases."
"But it's Tango I'm talking to right now, in one of those bases."
"Potato-potahto." Tango waves his hand. "Maybe Tango just wanted to hang out with his good friend Impy!"
Impulse snorts. "And maybe Tango's good friend Impy is trying to participate in a server storyline, has Tango considered that?"
"Tango has spent most of his last three months in a hole in the ground and has lost all sense of time. And plot progression," says Tango. He throws an arm over Impulse's shoulder. "Seriously, man. Your storyline's safe with me, I won't tell a soul. Decked Out's my first priority right now, and I really can't risk the war spreading in there- can you imagine the extra hours of daily maintenance?"
"You'd have to start banning people," agrees Impulse, leaning into Tango's arm.
"Decked Out would be furious," agrees Tango. He kicks his feet over the abyss. Decked Out snaps its front door shut as Etho stumbles out, victorious.
"I'm sure," agrees Impulse. He rests his head on Tango's shoulder, staring down with him. "I'll take your word on the neutrality, I guess. But if it gets back to me that you broke your promise..."
"I know, I know," says Tango. "Knew you'd be reasonable about it."
Impulse shrugs, smiling against Tango's shoulder.
Then he stabs Tango in the side to force a respawn, which is fair enough. Tango is in his secret headquarters.
Tango is fiddling with the design for the artifact shuffler when something nearby wakes up. It’s vast, bigger than him-Decked Out-him, crisscrossing over-and-around him, threaded and filamenty, blanketing the ground above him and sewing roots-not-roots through the ground around him, concentrated very very near him.
It sinks, and sinks, and doesn’t quite touch him, and becomes aware of him right back, and that’s how he knows it can think. Decked Out is big. The thing awoken is bigger, spanning the entire shopping district, touching bedrock, and Decked Out-Tango-Decked Out shivers despite itself as that vast awareness brushes past.
Mother, she names herself. Was-Here-First. Her awareness is concentrated near him, in a little underground cave dug out nearby-above him, spiderwebbed with mycelium. Living-Spreading-Undying.
Decked Out, names Decked Out in return, settling back on its heels, pacing, settling back on its heels, tossing a redstone torch hand-to-hand. Challenge. All are welcome. Any who enter risk death.
She pauses, thoughts filtering through fine lines of mycelium to whatever central point of her stands unmoving in that little cave, then brushes her awareness past him, on its way, and Tango-Decked Out-Tango breathes out a long breath and sits down on the edge of a dropper.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
Then he shrugs, and goes back to cycling test items through the shuffler. If this Mother of all Mushrooms or whatever she is becomes a problem, she can be a problem for Future Tango. Present Tango has a deck-building dungeon-crawling treasure-hunting collect-em-all trading game to finish, and he’s so close to playability.
Looming presences that’ll probably want an entire plot arc to address can wait their turn for the dungeon like everyone else.
Interloper, says the Mother Spore. Her eyes are shut, and beige threads of mycelia fall from her hair like a veil.
Decked Out shrugs. The two of them are standing at a crossroads, where an underground thread of mycelium touches Decked Out’s iron-and-redstone guts. Just a neighbor, says Decked Out. I figured we could get along?
The Mother Spore has an eerie stillness to her silhouette. The only bits of her host body that move are the mycelia of her veil, which grow and grow as Decked Out watches until they connect with the pale purple floor and break off, coiling. Decked Out, meanwhile, paces back and forth, back and forth, like the ravagers in its belly.
A hopper minecart picks up compass 23. A dropper dispenses loot box 23.
The Mother Spore’s lips don’t move as she speaks. You will not touch my children, she says, in a thousand little voices. They are parts of me. I will know. Her skin is pale and smooth as mushroom stem, and her sweater is fuzzy with mold, and a few threads of mycelia spill out from between her teeth.
Grian, Decked Out knows, is almost never still. He’s somewhere in there, subsumed willingly or unwillingly, and it’s his sly smile frozen on the Mother Spore’s lips. It’s eerie, supposes Decked Out, but it suits her.
Decked Out paces. An observer watches a soul flame go out, and sings a pulse of power to redstone wiring that slips around its perimeter, through its outer walls, past the Mother Spore’s veil, between Decked Out’s pacing feet.
You won’t breach my walls, it says. The Mother Spore doesn’t move, but she’s listening, as much as anything vast and complicated as either of them can. I’ll know.
She nods once, graceful and slow, thinking, if a mass of tangled living thread woven through a living person can think. A ravager growls. Zedaph slips out the door, and Decked Out sighs, and settles. The Mother Spore says, You will agree to a treaty, then. We keep each other’s secrets.
And leave each other alone, agrees Decked Out. It looks her up and down, trying to find any evidence of her host body’s cognizance. She’s unreadable, though. Secret. Well, it can just ask. Should I be letting Grian play? I think that might be cheating. How much of my design do you know about, exactly?
That startles a laugh out of her, and yeah, there’s Grian. Zedaph picks Resistance I from his choice of cards.
I still would like to play, pouts the Mother Spore, face unmoving, thousand little eerie voices sounding more than a bit put out. You will let me play. I have a key, interloper.
Decked Out snorts, a ravager-sound not quite at home in its human lungs and throat. It says, Yeah, yeah. Just don’t cheat. Or infest my insides with mushrooms.
She stands there, veil lengthening and dropping away, growing anew. There’s a fuzz of mold inside her mouth, too, sister to the strands of mycelium that spill from it, and little white lumps press up from the backs of her stem-smooth hands.
She says, And you will not disturb my growth. We will be neighbors.
Decked Out nods. Neighbors, it agrees. It can do that. It had suggested that to start with.
She appraises it, eyes closed, silently, for some time longer, as it paces, paces, powers down from Zedaph’s run, ticks the compass ticker up one tick. It paces. And then she disappears, slowly, gracefully, into a cloud of spores that scatters, sparkling, into the air, spreading her consciousness back across the island. Grian blinks open his eyes.
Decked Out paces, paces more, and then goes to assemble more loot boxes.
Tango lands in the shopping district, and Decked Out swallows him.
“Hey,” he says, mildly, catching the side of the metaphorical throat before his identity can quite finish dissolving. “Who says I’m here for you?”
Decked Out growls, low in Tango’s throat. It borrows Tango’s legs to start walking towards the entrance, which works for about three steps until Toon Towers twists him around and starts towards Tango’s shops, which ends with him stuck frozen in place, quickly developing a headache.
“Guys,” he manages, wresting the use of his mouth away from his bases for the length of about one word.
, writes Toon Towers, on a sign Tango apparently had in his inventory. Toon Towers breaks it, then replaces it and adds,
And all the shop profits are going to me, that was the promise, snipes back Decked Out, entirely self-satisfied.
Tango, regaining control of his arms, raises his hands to his temples. Then he sighs, crafts a boat, rows to the middle of the strait separating Toon Towers from the shopping district, pulls a ravager head and a block of magenta concrete from his shulkers, places them in front of him on the bow, and says, “Alright. I’m not going back to either of you until we can all get along.”
An anvil clangs against the inside of Tango’s skull, and a growl spills from his throat.
He rolls his eyes. “I mean it. I can just go work on the gaming district, you know.”
Decked Out tries to use his throat to whine. Toon Towers tries to use his throat to gasp in offense. What comes out sounds almost exactly like a deflating balloon.
Tango makes himself comfortable, and concludes that he really should have brought a pillow for his behind. Odds are, he’ll be here for awhile.
“Mayor Scar,” greets Tango. He’s being diplomatic.
“Tango!” Scar says brightly, clapping him on the shoulder. Tango quickly shrugs his hand off; not out of any hostility, but just because with Decked Out all around him and redstone firing in his nerve centers, he’s already exerting most of the energy and focus he has available on not mauling the mayor out of sheer excitement, and Scar is not really making it any easier. “This place looks amazing.”
Thank you, Decked Out says, flattered, and Tango clears his throat hard. This is a delicate situation; not really one where he’s comfortable letting it run rampant with his vocal chords.
Fortunately, Scar’s already gotten distracted squinting at the terracotta, and doesn’t seem to have remotely noticed the interjection, so Tango lets himself preen a bit anyways. Delighted as he may be at the prospect of Scar getting torn apart by ravagers, he is both the mayor and one of the best environmental builders on Hermitcraft, so his praise really counts for double.
Scar grins, straightening up, and claps his hands. “Well! How do I get started?”
The Mother Spore, or some aspect of her, is watching now, attention piqued by the mayor’s presence, underground and dangerously close to her sanctum.
Tango keeps his expression as close to neutral as he can. “I’m so glad you asked! First, find an unclaimed board and put your player head above it- there’s a few still left if you take a look around.”
Scar heads off, and Decked Out turns its attention to the probing threads of mycelium. Quit it. He’s playing.
The mycelium draws back slightly, and Tango relaxes just as slightly. The Mother Spore doesn’t say anything. He suspects she can’t, from this distance, not without him being a part of her hivemind proper, and he’s perfectly happy not, thank you very much. It’s busy enough inside his head this season already.
“If Grian gets to play, so does Scar,” he adds under his breath, and the probing fungi finally retreat in a manner he can only characterize as huffy just as Scar hurries back, key and shulker in hand.
Tango runs through the rules and goals of the game on autopilot as he guides Scar to the dungeon entrance. The anticipation of the hunt, of fresh bloodshed, is running up and down his spine like trapped electricity, and it’s making it hard to think. Scar is just so stringy and bony, is the thing. It makes Tango want to tear him limb from limb, in a friendly way.
“And remember,” he finishes as the doors click open, and Decked Out grins with what feels like definitely more teeth than should be in his mouth, Have fun!
“See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” says Tango. He’s replacing the blocks of mycelium the Mother Spore left around scattered around his redstone, mildly irritated.
Some threads of her twitch, just outside his walls, mostly placated but not quite all the way there. Tango fills a gap with cobble and rolls his eyes.
“Scar died immediately,” he points out. “I thought you’d like that.”
Her consciousness presses against the edge of him, the walls of him, leaning, creeping. He could call her on breaking treaty by threading mycelium into his guts, but she was conscientious enough to not actually touch the redstone, and he’s feeling pleasant and slow and satiated as the ravagers above, so he won’t.
“Everyone gets to play,” he says instead, a reminder. Maybe a threat, but probably not. “Everyone. That’s the rules, remember?”
Tango doesn’t mean to be reading the Shopping District bulletin boards at the same time as Grian. It happens, though, both of them skimming text, Tango letting his eyes wander and Grian fixated on a mycelium-related notice, so Tango shrugs and decides to make conversation.
“Hey,” he says, casually as he can. “How’s the two builds thing working out for you?”
Grian jumps anyway, and then narrows his eyes. “I don’t have two builds,” he bold-face lies. “Well, unless you count the Upside-Down version of the Mansion, but that’s the same build, just flipped. And it’s pretty much done.”
Tango only barely knows what the Upside-Down is, but he doesn’t mention that. He shrugs. “It’s been a pain for me, that’s for sure. The intra-base jealousy...”
“If I had a second build,” announces Grian, holding one finger up in the air and scowling, “which I don’t, the Mansion would understand. They already have to share with the Barge, anyway.”
“Shops don’t count,” says Tango, ignoring the fact that the Barge has had enough work put into it it probably has developed a consciousness. He smiles, lopsided. “Glad to hear the Mansion’s being understanding, though. Toon Towers was trying to get me to redirect the anvil launchers to the Shopping District for a bit there. Or possibly my own cranium. Almost built myself a Tango splatification circuit!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Grian. There’re mycelium-strands mixed in with his hair, but Tango doesn’t call him on it, because he’s pretty sure that even outside Decked Out, his own eyes lick with blue flame.
Instead, he flips a lazy salute. “I may be with HEP now,” (Grian makes a face), “but just to be clear, I won’t be breaking our treaty. My regards to the Mother Spore.
“Decked Out,” Grian hisses, and then his voice dips into the Mother Spore’s actual echoed sibilance, we are in PUBLIC.
“Hey, hey,” says Tango, placating, palms out. “Just making conversation, just making conversation.”
In front of Town Hall, really?” Grian asks, mouth moving again. He scowls.
Tango shrugs. “It’s not like anyone’s in there. Or online, actually. Also, didn’t you throw a block of mycelium at me the other day? Right over there?” Grian makes a petulant face, so Tango pulls a Decked Out key from his inventory and tosses it to him. “Go do a run. It’s on me- you look like you need the stress relief.”
“Being torn apart by ravagers is not my definition of stress relief,” he complains, but stashes the key up his sleeve anyway. “Not that that’ll stop me playing. Can’t turn down free fun!”
“Have fun. Just remember, no mushrooms in the dungeon, says Decked Out.
In public! complains the Mother Spore. She turns away, rustling his wings and palming a rocket. “Do you even know what a secret is?”
Grian’s thirty feet in the air before Tango can answer, though, so he just rolls his eyes and goes back to skimming the bulletin boards.
“It’s okay,” soothes Tango, patching with cobblestone. “I’ll have you fixed right up, and then we can get right back to mauling hermits.”
Tango doesn’t really feel okay. Mostly he feels slightly annoyed. And murderous- oh, that’ll be Decked Out.
I should ban him, it grumbles. I should not ban him,” disagrees Tango. He rolls his eyes. “If his resistance-finding machine had clipped the dungeon instead of the redstone, you know he’d have stayed to fix it up.”
Decked Out grumbles again, but settles, giving Tango back his throat. Tango likes having his throat. Sometimes Decked Out forgets to breathe fast enough, lungs synchronized with the ravagers rather than with a generally humanesque body, and then it gets horribly confused when its head starts spinning and it has to sit down.
Then again, Tango has to sit down sometimes too. Redstone dust in the lungs’ll do that to a guy.
“Would have appreciated it Scar and Mumbo’d managed this a few days after I closed the dungeon, instead of two before,” admits Tango. He finishes patching, starts taking stock of the redstone supplies he’ll need to replace the missing chunk of the soul flame circuits. He shrugs. “Oh well. Last minute tweaks it is.”
Sooner this Turf War is over, sooner Tango’s life can go back to being maximally hassle-free, that’s for certain.
“I hear,” says Bdubs, “that you’ve got secrets, Tango Tek.”
They’re standing on the balcony of HEP headquarters, overlooking the Shopping District. Below, Keralis follows his compass through Decked Out. Across the water, Toon Towers rises up, blocky, from impossible trees and concrete powder.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” lies Tango.
Bdubs scowls at him. “You know exactly what I’m talking about!”
“Nope!” says Tango. He taps a finger on his thigh. “Unless you’re trying to cheat at Decked Out, in which case I’m very disappointed in you.”
“Hey!” says Bdubs. “I don’t need to cheat at Decked Out, I’m great at Decked Out! I’m the best at Decked Out! Don’t look at the scoreboard.”
Tango laughs. Then he says, “So you’re not trying to get the location of the Black Market out of me, I take it?”
“Obviously not.”
“That’s good, because Keralis just picked up his loot token and started heading over, so you wouldn’t even be the first in.”
Bdubs scowls again. He says, “I could tell our fine mayor to fire you.”
Keralis stops to admire the torture room. Tango looks out over the shopping district, admiring the roads-in-progress, the incomplete chaos of color and capital. “You’re the one who hired me,” he says.
“That’s a good point,” says Bdubs. “I could fire you. And- Hey, you changed the subject! I will fire you! You’re keeping secrets about those filthy mushroom-lovers!”
Keralis finds the Cavern of Souls, toes of his boots sinking and clinging in soul sand. Decked Out watches him explore, and then Tango says to Bdubs, “What makes you think I’m keeping secrets?”
“You’re underground,” declares Bdubs, hands on hips. “So are they!”
“I’m standing right next to you. Decked Out is und- Oh, hang on.” Keralis has been standing in front of the door to the Black Market, throwing coins at it, and it’s becoming just a bit painful to watch. Tango texts him that it’s a wooden door, he could just open it, and then puts his phone back in his pocket and turns back to Bdubs. “Anyway. Decked Out is underground. I, Tango Tek, member of HEP, am standing right next to you.”
“You’re being a pain right next me, is what!” says Bdubs.
Tango leans forward and puts a hand on Bdubs’s shoulder, doing his best to sound convincing even though Keralis is being more than a bit distracting. “I’m not gonna betray you,” he assures, borrowing the tone he uses for every other temperamental consciousness he has to deal with. “I want this island grassificated as much as the next hermit.”
Bdubs narrows his eyes. “But you’re not gonna tell me what Decked Out knows.”
Keralis drops coin after coin in the Lucky Coin gambling machine, clank increasing increasing increasing.
“No,” says Tango. “Neutral ground is neutral ground.”
Keralis, lucky dog, hits jackpot.
Bdubs shrugs Tango’s hand off his shoulder. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, mister,” he announces, and almost manages to get through the sentence without giggling. Tango grins, and Bdubs stomps on his foot.
Keralis, on the other hand, buys that potion of invisibility Tango really needs to raise the price on, and ducks out of the Black Market.
“Maybe if you look hard enough you’ll find a Decked Out box,” teases Tango. He does actually need to hide a few more later. They’re going like hotcakes, as always, and the hermits have been learning his usual spots. “If your eyes are good enough, of course.”
Keralis books it out the door unscathed.
“Why you!” complains Bdubs, and shoves Tango off the HEP balcony, laughing.