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Sausage was the kind of person to have a creepy basement with even creepier things lurking inside. Jimmy had been down there once before when he'd gone inside the wrong nether portal by accident, taken a good, twenty second long stare at the dimly lit, oppressive room, before leaving with a totally normal amount of haste, thank you very much Lizzie, no I was not being a wimp-
Things he had spotted in Sausages creepy basement included: cages, barrels of strange substances, propped up weapons smeared with incredibly suspicious red stains, cobwebs, more than a few things that were probably dedicated to the demon running around the server and a yawning expanse of shadows that had sent shivers running up his spine. So, as any sane person would do, Jimmy had vowed to never go in there again.
A vow that, as he heard more than a few concerning noises drifting from below, he was probably going to bream.
His original goal had to be to find Sausage, but seeing as he wasn't around, it wasn't like he could get upset at him for going in. And, well, he was just being nosy. It couldn't hurt to have a look at his neighbours freaky as fuck basement, right?
Jimmy grimaced as his hand almost slid off the oily rungs of the ladder, being sure to place his foot down with the extra care needed to make sure it didn't cause him to slap and fall to his death (because really, that would be inconvenient). The clink of chains disturbed the disgustingly empty silence, and he was hit by the awareness that maybe the basement was not the most fantastic place to explore-
Something rustled.
His blood couldn't really freeze, cod were special in that section of biology, but in that moment his blood felt like ice.
Oh yeah. This was an awful place to get curious about. Jimmy was leaving now, thank you very much! He'd heard just about enough of this spookfest. That was enough for today. Why was he even down here? He could have just asked Sausage what was in his basement. He would be, actually, next time he saw Sausage, because-
Just as he was about to make his way up, he heard a whisper. A scared, cracked, concerning imitation of a whisper.
…Well now he couldn't just leave. He was many things, and a coward was definitely one of them, but he couldn't leave after hearing that.
He swallowed and continued his descent. It was light enough that he could see, with the hesitantly sputtering lanterns and the cascading glare of the Nether portal, and yet darkness seemed to cling to every nook and cranny in shadowy, spidery fingers. The perfect place for something to be lurking and crawling and ready to snap. The perfect place for a corpse to be stuffed in a barrel to rot. The perfect place for the demon to be standing in the darkened corners, watching him with malice in their eyes.
There was another, tiny sound that could have mrant a whole host of unpleasant things, and Jimmy startled, almost falling off the ladder completely. He cursed out of instinct and dragged a hand over his mouth, trying to muffle the words. It was unfortunately too late. If there was anything else in the basement with him, it had already heard him.
A hurried, burst of a choke emerged as he placed the last foot down, and he cricked his head around to where a wall jutted out, hiding whatever had coughed from view.
His hand drifted towards his sword, fingers cramping around the handle. He couldn't decide whether or not to draw it. It was then, and only then, with a ridiculous amount of courage and even more stupidity, that he was able to strangle out a question.
"Hello?"
Silence.
Then-
"Jimmy?" The voice was hushed, cracked and frayed at the edges. All the things he would rather not be hearing from the world's freakiest basement. His heart skipped a beat.
"Yes…?" He bit back any of the nerves lingering in his system and slowly, slowly made his way to the wall. It jutted out in such a way that it touched halfway across the already fairly wide room, leaving an empty, flat area in front of it. Any possible glance at the occupants was concealed by stones sealed with moisture and moss.
And there was blood, he realised. His gaze pinned to the floor and every piece of his conciousnes immediately started screaming.
"Who's there?" Jimmy managed to gasp. "What happened?"
"Aeor," a half hysterical voice hissed, before shooting in a sharp breath. It was feeble. "Jimmy. Jimmy help-"
The voice was cut off with a suddenness that made his stomach twist. Aeor? Then the voice sunk in, and he was hit by a sudden, dizzying wave of nausea. "Scott?"
Before he even fully grasped what Scott's voice was laced with, he was effectively sprinting to see what was behind the wall. He expected just about anything. A sacrificial altar, a summoning circle, some monster that replicated voices… his mind scrambled for practically anything to answer the questions that the blood provoked.
The reality was a lot simpler than any of those things. Two cells lined up against the wall in mimicry of cages. The one pressed against the far side was shielded in darkness, but the other was lit up with a casual intensity, perfectly displaying the absolutely horrific depiction of what he thought was supposed to be Gem.
She was sitting on the floor, long hair fallen in her face, and covered in blood. Her eyes were staring directly at him.
Shit.
"Gem." Jimmy stuttered, immediately rushing forwards to the cell. There wasn't a door- which made it so, so much worse- "Are you okay? What-?"
"Jimmy." Her eyes were bloodshot and strained. He'd seen her just under a week ago, all fresh and pristine and covered in glittering crystals, holding a staff powerful enough to kill anyone who even touched it. What had happened? "Jimmy."
His pickaxe was out in a heartbeat, and without second thought he began to smash it against the bars. The metal wailed far louder than it should have. To say his heart was pounding was an understatement - it was flying.
Adrenaline crawled into his veins and sang in response to the noise. At any moment, something, someone could crawl inside and stop him.
This was Sausages basement. Was… Sausage was deranged, alright, but he… wouldn't. Not to Gem. But he remembered the gleam in his eyes, the way that everything about him had shifted and…
The bars snapped - he'd put in more force than needed, and as a resulr the bones in his hands felt so stiff they might break. Using the pickaxe to try and widen the crude gap he'd created was an act of desperation; every second longer he spent on breaking it the more red seemed to pool out on the floor, and as soon as he was sure that he could actually fit through, he dropped his pickaxe on the floor and rushed inside. He couldn't afford to spend a moment longer gawking at Gem's crumpled form, he just knew that he had to get her out-
Sausage had teased him, quite some time ago, about the fact he chose to help move barrels of slime onto ships instead of letting the sailors do it. It was now, that he was holding Gem, with her great, heavy antlers and the enormous legs of a deer, that he was glad, horrifically and violently glad he did so much manual labour.
…the more he thought about Sausage, the more ill he felt. His arms shivered. He really, really didn't have the time to throw up right now, and he really did try to avoid looking at Gem's cracked, broken nails, or the bloodied fuzz that was peeling off her antlers, or the gaping hole in her leg that stared at him-
"Jimmy." Her hand snatched his wrist with surprising ease considering how… corpse-like she looked. He was snapped out of the nausea the moment he looked into her surprisingly intense eyes. "Scott's in the other one."
Oh.
Oh gods
The realisation that hit him must have been visible, because one moment Gem was staring up at him, and the next she had snatched the bars for support and was hauling herself out of his grip (when had they even gotten out of the cell-?).
"You- shouldn't be standing." Jimmy frowned, staring at the way her knees buckled and strained underneath the weight of pain and bloodstains. He didn't know how to fix those. Surely Sausage must keep medicinal things somewhere, right? He wouldn't want her dead- which made it a lot, lot worse-
"They put my things- potions in the barrels." She grimaced, face whitening as she began to drag herself towards a pile of barrels on the other side of the room. He opened his mouth to argue, because she looked so pale and clammy that she could collapse at any second.. "I'll live." She swallowed. "With the potions. Go get Scott."
Right. Scott. He'd heard him earlier, but the moment that Jimmy stepped towards the darkened cell, every single part of him wanted to flee. A bit odd, considering that Scott was fairly passive and had never really tried to attack him, but the closer he walked, the more his nerves began to scream.
...something had cut Scott off, hadn't it?
If there was something else with Scott in that cell... no, no, no, he was not thinking about that-
He snatched the pickaxe off the floor and went back to breaking bars. These ones were definitely weaker, as if the very metal itself was rotting away. It practically crumbled in front of him. Which… wasn't a bad thing, considering that for all he knew Scott was literally dying, but it was much louder than he thought it would be. The noise couldn't have been a good thing. Not when he was literally underneath Sausage's house-
Jimmy could have sworn he heard something bump upstairs and he cursed under his breath, practically rushing inside the cell, spurred by a freezing momentum of panic. If he squinted, he could make out Scott's vague form. He crouched, stooping to grab him like he'd grabbed Gem, except-
His skin was free from blood. That was the worst part. Instead, he was draped in thick spirals of corruption. Streams of red had withered across him: around his arms, his legs, his head, his mouth, all preventing him from moving. Like an animal about to be sacrificed.
...didn't Sausage do sacrifices with the blood sheep-?
He yanked the sword out of its holster, almost dropped it, and spat out curses under his breath. The blade was designed for heavy duty combat, not at all for trimming away stands of demonic matter, but he cut them loose to the best of his ability. Which turned out to be not very efficient at all. His mind continued to spiral. Why was Scott restrained with corruption, but not Gem? Why was there corruption in Sausages basement in the first place?
He took back that question back as soon as he thought it. Sausage had been… unhealthily devoted to the demon for a while now, but Jimmy had never thought that it's demonic influence would go this far. Not to the extent of- of this-
He twitched. If Jimmy wasn't so focused, he probably would have dropped the sword entirely. Couldn't afford that right now. He continued, hand snatching for the pieces of corruption the moment they were sawed off and throwing them to the side. With every noise, every scitter, every rustle and tiny gasp from Gem, his heart seemed to pound louder.
Scott's eyes cracked open - Jimmy startled. It was an instinctive reaction, the creeping shadows and the crawling corruption had held him on edge. He twitched again in the hold of the tendrils, and Jimmy burst out in a stream of hushed muttering.
"You're okay." He blurted out on instinct, tearing another piece away from his wrists. The hand flew up to grip his arm, fingers curled so tightly around him the knuckles turned white. "You've got to be okay. Alright? You've got to be-"
Gem's voice was strange and odd from where it drifted from behind him. "Jimmy. You might need to hurry up."
Oh. Okay. Yep. He was hurrying. He was definitely hurrying. The blade snagged one of the big pieces of corruption around his leg and tore through it like flesh. He chose to ignore it. He didn't want to think about how the moisture inside the tendrils seeped like blood. He was not going to waste time nauseating over the great clumps of red.
Scott's grip tightened around his arm, and Jimmy's rambled increased tenfold. "You're okay." He stammered hurriedly, pulling more of the corruption away. "Please be okay. Please be okay." He had better be okay, because if Gem's healing potions weren't there, they were both done for. There was no way he could carry both of them-
As soon as he sawed the matter off of his other wrist, Scott's hand flew up to where the corruption was wrapped around his mouth and curled, yanking the spiral of red away. No sooner than a second had passed before he was coughing and sputtering violently. His nails dug into his skin so tightly that they cut into the flesh, printing sharp crescents into his arms.
He coughed, a dull resonance that shot through the air. His eyes stared at him with the intensity of a thousand moons, his fingers gripping him so hard that his arm went slightly numb. "Jimmy."
"Scott," he whispered back, because what else did you say to someone who had been kidnapped and... had that happen to them? He wanted to say a thousand things at once. But he couldn't say any of them, because they were in Sausage's basement and Gem was almost half dead and they needed to leave, now.
He pulled the elf into his arms. His antlers pressed against his shoulder at an awkward angle, but he was so detached from his body he couldn't feel it. Everything seemed numb. What had happened? What had Sausage done?
Scott inhaled sharply. The corruption had left a red mark across his face so sore that he could see it even in the darkness of the cell. It would bruise, probably.
"I'm okay." His voice was the weakest that Jimmy had ever heard. Jimmy didn't believe him, but real reassurances could wait. They didn't have the time for this. They never had time for anything, but this, especially, there would be no time for. They had to leave.