Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jimmy, Three learns rather quickly, is an easily-flustered man with the sort of voice and face to match it. He’s not particularly happy about Three’s presence. Martyn spends a great deal of time trying to explain it. If Three were smart, it would pay close attention to this conversation, since it has everything to do with whether it will get to continue to exist. However, Three has no input on the outcome of the conversation, so it doesn’t need to know all the intricate details.

It pays attention to a few. For example:

“You might be trying to throw your life away, but believe it or not, I’m not trying to, and I’m also not trying to let you!”

“Oh, come on, Jim, that’s not fair.”

“Not fair? You let one of the most deadly things any of us know about follow you home!”

“Well, I told them to, and they did. That’s different. You know that’s different.”

“How much thought did you even put into it?”

“I—exactly as much as I needed to.”

“You told me it was a fairly safe infiltration!”

“Plans change, Jimmy!”

It’s useful to hear conversations like this, because it’s important to understand the dynamic between handlers in those times when there are more than one of them. It can have an effect on Three’s efficiency. Here, it tells Three that while Jimmy is easily flustered, he also seems to have strong opinions on Martyn following plans safely and efficiently. Martyn disagrees. It’s not an argument Three knows how to solve, because Three doesn’t have all the details. To effectively solve this argument, Three would need to know all the original parameters of Martyn’s mission, would need to know how dangerous it was, and would need to know whether it was actually mission-critical for Jimmy to know those things. That would decide who is being reasonable here, and who is being volatile.

Another thing it pays attention to is:

“I don’t—Martyn, I don’t want a Watcher in the house. Not when…”

“I—okay, look, I didn’t think about that, but listen, they’re like… tamed? No, that sounds wrong. They’re… look, you didn’t see what they did when I said I was there to kill them. They offered—”

“Kill them? Martyn.”

“You know what I do.”

“I know, just—ugh, I don’t know what I want. It’s just—it could be one of the ones that I watched kill Grian, I don’t know, they all wear the same mask!”

“We’re getting them a new mask at some point.”

“That’s not—that’s not the point, Martyn!”

“Bit late to leave them somewhere now. You’re the one who always tells me I should trust my handlers less, so here I am, trusting the Listeners less and bringing them right to you.”

“You’re insufferable!”

“You love me.”

“Now is not the time!”

It’s an important part of the dynamic. It seems as though Martyn does this often, or perhaps Jimmy gets this sort of upset often (those are two different, but similar things, that could be happening here). It would seem the mask is potentially still a pain point. Three does not reach for it this time; it knows better than to do that and give away that it still doesn’t want to show its face.

It’s interesting that Jimmy doesn’t trust his own kind, though. Three wonders how that sort of thing happens. Perhaps all of Jimmy’s own superiors had been idiots, the way some of Three’s handlers have been in the past. It supposes this would make sense.

“Besides, you’re talking about them like they aren’t here,” Martyn says. “They can hear everything you’re saying.”

“See,” Jimmy mutters. “You know they read lips instead of—”

“Fine, fine, you get the point, pretty sure they’d use the word ‘hear’ too. It doesn’t matter.”

Jimmy reaches up for his headphones, closes his eyes, and seems to try to shut out the world for a moment. Three had missed much of the argument, but is aware it is about to be brought in, so it doesn’t surprise it when, after a moment of pause, Jimmy looks directly at it.

“Fine. Fine. So Martyn ‘stole’ you?”

Three tries to decide if it’s gotten enough data on Jimmy to know whether its new handler would want it to answer that question or not. Martyn doesn’t say anything, so Three simply answers: “Affirmative.”

“And you just… let him?” Jimmy asks.

“He was in possession of standard control codes,” Three says.

“Yeah, but why didn’t you just ignore it when you realized—”

“Weapons do not decide whether correct authorization codes should be followed,” Three recites. It’s easy. The excuse has been playing in its head since this all started. Excuse? Not an excuse. It also did not mean to interrupt. Clearly, it is already experiencing decay of conditioning, due to inadequate rest and reconditioning time between assignments. Hopefully, the two Listener agents don’t know the signs. It doesn’t want to be reconditioned somewhere it isn’t already familiar with. It doesn’t want to be reconditioned at all.

Jimmy is staring. Not-staring. Jimmy’s eyes aren’t meeting Three’s. That is normal. Listeners don’t stare with their eyes. Three knows Jimmy is staring.

“So what, you’re just going to… follow his orders?”

“Affirmative,” Three says, feeling oddly restless.

“How am I supposed to believe that?” Jimmy asks.

“A Blade does not disobey orders. I do not disobey orders. It is outside of my capacity,” Three says.

“I’m supposed to just believe you aren’t here to, to, I don’t know. I don’t know. What if you’re here to hurt Martyn?”

“I cannot hurt my handler,” Three says. “It is outside of my capacity.”

“Why should I believe you?”

Three doesn’t know. Why is it being asked that? This isn’t a question for something like Three. “I follow orders,” Three says, hollowly.

“Woah now,” Martyn says.

“So you followed orders to betray your own side?”

“I follow orders,” Three says. “I am designed to follow orders. I am a Blade to follow the orders of my handler. It is outside of my capacity to decide on the veracity of those orders. I do not have a… I do not…”

“Look what you’ve done, you’ve upset them,” Martyn says.

“Yes, I’ve upset the murderer you brought home,” Jimmy says.

Three doesn’t know what they are talking about. Three is incapable of being upset, on account of being Three. A blade that gets upset wouldn’t be particularly useful at all. Three knows this. It didn’t finish answering the question correctly, though.

“A sword is not capable of betrayal,” Three finally says. “I am following orders. I am designed to follow orders.”

“Jimmy,” Martyn says.

Jimmy sighs. “No, you’re right, I don’t hear any lies, I’m just—I’m not really happy with you. You sounded happier when you called me. I thought maybe—it doesn’t matter,” Jimmy says. “You’ve gone and done this instead. I can’t just kick it out, can I?”

“If you really needed to,” Martyn says.

“No, no. I’m not a monster,” Jimmy says, and Martyn winces, and Three doesn’t get why.

“I’m sorry,” Martyn says. Jimmy’s shoulders slump.

“Yeah. Okay. I guess we’d better get a third bed,” Jimmy says quietly.

“Yeah. Guess we better,” Martyn says. “I’ll make a welcome home dinner for us.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says, and he walks away. Martyn watches him climb down the trapdoor into one of the downstairs rooms of the base.

Martyn turns to Three. “That went pretty well, all things considered.”

“Understood,” Three says. It tries quite hard not to display its skepticism.

---

Jimmy apologizes at dinner for calling Martyn a monster. He’s sorry. He knows. He’s still angry, but that was out of line. He apologizes, also, for freaking out so much, and Martyn says no, he’s sorry, he knows, he’s not that angry, that’s what he’d think too. He’d been planning on killing Three but it’s—he’s trying not to be all the way a monster. Jimmy says he knows, he knows Martyn is trying. They go back to eating.

Three stands by the table and watches. It will find rations somewhere later. It won’t steal (that is against most handlers’ rules), but it knows better than to think it will eat at the table. It is expected to find its own food when needed when with more permissive handlers, like Martyn, and it will do so. On a server this spread-out, even finding fresh livestock should be easy.

As it stands there, and Martyn and Jimmy apologize, Jimmy looks up at it, as though to say something, but doesn’t.

Three wonders if it has missed something. It doesn’t easily miss things that are important to its mission, but it doesn’t know what its mission is, at the moment.

As soon as Martyn and Jimmy go to bed, Three makes sure they’re secure, and stays close enough to See Martyn while hunting down some pigs for pork. Hopefully, those rations will do. It is important to occasionally eat for system maintenance, after all.

It stays awake and Watches over the night.

---

Three is not told its new mission for the next several days, beyond the fact that it has been stolen, it is not allowed to hurt Martyn or Jimmy, and that it is also not allowed to let them die. (Technically, that last part isn’t something Three’s been actively told is its mission, but it is assuming that must be one of its marching orders, as it would be somewhat strange if it were not.) It is, however, given several strange new orders in this time.

The first comes from Jimmy. It’s the next day. Three largely maintains a perimeter. Martyn is resting, as apparently his own mission had been tiring. Jimmy, Three notices, largely stays inside, and when he leaves, does not leave for long or go particularly far, and does not seem to enjoy leaving. This makes guarding Jimmy much easier, Three thinks, but also makes it so that there’s no avoiding Jimmy while guarding him.

It’s during mealtime that it happens.

“You know, it’s kind of creepy for you to stand there and watch us eat,” Jimmy says.

“That’s rude,” Martyn says, although it sounds like he is largely joking.

“You can sit down and eat too,” Jimmy says.

Three stares. No it can’t. That’s basically always not allowed. It is not meant to sit at the table and eat the sort of foods handlers eat. It’s not designed to eat the things Greater Watchers do, for one. Neither Martyn nor Jimmy are the sort of creature a Greater Watcher or Listener is, and don’t need emotions to sustain themselves. Still, it is not meant to eat at the table. It is meant to hunt down its own food in the space it has as downtime during missions.

“I am capable of retrieving my own rations,” Three says. It is possible neither Martyn nor Jimmy understand this about it. That would be an understandable and acceptable mistake to make. Some handlers assume Three is less self-sufficient than it is. This is often a painful assumption, as it leads to a certain level of resentment and difficulty in operations.

True, Three does not like acting without a mission, but Three will not hurt itself when left to its own devices. It can get its own rations. It is fine.

“Yeah, but it’s easy for us to cook for three,” Jimmy says.

“I do not require human food intake,” Three says.

“Leave them be,” Martyn says.

“Do they have to stare at us, though?” Jimmy says.

“I mean, they’re a Watcher,” Martyn says. “So… maybe? I mean, that’s their whole thing…”

“Just. Don’t stare at us while we eat. Get your own food so I at least can’t hear you staring as loud,” Jimmy says.

“Will comply,” Three says, and leaves to go get its own food. What an odd order. It truly doesn’t understand these people.

---

The next strange order Three gets is two days into its time in the house. The candle by the photograph in the alcove is getting low. Jimmy goes to change it, because Martyn is resting. Martyn requires a great deal of rest after missions, apparently. Unlike Three, he finds world-hopping exhausting. Three supposes it understands; most people are not forced to do it as frequently as Three, and apparently, Martyn does not have the tolerance for the sort of pain world-hopping can cause.

Jimmy snaps: “Do you ever sleep?”

“I require minimal downtime,” Three says promptly. “I require no more than ten hours of sleep per seven days to maintain appropriate efficiency.”

Jimmy pauses. Turns around at Three. Jimmy covers the photograph with his body as he does. It’s not a particularly good attempt at keeping it outside of Three’s vision range, but the oddly protective gesture is noted and categorized. Three will attempt to not threaten the space around the photograph that Jimmy has laid there.

“Geez,” Jimmy says. “Geez! And you’re so quiet. Make less noise than Martyn.”

“Do you wish for me to be louder?”

“No, no, I mean, you aren’t so quiet that you don’t make noise. You’re just, like, so quiet for no reason,” Jimmy says.

Three has a reason to be quiet; Three is designed for killing Listeners, amongst others. It would not be effective at that job if it was easy to Hear. It doesn’t understand why this is strange, but to be honest, Jimmy seems sort of stupid in distinct ways from how Martyn is stupid. It isn’t going to judge; not everyone is designed to be as good at their job as Three is.

“But it’s still there. When I’m supposed to—ugh. Will you just. Go away? I don’t want you anywhere near him.”

“Will comply,” Three says, and Three leaves, before realizing it’s not certain how to fulfill this order. Context clues suggest ‘him’ is the photograph, rather than Martyn, although Three also knows that Jimmy doesn’t want it anywhere near Martyn. Additionally, ‘away’ is a very uncertain parameter. Three doesn’t have a mission yet, but it has been stolen. Things that are stolen, presumably, have to stay near the person that has stolen them, on account of not being very stolen, otherwise. It also thinks it needs to guard Jimmy, on account of Martyn caring about Jimmy, and Jimmy being a member of the home front. It hasn’t gotten a chance to have downtime to refresh lately, so it may not be thinking well, although it should still be functioning fine.

How far away is away, while still maintaining the presumed mission of watching Martyn and Jimmy? It’s not certain. It isn’t certain if it is allowed to leave the house for more than finding food for itself and defending the borders of their area. It’s not sure what it’s supposed to do.

Jimmy’s shoulders shake. He’s looking away from Three, but they both can likely see or hear each other as if they were standing in front of each other. There is no way, Three thinks, to leave Jimmy’s range and stay within a reasonable distance of Martyn. The amount of soundproofing in the house is a dead giveaway that Jimmy has a pretty high range. It makes it… hard… to follow this order.

Three, ultimately, goes outside to sit on the roof. It can still see Jimmy perfectly well. Jimmy has replaced the candle. Jimmy has apologized to the picture in the alcove. Jimmy goes to sit down on a couch and curl up his legs to himself and ask what he’s doing. Jimmy looks up at the ceiling.

“Get down from there,” Jimmy says. “Get in here. Geez, I didn’t… well, I did mean it, but…”

Three climbs off the roof. It knows Jimmy will ask again, and now it knows that ‘go away’ doesn’t mean ‘get on the roof’, at least. That will make it easier. It comes back inside.

“What are you even supposed to do?” Jimmy asks. It is most likely a rhetorical question, but just in case, Three decides to answer.

“Follow orders.”

“Gods, that’s all the people around me seem to do,” mutters Jimmy. “No wonder Martyn brought you home.”

Three could say that Martyn had been pretty explicitly ignoring orders to do that, but decides against it. It’s not Three’s business, and that information may not be meant to be shared.

---

“Can you… that mask,” Jimmy says, after several hours of Three largely just standing around, watching him fumble around the house, feeding the sheep, recording something Three isn’t allowed to hear in a recorder, and knitting, apparently.

Three reaches for the mask.

“I know Martyn said when he’s up to it he’s going to take you to the costume store, but I can’t just… watch you walk around my house in that. Thing. Looking like—yeah, no.”

Three’s hands shake. “Will. Will comply.” It reaches up slowly. Jimmy yelps.

“No, no! I know that’s like, if your eyes are anything like my—geez, no, you don’t need to take it off without a replacement,” Jimmy says. “I was gonna say you should find a new replacement. So I don’t have to keep looking at… Martyn can put it in with his stuff.”

“What am I going to put in with my stuff?” Martyn asks, coming up from upstairs.

“Three’s mask,” Jimmy says.

“Oh, sure,” Martyn says. “Pretty sure it won’t work as well as the feather I had to use, but it should at least be an effective taunt for the more human ones.”

Three’s feathers start to puff out. It really doesn’t like any of this conversation. It is not meant to remove its mask. It can withstand that torture, of course, but it is not meant to let anyone see its face. It doesn’t know what the solution here is supposed to be. It will withstand it if it has to. It will.

“I think I have a sleep mask or something that I can give to Three to cover their eyes,” Martyn says. “Let me go get that.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says.

Three isn’t panicking at all. Three is fine. Three is only looking around for appropriate things with which to cover its face because it wants to maintain peak efficiency, which it will not if it is left with an uncovered face and is experiencing overload.

Martyn comes back up with the sleep mask. “Okay. Three can replace its mask with this until—”

Three grabs the first face cover it sees. It is not the sleep mask. It is, in fact, a bag that Three, in its haste, had not realized still had two bras in it. It throws the paper bag over its head. Once it’s fairly certain its face is covered, it unhooks the mask it got from the Watchers. While it’s there, it grabs the bra that had more fallen over its face than onto the ground and hands it and the mask over to Martyn. It winces. The bag isn’t perfect. Three can see out of the bottom of it too well, making its head almost instantly start hurting.

It shouldn’t have done that, it realizes a second later. It had not requested permission first.

Martyn and Jimmy stare for a moment.

“We—got you the sleep mask,” Martyn says.

“I must cover my face entirely for peak efficiency,” Three says.

“I still don’t understand why this is the thing—”

“I think I do,” Jimmy says, picking up one of the bras—his, Three thinks—and looking at Three. “It’s like my headphones, I guess? I didn’t think they would care, though. Could feel that kind of pain. But, hey…”

“Right—oh.”

Jimmy looks at Three again. “You can wear that and the sleep mask, if that will be better.”

Hesitantly, Three grabs the sleep mask. With that and the paper bag on, it’s almost as good as its old mask at blocking out visual input. It’s strange, not wearing the old mask. Its face is exposed to the elements, just a little bit, even as covered as it is. The old mask is smooth on the front, like any Watcher mask, a plain white oval with a symbol on it, but the inside was fit to Three’s face. This new facial covering is pink and white and paper, and only the eye mask is fit to Three’s face.

This is odd. It does not understand why it is more acceptable to wear the bag and the sleep mask. It doesn’t understand why it hasn’t been yelled at for grabbing the bag instead of something more sensible, or just taking the offered mask. It doesn’t want to be reconditioned. It doesn’t understand what’s happening.

Jimmy starts laughing. “You look really stupid, you know. Haha. Didn’t know Watchers could look stupid.”

Martyn snorts. “You’re right. Thought they were addicted to appearances.”

“Better than the mask for sure. Maybe now the nightmares—you got another bed, right?” Jimmy says.

“Yeah,” Martyn says. “I should have—nightmares?”

“I mean, now I’ll be imagining us murdered by a guy wearing a bra bag on their head. Which, you know, then my last thoughts will be ‘man, I wish the Listeners had also given me top surgery’, instead of about being left in as many pieces as Grian, so, you know, hey.” Jimmy shakes his head oddly and looks at Three. “You really are just a very confused person, huh? Sorry, I didn’t really believe Martyn all the way. Wear that until we get you something better. Explaining this to anyone at the costume shop will be fun…”

Three doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.

However, it will comply.

---

“So, like, why are you following me around?” Martyn asks, some four days in. He isn’t sleeping as much anymore. He’s wearing brighter clothes. He has placed most of his things in a room that Jimmy does not open. It seems that when Martyn is not on a mission, he spends a great deal of time wandering. Not too far, but he wanders, and, depending on the day, it is easier to follow Martyn to keep track of everyone than to stay in the house. Three has not been stopped yet.

It is something to do. Something. It still doesn’t have a mission, after all. It has been several days. It doesn’t understand why it is being kept idle. It supposes that if it’s been stolen without any purpose, there’s no reason not to keep it idle, but it’s starting to get frustrating. It doesn’t know what the boundaries are, when it is both awake and not performing a mission or having maintenance. It hasn’t been both of those things at once before. It’s quickly finding it has to make up tasks that might be its mission, without stepping over any boundaries, and it’s not sure how to.

It doesn’t help that it has not yet had a chance to sleep. It doesn’t need to, of course. It has many days left before it will need to. It hasn’t been allowed to yet, and it is growing tired.

“I do not have a mission. I have defaulted to protecting my handler,” Three says.

“Oh, uh, you don’t need to do that,” Martyn says. “To be honest, I think you’re freaking Jimmy out. Which is fair, I shouldn’t have dropped a Watcher on him without warning, but you’ll freak him out less if you don’t follow him.”

Three is briefly, irrationally, struck by the desire to ask Martyn how far away ‘go away’ is. It refrains. It also refrains from changing its behavior. ‘Don’t need to’ isn’t an order, after all.

Once they’re home, and Martyn has gone to shower, Jimmy also asks: “Why are you trying to learn our habits, huh? Suspicious.”

“I do not have a mission. I have defaulted to protecting my handler,” Three repeats. It pauses. “I do not know if this is suspicious. I am not trying to hide my behavior.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jimmy says. “If you get a mission, will you stop following us around?”

“If the mission is not following you around,” Three says.

“Can Martyn and I just order you to not follow us around?”

Three thinks for a minute. “I have a mission. I have defaulted to protecting my handler. I can open my senses instead.”

“Yeah, don’t do that,” Jimmy says.

Three resists the urge to shout: what do you want me to do? It knows better. If not given orders, most handlers either have secret, invisible orders that they have not given but have intensely thought, or they want Three to do nothing. Jimmy appears to want Three to do nothing.

Three is not designed to do nothing. Three will do as ordered, but Three also needs a mission. It is not sure what to do in a place this unfamiliar without a mission.

“I’m going to ask Martyn what to get you to do. Surely you can just like… I don’t know, learn to knit?”

Three stares for a moment.

“Will… comply?” it says, trying not to show too much outright skepticism. Not enough, ideally, to make Jimmy angry for backtalk, but little enough to indicate that Three isn’t entirely certain Jimmy meant to give an order that idiotic.

“Hah. What if I did let the superweapon learn to knit. Haha, that’ll show the Watchers. No proper superweapon will knit. Yeah! Learn to knit!”

Three is feeling increasingly baffled. Martyn comes out of the shower. “What are you telling Three to do?” he asks.

“Learn to knit,” Jimmy says.

“Why?”

“It’s funny.”

Martyn thinks. “Yeah, that is funny. Three should learn to knit. You know what to do.”

“Will comply,” Three says again, and decides to hunt down how to knit. Surely its various skills in hunting down targets will also assist it in hunting down the means to knit. It has a mission now; it will not fail it.

At least it knows what to do now, even if it makes no sense.

As it goes to find Jimmy’s knitting materials, it sees Jimmy say: “Are we… bad people for making them knit because it’s funny?”

“A little bit,” Martyn says. “But I—I think we should be doing more than that. I don’t know how to explain they can say no.”

Jimmy snorts. “To be fair, it’s not like that’s a thing we know how to do either.”

“Fair enough,” Martyn says.

They keep talking. The conversation is irrelevant to knitting. Three disregards it, and continues on.

---

“Hey. New mission. Get some sleep,” Martyn says at two AM on finding Three awake. He gestures at the third bed they had put in their sleeping quarters some time ago, to Three’s confusion.

It’s a strange mission. Three lies down in the bed and stares at the ceiling, and wonders what exactly it is meant to be doing here, but knows it has been ordered to sleep in the bed, and it is too tired to argue. The bag feels strange around its head. Maybe everything will make more sense once it finally sleeps.

It sleeps for twenty hours.

Knitting is strangely difficult.

Three had supposed that, being designed to be good at many things using its hands, it would find knitting easy. It would copy the stitches from the way Jimmy’s hands moved when he made them, and from then on, it would be a master at knitting. It’s good at mimicking; that is how it’s meant to blend in when it has not yet eliminated a target, after all.

As it turns out, though, knitting appears to be more than copying the stitches. For one, Jimmy is apparently uncoordinated with his stitches. For another, to do patterns that it cannot copy from Jimmy, it must know the other mechanics. For yet another thing, Jimmy, while he does knit in his spare time, gets too clearly frustrated while knitting to properly show Three what to do. Three is meant to figure this out on its own.

(Briefly, it wonders why Jimmy knits, if it frustrates him. Maybe he simply cannot stand to be alone in the house for as many hours as he tends to be.)

Three is provided yarn and knitting needles. The yarn Three chooses is red and green. The colors don’t normally go well together, but Three is certain it can make them into a reasonable pattern. Maybe it will, by osmosis, cause Jimmy and Martyn to understand what looks aesthetically decent together, even when the only colors available are clashing. Also, Three likes red, and there hadn’t been enough red yarn to make a scarf.

Knitting requires focus. Knitting requires Three to hold the needles carefully, lest the claws carefully hidden beneath false fingers get in the way of its work. Knitting requires Three think about how something looks.

It’s something to do, and Three throws itself into it nearly to the exclusion of anything else. That is Three’s mission, and Three will follow it loyally. That is the least it can do.

Well, that and getting some sleep. That is an odd mission as well, but Three has been given a bed, and it—it will need so much reconditioning, it thinks, but it is more important to follow a mission than it is to remember that it is not meant to take unnecessary comforts like slightly lumpy beds with wool blankets that scratch between Three’s feathers. Reconditioning, it is—it’s meant for when missions make it so Three starts doing something it should not. To make sure habits from one mission don’t blend into bad habits altogether.

It is to be expected. For now, Three will stick to its two missions.

Three feels like its skills are perhaps being slightly wasted by the thief, and Martyn and Jimmy are very poor handlers indeed, but it’s beginning to be able to make smaller and larger stitches on purpose while knitting, instead of by accident, so it’s at least starting to get the hang of it.

Perhaps the knitting is for a future goal. Wool is a fairly good means of soundproofing. Perhaps knit clothes help hide from Listener senses. This is not something Three has ever heard before, and Three would know, on account of the hundreds of Listeners Three has killed. But hey; maybe that is the sort of knowledge that Listeners guard closely.

It throws out, cuts up, and destroys many things while learning as well. It would not do to leave imperfect knitted creations where Martyn might see them. Three is not certain what Martyn would do about it—indeed, many of Jimmy’s knit creations are very imperfect too—but Three is a perfected blade and machine, not an eclosed Listener who never learned to go outside properly, so it should be better at this. Things that would be forgiven in someone less well-created than Three are not to be forgiven in Three.

There are destroyed scraps of yarn all over its room. But it’s starting to get the hang of this new mission. It is.

It’s only after the seventeenth attempt that Three realizes it had not asked before picking the colors of yarn; it had been told it could take what yarn it needed, and selected green and red on its own. For a moment, it considers whether this, too, will require reconditioning, but it had been told first that it could take whatever yarn it needed, and it’s not like Jimmy used colors that weren’t blue all that often.

It… also doesn’t know what the success condition is for this mission, but that is why it is starting with a scarf. Scarves are straight lines. They are the easiest way to show its mastery.

This is fine.

---

“Right, well, as funny as it is to watch you run around with a paper bag on your head, we should probably go get you some other kind of mask some time soon,” Martyn says. Three is sitting on the bed knitting. It doesn’t really want Martyn to see what it is doing—it is getting better at knitting, but this scarf is a little too lumpy, and Three will need to burn it.

“You do know that means we’ll need to walk into the shopping district with a guy wearing a bag on their head,” Jimmy says, entering the room as well with a steady clack of his cane. Three is slightly less inclined to hide the unfinished scarf from him. Jimmy’s probably already heard it.

Both Jimmy and Martyn turn to look at Three. Three looks back.

“I can wear something else,” Three says, after neither of them say anything. It is, in fact, aware that the bag and the sleep mask are not typical facial wear. Its mask is not, either, but when the Watcher symbol is hidden, it is at least more in fitting with the sorts of things Players like to dress in.

“No, don’t,” Martyn and Jimmy say at the same time.

“Complying,” Three says.

“We’ll just say they got a bad haircut,” Martyn says. “No one will ever know!”

“I feel like a few people might ask about eyeholes,” Jimmy says.

“It was a really bad haircut,” Martyn says.

“Sure, fine, it was a really bad haircut,” Jimmy says. “If anyone asks, you got a really bad haircut.”

“Complying,” Three says again, and resolves to say exactly that if asked. It has been ordered to, after all. If it said anything else, why, it would be acting against orders! It could get in trouble for that.

“We could do it today, if you’re up for it,” Martyn says.

“I—I can go,” Jimmy says. “If you want, we can go. I can go; my leg doesn’t hurt that badly, and I’m… baseline overwhelmed? But I can…”

“You don’t have to be up for it,” Martyn says.

“The noise cancellation on these new ones is supposed to be really good,” Jimmy says.

“You got new ones?”

“While you were out. I needed them.”

“Oh. I hadn’t noticed.”

“They’re just the newer versions of the—I’ll be fine, is my point, Martyn, you don’t need to baby me.”

“I’m not babying you, geez,” Martyn says.

“I know. Sorry,” Jimmy says. “I just—I get frustrated too. I’ll be fine. Gung-ho, right? I’ve let a Watcher live in my house and have only cried like once! I’m a real manly man! Yeah, I can head out to the shopping district and I’ll be fine! We won’t teleport directly, right?”

“Nah, we’ll head to the spawn waystone. Tends to be a little less busy,” Martyn says.

“Really? Spawn is normally at least a little busy,” Jimmy says.

“Well, unless you want to fly…”

“I might prefer that, actually. Less sudden noise,” Jimmy says. “Uh. I mean. Unless… do you have any input? Three?”

Three isn’t certain what it’s meant to have input on, here. “I am capable of flight,” it decides to offer, because it’s still not really sure what exactly it’s meant to be commenting on.

“That’s not really what I was asking,” Jimmy says.

Great. Three has no idea what Jimmy was asking, then. “I require a lot of space for takeoff and landing. It is one of the few inefficiencies of my design. It in turn allows for far greater capacity once in the air.”

“That’s also not what I was asking,” Jimmy says, “but okay, I guess I could come right out and say ‘will you get overwhelmed like I would if we go out’?”

“I am designed to work past limitations,” Three says. It doesn’t say it judgmentally. Jimmy clearly has not been trained on any kind of mitigation, when it comes to his abilities, and Three imagines it’s quite loud indeed. Jimmy hasn’t been as perfectly designed as Three. It makes sense; the Listeners are a powerful enemy, but they do have a tendency to at least pretend people have a choice, which makes it harder for them to make necessary modifications when one of their chosen decides to actually make a choice.

The Watchers are far more efficient. They do not bother pretending to give any choices at all.

“Right, flying it is,” Martyn says, before Jimmy can ask Three anything else.

The three of them step out of the house. Jimmy briefly freezes up, hands over his headphones, then he takes a deep breath and moves his hands to his side. There’s a small shimmer in the air—a sound, although in a register a Watcher cannot hear—and then a pair of butterfly wings opens. They’re black, with blue and white accents. The black swallowtail; interesting. Three does not perfectly know Listener insect symbolism, but butterflies do not tend to be common.

Three needs to step away from the house to open its own wings. There’s a soundless flash of light.

“What the fuck!” shouts Martyn, jumping back. “Why are they so big! Jeez! What’s the point of that!”

“Long-term aerial travel,” Three responds. “They are not good for sustained flapping flight; however, on servers with rockets, or other means of elytra travel, having wings optimized for gliding—”

“I thought all of you fuckers were birds of prey,” Martyn says.

“Uh, I mean, there could be a seagull that hunts like an osprey? I guess?” Jimmy says.

Three huffs. “Albatross eat fish.”

“Huh. Alright, didn’t think that counted. That’ll make it harder to recognize you lot—or I guess, not you? Whatever,” Martyn says. “Let me go get my elytra, you two showoffs.”

“It’s not showing off!” says Jimmy. “Hey! Don’t you dare call me a showoff, you big—if anyone’s a showoff, Martyn, I’ll have you know it’s not me, that’s for sure. No showoffs here. Nope.”

“I can fly with elytra if it’s preferred,” Three says.

“No, use your fuckoff huge wings! Won’t get attention at all!” Martyn says.

Three considers mentioning that using its wings instead of its elytra does, in fact, tend to cause it to be more noticeable. It decides Martyn probably did not actually mean it. After all, he hasn’t told Three to use an elytra, and its wings really are a cheaper and easier means of flight in all circumstances except rapid movement near the ground. It doesn’t get to use them often, on account of them being potentially recognizable (although easily enough mistaken for the sort of thing a Player might have as to blend well enough, as well as easily mistaken for a seagull if the person who spots them is not familiar with them), and on account of many of Three’s fights taking place on the ground, and on account of them really being designed to augment elytra flight for longer-term missions that require great distances, and…

Martyn and Jimmy’s house is far out from spawn, so it makes more sense for Three to get to use them, and that is all. If it does not tell Martyn the potential downsides, that is Three’s business.

It gets its running start and takes to the air. It is circling the house when Martyn and Jimmy join in.

---

The server’s shopping district is some kind of mall. It’s clear that, the way it’s run, server members are expected to buy plots within the mall, and place their shops in those plots. The plots are purchasable with diamonds, but also with another server currency that can be exchanged for in the mall. It feels half-abandoned, with half the slots unpurchased, a good third of the slots clearly not kept in-stock, and the remaining two-thirds largely unmanned.

Jimmy almost falls over when he lands, Martyn needing to catch him as they go. He steadies himself against his cane. “I’m fine, Martyn.”

“Okay, geez, sorry,” Martyn says.

“We’re getting a mask for Three, yeah?”

“And some clothes, if you’re—uh, they’re up for it.”

Three catalogs the shops as they walk together, even as it scans the environment for threats. There’s a lost-looking new Player, clearly trying to find somewhere to gear up. They’ve likely brought most of their clothes from their home server, and aren’t looking in the same places the three of them will be looking. There’s a very geared Player, someone who must play on this server frequently. They’re trying to figure out how to commission a map from a nearby shop for it. Interesting use of money and time by everyone involved, but unhelpful here. There’s a wool store. It sells yarn. Three catalogues this, so if its knitting mission continues, it may procure its own yarn in the future.

There is a large store in front of them with a yellow banner.

“I never really got this joke,” Jimmy mutters.

“It doesn’t matter! It’s a costume shop! Nowhere better to get a mask for Three, I figure!” Martyn happily marches inside before anyone can argue. Three starts to follow. Jimmy, behind them, stares at the entrance.

“They always make this place miserable,” Jimmy says, and follows inside.

The inside of the store is bright orange, bright yellow, and black. It is an awful, contrasting color scheme, only made a bit more manageable by the occasional purple and the fact that at least a few of the shelves are sensible black. There are bats. They squeak throughout the roof. The sign on the entrance says it’s for “holiday ambiance”. There’s a jukebox continuously playing 13. There is another jukebox that is only playing the beginning of Mellohi. They are playing at the same time. Three doesn’t mind too much, but it’s no wonder Jimmy can’t stand it. No, the thing Three can’t stand is the tiling, which is a saturated orange and yellow that practically makes Three’s head hurt just looking at it.

“Oh, I love this place!” Martyn says.

“I feel sick,” mumbles Jimmy.

“You said you could come!” Martyn says.

“And I will! I will be here as moral support! Just, uh, don’t expect me to—to think very loudly.”

“It’s not that bad!”

“It’s a little bad.”

“Alright. Three, let’s look around for a mask! Why don’t you pick out a few of your favorites, and I’ll pick some more cunning disguises for missions!” Martyn says, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Before Three can ask for additional parameters for what it is supposed to pick, and why it is being expected to have something like a ‘favorite’, Martyn is gone, and Three is standing in the middle of the store, heart racing for some reason it can’t quite identify.

“He does that,” Jimmy says.

“Will comply,” Three says blankly.

“Do you need like… help picking something out?” Jimmy asks.

Three is not supposed to need help. It shakes its head. “Will comply. Will pick… a few of my favorites?”

“How is this the thing that makes you sound uncertain?” Jimmy asks.

“I am not capable of uncertainty,” Three says, drawing confidence around itself like a cloak. “I will comply with the order to pick my favorites.”

“It was a request, you know,” Jimmy says, following closely behind Three. “Not an order. Martyn suggested it.”

“I follow orders,” Three says.

“And a request’s an order. Got it,” Jimmy says. “Got it.”

The store is annoyingly large for such a niche idea. Beneath each garish costume, there is a label stating how much the costume is in both server currency and diamonds, in individual pieces and all together. Three quickly decides it will not be getting any of the costumes in full. It’s not entirely certain why someone would.

It’s not sure why anyone would pick most of these masks, either. The bag on its head is not exactly inconspicuous, but many of these masks do not cover the face in a way that would actually disrupt its appearance, or are garishly colored, or generally seem ineffective for the purpose of a mask. Most of the ones that don’t disguise appearance Three can throw out, on account of not covering its face, but it would, for the mission, require a mask that is not too garish, it thinks.

It lifts a plague doctor mask off the shelf. If the eyes were filled in, this may be acceptable, although it allows more of the lower face through than would be peak efficiency for Three. It also lifts another mask off the shelf. It’s a screaming face, surrounded by black cloth. This one would be perfect, if the black cloth was filled in to make it less transparent. There are several masks shaped like famous players, and Three grabs those as well. It can pretend to be a cosplayer in masks like those, it thinks. These are likely distanced enough from Three’s old appearance that Martyn and Jimmy wouldn’t mind, as well. They will fulfill all the requirements a mask would have.

Jimmy pulls something else off the shelf.

“Hey, maybe you’d look good in this? I don’t know.”

The mask Jimmy has grabbed, Three admits, is far less garish than any of the masks it is currently holding. It is a Venetian harlequin mask, largely white with gold and black ornamentation. It’s largely smooth. It is the most similar to its old mask, which means that it should be out of the running, for the comfort of Jimmy and Martyn. It is also something many players would find unsettling to be faced with. This makes it stand out in a way that its current masks wouldn’t. It shouldn’t add it to the pile, except Jimmy is offering it, so maybe it is the true intended solution?

“There’s also one in red,” Jimmy says, and Three would have to fill in the eyes somehow. It’s not sure how. But if it could fill in the eyes, it would be…

Less effective. Than the fake slasher film face. At being unrecognizable. Yes. This is a trick question, Three realizes. Jimmy is trying to trick it. Three didn’t think he had it in him.

“I have retrieved suitable masks for our purposes,” Three says.

Jimmy looks at it. “Oh,” Jimmy says. “Oh, this was going about it wrong. I knew it! I’m going to have to tell Martyn that I told him so and he’s going to sulk so much about it.”

A pause.

“I can’t believe the knitting I did to be a dick is working better,” Jimmy says. “Let’s go get Martyn before he decides you have to dress in skimpy hotdog costumes or something.”

Three tries very valiantly not to display the alarm it feels at this idea. It doesn’t quite stop its feathers from puffing up slightly, but smooths its emotions back to normal in a moment. It carries the masks over and shows them to Martyn.

“Oh, man, all of those are hysterical,” Martyn says. “Getting you to dress as Minecraft Michael Myers is the funniest idea possible. We’re going with—uh, actually, no, I can see your feathers puffing. But still! No one will be scared of you like that! Or guess you’re a Watcher under there! Wow, you’re good at picking.”

“Will comply,” Three mutters.

“We’ll get you changed at home, no need to make you take off your mask in this place,” Martyn says.

Three is unfortunately very grateful for this. This store is far too busy for removing its mask. If it tried to remove its mask here, it may become as sick as Jimmy was on walking in.

“You up to pick clothes?”

Three wants to be separated as far as possible from wearing any of the masks it has just picked, although they’re at least more dignified than the paper bag. The question is clearly meant for Jimmy anyway. It turns to Jimmy, who nods, and they exit the store.

Three feels like it can breathe again. Jimmy actually sighs out loud. Martyn rolls his eyes. “I can’t believe I stole a weapon and they’re as much of a drama queen as you are.”

“You know it’s not drama.”

“…yeah, I know.”

The clothing store is all in sensible whites and blacks. Armor stands display the clothes. “You pick out what you want, I have enough diamonds on this server to handle it,” Martyn says, and great. Even less guidance exists here than existed for the mask. Three doesn’t even know where to start. It supposes it will simply pick mission-ready clothes; as much as the mask will not be mission-ready, if it buys all-black, easy-to-move-in clothes, it will be most prepared for whatever tasks Martyn and Jimmy give it later.

Jimmy frowns and picks up some other clothes as well. They are not in Jimmy’s size. Three doesn’t understand the point.

New wardrobe in hand, they leave to go back to the house. Three is perfectly fine with everything it has gotten, and has no issues with any of it at all.

---

That night, at dinner, Jimmy suddenly says: “You’re not ordered to sit at the table, but we’d really prefer if you did. Instead of running off to hunt your own food.”

“We would?” Martyn says.

“Shut up,” Jimmy says.

Three doesn’t understand what that means. What does that mean. If they’d ‘really prefer’ it sit at the table, that’s the same as an order, isn’t it? Won’t it be punished if it doesn’t comply? But Jimmy explicitly said it was not an order, which means it is, well, not an order. If it is not an order, then Three does not need to comply. But if Three doesn’t need to comply, why bring it up at all? It’s a trap. It’s a trap and Three is going to be punished either way. Three knows it. Everything today has been a trap. The masks, of which Martyn chose one of the most embarrassing. The knitting, which Three is not good at. This.

It’s all a trap to punish Three. Three is already going to need reconditioning; it makes sense the sort of people that would steal it would do everything in their power to trap Three into a situation where they could justify it. Listeners are all about the illusion of choice. This is a thing Three has been taught. They are all about the illusion of choice, but those choices are a trap. Like this. This is a trap. There isn’t actually a choice.

Martyn frowns. “Oh,” he says.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says.

“I knew it was this bad,” Martyn says.

“No, you didn’t,” Jimmy says.

This bad? It hits Three that it has taken neither action. It takes the fastest solution and sits at the table. Robotically, it takes chicken from the plate. It is complying. It is complying. It is comply—

The chicken is good.

Three’s not sure how or why it knows that. It doesn’t normally eat cooked chicken. It’s not sure it ever has before. But. Compared to the largely raw and roasted meat it gathers for itself. There’s a glaze on the chicken. It’s made of berry. It’s—it’s a little burnt, actually, but it’s—it’s good.

Three grabs more chicken. If it is to be punished, it will at least get one thing it enjoys.

“There you go,” Jimmy says. “You can go hunting if you’d prefer it, but you can eat here. No tricks. Every night. That’s… not an order?”

“The order’s that you pick which one you like,” Martyn says.

“Yeah, what he said.”

Three’s hands shake.

“Do you like the chicken?”

“It’s good,” Three says. Any handler would like to hear something like this is good. A reward is always good. Three feels oddly like crying. It doesn’t understand. It really doesn’t understand.

“I know you’re lying because I burnt it,” Jimmy says.

“No, it’s good,” Three says forcefully, and then stops. There’s a moment of quiet.

“Hah. Stop putting yourself down,” Martyn says. “Three says it’s good even if it’s a bit burnt, so you know it’s got to be good!”

It still isn’t punished.

“Fine, fine. You still have to cook tomorrow,” Jimmy says.

“Well, I am home to do it,” Martyn says.

It isn’t punished. It isn’t told to stop taking the chicken, despite the fact that surely this sauce had to have taken effort, and must be in somewhat limited supply as a result.

Surely.

It won’t push its luck. It won’t say anything for the rest of the night. These are Listeners, so Three will make as little sound as possible, and will enjoy the berry sauce on this chicken, for whatever amount it is capable of enjoying things, and it will try not to think of the reconditioning and punishment this will surely lead to in the future. That is what it must do. Right?

---

On the bed with its knitting materials, Three is startled to see the red harlequin mask, with black patches sewn across the eyes that Three will not be able to see through. There’s a pile of clothing as well. Graphic t-shirts with a variety of jokes, symbols, and designs. Jeans. Sweatpants.

Most of it is red.

There’s a note.

“It was Grian’s favorite color too.”

It isn’t signed. Three holds the mask tightly. Okay. Is that an order to wear it? Is that an order not to?

Next to it, there’s the Minecraft Michael Myers mask, and the black clothes it had picked out, and everything it had decided Martyn and Jimmy must want for it. But one of them must have put these clothes here, too. There has to be a correct answer. Handlers always have a correct answer in mind, after all.

There wasn’t a correct answer at dinner. Maybe it just gets… punished either way… so it doesn’t matter?

It waits until all the lights are turned off before putting on the red mask. It will still wear the black clothes. It will find out if it is wrong in the morning.

This is stressful. It’s not sure it likes this new way of getting orders. It doesn’t want to sleep, and it has had more sleep lately than it is capable of remembering having had before, so surely ‘getting some sleep’ does not require sleeping every night? It can continue its other mission.

It can burn the knitting it has now, and start over with something new, and maybe this time, it will be perfect enough.

This is harder than wiping out servers or destroying evidence or assassinations or even sometimes reconditioning, it thinks, then it decides to try not thinking about anything but knitting for a while instead.

Three’s still not perfect at knitting, which is a problem, as the house feels like it’s getting more tense. This may just be in Three’s head; it isn’t normally on missions for this long without action. It feels like it is waiting for the moment it needs to start killing things again, but Martyn and Jimmy still live so far out that they don’t talk to other people, and there’s hardly anything dangerous around, and even when Three sits on the roof, it can’t really be reached by mobs. Taking pot-shots at creepers from the roof is hardly a mission, either.

It’s starting to figure out what to do with the red yarn, though. Its… favorite color. It supposes it likes red best. It hadn’t thought about it much, not until it had been told that red might be its favorite.

The red mask…

No one says anything about Three’s mask. No one says anything about the clothes. Martyn does say something about dinner, but the something he says is giving Three two options for what they will eat that night, and telling Three that, if it’s going to eat with them, it’s going to have to pick what they eat sometimes. This is stressful enough, given that while, as best it can tell, eating at the table had been the correct move, it has been given no information to tell it what sort of option Martyn wants it to pick. The choice is fairly simple—a stew Martyn had been working on, or steak—but Three hardly thinks it has enough information to fully decide.

Given stew is probably more nutritionally complete, Three suggests that. Martyn says ‘good choice’, and then doesn’t say anything else about that, either. It’s really rather concerning. It makes Three’s heart pound. One day, it is going to trip up. One day, it is going to be asked to make a decision it doesn’t normally make, and it will make it, and it will make the wrong decision, and Martyn will say something.

No one’s said anything about the mask, though.

It doesn’t work as well as the mask Three had from the Watchers, but it is more memorable, and Three thinks it likes it better. It shouldn’t have a preference on the matter. As long as its whole face is covered, and its eyes especially are adequately covered, what the mask looks like doesn’t really matter. It would have been fine dealing with an aesthetically unpleasing appearance, even if it’s not ideal.

It’s just… It looks very different now, doesn’t it? Changing what its face looks like so fundamentally, it makes it look… different. It didn’t even choose something all that non-threatening, given that most Players are disconcerted by masked faces, but it looks… different.

Three could almost be mistaken for not-a-weapon, not-a-Watcher. It’s odd.

Martyn and Jimmy don’t say anything about it, though, and don’t give Three any more missions, other than to do things like choose what’s for dinner, and so Three decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and to keep wearing this, before it’s forced to wear something far uglier because Martyn thinks it’s funny. Certainly, that would make more sense, but this is more comfortable, and Three rarely gets chances to be comfortable.

Being comfortable is probably bad for it, but it’s determined that this whole time being stolen is bad for it to such a degree that it’s dreading the moment it’s not stolen anymore. The amount of reconditioning that will be required is—and Three doesn’t want to be reconditioned.

It mostly suspects Martyn doesn’t know how.

They have stew. It’s not as good as the berry chicken. Three does not say so.

Three is developing favorites. The house is getting more tense. It’s not good at knitting yet, certainly not good enough to finish the mission. It doesn’t have another mission. It is trying to knit a scarf, and it is finally making stitches that are all the same size. Martyn asks about dinner. Three sits on the roof and takes more pot-shots at creepers and spiders and skeletons, but leaves the zombies alone, because frankly they won’t be a problem when morning comes anyway, and unlike the skeletons, they can’t reach it on the roof.

Maybe if it is less idle, the tension will stop getting to it, and it will stop expecting people to ask about its mask. If it clears its head with something it is better at than knitting, it will stop seeing Martyn and Jimmy looking at each other oddly, will stop feeling like it’s waiting for something big and important and no good to happen. It will know what the choice Martyn wants of it for dinner is, so it stops having to guess what the right answer is (although it has not guessed wrong so far).

It takes to outside to practice maintenance exercises. It could try them inside, but since there is outdoor space large enough for its wings, and no one seems to mind if it has them open, it will do that as well. It adds that to the routine with knitting, and can’t help but feel like they’re strangely pointless. What’s the point of practicing all of its sword stances if it’s never being asked to pick up a sword? What’s the point of practicing hand-to-hand motions if it doesn’t have to fight? What’s the point of staying in shape if it isn’t going to do anything with it?

What a strange, stressful purgatory.

It strikes it that it is technically a prisoner.

It hasn’t thought of itself like that yet so much as a stolen weapon, but it supposes that, if weapons can be prisoners, it is one? It won’t leave, of course. Technically, there’s nothing stopping it, but it’s not allowed to leave its handler without warning, and this certainly would count as “without warning”. But if it is being treated like a prisoner and not a weapon, it would explain why its only missions have been to do things like knit and sleep and become a less effective weapon.

It does not explain choosing meals.

Martyn asks it to pick another one. It’s always given two options. It hasn’t picked wrong yet.

---

The third time Three sees Jimmy replace and relight the candles by the photo in the alcove, Jimmy finally stops trying to shield it from Three with his body. Jimmy’s shoulders are low.

“It’s almost September,” he tells Three. “It will have been five years.”

Three looks at the photo. There is a smiling man in a green hat. He is blonde, and he has black eyes. He is holding a stick of TNT, and he looks like he didn’t quite realize the camera was there. He has the smile of a person who is laughing. He is a Player, and a largely human one.

“That’s Grian,” Jimmy says.

“Martyn says I might have killed him,” Three says. “I do not have data on prior missions. I only retain information critical to future performance.”

“I know,” Jimmy says. “’S why I didn’t want you messing with him. But it’s fine. I sort of realized—it’s a little dumb, blaming you for it if you did do it, right?”

Three wouldn’t know. Three thinks being blamed for killing someone it did, in fact, kill, would be the reasonable thing to do about it. However, if Jimmy has decided for some reason not to, Three is not going to argue with him. It’s generally for the best when Three’s handlers at least pretend to like it.

“It’s not like you know you can say no. Haha, that’s so stupid, right? You’re the most dangerous person in this room and you’re held in check by the fact that you don’t think you’re allowed to say no. Well, you are. Don’t think you or Martyn get that, but you can say no all you want. I did, sorta. Left and everything. I wouldn’t have started—but you really don’t get it.”

“I obey orders,” Three says.

“Yeah, I know. Have you considered stopping?”

Three stares, horrified. It only remembers to smooth its feathers back down after several long seconds.

“Gods, sometimes you remind me of him, the way you look, then you go and do something like this and it’s like, nope! You’re a Watcher superweapon Martyn brought home and I accidentally decided to be a little fond of!” Jimmy says. “What is our life.”

It’s not a question. Three squints at the picture behind its mask.

“He’s wearing green. You said his favorite color was red,” Three says.

“He decided to try to defy expectations for that one server,” Jimmy says.

“Oh,” Three says.

Jimmy stands up. “I’m going to be—everything is so messy. I’m normally more keyed up in September, because it’s—it’s not that I don’t remember all the time the rest of the year, especially since months server-to-server get weird, but it’s just. I’m glad no one around here has to go to the End or anything. Geez.”

Three watches Jimmy warily.

“You probably don’t even need to know all of this. Is our plan really just to keep you here? I don’t know. If you have any ideas for what to do with yourself, tell us,” Jimmy says.

That’s an order. “You could use me as an actual weapon,” Three says.

“Yeah, no,” Jimmy says. “No fighting. No making someone fight who doesn’t think they can say no. I’ve had enough of that in my life, thanks.”

Three’s feathers flare.

“Besides, you’d either have to fight me, and, uh, even when I was eclosed, no one thought I was going to fight anyone, I’m hurt too bad. Or you’d have to fight Martyn, and—and no. I’ve had enough of that, too,” Jimmy says. “I’ve had enough of a lot of things. It’s almost September, you know.”

“If you are to keep me prisoner, you could put me in hibernation,” Three says. “I will provide instructions on request. It is considered appropriate storage. Prevents degradation of conditioning, and requires less reconditioning in the future.”

Jimmy laughs hollowly. “Yeah, not after seeing you awake and like this. Gosh, what have we even gotten into,” Jimmy says. “You should consider saying no sometimes.”

“Will comply,” Three says, but it’s not sure it really means it.

---

“You know what, screw Jimmy,” Martyn says one day, and Three realizes it must have missed an argument. Odd. It hasn’t been paying attention to everything its handlers do and say, but it likes to think it’s normally more perceptive than that. “I will ask if you wanna spar.”

Three looks at Martyn. “Will comply,” it says.

“No, no, don’t—or, do? Ugh, I mean, listen. Do you want to fight me?”

This feels like another trick question. Three is tired, though. Three doesn’t want to dance around the question. “Yes,” it says.

Martyn pauses. “I… don’t know how to respond to that, actually?”

“You asked if I want to fight you. I do,” Three says.

“Yeah, okay, brought that on myself,” Martyn says. “Listen. I want you to spar me. I need to practice fighting Watchers. Long as you don’t actually kill me, should be fine, right? So let’s go, let’s fight.”

Three stares at Martyn for a moment. “Will comply,” it says as slowly as possible. It doesn’t bother dropping into a ready position.

Martyn stares back. “You know, I’m beginning to think you’re actually a deeply sarcastic person.”

Three obviously has no idea what Martyn is talking about, and obviously is only waiting for Martyn to fight, as he said he was going to.

Martyn seems to realize Three won’t make the first swing, and comes in first. It’s a fairly predictable attempt at a blow with a sword. It would get novices, and someone who was off-guard, but for Three, it’s child’s play to dodge. Martyn seems to realize this, and switches up partway through, but that’s child’s play to dodge as well. It barely has to exert that much effort.

“Ugh, shut up and actually fight!” Martyn says.

“I haven’t actually said anything,” Three says.

“I’m back on my feet. I’m fine,” Martyn says.

“Okay,” Three says.

As they talk, Three continues to mostly dodge. It has been told not to kill Martyn. While Martyn would likely respawn on this server if it did, on account of Three having done nothing to neutralize Martyn’s ability to respawn, it has still been ordered not to do a killing takedown, and that sort of thing would get Three in a great deal of trouble. Three is only supposed to kill people it has been specifically ordered to kill, permanently or impermanently. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be much use as a weapon at all.

Unfortunately, Three doesn’t know a lot of takedowns that aren’t killing blows. Most of them incapacitate in a single hit. This would be a blow to Martyn’s pride, and Three doesn’t think it’s wise to make a blow like that to his pride.

“I’m never going to finish learning anything if I don’t practice and—stop patronizing me, I can fight!” Martyn says.

Three didn’t think it was patronizing him?

“Fight back,” Martyn says.

“Is killing to respawn allowed?”

“Can you not fight without killing? What kind of person are you?”

“I am a blade,” Three says.

“Oh. Right.”

Martyn stops. Three squints for a moment, and then breaks Martyn’s leg in a single smooth motion with its claws. Martyn screams lightly and falls. “What was that for!” Martyn shouts, tearing up.

“You told me to fight back,” Three says.

“Not like that!”

“My apologies.”

“MARTYN!” shouts someone from inside, and Jimmy hobbles out. “What just—did you just try to fight Three? Hold on, I’ll get a healing potion. Why on earth did you do that? Martyn!”

Martyn appears to mostly be trying to hold it together. His pain tolerance is appropriately high. He is experiencing a level of pain many fledgling Watchers could not handle. It is a level of pain Three could easily handle, but Three is not a typical Watcher, and has training in this.

“I was thinking I need to be better at fighting these things, and Three would fight me if I asked,” Martyn says.

“You could always just stay home this time,” Jimmy says, shoving a healing potion into Martyn’s hands. He downs it.

“You know I can’t quit,” Martyn says.

“You could try,” Jimmy says.

“I’m going to take down the bastards that killed Grian and ruined all of our lives and you want me to, what, just stop?”

“You could not have the guy who can’t say no break your leg!” Jimmy says, throwing up his hands. “We have healing potions, but you know injuries like that can become permanent, and you know Three can make them permanent if they want!”

Oh. Okay, they’re going to talk about Three like it isn’t here now. It’s odd they aren’t being blamed, but Jimmy had just talked about this. Instead, Martyn and Jimmy continue quietly arguing about how safe or unsafe that sparring session had been. Three mostly thinks about the fact it clearly needs to brush up on non-lethal takedowns. Clearly, those are going to be valuable during its time here. Martyn obviously kills, true, but it seems that they don’t want Three killing.

Perhaps it will practice on zombies, instead of watching them from the roof. It would practice on creepers, but creepers tend to make poor practice companions for any sort of hand-to-hand, on account of exploding. Three knows how to survive an explosion, but that doesn’t tend to be relevant at any other time, so there’s no real reason to do it. Skeletons are probably also worth practicing on. Maybe it can get to the nether and practice on piglins—those are likely closer to a proper living anatomy for practicing.

“Okay, we got the healing potion on fast enough, at least. Thanks, Jimmy,” Martyn says.

“I wish you’d just stop,” Jimmy says. “One day, you aren’t going to come back.”

“Aw, you love me,” Martyn says.

“You’re the only friend I have left,” Jimmy says. “That doesn’t mean I like you for your personality.”

“You do, you love me!” Martyn crows.

“I—gosh, why do I stand you?” Jimmy says. “Gosh. I love you. That’s what you take from that. I love you.”

“It’s okay, I love you too, Jim,” Martyn says.

“Ugh,” Jimmy says. “That isn’t—this conversation isn’t over, it’s… It’s not fair of you to… I don’t know how to say it!” Jimmy throws up his hands. “It always ends like this!”

“Yeah, because nothing can take the Property Police apart! Healing potion has set, and we’ve got more, right? Let’s do another round. Fairer, this time. Come on, Three, having an actual partner to practice on means I won’t have to do everything stealth in the future.”

Three turns and prepares itself. It should be fairly easy to do another quick, nonlethal takedown. It will have to practice to make sure it stays nonlethal, but that is why this is a spar, and not a proper fight.

“No!” Jimmy says.

“Ahh, come on,” Martyn says. “We aren’t killing each other. That’s better than I’ll get on the field. Later, if it doesn’t mind respawning, I’ll try it again with killing blows.”

“I am unlikely to need to respawn,” Three says.

“See? Perfectly safe.”

“That’s not what that means,” Jimmy says.

“You can’t stop me from doing this,” Martyn says.

Jimmy looks between Martyn and Three. His expression cracks. “It’s—fine, but only if they also go knit after this.”

“Will comply,” Three says.

“If they want,” Jimmy says.

Three squints. “Will comply?” it says.

“I—I want to state for the record that I don’t like this. I think it’s a bad idea,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah? Who cares,” Martyn says.

“I shouldn’t,” Jimmy says, and he throws eight healing potions on the ground. “When they’re out, they’re out. I, you know I can’t go to—can’t go out by myself. To the nether. We’re out of blaze rods. So. That’s that.”

“Hey, that’s eight more broken bones!” Martyn says. “Thanks, Jim!”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “Yeah. Thanks, Martyn.”

Jimmy goes inside. Martyn turns to Three. “Right then. Let’s keep going!”

Three, almost immediately afterwards, gouges out one of Martyn’s eyes. It’s a startling and painful enough blow as to be incapacitating, and requires Martyn to immediately go to the healing potion. Martyn manages not to scream. Three raises its assessment of Martyn’s pain tolerance. With a bit more effort, Three is certain it can help bring Martyn to such a level of training that he won’t even start trying to scream with most of these injuries.

It can only assume that’s what Martyn really wants, because by the time they run out of healing potions, Martyn has only managed to land a hit once, and it was hardly even enough to bruise Three. Another Player, sure. Another Watcher, maybe. But Three, no. It’s at least impressive; most human Players wouldn’t be able to land a hit on Three at all.

As Martyn takes the last healing potion, this time for two neatly destroyed elbows, he admits to Three that at this point, he’s just proving a point, and later Three’s going to have to learn how to spar in a more productive manner. Like this, it apparently doesn’t teach either of them anything.

Three says: “I was unaware sparring was meant to be for teaching.”

Martyn laughs, a little bitter. “Yeah, I’ve started to get the sense they just tortured you until you got it, which shouldn’t have fucking worked, but hey! That’s the Watchers for you.”

Three doesn’t know what the difference between training and conditioning and reconditioning and torture is supposed to be, anyway, so it does not comment. They’ve all seemed similar enough. Maybe it’s just one more way the Watchers are more inefficient than they ought to be.

---

Jimmy doesn’t talk to Martyn at dinner, which is awkward. They are having mac and cheese. It is still not as good as the berry chicken, but Three thinks it likes it. Mentally, it adds it to the list of things it will try to find an excuse to request again.

It returns to knitting. As confusing as the knitting is, and as bad as Three is at it, and as much as it needs to burn this scarf again, because it tore part of it, which is a shame, because it really is starting to be almost perfect—as much as all of those things are true, it almost prefers the knitting to sparring. It should spar again. This will help it maintain its skills.

But. It decides that, unless Martyn and Jimmy tell it to, it will knit and take potshots from the roof, instead of practicing non-lethal takedowns.

It didn’t like the way Martyn screamed, it thinks. This is odd, because it has never really had much of an opinion on any of its targets screaming before. Maybe it’s just that targets don’t normally get many opportunities to scream, on account of shortly thereafter being very, very dead. Perhaps it’s the instincts it was built to have being upset that Martyn was still alive after the kill.

Three does not want to kill Martyn, either. This makes sense, because Martyn is its handler.

It doesn’t want to make zombies or skeletons or creepers scream, though. It doesn’t mind taking potshots from the roof.

It also wants to make a new scarf. If it knits a perfect scarf—is that really mastering knitting? It will need to knit more and more red things, to master that.

---

It’s late the next day, and Jimmy has only just started talking to Martyn again, when Martyn gets a message on his communicator, shrugs, and turns to Jimmy.

“Well, I’m out again.”

“What?” Jimmy says.

“You know,” Martyn says.

“You just got back,” Jimmy says.

“Well, one of us got to be a science experiment and left, and the other one of us got trapped in a contract to help try to take down those Watcher bastards, so yes, I’m leaving again,” Martyn says.

“You know you shouldn’t trust them either,” Jimmy says.

“Who said anything about trust?” Martyn says.

“Stay until dinner, please,” Jimmy says, and Martyn softens.

“Yeah, I will,” Martyn says.

“Can we be normal? Until tonight?” Jimmy asks.

“As much as the Property Police have ever been,” Martyn agrees, and then perks up. “Hey, I have an idea. Three, have you had any baking yet?”

“No,” Three says.

“Wanna try to learn to bake with me?” Martyn says.

“Will comply,” Three says.

“Excellent. We’re making lemon bars, then,” Martyn says, and he pulls out the recipe. Jimmy comes with them. There’s a lot of sugar in the recipe. While the citrus also has a certain amount of nutritional value, the overall value of the lemon bars will be quite low. Three knows that the idea of lemon bars is that they’re supposed to taste good.

Three goes to get some ingredients off the shelf. Jimmy pulls out the mixer. Martyn starts imperiously reading out the directions, with Jimmy adding his own interjections as they go. Jimmy says something about how lemon rind can’t possibly taste that good, it’s the peel, and Martyn says that’s what the recipe says, and Jimmy says that maybe they should just use twice as much lemon juice to make up for it, and Martyn says sure, and Three isn’t exactly an expert in baking, so it cannot tell them that this is a bad idea (even though it knows it must be).

From time to time, one of them asks if Three remembers that, because Three is going to make the second batch, if it wants, and should remember the changes it thinks will taste good. This is somewhat daunting, as the two things Three currently knows it thinks taste good are berry-glazed chicken and mac and cheese. However, it will do its best to comply.

It’s almost fun. It’s nearly as good as knitting, and definitely better than sparring, but not as good as berry-glazed chicken. Three is not certain why that’s so good, it just—it is. It is.

It’s exactly that good until the first batch is in the oven, and they are all just waiting.

“What am I supposed to do with the Watcher you’re leaving me while you’re gone?” Jimmy asks.

“Eh, they listen to you, don’t they?” Martyn says.

“I’m trying not to give them orders!” Jimmy says. “Trying to teach them to say no! You’re not doing so great at helping—”

“Excuse you, I’m so helpful,” Martyn says.

“They’re another problem you stole and dumped on my lap,” Jimmy says.

“How many of those do I do? I’m pretty sure I stole your problems first.”

Jimmy’s quiet. “Maybe so.”

“Anyway, if you’re so keen on teaching them what to do, why not ask them what they want while I’m gone? It’ll only be a few days. Come on, ask them what they want. I’m sure they’ll give a really helpful answer.”

“Fine,” Jimmy says. “Three, er, what do you want? You can say anything.”

Three thinks for a moment. It looks at the baking lemon bars, and back at Martyn and Jimmy, and thinks of everything that’s happened so far, and decides to take a risk.

“I think I want you to use ‘it’ when you are talking about me like I am not listening,” it says.

Jimmy and Martyn stare for a moment.

“Holy shit,” Martyn says.

“Wait, did you just make an unprompted decision?” Jimmy says.

Three’s eyes widen. Oh no. It did something wrong. “I do not mean—”

“No, no, that’s great!” Martyn says. “That’s—wait, clarification, the ‘it’ is a gender thing? Oh no. Oh no. I thought—dammit, now I feel like a tool.”

“Only now?” Jimmy says. “Er, but. Yes. If you want to use it, that’s—that’s great! Will do! Was trying to, I don’t know, think of you as a person? But you’re a person who uses it? Cool. Cool cool cool.”

Three waits. It’s probably not going to be long until they insist on something else, or yell at Three for making a decision out of turn. It can’t possibly be that long until that happens. It can’t be that long until the trap is sprung. It’s being asked for so many decisions, and it’s now been asked what it wants, and it said, because really it’s not a thing that matters that much, but it’s an it, and…

“I do not understand. Gender thing,” Three says hesitantly.

“Wait, but you know I’m trans, right?” Jimmy says.

“How is that related,” Three asks.

“Oh my gods,” Jimmy says, and Martyn laughs so loud he nearly falls over.

For the rest of the time the lemon bars bake, Jimmy tries to explain the idea of a ‘gender thing’ to Three. It sort of understands the concept, and, when asked, states that it is a blade as a ‘gender thing’. This makes Martyn laugh and say something about studying the blade. Three does not understand the joke, but at least it has made Martyn laugh. Jimmy and Martyn apologize, for some reason, which Three doesn’t really understand. Handlers have called it much worse things than ‘they’. The lemon bars finish baking.

They taste awful. They have put too much salt in them, somehow. Possibly, this happened while Martyn and Jimmy were originally trying to explain how to make them. Three commits the exact same recipe to memory. When it is its turn to bake them, it makes them the same way again. Imperfect.

Both Martyn and Jimmy are laughing, then. They say Three has pulled a prank. Three responds that it had just been following orders to make the same recipe. Martyn says something about Three being sarcastic again.

It feels good. Three can’t explain it, but—it feels good.

---

The next morning, Martyn is gone for his mission. He does not leave a note. Jimmy stares out the door, but does not leave the house, for the next two hours.

In some ways, the house doesn’t change at all when Martyn’s gone. Jimmy still only leaves when he has to, and spends a lot of time on his own, and Three still knits, and sits on the roof, and sleeps. It’s a little anxious about Martyn leaving without saying much, true; Martyn is technically its handler, not Jimmy, and letting Martyn leave feels counter to what Three is normally meant to do. But above all protocol, Three is meant to listen to its handler, and Martyn had been clear that Three was not to be discovered by Martyn’s own handlers, so following him would not be optimal.

It’s still strange, knowing its handler is off completing some mission, and it is not. Stranger than it would be to be, presumably, fighting Watchers on command. It is not as though Three has not done that before. That would make sense.

Instead, Three is at the house, and Jimmy is quiet.

Jimmy forgets to come up with something for dinner. Three considers whether he wants to talk to it at the moment, then decides discretion is the better part of valor. While Martyn is Three’s actual handler, it has been made clear that Jimmy counts as a proxy. It’s never a good idea to upset a handler. When a handler is already upset, Three simply tries its best to predict what that handler will want or need, and retrieve that for the handler, whether they expect it or not.

Three is pretty certain Jimmy will need to eat.

It leaves. Jimmy does not try to stop it. It hunts down a pig. It knows how to make pork. It will not try to make berry chicken, because it’s absolutely certain it won’t be as good as when Jimmy made it, but it can try to make something with honey, maybe? Honey and pork have to taste good together, right? Or sugar and lemon? The lemon bars from the other day—that was one of the first times Three had made food intending for it to taste good, instead of simply being edible. Perhaps if it just… takes some of those techniques?

It’s brought the hunted pork and the honey and the sugar into the kitchen and is staring at it blankly when Jimmy walks in.

“Oh, are you cooking dinner?” Jimmy asks. His voice is very quiet.

“Yes,” Three says.

“Thank you,” Jimmy says. “I—to be honest, wasn’t really feeling up to it. You don’t have to make something for me.”

Three stares at the ingredients again. The whole point of making this was for Jimmy. It doesn’t matter what Three is making for itself; it would have chosen to just eat the pork. It decides to disregard.

If the Listeners want to pretend Three has choices, then Three will take the opportunity. The choice here is whether to cook dinner for Jimmy. Three is going to cook dinner for both of them.

“I’m going to go lie down,” Jimmy says. “Sorry. It shouldn’t upset me that much. Just—could always be this time he doesn’t come back. And he never warns me. And it always hurts him. And it’s—the world’s so loud.”

“Okay,” Three says, acknowledging Jimmy before turning back to making dinner. It watches Jimmy leave behind it as it starts staring intensely at the pots and pans. Maybe the honey can be used to make… some kind of glaze? It will put the lemons and the sugar in the honey and… cook it? That seems about right, based on what it had learned from baking, but it’s not very certain. It thinks it remembers that cooking and baking are two different things. It also knows that pork probably shouldn’t taste like lemon bars, although it’s probably fine if it tastes a little bit like that, right?

Slowly—very slowly—it starts turning up the heat on the stove. A simple honey glaze, and then it cooks the pork, and then it has a reasonable meal. How hard can it be?

The plate Three throws down in front of Jimmy, in the end, is burnt. It had considered throwing it out, like the knitting, but then neither of them would have anything to eat for dinner at all, and that is even less acceptable than a less-than-perfect meal. Jimmy stares at it. Three attempts to stare right back. It will not act as though it understands anything is wrong. It will act like this is normal pork, and a normal meal, and perhaps Jimmy won’t punish it?

“You, er, aren’t a great cook,” Jimmy says.

“I am not trained in cooking,” Three says through gritted teeth.

“Yeah, I can tell,” Jimmy says. Three valiantly does not flare its feathers. “It’s, uh. Still better than nothing? Geez. Trying not to be ungrateful here, I was just not going to eat…”

“I will accept whatever punishment—”

“You still think we’ll punish you?” Jimmy interrupts Three to say, and Three stops talking. It’s crossed a line, it knows it has. It did this without asking, and now it said something Jimmy doesn’t like, and Jimmy is… upset Three thinks it will be punished for this. Hm.

Maybe Three’s understanding of the line is not as good as it thought. Maybe the line isn’t really there. It doesn’t know. But.

Slowly, it says: “You and Martyn. Punished each other for wrongdoing.”

Jimmy looks at Three for a long while.

“Geez,” Jimmy says, and doesn’t say anything else. The two of them eat in silence. Martyn’s chair is empty. It’s quite a noticeable absence. Three hopes he doesn’t get killed. Three isn’t certain what it is programmed to do if a handler dies on a mission, but Three has found being stolen… acceptable. It doesn’t want to go back this soon. It wants to…

It wants.

It wants, and it wants many things, it realizes.

“Geez,” Jimmy says again, quieter. “Geez. Figures we’re dysfunctional even to the weapon. Geez.”

He says ‘geez’ like it’s a much stronger word.

“We’re in over our heads and I don’t even know how long Martyn will be gone,” Jimmy says. “I can’t do this by myself. Can’t do this even when Martyn’s here. I can’t.”

Three’s learning a lot of things about itself tonight. For example, it’s learning that it’s not sure it appreciates being referred to as a thing to be done, and that it’s not sure it minds burnt pork, and that it should learn to cook. It’s learning that even when the routine is almost the same, a place and a pattern can still feel nearly empty, when left to its own devices like this one has been.

It’s learning it can ask questions, too.

“If I give you imperfect mission results, will I be punished?”

“Imperfect mission—Three, you know what, your only mission is, I don’t know, be yourself or something. Can’t possibly fail that.”

Jimmy looks at his hands and sighs.

“Yeah. Can’t possibly fail.”

This doesn’t answer Three’s question. It determines, through context clues, that the answer might be no. It is getting much better at context clues now.

It leaves Jimmy with his plate, only partially eaten, and goes to bed and stares at the ceiling. One of its missions is still to get some sleep, and it finds it wants to keep doing that, now.

---

Jimmy apparently has a whole phonebook full of people who won’t talk to him. Three discovers this the next day, as it slowly decides to try actually finishing a scarf instead of burning it. The pattern is a simple one of knits and purls, and leaves it much time to Watch Jimmy continue to try to call people and fail.

The first three people Jimmy calls are all Martyn, just at different numbers and comm codes. He answers none of them. This isn’t really surprising, given that Martyn is currently probably dark for the mission. Still, watching Jimmy shout something about how he’s not very good at taking care of Three and is going to call for help and sorry for giving away a secret is… concerning.

Martyn had been very clear that Three is supposed to be secret. No one is supposed to know Three is here, or what Three is. Also, Three is a weapon of mass destruction. Three can take care of itself. It can even knit, and start to learn to cook.

The next person Jimmy calls is someone named Netty. He intentionally seems to have let this one go to voicemail. He just says that Martyn is out again and hangs up. He doesn’t seem much like he expects a real response.

Next, he starts rotating through numbers. Three doesn’t know most of the names. A call to someone called Zee that starts with “I know you never liked me”. A call to a Mini that starts “This is bigger than our arguments”. A call to a Pearl that starts “Listen, I know it was my fault”, a call to a Tom that starts “This isn’t a joke”, a call, a call, a call, and none of them answer.

He hovers over the last number (a Taurtis). He hits the number. The screen helpfully displays that the number has been disconnected. He stares at his phone.

He’s out of numbers, Three realizes.

Jimmy shoves his phone in his pocket and gives up for the time being. “Maybe there’s like, a self-help book somewhere? I don’t know why I thought someone would answer. Why would I need help? I’m the best. I’m the best at, at rehabilitating. No one else like me to do it, is there? I mean, who else has left the Watchers or the Listeners! Personally, I don’t know them. Nope. Don’t know them one bit.”

He stands up and starts walking away. “I mean, look what I’ve already done! I’ve gotten the thing knitting, and cooking dinner, and the other day it even talked back at me! I’m a right saint, I am. Don’t need Martyn, don’t need help, don’t need self-help books, don’t know what I was thinking there. I’m perfectly qualified for this task and there isn’t anything anyone can say otherwise about it!”

A pause. Three watches Jimmy look up at where Three is and wince. Given Jimmy can absolutely hear Three, it thinks he has just realized Three can absolutely see him.

“You know, it would be nice if anyone I trusted still liked me,” he mutters, looking down and away, probably assuming Three can’t hear. It can’t, but it can lipread.

“Right then. Step one. I don’t know what to do for step one. I’ll improvise. I can improvise by myself! I can’t go outside by myself, but I can improvise,” Jimmy says, and then he stares at the door for a while.

“…I need something better than ‘I can improvise’ to tell Three,” Jimmy says, and, oh. He doesn’t know that Three can see him. That is fair—Jimmy is downstairs, and there is solid flooring between him and Three, and Jimmy only seems to have interacted with Watchers that are openly trying to kill someone, not Watchers who are just Watching. But Three is knitting, and the pattern is easy, and it’s easy to watch Jimmy pull out his phone again and try not to look at the call history of dozens of unanswered phone calls.

Three thinks Jimmy must not be very good at phonebooks, if the only people in his don’t answer him. Three wouldn’t know, it doesn’t have one, but that seems counter to the point. Little bit sad, really.

Three decides that’s enough that it’s going to have to pretend it didn’t watch, though. Jimmy doesn’t think Three could see, which means, unless he asks, Three didn’t. It wouldn’t do to make Jimmy mad and have him start claiming Three was spying on him. He wouldn’t be the first handler who had.

---

Three isn’t quite certain what the plan Jimmy improvised was meant to be, because almost as soon as he goes to try to tell Three, he also accidentally lets all one-hundred and forty-seven sheep out of their sheep pen while trying to get extra wool. He screams and covers his head. “Oh no! Betsy!”

Three comes out and frowns. “Which one is Betsy?” it asks, as that one must be important—

“All of them,” Jimmy says.

“Ah,” Three says. It had forgotten. As fond as it may be getting of its new handlers, they are, in fact, still idiots.

“You have to help me,” Jimmy says. “Martyn can’t come back and find out I let out all our sheep. Where are we gonna get wool?”

“You could build a wool farm,” Three suggests tentatively.

“That seems so mean to the sheep?” Jimmy says.

“You had one-hundred and forty-seven sheep,” Three says.

“I need a lot of wool. It’s important if I break my headphones, I need it to insulate sound, and I had gotten into knitting,” Jimmy says.

Three considers pointing out that yes, but that does not make it any less cruel to the sheep. It then decides that would be cruel to Jimmy, on account of the fact he does not seem to understand the problem in the first place. It also considers the merits of just building a wool farm. Maybe then the sheep would not be in a patchwork of colors, and there could be more red wool? Maybe it would be possible to fix the affront to good visual sense that is Jimmy’s soundproofing, if they had more consistent collections of wool colors?

But first.

“Oh man. BETSY! COME BACK!”

“Do you have wheat?”

“Do I need it?”

It is going to have to start from basics. It is not entirely certain how to wrangle sheep, but it knows holding wheat in one hand normally makes them follow you. It had been under the impression this fact was impossible not to know, if one had been alive and on any server at all for any length of time. Sheep aren’t uncommon. Jimmy had one-hundred and forty-seven of them.

“You will chase the sheep with the wheat,” Three explains.

“I… can’t exactly do that one,” Jimmy says, gesturing to his cane.

“You have wings.”

“Yeah, not… not what I need for this,” Jimmy says. “Look, can you do it? I’ll stand in the middle of the pen with wheat, will that work?”

“Will comply,” Three says, because it’s not an awful plan, at least.

It’s easy to forget what Jimmy might have been trying to plan in the somewhat confusing attempt to corral sheep that followed. About ten minutes into the effort, Jimmy sits down with a wince, and Three realizes his injured leg must still be hurting him. It’s an old injury, one that clearly goes so deep even respawning doesn’t fix it. Either it’s tied up in Jimmy’s self-image, or it was made by someone who could intentionally inflict wounds like that, such as a Watcher, or a Listener, or a Player with knowledge that Players aren’t meant to have.

It makes it somewhat more forgivable that Jimmy isn’t helping much with the sheep, as does the fact he’s starting to curl in on himself from the amount of time outside. Three wonders how he handled the Halloween store. Maybe it really was as simple as having someone else with him?

If Three took off its mask, it wonders if, with other people—

It does not want to do that.

Partway through corralling sheep normally, it decides it’s going to give up and start throwing sheep into the pen instead. It is not good at herding when it is not herding panicking things, and every time it scares the sheep, Jimmy gets inexplicably sad. It is good at throwing things. Throwing the sheep seems like a reasonable solution.

“Three,” says Jimmy. “What are you doing to Betsy?”

“Throwing it,” Three says.

“Poor Betsy,” Jimmy says.

“Do you want me to throw them or scare them?” Three asks, and it doesn’t bother disguising its growing annoyance.

“Throwing them is better, I guess,” Jimmy says. “Oh. Shoot. I was meant to—if you’re actually upset, you don’t have to do either, though. Throwing them or scaring them? You can go inside. This is my mistake. I mean, normally the sheep love me so much, I can’t imagine why they ran off! I mean, I guess I can, they do probably need a bigger pen. And they do have a good reason to associate me with the fact it’s not bigger in the first place. And to be honest, I guess I do know, it’s just… Man.”

Three isn’t sure what it’s supposed to get out of that. It can, however, offer: “Throwing the sheep makes me feel better.”

Jimmy laughs. “That’s so mean!”

Three isn’t mean, it is just being honest.

“Why on earth does throwing things make you feel better?”

“Then I am making meaningful progress towards the task,” Three says.

“That was meant to be rhetorical,” Jimmy says, “but that feels deep, somehow.”

They get the last sheep in. Jimmy doesn’t stand up all the way, so Three offers its shoulder in the way it has seen Martyn do to help take Jimmy inside. Jimmy leans hard against Three.

“I had a plan. I was going to use this to. I don’t know. Teach you that you don’t have to listen to me or Martyn. Instead I’m making you throw sheep. But I didn’t want you to! So that’s progress!”

Three still thinks Jimmy’s an idiot. It doesn’t say. It thinks it may be obvious anyway.

---

Jimmy’s phone is on the table during dinner. He smiles weakly at Three.

“Martyn hasn’t sent any word. I, uh, know I need to go get more food later. And go to the nether for blaze rods. If you want to, you can do that, I’m not good at the nether, but I won’t make you.”

“Okay,” Three says.

“Man, you’re really bad at cooking,” Jimmy says.

Three is offended. It thinks the steak it made is fine. It is thoroughly cooked, all the way through, in such a way that leaves none of the meat raw. It is not burnt. True, it is a bit tougher than when Three eats steaks normally, but that is because Three is perfectly equipped to eat a cow raw. It understands that cooked food is better for health recovery and for taste.

“I have never met anyone who is this spectacularly bad at cooking,” Jimmy continues. “I was beginning to think they made you to be good at everything except, like, being a person? So the fact you’re bad at cooking is great! I can absolutely mock you for that. Just give me time to figure out how to.”

“I was not intended to be a person,” Three says.

“What?”

“You said the one thing I was bad at was being a person. That is outside of my parameters.”

Jimmy looks at his phone. “Geez. I don’t know—we’ve already had this conversation, right? You can do whatever you want. One of those things is be a person. I kind of want to make it your mission, but also the knitting is still way funnier.”

Three is getting the sense Jimmy does a lot of things because they’re funny.

“I can feel a bad day coming tomorrow, though, so, uh, new order: why don’t you go… man, I don’t even know.”

That is singularly unhelpful.

“I will make a nicer bedroom,” Three says, hesitantly.

“Look at you. Making decisions even when Martyn isn’t here. He’s going to be so jealous he missed it, by going and getting himself killed,” Jimmy says, and stabs at his well-done steak.

---

Three finishes its scarf in the middle of the night on the roof, and tries not to watch Jimmy have a nightmare. He keeps mouthing names Three doesn’t know, but mostly two names it does. Three does not know the protocol for nightmares in handlers. Previous handlers were Watchers, and while even Watchers can be inclined to nightmares, they are not inclined to show it. Both Martyn and Jimmy have nightmares. Previously, though, they had not been so violent.

Three remembers how Jimmy kept repeating that he couldn’t do things on his own, and how Jimmy kept repeating that Three should make its own decisions. Decisions for the health and well-being of its handler are the sorts of decisions Three is meant to be able to make in a combat situation. Nightmares are not combat. They are similar enough.

Three goes inside. It hangs the scarf outside its door. It goes down to Jimmy’s room. It is uncertain how to fight off nightmares. Surely, however, if it keeps watch, it can do so.

It misses Martyn. Martyn is better at fighting nightmares. Martyn argues a lot with Jimmy, but Jimmy shakes a lot less when Martyn is there to hold his arm.

(It’s strange, how that works.)

Three keeps vigil. It spreads its senses out. It does not see any threats that may enter the house. It starts counting Betsy instead. It already knows how many Betsys there are, on account of having just put them all back in the pen, but it would like to know where they are sleeping, and keep them in order. Maybe then it can convince Jimmy he needs a wool farm, and use some of the Betsys that would be upset by the idea instead.

It—

“You,” hisses Jimmy, hoarse, voice echoing around the inside of Three’s head the way only a Listener’s can, and Three pulls its senses inwards.

Jimmy is reared back. He looks less human than Three has ever seen him. His lips are pulled back to reveal normally-hidden mandibles. His eyes gleam. There’s a sense of motion about his skin that’s uncanny to watch, strangely rigid around the joints, even given that Three knows it’s not skin. Claws that are normally retracted back into his fingers are fully extended, long and disjointed in the way only bug legs and Listener claws can be.

“Ready to comply,” Three says after a moment to assess.

“You. Why are you here? Haven’t you taken enough from me? I’m not—after everything that’s happened, I’m not letting you take me too!”

“Will comply,” Three says.

Jimmy drags himself to his feet. He’s immediately crooked against his bad leg, hissing as his weight hits it, but he stays standing. Hysterical strength. He is still having a nightmare, Three realizes.

“Get out of our house. Get out of our house.”

Three starts to step back. “Will comply.”

“Get out! Get out! And—and if you dare—I can’t watch Martyn die too get out get out get out!”

Three is not designed to disobey orders, and it certainly isn’t designed to disobey orders from a handler that is primed to attack.

Three gets out.

---

The next morning, Three keeps an eye on Jimmy from the roof. He is checking his phone. He stares at it for a moment. He laughs. “Of course not. I’m going to have to figure out who to sound pathetic enough to.” He looks up at the roof from the inside. “Three, you can get in here for now.”

Three climbs off the roof and comes inside.

“Right. Sorry for snapping at you last night, I guess. I didn’t realize—server time zone shifts. Haven’t lived in one place for long enough for… It’s basically September.”

Three continues watching Jimmy.

“I need to leave for a little bit. If I’m going to have bad days, I need… I need space. For a little bit. Just a day. Can you do that?”

“Will comply,” Three says.

“I’ll find someone to do… something. I don’t know. Someone who’s better at being a person than me.”

“Understood,” Three says.

“I just need. I don’t know what I need, okay? I don’t know.”

“Understood,” Three says.

“Oh,” Jimmy says, and Three stands silently at parade rest. “Oh, man. Martyn’s going to kill me.”

Three thinks that its Listener handler is far more similar to its thief handler than different, but does not say it, because most handlers do not like it when it speaks out of turn.

“I’m not mad at you, I think,” Jimmy says. “You know what? Screw it. I’m going to call the biggest pushover I know. I already did, but—but this time I’m gonna be mean. Yeah! I can be mean! I was a cop! That was basically my whole thing, being mean!”

He pulls out his phone and dials a ‘BigB’. The phone rings several times before going to an answering machine again. “Hey, man, it’s kind of an emergency. Can you come watch my place? You wouldn’t have to see me at all. I will owe you. You like that, right? Thanks!”

Jimmy hangs up. Three minutes later, ‘BigB’ is the first person Jimmy has tried to contact in two days that actually answers him.

“Hey, Jimmy. Sorry I missed your calls. What’s up? You don’t call.”

Jimmy covers the phone and laughs. Three does not think the laugh sounds very nice. It sounds more like crying, or when Martyn was screaming.

“Yeah, I don’t call. Sure,” Jimmy says. “I can’t stay mad at you. Barely your fault anyway. Look, I… it’s a long story I have to explain in person, but Martyn is gone again doing Martyn things and I need someone else to help. It’s not something I want to get you mixed up in, but…”

“Hey, I’m curious,” BigB says. “I can come by. Are you all still staying in that weird pay-to-win server?”

“It’s not pay-to-win, it’s operating costs for the server currency,” Jimmy says, “and if an Admin hears you call it that I’ll be in trouble, so can it.”

“Yeah, you’re still staying in that weird pay-to-win server,” BigB says. “Haha. Yeah, sure. I’ll see you in a few? Gotta grab a few things if I’m coming by.”

“Thanks, man,” Jimmy says. “I know you don’t owe me any favors. Lord knows you don’t owe me any favors. But…”

“Jimmy, you are literally the only other person who bothered staying in contact, man,” BigB says.

“Haha. Yeah. Barely even tried,” Jimmy says.

Three thinks of dozens of unanswered calls.

“I can do this. If it sucks, hey, I leave. It’ll be fun.”

“See you then?”

“See you then,” BigB agrees. He hangs up. Jimmy stares at his phone.

“I don’t call,” he says, and he starts laughing hysterically again. Three doesn’t get the joke. “I don’t call. Sure. I don’t call. He’s so casual. He’s so casual. And he’s going to kill me, when I show him a Watcher, because of course he’s going to. If he doesn’t try to kill you. He’s bad at it, nearly as bad as me, but… I need to… I need… Can you go back to the roof? BigB’s a guy with a cookie on his jumper, you can’t miss him. He’s allowed in, if he shows up.”

“Will comply,” Three says. Three hesitates. “I finished a scarf, if you desire it. I have not completed my mission to learn to knit. The scarf is… imperfect. I will burn it if—”

“No,” Jimmy says.

“Will comply,” Three says.

“I’m gonna wear the scarf, I just can’t stand to look at you right now,” Jimmy says.

“Understood,” Three says, and it goes to the roof.

It takes potshots at more creepers. It keeps watch for BigB. Inside, Jimmy is crying into the scarf. He looks frightened.

Three, quite suddenly, wishes it had been created with the capacity to understand why.

“Man, why is there a Watcher wearing mittens standing behind you?”

“Because I gave it mittens, now get inside,” Jimmy says, as Three stands behind him, wearing mittens Jimmy had given it three minutes earlier and told it to do its best to look non-threatening in. Three is uncertain how wearing mittens does or does not make it more non-threatening, but it does its best to comply.

“Okay,” BigB says, “that’s not really the part I’m concerned about. You know that, right?”

“It won’t hurt me,” Jimmy says.

“You’re not looking at it,” BigB says.

“Just… come on inside so I can explain.”

BigB is a dark-skinned man in a blue jumper with a cookie on it. He’s tall and has a beard. He is, by all accounts, a rather average humanoid Player. Three wonders how Jimmy knows him, and why he is apparently trusted over other potential options, even though he did not immediately answer the phone when Jimmy called.

“I never really dealt much with these guys,” BigB says nervously as he walks into the house. Three follows. Jimmy closes the door.

“I know, I know, I just—you at least know what a Watcher is, which is better than—I mean, no one else was going to answer me, and I know a few people who aren’t you all—you know, bigwig Admin types, no big deal or anything, just got friends in high places—but no one who would know what to do with this.”

“Yeah?” BigB is. He sounds somehow doubtful.

“I do,” Jimmy says.

“And you’re still living on some random pay-to—”

“Shush.”

“Some random public server, then? Okay, Jimmy.”

BigB is good at sounding casual when he’s nervous, Three realizes. If Three were not designed to pick up on signals in people, it probably wouldn’t have realized that BigB has not turned away from Three the whole time he’s been in the room. He’s clearly scanned for exits. He has, ready to draw at any moment, an axe, which he must have picked up somewhere on the way here. It’s iron, which won’t do much against Three, but the thought is more than most people have.

“It’s complicated,” Jimmy says. “Look. Three here is—oh, wow, okay, explaining this takes a lot more poking at things I think Martyn would tell me are classified than I thought I remembered it would, actually. Uh. Are you aware of the the Watcher’s Blade?”

“No,” BigB says.

“Right. It’s a—so, the Watchers have this one guy, legendarily, who is basically a weapon of mass destruction? Like, mass atrocities and small-scale assassinations alike, if they really need someone dead and gone, they send this guy. Designed for the task. So Martyn stole it? That’s who Three is. Except it was brainwashed into a not thinking it was a person, not willingly doing those things, so once I got over being furious I figured, me and Martyn, we’d try to help it be not the Blade. Then the Watchers wouldn’t have one of their worst weapons and also Three would get a chance to try to be a person. With me so far?”

“No,” BigB says. “What on earth?”

“It’s—you haven’t spent the last five years deep in the Watcher/Listener stuff. This all makes sense if you’ve been in the kind of stuff Martyn and I have. Sorry you aren’t as cool as us,” Jimmy says.

“You don’t need to fake bravado about it,” BigB says.

“What? No, I am cool. Three, tell him I’m cool.”

Three hesitates.

“Never mind, don’t do that, I know you know, don’t need to tell anyone at all.”

Three does not, in fact, think Jimmy is cool, but it can keep that thought to its chest. BigB is an outsider. It’s best not to project weakness. This might be hard with Jimmy, on account of how hard he suddenly seems to be trying to project weakness on purpose, but an attempt can be made.

“Right,” BigB says.

“It’s just. Okay. I think—and I know this will come as a surprise, given how much I’m like, one of the only people out there qualified—but I don’t think Martyn and I have been doing a great job and also it’s September, BigB.”

BigB finally takes his eyes away from Three to look at Jimmy intensely. “So what, you’re trying to get me to help out with it instead?”

“I’m—you liked to talk about community. You—you still do, I know you kept contact with everyone else where I couldn’t,” Jimmy says. “I only want to trust someone who already knows with this. We can’t go telling the Watchers or Listeners. If we accidentally make them look at us—”

“You lose your human weapon? This seems kind of dangerous, man.”

“It is,” Jimmy admits. “It wasn’t my idea, but it’s… I think it might be the right thing to do now. I’m not sending it back to them.”

BigB looks at Jimmy for a while and sighs.

“You just need me to babysit?”

“That seems rude. Three is an adult. It’s watching out for a threat, not babysitting. But yeah. I need someone who isn’t me or Martyn and was less…”

“Less fucked-up by everything?” BigB says. “Haha. I’d say bold assumption, but…”

Both Jimmy and BigB stay there for a while. There’s a subtext here that Three is missing. It doesn’t have to try too hard to guess, though—there is a photo in the alcove, and there’s a candle in front of it, and it’s September. It couldn’t really be anything else.

Three wonders what the whole story is there, other than the fact it apparently is quite likely to be the story that murdered Grian. It’s not its place to ask, though.

“I need to get away before I do something I think Three doesn’t deserve,” Jimmy says. “Just for a day. Teach it, I don’t know, something that defies authority? It’s kind of sarcastic?”

“Eh, I’ll think of something,” BigB says.

Jimmy hesitates. “I don’t normally leave the house much by myself,” he admits.

“Your life is kinda sad, man,” BigB says.

Jimmy looks at BigB for a while. “Sure,” he says. “Sure. I had a chance. Sure.”

“I didn’t say anything like that.”

“You were—you know what, never mind. I’m going to go fly to… There’s a hotel near spawn that lets you put wool up on the walls. I’m going there to try to get my head on straight. Make sure no one burns down the house. If someone other than Martyn tries to come in, come get me. If Betsy gets out again—thank you so much, BigB. I’ll. I’ll owe you for this. If anyone gives you trouble—”

“I always thought all the blaming you was a little silly,” BigB says, something very sharp in his voice. “I owe you.”

“You don’t. None of you do,” Jimmy says, and before anyone can argue, he leaves.

BigB sighs. “And this is why it’s hard to keep contact. I know he thinks we all hate him, but we aren’t all Taurtis.”

Three knows it shouldn’t follow Jimmy. It knows that, the past day, Jimmy has been strangely distant, rocking back and forth between trying to act like he’s fine and panic attacks. It’s not sure what triggered it. It’s aware that PTSD can be triggered by innocuous things, but it hadn’t managed to hit a snag this hard yet, and it’s not sure what it had done differently. Maybe Jimmy just has bad days, sometimes. Bad weeks. Sometimes his leg hurt more than normal. Sometimes his heart hurt more than normal.

It doesn’t seem right, somehow, but Three hadn’t wanted to say otherwise, because as much as Jimmy and Martyn had been trying to make sure Three made choices, the choice to argue that it didn’t seem right, the way Jimmy was acting, seemed like a bad one to make towards a handler. Three should keep its handler happy. Never mind that ‘handler’ was beginning to seem like an entirely arbitrary distinction that no one in this house cared about, just… It can’t break the rules. It is designed to follow the rules. It is designed to follow orders.

It is designed to not let its currently unstable handler leave and get hurt, and then blame Three for the failure.

If the source of that instability is Three’s fault, though…

This is all awfully complicated. Three doesn’t understand how to triage someone’s mind, just their head if they break it. Those are two very different things.

“So, uh, you’re one of those Watcher guys?” BigB asks Three slowly.

“Yes,” Three says.

“And I’m supposed to teach you how to be a person? You’re already pretty person-looking, I’m going to be honest.”

“I can flare my feathers if you would like confirmation,” Three says.

“No, I’m going to guess that’s freaky, like Jimmy’s mandible thing,” BigB says. “Have you seen that? He gives me the heebie-jeebies these days sometimes. Which is weird, because it’s Jimmy! How did they make Jimmy into someone unsettling, huh?”

Three considers whether to answer that with an explanation of what it knows of the eclosure process or to treat it as rhetorical. Also, even the other night, it hadn’t found Jimmy so much frightening as… It’s a hard thing to describe, actually. It had known it needed to obey Jimmy in that moment. Afterwards, the thing it felt hadn’t been fear. Jimmy has a bad leg, even when letting himself be fully a Listener, and always wears his headphones, and had clearly left the Listeners before getting much training. Three isn’t afraid of him. Three is afraid of something, but is not afraid of Jimmy. So it hadn’t been fear it had felt.

“He is not,” Three decides after a moment.

“He absolutely is. He isn’t even a butterfly. Butterflies don’t have mandibles.”

“Listeners do.”

BigB assesses Three. “You’re oddly protective of him, all things considered.”

Three frowns under its mask. “Am I?”

“Yeah, a bit, but it’s fine. Maybe he needs more friends that actually stick around.” Something churns in Three’s guts. “Anyway, uh, that’s enough serious talk for now? I think I could tell you that if you’re lying to spy on my friends I’ll kill you, but like, I don’t think I could do that if I tried? It’s probably all fine. I mean, not fine, given all I know about Watchers, but—sorta fine? Sorta fine.”

BigB is lying. He is still visibly nervous. The axe is still in range to draw, and Three suspects he probably also knows how to shout in a way that will attract Jimmy (or if he doesn’t, has a guess at it). Three is not certain how to fix that. The mittens aren’t helping. The mittens are stupid, actually. Three isn’t sure why Jimmy suggested them. They’re red and warm, though, so Three figures it can leave them on for the time being. If it really needs to, it can extend its talons through the wool easily enough. The point is the mittens seem to have done very little to make BigB less afraid. Three wonders if the scarf would work, but after quickly spreading its sight out around the house, it realizes that, despite saying he couldn’t stand to look at Three, Jimmy took the scarf with him when he left.

…huh.

“I can be protective of him, I think,” Three says.

“That’s great, buddy,” BigB says. “Uh. You know, I don’t know how to help someone be human either. I’m not sure why Jimmy asked me? Except that I’m the only person he knows who answered him. Man, his life really is sad. I can’t believe he turned into a… what’s the word… hik… uh, something hikam… herm… uh… shut-in.”

That sounds like an insult. It is, however, an insult that’s sort of correct. Jimmy rarely leaves the house.

“He has not been trained to withstand torture as I have, and blocking hearing can be more difficult than blocking sight,” Three says.

“Torture?”

“Yes. I have been trained to withstand torture such as: removing my mask, waterboarding, branding, plucking my feathers, w—”

“Okay, okay, geez, that isn’t what I—good gods, you really are a brainwashed mess. I don’t know what to… I did agree to this.”

He did. Three will not deny that he did. It also can take care of itself and doesn’t need babysitting. It can go up to the roof and knit. BigB does not look like he would be very fun to fight, or like he would want to, so it doesn’t think it should ask about that. It could even, from the roof, probably spread its vision out enough to find Jimmy, if not Martyn, since Martyn is off-world. It doesn’t need to. Jimmy can, despite all signs to the contrary, probably take care of himself as well. It could…

It looks around the house again and, on realizing something, turns around. “Excuse me. There is a task I must perform.”

The candle in front of Grian’s picture is getting low. Three carefully takes that candle, moves the flame to a new one, and sets the new candle, as it has watched Jimmy do several times before.

BigB looks at it, and then at the picture, and then at it, and sighs.

“Oh, Jimmy,” BigB says, and is quiet for a bit.

Three turns around. “That is done. I did not wish for my handlers to be upset if it wore down.”

“You don’t like upsetting people, do you?” BigB says. “Funny, given how much I just realized you look like Grian. If it weren’t for the fact your skin is freaky and moves, and that mask, and—huh.”

BigB is quiet again for so long Three decides he must be broken and can be disregarded. He’d almost seemed sensible before, so it is strange he isn’t now. Three decides that it is probably fine to go knit on the roof. It wants to have a scarf to give Martyn as well, when he gets home. Three will likely also have to prevent Jimmy from strangling him with it, but as that will be a trivial task, it seems like an acceptable risk.

BigB sits on the floor of the house for a while as Three does this. Martyn’s scarf will also be red, but with little green stripes. It is a good next step in its knitting ability.

It does this for several hours.

---

“You knit,” BigB says, climbing onto the roof himself.

“Yes. It was given to me as a mission. I will complete my task,” Three says.

“Of knitting?”

“I made a scarf for Jimmy. I am making one for Martyn,” Three says.

“You… really just… maybe I was wrong,” BigB says. “Right. Do you know what a prank is?”

“I am aware of the concept of a prank,” Three says.

“Tell me what you think it is.”

“It is a type of joke based in inconveniencing someone else.”

“Well, having been pranked enough times, I guess I can say it was inconveniencing,” BigB mutters. “But yeah, something like that. It’s normally doing something bizarre to mess with someone. It’s fun. I think you should try it.”

BigB is not Three’s handler. It can afford to look at suggestions like this with suspicion. “I am not designed to act against my handlers,” it says.

“No, no! Just… mildly inconvenience Jimmy. I think you might find it fun. He’s really fun to fluster. He actually likes it, too. Only person more prankable than Tom and I, really.”

Three considers. It seems strangely likely that Jimmy would enjoy being messed with. He does still live with Martyn, and he did lose all of his sheep. He’s easy to fluster. He’s also easy to make sad, and has bad days, and from what Three understands, pranks make people laugh. If he does hate the prank, then Three will simply blame BigB, and it thinks Jimmy will believe him.

“Okay,” Three says.

“I mean, he also likes nicknames—those are fake names you give someone instead of using their real name, based on their name or something they did—or at least, he did back when he actually talked to us. You can do that instead of a prank—”

“I’m going to prank Jimmy.”

“There you go,” BigB says.

“What should I do?”

“I want to see what you come up with.”

Three thinks about it a little bit. It doesn’t know what kind of inconveniences are funny and what are inconvenient. It thinks that maybe unexpectedness is a key part of humor? So, clearly, whatever it does should be somehow deeply unexpected.

“I could blow up this ugly house and replace it with something better?” Three suggests.

BigB snorts. “Oh my—no, no you cannot do that. You’re right, but you can’t do that, okay?”

“Okay. Is that not funny? It is unexpected.”

“Wrong kind of unexpected. I mean, uh, my house has been blown up a few times, and it was kinda funny, but not the kind of funny we’re going for here. Also, I didn’t know you could find the house ugly. Thought insulting Jimmy was beyond you.”

Oh. That was an insult to Jimmy. No one seems to care, though.

“I have eyes, and also many many light-receptors on my body in the form of mirrored feathers,” Three says as explanation.

“Yeah, I mean, fair. I’m not much of a builder? But like, if I were…”

“I am going to cover it in peanut butter.”

BigB squints at Three. “What?”

“You said blowing it up is the wrong kind of unexpected. This sort of prank is a different sort of unexpected.”

BigB thinks for a moment. “Yeah, you know what, why not? I mean, it’ll be a pain to clean, but Jimmy really shouldn’t have just given me unsupervised access to his house with a Watcher then. I may be here as a favor, but sometimes he still just… kinda deserves it.”

“I do not want to see the clashing colors,” Three says. “It will be better for Jimmy and Martyn as well. Maybe then they will blow it up.”

BigB starts laughing then. Three doesn’t get it. It especially doesn’t get why BigB starts to seem upset as he keeps laughing. “Man, what did I even just get myself into. Glad I actually answered him, but—what did I get myself into.”

“It would not kill anyone,” Three clarifies. “I know how to blow things up and only kill the people inside I actually want dead.”

“Yeah, I know,” BigB says. “I’m tempted to ask what your favorite block is.”

“I—Jimmy says my favorite color is red, so maybe a red one,” Three says. “That sounds irrelevant.”

“Sure. Sure,” BigB says.

“I need to retrieve peanut butter,” Three says.

“Let me go get it, then I want to see what you do with this. My treat, okay? Work on your scarf or something until I get back, I don’t know.”

“Will comply,” Three says, and turns back to the scarf. It is going to do a very good prank, which will either make Jimmy terribly angry, or make Jimmy very happy. Pranks have something to do with confusion, which is the root of humor. Three is starting to get the hang of this whole ‘emotions’ thing, it thinks, pleased with itself. It can’t see many ways this could go wrong. Maybe it will even get to at least renovate the house, so that it is no longer uneven, and it has matching colors. Surely that would be appreciated as well?

If not, well, it is not as though Martyn or Jimmy have good taste. Three knows this for a fact.

It weaves the green in with the red, and it does what it thinks can be described as ‘scheming’.

---

Methodically covering an entire house with peanut butter is not a particularly easy task. It is, however, a task that is repetitive, different than what Three had been doing before, and technically fulfilling something resembling a mission. It is not as satisfying as knitting, Three decides, nor is it as satisfying as clearing a battlefield on its own. However, there’s a certain sort of satisfaction to making sure the peanut butter is as smooth as possible. It’s a bit hard to do, on account of the materials the house is made of not being smooth, but Three perseveres, for the sake of the prank.

“I have to say, this is somehow officially the weirdest thing I’ve seen a Watcher do,” BigB says, and Three doesn’t respond. BigB has been talking at it a lot as it works. Most of it is fairly casual conversation. Three does not answer most of it, because most of it is irrelevant chatter. It’s irrelevant chatter in a very different way from how Martyn does it, however. Martyn does it because he likes to hear the sound of his own voice. BigB does it because he has a drive to be social. Three knows how to handle someone who likes to hear the sound of their own voice; Three does not have a drive to be social.

Every time Three fails to answer something, it can practically see BigB making tick marks in his head. It’s not sure why BigB is tallying what Three is doing. It’s trying to do the prank, as suggested. It is even a prank it came up with itself. Doing this displays exactly the kind of autonomy its handlers appear to want from it. It will be… funny, presumably. It’s not certain. BigB said it should do it, though, so if it’s not funny, once again: Three is blaming BigB.

Also, it thinks maybe BigB hasn’t seen Watchers do very many things. The sorts of Watchers that interact with Players regularly do enjoy testing them, after all. It’s a good process for finding Players who have the potential to be fledged, wiping out humans who have too high of potential to eclose, grooming Players to follow the will of the Watchers, and other assorted useful functions. From what Three has heard, those Watchers often enjoy making puzzling situations for Players. Surely, covering a house with peanut butter for a prank is not any more baffling than the puzzles, as puzzles are intentionally baffling, and the peanut butter is merely unexpected.

Then again, BigB hadn’t seemed all that surprised at the existence of Watchers, just the details Jimmy had mentioned. Maybe he simply has a weird combination of things that do and do not baffle him?

Either way, it doesn’t matter. Three is not that sort of Watcher. Three is the sort of creature that was designed to be a weapon of war. Some handlers had insisted Three was barely a Watcher, or not a true Watcher at all. This is silly—it is at least as much of a Watcher as most fledgling foot soldiers.

It is about as disposable too.

It pauses in the peanut butter. It hadn’t even stopped to consider what another Watcher might think of what it is doing right now. It has mostly just internalized that it is going to need more reconditioning than it has ever had to go through before. It has been on longer missions than the time it has spent stolen, but as its memory is largely wiped between missions, this is the one that sticks in its head, and this is, it is fairly certain, also the one time it has had a handler that is actively working against Three’s conditioning. But it thinks—it knows it is only supposed to have knowledge relevant to its mission as a weapon.

It doesn’t know if pranks, or knitting, or how good berry chicken tastes, or the color red, or Martyn, or Jimmy are knowledge like that. It will probably be wiped if it gets returned to the nest, and—

Funny. The memory wipe had never been as frightening as reconditioning before. It just wants to remember how this goes. It has been led to understand that the reaction is the good part of a prank, after all.

“You really don’t talk much. Beginning to think that instinct was wrong,” BigB murmurs. “Yeah, it’s… it’s probably just a coincidence. Weird fucking coincidence, but it’s probably got to be one, right? I mean, I was there when Jimmy brought—yeah, what are the odds I was right, anyway? I don’t think Watchers can resurrect the dead.”

Three doesn’t follow BigB’s thoughts at all.

“Can Watchers resurrect the dead?”

“No one can,” Three says. It does a good job of not making any incredulity shine through its voice.

“Just asking!” BigB says. “Just thought I saw a ghost.”

“Ghosts are not real, except on certain modded servers,” Three says.

“Yeah. I know,” BigB says.

Three goes back to the peanut butter. It likes the methodical nature of the task. It will never be perfected all the way, but since it’s a joke, that doesn’t matter. A lot of things not being perfect don’t seem to actually matter. It’s an interesting discovery. One day, it would like to know more about it.

---

“What did you do?” Jimmy shouts, between despair and incredulity, when he arrives back at the house well after the day has passed. Three is sitting outside, taking potshots at creepers. BigB is inside, but Three can see he’s already laughing.

“BigB taught me how to do a prank,” Three says.

“What kind of prank is this! Why would you do that! I thought, I don’t know, you’d make insinuations about the PP sign, or blow something up—”

“I suggested blowing something up. BigB said it was a bad prank.”

“It is! It is—but what is this!”

Three tilts its head to make sure that Jimmy can understand its general expression, even though it is wearing a mask. “I have covered your house in peanut butter,” it says slowly.

“Why?”

“It is unexpected, and therefore funny.”

Jimmy laughs incredulously. “I mean, sure, but how are we going to clean this up?”

“We can still tear down the house and start over,” Three says.

“Absolutely not,” Jimmy says, still laughing to himself a little bit. “Martyn and I built this together. I know it’s not very good, but I’m not getting rid of it.”

“Fine,” Three says. “Will comply.”

“That is the most pathetic I’ve ever heard you sound saying that.”

“Your house is pathetic,” Three says, and then flinches. It doesn’t know why it said that out loud. What was another one of the things BigB said Jimmy would like? Nicknames?

“Excuse you?”

“Apologies. Will comply. Timmy,” Three says—

And Jimmy freezes.

“Don’t call me that,” he says. “Don’t—only one person is allowed to call me that, and I carried about a quarter of his corpse across—don’t call me that. Don’t.”

Three steps back. “Will comply.”

Jimmy takes a deep breath. “Where did you even—”

“BigB said I should call you a nickname,” Three says. It is employing the strategy of throwing BigB under the bus, but it does not feel very good about it. It feels bad about it, actually. “I did not mean to choose one that upset you,” it continues slowly.

“No, no, it’s—it’s fine. You couldn’t have known.” Jimmy looks up at the house. “You do have to help me clean up, though. I’ll go send BigB off.”

Three nods. Jimmy goes inside. It looks at the peanut butter covered house. It’s not sure it exactly cheered Jimmy up, but it made him laugh. Perhaps it is a successful prank? Maybe it will have to try pranking again another time, in order to properly determine the level of success.

---

When BigB leaves, he whispers to Three: “I hope I’m wrong. I’m gonna do some asking around, okay? Hang tight.”

Three still doesn’t know what he means. The sentiment is strange, and BigB never pulled the axe from a ready position the entire time he was there, teaching Three how to prank.

It goes back to helping Jimmy wash off peanut butter.

The house still smells like peanut butter, no matter how hard Three and Jimmy work to clean it up. This, Three decides, is the downside to a prank like this: it will now have to smell peanut butter for quite some time. It’s worth it, though, for the incredulous way Jimmy reacts every time he finds peanut butter very carefully spread exactly through a small alcove in the build, or evenly spread across a fence, or the careful layer on the windows.

It is not sure how to follow it up. Apparently blowing up the house is expected, but also a bad prank and mean and Three should not learn to regularly do that, but also if Three did that Jimmy would manage, but also it’s a bad prank and Three’s not allowed. These are incredibly contradictory orders in a way that makes it completely impossible to decipher what, exactly, it is that Jimmy wants. Jimmy doesn’t want Three to blow up the house, but that’s a normal prank, but it would be expected and wouldn’t be funny, but it would be fine, but Jimmy doesn’t want it to? That is not a sensible collection of orders, that is indecision disguised as instructions.

Going out on a limb, Three says this, and Jimmy nearly chokes, but is not mad, so it is fine.

“You are ridiculously judgmental under all the people-pleasing,” Jimmy says.

This doesn’t solve the problem of what sorts of pranks are acceptable, or the fact the house still smells like peanut butter, and also Three thinks it’s an unfair assessment. Three is not ridiculously judgmental. It is a normal amount of judgmental, quietly, where no one can hear it. It is only speaking up because Jimmy seems to think it ought to, which isn’t being judgmental, it’s being a people-pleaser again. Also, people-pleaser feels a bit judgmental itself. Jimmy does not have room to talk.

It tries to ask about how to do better pranks, but Three isn’t certain Jimmy’s prank ideas are any better than its own. For example, Jimmy suggests the idea of making a mean song about somebody. This mostly seems pathetic to Three, and not worth pursuing at all.

For all Three doesn’t know how to follow up the prank that left the house smelling of peanut butter, though, there’s something much calmer to it than there had been in the past. The routine hasn’t changed overly much, and occasionally, Jimmy still has nightmares. Maybe it’s that Three no longer goes to try to guard the nightmares, or maybe it’s the peanut butter, or maybe it’s that Jimmy got his time away. Three has no way of knowing which it is. Whatever has happened, things are a little more relaxed.

Jimmy still has trouble remembering to eat, though, so Three has been trying to remember. It made soup badly. It found a recipe online, but it did not actually know how to properly simmer a soup, so it had burned. It also made fish, and that turned out better. It still doesn’t have anything as good as the slightly burnt berry chicken, though. It is beginning to think that even berry chicken wouldn’t be as good as that berry chicken, which feels like a silly thought, but it’s true.

The scarf for Martyn isn’t done, but Three is already considering other projects. Learning to knit is a very large mission, and scarves alone are not good enough. It should learn to stab people with knitting needles, for one, but also it thinks it wants to make sweaters one day. If mittens and scarves are things that help people calm down, then sweaters would be especially good for that.

Three is restless.

True, the house is calmer. Jimmy seems less like he may have a panic attack any moment. But Three is restless, and it’s not sure why. It’s probably not the peanut butter, though it admits it hasn’t spent long anywhere that smells of peanut butter before. It might be that fighting mobs isn’t enough to satisfy the urge for a good fight. It’s a little funny, actually—Three had once thought that during downtime, all it would want to do would be downtime. However, this has proven to be untrue. Three is still designed to fight. With nothing to fight, it is looking for one.

It might be that Martyn isn’t home yet, and that a fight might be out there, waiting.

Three is also designed to be paranoid.

That’s what it tells itself at first. It’s designed to be paranoid in situations that are unfamiliar to it, and unfamiliar is what this situation is. BigB’s nervousness and strange questions still rattle in Three’s head. It can’t fight nightmares. It’s paranoid. It doesn’t have enough to fight to get out its energy. This is a perfectly reasonable hiding place. Jimmy had invited someone else into it. Martyn keeps leaving and coming in.

Something’s coming.

The house keeps smelling like peanut butter. Three tries to think about pranks instead. It thinks it likes the idea of them. With blowing the house up turned down, it decides to consider what would happen if it just rebuilt the house, but with a roof that isn’t an even number of blocks wide. That seems like it may qualify as a funny prank, and it would not need to be fixed, like the peanut butter. Maybe it could also put a sign that says “watch out” in the house, but nothing under the sign. That would be unexpected, and therefore funny. It could even finish the joke by coming up and—ah, no, BigB had also mentioned at one point that stabbing made a bad prank…

“Do you know how to fight?” it asks Jimmy.

“Where did you get this unprompted?” Jimmy asks. “I already told you I’m hurt too bad to be a very good fighter. The damage to my leg is, uh, permanent, even after eclosing. They would have had to erase me entirely to fix it, it’s respawn-deep nerve damage, you know how it is. They can fix almost any injury if your heart’s still beating but you won’t stay you.”

Three tilts its head. “Did they not offer? I know that Listeners are all about false choices.”

Jimmy’s lips form a straight line. “They did offer. I refused. I left. I—I didn’t have many choices, but I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to avenge Grian. ‘Course, it was already a bit too late to leave anyway, what with Martyn and being halfway through being made into one and I—I mean, I wouldn’t, but sometimes it would have been—easier, it would have, but then I would have forgotten, you know, everything, and I was the only other person there when he—when—I can’t just forget—I got a choice. I refused. That’s what I mean. Geez, rambled a bit there. Haha.”

“Oh,” Three says.

Jimmy opens his mouth. Jimmy closes it again. Jimmy looks away. “Watchers not big on choices, huh.”

“Not false ones,” Three says.

“So you got a real one?”

“My first waking memory is on the operating table in the nest,” Three says slowly. “That is not a time for choices. That is a time for being created.”

“Right,” Jimmy says. “Right.”

“I am designed to follow orders. My memory is mostly wiped between missions. Only learned skills are retained, and only relevant skills. After many missions, I undergo some level of reconditioning, so that I remain at peak—at expected efficiency.”

Jimmy snorts. “No longer consider Watcher baseline peak efficiency, huh.”

“I am designed to follow orders. Some orders are inefficient,” Three says.

“You calling them stupid?”

“Many handlers are very inefficient,” Three says. “You are not exempt.”

“Hey! I’ll have you know I’m doing a better job than anyone else! I’ll—I’m perfect for this! Who else would get you like this, huh?”

“I am surprised you left,” Three says instead. It is not the way it actually wants to respond. It’s not sure how to say the thing it wants to say.

“I—I think I wasn’t the vessel they actually wanted,” Jimmy murmurs. “And, well, Martyn’s more useful to them than me, which isn’t the same thing as me getting out, exactly.”

“Oh,” Three says.

“I—I’m super cool like that, though, leaving, right? Takes a lot of courage to leave. Not just anyone has that, you know! It’s why I’m so cool,” Jimmy says, voice audibly shaking.

“Oh,” Three says again.

“This is off topic! This is off topic. You asked if I could fight, and I said no—”

“I can teach you,” Three says. It considers. “I can teach you how I was taught. You may not respond well to it.”

“Yeah, uh, let’s—let’s not do that.”

“Will comply.”

“Is there a reason you want me to be able to fight?” Jimmy asks. “Should I be scared?”

And Three—

Three cannot tell a handler that it has a bad feeling. If the bad feeling is nothing, it will be punished for making something of nothing, and even if it is something, it will be punished for not having enough details. It should not speak out of turn, and it should not bring up things like this, but the thing is—the thing is—

“I am restless,” Three says.

“Geez, that’s it?” Jimmy says, and Three’s heart briefly sinks, before Jimmy says, “I mean, I get freaked out when Martyn’s gone too. Keep thinking he’ll never turn up again, or maybe I’ll get a Listener to turn up and tell me he’s dead and that’s, that’s—”

“I do not want him to die,” Three says.

“Yeah. Neither do I,” Jimmy says.

They sit there for a while, and it still smells just like peanut butter, and Three doesn’t teach Jimmy to fight, because to tell the truth, Three doesn’t really want to make Jimmy scream. Instead, it looks at how to best guard places like Jimmy’s cane and his bad leg and his headphones, so that when the bad feeling turns into something worse, it can stop whatever comes from attacking those things. That way, Jimmy will not have to fight, since he was not designed for that.

“It still smells like peanut butter,” Three says after a moment.

“We can try something that smells stronger to clean it with,” Jimmy says.

That, however, Jimmy can help with. That’s part of the fun of the prank, Three thinks.

---

It’s when Three is inside, with Jimmy, trying to figure out how to bake meringue cookies when neither of them bake and neither of them are quite certain what meringue is and it still smells like peanut butter, which is making judging taste hard, that there’s a sudden loud crashing from outside, and Three throws itself outside as the restlessness turns into action. It has its claws bared, feathers flared, and attack ready well before it sees who it actually is.

Martyn is covered in blood. Some of it is his. Much of it is a deep purple that means it’s not. “Fuck,” Martyn says. “Stand down.”

Three stands down.

“Goddammit. I need to—JIMMY!”

Jimmy limps outside. “Martyn!” he shouts.

“Did you—healing—”

“I saved a regen but I, I couldn’t get to the blaze spawner by myself—”

“That’ll do,” Martyn says.

Three takes a moment to assess Martyn’s injuries. He has a mild head injury. He has a number of scratches. Some of them appear to be defensive wounds as in Martyn defending himself. Many of them appear to be the sorts of wounds a fledgling Watcher defending themselves may inflict, accidentally or not. He has a deep gouge on one of his arms that is almost certainly from the combination of a Watcher lashing out and Martyn trying to defend himself from it. They are odd injuries for a human thief to have, but Three is suddenly struck by the memory that thievery was not Martyn’s original goal, when he had broken into Three’s nest. Stealing Three had been a change of plans.

Three knows what the original plan was.

Jimmy shoves the regen potion into Martyn’s hand. Martyn downs it. Martyn puts the bottle away and sighs. “Thanks.”

“You’re supposed to call before you get back,” Jimmy says.

“I had to hurry,” Martyn says.

“You’re covered in blood still,” Jimmy says.

“I had to hurry,” Martyn says. “You—there’s news, I need—”

“It’s not your blood,” Jimmy says.

Martyn is silent.

“Let’s get inside,” Jimmy says.

They step inside. Jimmy is oddly defensive. His hands keep on lifting up onto his headphones and holding them closer to his head. He’s limping because he hadn’t grabbed his cane; as soon as he gets inside, he practically collapses onto a chair. Martyn, by contrast, remains standing, despite the gashes slowly knitting themselves across his body. Three decides to stand between the two of them and the door, because Martyn seems frightened. That way, if he’d been chased, Three is between them and whatever the threat is. This will allow them to consider their conversation unimpeded.

“You’re covered in blood,” Jimmy says again, weakly, after a moment.

“That doesn’t matter,” Martyn says. “Look, I’ve got—it’s bad news.”

“Lay it on me,” Jimmy says.

“We’re going to have to move again. Not sure where. They know where we are, the Watchers, and hell, probably the sorts of Listeners we didn’t want knowing, though they probably knew where I was the whole time but I have no idea if they knew Three was here, or you were here. Doesn’t matter, they know now. So we’re leaving. Pack up. We blow this joint up, go hide in a large hub world, find a server that’s advertising, go there—you know the drill.”

Jimmy stares at Martyn. “What?”

“We need to go. We’ve been—look, I was, I was questioning a Watcher, had to catch the bastard but got some tools for it, and they’re planning on—they’re going to kill you and either take or kill Three, it was unclear, and we need to leave. Found us—”

“How did they find us?” Jimmy asks.

“How should I know?” Martyn responds.

“Is it—you brought Three here,” Jimmy says.

“I mean, probably? Probably really wanted to hunt it down. Doesn’t matter now—”

“It matters some,” Jimmy says hoarsely.

“Not like we know anyone here,” Martyn says.

“Did you notice the peanut butter?”

“What peanut butter? Why does that matter?”

“Well, you weren’t here for—there are memories here, Martyn! Just because we don’t know anyone doesn’t, doesn’t mean—Betsy!”

“Aw, man. I guess we’ll just let them go. Not like that’ll hurt much more than by causing lag.”

“I don’t—when do we—”

“Now.”

“We can’t just leave now!” Jimmy says.

“Yeah, we can. You know how to pack a go bag. Get the shit you care about and get out,” Martyn says. Three realizes something. It goes to retrieve the scarf it had been working on. Martyn keeps talking. “If they figure out we were here it’s fine, we’ve just got to be elsewhere in, oh, the next three hours? Was careful hopping here but Watchers are pretty good at picking up when one of their own is hurt, so the blood may have—”

“You led them here?” Jimmy says.

“Fuck, I don’t know! They already knew! Bastard could say exactly what server we were on when I interrogated it!”

“Martyn!” Jimmy shouts.

“Oh, fuck off, you already know I do wetworks,” Martyn snaps. “You also already know I get information. Put two and two together.”

“Yes, I know, that doesn’t make it—that’s still not okay! Not to bring home!” Jimmy snaps back.

“Well, how else am I going to avenge Grian? I don’t see anyone else doing anything for it!”

“I—you know why I can’t!”

“Yeah, refused the call, didn’t you?” Martyn says.

Jimmy falls silent.

“Well, fuck you too,” Jimmy says.

“Jimmy,” Martyn says.

“No, no, you don’t get to—you know what I did! You know what I did for him! Did to him! You know you don’t have the right! You don’t have the right! You don’t!” Jimmy shouts. “I’m mad at you for, for leading trouble right to us! You’re still covered in blood! Just because they already knew doesn’t mean—this can’t keep happening! You can’t keep doing this! One of these days, they’re going to turn around and get you back!”

“Oh, so it’s not a morals thing, huh,” Martyn says.

“Maybe it is! I don’t know!” Jimmy says, throwing up his hands. “Maybe I just, I just—I can’t keep leaving! I can’t keep imagining you—I can’t just do this!”

“You say that every time,” Martyn says. “You say it but you know as well as I do that we, we just—it’s not like I have a choice, Jimmy. One of us signed a contract, and there’s not a clause for just getting out. Besides, you’re the only one in here who isn’t a murderer. Congrats.”

“I don’t want to have this argument,” Jimmy says.

“You started it,” Martyn says.

“We’ve had it so many times,” Jimmy says.

“Well then,” Martyn says. “I—I did go too far. I admit it. But it’s—what else am I supposed to do? How else am I supposed to make sure no more Watchers do what ours did?”

Jimmy looks away. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe. Maybe that’s not…”

They’re both very quiet. Suddenly, Three remembers something.

“I made you a scarf,” it tells Martyn. Both Martyn and Jimmy turn to Three. It holds out the scarf. It’s red and green. “Do not get Watcher blood on it. It is not designed for that, and it feels as though it would harm the gesture, if blood like mine was on it.”

“Fuck,” Martyn says, shaking. “Fuck. Okay. Fuck. Fuck, I should have—showered, called, I just—I thought—fuck.” He starts shaking harder.

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah,” Martyn says.

“I did not think you had the temperament for assassination and torture,” Three says. “It appears you still do not. You simply have trained yourself to ignore it. That is impressive.”

“Not to anyone else, buddy. Learned to talk back?” Martyn says.

“No,” Three says, and Martyn snorts.

“You’d think after this long I’d stop being mad about it,” Jimmy says.

“Fuck. Sorry. I normally try not to come home when—hell,” Martyn says, and he barely turns away from Jimmy before retching into the trashcan. Jimmy hobbles to his feet and goes to rub Martyn’s back. Three is left standing there, holding the scarf. Somehow, incomprehensibly, everything still smells a little like peanut butter. It is not sure why it keeps thinking about this, but the smell and the thought keep turning end over end in Three’s head.

“Sorry. I should know better than to yell when you think someone’s out to get us. I get like that too,” Jimmy says.

Martyn wipes at his mouth. “Yeah, well, we’re both fucked up, that’s nothing new. Yeah. Not like this is a new argument.”

“I don’t want to leave yet,” Jimmy says.

“Why don’t we pack,” Martyn says.

“I hate hubs,” Jimmy says. Martyn winces.

“Yeah, I know. I can at least try to figure out if they’ve got better noise-canceling tech these days?”

“Three?” Jimmy says.

“Yes?” Three says. The scarf is still hanging limply in its hands.

“Any special concerns with hub worlds?”

“I am trained to withstand—”

“Yeah, I know, but like, if you had a choice,” Martyn interjects.

Three thinks this is a stupid conversation when Martyn has just thrown up, both he and Jimmy are visibly shaking under the speed of their heart rates, and they will have to run to escape the Watchers (or maybe possibly the Listeners, the argument had gotten unclear) at any moment now. It’s not sure why, when they’re both falling apart, they’re focusing on Three.

But if it will get them moving faster… “It is best if I can stay somewhere I can keep completely dark, when time in the main areas is done,” it says.

“Yeah, that shouldn’t be too hard,” Martyn says. “I, uh, will look for a hotel room in one of those between-servers sorts of hubs. How about that?”

“Yeah, that’ll be fine,” Jimmy says. “Uh—”

“Yeah,” Martyn says.

“Do you need some stomach medicine?” Jimmy asks.

“I need to pack,” Martyn says, and that’s all there is to say about that.

---

The things Three ends up taking from the house and packing in its own go bag or on its person are as follows: the red mask, because that is the one it is currently wearing. The black clothes it is wearing. The t-shirts and jeans Jimmy or Martyn had bought it, even though it does not currently wear them, just in case. Knitting materials, including all the red yarn it can find. An empty jar of peanut butter, which it does not need, but it thinks it can find a use for, so it’s reasonable to take. A sword it will sneak through server barriers, just in case it needs it. A spare candle, when it realizes that Martyn has not grabbed any, and that Jimmy might run out of room.

This is more than it normally takes on any given mission; it is normally expected to fend for itself between missions. This is not the same thing, but it somehow feels similar.

It watches as Jimmy and Martyn pack. Neither of them have much, either. Jimmy also packs knitting materials. He very carefully packs the picture of Grian and the candles he has room for. He packs a number of recipes he doesn’t know how to make, and some that Three presumes he must know how to. He packs one of the silly masks. Martyn packs all the remaining silly masks and some practice targets. He also packs a crossbow to sneak over server barriers, in case he needs that. Three approves. They both pack clothes, though they do not have very many changes of them.

Jimmy goes to let the Betsys out on purpose this time. The sheep run free. Three does not count them; there are the same number as there were before, and there is not time to try to entertain itself by counting sheep. They are leaving too soon for frivolities such as that.

With a bag that is heavier than usual in Three’s case, and two bags that are surprisingly efficient in Jimmy and Martyn’s case, they all stand outside the house.

It is as ugly as Three remembers. The wood types are awkwardly varied. It has a two-block center. Three remembers Martyn saying it would love it. It does not love it. The house is ugly. It is, however, the first house that Three has stayed in for such a long time as this, and that, it supposes, makes it worth committing to whatever kind of memory Three has. Briefly, irrationally, it tries to categorize the ugliness of the house as a skill, so that when it has its memory wiped, it will still at least remember the ugliness. It’s not sure it’s working. Ugliness isn’t a skill, it’s a mistake.

“Well, time to blow it up,” Martyn says. “A perfect big old fuck-you to whenever the Watchers manage to find it.”

“I don’t want to watch,” Jimmy says.

“I do,” Three says. “I would like to blow it up. I am designed to be able to blow up buildings without harming anyone except who is inside the building. Do not go inside; you will be very dead. However, so will the building.”

Martyn snorts. “If you want to, sure.”

Three considers. It might be more efficient, it realizes, to instead use the building as a trap. It wouldn’t even be that hard to rig it up to blow if anyone tries to come inside. But no—the Watchers would see such a trap before entering, if they sent anyone at all competent, and if they sent someone incompetent enough to fall for it, well, that would hardly be worth the effort of the trap at all. Besides, this server is public. While Jimmy and Martyn live—lived—far, far away from spawn, it is still possible some unaware stranger stumbles across the house before it is descended upon by Watchers.

Suddenly, Three realizes this is a public server. Were Three still in the hands of the Watchers, they may choose to wipe the server out, rather than let any potential Listener infection in the server spread through its public channels. They might instead challenge or test the Players present. Three isn’t certain. It also isn’t available for the Watchers to use for such an operation, so they would have to do it themselves, and Three is not sure if any of them are as well-designed for killing as Three is.

It glances at Martyn and Jimmy. It wonders if they know. Three knows many Players do things like care about strangers, and collateral damage to those strangers, but Jimmy is a Listener, and Martyn does wetworks. It is likely not a surprise to them that everyone here will die.

But—

“Give me the TNT. I will blow up this house,” Three says.

It lays the TNT carefully. It lays a line of flammable material. It takes a flint and steel, and it lights it, and then, in a glorious explosion of the stack of TNT they’d managed to pull together from all the pot shots at creepers Three had been taking, the house is gone.

Three is delighted; the explosion is fantastic, and the house truly had been ugly. Destroying ugly things with fantastic explosions is a wonderful hobby that absolutely everyone should try.

Three is also sad. The house is gone.

“The house is gone,” agrees Jimmy out loud, though he can’t possibly know he’s agreeing with a thing Three had just thought.

“Yeah,” Martyn says. “Well. There goes another safe house. Time to find a new one.”

“Yeah. Okay,” says Jimmy.

“You all want to teleport or fly?”

“Will flying take too long?” Jimmy asks.

“Nah,” Martyn says. “I mean, I can also use the amulet to hop servers from here, but thought maybe you would like to fly over the server before we left.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

They open their wings, and they fly to spawn. Three isn’t sure what the point of the exercise is, since it wastes time, and Martyn has the amulet to jump servers from outside of spawn, but it doesn’t mind all the same. When they get to spawn, Martyn says: “Right, time to do some arbitrary jumps, then, uh… yeah, there’s a fairly large and nondescript hub we can probably crash in safely for a bit while I check out the server ads there, that sound good?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says.

“That is the most efficient path,” Three says.

“Well then. Goodbye, shitty pay-to-win server. It was weirdly nice here,” Martyn says, and they’re gone.

The moment they finally hop into a hub server, Jimmy freezes in place, and Martyn grabs his arm before he can fall over. Three understands; it has to adjust its own senses to the massive input of signals as well. It focuses in by categorizing threats and major paths in and out of spawn, as it has been trained to. Jimmy, by contrast, seems to have trouble focusing on anything at all. His heart rate is up, and his already shaky balance on his bad leg is down.

“Deep breaths,” mutters Martyn.

“I know,” says Jimmy. “Give me a moment. Shut up. Please.”

Slowly, they walk forward into the crowd. It’s a very busy hub world, one of the ones that’s mostly made up of a crowded city, Admins advertising their own servers, shops, hotels, mini-game lobbies, and places to meet up with others. Servers like this aren’t designed for people to live in long-term, but a few months at a time isn’t too uncommon. They’re meant as a halfway point between servers, a place for people to meet up, a place for people to find out about other servers, and a place for people to find out about each other. Three has only ever spent much time in busy places like this for missions, and even then, it is best to carry out assassinations by following people into proper home servers rather than a hub like this one.

It’s loud, visually. There are people everywhere. Many look stranger than Martyn, Jimmy, and Three do; it supposes that’s one of the few advantages to being in a place like this, even if everything else about it degrades Three’s performance worse than the Halloween shop did. If it had not been trained to withstand torture, it likely would be responding as Jimmy is.

It continues to catalogue escape routes more than any individual thing in the mess of sensation, as Martyn seems to know where he’s leading them. It stands slightly behind Jimmy, as to provide support should his shutdown become even worse.

Jimmy is taking deep breaths.

“I hate these places,” he whispers.

“I know,” Martyn says. “Only a few days. We’re getting a builder hotel, I have enough credits here to get a room.”

“Please,” Jimmy says.

“Just follow me,” Martyn says.

There are notable threats in the crowd. None of them are at a level Three could not take out, at least, but Three knows a few from its internal database of Players who are threats in combat scenarios. Players who frequently win at games designed to teach them to fight, for example, or, Three notes, a few that Three is meant to treat as though they might be Listener agents. Of course, given that Three is already with Listener agents, it probably doesn’t matter if these unknown Players are actually Listener threats or not. Still, it catalogues them. It’s something easier to focus on than everything all at once, and there’s nothing saying Listeners might not be threats to their own.

It also notes any people who are connected to current Watcher-controlled worlds, as those should also be considered threats, everything considered. It would be a very, very bad time to be recaptured. Three does not want to be recaptured. Three does not want Martyn and Jimmy to be eliminated.

Worlds like this have too many threats. None of them are at a level that Three could not take out—it will remind itself of this—but large hubs like this always have too many threat vectors for Three to be truly comfortable.

Martyn seems semi-familiar enough to get them into a builder hotel. Jimmy wavers on his feet at the counter, and Three doesn’t bother to pay attention to what Martyn is saying in favor of watching the entrances and exits in the lobby, just in case. It hopes Martyn is doing what he says he’s doing, because no one else in their party would know if he’d just lied.

He probably hadn’t, though, as they step back into the sprawling hotel, through a portal, and into a forty-by-forty room made of stone with three windows, three beds, a bathroom, and a portal back out. Almost immediately, Martyn starts placing wool over the walls; Jimmy sits down on a bed, puts his head in his hands, and breathes. Three is briefly impressed Martyn also got his hands on wool already. Hotels like this normally have building materials available; they’re intended for Players who have to stay long-term on a hub world and want something they can build in and customize while they try to sort out where their permanent home will be. It’s still somewhat impressive Martyn managed to get what appears to be a ridiculously large amount of light blue wool already, since most of the hotels charge for more than the bare basic building materials on account of having a fairly captive audience.

Martyn starts covering the windows. Three closes the door by the portal.

“Right then. We’re going to have to split up again,” Martyn says. “I don’t really want to, but if we’re all being tracked, harder to do it if we aren’t all in the same place. If by the end of the day, no one’s following us anymore, don’t have to stay split up, but…”

“I don’t… I know we have to,” Jimmy says.

“You can stay here,” Martyn says. Three turns to look at Martyn sharply. True, a hotel like this is typically hard to break into, but Jimmy is clearly their most vulnerable companion. Leaving Jimmy alone without further defense seems unwise. Three acknowledges the necessity of splitting up—it’s much easier to find the three of them together when they’re known to travel together than it is to find Martyn or Three going to ground, and Jimmy alone probably isn’t a target when Three is still considered to be rogue—but it still feels wrong.

“Thank you,” Jimmy says.

It’s not Three’s decision anyway.

“We can go out and about. I might go play darts or something, I don’t know,” Martyn says. “Uh, Three, you can go try to make a friend that isn’t us.”

Three tilts its head. “Is that required?”

“Uh,” Martyn says. “I mean. I probably shouldn’t order you to make friends, that’d defeat the point. Do it if you want? Just—there’s a lot to do out here, do something fun instead of just staying on alert the whole time. It’s not worth the energy.”

Martyn won’t be able to see whether Three chooses to stay on alert the whole time or not. It decides that it can quietly discard that order unless it appears Martyn or Jimmy is nearby. It gets the sense Martyn realizes this, too, from the expression on Martyn’s face, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Right then. Jimmy, will you—will you be okay?” Martyn asks. Jimmy smiles weakly.

“I’m a big strong butterfly,” Jimmy says.

“You need anything, uh, start spinning in circles or something, Three’ll notice. Or message me. That’s probably easier. Geez, not so great at—”

“Love you too, Martyn. I’ll be okay,” Jimmy says.

Martyn’s whole body slumps. “Yeah. I’m…”

“I know you’re sorry,” Jimmy says.

“Good,” Martyn says. “I’ll slip out, then. Uh. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

He leaves. Jimmy sits on the bed and rocks back and forth and plays with his hands. Three knows it ought to leave too, if they’re splitting up. Jimmy said he will be fine, and it is important to trust that a handler isn’t lying, and also probably important to trust that a friend isn’t lying.

Jimmy’s a… friend.

“I wish to say something,” Three says.

“Go for it,” Jimmy says quietly.

“I have a secret. It is not for handlers, or for high-ranking Watchers, or for any Listeners at all. I have been attempting to count sheep,” Three says.

“Oh?” Jimmy says.

“Yes. When I am alone on standby. I count sheep. It is a focus. I do not know if that will be as easy to do by Listening. I do not know how loud sheep are to a Listener. You could count something else. Like Ghasts. Those are loud. You also cannot tell anyone else I count sheep. I am not allowed.”

Jimmy stares for a moment, and then, inexplicably, tears up. “Yeah?”

“It may help you while you are alone. I am telling you so that you operate at high enough efficiency,” Three says.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “I’ll try counting sheep.”

“I sort them by color,” Three says. “You can sort them by loudness.”

“I will,” Jimmy says. “Tell you what. I’ll—I’ll tell you about the sheep. And if it works. Okay?”

“Okay.” Three pauses. “If you determine the purpose for which Players count sheep—”

Jimmy makes a watery laugh. “I’ll tell you. Go split up before we get caught.”

“Alright,” Three says, and it steps out of the room, noting the number as it leaves. It pauses in the lobby of the hotel. Their room is a ways away from the lobby. That is not uncommon in hub world hotels, as space is often limited, and portals can be used for doors. It takes a moment for Three to pinpoint it. It takes another moment still to pinpoint Jimmy. He is muttering numbers to himself.

Three will keep Watch, somewhere in the back of its head.

It spreads its sight out. It is difficult, in a place like this, to do that. It makes its head hurt. It catches sight of Martyn. It will Watch him, as well, because Martyn seems like the sort of person who might get hurt.

Then, it melts into the hub world, and is truly alone for the first time since Martyn stole it.

---

Three must make itself hard to follow, if it wants to get back to Martyn and Jimmy physically, which it thinks it does. To do that, it will slip into the crowds of people who are already in the hub world. This is a little hard to do while still Watching the other two and keeping track of threats, and with how busy and hard-to-handle hub worlds can be for Three’s senses, but it is trained to handle situations like this.

If it were an ordinary Player, where would it be going?

No, that’s the wrong framework. It is not an ordinary Player, does not look like an ordinary Player, and should not be trying to be an ordinary Player. It should use one of its existing frameworks and behaviors. It has been trained for situations like this, and should use that training. It has been so far out of its frameworks lately that it had forgotten that it knows how to blend into a crowd and follow it through a hub world. It can even gather minor amounts of information in this way, though it admits it was never designed for information gathering so much as for annihilation.

It follows the flow of the crowd. It takes care not to do so too perfectly as to stand out; it occasionally moves too fast, or too slow, or nearly runs into people, though it does not actually run into anyone. It also continues cataloguing threats. The direction the crowd is going has a number of surprisingly high-profile Players, Three realizes. It also has a number of Players that are not on Watcher watch lists, and Players who are hardly high-profile at all, but that does not mean the proportion of high-profile Players isn’t slightly higher than usual.

Oh. It’s a meetup area, Three realizes. For Players seeking out partners in their projects. Many hub worlds have them; there have to be ways to meet strangers somehow, after all, and most Players can’t hop onto servers at random. In the area, there are bars, and there are small areas to show off building or to put up signs asking for collaborators, and then, much further back, where many of the less-established Players are going, there are Admins advertising that they have open whitelists. It’s a particularly busy area filled with particularly unusual Players, typically, so it’s a good place to blend in. However, it has one crucial disadvantage: people will certainly try to talk to Three, and it is already operating at a lower efficiency, due to the number of visual stimuli in the area. If it is forced to talk to someone, it is unusually highly likely to give itself away.

It pauses for a moment. It checks on Jimmy. It checks on Martyn. It checks on any sheep that it can manage to count, although it can only count a few without losing focus on its surroundings entirely, on account of most sheep being far from the city itself.

Centered the best it can be, it continues onwards. It catalogs the Players as it goes. Several of them are carrying weapons. A few of them are hiding weapons, meaning they have likely smuggled them the way it and Martyn had. A few of them are not, which means they likely are either considered at-risk enough to be allowed to carry protection or are high-enough ranked at some local PvP minigame that they get special dispensation. Either way, they’re worth keeping tabs on.

So many people are already trying to talk. Three should continue to try not to stand out, but it doesn’t have to stand in the middle of the crowd. It splits away into one of the bars. There are seats in dark places in the bar. That will be nicer. Less visually noisy. Easier to Watch from. If Three sees anyone following it, it will go into more crowded areas again, but until then, it will be able to watch and gather information inconspicuously just fine from here.

This is the closest it has come to behaving as it would on an ordinary mission in a while, it thinks. It does not have a target, which means this is not quite like an ordinary mission, but it is close to being like one. There is no wiping out a group of Players here in a blaze of blood, there is no assassination, there is no warning kills, but there is waiting, and there is discomfort, and there is no one else there to tell Three what to do, which is normally one of the best parts of missions, but right now feels odd more than anything else.

The crowd outside moves around. The bartender asks if Three wants a drink. Three asks for water. It is against the rules to be incapacitated on a mission. It is also stupid. Three is not stupid. It is not about to start drinking when it is trying to make sure any Watchers on its tail have been shaken.

It checks on Martyn. It checks on Jimmy. It—

“Oh, goodness, there’s someone in my spot,” says a man with a mustache in front of Three. Three looks up.

“This spot is in a public area,” Three says.

“Yes, I know, it’s just—normally everyone here wants to talk. Goodness knows why,” the man with the mustache says. “I mean, er. I don’t mind talking, not particularly. It’s just that there are so many people it’s distracting, you know? I just need somewhere dark to sit alone when we come here.”

“Oh,” Three says. It would admit it needed that, too, but it should not admit weaknesses to a stranger. A stranger, Three notes, that has a sword, but a stranger nonetheless.

“Do you mind if I just… sit here with you?”

“I cannot stop you,” Three lies.

“Thank you,” the man says, and he takes a drink from the bartender—orange juice, for some reason—and crumples into the remaining seat near Three. “Gosh,” he says again, mostly to himself. “Gosh.”

They both sit there, watching the world in front of them, sipping their drinks. The man with the mustache fidgets quite a bit. Three, by contrast, sits entirely still, as any fidgeting it may have done at some point has been very thoroughly trained out of it. The man’s fidgeting is somewhat distracting, though. It makes it just ever-so-slightly harder to keep an eye out for threats without checking back in on the mustache guy.

“Oh, now I feel rude not talking to you,” the man says.

“Okay,” Three says, failing to see how that’s its problem.

“If you don’t want to talk, I suppose I’ll shut up? Really, as I said, it’s not that I don’t want to talk. It’s just, oh, it’s so intimidating when so many people are talking. And, well, the truth is, I don’t normally come places like this to make friends. My friends—the ones I already have, I mean—sort of made me. They said that if we were coming out here, I should try to make not-Hermit friends again, which really seems rather unnecessary. I mean, yes, I was looking forward to collabing with that one builder fellow, but even after bonding over spiral slides he’s just ghosted me, which suggests to me, at least, that friends might be hard for me?”

Three takes a moment to process all of that.

“I was also told to make friends,” Three says.

“Oh, I see.”

“I asked if it was an order and he said it was not, though, so I don’t have to,” Three says.

“An order? Goodness, that sounds like a demanding friend.”

“Not really.”

The mustache man fidgets again. “Maybe if we introduce ourselves—if you don’t already know me, I mean.”

Three mentally scans through Watcher threat lists. This man is not on them. “I do not,” Three says.

“Oh, good. My name is Mumbo Jumbo. And yours?”

“Three.”

“Nice to meet you, then,” Mumbo says. “Why are you out here? I came here with my friend Iskall, he’s hiring for a build team and really seems to think I can find someone to help me with a design problem. I’m more of a redstoner than a builder, you see.”

“I am here between worlds. Moving homes,” Three says, the half-truth rolling easily off of its tongue.

“Oh, uh, well, good luck? I haven’t moved in so long I’m not sure that’s what to say…”

Three thinks that’s probably not something to say to someone who is simply moving worlds. Moving seems easy enough to it. To someone who is actually secretly on the run from a great force, however, it’s a useful blessing. Perhaps Mumbo knows—but no. He seems genuinely uncertain, and while he is carrying a sword, he’s not carrying it like someone who uses it often.

“Thank you,” Three says.

“You’re welcome.”

They sit in silence together for a bit. It’s actually rather nice. Certainly, Mumbo fidgets too much, but he seems to want to give Three space, as well as himself, and Three appreciates it.

“Do you do much building?” Mumbo asks. “Or, goodness. That sounds like I want to use you, I just, I really am not a builder, and I want to do something a bit less geometric this upcoming season, and—”

“I am not a builder,” Three says. It pauses. “I have aesthetic sensibilities, though.”

“Oh. Do you mind looking at this?” Mumbo asks further. “I mean, you really don’t have to, but extra eyes from someone who doesn’t even know who I am, that just sounds grand.”

Three pauses. “Sure,” it says, as Mumbo pulls out the plans. “I am not a builder, though. Oh. No. That part is ugly. If you want to do plants it is too symmetrical. Do better.”

Mumbo laughs, startled. “Oh, wow, for not a builder, you sure have some strong opinions!”

“I have eyes,” Three says, in a massive understatement.

“Goodness,” Mumbo says.

“Listen. Here is how you make something look convincingly alive, even though it is dead,” Three says.

“You have phrased that in a very concerning way,” Mumbo says, but his eyes are bright. “Tell you what. If you tell me more, I’ll buy you some drinks?”

“I don’t drink.”

“Oh, goodness me, I more meant—something other than water?”

Three considers. It does not know this person yet. Also, it does not know how to sugar-coat its criticism, a thing it knows many people need. It should probably refuse on those grounds. However, this is still a good place to watch for threats. It does not detect any immediate tails. It can spread out its senses and check on Jimmy and Martyn, and this man does not seem to comment on it. It also will be less suspicious than sitting alone in a bar.

There are more advantages to agreeing than to refusing.

“I will try to help you,” Three says.

“Thank goodness. Now Iskall can’t judge me for not even trying to make friends, either, haha…”

Three pauses. “Oh. That is an advantage.”

“I know, right? Now, er, you said something about a trick about vines,” Mumbo says, and Three starts in on helping Mumbo’s plants not look hopelessly like machines in his building plans.

---

By the time the local day gets late, Three has spent several hours with Mumbo. They click oddly well. Mumbo does not mind that Three is blunt, even if sometimes he will call Three out on being rude. Three does not mind that Mumbo rambles, although it will cut Mumbo off if he rambles for too long. Mumbo is not a handler, and does not know who Three is. Mumbo, tentatively, admits he is quite famous for redstone contraptions, and that is why he has a sword, and appreciates when Three says it does not know who Mumbo is once again.

Mumbo says something about people finding his bunkers recognizable. Three says that must be because those bunkers are not threats outside of controlled environments. Mumbo gets a bit put out by this. Three suggests more efficient weaponry to make in an actual survival or fight scenario.

They get drinks. Neither of them gets any alcohol. Three goes over the plans with Mumbo. He is not actually a terrible builder; he is not Jimmy. He simply likes straight lines too much, and is too nervous to make things that are not symmetrical. Three is a little surprised to realize it has strong opinions about this. In turn, however, Mumbo tries to get Three to do redstone. Three is not good at redstone. Three is only good at things that cause explosions or are useful for on-the-fly offense or defense.

Mumbo laughs and says Three must be quite the PVPer. Three does not correct him. Three doesn’t want to correct him.

They stay in a dark part of the bar where there are fewer people, and it’s nice, and it is less overwhelming than anything else today has been.

Mumbo even compliments Three’s mask. He calls it fancy and off-putting. Three appreciates being called fancy and off-putting. Three likes Mumbo. For a person it is using to be less noticeable to pursuers and threats, Mumbo is very nice indeed. Mumbo is not a threat. Mumbo, Three thinks, doesn’t even know what it’s like to scan the world for threats. Three does not know if it has ever talked to someone like that who isn’t a handler (and therefore thinks they are above threats, even though this is very stupid). It’s not that Mumbo thinks he’s above threats—he has the sword afforded to people who are famous and may need the protection, after all. No, it’s that Mumbo seems to have never been under particular threat, and therefore has no understanding of how bad threats can be.

Mumbo is a civilian.

Three tells Mumbo the base he is building has very indefensible entrances and exits, and Mumbo laughs, saying that bases are off-limits for griefing on his server anyway, and gosh, is Three from some sort of anarchy server? Three says yes, even though it is lying. Watchers dislike anarchy. Three is the person who kills off anarchy servers that get too uppity. Mumbo assures Three it’s not like that where he’s from.

It’s a little fascinating, talking to a civilian.

They’re discussing the pros and cons of water features as a building element when someone with a single eye waves to Mumbo—oh, the Iskall Mumbo had been talking about is Iskall85, known threat due to connection with low-level potential deities, on a watchlist for potential elimination should he ever take those outside of his own small circle, as well as a known threat due to previous paramilitary associations—and Mumbo sighs and stands up.

“Right. Well, er, it was very nice meeting you,” Mumbo says.

“It was nice to meet you,” Three says.

“Maybe we should collab sometime after all,” Mumbo says. “Oh, uh, here, let’s trade numbers.”

Three realizes it doesn’t have a number. As Mumbo writes a number down for Three to take, Three makes up a number and hands it to Mumbo. Hopefully, Mumbo does not message it.

It takes the number and hides it away.

“It really was nice meeting you,” says Mumbo. “Uh. Don’t be afraid to call if you want to talk?”

“I will,” Three says, and suddenly feels a strange aching. It most likely will not talk to Mumbo again. Mumbo is potentially useful as a contact about Iskall and his associates, but is not mission-useful otherwise, due to largely doing impractical redstone and being too famous to be inconspicuous. Even if Three is not forced to forget Mumbo, he is a civilian.

Three isn’t supposed to stay in contact with civilians.

Martyn had told Three to make a friend, though. Mumbo is a friend.

“I will,” repeats Three, uncertain when, but suddenly more determined to do it than ever, allowed or not. It tries to commit the number to memory. This number is a contact about Iskall and his associates. It shouldn’t be forgotten, because contacts are useful in assassinations.

“Good! Good. Well, Iskall is ready to go, and as much as I’d like to stay and chat—”

“Go home,” Three says, and Mumbo leaves, and Three stares after for a bit, though it does not use its senses to keep track.

It should stay out for at least another hour before returning to the hotel. It hasn’t noticed a tail yet, so after that, they should be safe temporarily.

Maybe it should buy a new phone. It will have to steal the money to do so. That shouldn’t be hard. A place like this is easy to pickpocket for mission funds.

---

I lied about my number. This is actually it.
why on earth would you lie about that?
I am shy.
okay! well i will save this one then

Three steps through the portal to the room, where Jimmy is still sitting on the bed. He has a piece of paper in front of him. He’s concentrating on it, writing down notes, and Three realizes after a bit that they are notes on sheep.

“Oh, you’re back!” Jimmy says. “Hey, when did you get a phone?”

“Twenty minutes ago,” Three says, putting it in its pocket. “I have made a friend.”

“Oh, okay?” Jimmy says, sounding awfully confused for some reason. “Sure?”

“You are counting sheep,” Three says.

“You were right. It does help me focus. I’ll put this away now, I guess.”

“Tell me about the sheep.”

When Martyn gets back, Jimmy is explaining, in stumbling words, about the sheep that are healthy, and the sheep that are unhealthy, and everything in-between. He is explaining about how he thinks he has discovered a mild sheep pandemic in the sheep that live near the bed wars arenas, and how sheep hybrids don’t sound anything at all like regular sheep, and that he also has no idea why regular Players would count sheep when he gets so much more interesting detail like this and also he was only doing it so he didn’t melt down. Three nods along, mentally adding this data to the mystery.

Martyn stares for a moment. Three freezes.

“I don’t want to know,” he says.

Despite everything, Three thinks it was a good day, in the end, as it helps Jimmy pack up the notes on sheep, and then stays awake and watches the room as Martyn and Jimmy fall asleep on top of each other in the bed. It has been as good of a day as it could be, given that they have still been driven from their home.

It wants more days like this.

The next few days feel strange.

It is not strange because of the level of vigilance they all have to use, though Three is surprised to realize that a few weeks in Martyn and Jimmy’s house have made it out of practice with paranoia. On any other mission, though, preparing for and anticipating the enemy is expected. Being forced to continuously split up or use other evasive tactics is expected. The quiet, constant undercurrent of vigilance is expected. Three guarding the door at night, even when Jimmy tiredly tells Three it is allowed to sleep, is expected, except maybe for that last part, because handlers don’t tell Three to sleep when there is already another greater threat. It is expected, though, because Jimmy is not Three’s handler, except perhaps when Three is intentionally being obstinate about something.

It’s a bit strange, properly categorizing that. That’s part of what makes the days feel strange. It is on a mission. It is partway in a mission mindset the whole time. At any moment, they could all be captured, if they do not get to a less public place to regroup soon. Martyn is in a mission mindset. Even Jimmy, for all that he is almost a civilian, is in a mission mindset. On a mission, Three should have a handler. Martyn is Three’s handler, except he almost is not, and Jimmy is Three’s handler, except he is not, and he is Three’s friend instead.

(Three does not say this. Three is not certain how to say this. Jimmy is weaving Three a story about sheep every time they talk.)

Certainly, Three is watching for threats. It can tell they’re close. It only takes three hours into the second day for Three to notice a Watcher. It is a young one, a fledgling. It is easy to avoid. It tells Martyn; Martyn had also noticed by the time Three let him know, and Jimmy had noticed only slightly after Three did. The presence only starts to get heavier after that. The three of them barely spend time together. Three spends even more time split apart from everyone else.

It does not meet another friend. It does keep texting Mumbo. Most of the messages are about various building ideas, though it also helps Mumbo out with concepts like “how to make a bunker more practical to build during an actual life-or-death scenario”. That particular conversation is actually a nice distraction whenever Three has to squeeze itself into a crowd and the colors of everyone’s clothes and the ways they move start to get overwhelming. Three can simply imagine how it would fortify itself in this situation, and argue the practicality of the somewhat over-the-top defense solutions Mumbo suggests. It is not that Three is against overkill; while it personally finds that it is best to aim for blows that use the least amount of energy and resources possible while still solving the problem, there are times when the best way to do that is killing something very, very dead before it gets a chance to be anything other than killed very, very dead. It’s more that in most practical scenarios, resources are more limited than Mumbo’s designs would suggest, and invaders will not simply approach from the front.

Mumbo calls Three paranoid more than once. Three does not think it is being adequately paranoid for the amount Watcher presence is increasing by in the hub world they’re hiding in. At least it’s not just Watchers; outside of Martyn, there are other people that Three knows are flagged as potential Listener agents too. When it mentions this to Jimmy, it does not make him less antsy.

“It’s so stupid that I’m just stuck in here,” Jimmy says.

“It is very loud outside,” Three says.

“Yeah, but it’s still stupid that I get so overwhelmed,” Jimmy says.

“Oh,” Three says.

“I just—it’s really getting worse?”

“They are trying to corner us,” Three says. “I do not think they know for certain we are here yet, or they would likely have tried to—to use override command words on me, most likely. If I were them, that is what I would do, at least, though not everyone in command is as efficient as I am, so maybe they would not. They wouldn’t care about making a little scene, though. Little scenes happen in hub worlds all the time. They simply must not make a big one.”

“Yeah, but our people are here too,” Martyn says, though his tongue twists over the word ‘our’ like he doesn’t actually think he’s being honest when he says it. “Listeners and Watchers probably don’t want to make a big fight of things in a hub world. So. They’re trying to corner us. Makes sense to me. Just means we have to not get cornered, right? Like, they haven’t managed to shut down entrances and exits or something stupid. Maybe we should just dip to another hub world until I find a server that looks secure enough to set up base in.”

“Do you have the list?” Jimmy asks.

“Yeah,” Martyn says.

“I wish I could leave to ask the Admins about it myself, I do,” Jimmy says.

“I know you do,” Martyn says.

“I would ask, but my criteria are likely different from yours,” Three says.

“That seems like a nice thing to talk about,” Jimmy says, lying back down on the bed he’s barely left since they’d gotten here. Briefly, the three of them, together, had gone out to eat. It was apparently a very nice restaurant; made things that were meant to specifically appeal to the hybrid tastes of its customers. Jimmy’s dish had honey in it, and Three’s had fish, and it had tasted all rather bad, Three thought, but did not say, because that’s just rude to say when it had clearly been meant as a nice thing to do together. They’d left early. Martyn had stolen someone’s wallet to pay. Three did not comment on this, because if Martyn had not done that, Three probably would have stolen someone’s wallet to pay Martyn back.

Jimmy had turned off all the lights in the hotel room and kicked both Martyn and Three out again after they were done. They’d come back in later and he’d said it was nice.

It had been, in some ways. That is something else that has made these days strange, Three thinks: there is so much paranoia, but there are also more and more things Three wants more of. More, and more, and more of. It beats inside Three’s chest. Any moment, it could be made to forget this. Any moment, it could be made to—

“What?” Martyn says.

“Well, what sort of place Three would want to live. What if we didn’t have threats to our lives hanging over us and all,” Jimmy says.

“That is a very big decision,” Three says after a moment. “However, I have been talking with the friend I made about defensible locations—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Jimmy says. “I mean, if you just had—had any choice in the world, really.”

“I do not,” Three says.

“You could,” Martyn says.

“I could not,” Three says.

“You—”

“No, it’s right,” Jimmy says, interrupting Martyn.

“Hey, we’re—”

“I mean, you have free will and all, Three,” Jimmy says, like that’s an afterthought, a given, a simple thing, and not one of the most baffling things that has happened so far. “But it’s a bit naive to say it has any choice in the world, isn’t it? It’s just—play-pretend. Like nothing’s happened. If there were any choice in the world, no problems at all…”

Three looks at the ceiling. They’re all quiet for a long while.

“It would be somewhere aesthetically pleasing, and efficient, and covered in stars,” Three says.

“That sounds nice,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah. Good taste,” Martyn says.

The ceiling is not covered in stars. It is covered in light grey wool, because that insulates sound best. Outside of the covered window, there is a crowded hub, one from which they will have to find somewhere to leave to soon. If they’re even more surrounded tomorrow, they will probably have to leave regardless of whether they’ve found a final destination. There are other hub worlds. There are other places with crowds so large that it will protect them until there’s a safe place. Three has no attachment to here, not the way it realizes it did to the house. This place is loud, and chaotic, and has nearly no stars at all.

Three’s phone buzzes. It is Mumbo. Three picks it up to respond.

But it’s strange. The days are strange in a way Three never wants to forget. Never wants to be made to forget. Never wants—

Three would like a choice that it doesn’t have, and that is probably what makes these days strange, because it can feel the fact it doesn’t have a choice closing in, and for the first time in its life, it is well and truly furious about it.

It knits, too, because that is a mission, even if Three acknowledges it is of much lower priority than the one it is currently on. It wants to learn to make sweaters. It wants to make itself a red sweater to wear, it thinks. It would be nice, to be draped in red. It’s a nice goal to have, if Three will have time for it, even as it seems more and more like it won’t. It asks Jimmy for advice. Jimmy laughs and says that sweaters are months of work and that he’s never really had the patience, really, but if Three wants to go for it, it should. Months of work. Three clings to it. Months to finish this mission. It isn’t even that good at scarves yet, so it will be even longer than that. Even if its memory is wiped, this mission won’t be done, so maybe this is one thing it will keep, lingering on after reconditioning.

It goes with Martyn on a cool morning, almost four days in, to go check out server Admins and read them for if Martyn’s guess on who would sell them out is correct. Martyn hangs back. Once he’s outside of where Jimmy is paying attention, he deliberately puts his backpack straps over his clothes in a way that entirely hides the leaf he normally wears, and Three realizes Martyn is hiding identifying marks on himself. It makes Three feel somewhat self-conscious for the very identifiable mask, but it does not change, because that mask is its, and no one else’s.

Martyn laughs at Three’s blunt assessments of the Admins who are advertising their servers to them. Martyn’s sense of people is good, but Three knows names Martyn doesn’t, and also knows exactly what sorts of people would have cracked for it if it were the one trying to hunt someone down in their server. It knows exactly which ones would even care enough to know. It also knows which of them are obviously idiots. It says as much. Martyn’s delight at it means Three will even say it again.

They have a short list, but none of them are great options. Some of them are at least acceptable options, which is about what anyone can expect these days, but none of them are particularly great. Most of them are either too busy—bad for long-term safehouses due to the number of new strangers leaving and arriving—too private—the amount of leaving and returning someone like Martyn would have to do would raise suspicions—too small—easier to pick them out of the crowd—or have Admins that would be likely to sell them out. They also don’t have the luxury of waiting for perfect. One of them has noise ordinances. Maybe that’s too obvious. Martyn and Jimmy and Three sit in the hotel room and argue about whether choosing one for having noise ordinances is too obvious, about whether it’s better or worse to not have to live thousands of blocks from spawn again.

They are going to be caught. They are going to be caught soon if they don’t leave. Three suspects they will be caught if they do, as well, if the Watchers have realized Three is truly here. Three isn’t as disposable as any fledgling. There is only one Blade at a time for a reason. It’s just that Three is also more disposable than a high-ranking Watcher, and that is the intent of having a Blade at all.

It thinks, idly, that it’s been ruined for that too. It texts Mumbo back to say that burning arrow based lasers in a bunker sound very intriguing, but are definitely impractical in any real-world scenario and not a creative simulation, no, even if he knows a guy who could absolutely build them, he couldn’t build them on short notice, could he? It’s not about whether it can be done, it’s about whether or not it can be done before you are killed, or done in a way the enemy cannot circumvent.

Jimmy has created a sheep family tree. Three still does not understand the purpose of counting sheep, but when it does not sleep again that night, Jimmy tells it to count sheep while keeping guard, to add colors to the family tree, since Jimmy can’t add those himself. It does.

It is getting quite bad at paranoia. It’s been ruined. It doesn’t want to be fixed. It’s strange. It’s good, also.

(They’re running out of time. But the time they have—they’re good days, and that’s the hardest bit to deal with of all.)

---

The decision on where to go is ultimately taken out of their hands. They’re already preparing. They’ve found a few places to go out. The plan is to act as though they’re setting up on one of those worlds, then jump through several more, and then actually settle on another one of them. It’s as good of a plan as they can manage at the moment when they know they’re surrounded and know they’ll be followed the moment they leave. Three turns its phone over in its hands. It is going to keep it, even though, in theory, it could get them traced, because it is not sure how to transfer the number. It tells Martyn this and Martyn shrugs and says Jimmy keeps his phone with all his contacts, just in case any of them ever decide to call him again, and—

Sometimes, Three is angry over silly things.

They’re already packing up to leave when one of the hotel workers comes up. They’re a bored teenager with a hub world job for one of their first jobs while trying to pick out where else they’ll stay; not a threat, but also not likely to prevent a threat.

“Yeah, uh, you all are… InTheLittleWood and company?”

“That’s us,” Martyn says.

“Right, there’s someone in the lobby who wants to see you. Says his name is, uh, Big… statz? Dark-skinned guy with a cookie sweater. Sounded urgent. So like, get down to see him if you want. Or not. He’ll probably leave eventually.”

Message conveyed, the hotel worker leaves again. Three shifts, flexing its hands until its claws are at the ready. Martyn drops a sword into his hands.

“I mean, could actually be him,” Martyn says.

“We should not make optimistic assumptions,” Three says.

“Yeah, was thinking that too,” Martyn says. “Optimistic.”

“I’ll come down too. We’re mostly packed. We can—it’s just an extra fee if we don’t clean up the room as we leave,” Jimmy says. “All the important stuff is already ready to go.”

“Right,” Martyn says.

“Stay behind me,” Three says to the both of them.

“Now, hold on,” Martyn says.

“Okay,” Jimmy says. “Give me a hand, Martyn?”

Martyn stands down immediately. “Yeah. You know what, that—yeah, that makes more sense. Here. Take my arm. There you go.”

Once they’re all readied, Three steps through the portal into the lobby first. It relaxes when it realizes it is actually BigB there; it had really assumed that either a Watcher or one of Martyn’s handlers had gotten tired of waiting, and in either of those cases, Three had to be ready to fight. Unless BigB had been suborned—unlikely, possible but unlikely—they were likely safe.

“Oh, thank goodness, I found the right guys,” BigB says.

“How did you?” Martyn says, stepping through the portal himself.

“A lotta really educated guessing. Also, uh, I’ve been doing some digging around. You all are in trouble, did you know that?”

Jimmy laughs.

“Yeah, I’ll take that as you knew that,” BigB says. “Look, I’ve just got more bad news—you still paying for your room? You look awfully packed.”

“We hadn’t checked out yet,” Martyn says.

“Okay, good, that’s more private,” BigB says, and they all step back through to their room again. BigB looks around at the wool still up on the walls and the hasty packing and visibly winces before leaning against a wall. He looks at Three for several long moments as well before shaking his head to himself.

“So, what’s up?” Martyn says. “Why’d you come looking for us?”

“Well. After I helped Jimmy out the other day,” BigB starts.

“You what?” Martyn says.

“I invited him over. I needed… out. And I wanted Three to get to know someone less br—more normal.”

Three looks at Jimmy. “I know Mumbo now. You do not have to invite outsiders again.”

“I know,” Jimmy says. “Probably for the best, it is.”

“Outsiders? Man,” BigB says.

“Look, it’s nothing personal,” Martyn says.

“You all really are in deep shit, huh?” BigB says. “I mean, we all sorta knew, what with everything else and Jimmy’s transformation and all, but—uh, shoot, I was here for something specific. Right. I did some digging, after that. Turns out that you all are, uh, pretty wanted in normal Player channels. Which—I think it’s not for normal civilian things, given everything Jimmy told me.”

“Jimmy,” Martyn says.

“I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?” Jimmy says. “Besides. They’re—it’s not like they all don’t know about Watchers and Listeners and stuff already, even if BigB’s the only one who bothered to answer when I asked. It’s not like—I mean, that’s part of why none of them talk to us anyway.”

“You know that’s—it doesn’t matter right now,” BigB says.

“There’s a reason this is a secret,” Martyn says.

“Look, I know, I just—”

“Man, I don’t have time to sit through an argument,” BigB says, which stops Martyn and Jimmy in their tracks. This is good, because Three does not have time to sit through an argument either. They need to leave sooner, rather than later. “Listen. Your names are going around server wanted lists. Appearances, too. Whatever you’re in, they’re trying to give you nowhere to run. Also, like, I wouldn’t stay here too long either, ‘cause even if you know most hub worlds don’t care about those watchlists, they also publish them, and…”

Martyn winces. He turns to Jimmy. “Yeah, there’s no chance the one with the noise ordinance won’t care about that.”

“It was a long shot,” Jimmy says. “Our other out, though. The, uh—had chunk-claiming, a server economy they decided to base off of emeralds for some reason?”

“Maybe,” Martyn says.

“It may be wise to switch hubs,” Three offers. “That one is unlikely to care much for watchlists, but likely would care enough for themselves that it would still put us at risk. There are better servers. We may be able to create a safer house on a small anarchy server.”

Jimmy shudders. “I don’t know if I can…”

“We can manage,” Martyn says.

“Don’t,” BigB says. “I have a place.”

“You do?” Martyn says, baffled. “No offense, but we need—”

“They won’t expect to look for you there, if I’ve got the things they’re looking for right. And, well, Pearl owes me a favor—”

“Absolutely not,” Jimmy says hoarsely. “No. She—she doesn’t want to talk to me. And don’t, don’t make like she doesn’t hate me, you know she…”

“She owes me a favor,” BigB says, and then, for some reason, he turns and looks at Three for a good long while.

“She owes me a favor too,” Martyn says. “They wouldn’t look for us there.”

Jimmy wraps his arms around himself. “I don’t—there has to be a better option.”

“She’s really good at hiding things from Watchers, too,” Martyn says. “It’s why I was hanging onto the favor, in case a mission went south enough that I needed to get in there without Pearl throwing a fit. I mean, it would work.”

Jimmy frowns, but doesn’t speak.

“Look, it’s just until people figure out you all aren’t actually terrorists or whatever they’ve got people saying,” BigB says. “Since, uh, seems sorta like you don’t have anywhere to go. I’ll take the blame for bringing you there. Between Martyn and I, she can’t get out of the favor.” He goes quiet again. He looks like he’s trying to look deep into Three, for some reason, to find something in it that is hidden. Three is not sure what. True, it wears a mask. True, it is designed to appear far more like a human than it actually is, with coloration that hides the feathers and claws until it’s too late. True, its wings are elsewhere until Three brings them out. But once someone knows those things (and BigB certainly does), it is not as though Three tries overly hard to hide what it is, or what it wants with the world. Three is what it says it is on the surface, for all that it’s designed to deceive.

Maybe BigB had simply been deceived, last time.

“Why?” Jimmy asks hoarsely.

“What?” BigB asks.

“Can you be honest? Why are you here? I know why you showed up last time, but… why are you here?”

“Can’t a guy be worried about his friends?” BigB asks.

“It’s not the first time Martyn’s been wanted. I know it isn’t,” Jimmy says.

“Hey,” Martyn says. “Hey, Three and I are supposed to be the paranoid ones.”

“We’ve all learned,” Jimmy says. “I just want him to be honest about what he even wants with us.”

BigB is very quiet for a moment. “Look. What I want right now—it doesn’t matter, right? I’m offering you somewhere safer than you’ve got. And hey, I still—what I want probably will amount to nothing anyway. Low odds. You don’t worry about it, and I won’t worry about it, and we satisfy a curiosity of mine, and the way I see it, the far most likely option is that we all leave again and act like this didn’t happen? Which isn’t for the best or anything, but you can trust that I’m not going to turn you in to the Watchers, at least. I hate those guys too.”

“…well now you’ve made me more paranoid,” Martyn says.

“I don’t know why,” BigB says. “I’ve been completely honest.”

“Fine,” Jimmy says.

“What—really?” Martyn says. “I mean, we were going to do it, not like we have much of a choice or anything, but—really?”

“Not like we have much of a choice or anything,” Jimmy says, but there’s something else in his eyes, too. “You’re probably going to have to sneak us out. Do a lot of pretty nauseating jumps with Martyn’s cheat thing.”

“Cheat thing? Oh, are you a hacker now?” BigB asks.

“I mean, if you want to call it that,” Martyn says.

“I’ll just tell Pearl we’re coming then! Or, probably not tell her that you all are coming. No offense, but dude, she really does like to act like she hates you.”

Jimmy curls into himself a little bit. Three isn’t quite certain why they’ve all decided to take shelter with someone who hates them, but it’s probably better than apathy. The handlers who had openly hated Three had always been better than the ones who approached it with apathy, because with the first group, Three had at least always understood where it stood.

It does, however—now that it knows it can drop its guard for a moment, while Jimmy and BigB and Martyn start discussing leaving the hub world again—decide to text Mumbo. It tells Mumbo it’s switching worlds, and it tells Mumbo it will be busy for a while. Mumbo says that is okay, which is good, because Three isn’t certain what is okay with friends, but Jimmy had seemed rather nervous about leaving Three alone, so it thinks maybe friends aren’t supposed to leave each other alone very often. It looks back at the hotel, and looks back at the rest of the group, and decides it has one opinion.

“If Pearl’s house is also ugly, I am going to prank it and also fix it,” it declares.

BigB looks at Three and laughs for some reason. “You know what, you tell me if you think the place is ugly when we get there. Yeah, you tell me. It’ll be funny either way.”

“Okay,” Three says.

“I need to get closer to spawn,” Martyn says.

“I will stay in front,” Three says.

The range of Martyn’s amulet, at least, isn’t too bad, so they do not have to go through too much crowd to get back out of the hub world. Outside, Three can see the enemy circling. The enemy, it’s a mix of Watchers and Listeners and people who are too colorful to look at and people who are too loud, and they’ve been here, looking for them the whole time. It’s okay, because they’re leaving now. It’s also strange, to keep leaving. It’s not like Three is attached to this as a place. It had been hoping to leave soon regardless.

None of the enemy strikes. They do Watch, and Listen, and track where the four of them are going, though. BigB seems to notice, too. Good instincts. Three wonders where he got them from.

“Ready?” Martyn says.

“Ready,” BigB says, and Jimmy does not respond, although he leans closer to Martyn, and is breathing a bit heavily.

“I forgot the sheep family tree,” Three realizes suddenly.

“I have most of it memorized,” Jimmy says.

“Okay,” Three says.

“A sheep family what?” BigB says.

“You would not believe how weird our life gets,” Martyn says, which Three thinks is very, very rude of him. He hardly gets to judge.

Then, they step out of the hub again, and at last, everything is quiet once more. Despite that, neither Jimmy nor Martyn look any better through the rest of the worlds they hop.

At first, Three doesn’t know they’ve gotten where they’re going when they get there. It’s another server to hop through to throw any pursuers off the scent, as far as Three’s concerned. After all, the spawn they land in is… unmaintained, to put it kindly. It is covered in brambles, and vines, and cobwebs. Buildings are starting to decay. It looks like it was actually, at one point, a fairly nice-looking if chaotic place, but now it has fallen apart, as though it has been abandoned for many years.

Near the middle of spawn, there is a statue with the symbol of the Watchers, and a symbol embedded in the ground. The statue has been repeatedly and impressively defaced, bedrock or not. It is barely recognizable.

It is no wonder Three does not think this is where they’re staying.

“They never fixed it,” Jimmy says hoarsely.

“When would we have had time to?” BigB asks.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy says. “I don’t—Pearl still…?”

“Yeah, she’s still living in the Grian Empire,” BigB says.

“Geez. I haven’t been back here in a long time. Forgot how bad they wrecked the place,” Martyn says.

Everyone is very quiet in the way people get when there is something wrong, but none of them want to say anything about it. Three looks around the spawn again. They’re from here, apparently. This decaying place, with the signs of a time the Watchers were here, and the Watchers abandoned them. Hm. A place for Listener recruitment indeed.

Something aches in Three’s chest. A time when the Watchers were here, but used and abandoned them.

“Little ways out to get to the Grian Empire,” Martyn says.

“She’ll have seen us log in,” Jimmy says.

“Give her time to cool down?” Martyn says.

“You guys are not very subtle at all,” BigB says.

“Screw you, my whole job is being subtle,” Martyn says.

“You aren’t very good at it,” BigB says.

“Where are we?” Three says, and everyone gets quiet a second time. “I had thought we were going to a safe house where there will not be Watchers or Listeners.”

Everyone looks at each other. BigB looks back at Three first, the expression on his face pained. “This is Evo, Three. This is where we’re all from.”

“Oh. You have not taken care of it very well,” Three says.

Jimmy makes a hysterical sound and does not respond to the accusation beyond that. Three looks around again as BigB starts talking again.

“It’s safe enough from the Watchers, for now, because Pearl is pretty good at keeping them out somehow? And also because, uh, no offense, but no one would have expected you all to come back here, like, ever. I mean, I dragged you back here, but on your own—”

“Yeah, okay, we get the picture,” Martyn says. “Geez.”

Three looks around some more, walking forward slightly to check the closest buildings for whether or not they have any threats in them. It is quiet; there aren’t even really many mobs nearby. Occasionally, Three has to slash away a cobweb with its claws to look further into the decaying spawn area. It thinks about Martyn and Jimmy’s house, and then it thinks about the hub world, and then it thinks about this place, and it decides that it doesn’t really understand how Martyn and Jimmy could have come from here.

It wonders if they would think the same thing on seeing the sterile room Three was made in. Then again, Martyn had retrieved Three from the nest; it can’t be that odd. Not like this is.

“Let’s just get going,” Jimmy says quietly. Martyn and BigB share a glance. They start walking. No one pulls out their wings. Oh. Three Looks around. This server is a very old version; wings would be unusual indeed on a server like this. Most things would be unusual. It seems like, in general, an unusual place to live. Some people who play on modded worlds or people who prefer combat like older versions, sure, but not older in the way this is, like the bones of the universe hadn’t quite been settled into place yet. Most people find it uncomfortable. Then again, that symbol of the Watchers; perhaps that was the game they had been playing here, the test they were placing on these Players.

Clearly, they’d failed.

Three thinks that’s stupid and inefficient and, most importantly, idiotic (which is like stupid, but stupider). There is no reason to fail Martyn and Jimmy, except perhaps for the fact that they are not very good at building, and that their spawn is falling apart. They’re very good operatives, in their own way. They should not have been failed.

Jimmy looks down at his phone and winces. “Pearl knows we’re here, alright,” he says.

“Tell her I’m cashing in a favor, and so is Martyn,” BigB says. “Then, uhhh… We should probably wait here, honestly. Instead of meeting her at the—”

“Do we have to?” Jimmy says very quietly.

“…yeah, she’ll kill us if we get to her before she gets to us,” BigB says.

“Okay,” Jimmy says.

“I will keep watch. No one is killing you all,” Three says.

“I’d say you need to learn idioms, but she’s probably actually going to, so,” Martyn says, and they wait there, in that decaying shell of a spawn, for the woman they’ve come to get shelter from to arrive.

---

Pearl’s arrival is preceded by some of the most loaded silence Three has ever witnessed. Occasionally, Martyn or BigB will try to start up conversation, but it’s quickly stifled by something in the air. Three blames, in order: the cobwebs, the buildings, and the Watcher symbol that none of them are near anymore, but still know is there. Jimmy has sat down against one of the walls and has his knees curled in towards his chest. Martyn keeps on checking all the alleyways, on almost the exact opposite pattern to how Three is doing it. BigB is nervously tapping his foot and checking his phone.

Three, for its own part, is keeping watch, as it always does in unknown, potentially hostile territory. For all this place is strangely decayed, it’s also fairly well-built. There are some ugly structures on the world—briefly, Three wonders if those must be Martyn and Jimmy’s faults, or if they’re someone else’s—but, beneath the decay, there is a small section of city, there are shops, there are hub buildings, there are a million little things. There is a building with a large “PP” on top of it, which Three knows must be Martyn and Jimmy. There are the remnants of what Three thinks must have been pranks, and there are the remnants of what must have been half-finished builds. This is a place built by the hands of many Players. Three only knows three of those Players. It is wary of what else might be here. It has to keep an eye out.

There is only one Player on this world, though, and she is approaching them, so it tries to stand down. It finds it cannot, so it decides to keep watching, because it’s easier to keep a watch than to try to calm the part of itself that is certain this is somehow enemy territory. This territory, it tells itself, is too empty to truly be enemy. Empty land cannot attack.

It keeps watch regardless.

It is therefore not a surprise that Three is the first person to properly spot Pearl approaching. She is on foot, although she’d taken a boat for a decent part of the journey as well. She is a tall, pale woman in a black hoodie and jeans with long brown hair. She doesn’t look particularly happy. Three turns, purposefully obvious, to where she’s approaching from.

“Oh,” Martyn says, and turns that way. Jimmy tries to lift himself off the ground using his cane, and ultimately takes a hand from Martyn to finish getting all the way up.

“You don’t have to be at parade rest for her or anything,” BigB says. Three immediately adjusts its posture to a proper parade rest.

“I just want to look her in the eyes while I convince her of this one, is all,” Martyn says.

“Yeah, feels rude otherwise,” Jimmy says.

“Suit yourselves,” BigB says.

Pearl stops before where she’d come into sight for the others and takes a deep breath. Three pulls back its vision some as Pearl comes into ordinary, mortal view. She stops on seeing everyone. She stares directly at Three.

“You brought one here,” she says lowly.

“It’s a big favor,” Martyn says, stepping in front of Three suddenly. Three’s feathers ruffle and flare out. It tries to step back in front—it is the weapon, and Martyn is a mere Player—when Jimmy also manages to hobble in front of it, and now Three can’t go that direction or risk pushing Jimmy over. Distantly, it strikes Three that they probably both stood up because they’d been planning on shielding Three like this. It’s unnecessary. It makes something in Three’s chest pound oddly. This isn’t how this relationship is supposed to work.

“You brought one here,” Pearl says again. “You know, I was prepared to hear you out. You said you needed a favor and a safe space to stay. Fine. I was willing to hide you. But you brought a Watcher here?”

“It’s not like that,” Martyn says. “Well, it is like that, but see, Three isn’t a normal Watcher, and—”

Pearl, quick as a whip, pulls a bow and trains it on them. “Get out.”

“Pearl,” BigB says nervously, stepping out from behind them.

“I trusted you?” Pearl says to BigB. “Didn’t trust these assholes, but—”

“Listen, it’s—it’s really not—” Martyn says.

“You brought a Watcher here! Here! You expect me to keep it in his house? No. I’m not doing that. You aren’t allowed to stay. Get off this fucking server,” Pearl says.

No one moves. Martyn, if anything, tries to throw Three further behind himself. This is entirely inefficient. If Pearl actually fires, now Three would have to throw Martyn to the ground to take it. Three starts trying to find a way to inch back in front of the unexpected wall of people in front of it.

“Listen,” BigB starts.

“No, I don’t want to listen to you all,” Pearl says.

“You owe—”

“Not this!” Pearl shouts. “I’m not spitting on Grian’s memory like this!”

BigB visibly winces and backs off again, looking between everyone furtively. Three wonders if mentioning that it follows Martyn’s orders would help, like it did with Jimmy, but it gets the sense that Pearl is far less likely to be forgiving than Jimmy is, and far more likely to react like Martyn did before he changed his mind, and request Three’s decommissioning. Three would—Three—Three would have to obey, but finds it does not want to be decommissioned at all. Maybe there had been a time when that would have been acceptable, but it’s not now. It’s not.

If they have to fight their way out, Three will do its best. It hopes they do not, however. Jimmy is displaying several visible signs of pain. He is trying to hide them, but he is not doing it in a way that successfully hides them from Three. This will make transporting Jimmy out in a fight more difficult, as it will have to account for not harming him worse.

“Listen, we don’t have to stay with you, we can clean up the old Property Police station, right?” Martyn says, talking faster. “I—look, you owe both me and BigB a favor, so—”

“No,” Pearl says. “No, I don’t think I do anymore. Not after this. Now get out.”

“Pearl, please,” Jimmy says quietly. She turns to him, expression dark. “Pearl.”

“What excuse could you possibly have for bringing a Watcher here? You, of all people?” Pearl asks. “After everything you did. I told you—”

“I know, so I’ve got to have a pretty good reason, right?”

Pearl stares for a while.

“That thing could very well be one of the ones that killed him.”

Jimmy’s voice cracks. “I know.”

“Don’t follow me,” Pearl says, and she turns around and walks away. She does not continue to try to force them out of the server, which is good, since they did not have another end destination planned. She might come back and do so. Three starts mentally going through the servers they’d considered hopping to from the hub world. By now, they may have thrown off their pursuers scent, so they have options open again. There’s also another hub world Three knows of that they could jump to. It is not sure that its own and Jimmy’s health could take that so quickly, though, so one of the smaller servers they’d been considering. That, or a small anarchy server Three knows of. The active Player list is low, so the risk is lower than it would be staying somewhere with a high turnover, but once Three laid down the law, they would be unlikely to mess with it. Strength respects strength, in places like that. That is what Three’s handlers had always taught it, at least.

It can’t rely on staying here.

Three is suddenly struck with the thought that it is the reason they cannot rely on staying here. It had known its continued presence is part of what has led to Martyn and Jimmy hiding in the first place. That is the consequence of stealing a weapon of Three’s caliber. It’s not as though Three can just leave its handler, either. But if it were not here, and Martyn and Jimmy were being hunted down…

“Sorry, guys. Probably should have gotten her used to the idea of Three first before taking you here,” BigB says. “That one’s on me.”

“She’s right,” Jimmy says, shaking. “She’s right.”

“Don’t—don’t say that,” Martyn says.

“It is spitting on his memory a little bit.”

“That’s not entirely fair,” Martyn says.

“I just think it’s notable I don’t care I’m spitting all over his memory,” Jimmy says, a little hysterical. “That even knowing bringing Three here isn’t, isn’t fair, I still…”

“Oh. Yeah. Fair,” Martyn says.

“She’s going to come back and kill us,” Jimmy says.

“She might not!” BigB says optimistically.

“I have planned several escape routes,” Three says.

“She has the right,” Jimmy says. “Out of everyone, she has the right.”

“Hah. Yeah. Probably,” Martyn says.

“Query,” Three says.

“Yeah?” Martyn responds.

“I am causing greater danger to my handlers. I am capable of taking care of myself. I have compiled a list of servers I can hide in—”

“No,” Jimmy says, harshly. “No. At this point, that’s worse. Not unless you want to, I guess. Do you want to?”

Three stays where it is. It can’t leave without an explicit order. It can suggest it is the best way to protect its handlers, but it can’t leave on its own. It reaches out its sight once again. Pearl has not gone back to her base. She has simply moved out of sight of everyone. She is crying.

“Okay,” Jimmy says.

Everyone stays like that for a while.

---

Pearl has her bow at the ready once more when she returns. “You haven’t left.”

Martyn and Jimmy move to try to stand in front of Three again. It’s very unnecessary. Martyn has his sword dropped into his hands.

“You’re still taking its side,” Pearl says.

“Look, we’ll get out of your hair if you want it,” Martyn says.

“Uh, will you?” BigB says. “You all were pretty—”

“But. New negotiation. See this Watcher here? I stole it. That’s why we’re being chased in the first place. Because it’s our, uh. Prisoner, I guess? So there. Work with that.”

Jimmy looks over at Martyn sharply. Three’s not sure why. As much as things have seemingly changed, things have also largely stayed the same. Three is, technically, still a stolen weapon, and describing it as a prisoner is not entirely inaccurate. It certainly isn’t accurate, given the amount of autonomy Three has, and the fact Three is friends with Jimmy and maybe also Martyn, and the fact that they keep on trying to force Three to take more autonomy as opposed to giving meaningful orders, but describing it as a prisoner to a stranger who seems wary of it isn’t the worst idea.

“Prisoner,” Pearl says flatly.

“Yeah. Uh. Three. Do… a little hop?”

Three pauses. “Will comply,” it says, and, with as little energy as possible, hops. It hopes it gets across what it thinks of that.

“Well, you didn’t have to be sarcastic about it,” Martyn says.

“That was sarcasm?” BigB mutters.

“Listen, for what Three used to be like, yeah, that was,” Martyn explains.

Pearl watches them for a little longer before, finally, lowering her bow. “If it’s actually your prisoner, then fine. All three of you owe me favors now, though. Especially you, Martyn. I will call that in. I know what you do for a living these days.”

Martyn grimaces. “I mean. Yeah. Okay.”

Jimmy looks away. Three can think of many things Pearl could want a favor from a Listener for, even one who is as unsuited for combat as Jimmy is. BigB just shrugs. Three stays where it is. It shifts into parade rest. It should be good for Pearl. Pearl would not want it to be bad.

“Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but why?” Martyn says.

Pearl takes a deep breath. “Because you all haven’t been back here. And if you’re going to be running around with a Watcher, I want you to see the things he left behind.”

“Pearl,” Jimmy says.

“Especially you,” Pearl says. “You haven’t been back here since you buried him. Especially you. So you’re going to get to be back here. Go on. Show up with a Watcher.”

Three is not good at tones of voice, but that does not mean it can’t tell Pearl is bitter. Very, very bitter. It shows all over her face.

“Okay,” Jimmy says weakly.

“You want shelter? Fine. You will shelter with me. The Grian Empire less welcomes you as thinks it can keep a better eye on you in its halls.”

She turns to start the trip back to the place called the Grian Empire.

“That went well,” BigB says, and no one else laughs, even though BigB looks like he had been hoping to get a laugh, and Three does not understand why.

---

The server is in less and less disrepair as they leave spawn, following a railroad line. It feels almost as though spawn and the surrounding town had been maliciously left in disrepair somehow, and as they get further from that malicious path, things get less decayed. The sense of abandonment, however, does not leave. There are still half-done builds, the remnants of pranks, and the rail line they all continue along. Three can’t help but expand its senses again. This is obviously not a singleplayer world, if it is where Martyn and Jimmy had come from, but Pearl remains the only Player here.

Jimmy gets more and more strangely alert as they walk. His usual human appearance starts to slip more, the strange sense of motion the hairs on his chitin provide him growing more and more pronounced. BigB keeps flinching away from it. Martyn just offers Jimmy his body weight to lean on and, on determining Pearl seems unlikely to turn around and train her bow on them again, Three decides to do the same. This is a good decision, as Jimmy seems to need the extra support badly.

They’re all quiet as they follow Pearl further out. It is not far until they come across a structure rising from it. It is made almost entirely of snow and clay and stone. It is largely made of circular parts and domes, and is held up by many columns. It reaches out of the water, but is also built somewhat into it. It somehow feels unfinished, though Three cannot explain why. Perhaps it is simply that it is built in this early version of the world, and therefore does not have all the options later versions would have for making it nicer. Nonetheless, it is a very aesthetically pleasing building. There are things Three would have done differently, but compared to the places Three had been recently, it’s almost comforting in how it feels.

“You haven’t done much to it,” Martyn says.

Pearl doesn’t respond at first. She just guides them through the train station and down a tunnel that leads them into the base itself.

“I thought, if you’ve been living here—”

“I do my building in my own world,” Pearl says.

“Oh, yeah. Fair, I guess,” Martyn says.

Three steps inside with the others. Jimmy looks vaguely sick as they all get out. As they step inside, Three is struck by how empty the interiors are. Someone, at some point, had clearly cleaned everything into a decently well-sorted series of chests, which line the walls of one of the rooms. There are some beds, and there are signs Pearl lives here, but clearly whoever had built this place didn’t care much for interior decorating. It makes the whole place feel oddly lifeless, for a place someone lives in.

Outside, he can see where curtains of water fall around the very middle of the base. Building on the water in a version this old is fairly impressive. It’s pretty. It makes a lot of noise and the light reflecting through the water can feel busy, but in a way more like white noise than anything else. At the parts of the building closest to the seafloor, it makes everything feel washed out, putting a distant bubble around the place.

As it stands, that distant bubble mostly exists through the lack of interior decorating, and the way no one is looking each other in the eyes.

“Welcome to the Grian Empire,” Pearl says. “Might as well make it official that you’re all staying here. Don’t leave without me. You aren’t allowed. Not after the way you came. I am going to another room. Do not talk to me. Don’t expect me to talk to you. You’re here because I owed you at one point, you’ll owe me more now, and—and I’ll be able to, to keep an eye on whatever it is you’re doing. Maybe use the prisoner thing.”

BigB says: “I’m sorry, man, I thought—”

“This is a mockery.” Pearl says. Another pause. “You are no longer in my trust.”

“Right,” BigB says.

“I—I don’t like any of you terribly much already, but now I don’t even more,” Pearl says, and she turns to leave. If she’d had a door to slam, she would have slammed it behind her, Three thinks. Three stretches its senses to start to follow Pearl, but quickly stops when it realizes Martyn had not been lying about Pearl having defenses set up to prevent Watchers from hurting her here. There are colorful, strobing lights, the type that should not work on this version at all, set up in strategic places all across the Grian Empire. It renders it almost impossible to effectively Watch anything happening in the place. It’s clever. It is the sort of thing Three would expect Martyn to have on hand, but because he has the advantage of working for Listeners. Pearl had set this up on her own.

Life had given Pearl a reason to set that up on her own.

Three is capable of putting together dots. Three rather suspects the reason life had given Pearl to set up the flashing lights is the same reason life had given to Jimmy to become a Listener (even though he is not terribly suited for it), or Martyn to steal and kill and torture (even though he is only really suited for stealing), or BigB to look at all of them with an expression that Three does not know how to read, no matter how hard it tries to.

It strikes Three very suddenly that it is somewhere where a lot of people were made. It wonders, for a moment, if this place should feel like an operating table in a white room, with eyes hovering above it, since it made so many people. It does not. It mostly just feels haunted.

“That went well,” BigB says optimistically, after a long while.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Jimmy says.

“Don’t be like that,” BigB says. “You’re here now, aren’t you? Better than if you weren’t?”

“Yeah, well, jury’s still out,” Martyn says, and, even though Three has no history with this place at all, it finds it cannot help but agree.

Not being allowed to leave the Grian Empire does not solve the way everyone feels distant, but it does make Three feel almost stir-crazy. It is strange. The Grian Empire is certainly bigger than Jimmy and Martyn’s house had been. Maybe it’s that this place is emptier. Maybe it’s that, for all Pearl has protected this place from being easily seen by Watchers, Three knows they are still being chased. Maybe it’s the way BigB keeps on looking at it, somewhere between expectant and relieved and disappointed. Or maybe it’s just that Three has realized it does not like being disliked, even by someone who could be just as much of an enemy as an ally. 

It’s probably mostly that Jimmy has gotten very quiet again, like he was after Martyn left when he could not stand to look at Three, and that Martyn has gotten very loud again, like he is upset as well. It makes Three want to find something it can do about it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t know what it can do about it. There are too many enemies to simply hunt them down and destroy them. There are plenty of sheep on this world, but Jimmy does not seem very interested in counting them, this time. It isn’t supposed to leave, so it cannot go hunt for something to cook for them all. It hadn’t been planning on knitting anything new for them, and it is not sure that would help with the unsettling feeling over everything. 

It settles for knitting, because if nothing else, that calms Three’s own nerves slightly. That is still a mission. It is still, for the barest facade of anyone caring about it, following an order. It gives up on the sweater for the time being (a bit too far of a leap from its current skillset) and decides instead to knit a red hat and socks. These will help it practice for when the time comes to knit a sweater in a way that the scarves had not, since the scarves were mostly straight lines, and sweaters require a lot of things that are not straight lines.

Also, if it wanted to wear a sweater itself, maybe it would need to put slits in the back, for if it decided to call out its wings. Otherwise, the sweater might rip. There are a lot of patterns for it online, Three finds, because there are plenty of people who have wings these days on higher version worlds. Wings like Three’s are rarer, on account of them being due to Three having been destroyed and remade into a weapon of war, but it is easy enough to pretend Three has the normal sort of wings that are either always there or there when an elytra is put on, as opposed to the less-normal sort that appear when needed through Watcher magic.

It could practice putting slits in things with the hats or the socks. Three is not entirely certain where hats with slits would be helpful (maybe to fit Jimmy’s headphones through?) nor is it certain where socks with slits would be helpful (perhaps to have space for its claws, should it need to kick using claws sometime?), but it should practice that, too.

It uses a lot of red wool, staying in one place. Pearl glares at it while it does. It does not pay this any mind. It would like it if Pearl were less angry, because then Jimmy and Martyn might be less upset, but it knows that it is a weapon that has done a great many things. For example, apparently it may have killed Grian, someone everyone here seems to have cared very much about. It is not surprising that Pearl is angry. Three thinks it would be more surprised if Pearl were not.

Occasionally, since it is allowed to see other parts of the Grian Empire, if not leave, Three wanders. The use of snow and clay is rather impressive. Builds like this, that look as though they should be carved from concrete and stone and marble, are not very easy in a world like this one, where there is no concrete or quartz and where the stone is entirely more ugly than it would be in another world. Snow is a finicky building material as well, sensitive to heat and light and with a blue-ish tint that makes it harder to work with than something plain white, like quartz, would be.

There are things Three would not have done. For example, in the middle of one of the courtyards, it rains mobs. They hit the floor loudly and die for their drops. Three is well aware there are not hoppers available here, it’s just… in the middle of the building? Where anyone could just walk in? Directly in front of the nether portal? Without any kind of fence? It seems terribly unsafe, and terribly inefficient. The building is also all rather impersonal feeling, especially without the interior completed. It had been built for grandeur from the outside, but on the inside, it barely gives Three a sense at all of who Grian had been. It’s beautiful, in whites and greys and clean lines and circles, cutting into the ocean, curtains of water falling around it. 

Beautiful and impressive and dead.

Three thinks about the ugly house Martyn and Jimmy had been living in. It had been very ugly. If Three were asked to blow it up a second time, Three would bring fireworks, just to show off how happy it was to blow it up again. But on the inside of that house—there had been no question, the kinds of people who lived there.

Three thinks this building feels like it had been built to be haunted. It doesn’t know what it thinks of that. It really likes the clean lines. It really likes the clean colors. It likes the sense of grandeur, the sense of beauty, the efficient circles, but—it’s just… haunted.

It tells Martyn: “I would like to learn to build interiors.”

Martyn raises an eyebrow. “Er, not sure why you’re asking me, but sure. Not any good at… most building, really.”

“I know. You are bad at it,” Three says.

“Okay, ouch, you were supposed to comfort me.”

“That seems stupid,” Three says.

“I don’t know why I try. Uh. Why interiors?”

“I don’t want to build things that become haunted,” Three explains.

Martyn looks out towards the water. “Yeah, sorry. I’m not sure that the interior here has anything to do with how haunted it may or may not be.”

Three thinks that’s also stupid, but doesn’t say so. Three also thinks that it knows full well that this place is haunted because Grian is dead and everyone is still very sad about it, but if there had been an interior full of things he’d left behind, maybe they’d be a little less sad. Maybe they’d trace their hands across walls covered in wool, or they would light candles, or they’d sit around a crooked table eating chicken and thinking about the person who had made that table. That’s all Three is thinking, really.

Maybe it’s not the most efficient way to avoid making a haunted shell of a building. Three isn’t particularly well-designed to understand emotions, after all. That is not one of Three’s strengths. It feels like it might be a decent enough way, though, and that’s what matters.

It mentions this to Jimmy, and Jimmy says: “Er, well, good for you, I don’t know how to make those though. I—don’t insult this, though. It’s not like he had time to finish, is it?”

It mentions this to BigB, and BigB says: “Right. You do that. Learn to make interiors because you don’t like this one. Sure.” He pauses and adds: “Not very good at building myself, honestly. Think Pearl’s the only one here who is.”

It would mention this to Pearl, since it’s been told she’s good at building, but Pearl is avoiding it, and also it thinks that maybe saying that it doesn’t want to make a haunted building when it may well be the thing that made this one start being haunted would be unwise. Three knows safe places to go if they’re kicked out, but Jimmy has not been doing well, and Three does not think that forcing Jimmy to travel to one of Three’s theoretical safe places would make him do better.

As a result, though, Three can’t learn to make interiors, so it is back to going through all of its red wool. It does not take long to become surrounded by lumpy socks that fit no one’s feet. It does not burn them, even though it wants to when it realizes how little they resemble socks, because it is easier to study what is wrong with them if it still has them, and not at all for pointless, emotional reasons, like because leaving the red wool socks scattered on the stone around its bed makes it feel like it is more obvious it has been there.

---

When Pearl finally talks to them, they have been there three days. Three can’t say what she’d been doing before then, because she never leaves the area with hidden strobe lights. Three probably could have followed her with its senses if it had wanted to, after a day or two of cooling off from the hub, but it had not wanted to overstep, and also that would have still hurt it, and while it has been trained to withstand torture, it finds it does not really want to hurt.

It doesn’t ultimately matter what Pearl had or had not been doing, really, since she hadn’t been talking to them, but now she is. She has wrapped herself tightly in dark jeans and a black hoodie. She still has her bow. There is a sword hanging at her hip. She looks, to Three’s eyes, like she’s dressed herself up for war.

“If you’re going to be here, you need to visit him,” Pearl says.

“Oh,” Jimmy says, like a desperate sigh. 

“Are you sure you want us all there?” Martyn says, glancing at Three.

“You,” Pearl says, and it takes a moment for Three to realize she’s referring to it. Odd. It had gotten used to being referred to by name somehow. It used to be a bit better at responding to people who did not refer to it using any particular name at all. It will have to brush up on the skill.

“Yes,” Three says.

“You will not disturb anything there. But since you’re here, you’re visiting too. Tell me, were you involved in Grian’s death?”

“I do not recall specific targets,” Three says. “I am not allowed.”

Pearl snorts. “So you were. Got it.”

That’s not what Three said, but it can’t stop Pearl from thinking that, especially given that it can’t remember anything that would refute it, either.

“You’ll come. You won’t be left here alone. I’m not leaving a Watcher alone.”

“Will comply,” Three says.

“It’s not far,” Pearl says.

“I know,” snaps Jimmy. “I buried him.”

“Well, you haven’t exactly visited,” Pearl says, and Jimmy looks away. That seems to be the end of that discussion. They gather together. None of them look very comfortable. Jimmy is hiding in his clothes. Martyn is fiddling with the part of his coat Three knows has a shortsword in it. BigB is—well, Three does not know BigB well enough to say exactly what, precisely, is wrong with BigB, but he does not look particularly comfortable either.

They gather on boats. They’re small. Three had forgotten boats had once been smaller. Then, they follow Pearl across the water silently. A short distance from the Grian Empire, just outside of easy view of the buildings, is when Three spots a structure on the shoreline. It’s tall and made mostly of stone and cobblestone. It is shaped like a spire, wider on the bottom and reaching upwards. At the top, there is a fire burning. At the bottom, it is surrounded by flowers.

When they get to it, Three sees where words have been etched onto the stone:

GRIAN

AGAINST THE ASSAULT OF LAUGHTER, NOTHING CAN STAND.

There is a small grave beneath the monument. It has been well-maintained. The flowers are well-kept, and the vines are clearly trimmed when they get too close to the etching. Despite being near the shore, there is no risk of water reaching up and eroding away the dirt, thanks to a small stone retaining wall against the shore. It is clearly a very important place.

Jimmy stares at it and then, silently, places a candle in the flowers and lights it. He doesn’t stand up again after doing so. His body is shaking too much to stand on his bad leg.

“You’ve been taking care of it,” Martyn says.

“He left me everything,” Pearl says. “And none of you were here to.”

“You should go somewhere else,” Martyn says. “Do anything else. You’ve just… been here.”

“I’ve chosen to be,” Pearl says.

“Please, be quiet,” Jimmy says.

Everyone is quiet again. There is a light breeze. Three stands there and looks at the grave of the person that came before it, and wonders if it should feel something. Everyone else does, but they all knew Grian. They knew the laughing man in Jimmy’s picture he lights candles for. They knew the person who had built the place they were staying in. They knew the person who had clearly, at least somewhat, torn them apart. 

Three did not. Three doesn’t feel much other than worry, since Jimmy will have trouble standing, shaking like that.

“Sorry I haven’t come back,” Jimmy croaks to no one in particular. “Sorry.”

“He can’t hear your apologies,” Pearl says.

“I know,” Jimmy says.

“Okay,” Pearl says.

“It’s not his fault,” Martyn says. “I can’t stay anywhere long, and he insisted on staying with me.”

“That’s not what he needs to apologize for. I wasn’t exactly on good terms with him anyway to invite him here,” Pearl says.

“…that’s not his fault, either,” Martyn says.

“Not how he told it,” Pearl says.

“Pearl,” Martyn says.

“Please be quiet,” Jimmy says. “I said sorry. Not in front of Grian. We’ll do this back at, at the Empire, I guess.”

“Fine,” Martyn says. “You shouldn’t let—”

“Quiet,” Jimmy says, rocking back. “Quiet, quiet, quiet, all I want is quiet, quiet, quiet.” 

The words don’t seem to be coming out of Jimmy quite right, but even with how angry Pearl is, she lets that be, and she’s quiet again. It seems everyone knows he has a good reason for not talking right, right now.

They all remain by the grave for a while. Eventually, Jimmy lifts his head up, and reaches up an arm, and Martyn lifts him to his feet. He’s also too shaky to seem balanced on his cane, but he does not go down again. They do not turn to leave, though, and then Martyn, Jimmy, BigB, and Pearl are standing shoulder to shoulder in front of Grian’s grave, together.

“This is the most of us who’ve been here at once since then, huh,” Martyn says.

“That’s why I figured no one would look for you all here,” BigB says.

“I think I hate you for that,” Martyn says, and BigB doesn’t respond.

They stay there just a little longer.

“Right,” Martyn says. “Not like this does much of anything. The dead are dead. We should leave. The Empire has better protections.”

“Martyn,” Jimmy says.

“I mean, uh. Well. You know what I mean. Standing here isn’t fixing anything.”

“Does visiting him mean nothing?” Pearl says.

“I—that’s not what I said,” Martyn starts.

“Not here,” Jimmy says. “Not here.”

“Yeah, man,” BigB says. “Not here.”

“Fine,” Martyn says.

“If we’re just going to argue, we can leave,” Pearl says. She breaks the chain of them standing in front of the grave, and she turns, and suddenly she is face-to-face with Three. She looks down at its mask, expression darkening. Three looks back, because it has not been asked to look away.

“Anything to say to him?” Pearl asks.

“I do not know how to talk to dead people. I have never heard one respond before,” Three says.

“Figures,” Pearl says.

They all get back in the boats. Three once again wonders if it should feel something, if it should understand what the point of all of that had been. 

It does not.

It keeps watch over everyone else’s boats, though, since the reason Three had not been designed to feel its own emotions is that they’re distracting. As ruined as that conditioning has been lately, it still recognizes when it needs to watch over someone else for the same thing.

---

Despite having headed off the arguments by implying they’d keep having them once they got home, everyone largely just stands awkwardly as they get off the boats. Whatever energy had possessed them all to argue is gone. Perhaps it’s the way the water curtains the Grian Empire is sunk behind feel like they dampen the sound around them. Mostly, though, Three thinks it’s that arguments aren’t really an easy thing to put down and pick up again later in the same way.

“I’ll try to stop by more often,” Martyn says, finally.

“I can’t say you’re welcome, after this,” Pearl says.

“Why do you still blame him?” Martyn asks.

“He was there. He could have—he could have done something,” Pearl says. 

“That’s not fair,” Martyn says.

“It’s true,” Jimmy says. “And now I’m here. Didn’t even go through all the way with the Listener thing. Haven’t done anything useful at all. Didn’t then, and haven’t now. Happy?”

“Man…” BigB says.

Pearl looks over Jimmy. “You aren’t Martyn. You aren’t destroying yourself for a vengeance that isn’t yours to take, at least. I can give you that much.”

Jimmy looks away.

“Hey, that’s not fair either,” Martyn snaps. “He was my friend too.”

“And he left everything to me, so I had to stay here, vengeance or not.” Pearl looks away again.

“I don’t understand,” Three says, and then realizes it has said it out loud when everyone looks at it at once.

“Of course you don’t,” Pearl says.

Three decides that it has already spoken out loud, so it should go through with just asking its question. The nice thing about Martyn and Jimmy is that they are not normally mad at Three for asking questions, even if the questions are upsetting.

“I don’t understand. You say I killed Grian. Why are you mad at Jimmy?”

“Well, he was there too,” Pearl says. Her voice is a little weaker this time. Her expression is oddly self-conscious, like she knows what she is saying does not make much sense. It is good she knows that, because Three really, really doesn’t understand it.

“Even you know it’s flimsy,” Martyn says.

“No, she’s—not wrong,” Jimmy says.

BigB looks up. “We have a neutral party. Uh, Three doesn’t know what happened to Grian, right? If one of you tells the whole story, well, then it can decide whether or not it thinks it makes sense to blame Jimmy.”

Everyone looks at BigB.

“It’s not a nice story,” Pearl mutters.

“It’s my story to tell,” Jimmy says, finally. “And—I guess. Three. Do you want to hear it then? It’s a bit much of us, to ask you to judge something like who’s to blame, but…”

“I want to hear it,” Three says.

“You don’t have to—” Martyn starts.

“No, I haven’t told it in a—I think after all this, Three deserves to hear something. Just. Let me figure out how to start? It’ll be—I don’t know. It’s hard to know where to start,” Jimmy says.

“I’ll start,” Martyn says. “It was after we saw evidence of the Listeners for the first time, and they told us to tell nobody. ‘Course, at the time, I didn’t know anything about them, other than that they were giving us cryptic warnings and telling us not to tell anyone about them. I’ve always wondered if that’s why the timing was like that, but given the dragon fight was a part of everything, it was probably just… I don’t know. Feels like it was probably relevant, but I don’t know why.”

“That’s where you’re starting me?” Jimmy murmurs.

“It’s as good a place as any,” Martyn says.

“I wasn’t there,” BigB says suddenly. “I was out. Uh, on another server. Taking a break for a bit. I don’t come back until after. But I wasn’t… there. Maybe it’s because between me and Taurtis—”

“Taurtis was going to be gone no matter what,” Pearl interjects.

“Still, you know, a man wonders, right?” BigB says. “Uh, sorry. I know that, uh, you all have more claim to this than I do. It’s just, with Three here, I’m like, maybe some detail will stand out to it that doesn’t to us.”

“Guys, please be quiet,” Jimmy says. “Fine. We’ll start there though. It was after we first met the Listeners, but before we really knew—I mean, the Watchers had never liked me much. That’s important, isn’t it? That they’d never liked me? Hated me, is what they really did. Even compared to Grian. Grian, they had, you know, expectations for. Me? I think they just wanted me dead in a gutter somewhere, really. Well, I say think, I know that, they said that, they were going to—no, we’re going in order. So there was—they hated me, and they had expectations for Grian, and most everyone else was somewhere on a spectrum elsewhere to them, I reckon. Knowing what I do now, can’t help but wonder if they were just… using us for something.”

There’s a long pause. Three takes this as a sign it is supposed to add input. “Many Watchers enjoy putting Players through games. It is to test them, and also to test other things the Watchers are working on. It is one of their roles.”

Pearl looks at Three sharply. “Are you?”

“I am not—I am a weapon,” Three says. “I am designed for use as a weapon when one is needed. I am not meant for other desires.”

“Right, that’s not actually important,” Jimmy says. “Or, well, it is? It’s an important part of Three, and of, of the Watchers, but it’s not really an important part of all of this.”

“‘Course. Continue,” Martyn says.

“The thing with Evo is that it used to move up through the versions of the world. The Watchers had a bit to do with that sometimes, but it was originally just a thing Grian set up as Admin. I hadn’t mentioned—he was Admin at one point. Said he’d pass it on to Taurtis while he was still around, but since he left, pretty sure his will had Pearl inherit—Pearl owns this place now. Hasn’t updated.”

“Why would I? No one’s here,” Pearl says.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t anymore,” Martyn says. “Could draw too much attention.”

“We’d just updated to… you know, I don’t know the numbers? You’d think I’d—it doesn’t matter, really,” Jimmy says. “The one that let you get to the End. The one that let you fight the dragon. Most of us hadn’t really done it in a long time, if we’d done it before at all, and, uh, the dragon, it was supposed to be harder. Of course, it wasn’t the dragon that was the problem, it was—they cheated—no, I’m doing this in order.”

Martyn puts a hand on Jimmy.

“We all decided to go fight the dragon together,” Jimmy says.

“Except me,” BigB says.

“Except you,” agrees Jimmy. “We all jumped into the portal, and, and…”

Jimmy trails off. He looks up at the sky for a while. No one interrupts him while he breathes deeply and tries to collect his thoughts.

“It was only me and Grian. Except, I wasn’t supposed to be there, was I? There was—they were Watchers. I hadn’t seen a Watcher before, just their statues and symbols. I didn’t know what I was looking at. And there was a dragon, and that was secondary, and it was like all of a sudden I knew—I. Maybe we should have just died to the dragon. Jumped off the island or something. I mean, we could have both died, but—”

“Jimmy,” Martyn says.

“Right. If I’m telling it—I. Well. The Watchers said I wasn’t supposed to be there. They just wanted Grian for his ascension. Or something. For something burned in my mind, the—the words aren’t easy. They said—I was already tainted. By Listeners, maybe, or by being me. No one ever likes me much. They always hated me. Whole universe always has. It’s like I’m cursed or something, it’s—it’s not fair, I wasn’t supposed to be there. If I hadn’t been there, maybe… I wasn’t supposed to be there,” Jimmy says.

“Sit down,” Martyn says, and Jimmy sits.

“You don’t have to finish,” Three says. “It is okay.”

“No, I’m—I’m not at the important part,” Jimmy says. “I’m not—Pearl’s right. If I’m here, I should visit him, right?”

“Jimmy,” Pearl says, and Three is startled to realize her expression is guilty.

“No. I’m finishing it. There’s—it’s the important part,” Jimmy says. “It’s the very important part. See, they said they were going to kill me. Get me out of the way. No one’s supposed to watch a new Watcher get fledged. That’s a rule. So I had to die.”

No one is looking at Jimmy but Three. Everyone else is looking away. 

“And Grian said… Grian said he didn’t know what was happening, but despite everything, I was his friend. He said—he said ‘you can take Timmy over my dead body.’”

Pearl hisses in a breath from where she is looking away.

“And you know. He wasn’t lying,” Jimmy says. 

Everyone is very quiet. Jimmy seems to be done talking.

“Afterwards,” Martyn says slowly. “Afterwards. We’d also fought a dragon. Didn’t know where they were. Woke up at a new spawn, far away from here. Started going back. Met Jimmy partway. He was carrying what was left of Grian. Covered in blood. Hysterical. Limping and bleeding. You can guess how it goes from there. There’s a funeral. We all go our own ways. Jimmy goes to become a Listener because they claimed they could help fix it and I join up with them, because I’m not letting any more Watchers do that to anyone else. Bunch of people blame Jimmy, because they’re cowards.”

“Pretty much everyone blames themselves,” BigB corrects.

“Amounted to the same thing, didn’t it?” Martyn says.

“Oh,” Three says.

Jimmy is still sitting. Three thinks about it for a minute, and sits down as well.

“If I had been the one to kill Grian, the fact you are alive is impressive, and the fact he is not alive has nothing to do with you at all,” Three says.

Jimmy, for some reason, laughs and laughs and laughs at that. Three doesn’t understand why. It was not very funny.

Pearl, quietly, leaves, and after a moment, BigB leaves too, and then it is just Jimmy, and Martyn, and Three, and they are all sitting on the floor together. That is fine. The floor is comfortable enough.

---

Something Three witnesses, and reads the lips of, while it is knitting, even though it really ought not to:

“It’s not really that I blame you,” Pearl says to Jimmy. “You have to understand.”

“You should.”

“It’s that I’m mad at him.”

They both stay still for a bit.

“Yeah, okay,” Jimmy says. “I was mad at him all the time before it all happened, and I probably still am now.”

Pearl laughs. “He was good at that.”

“He really was—”

And then they all stop talking, and the sky is brilliant purple.

When Three comes to again, it is in a bed. There is a blanket laying over its face. This is strange, because every fibre of its being had previously been braced to wake up for a reconditioning session, or to wake up fully not knowing what had just happened, in a Watcher nest, waiting for its next mission. It knows, with utter certainty, that it should be waking up in one of those places. If it’s in a bed, it should be a hospital cot, but no—it is in an ordinary, soft bed, with an ordinary, soft blanket over its face instead of a mask, with a bit of awkward heat pooling over its face from where its breath had met the fabric. It’s lucky it doesn’t need to breathe like a human, exactly, given the presence of the blanket over its face, and…

It takes a moment for Three to try to remember what had happened. Everything is strange, and its head hurts quite badly. If it recalls correctly, Watchers had arrived to steal it back from Martyn, and had recited its code words, so it had reset its mission. Except… someone else had recited code words as well? Someone it had wanted to listen to more? Jimmy, if Three recalls correctly. Jimmy had recited code words, and Three had wanted to listen to him more, and it had ended up halfway between; a danger to everyone, not just to the people it cared about. 

It lies there, picturing cracking Pearl and Martyn’s skulls open and leaving them for dead. It pictures the moment it had been about to permanently kill Pearl.

It does not like that feeling.

The exact memories of those things are simultaneously crystal clear and hard to access. They play in Three’s mind repeatedly. Mission-haze is rare; normally, on receiving a new handler, Three is expected to be somewhat lucid. For certain orders, though, and orders given meant to be a complete temporary wipe until reconditioning can actually happen, combined with a situation that it apparently had not been properly conditioned for… It is no wonder, it decides, that its head hurts.

It is a little bit more of a wonder that its heart hurts. It had—it had tried to kill everyone. Like it had been designed for. If it had not been lucid enough to figure out how to shut itself down before it could do worse, it probably would have just kept going. None of them would have been able to stop it. 

It very, very much does not like that feeling.

In some ways, it would be easier if it were simple. If Three had killed them, and had its memory wiped, and been reconditioned without incident, and would never remember any of this again. But the idea of not remembering feels a little like the idea of dying, and Three doesn’t want to do either of those things. In some ways, it would be easier if it were simple. If Three had simply fully rejected the conditioning, and the command words hadn’t worked, and Three had ignored orders and made its own decision. If it hadn’t been reliant on someone else saying a new set of words for it to get conflicted enough to be able to.

It would be easier if it were simple: Three could disobey, or Three could not.

Three is, ultimately, a person, or Three is not.

…does Three want to be a person?

Three does.

Three wants to be a person. Three wants to be like Mumbo or Martyn or Jimmy or BigB or maybe even Pearl. It thinks it does not ever want what has just happened to happen again easily. It thinks maybe it should find a way to make sure there’s always someone to confuse things enough if the Watchers decide to come back again—although killing those who should have had an easy retrieval job will be a very good deterrence for the time being, especially given that they know full well Three will have figured out the trigger by now.

It strikes Three all at once that this means, if it’s careful, it can be stolen for good. It doesn’t have to go back.

Its head hurts. It is very tired. It would like to sleep more again, and hopefully when it wakes up, it will have finished figuring out how to process this, and what to do about it. It thinks when it does it will thank Jimmy, and also Martyn. It will apologize to Pearl if it needs to, though it does not know if an apology is necessary if it was following orders. Surely Pearl understands…

Surely.

Three feels strange, and Three goes back to sleep.

---

“Grian?” someone says as Three wakes up again. 

“Who?” Three asks. It opens its senses enough to start seeing again. Jimmy and Martyn are sitting by the bed. Martyn is the one who spoke.

“You,” Martyn says. “You know who Grian is. Surely.”

“Yes,” Three says slowly. “He is dead. That is who Grian is.”

“That’s—that’s one way of—gods,” Martyn says. “Do you. Can I take off the blanket and show you your face in the mirror? I know that hurts you. That’s a stupid question. I should have just taken a photograph. But we’ve talked to BigB too, and—look, it’s important.”

Three’s feathers flare. It doesn’t understand what Martyn is saying. There’s something in his expression, though, and the way his mouth is forming the words he’s saying, and in the tremble of his hands that’s unsettling.

“I am trained to withstand torture. I only shut down before because I was already at peak capacity due to earlier logic failures.” A pause. “I can do it for a short time. I will be fine.”

“You aren’t just doing it because I asked?” Martyn says, although he looks like he doesn’t really want to have to ask politely to make Three do it.

“Yes,” Three says. Martyn pulls out the mirror. He already has it. He must really be eager. Three isn’t sure what to feel about that.

“Martyn,” Jimmy says softly.

“I’ve got to check for myself. And show Grian.”

“He’s dead,” Three says.

“About that. Just—the mirror,” Martyn says, and Three takes a deep, bracing breath, and shoves the blanket off of its head. The world is bright, and everything is moving, and there are so many things in it, and Three’s head hurts again and everything hurts and is so, so, so much, but just for a moment, long enough to see its face in the mirror, it is in a bed and not mid-combat, it can manage that much, it just needs to manage to focus its senses enough to look. Past the pain of having its face uncovered. It can do this. It can do this.

It looks in the mirror. It blinks.

“Oh. I do look like Grian,” it says. It’s true. Looking at itself in the mirror, it—well, it is still a creature with feathers instead of skin. But it has the same face as Grian’s, similar in a way that’s impossible to avoid without the mask. It tries to focus in on the mirror for longer. It does not see its own face often. Most Watchers don’t, but Three especially does not. It feels as though it should try to memorize it, just in case it does not get another opportunity again without getting overwhelmed and hurt. It can withstand torture. It can withstand enough for this. It can withstand enough to see it looks just like the picture Jimmy had lit candles in front of for so long. It is not smiling, though. Its face is blank, as it has been trained to be. The rest, though—the rest— 

It pulls the blanket over its head again, and for several minutes, it simply sits and breathes and attempts to recalibrate to the world around it. That had been a lot. It looks just like this Grian person. 

“Yeah, yeah, you do,” Martyn says.

“So, I just—I want to make sure,” Jimmy says suddenly. “You don’t remember where you came from, but if they were to make a new one of you. What would the process be.”

Three thinks slowly. It has talked about this to Jimmy before, but not in detail. “A Player vessel would be taken. One that is suited for becoming a Watcher in some other way already, but likely one that could not fledge into a normal Watcher. They would have their memories wiped, and they would be completely remade, in the way that fledging does, but more. Once they were remade into a weapon, they would do training, and it would be like mine. I would still be taking missions. Once their training had come along, I would be brought in, and would finish the training. They would then fight and kill me to prove their worth, just as I killed Blade-Two. This would be after I have had an appropriate amount of service. That is normally many decades, even centuries, but—well, after this, if they were to make a new one of me and use me for the process as they have in the past, they would wait less time. I have proved deficient in other ways. That is the standard decommissioning process. Given that they already have lost me, though, they may choose to take a vessel without performing the normal knowledge transfer steps from myself to them, and start from scratch.”

Jimmy and Martyn are staring.

“You killed the prior blade?” Martyn says weakly.

“Yes. There can only ever be one. We are too dangerous to have multiple of, and it is best if there is a rumor it has only ever been one Blade.”

“That solves the last issue,” Martyn mutters. “That solves how you could be Grian when there are confirmed kills in your name for, for decades. With the mask and the scorched earth policy, no one would know, as long as it always seemed like the same—gods. And completely remade. Remade but for—”

“Eclosure keeps the face,” Jimmy says. “Keeps it almost the same. That’s half the point, that without a vessel it doesn’t work, so I kept a lot of my original form.”

“I was fledged,” Three says.

Jimmy laughs hoarsely. “Oh, Grian. They wanted to make me more like you than this. You know it’s a similar process, just less… forcible brainwashing. And murder.”

Three pulls the blanket tighter around its face. “Why are you calling me that,” it says.

“Well,” Jimmy says. “Well. Why do you think?”

“Oh,” Three says. 

“I—I’m sorry I didn’t realize. I should have—I’m not a full Listener, but I should have been able to hear,” Jimmy says. “I should have—I should have—I watched them take you. I thought they’d killed you. Remake you. Remake—if they’d managed to keep you alive just long enough—”

“Oh,” Three says again, because Jimmy’s crying now, and it isn’t sure where to start.

“I can’t believe I found Grian,” Martyn says hoarsely. “I can’t believe after all this, I found him, and he was—”

“It,” Three says.

“What?” Martyn says.

“It. You asked me what I wanted, before, and I said—I said I am an it. You found me. I am an it,” Three says. Something very strange is burning in the middle of its chest. It’s not anger, not really. It’s not even sadness. It’s just a ball of something that feels like fire and mud mixed together, right there over its heart.

“Right. Right. I’m sorry. You still…?” Martyn says.

Three nods. It pulls the blanket even tighter.

“This is probably a lot,” Martyn says. “Finding out who you are.”

Three doesn’t say anything. 

“Tell you what. I’ll leave you alone for now to think about it. Okay? Unless you want to hear stories…?”

He sounds so hopeful. Three should listen to its handler. Three shouldn’t send a handler away. Except—no, Martyn isn’t Three’s current handler. Jimmy is. It looks to Jimmy.

Jimmy is looking at Three with an expression that resembles nothing so much as heartbreak.

“I think it is okay if I am alone, right now,” Three says. Jimmy breathes out a sigh of relief.

“Okay,” Martyn says. “I’m glad I found you, Grian.”

“Yes,” Three says. “Yes.”

They leave. Three stares after them. It thinks about the face in the mirror. It realizes it forgot to ask about a mask. It had meant to ask about where its mask had gone. It liked that mask. If it had gotten destroyed, it would have liked to have at least known. Then, maybe, it could get a new one, one that it likes, and gets to choose for itself.

It takes a deep breath. Its head hurts. It wonders how many sheep are on this world. It will start counting them. That is what it will do. That will make sense. Counting sheep makes sense, or at least, far more sense than all of that.

One, two, three…

---

Eventually, Three stops counting sheep. It has counted thousands, and grouped them into little groups in its mind. Despite this being an old server, it’s the kind of old server where building with wool was often the only way to get many colors, so there are plenty of sheep in corrals for this purpose. Also, sheep do not drop very much meat in this version, making cooking with mutton next to impossible, so killing a lot of sheep for resources would rarely be effective. As such, Three had needed to start grouping up sheep early, in order to more effectively count them. Once it started getting out of the heavily-populated chunks, the sheep spawned in more natural patterns, but Three grouped those by family, too, until its heart calmed down some and its chest stopped pounding and it could think a little bit more.

It is not sure why it is so upset. It has simply found out who it apparently was, before it became a Blade. This makes sense to Three as a thing that Listeners would discover. This is proof that Three at least at one point was a person, and therefore it is not strange that Three wants to be a person again. Three barely knows anything about Grian, but it is sure it can learn.

It wraps the blanket awkwardly around its head and stands up. It is not injured, after all, it had just been overwhelmed and the sort of sick that it gets after being put into a shut down against its will. 

It reaches out its senses. It seems most of the Watchers were dealt with while Three was out. It is not certain whether any of them had been allowed to leave or if Martyn had used his experience to finish them off, but either way, the only evidence of the battle is a mix of purple and red blood across the Grian Empire and some scattered feathers washing into the walls of water that surround it. 

The fact it does not have to help clean too much is probably for the best. It is unwieldy to try to do something like that with a blanket tied around its face. It does want to find its mask, or figure out where to get or make one for itself soon, at least.

It avoids where Martyn is. It should not. Martyn is just trying to help it. Martyn helped figure out who Three once was. It just isn’t ready to talk to him yet, is all.

It does not think to avoid the others.

“Oh, good, you’re up!” BigB says. “Uh, guess you got told?”

“About what?” Three asks.

“That you’re Grian,” BigB says. 

“Oh. Yes. I was told that,” Three says.

“Wild news. Haha. Never could have guessed,” BigB says.

“Why are you lying?” Three asks.

BigB’s expression flattens slightly. “Now, it’s not very polite to call someone out on their white lies, you know. Figured you wouldn’t want to hear about how I was hoping to either trigger you figuring out who you were when I suggested coming here, or determine that you definitely weren’t Grian when you didn’t recognize anything.”

“Oh. You had ulterior motives,” Three says.

“Yeah, I had ulterior motives,” BigB says agreeably. “To be fair, when Jimmy invited me over, I didn’t! I mean, I sorta did, I thought maybe I was ready to try to reconnect, for everyone to—I’m not as obsessed as some of the people here. It wasn’t until after I started talking to you that I—and I left to figure out what I wanted to do about it. Heard about you all getting wanted—that was real, by the way—and realized what I had to do, you understand?”

“I don’t… remember building this,” Three says.

“You were gonna tell me if you thought it was ugly,” BigB says.

“I think it is empty. It is haunted. I do not like that. I want to build interiors. I have already said this,” Three says.

“Now that you know you built it?” BigB asks.

Three shuffles. “I don’t think I—I don’t remember that. I do not think I would do the same thing again. I do not think it would turn out well.”

BigB studies Three’s face. “Well, we’re all staying here a little longer anyway, since we know how to send the Watchers packing now. We’ll just stay back while we do it.”

“You are going to use me to protect yourself,” Three says.

“I mean, uh, would you not do that?”

“I would protect you all,” Three says.

“Yeah, see like, there you go,” BigB says. “Er. I mean. Not that I’d use my friend who came back from the dead, and all, it’s just, you know. It’s important we all stay here a while, I think. You might knock some memories loose in there! It’s—I don’t know what to think of the fact that you’re Grian, honestly. I was sort of hoping you wouldn’t remember anything, and everyone would leave, and knowing that would at least get us all talking a little again, and then you’d leave, but here we are.”

“You put Martyn and Jimmy in danger,” Three says.

“Hey now. I really did think it was safe,” BigB says. “I really did. I wouldn’t have brought you here if—I didn’t think they’d turn up that fast. Thought we’d have more time.”

“I almost killed Martyn.”

BigB is quiet.

“You got a lot more opinionated.”

“I am practicing disobeying, and you are not my handler,” Three says.

“No, no I’m not,” BigB says. “That’s true, isn’t it. Gods, I was really hoping you weren’t him. Grian, I mean. I was really hoping. I mean, I was hoping you were, but—the way you are now. It’s—you might have been better off dead, you know? I mean, not that I want you dead, man. I like you alive. It’s just that you aren’t the same.”

Three’s heart feels the same sort of muddy fire again. It doesn’t like it. It wants it to stop. 

“It’s—I have some more ideas to try to trigger some memories in you. Just hang in there, okay buddy? We’ll do what we can to fix what we can.”

Three’s heart feels even muddier and even more on fire. It’s such a weird feeling. Three thinks it’s probably similar to grief, although it wouldn’t know, because it does not remember feeling grief ever before, and it hasn’t lost anything, not really, so there’s no reason to be grieving. It just feels similar to how it thinks Jimmy’s face looks when he’s lighting candles in front of Grian’s portrait.

“Do you know where my mask is?” it asks.

“That was—you sort of fell on it. Sorry, man. You’ll get something new at some point, right?”

“Right,” Three says.

“We’ll find something else red. Favorite color, right? Like TNT.”

“Will comply,” Three says.

BigB’s eyes get dimmer. “Right. Will comply. Right. Man. I really had been hoping you wouldn’t be…”

“Apologies,” Three says, because that’s what you say to a handler when they are mad at you, even when they are not mad at you for any particular reason.

“I mean, not like it’s your fault, is it? Just—don’t worry too much, Grian.”

“Okay,” Three says, because people keep on calling it Grian, so it should probably answer to that.

---

Jimmy finds Three on his own later. His steps are shaky. He finds Three cleaning up its socks and grabbing its knitting materials. Those hadn’t gotten lost thanks to Three’s quick thinking, so it should be fairly easy to get back to knitting. That is a long-term mission Three is not particularly eager to quit doing. It is still in the middle of figuring out how socks work. It doesn’t want to somehow forget.

“You have a blanket on your head,” Jimmy says.

“Yes. I do not have a mask,” Three says.

“Oh. Shoot. Yeah. We need to get you another one. Do you want it to be similar to the last one?”

“Yes,” Three says.

“Okay. Yeah. Sure. Why are you Grian?” he asks.

“What?” Three says.

“Sorry, that’s a stupid question,” Jimmy says.

“I do not know why they took Grian to make me,” Three says. “It sounds like they thought he had potential. I do not know how this works. I am not that sort of Watcher.”

“No, you aren’t. Gods,” Jimmy says, and he runs a hand through his hair and shifts his arms in a way that human bones wouldn’t quite let him. “You know, I never thought you were alive. The others—but I never thought it for a moment. Replayed you dying too often in my head. Shows what I know.”

Three’s feathers flare out. It is the only sign it shows that it feels something at that.

“Fuck. We’re going to have to tell Taurtis. He said that we weren’t ever allowed to speak to him again after you died. Last thing he said at the funeral. Now we’re gonna have to call him and… Someone’s going to have to tell him. It should probably be me. I’m the one who said you were dead.”

“Oh,” Three says.

“You don’t know who Taurtis is,” Jimmy says.

“No,” Three says. 

Jimmy takes a deep breath in. Jimmy takes a deep breath out. Three watches him do this. 

“I can’t do this,” Jimmy says. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. Gods. I shouldn’t have come to find you. I can’t do this. I don’t know why I thought I could. I’m a horrible friend.”

“You are important, not horrible,” Three says.

“I can’t do this,” Jimmy says, after a moment of pause. “Not when you say things like that. I can’t—this is terrible. Sorry, Grian.”

Jimmy turns to leave again. Three looks between its knitting and Jimmy, but none of its socks are ready yet, so it can’t give them to Jimmy. It thinks maybe it should tell Jimmy to stop and come back, but it’s not sure why it would. Jimmy would like to leave. Jimmy has been unable to stand being near Three before. Then, it was because Three killed Grian. This time, it is because Three is Grian. Both of these make sense; Jimmy cared a great deal about Grian.

Maybe it will add blue to the socks though, and green, to give to Jimmy and Martyn. It does not know if Grian knitted. It sees no evidence of it around the Grian Empire. It sees no evidence of interiors either, though, or of anyone who lived here at all, besides the chests that have clearly been re-organized over time, so it supposes it wouldn’t know. If Grian knitted, he clearly kept those supplies somewhere else. He—

Should Three call Grian it? It had been upset earlier, it realizes, when Martyn did not, but that’s because Martyn was referring to Three as Grian. Which makes sense, because Three is Grian, and if Three is Grian and Three is it, then is Grian it?

Grian. It tries it out in its head. It feels nothing.

The Grian before is a he. Surely that is fine, when referring to the Grian of before? 

Anyway, Three doesn’t know if Grians are supposed to knit, but Jimmy hasn’t revoked the order. That’s the thought it had been trying to get at. It probably doesn’t matter. Three knits now. It can finish the socks. It can do them as many times or as badly as it needs to. Eventually, Jimmy will come home again, and be able to look at Three again, it hopes.

By then, maybe it will have blue socks.

---

Three puts down the knitting and starts to wander eventually. It thinks maybe it should see more of the Grian Empire, if it belongs to it instead of Pearl. The name would suggest it does, but Three wouldn’t know. Pearl has been living here for several years. Squatters rights aren’t always a rule on servers, and on many would be frowned upon, but it would be more frowned upon to take ownership of Pearl’s home. So perhaps it is Pearl’s Empire, actually, despite the name? Maybe Three should suggest a name change. That seems prudent, these days, now that there could be a potential claim.

It feels unreal.

It brushes its hands across the snow on the walls, and kicks its feet across the stone. It puts its whole head into one of the curtains of water, and paces around the circles of the building. It avoids talking to anyone else, since Jimmy wants to avoid him, and BigB has ulterior motives, and it is not sure it wants to talk to Pearl (who is mad at Grian) or Martyn (who has stories) yet. It scrapes its fingers through some logs, and climbs down into a room Pearl had blocked off that is filled with obsidian. It has a portrait of Grian in the back, and beneath it, there is a Watcher symbol and an opened piston door.

Behind the piston door are some older Watcher puzzles. They’ve already been finished, but Three knows what they look like. It supposes this is why Pearl had blocked off the room. It crosses the lava parkour, then goes the other way over it again. It’s not very entertaining. It’s too easy. Three goes back to the room filled with obsidian and instead tries to guess what it’s for. It would be easy to explode things in here; the obsidian wouldn’t explode, but everything else would. Maybe that’s what the room was for originally?

It climbs back up again. It climbs up, and up, to the highest point in the Grian Empire it can reach without climbing into a mob farm. It looks out the edge to the ocean. It looks out towards spawn. It thinks as hard as it can about the buildings of spawn.

When no one stops it, it finds and goes through the chests. This is rude as a guest, but no one is stopping it, and it does not touch anything, really, so much as look at everything it finds and try to—try to—

It should know what everything in these chests are, if it is Grian. If these are Grian’s things, and Grian’s chests, then it should know what is in them, right?

There isn’t a good mask in them. Grian was an ordinary Player, so it makes sense there is not. Three is not sure why it expected to find one. It is standing, hovering over the chests like this, when Pearl finally comes in and looks at it.

“Oh. Hello. Hello, Grian,” she says.

Three doesn’t respond at first, because it isn’t used to responding to that name, and it is too busy looking through the things in the chests, just in case there is something important in them. It has not found something important in them yet, but there always could be, and it is worth it to stay prepared.

“Grian?” Pearl says.

“Oh. Hello,” Three says, and stands at parade rest.

Pearl grimaces. “You’ve been exploring.”

Three does not answer, because it has not been asked a question. It takes a moment for Pearl to realize this. It is inefficient, communicating without direct questions, especially because Three is supposed to not speak when it hasn’t been spoken to, with handlers.

“Look, I figure you’re trying to remember things, so here,” she says. She hands Three a leather-bound book. It’s a photo album, Three realizes. “I—I only look through it sometimes. But if anyone should have it, it’s you. I’ll be here when you remember.”

She smiles. Three stands there, holding the book, and its face is wrapped in a blanket, so she does not have to see that it does not smile back. Its feathers flare. It looks at the book, and it looks back at Pearl, and it nods once, and it goes back towards its room, waiting for the order to return the whole time. No order comes. It is alone with the book.

It does not look at it.

It starts knitting again instead. It wonders why Pearl thinks it had been trying to remember. It hadn’t thought that itself, but it makes sense. That is the mission everyone seems to expect of it, even though no one has officially given it yet. Three has been known to pre-empt missions before, and while it feels more and more like everything inside of it is mud made of fire, it has even been known to pre-empt missions on autopilot before.

It has not succeeded in the mission, however, and it is not sure how it would. It does not remember anything before being created, and it barely remembers that.

Grian. It is Grian. It should remember that. It should be impossible to forget, but it already has once, so it supposes it can be forgiven for the fact it keeps doing so.

The next several days are odd. Three resolves to continue as it has been until it gets an order otherwise, no matter what memories it is supposed to be trying to recall. Pearl no longer seems to be claiming Three needs to stay in the Grian Empire, so it will go hunt for its own meals unless it is invited to dinner, and it will count sheep, and it will knit, and it will try to keep itself sharp no matter how fuzzy its head is feeling. It is a strange thing, though, to try to continue as it has been. It had assumed that would be an easier option, but everyone is treating it very differently now. It would understand more if they were treating it like it were dangerous, because it is, and they have now seen what happens when Three is on a side that is not theirs. 

That’s not how they’re treating it, though.

“So, done any cool pranks lately?” Pearl asks Three, for example, voice strange and wavering.

“I have only done one, that BigB helped me with. I covered Jimmy and Martyn’s house with peanut butter. It was very difficult to get it into an even layer. I do not know what I think of pranks, but I think I should do them again.”

“Oh,” Pearl says. “That’s—geez, Grian.”

Three looks away.

“I thought about blowing their house up, but BigB said that would be a poor prank.”

Pearl laughs. “That’s never stopped you before, though, has it?”

“I do not know. I haven’t done other pranks before,” Three says.

Pearl goes silent. “Right. Actually you’ve done a lot of them. I wasn’t here for all of them. BigB and Jimmy were two of your favorite targets.”

“Oh,” Three says. It thinks about this quite hard. “I think I would kill someone who blew up Jimmy’s house, though, if it were not me who did it, and if they did it without asking first.”

Pearl grimaces. “That’s not—the point is that it’s a joke. You like jokes, right?”

“I am learning humor as well,” Three says, because it is.

“You’ll—you’ll get it back,” Pearl says. “Have you looked at the photo album?”

Three does not say: I do not want to, and you are not my handler, so you cannot order me to. It would like to say that, because the photo album fills it with a deep dread it does not know how to explain. Instead, it just says, “I have not had time,” and Pearl grimaces, and then she makes niceties a little longer, and she leaves. She will be back again. She keeps on coming back and trying to make small talk. Three does not know how to make small talk. Three thought it was not a surprise that it does not know how to make small talk. Perhaps Grians should make small talk, though?

It isn’t sure. It doesn’t know what a Grian should do.

Another example of how they’re treating business as usual as very different is Jimmy. He is avoiding Three. That is okay, because Jimmy has avoided Three before, but this time it feels different in a way Three isn’t entirely certain how to describe. Maybe it’s that Jimmy keeps on making strange, aborted attempts to talk to it, and then leaves again. It is not the first time he has done this, Three reminds itself. It hasn’t been that long since the last time. Jimmy has parts of his mind that are always trapped on what happened to Grian, Three reminds itself. It’s fine. It’s—

It doesn’t want to talk to BigB by itself.

Martyn is also weird. As an example, a conversation with Martyn sometimes goes like: “Man, we should have hung out more when we were all here together. We hung out sometimes, but you liked to cause a lot problems, and as one of the Property Police—”

“Oh, okay,” Three says.

“I like you now. Kinda,” Martyn says. “You’ll get some spunk back. Hey, you said you wanted to learn interiors. Why not start here? Really finish off the place.”

Three does not say: I do not want to, because this place has already been haunted, and I do not want to build interiors in a mausoleum. Instead, it remembers that Martyn is at least like a handler, and says: “Maybe I will experiment.”

“I don’t know anything about interiors. Uh, you’ve said you have a strong aesthetic sense, though, and now that you’ve got all the eyes—”

“Will comply,” Three says.

“Whoops. I’m not forcing you to,” Martyn says.

“Okay,” Three says. Then it will not comply, if that’s what is being asked of it. Considering people keep on talking about pranks, though, and building, and other such things, Three thinks it might try hanging its socks around the base. That seems like it is like a prank, because it subverts expectations, but it is not too disruptive. It does not think Pearl would appreciate it blowing up Grian’s last monument.

---

Jimmy approaches again in the middle of the night while Three is hanging up socks. This is a surprise, because it is very late, and Jimmy is not normally awake this late.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I am hanging up socks. People say I should like pranks,” Three says.

Jimmy sighs. “I don’t—I’m going to be honest, I’m not sure hanging up socks everywhere is a very good prank.”

“Oh. What is?”

“I have no idea? People normally just like making me mad. It’s funny.”

“I don’t want to,” Three says.

“I know,” Jimmy says.

“Why are you awake?” asks Three.

“I—it’s nothing,” Jimmy says.

“Oh. Does counting sheep help you sleep?”

“Not really.”

“Sometimes I think I understand it, and then I do not again,” Three says.

Jimmy laughs bitterly. “Isn’t that just life? You think you understand it, then you don’t.”

“I am sorry I remind you of when Grian died,” Three says.

“That’s not your fault,” Jimmy says, then pauses. “When you died, you mean. When you did.”

“I am not dead,” Three says.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? I should be happy. I should be so, so happy.” 

“You have been crying,” Three says.

“Yeah, I sure have,” Jimmy says.

“Oh,” Three says. “I do not know how to help. I know pranks make people laugh because they are confused. If I drew faces on the socks, maybe…”

Jimmy lets out a startled snort. “You know what? Sure. I’ll help.”

They’re both utterly silent as they draw faces in permanent marker on all the socks that Three has made that will fit no one, and as they hang them up all over the Grian Empire. They aim to put them in places that are either very conspicuous, like the main courtyard, or in places that will be a surprise, like in peoples’ wardrobes. Three does that second part on Jimmy’s direction, because Jimmy is not very sneaky with his cane, despite being able to hear how loud he’s being very well. Three is sneaky, though. Three even manages to put a sock right on Martyn’s bedpost while he sleeps, and Jimmy laughs at that, so Three thinks it is a success.

“This is so stupid,” Jimmy finally says, after they have exhausted their supply of socks.

“I thought that was the point of pranks,” Three says, hesitantly. “I have not learned better. People keep on bringing up TNT. Maybe that should be the prank?”

“No, you can’t blow this up, Pearl will kill us,” Jimmy says.

“I know. That is why I am hanging up socks,” Three says.

They both stand there in the center of the Grian Empire. The sun has not come up yet, but it will very soon, which means that Jimmy should be asleep, and Three should at least pretend to sleep. Instead, they both stand in the middle of the thing Grian had built, and the thing they had covered in socks, next to each other. Three wonders if Jimmy is feeling as odd as Three is. It isn’t sure, especially since it isn’t sure how to describe how it feels.

Jimmy, suddenly, reaches out and grabs one of Three’s hands. He runs one of his own claws through Three’s feathers. Three instinctively shudders, but does not let go. It is oddly comforting.

“We’ll go get you a new mask soon, promise. There just aren’t many places for it here.”

“I can do that on my own.”

“I don’t really—it’s okay if you do, I just want to be able to buy you a replacement, since we’re the ones who broke it.”

Three nods. “That would be nice. Like when we were first becoming friends.”

Jimmy swallows, but then smiles oddly. “Yeah. Just like that.”

Jimmy lets go again.

“I’m gonna go try to get two hours of sleep,” he says.

“Okay,” Three says. 

He turns to leave. All at once, Three realizes he is wearing the scarf Three made him. This should not be a surprise. Jimmy has not really taken it off often since he got it. It’s just that Three hadn’t put together, really, that Jimmy had been wearing it just now.

It goes back to its own bedroom, so that it is less of a suspect for the prank.

---

Martyn seems so happy when he sees the prank, but he doesn’t laugh in the way Three had been hoping. Everyone assumes it is Three. No one suspects Jimmy’s involvement. Pearl says something about cleaning up harder, and Three nods and goes to clean up the socks. BigB is watching it oddly. 

Everyone acts so unsurprised, though, when they see it, that it almost upsets Three. They are happy. They are so happy. But they’re unsurprised by it. It does not know why. That is not where socks go—socks are meant to go on feet, and not the wall. It is also not normally where Three puts failed knitting projects, and barely anyone had commented on the faces. BigB jokes that it’s a bit small-scale. Three points out that, unlike with the peanut butter, it had only had but so many socks. That does not seem to get its point across.

The burning feeling from before is back. It is glad that it has a blanket around its head, because it thinks that looking like how its face probably looks is not very good when it is the one who has done the prank in the first place. It flares its feathers a little. Pearl looks away as it does. It is not sure why it is pleased at that.

Martyn puts an arm around Three’s shoulders and starts telling Three about pranks Grian had done in the past. Three nods along until it can leave, and then it does.

It is not sure why it feels bad. It is succeeding. It has done a prank. That prank has made people happy, even if it hadn’t been surprising. It has even succeeded at getting people to talk to it more. It just doesn’t feel right.

---

The first time Three goes to dinner with everyone again is after the prank, even though it had been invited earlier. It’s strangely stilted. No one seems sure what to say. Three is surprised. They are all friends. Even if Three has been a wrench in the works recently, it knows everyone is meant to be friends with each other. 

They all sit there eating in silence, though. It does make it easier to eat. This time, they are eating a simple beef dish. Three doesn’t really taste much of it, though. It is not sure if that is because the dish tastes bad or because Three doesn’t feel much like tasting things at the moment.

“What do you think of calling people soon? I don’t know when, but… soon?” Jimmy asks.

Martyn swallows. “That’s not going to be fun.”

“Calling who?” Three says.

“The others,” Martyn says. “The others. They need to know you’re alive too.”

Three hadn’t realized there were others. That makes sense. Jimmy has a whole phone full of contacts that won’t answer him, after all, and not all of those names are here. He’d even directly talked about needing to figure out how to tell Taurtis, hadn’t he? The only thing that Three knows about that person is that his number had been completely disconnected. That must make it hard to contact him.

“Pass the peas,” Pearl says.

“Yeah, sure,” BigB says.

“I just don’t think, um, I should do it,” Jimmy says. “I mean. No. I probably should? I mean, I broke the news Grian was dead, I just didn’t break the news, um, well.”

“You were covered in blood,” Martyn says. “You get a pass.”

Pearl aggressively stabs her peas.

“I… I just don’t know how to break the news Grian is sort of not dead.”

“Sort of?” asks Martyn.

Jimmy shrugs. Martyn looks at Three. Three also shrugs. It does not really know what Jimmy means. 

“I mean. Um. Well.” Jimmy looks at Three. He swallows.

“You can say whatever you’re saying,” BigB says.

“It’s just… Three doesn’t remember being Grian, does it?”

There’s a long silence at the table. No one talks again for so long it feels like the conversation has ended, because no one is willing to respond to that. It’s true. Three does not remember being Grian. Three still doesn’t really believe it is Grian. It knows it is, in the sense that it was created using Grian’s body, but it is just hard to get its head around, is all.

“It could remember,” Pearl says. “There’s so much here that’ll trigger memories. We can take it to Downtown Evo if this doesn’t, that place has a lot of memories too. Besides, that doesn’t matter, right? Grian’s alive whether he remembers or not.”

“It,” Three says quietly.

Pearl pauses. “It. It remembers or not.”

“When you talk about past Grian, it is fine if you use he,” Three explains. “I am not past Grian. But when you—”

“What do you mean, you aren’t past Grian?” Martyn says.

“I’m not the same,” Three says. “I don’t mind.”

Jimmy puts his hands on the table. “Yeah. That. It’s not the same. Three isn’t the same person. I know—I know it’s Grian. I know. But that’s not the same thing. It let me tell it what to do while we were pranking.”

“You were involved in that? Better prank than usual, Jim!” Martyn says. Jimmy flushes.

“Thank you. I am an expert. That’s me. Expert prankster Jim! No one can stop my fantastic, uh, jokes and japes. You should have known, really.”

“Really? Expert prankster?” Pearl says.

“Excuse you, I was a very important part of that prank! The importantest!” Jimmy says.

“I suspect Grian here came up with most of it,” BigB says. 

Jimmy’s face gets funny and he gets quiet. He goes back to his food. 

“But like, more seriously, Jimmy has a point,” BigB continues once no one else talks. “Love Three. Great, uh, feathered monstrosity, really. Hard to find a better one. But as Three is right now, it’s barely what people will want to hear about when they hear Grian’s alive. I mean, Three is hardly—look, I sort of suspected from earlier, but I didn’t want it to be true.”

“What, why?” Martyn says. “Isn’t it better Grian’s alive? Why would you hope otherwise?”

“Well, uh, consider where you found it, man,” BigB says.

“It’s—oh.” A long pause. “That’s not fair though. You don’t get to just insinuate Three’s, I don’t know, broken or something because, because it doesn’t remember being Grian. It’s not like they’re actually different people. It’s like—like a different flavor of Grian, is all.”

“Yeah. It just doesn’t know how to be Grian anymore,” Pearl says.

“That is true,” Three says. “I do not know what a Grian is supposed to do. I thought I was beginning to understand what a Three is supposed to do, though.”

“Aren’t those just the same thing?” Martyn says.

“It doesn’t matter what’s supposed to, we’ve got to tell everyone Three’s—Grian’s—oh, you know what I mean,” Jimmy says. “It’s just… it’s complicated, is all. We should remember that it’s complicated when we tell them, otherwise they might not be ready for the fact it’s complicated.”

“I don’t think it’s all that complicated, though?” BigB says.

Three tries to eat more of its beef, and that beef continues to not really taste like much of anything.

“They’ll all be happy,” Pearl says. “They’ll all be so happy to see you.”

“Okay,” Three says, and it does not hide the doubt in its voice.

“Let’s talk about nicer things,” Martyn says. “Oh, I’ve got something for everyone—read it in a book of riddles and jokes.”

“Oh no. Spare us,” Pearl says.

“Okay, get this: so there’s this guy who runs trains—”

“You’ve already told me this, Martyn, you’re doing it wrong,” Jimmy complains.

“Are you telling the pun or am I?”

The talk turns a bit brighter. 

Three isn’t very good at jokes, because it isn’t very good at wordplay. It is, however, surprisingly good at solving riddles, and quickly realizes it’s quite fun to solve logic puzzles. Pearl goes to go find some of the puzzles she solves when she’s bored and alone, and then suddenly they’re all sitting around the table, trying to time how fast Three can solve sudoku puzzles as someone new to the type of puzzle in comparison to Pearl, who has been doing it for years but doesn’t have the advantage of being a superweapon to work with.

BigB very seriously declares that Three is cheating when it wins, and then they all go to get some different puzzles. Idly, Martyn comments that “you used to hate Watcher puzzles”, and Three politely doesn’t point out that it’s a Watcher now itself, even if it’s not that kind. Instead, BigB fishes out a crossword puzzle, erases the bits he’s already done, and they all sit there and argue about how to fill it out.

The crossword is harder than the riddles or sudoku, because Three doesn’t know the trivia it needs to fill it out. This is, oddly, where Jimmy starts to shine. He frequently gives bad answers too, but sometimes he’s the only one who knows something without anyone trying to look it up.

Dinner mostly gets forgotten as they all get distracted. The conversation about telling everyone that Grian is alive also gets forgotten, which is good, because Three didn’t like that one very much. Instead, they laugh about something that has very little to do with Grian at all for a while, and the Empire suddenly feels a lot less haunted.

---

This is what Three realizes, after that dinner:

The ball of weird fire in its chest goes away when it is just laughing with everyone. When it is hanging up socks with Jimmy, or doing puzzles. The ball of weird fire comes back whenever anyone tries to talk about the past life they have realized it has. The ball of weird fire is grief. 

It doesn’t know what to do about that, and it isn’t sure it can figure it out on its own. It can’t exactly ask Martyn or Jimmy, though. Jimmy is still very sad, even though it is alive, because Jimmy keeps on looking at Three like it is actually dead. Martyn is very happy, because it is alive, but keeps looking right through Three. Neither of them will be very happy if Three tries to explain the grief and anger and fear it feels every time someone calls it Grian. BigB and Pearl—Three is not friends with them. They remember being friends with it, but that is different from Three being friends with them itself. 

There is one other person it is friends with it can ask, but that person doesn’t know anything about what’s happening, so it seems like it might be a bit rude. It doesn’t want to impose. 

It really would like to talk to someone who won’t call it Grian, though. That isn’t imposing. That’s just talking with a friend.

Three texts Mumbo and asks when they can talk. It is startled when Mumbo calls right away.

“Three!” he says. “Oh, it had been a bit since we talked. I wasn’t worried—I mean, I get distracted by projects for much longer, but see, I had been talking to Iskall, and she said when I talked about you that you seemed like you might be in some kind of danger—”

“I am fine,” Three says.

“Good. Good. What did you want to talk about?” Mumbo asks.

Three has a lot of things it wants to talk about, but it also does not want to talk about them, so it says something about the base plans Three had been helping Mumbo with instead. Mumbo seems happy to talk about them, and how he thinks he’s finally gotten down how he’ll build the vines, and also he’s decided to implement some of their more clever defense mechanisms, like the fake floor. Three happily settles into just talking about their respective opinions on building for a little bit.

It’s refreshing. It’s a little like the conversation about puzzles. Three mentions it wants to learn about interiors, and Mumbo says that he definitely isn’t great at those, but he has some builder servermates who can probably give Three some actual tips on interiors and detail work. Three says it appreciates it. It mentions to Mumbo that it is staying in someone’s mega base right now, and that it has not built a mega base before, so it’s been curious what it would build for itself. It’s not sure about big, really—it would like to live somewhere cozy, but aesthetically pleasing.

Mumbo laughs and says Three should definitely talk to some of his servermates sometime about that, and they talk a little longer about what Three would build if it could build something big, or small. Mumbo offers to add sensible defense measures if Three ever builds it, which is very nice of him. 

Three doesn’t want to hang up, especially since it has things to talk about.

“You are meant to be famous, right?” Three asks.

“Er, that’s—that’s one way to put it. Ouch. Meant to be,” Mumbo says.

“Have you ever had people expect you to be someone, but you are not very good at it?” Three asks.

Mumbo pauses. “Oh, that’s an odd question. I mean, er. Sort of? Or, actually, all the time. I know people think I’m a redstone genius, but really, I build off the backs of other people, and I’m not very sensible. I mean, you know I’m not sensible. People seem to think I’ll be sensible but you’ve pointed out so many times that my bunkers don’t actually work very well in a real scenario, and… Gosh. Wait. Do people have expectations of you?”

Three thinks. “Apparently, I am also someone named Grian.”

“Grian? Really? Gosh, that name sounds familiar.”

Three’s heart sinks for a moment. It doesn’t want Mumbo to know Grian. He doesn’t make any other comment, though, so Three thinks maybe it is fine. “Yes. I do not remember it at all, though. I do not know how to be Grian.”

“Oh.” Mumbo thinks for a moment. “I mean, are you sure you’re Grian then? You seem like a Three to me. Unless you want me to call you Grian, in which case I’m terribly sorry I didn’t mean to—”

“I do not.”

“Then you’re Three,” Mumbo says decisively. “Whatever else is going on seems like it’s probably altogether too confusing.”

“Oh,” Three says, “That makes sense.”

“Did it? I didn’t think it did. Actually, I’m still confused. How can you be someone named Grian if you don’t remember it? Oh dear. Does this have something to do with why Iskall said you might be an assassin?”

Iskall is apparently a much more realized godspawn than Three had known. That is worth keeping in its internal records. “Yes,” Three says.

“Wait. Oh gosh. Are you actually an assassin?”

“Not really,” Three says. “I am a weapon. That is supposed to be secret.”

Mumbo is quiet for a moment. “Do you need a place to go?” he blurts out.

“What?” Three asks.

“I just mean—if you’re in trouble, and people are trying to claim you’re someone you aren’t, and you’re upset, then if you need somewhere to stay for a bit, I’m sure I can help keep you at one of my solo worlds, and I’ve not used my invite privileges to Hermitcraft for a permanent member before, even if Tango became a permanent member later, and surely everyone would understand if I explained I was helping out a friend in trouble. You could leave again too. We could claim it was creative differences. No one would question that because then it would be too awkward.”

Three quite suddenly doesn’t know what to say.

“Oh,” Three says. “I do not know.”

“I’ll leave the offer open,” Mumbo says.

“Why?” Three asks.

Mumbo thinks for a minute. “You know, when I met you, it was like—have you ever met someone and, at first sight, you just—you just know. You click! Like in a fairytale, but with less, er, you know, love and stuff. It’s like that. The first time I thought that happened it was a false alarm, but this time I’m just making up for lost time, I think.”

“I am dangerous,” Three says.

“My friends are too,” Mumbo says. “If you take my offer and manage to hurt anyone very badly I will let you say that you told me so, though.”

“It’s a deal,” Three says. “Thank you.”

“We’re friends, right? Now, you said something about wanting to use quartz…”

They keep talking for a while and the remaining hot mud in Three’s chest clears away, bit by bit. It is nice to have friends. It is okay when they are complicated, but Three also likes when they are simple. Maybe that’s the whole thing here—all of this ‘Grian’ thing is very complicated, like Mumbo said. Everyone is making it too complicated, and that’s why Three doesn’t like it.

It holds that close to its chest for a while, and decides it likes the shape of it quite a lot. Three, uncomplicated. Simple. It’s that easy.

It does not know how it will easily explain that to anyone else, but it likes it.

The next morning, armed with the knowledge that it is Three and that this should be simple, Three faces the photo album that Pearl had given it. It is still fairly certain of its conclusion, but it knows that it should not make decisions like that without first checking on all of the data. It stares at the book nervously. It still does not like it. Something about the idea of looking at all the photographs of Grian makes it frightened. It shouldn’t be. Three has seen pictures of Grian before. It’s just the pictures it has seen have always been behind a candle, or held up next to a mirror, or some other distant place without context. These are pictures that are meant to have memories in them. These are pictures that mean something more than an image of a lost friend.

The photo album is big and heavy. It’s leather-bound. It feels like lead in Three’s hands.

Three sits on the bed. It looks up. The thing about the Grian Empire is that it doesn’t have much in the way of discrete rooms. There aren’t many walls to hide behind. Three does not normally mind this, because it does not normally need to hide, but it thinks it should look at these alone. That way, if something goes wrong, or if it gets upset, or if anything happens, no one is watching, and Three can deal with it on its own. It nods to itself at that thought. Yes, that way it could be dealt with without having to worry anyone. 

It flips open the cover. There’s a note dating the album. It is in unfamiliar handwriting, which could mean anything. It says that it is meant to document the adventures of the Grian Empire. That makes sense.

It opens the first page. There is a picture of Grian. He is standing with Jimmy, Martyn, BigB, and a number of unfamiliar people. They are in a mostly empty spawn. The picture is labeled with being from the start of the server. Shortly after, there’s a picture labeled “breaking ground on the Grian Empire” that has Grian trying to place sand in the water. There’s a picture of a strange shrine-like platform. Next to it, there’s another picture of a man in headphones and Grian together. There are scribbled words in the margins about celebrating the start of a brand new adventure and a new friend joining the server. The grass is an almost ugly bright green. Apparently, there is someone named Taurtis, and he is starting an empire too.

Three flips the page. There are pictures of Grian building, as well as of several other people. The server is beginning. There’s a commemorative picture for ‘first version upgrade’, and Three sees the mark of the Watchers on it, even though it is a very non-obvious symbol in that picture. There’s a picture of Grian gleefully running away from an angry Martyn. A quiet picnic. A picture of BigB and three unfamiliar people, and Grian trying to sneak behind them. Grian, arms around the unfamiliar man with the headphones, clearly telling a story.

Three flips the page and frowns to itself. The mayoral election. Grian pasting images of a man in headphones on the walls, giving a speech. A town hall; it looks unused. More commemorative pictures of version upgrades. They all have the symbols of the Watchers on them, but that’s not the part Three tries to focus on. Instead, it looks at the pictures of everyone solving puzzles, together and apart. It tries to focus on how many pictures Grian is in. Grian, showing off some TNT. Grian, yelling about a creeper that had managed to sneak behind him. 

He’s smiling in most of them, Three realizes.

It’s a nice smile. A bright one. Three can understand why people would miss it. Three cannot smile like that. Even if it could choose not to wear its mask, it has sharp teeth in a way that Grian didn’t. Briefly, it tries to contort its lips under the mask, but it doesn’t work very well, so it gives up.

There are a lot of pictures of the aftermath of pranks. Stapled-in notes from the Watchers about the follies of greed, about treating others better. Christmas photos. Grian is delightedly holding up a piece of coal from a chest Jimmy is in front of. A number of pictures of what Three thinks is meant to be an octopus, or maybe a squid, built up and constantly changed. Pictures of the growing Grian Empire, of the stages Grian has been building it in. 

There’s letter from Taurtis that says ‘wish I was there’. It has the same handwriting as the original title of the photo album, and so Three supposes that, before it became Pearl’s album, it must have been Taurtis’s. Three wonders what Taurtis is like, and which of the people in the photographs he is, but it supposes it doesn’t really matter. It is not as though Taurtis is here right now.

It flips the page. Pearl has started to appear in the pictures. There’s a picture of her holding a cat and Grian covered in scratches. She starts appearing in many of Grian’s pictures. So do more Watchers. They get more frequent. The notes about them get angrier. They’re in a new handwriting now. This, Three does recognize. It is Pearl’s. She has taken over the photo album.

It’s funny. Grian doesn’t seem to know he is being photographed in most of these. So many of them show him slightly from the side, or the back, or many other angles. He’s smiling, scowling, laughing, playing. He is close with everyone in the pictures, Three thinks, though it isn’t sure, because it doesn’t have many examples of what it is supposed to be looking for in closeness. 

Three thinks closeness might be counting sheep. Grian is not doing that in any of these pictures, though. He doesn’t seem to stand still long enough for it.

Three brushes its hands over a picture. It is labeled: “before the dragon fight”. Everyone has their arms around each other. Grian is near the middle. Behind them, the End Portal is lit up.

There are no more pictures.

Three pauses and flips back through the photos again, uncertain what it is looking for. It thinks it might be supposed to feel some connection to the photos. That had been why Pearl had given it the photo album, after all. It might be supposed to remember the events, or maybe the people, or maybe just recognize Grian in some fundamental way, since they’re meant to be the same person.

It would be easier to feel something if the people in this book weren’t largely strangers. Three feels the most looking at what Jimmy and Martyn used to look like, and how much they used to smile. It can manage perhaps a bit of guilt that it cannot make them smile the way Grian does in some of these photos. It can manage to feel that it hopes they run around and smile like that again, because they are Three’s friends. Most of the pictures, though, are of strangers. Strangers who are happy, living their lives, and no matter how good it is that they are recorded, they are still distant strangers that Three does not know at all.

It would be easier, Three thinks, if it felt something. It would be easy to explain that, when it explains itself later. Instead, it most just feels nothing at all, and then a gaping, yawning realization that it is not the ghost in these photographs. Three is here. Grian is not.

It really is that simple, and it really is that horribly complicated.

Three looks one more time at the picture from before the dragon fight. It is the last picture there is of Grian. It feels like it should say something, but it does not know what is adequate, and since no one is around to hear what it would say anyway, it does not. Instead, it closes the album.

Gently, it puts the book down on the bed. It will have to return it to Pearl. These memories don’t belong to it. That’s fine; the book should go back to someone who the memories do belong to.

It knows what it needs to know now, anyway.

---

It goes to BigB first. Not because Three particularly trusts or likes BigB—it doesn’t mind him, exactly, but after everything that has happened, it thinks that trusting and liking him will take more time than they’ve had together. It goes to BigB because he’d seemingly already guessed who Three used to be when they’d first met, and because he seemed to agree Three was different now. Since Three isn’t already friends with BigB, it’s also easier to do something that might disappoint him. True, BigB might tell the others, but he seems to prefer to hold things close to his chest, so he probably won’t. 

It’s safer to approach him and say: “Hello. I have something I need to tell you.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, man, go for it,” BigB says. He’d been sketching, but he puts it down when Three approaches him.

“I am not Grian. I am Three,” Three says.

“Oh,” BigB says. “I mean, you are Grian. I knew it when I first met you.”

“No, I am not,” Three says. “I’m Three. I was Grian at one point, but I’m not now.”

“It’s not that easy,” BigB says.

“It is,” Three says. Frustration builds up in its chest. “I wanted you to know, because it is important. Maybe one day I will be Grian again, but I am not right now, and I do not want to be. I don’t want to be Grian. I want to be Three.”

BigB looks over Three. “You know, and I didn’t want you to be Grian,” he says.

“You said you think it might have been better if I died,” Three agrees.

“That’s not really what I meant, it’s more… You talked about how resistant they made you to torture. Don’t think I don’t know how they must have done that.”

“That is not a reason I should be dead,” Three says.

“I know, but—”

“You agreed I was not the same person. When everyone talked about calling the others,” Three says.

“That’s not the same thing as—you are Grian,” BigB says, slowly. “You’re just different now.”

“I know. And my name is Three, and I do not think you should expect me to be Grian,” Three says.

“Oh. Okay. Yeah. I can do that,” BigB says. “Geez. You know, I’d say that I wish Jimmy hadn’t called me, either, but that’d be a lie.”

Three looks over BigB critically. “You have accepted this easily.”

“I know who I can’t win arguments against, man. You’re only barely starting to be a person, let alone a person I can win a debate with. Maybe once you’ve figured out how to be a person more we’ll come back to it, if it comes up.”

That stings, but that is okay. It has mostly gotten what it wants. Its heart hurts a little, for some reason, but that’s why it talked to BigB first. BigB would accept it easily enough. BigB is probably going to just roll with calling it Three now, and even if this has made him decide Three is not enough of a person—

It thinks BigB didn’t really get it. It doesn’t want to talk to anyone else after all. It is afraid. It is not designed to be afraid. Weapons shouldn’t fear. Three isn’t just a weapon anymore, though, so it makes sense it is so afraid.

“We should do something all together,” Three says, after a moment.

“So you can try to tell them you aren’t Grian? Yeah, that’ll go well.”

“So we can all be friends.”

BigB looks at Three and sighs. “Yeah, I’m always going to wonder if I should have never answered Jimmy. That, and now I’ll always have to know know that I’m kind of an asshole, given everything I’ve been—fine, fine. I have board games. We can play Battleship or something.”

Three nods. “Okay.”

---

Three didn’t realize until it was happening how much it would sting for people to keep calling it Grian, now that it knows it doesn’t want the comparison. It isn’t all bad. BigB isn’t doing it, and Jimmy only does it sometimes. Martyn and Pearl do it all the time, though, and it makes it a little hard to play Battleship effectively. 

It is also hard to play Battleship without cheating. It had not realized this was a game where it would have to not See the other board. It is not as though it tries to, exactly, it’s just hard not to look at things that provide a tactical advantage. That is what it is designed for.

It thinks about what it has already said to BigB. It hadn’t been planning on saying everything in this group. It had been planning on simply returning the photo album to Pearl, and waiting until it and Martyn and Jimmy left, and then if they kept calling it Grian, it would correct them. And they would change the name, and they would keep on looking at it like—

Now that it knows what is upsetting it so badly, it is very hard not to see the signs.

It hurts. It hurts when Martyn looks at Three with an expectant grin after a joke, as though Three should follow up, even though it is not good at jokes. It hurts when Pearl finishes an inside joke, and Three doesn’t know how to start it, or join in, or even how to expect the inside-ness of the joke. It hurts when Jimmy just can’t quite look it in the eyes. It hurts when BigB looks at Three like it’s some broken puzzle piece he can find some way to fix.

Some of these things hurt more than others.

Three sits on its hands and thinks about the game. It is hard to think about the game, though, on account of the fact Three finally gets kicked off for cheating, even though it is trying very hard not to. It is not fair that Battleship boards are visual; if they were based in sound, Three couldn’t cheat at all, and Jimmy wouldn’t be able to play. This is not a convincing argument. Someone laughs about how of course Grian had tried to find a loophole. Three is offended; that is not a loophole, that is just cheating. Three doesn’t want to cheat. Three doesn’t want to break rules, even if they are very stupid rules, because they are still rules. Three doesn’t want… 

Three watches them all play Battleship. It’s tense, still. Three being alive does not make the four of them better at communicating as friends. Jimmy and Martyn get into an argument, and Pearl snaps at Jimmy a lot, and Martyn and BigB don’t seem to trust each other. It is getting better at telling dynamics like that. It would be easier to say something if they were all just having fun, Three thinks. If they were all just having fun, Three could say: I am not having fun. Everyone would then have less fun, but it wouldn’t sting.

It wouldn’t sting like:

“You always do this,” from Jimmy to Martyn. 

“I can’t help being practical!” from Martyn to Jimmy.

“If you’re just going to cheat we should let Grian play,” from Pearl to Martyn, but also to everyone.

“I’m just using my natural advantages too,” from Martyn to Pearl.

“Yeah, but that advantage is sorta cheating. Sorry,” from BigB to Martyn.

And they’re talking about Battleship, so it is not a big deal, but there’s something else to it. Another time, this conversation would be fun, but there’s something else to it. It would be easy to interrupt Battleship and go against the plan, if there weren’t something else to it. Maybe Three shouldn’t, though. Not when tempers are already high. It is never a good idea to provoke a handler when their temper is already high, after all. 

But BigB already knows. He is not saying anything, but he already knows. They are all going to know soon.

So when Martyn says: “You know what, fine, let Grian play!”, Three takes a deep breath.

“I am not Grian, I am Three,” it says.

“What?” Martyn says. “Did you remember something that means—”

“I was probably created using Grian as a vessel,” Three says, suddenly feeling very frightened indeed. “This is probably Grian’s body. But I am not Grian. I am Three. I was Grian, maybe. I don’t remember being him. But I am Three. That is my name. I do not think I will remember otherwise.”

It’s not sure its point is coming across correctly.

“No, don’t be—we can’t just give up,” Martyn says. “You just haven’t known that long. You can figure yourself out. We can’t just—it’s only been a little bit. We can’t just give up.”

“That’s not what this is,” Three says.

“You’re—you just said you’re probably Grian,” Martyn says.

“That’s not what I said,” Three says.

“You’re probably—you’re my friend and I have to help you,” Pearl says.

“I read the photo album,” Three says. “I don’t remember any of it.”

“That’s okay, we can try later!” Pearl says, a little hysterically. “You’re my friend and I almost turned you away and I almost killed you when I saw you and we’ll figure it out, okay? We’ll figure it out and that will never happen again. Don’t give up on remembering everything, you’re going to be fine.”

Three should have known this would go badly. It never goes well to go against handlers. It looks to BigB. It explained itself to BigB earlier. BigB shrugs.

“I mean, sorry, but they have a point.”

“I do not think I will remember. I have never remembered something that has been fully wiped from my memory,” Three says. “It is probably gone. I tried, because you all wanted me to, but I did not like trying.”

“No,” Pearl says. “No, we just got you back. You don’t get to say you won’t remember anything! You don’t! You don’t get to die a second time! So just—just stay here. We’ll figure out how to fix it. We’ve figured out how to fight everything else, so we’ll figure this out, too.”

Three stands up. Three steps back. Three sinks into parade rest. It does not like how upset Pearl seems. It also does not like the expression on Martyn’s face, or the fact Jimmy still isn’t looking at it, or the way BigB hadn’t actually listened to it. Its heart hurts, and its head hurts, and it thinks it should not have said this while they were playing Battleship. BigB had been right. That was a bad idea. It had ambushed its handler with bad news, and now its handler is reacting accordingly. It should know better. This is a thing that always ends badly with handlers.

“You remember a little bit,” Martyn says.

“I do not think I do,” Three says.

“I mean, you’re a bit like Grian. Through a funhouse mirror, sure, but the way you reacted to Jimmy and my house, that was all Grian. Changing your name is fine, I mean. You’re Three. Got it. But—but you’re still the same person, just different now. You’ve got different memories and all. Those bastard Watchers, they, they pulled you apart and put you back together to make a weapon, but you’re here now. That doesn’t mean they destroyed you. That doesn’t mean—trauma doesn’t make you not the same—I mean, what would that make me and Jim—you didn’t die. I got you out,” Martyn says.

“That is not what you were there to do,” Three says.

“I—I didn’t,” Martyn says.

“I know. I am glad you did not decommission me. But you did not know who I was,” Three says. “You got me out, not Grian.”

“You are Grian, though, the same way you’re Three,” Martyn says. “You have to be, at least a little bit. That’s different from not being named Grian. You’re—you’re named Three, that doesn’t make you an entirely different person.”

“Mumbo said this would be simple,” Three says.

“Sorry. Sorry,” Martyn says.

“If it says its name is Three, it’s kind of rude to keep using a different one,” Jimmy says, and he’s still not looking at Three. “People change their names all the time. It doesn’t matter why. So, uh, I guess Grian is Three now, for good?”

“Yes,” Three says, and that—that, at least, is a relief, as everyone slowly nods.

“Oh. Oh,” Martyn even says, a little pale. “That isn’t what I was trying to—that’s. Sorry, Three.”

The name problem is solved. It does not solve the way everyone keeps on looking at it, though. It does not solve the thing it had tried to tell BigB, because he’d been safest to tell. It doesn’t solve the thing it had actually been trying to say.

They’re all quiet. Maybe Three should keep going. Maybe it should explain more of what it is trying to get at. The problem, of course, is that in explaining why it is not Grian, it would need to explain who it is, too. It doesn’t know how to do that. 

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t know who it is not. It just… needs to figure out how to be taken seriously, with that. 

If it’s possible. It doesn’t know if it is.

---

It does return the photo album to Pearl. She is shaky as she takes it back.

“You can keep any of the pictures that mean something to you,” Pearl says, quietly. “When you gave it to me, you said Taurtis had wanted you to make it because it was your first time being a server Admin, and that seemed like the kind of thing that should be documented. You said you wanted a record of all your friends, so you’d never forget how much fun we had. Thought I took better pictures; you always thought I captured life better than you, I don’t know why.”

Three stares for a moment. “Oh,” it says. “None of the pictures meant anything to me.”

“None of them?” Pearl says.

“I don’t know the people in them,” Three says.

“Oh,” Pearl says. “Okay. You can still keep it, if you want, Gr-Three.”

“No. It is your memories,” Three says.

“None of them?” Pearl says.

“That is not how memory works,” Three says.

Pearl hunches over the leather. She looks rather unlike the person with the bow who had tried to chase a Watcher out of her server. Instead, she just looks small.

“You should see my cats,” she says. “I don’t keep them on this world anymore.”

“I do not know if I like cats,” Three says.

Pearl laughs softly. “You love them,” she says.

Three is skeptical. It does not say so. “I will come see them sometime,” it says instead.

“Okay. It’ll be nice,” Pearl says.

Three leaves. It wonders if it should get a pet itself. It could get a cat, but it is feeling contrary. It might like a sheep. Maybe it can dye one red. Sheep cannot be fully tamed as pets, though, only as livestock. Are there red pets? It supposes there are parrots. Do parrots and albatross get along? They do not interact often naturally, Three imagines, but it hopes they would.

It sees Pearl’s shoulders start shaking behind it. It sees her say: “I don’t want to mourn you all over again. I don’t know if I can do it a second time.” It wonders if it should remind her it’s alive, but it’s not Three that Pearl is mourning, and Three knows it. It wonders if it should turn around. It does not.

---

Three doesn’t sleep that night. It climbs to the very top of the Grian Empire instead and looks out over the water. Down below, there is a mausoleum that the others are sleeping in. Up here, there are stars, and it is easier to try to track down sheep. As it sits there, it turns over its phone, and it thinks of the offer that Mumbo had made, and how just this morning, it had thought this would be simple.

“I do not want to be Grian,” it says to itself. It knows that. It said that, even though it upset its handlers. It would say that again. Okay. Okay. Okay.

It texts Mumbo: I am not in danger, but if your place will be safe for me to stay, I would like the option open. Do not panic. I am not in danger. I am not good at lying so you know I am telling the truth.

It is certain this is a very good message that won’t make Mumbo panic at all. It told Mumbo not to, after all.

It looks out over the ocean. In the distance, there’s a whole server of things that had been in that photo album. It tries to picture what the events in the pictures would have looked like, but they’re static in its head. It doesn’t know how they would have moved. In what it does manage to imagine, it is not standing in Grian’s place. It is standing to the side.

“I would have liked to be friends with Grian,” it tries out, and nods to itself. Yes. That makes sense. This is an impossible wish. If Grian hadn’t been killed, Three wouldn’t exist. If Grian hadn’t been taken by the Watchers, Three wouldn’t exist. In any world where Grian still exists, Three would not.

Oh. That is what had been so scary about the photo album. That makes sense.

“I don’t want to be him, though,” it says. “Being him and being friends with him are different.”

The waves hit against the curtain of water around the Grian Empire. There’s a high wind; in this version, that won’t be enough for the water to spill over, but it makes patterns across it anyway. If Three looks behind itself, it can see the direction to row to Grian’s grave. If Three looks below itself, it will see the Grian Empire, where no one else is asleep, either. They are all awake in their own way, and they are looking at ghosts.

Mumbo calls. 

“Hello? It is late at night,” Three says.

“Oh, gosh, I will get everything ready as soon as possible. I’ll talk to Xisuma. Who’s putting you in trouble? We’ll blacklist them. Or fight them? Gosh, I don’t know, I joined Hermitcraft when I was still a teenager, I’ve never been in trouble before, let alone had to fight anyone—”

“I specifically said I was not in trouble,” Three says.

“You sounded like you were under duress,” Mumbo says.

“I was not,” Three says.

“Oh. Whoops. Oh, gosh, it is late. Goodness knows what it is on your local server time—I’ll make sure I have something sorted out for you, though. I did offer. Although, er, you’re probably going to have to tell our server Admins what you’re running from…”

“That is okay. I am not really running from anything. I will also take care of myself,” Three says. “Sleep well.”

“Goodnight,” Mumbo says.

Three puts down the phone, mildly consternated that its plan to send a non-urgent late night text had instead panicked Mumbo. It doesn’t know if it’s going through with the decision yet, after all. It needs one more thing before it can really guarantee it will be safe to go to another server.

---

It runs across Jimmy before it can get to where Martyn is staying. Jimmy doesn’t quite look at Three’s face, looking to the side of where it would be beneath the blanket.

He holds something out.

“My mask,” Three realizes.

“You look really dumb with the blanket,” Jimmy says.

“Oh. I will change,” Three says. “I also think I look dumb with the blanket. You had to fix this.”

“I did,” Jimmy says. “Figure it’s a sorry for—I haven’t been looking at you. It’s not really your fault, it’s just—you’re all my nightmares, all at once.”

“I can try not to be,” Three says.

“No, it’s… it’s a me problem, not a you problem,” Jimmy says. “It’s… hey, can I tell you a secret? It’s—I haven’t told Martyn, but I wasn’t lying to BigB when I said I know another Admin who wants me on his server. It’s, uh, this guy named Scott, I met him online. I said I’d think about it, but I had always meant to keep saying no. I don’t want to leave Martyn alone. It’s just…”

“You do not need to leave. I am leaving,” Three says, and, screwing its eyes shut and bracing, it unravels the blanket and puts on the mask Jimmy had bought it before once more.

“You’re… leaving?” Jimmy says.

“I have places I can go. I just—you look at me and see nightmares. That is fine, but I want to learn what else I am, that is not nightmares. I want to be a person.”

“You are a person.”

“I know.”

Jimmy laughs weakly. “So that’s it? I’m running away again, and you’re—you’re also—”

“I do not think you are running away. If you were doing that, you would not tell me.” Three pauses. “I do not know how to tell you all. I should not leave. You are my handler. I am going to have to ask you for permission. But I need to leave. I know I do.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know,” Three says. “I need to, though.”

“I know you’re—it’s hard. You look like Grian, but I watched him die,” Jimmy says. “And you’re a Watcher. And you’re also—you’re my friend. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Jimmy says.

“I am sorry for frightening you,” Three says. “I do not mean to.”

“Nothing to do with you,” Jimmy says.

“I do not want to be Grian, though. So I am leaving.”

Jimmy looks out and sighs. “Yeah, that’s probably hard to do around here. I think—I think it makes sense. Leaving. To really step away from all of this. I mean, I’m doing it too. Uh, I’m in your way—”

“I was going to talk to Martyn,” Three lies.

“Go,” Jimmy says.

---

Three has never stolen anything before. Now, though, it does. Martyn is awake, but he doesn’t see Three, not immediately. It makes it easy to find Martyn’s go bag before he notices. It makes it easy to go through it. Its heart is pounding. This is disobedience. This is breaking the rules. It hates it. It does not want to keep breaking this sort of rule. But it’s important. It’s very, very important.

It finds a sheet of paper. It stares at the words. Longing, rusted, furnace, daybreak—

It puts the sheet of paper in its pocket before it can be seen.

“Martyn,” it says.

“Three?” Martyn says. “How did you get there?”

“I walked. Do you need a copy of my command words?”

“No,” Martyn says. “I have one, and I have them memorized, anyway. I can destroy them if you want. That’s probably best, isn’t it? Shoot, there’s probably a way for me to forget them if we figure out how to replicate the override.”

“I was just checking in case,” Three says.

“Hey. Maybe we can find a way to really deprogram those. Not like the weird override thing we did, but actually deprogram them. If not, though, at least we can do that again?”

Three looks at Martyn for a while.

“I trust you,” it says.

Martyn blinks. “Thanks?” he says.

“You are a very good thief,” Three says, trying to convey something with its voice that it doesn’t quite know the name of.

“Oh. Thanks,” Martyn says. “Hey, I haven’t been sleeping. Is it okay if we both try? Weird, but I feel safer if you’re also able to sleep, Three.”

“Yes. It’s alright. We can try,” Three says.

It goes back to its own bed, the paper burning a hole in its pocket, and looks at the server address Mumbo has sent, and Watches Martyn drift off. Slowly, it falls asleep.

Three makes sure to be at breakfast so it can tell everyone what it’s decided in the morning. It holds the piece of paper with its command words in its pocket. It is terrified of being told no. Jimmy has said yes already, but Martyn has not, and while Martyn may not technically be Three’s current handler, and while Three thinks it should leave whether he wants it to or not, it hasn’t had to stand up against a past handler before, either.

“I want to leave,” it says, because anything else makes it too complicated.

“We don’t have another safe house lined up yet,” Martyn says. “I can work on doing that, we had gotten a good list of servers—”

“I want to leave on my own,” it clarifies.

Everyone is quiet while they process this, except perhaps for Jimmy, who had already known, and who had already processed it. Three does not look away, because Three does not naturally look away from people, even when it is not sure what it will do when they inevitably tell it that it can’t.

“You can’t,” Pearl says, as Three thought she would. “We just reunited, you can’t—you can’t just leave! It’s—we can stay somewhere else. I guess seeing something this unfinished, I just—it was left to me in his will because I was also a part of the Empire, and I never felt like I could change anything, but now that you’re here we can—we could finish everything, fill the interiors—” Pearl starts saying. 

“Hey, wait, if Three wants to leave here, we can leave,” Martyn says. “We don’t have to stick to Evo. I mean, uh. Honestly sorta concerned about you still living in here too, it’s—it can’t be healthy. We can go somewhere else. I don’t have somewhere lined up, but one of the places we were looking before is probably fine. Or, I’m sure you have some places. I think you mentioned anarchy? Jimmy wouldn’t do well on an anarchy server, of course, but…”

“No,” Three says.

“Hey, man, they’re just worried about you,” BigB says, looking at Three sideways. “Have you ever lived on your own before?”

“I am designed to be able to sustain solo missions until check-in with a handler. I will be fine,” Three says.

“Until check-in with—I won’t be here to check in with,” Martyn says.

“I will be fine,” Three says.

Pearl slams her hands against the table and stands up. “No. No! We just watched Watchers attack you! I’m not—the Watchers aren’t allowed to kill you a second time! I won’t allow it! I won’t allow it! You aren’t allowed to go off on your own and get killed! I can’t—I can’t mourn you again. I can’t. I can’t, even if you say—you say you won’t remember but what if you do?”

Three watches everyone. Its heart pounds. It has to say, it does not like making people upset with it, even if it thinks it has to. It makes its head spin. It makes it want to apologize. It should apologize. It should explain to its handler that it will follow the order and stay. It should put the phone with Mumbo’s number in its handler’s hands and tell him that it has been communicating with someone attempting to suborn it against its handler without proper code words.

It does none of these things. It stands there, feathers occasionally flaring.

“I have retrieved my own code words,” Three says.

“Wait, really?” Martyn says.

“I have made multiple copies,” Three says. Its feathers are visibly flared outwards, making itself as large and unsettling as possible. It is trained to smooth them down when unsettled, but it finds it hard to do right now. Its heart is racing. “You will not be able to take them from me.”

“Three,” Martyn says.

“Because I have my own code words, I—I do not know what happens. I read them out loud, before we started talking, and I did not feel anything at all,” Three says. “But I think that makes me my own handler.”

“Three,” Martyn says again. “Shit. Fuck. You shouldn’t have to—”

Three’s feathers cannot flare much further out, but they make the attempt.

“Three didn’t have those?” Jimmy says.

“I forgot! I forgot! Look, you know what it was like when we first got it,” Martyn says.

“And it had to steal them as a result?” Jimmy says. “Martyn!”

“I didn’t mean—you could have asked,” Martyn says. “Fuck, Three, I wasn’t trying to—I don’t know, I wasn’t trying to do whatever this is. I didn’t think to. I forgot you would need them. Honest. It’s like I told you last night. I’d destroy them if you needed me to.”

Three thinks for a minute. “You’re both calling me Three.”

“Yeah, you asked us to, didn't you?” Martyn says.

Three considers that. It’s not enough to make it stay, not now, not after everything. It’s enough to make it think, though. It’s enough to make its feathers smooth down some. It’s enough to soften the blow of stealing the code words.

“Okay,” Three says.

“I don’t really understand, but is it, uh, exactly safe for Three to have its own code words? Like, I know it was once Grian and all that, but it’s also dangerous, you know. We just watched what happens when it goes rogue. Are you sure you want that?” BigB asks.

“Hey, Three’s its own person. That’s what we’ve been trying to get it to figure out this whole time. You don’t get to just decide it isn’t because you think it’s dangerous,” Martyn says. He pauses and squints at Three. “You know—you know even if I fucked that up, you are a person, right?”

Three takes a deep breath.

“I know. That is why I am leaving.”

It tries very hard to keep its feathers smooth when Martyn looks back with a heartbroken expression. It hopes Martyn isn’t mad. It’s not sure it can stand it if someone tries to forbid it from leaving on its own again. It probably wouldn’t leave then. It would stay here, and…

“If I stay here, you will try to make me Grian, instead of my own person. Maybe I am Grian; I do not know. I do not think so. I probably have some of a Grian personality, although I do not know what. You said that Grian’s favorite color was red. My favorite color is also red, so maybe that is because I was once Grian. But I have been trying to figure out how and why to count sheep, and I have seen no proof Grian would do that. I want to build interiors, and knit, and I also like fighting. I like explosions and pranks, although only explosions for warfare or that won’t make anyone upset. I don’t like it when people are mad at me. I hate ugly things. These are all things that I am. But they are not all things Grian was.

“I will not get back memories that are no longer there. So I do not want to stay here and—I want to be a person. I want to be a person who is Three. I don’t know who a person who is Three is. I am grateful, because you all showed me I had that choice, but now if I stay here, I think I will not learn who a person who is Three is. I will learn who a person who is Grian is, and that’s not—that’s not—I need to leave.”

Everyone stares at Three. It doesn’t know if it’s explained well enough. It doesn’t have much practice explaining itself. It’s not been expected to all that often, because it hadn’t been designed with emotions, or free will, or any of the things it has learned to have since it’s been stolen. Mostly, it sits there, looking at the great grey pillars around it so that it does not have to look directly at the people who want a Grian who is not there, who are its friends, who need something Three is not. This does not succeed, because it is a Watcher, so even if it points its eyes away from the table, it still Sees everyone around it.

“You know,” Martyn says. “You know. That’s the most defiant you’ve been since we found you. Proud of you, really. Hurts, but… fuck.”

Three focuses on Martyn again.

“Yeah, true,” Jimmy says. “Or, the most openly defiant? It’s always been cheeky.”

“Right? It’s just—huh. You’ve said no. Really, truly, firmly said no.”

“That’s new?” Pearl says.

“Oh yeah, it’s new,” Martyn says.

“Didn’t even like telling me no much,” BigB says.

“Oh. That’s not what I’d expect from Grian,” Pearl says.

“It’s not Grian, it’s Three, isn’t it?” Jimmy says, like that answers the question. Since no one argues, it must. Three tries to settle. It has established why it doesn’t need permission. It has stolen its own code words, and it has established it can say no now. It wants permission anyway. It does not like upsetting people, and it really, really doesn’t like upsetting people it cares about. Even if it can avoid these people having power over it now, it doesn’t want to make them mad.

Finally, Martyn sighs.

“Fine,” he says. “We really have just been…”

Pearl looks away. “It told me it didn’t remember from the photo album. It could, though. That might not be dead.”

“Do the memories really make Three Grian, or Grian Three?” Martyn says. “I don’t know. I didn’t ever really get philosophy. Probably why the Listeners have me stealing stuff and stabbing people instead of anything intellectual.”

“You’re also more expendable,” mutters Jimmy.

“Geez, thanks, Jim,” Martyn says.

“You know it’s true,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Cheery,” BigB says.

“My point is. Gods. We really have just been sitting here since we found out and expecting Three to be… different,” Martyn says. “Doesn’t make sense to… I’d be pissed too.”

“I’m not angry,” Three says.

“Yeah, you are,” Martyn says.

“I’m not. I am leaving but I am not angry. I am sad, but I am not angry,” Three tries to explain.

“Fine,” Martyn says, not sounding like he believes Three.

“But it is,” Pearl says. “It should get to know what it’s like being—even if it’ll never remember, it should get the chance to be our friend again.”

Three tilts its head. “I have already had the chance to be friends with Martyn and Jimmy. I can try to be friends with you all, but not from here, because you will try to convince me I am Grian. I do not want to be Grian. I want to be—”

“Okay, okay,” Pearl says.

“I—I am sorry. It is an inefficiency, to be unable to follow that command,” Three says.

“Don’t be,” Pearl says. “I’m being—I’m just doing the same thing I was doing to Jimmy again, aren’t I?”

“Our eggs are cold,” BigB says. “Just thought I’d point that out.”

“I can go make more eggs,” Martyn says.

“Yeah, yeah, let’s—I’ll help you,” BigB says. “We’ll make more eggs.”

“I feel like the world’s just shattered and here we are with cold eggs,” Pearl says.

“Nothing new’s shattered. We’ve already been like this,” Jimmy says. “We’ve been like this. Don’t—I’ve been like this too. All of us have—all just jagged pieces and nothing else. That’s us.”

No one seems to have anything to say to that. Instead, they get more eggs, and they eat breakfast in silence. Three keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. It waits for someone to forbid it from leaving, It waits for someone to try to insist it’s Grian again. No one does. It eats its eggs. It realizes it is over, and that is that. 

It had expected more of a fight. If it had been the Watchers, it would have been more of a fight. Even the Listeners would have given more of a fight.

Then again, Three would not have tried to tell them no, or explain why it said no, or anything else. Its eggs taste like rubber in its mouth as it wonders if, all along, it would have been different had it said no. Maybe it would have changed something. It probably would have changed nothing at all. Watchers don’t give choices, and Listeners only pretend to give choices, and Three only knows how to say no now because people kept on saying it could. Because these people kept on saying it could. It has been told it can enough now that it even knows it does not like saying no.

Grian apparently said no all the time. Grian said no when he saved Jimmy’s life and died. Three does not want to die, and Three does not want to be Grian.

Surely, it wouldn’t have all changed if Three had just still been able to say no.

It doesn’t matter. It’s changed this time. It’s leaving.

---

Packing this time is a strange affair. Three can pack whatever it wants. It would probably be rude to join a friend’s server with a hidden weapon smuggled across server borders, but Three does it anyway, finding a diamond short sword so short it’s more a dagger than a sword and placing it in its belt. It will take that in case Mumbo’s friends are actually dangerous, so it can fight its way back out with Mumbo, and perhaps bring him back here. It will not let anyone tell it that they told it so, because Martyn and Jimmy are just as bad if not worse when it comes to judging if things are safe.

When it comes back outside, it can see that Jimmy has also packed. Martyn is staring at Jimmy.

“You had someone else all along? And you were just… still here?” Martyn says hoarsely.

“I didn’t want to leave you alone. I know you would have told me—I mean, it’s fine,” Jimmy says.

“Gods, Jimmy. I’ve fucked you up. And to think, this all started because I didn’t want to leave you alone either,” Martyn says.

“I fucked myself up pretty good as well,” Jimmy says.

“Look at you. You’re even swearing.”

“Hah.”

“I guess this is it, then,” Martyn says.

“We’ll always be the Property Police, but I—I can’t. Not here. Not like this. And I want to keep you safe, but—”

“Just give me Netty’s number?” Martyn asks.

“You won’t call it,” Jimmy says.

“Maybe one day I’ll get the nerve back.”

“You really should. She’s worried.”

“After all this time? About this asshole?” Martyn snorts. “You really should have gotten out sooner. What changed?”

“I realized—I realized that Grian’s—it’s closure, Martyn. I know now. I never could have done anything. Just… just have to convince myself, first. He’s dead and I never could have done anything and they were always going to take him, one way or another. Now I’ve just gotta find a way to… I don’t know. Figure out what to do after that. Somewhere where I’m not afraid all the time? So. X Life.”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“It won’t be hard.”

“Jimmy, I—I love you.”

“Stay in contact, yeah?”

“Yeah. Just call me, you know I forget.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, shit, Three,” Martyn says, “how much of that did you hear?”

“I do not technically hear conversation. I read lips.”

Jimmy, inexplicably, starts laughing. Martyn and Three both look over at him, baffled. “Sorry, sorry, that’s—that’s just one of the first things I mentioned to you about Three. Watchers technically can’t hear so much as read lips. Said it like an insult at the time. I don’t—I don’t know why I remember that.”

“Okay, sure,” Martyn says.

“I’m just—we’re all splitting up here, huh? All three of us.”

“It’s for the best,” Martyn says.

“Yeah, it is,” Jimmy says.

“I’ll still—”

“I have a phone number now,” Three says. “I will give it to you all. I do not think we can talk about the same things as I do with Mumbo, and I do not know how often we will talk, but I will answer, if you contact me. I’ll come help you, if you need it. I have realized I am good at texting, but I am also still good at fighting.”

Three trades phones with Jimmy. It looks down. In the call history is a litany of names. It realizes that Jimmy must have called everyone even after the argument about it. Some of them have called back. Some of them have not. Taurtis’s number is still disconnected. It’s an awful lot for Jimmy to take on, but Three will do the one thing it can, and give a number that will always answer back when Jimmy calls. That is the most that Three can do.

“You’re staying with Mumbo?” Jimmy asks.

“Yes,” Three says. 

“You trust him, if someone comes for you—”

“Yes,” Three says.

“Okay,” Jimmy says. “Okay. This really is just it then. I don’t—gosh, I wouldn’t try to keep you anyway. It’s just funny. You’re still—I can’t live in the same place as you. Not until I have my head back on again. But still, the idea of you leaving…”

“I will also miss you,” Three says.

Jimmy laughs. “I don’t know about that.”

“I will,” Three says.

“Yeah, don’t say that Jimmy,” Martyn says. “Only one of us is the one who’s hard to like. You’ve just got, uh, an albatross around your neck?”

“Did you just try to make a pun about Three?” Jimmy says.

“What, it’s not like it’s not fitting!” Martyn says. “Don’t look at me like that! It was right there! It was easy!”

“I love you. I’ll miss you, you, you jerk,” Jimmy says.

Martyn and Jimmy hug, tightly. Then, to Three’s surprise, Jimmy moves to offer Three a hug. Three does not know what hugs are like, and decides to try it. It’s mostly, as it turns out, tight, and sort of warm, and very strange. Three does not move for the entire ritual. It is not sure it is up for doing that again any time soon, but it did not dislike it.

Jimmy looks at Three, and something in its feathers makes him laugh, this time a little sadder.

“You know, I—I wonder. You know, I actually didn’t get along with Grian that well. Then he died for me. And I—you know, I don’t know how to explain it. I’m about to sound really silly, but I’m actually a genius, so you can’t laugh.”

“Okay,” Three says, because it is not particularly attached to laughing.

“No promises,” Martyn says.

“It’s just—I don’t know. We’re not going to fix this. We’re not. We’re all leaving. And they say that some Listeners, they can hear the echoes of other worlds, and… is there anywhere we fix this? Is there a world where we’re friends without baggage? Where—I don’t know. I didn’t go to the dragon fight. Everything didn’t break. I want to think somewhere we’re—we’re free of all this but I, I don’t… I don’t… There’s no fixing it, is there? Not in this universe?”

“Jimmy,” Martyn says.

“Don’t answer unless you’re being honest,” Jimmy says.

Three thinks very hard. “Some handlers called conditioning breaking me in. I think that it was the kind of breaking that destroyed some of the pieces. I’m making new ones, though.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says. “Yeah. The worst part is now I think about a world where none of this happened, and I’m just…”

“It’s okay,” Martyn says. “Me too.”

“We should act happier. We’re just… all going on to fun new things, is all,” Jimmy complains.

“You’re the one making it morose,” Martyn says.

“Yeah, well, well… you’re morose!”

“Wow. What a fantastic comeback, Jimmy. I’m trembling.”

“Shut up!”

They continue on like that. For a moment, it feels almost like what Three imagines it would have felt like if Martyn had brought it home to a house where Martyn didn’t kill people for the Listeners and Jimmy didn’t constantly stumble under the memories of the very thing that made Three exist. Three doesn’t feel like a weapon, and doesn’t feel like Grian, and doesn’t feel like anything other than itself, and it’s good.

Three wonders if what it’s feeling right now is exactly what it feels like to be a person.

---

They go to Evo’s spawn. They pass through a city of buildings that Three now knows Grian helped build, and past the remnants of things it only recognizes from the photo book. They walk along the railroad tracks, and they get close enough to spawn that they will not need Martyn’s amulet, because they are all going separate ways. Three trades numbers with BigB and Pearl. It is not sure how much it will use those, in comparison to Jimmy or Martyn, but it does not mind having them, just in case.

They all stand around Evo’s spawn together in a circle.

“I’m setting up a reunion,” Pearl says.

“A reunion?” Martyn asks.

“To make up for the favor you all owe me now, you’ll show up. Everyone from Evo will. I don’t know what we’ll do. It won’t be in September. We’ll talk. We’ll just… talk.”

“I was not in Evo,” Three says.

“You’re showing up too. It’s rude to talk about people who aren’t there, so you’ll show up too.”

“Okay,” Three says.

“And—and you’ll tell me if you remember being Grian?” Pearl asks.

“I will not,” Three says, because it knows how memory works. If it could remember the things wiped from its mind, it wouldn’t be worth wiping it in the first place. The memories are gone. 

“I know, just—just give me time,” Pearl says.

“Okay,” Three says.

“If I come to the reunion, Netty—” Martyn says, slightly quickly.

“You should have thought of that before owing me a favor.”

“Oh, come on! You wouldn’t even be trying this if I hadn’t brought Three here!” Martyn complains, and then he goes quiet.

There’s a light breeze. It’s a nice day at Evo’s spawn. Compared to some of the weather Three’s stood outside for, it’s just about perfect. The sun is shining, there’s nearly no clouds, and the temperature is neither too cold nor too warm.

“It feels like there should be a fanfare,” BigB tries to joke.

“Has there ever been fanfare for us?” Martyn asks.

“No reason to fanfare a new beginning, right?” Jimmy says shakily.

“I’ll come back,” Martyn says. “Help you make sure Grian’s bonfire doesn’t go out. Help maintain it. We all should have helped with that. We shouldn’t have left you here alone.”

Pearl takes a moment to nod her head. “I guess we do have to keep it lit. Once—once Jimmy’s gotten everyone to understand, I’ll make a schedule. Before the reunion. I won’t ambush anyone. It was hard enough to do the four of you at once.”

“Can’t guarantee I won’t crash here again. The dead Watchers make a good deterrent,” Martyn says.

Pearl sighs. “I’m not not still mad at you, you know.”

“Right,” Martyn says, grimacing.

“I haven’t jumped to a server with a whitelist in ages,” Jimmy says. “I can never remember if I have to hop through a hub first or not.”

“It’s easier through a hub, but you can do it from anywhere,” Martyn advises.

“Hey, man, don’t leave before saying goodbye,” BigB says.

“I don’t know if I like goodbye,” Jimmy says. “I never get to say it when it matters, anyway. Not worth it.”

“Okay, no goodbye it is,” Martyn says. “Just—call?”

“Call,” Jimmy agrees.

“Yeah, I’ll be in touch,” Pearl says.

“Always will,” BigB says.

They pause, and Three realizes they’re looking to it to answer too. “I will do it before counting any sheep,” Three decides.

“That’s good,” Jimmy says. He takes a deep breath. “Uh, just in case—I’m releasing my claim on Three as a handler. I think that leaves no one alive? That leaves no one alive. Realized I ought to say that, just in case. Yeah. Have fun, Three.” 

Before Three can process that, Jimmy’s gone.

“Geez. Dramatic goodbye for a guy who doesn’t like them,” BigB says. “Uh, thanks, Pearl, for hosting us.”

“You still owe me,” Pearl says.

“I’ll pay it back in something better than just the reunion,” BigB says, and he’s gone too.

“I don’t have anything sappy, so uh, peace,” Martyn says, shuffling his feet. He grins oddly, and he’s gone.

Three and Pearl stand next to each other in spawn. Pearl doesn’t say anything else at all, so Three just salutes the decaying center of Evo, and then it’s far away, all at once.

---

Three is well and truly alone for one of the only times it has been in its life. There is no mission. There is no handler. There is no next step it must do, and there is no Watcher over its shoulder. It is in the hub world it met Mumbo in, because it will be easier to finish jumping to Mumbo’s personal world in a way that will not require breaking any whitelists or firewalls from there. Once it’s done that, it will find out if Mumbo has successfully gotten Three space on the server Mumbo is staying in or not. Apparently, it won’t be the first person Hermitcraft gives shelter. Three does not care if it’s the first or the last or anything in-between; Three just appreciates the opportunity.

It stands there, adjusting to the sensory input, and it is alone to do that, too, so it doesn’t bother looking stoic. It checks its bag. Everything is there. It has its knitting, it has its code words, it has the clothes it does not want to lose, and it has its phone. The dagger is still in its belt. A tiny piece of paper with the notes it remembers about the sheep it had counted with Jimmy is there. It hasn’t lost anything trying to slip them across server borders.

It won’t be alone much longer. It will be going to someone else who it will give an emergency copy of the code words, so that it can have them overridden if just knowing them itself is not enough. Right now, though…

It takes a deep breath. It closes its eyes once, then opens them again. It checks on the sheep from the family tree. It texts Martyn and Jimmy ‘thank you’, because it thinks it forgot to say it, even though it has wanted to for some time now. It does not get a response back yet, because the two of them are also still traveling, but that is okay. It does not need one. It just needed to say it.

The words properly said, it takes a deep breath, and it jumps again, away, to something new. 

It does not look back.