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He’s tired, and he’s not quite sure where he is or what’s really happening. He feels kind of floaty, which is weird… isn’t he supposed to be in pain? Maybe that was a dream… or maybe this is a dream. It feels like a dream.
He cracks open his eye (where’d the other one go? Did he have another one? He thought he did… eh, whatever. He feels too floaty to really worry about it) and spots people. He knows those people! One’s tall as anything, with a mop of black hair that doesn’t quite cover his horns; that one’s Beef! He likes Beef. Big, leathery, blue-and-cream wings are what he sees of the other person, and he could recognize Pause anywhere! Team Canada! Yeah!
He makes some sort of happy sound, he assumes, because both of them turn towards him. Pause is handing Beef a Tupperware of soup, which is a little weird, because Beef’s the cook. But Etho’s really the only one not trusted in the kitchen, so he supposes that it’s fine. What was he talking about again?
Right! Beef and Pause.
Beef looks sad, and Pause’s wings are droopy, but they perk up a little when he sees Etho’s awake. His hair’s long too now, which is also a little strange. Although… thinking about too much makes Etho’s head hurt, and he really can’t remember the last time he’d seen Pause. Maybe he’s been growing his hair out.
Pause presses the Tupperware into Beef’s hands, and through the haze, Etho recognizes the words “well, I’ll leave you to care for him, we just wanted to make sure you had lunch.” Which… that means Pause is leaving?
Panic jolts through Etho at the thought, and he can’t put his finger on why, but he knows he can’t let Pause leave. As he turns to go, Etho yells rasps (why is his voice so… focus Etho!), “Wait! Pause, don’t leave!”
Pause stops, and turns to him. “I can stay a little longer if you want, Etho, that’s alright.” He exchanges a look Etho can’t interpret with Beef, who looks… Etho doesn’t know. A statue of a bull hybrid. That’s what he looks like. Like he’s made of stone, and then Bdubs painted him. Bdubs is good at painting. What was he saying again?
Pause crosses the room and sits on the couch, but for some reason, that’s too far away for Etho. He doesn’t know why there’s this panic running through him, he just knows he wants Pause closer.
He reaches for him, makes a whine. When that doesn’t work, he rasps again, “Pause, please? Nest. Skulk.”
Pause and Beef glance at each other again, and then they both seem to come to a decision. Pause gets up and sits on his bed, quickly getting dragged into Etho’s octopus cuddles, and Beef sits in the chair right by the bed nest, running one hand through his hair.
With the oldest members of his skulk near him, Etho slowly lets himself drift away. He feels… peaceful, for the first time in a long time. He nudges himself closer to Pause’s throat, and then he’s dreaming, Team Canada highlights playing in his head.
-
They both wait until Etho is very deeply asleep, and then Pearl speaks, an Etho still tucked under her chin.
“What-? Why… I didn’t think we were this close, honestly. What just happened?”
Beef sighs, sitting back. His gaze turns distant. “What do you know about the end of Mindcrack?”
Pearl frowns, mind turning that question over and over, poking and prodding at it in confusion. “Almost nothing,” she responds, because… “We started Evo when Mindcrack was still going strong, and the comms in Evo weren’t really up-to-date. We didn’t really know much about the outside world until years later, and by then no one talked about Mindcrack anymore.” A thought occurs, and she hesitantly adds, “I heard it got shut down, but everyone on the server refused to say another word about it. Doc starts smelling like Grian’s TNT hoard whenever it comes up, and Bdubs stops smiling. Bdubs is always smiling! Etho straight-up disappears, and even you tend to find a reason to leave. I figured it was none of my business, and I wasn’t gonna ask.”
Beef sighs, again, crossing his arms over his chest and studying the back of Etho’s head in a way Pearl recognizes as seeing something far away from this hospital room.
“The end of Mindcrack wasn’t… it wasn’t good. It was-“ He stops, eyes distant, and Pearl waits.
“It was the middle of a season. We were doing what we did, and everything was going great, and it was just- it was a normal season, y’know? Normal day.
“I don’t even remember what I was doing. I honestly don’t. I know I didn’t finish it, but it felt so insignificant afterwards. I was working on something, it had some sort of redstone. I don’t know.
“It was… it was the time of the Feral Hybrids. It was a virus. It was a bad virus. Took a Player’s code, and warped them into a monster. They looked the same, but they weren’t there anymore. They’d attack anything that moves, especially other Players, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do. And once you started showing signs, you were done for.”
Pearl feels the horror overtake her expression. She knew about the Feral Hybrids, but her and hers had been off grid for this period of time. She didn’t know any of those details! She just knew some virus targeted hybrids, and people used it against them to this day. But Beef isn’t done.
“Pause was constantly on and off world. Void, we’d go with him sometimes, but he was constantly playing maps and minigames, some more stable than others. Some more safe than others.
“He… We were supposed to play this map, but Etho got sick. Not bad sick, but the idiot to this day goes all fight or flight when he’s sick, and back then was worse, and he wouldn’t take care of himself if someone didn’t make him... So I stayed with him, but I told Pause to go ahead.”
Pearl has a sinking suspicion of where this story is going, and she knows she isn’t gonna like it. Beef pauses, here, and when he speaks again, his voice wavers.
“Pause logged back on to the server after a week. And then our comms started exploding half an hour later, and then Guude told us to shelter in place, and then…”
Beef’s voice breaks. He swallows once, brings a hand up to scrub down his face, and continues.
“We sheltered in place for a week. Guude disabled our comms twenty minutes after the shelter in place warning, and said he’d get them back up when everything was over, but to not go anywhere or do anything until then. He-“
Beef’s eyes meet hers.
“He told us to set our spawns and starve if we had to. He wouldn’t tell us what was wrong, just said it was life or death. I remember that very last message like it was yesterday: all caps and italics; DO NOT LEAVE YOUR SHELTER. DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME ON THIS. I WILL EXPLAIN LATER. I REPEAT, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR SHELTER. And then the comms cut out. They were dead for a week.”
Beef leans forward, elbows on his knees, and stares at what little of Etho’s face he can see like he’s memorizing it.
“The actual shelter in place wasn’t too bad, at least for Etho and I. We played card games and dicked around like the twenty-somethings we were. But then Guude showed up at our door, and we knew something was wrong.
“And then Guude told us Pause was dead. Just like that. We didn’t know what actually happened until much, much later. Just… there was an accident, and he was gone.”
Beef pauses, eyes darting yet distant, and Pearl realizes that the worst is yet to come.
“The server got shut down. We had less than a week to pack our things, to say goodbye. We barely scrambled together a funeral in that time. We also were scrambling for where we were supposed to go next, applying for sanctuary anywhere we could, just to avoid our old sentences. We were grieving and we were losing our home, our safety, and we were just so scared…
“The funeral itself was a blur. There was hub security there and people from the Department of Sanctuary Servers, because that funeral was the last thing we did on that server. We packed our bags and had them with us in the service, and then we took his body to the End, lit it on fire, and dropped it into the void-“ Pearl gasps, recognizing Elytrian funeral rites, “-and then they took us in groups to the hub, to take us to… wherever we went next.”
Beef’s gaze goes even more distant. “The NHO were lucky. We got into Hermitcraft on such short notice. Others…” His voice breaks.
“Some people went back to prison. Some got hauled to a master or a lab they’d just escaped. They all got out eventually, but some spent 6 months, back in their own personal hell. Some of them- some of them didn’t last too long, once they did get out. Others… others went feral, not too long after the server shut down.
“We lost a lot of friends from Mindcrack. About half of us are still around. The- the deaths stopped, about a year after the server shut down, but our numbers were decimated by then. By that point, Feral Hybrid Virus was a known thing, and none of us were allowed to travel. Out of all the friends we lost, Pause was the only one we could go to the funeral for.
“We found out later… well. Guude called us, one night, late his time. Told us to get together, that there was something he had to say.
“He killed Pause. We already guessed that Pause had gone feral, but we didn’t know… he tried to do something, create a patch or something, but the longer he waited, the worse it got. In the end, he didn’t have a choice if he wanted to save the rest of us. He used admin commands to permakill Pause, and prayed it’d be enough to keep the virus from jumping to the rest of us.”
Beef smiles cynically, and Pearl realizes she never wants to see that expression on his face again.
“It wasn’t. Those on Hermitcraft, the NHO, we even had it. Xisuma was just ahead of the curve, had a patch ready before full-scale research was even being done, and patched the dormant virus out of every Hermit before we started showing signs, whether or not we had it. In those days, we didn’t know what it looked like yet, couldn’t scan for the dormant virus, so Xisuma patched all of us, without knowing one way or another. That same patch became the patch used in all sanctuary servers and hospitals, to prevent the transfer of the virus.
“Research was done, eventually. We figured it out, and when Xisuma found out what the dormant virus looked like, post-patch, he went through everyone’s code.
“Half the Hermits had it. Half. And it clearly originated from the NHO. Pause’s funeral- Pause’s funeral spread the virus to everyone from Mindcrack. The only reason Hermitcraft didn’t have an outbreak was due to Xisuma and sheer dumb luck. That virus could’ve gone active in any of us at any point before the patch, and it was sheer dumb luck it didn’t.”
Beef pauses again, and Pearl watches his face drop, watches him take a deep breath, and then listens as he says clearly-memorized lines.
“PauseUnpause was a good friend. He was a member of Team Canada, and instrumental to Mindcrack’s development. He was a secondary admin under Guude, and he never failed to make us laugh.”
Beef’s gaze focuses in the present, on her face.
“Etho can’t see well without his redstone eye. He saw your wings and hair color, and he assumed you were one of his best friends.
“You’re a good friend, Pearl. You may not think you and Etho are super close, but even if he couldn’t figure out exactly who you were, he still felt safe enough around you to call you his skulk and pull you into his nest. He wouldn’t have done that, mistaken identity or not, if he didn’t trust you.
“You’re not Pause. He’ll probably know that by the time he wakes up. But you’re still a damn good friend.”
Pearl stares out into space for a long moment, processing all of that. Then she comes to a realization, glancing quickly down at Etho, and then back up at Beef.
“I’m stuck, aren’t I.”
“Oh yeah. You’re not going anywhere for a long time.”
Pearl sighs as the serious tone finally breaks, frowning half-heartedly as Beef snaps a picture of them. Her comm buzzes in her pocket. The following buzzes tell her he sent that picture to the Hermit main chat.
As he opens up the soup, a shit-eating grin plastered on his face, she sighs again. Oh well. If she’s stuck, she might as well catch up on some sleep.
She holds Etho close, feeling her own protective instincts bubble up, and gently presses a kiss to the top of his head before she gets ahold of herself. She reminds herself that he’s not a wisp, and is in fact a full-grown man. …A very injured full-grown man that she shares flock with through Gem.
Her eyes glow, and Beef laughs as he realizes that she’s lost to The InstinctsTM for at least a while.
Maybe she won’t catch up on that sleep after all.