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Joining a new home world for the first time was always the worst part.
Quick visits were no problem, usually. Especially on minigames servers, where things were deliberately impermanent and the worlds had usually been carefully defanged well ahead of time. Even offworld projects that measured in the weeks and months usually weren’t too hazardous, though you had to be a bit more careful with those.
But properly relocating, setting down roots intended to be permanent, moving your infinite respawn; that was always going to cost you something.
Scar sucked in a breath through his teeth, drumming his fingers on his cane, laid across his lap. He and the others had planned to all leave for Hermitcraft together- make it a little less stressful, you know- but he’d been held up at the last minute, and hadn’t wanted to keep them. So Cub, Ren, Iskall and Wels had all gone on ahead, and he’d promised he’d follow in a couple days once he had all his affairs settled.
Well, it had been a couple days. Around him, Kingdomcraft, already abandoned, was disappearing in fits and starts: the sun dimming in the sky, trees dropping all their leaves at once, whole chunks of undeveloped land disappearing outright. Spawn had remained mostly safe thus far, but it wouldn’t be for much longer.
Before long, Kingdomcraft would be undone, dissolved, and Scar really did need to be somewhere else when it finally happened. He sighed, pulled the invite up again.
Hopefully, the changes wouldn’t be too drastic. They usually weren’t; just minor alterations to players’ bodies and minds to fit them cleanly in as creatures of their new home. Frequently they weren’t even outwardly noticeable. It was just always a little jarring and uncomfortable, and only occasionally catastrophic.
He tapped ‘join’, and squeezed his eyes shut reflexively as the world vanished around him.
Never nice, generally, seeing the unspace that existed between layers of reality. Especially not nice to see it through eyes that were being stripped apart and reconstructed with you still conscious.
His nerves were coming apart. It felt like his muscle fibers were being raked through with a fine-toothed comb. A headache materialized, pounded mercilessly for what might have been ten seconds and might have been two hours, and then abruptly vanished. His stomach swooped, jolted.
He lost all sense of where all the component parts of himself were. He kept his eyes stubbornly shut until he wasn’t sure if they were still closed or if he’d gone blind.
He was nowhere, and he didn’t want to see it. His head was hurting again, his hears ringing. There was nothing to touch, no air to breathe.
He felt dead.
And then gravity hit him like the world’s most welcome mallet, and he was sprawled in the mud, brilliantly real, coughing up clay, his entire skeleton aching.
He slowly cracked one eye open, and found his vision full of orange. It was midday, and the sun was blaring. He couldn’t tell if his color vision had changed or if the sky really was that blue.
So this was Hermitcraft! Well, he hoped it was as good as Wels had said it would be. A secondhand invite wasn’t exactly the best grounds on which to enter a new world, but hopefully he’d be able to stick around for at least a few months. He really was not enthusiastic about the prospect of having to uproot again any sooner than that. That sort of thing could do permanent damage to a guy! And he had had quite enough of that already!
He spat out another clot of dirt, and- oh, yep, yeah, that was blood. He propped himself up on his elbows with some effort, wincing, and squinted down at the wet clod in the sand. It was very red. The colors were still a little more intense than he was used to, which might have been the nature of the place and might have been the nature of his eyes.
He coughed again, choked, and a lump that had been in his throat since he’d opened his eyes finally came loose. It hit the ground with a horrible noise, and his mouth filled with the taste of iron and acid. Something internal, then. He thought he could see a tooth, too.
Well, hopefully he wouldn’t collapse dead in the next day or five because he’d just spat out his liver. He was pretty sure it wasn’t big enough to be his liver, anyways. Maybe there was a doctor among the hermits’ ranks who could check him out, just in case. Or, failing that, Cub, who was not a doctor but who did have a lab coat, which was practically the same thing anyways.
He took a few deep breaths to reassure himself he could, felt around for his cane. Once his hand closed around cool wood, not yet warmed by the sun, he felt a little more stable.
He swiped a hand across his mouth, winced when it came away red. At least the aching in his bones was fading. He pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet, relieved when they didn’t immediately give out under him.
Around him, the mesa was vast, tiered platforms of clay and stone stretching out to the horizon in both directions. There was a divot in the ground where he’d landed, and he wondered if the world had used clay to repair any damage done in transit. When he felt down his chest, he couldn’t feel anything missing.
Well, that was probably fine, then.
“Scar!” someone called from behind him. “Hey, you made it!”
He wheeled around, grinning at Wels as winningly as he could when he was about ninety percent sure his teeth were probably a little bloody still. “I did! Almost all in one piece, even!”
Wels grimaced. When he came to a stop, Scar could see he had a tufted tail twitching behind him, and the thought of growing all those extra vertebra made him wince in sympathy. “You’re not, like, literally going to die, are you?”
“Nah, I’m fine,” Scar said. “...Probably.”