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After the two of them had talked for a bit about what Cleo had been up to, Joe frowned. “We really need to figure out what exactly it is we’re doing about these missing Hermits.”
Cleo sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, we do.”
“Well, let’s list out what needs to be done, I suppose. We need to know where they are, first of all.”
“I might have a plan for that. I was able to get some information on you from the Archive of Tenos–it showed up after you…after the season ended, and there might be more there.”
Joe nodded. “This might be a tricky question, but…do we want the other Hermits coming with us to find the rest of them? I certainly do love chatting with them, but this quest we’re on seems like something possibly aided by a lack of additional companions.”
Cleo frowned. “...you’re not wrong. There’s definitely going to be sneaking around, the two of us work best together, and the more people I have to explain modern things to, the more I want everyone around me dead.”
“And I am a very big fan of not being dead! Having temporarily done it once now, I can see why people avoid it so heavily.”
“If we’re sending other people off, we need a new Hermitcraft world. Unless we’re just leaving them wherever we found them, which I’m sure they’d all love,” Cleo mused.
“Everyone loves isolation and not knowing when they’ll be found again or if they’ll fall back into a state of doom!” said Joe cheerfully. “So yes. We should probably find somewhere for people to go.”
As she cleaned up the small house she’d built, Cleo said, “You’ve got some admin experience, haven’t you?”
There was a momentary pause. Joe nodded. “I do. Why do you ask?”
“Well, if we made a new world, that’d be a fine place to send people,” reasoned Cleo.
“You’re not entirely wrong, although I don’t know how Xisuma finds those fancy worlds he does.”
“I’m glad you don’t. You’d just find a world everyone else would hate.”
Joe frowned. “Cleo, our friends will have all seen another Hermit likely for the first time in a while, and they’ll almost certainly be spooked, concerned, and startled by how long it’s been. Maybe even still mourning! Don’t you think it’d be a little rude to spring something like that on them right afterwards?” There was a pause, and Cleo raised an eyebrow at Joe.
Defensively, Joe said, “I’d only fill half of it with birch forests!”
Cleo rolled her eyes, and the two of them finished their cleanup, chatting the whole; it didn’t have the full crew of Hermits Helping Hermits, but it also wasn’t an entire mountain, just a small house.
Once they were done, the day having turned to night, Joe stretched. Cleo raised an eyebrow at him. “You do know you don’t have muscles anymore, right? That’s completely useless.”
Joe shrugged. “The memories of flesh run deep.”
“That was probably the worst way you could’ve phrased that, but sure.” Cleo stared up at the moonless night sky.
Quietly, Joe asked, “Do full moons still scare you?”
Cleo nodded. Neither of them said anything else for a while, after that.
Joe frowned, tapping at his communicator’s unfolded interface. It was really a very clever device; normally, the smaller version worked perfectly well, but occasionally one needed more options. And more controls. He was pretty sure X had a fancier version, one with floating monitors around him and all sorts of glowy screens and keyboards and all that, but he’d never needed to do that much.
He was sorta wishing he had all that, right about now. Or at least had, say, an instruction manual better than a host of spirits. Most of which didn’t know nearly as much as they thought they did. He’d never been one much for keyboards. When he was jumping worlds, there wasn’t the nice, clean framework of code. Just power, skill, and a little luck.
Joe had found that if you were lacking those, sheer contrarian stubbornness and desperation worked just fine, but he was hoping to make a functioning world today. One of the muse spirits whispered something about the sixth tab down from the third menu, and Joe sighed. Loudly.
Look. He understood the convenience of code. He got that most people didn’t have the power, luck, or contrarian determination to actually spin the threads of reality. But really? Really? Three menus?
He sighed again. It was what it was. Joe tapped his way through the menus, eventually reaching a very complicated screen he definitely didn’t understand.
“Who designed this,” he asked despairingly to the invisible cloud of spirits around him. They murmured something about ancient architects, and he waved it off. “I know, I know. But couldn’t they have at least made it a little user-friendly?”
The muses chittered with laughter, and Joe grumbled, “Okay, okay. Which one of these unnecessarily numerous buttons do I need to press to have a world?”
There was a quantity of answers. No quorum was reached. Joe’s eye twitched.
One of the spirits whispered something about power, something about conquerors of death and the strength of old incarnate and older magic. Joe paused, stopping his baffled tapping away (and dear whatever was he glad these touchscreens didn’t work off of electrical conductivity because he wasn’t sure how bones, ghosts, and terrible ancient magic interacted with electrons) and turning to the spirit, who flinched. He was pretty sure it hadn’t realized he could see it.
Joe glared at it. It wilted back from his gaze. He was pretty sure that gaze had gotten a bit more threatening, lately. “The rules are very clearly listed. No discussion of theoretical ancient and powerful magic that I definitely don’t have.”
The spirit seemed about to say something. Joe blinked open a new piercingly green eye. It stopped. Joe closed the spare eye, and returned to irritated tapping. “D’you think if I just pressed all the buttons at once, it’d work?”
The general opinion of the choir was ‘no but you should absolutely do it’. He did not. Maybe another time.
After about half an hour of frantic clicking, Joe finally found the ‘Create New World’ button. Well, button might’ve been a misnomer. It was more of a complex series of keys and commands, somewhat resembling a terrible minigame made by people who hated hik and which also independently hated him specifically.
He glanced over his choir of spirits. They stared at him. He mused (heh) to himself, and twitched his fingers. To them, their vision would stutter and pause for a few moments, as Joe sank ghostly fingers into the screen, punching through layers of code and data to reach the fuzzy, intangible Power that made up the world. He wove his fingers through it, tugging and pulling and weaving. The code worked great. This worked better, if you could understand it. Which, well…there was a reason Joe hadn’t made the whole world off of power and magic. He’d picked up a few tricks from Vechs’ inescapable worlds, but for a world he wanted to be stable for more than, oh, probably a few weeks, the Code’s framework helped.
Joe flexed his fingers, finishing a few of the last bits of power. There was a reason Hermitcraft had never been broken into, and it wasn’t whitelists. Xisuma was a good coder, but he was older than the Code, older than the term admin, and he knew the same secret tricks and paths that Joe did. Well, he knew them better than Joe. But Joe was a backup admin for a reason, and it wasn’t his computer skills.
Joe tugged the last bit of world-weave into place, flicking his fingers off to cleanse any lingering Power, and let the Code reform itself. The spirit’s vision flickered back into place. A couple mentioned it, but the issue was gone, and they assumed Joe had just inputted the commands while they weren’t looking.
Which, under some interpretation of that, he had! At least, the world was being created. So it was basically the same thing.
Joe yawned. He’d been watching the new world build itself up, both in the Code’s interface and through the underlying weave. It was nearly done, and so he meandered over to where Cleo was writing down notes for finding the Hermits.
She waved at him. “Hi, Joe. I’ve got…some notes. Not as many as I’d like, but some starting points.”
Joe nodded. “Season Nine–is that what this is? Is this Season Eight Point Five? Or Season Eightermission?”
“I’m not sure…depends on what the other Hermits think.” She shrugged. “What’s the actual time estimate?”
Joe glanced at his communicator. “Just shy of two minutes. Do you mind if I look over your notes while it finishes?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
He did so, musing over Cleo’s thoughts until his communicator beeped at him. He grinned. “Well, Cleo. Are you excited to see what this new world brings us?”
“Joe. Did you lie about not being able to find seeds?”
Joe blinked, staring around them at the impressive birch forest. “Y’know, given our earlier conversation, I’m not entirely sure of that myself. And I saw me make this place! For a certain interpretation of saw.”
Cleo sighed. “Well, Gem will like it, at least.”
As Joe meandered off to explore the area, he shouted back, “We are dealing with Hermits, to be fair! There might not be a birch forest here in a week!”
Cleo laughed, running to catch up with him. “You’re not wrong. What do you think you’ll build this season?”
“Hm. Maybe something pinball related…how about you?”
The two of them chatted about plans and ideas as they broke down trees, caved, and set up a small hut and farm on the spawn island for the Hermits. It was nice, and if it weren’t for the fact that the world around them was empty of other people, it almost would’ve felt like things were normal again.
Eventually, Cleo was the one to bring it up. “So…once this is done, who do we look for first?”
Joe frowned. “Seems like…we probably need another admin? I’m not horrible but, well. I’m the backup for the backup for the backup for a reason, y’know?”
Cleo nodded. “So it’s X, Hypno, or Tango…Tango mentioned he was going to try to fly to the moon and deal with things up there, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, he did…did you run into any convenient legends about Xisuma or Hypno while looking for me?”
As she set down another block of copper, Cleo frowned. “I did, but it was pretty unhelpful for most people…nothing on Hypno, and it did say that X and Gem both were in the Nether, but that it had collapsed.”
“Well, I’m not entirely sure what a dimension collapsing means for the people in it, but I get the feeling it’ll be hard to pry our way into. So…Tango?”
“It seems like that’s what we’re leaning towards.” Cleo set down the last few roofing tiles on the Spawn Shack, and Joe planted the last of his seeds. He’d been tempted to only plant beetroot, but in a situation like this, he’d decided helping the Hermits was more important than personal amusement. Which was why only half the field was planted with the much-disliked red vegetable.
He nodded. “Sure looks that way. So, a bit of research if we can, then…back to Season Eight?”
Cleo grimaced. “Well, back to its ruins, at least.”
The two of them finished the little spawn area, chatting about nothing in particular as they did. Joe’s mind wasn’t particularly latched on to the meaningless conversation, as he tried to scour his memories for traces of Tango’s tales, and from her absentminded replies, he had a feeling Cleo was similarly distracted. Which was fair, really.
The two of them had a lot to do.