Chapter Text
There are two new server members this season, and for most of the hermits, this is their first look at either of them. It’s probably a little intimidating for Pearl and Gem to be stared at from above by everyone else, but it’s difficult for most of them to remember to be courteous about it, because they're too busy staring at Pearl.
Players on Hermitcraft have always come in all different shapes and sizes, but none of them have ever been anything like Pearl. She’s a player like the rest of them, that much is obvious, but her body appears to be made out of wool, rather than any sort of organic material. Her eyes are buttons, and she has soft fuzzy antennae protruding from her hat that look like feathers.
Pearl stares back up at them, a slight grin on her face. She has yet to do much in the way of moving. Finally, when it comes time to introduce herself, she hops up to join the rest of them, moving around as easily as any other player.
Eventually, one by one, the hermits come to the conclusion that everything must be in order after all. They graduate from staring to sneaking occasional looks, and they do their collective best to treat her like any other player.
Because if there’s one thing Hermitcraft is known for, it’s things that defy logic with their very existence. And in that respect, Pearl fits right in.
Shortly after the Boatem Pole incident wraps up, it occurs to Mumbo that he’s gone and joined another club for the season—and that one of the other club members is a newcomer that he’d really like to know more about.
He figures Grian is his best bet for information about Pearl, seeing as he’s the one who invited her to the server in the first place. Mumbo finds him offloading his inventory into the start of what’s sure to be a formidable chest monster, and asks, “You know Pearl pretty well, right?”
“Of course!” Grian says. “We’ve been friends for years.”
“Has she always been…you know.” Mumbo carefully considers his choice of words. “Did she use to look any different?”
Grian shrugs. “Maybe.”
“You don’t know?”
“A lot of people have looked a lot of different ways over the years.” Grian closes the lid of the chest. “You can’t expect me to remember everything.”
He has a point, unfortunately. “What about since the last time you saw her?”
“You mean ten minutes ago? I doubt she’s changed much since then.”
Mumbo rolls his eyes. “Before today.”
“That was…a couple months ago, I think. Or a couple years. One of those.”
Sometimes, Grian is an extremely frustrating person to hold a conversation with. “I just want to know why she’s made out of yarn and stuffing!”
“Oh! Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Because—” Mumbo stops, realizing he might be equally at fault here. “I thought it would be rude.”
“Well, to answer your question,” Grian says, “I haven’t the slightest idea why she’s like that.”
“You never asked her?”
“I thought it would be rude.”
“That’s never stopped you before,” Mumbo points out.
“Excuse you! I don’t go around asking why you’ve got that mustache.”
Mumbo strokes the mustache in question, feeling a little self-conscious. “I think it’s a nice mustache.”
“Me too,” Grian says. “I also think Pearl looks nice the way she is.”
“So do I,” Mumbo agrees quickly. “Really, I do.”
“Glad we agree!” Grian pats him on the back, and Mumbo leaves even more confused than before.
Grian’s still thinking about his conversation with Mumbo when he goes to ask Pearl for help with a build.
The build in question is actually a prank on Mumbo, but that’s not why it’s on his mind. In the few weeks since they spoke about Pearl, it’s occurred to him that there is something a little different about her—he just can’t quite put his finger on it.
“Have you gotten a haircut recently?” he asks her. “It looks nice.”
“Don’t be silly,” Pearl says. “You can just tell me you like my new wings!”
Right, of course. The wings. Grian feels a little embarrassed that he didn’t realize. “I do quite like them,” he says. He knows that Pearl’s wings have been there since the beginning of the season, it just hadn’t occurred to him that they were new. Like he said to Mumbo, he doesn’t keep track of these things.
“I appreciate it.” Pearl pokes him in the shoulder. “I like yours too, you know.”
“Yeah, well—” He rolls his eyes, his feathers instinctively fluffing up at the acknowledgement. “They aren’t exactly new.”
“I still like them!”
“Thanks.” Grian takes a closer look at her wings. They’re grey moth wings with a similar texture to the fabric that makes up the rest of her body, though they have more detail than any of her clothes. With such a small wingspan, they shouldn’t be aerodynamic enough to get Pearl off the ground, no matter how little she weighs. “You can’t fly with these, surely.”
“Not with that attitude I can’t."
“I’ll be very impressed if you manage to prove me wrong.”
“Oh, yeah?” Pearl walks outside through the left-side door, and Grian follows through the trapdoors in the center. “Watch this!”
The way she rises is odd, to say the least. Grian is intimately familiar with the process of taking flight, and he’s pretty sure Pearl’s method violates the laws of physics. It’s not so much that she’s flying as it is that she’s being lifted, like an invisible hand is pulling her up by the feelers and holding her there, letting her dangle inelegantly in midair.
“Ta-da,” Pearl says, spreading her arms open.
Grian squints up at her. “When did ‘Suma give you access to creative mode?”
“I’m not cheating,” Pearl says, offended. She turns her back in midair, displaying her wings, which are slowly flapping back and forth. She begins to bob around in the air, sort of like a slow-motion hummingbird. It’s only marginally more convincing than her initial ascent.
“Fine,” Grian agrees, if only to get her to stop. “You can fly. I’m impressed.”
Mostly, he’s disturbed. His wings itch just looking at her.
“Thank you,” Pearl says, and much to Grian’s relief, lands beside him. “So what’s this about a tree war?”
The vague plans that have been taking place in Grian’s head will require flight for them both, but he really, really doesn’t want to watch Pearl hover like that ever again. “First things first,” he says. “Let’s get you an elytra.”
Keralis is no stranger to the unusual. He knows he’s a little unusual; people tell him so all the time! And unusual things are constantly happening around him, only some of which are his fault. But Pearl is really something special.
The first time she comes to visit, Keralis ropes her into a scheme he’s just come up with, which is to get a clock from Bdubs so he can do some interior decorating. This is only part of his motivation—he takes to the extraordinary like a moth to a flame, and there are many extraordinary things about Pearl. He wants to discover them all.
Like her player head, for instance. Normal player heads, dropped in the event of a player's death, have a very simple effect: when equipped, they give someone the physical appearance of that player from the neck up. Usually they don't feel like anything, but Pearl’s head behaves a little differently. The first time Keralis tries it on is a very disorienting experience.
He and Pearl continue to meet up over the course of the season, hatching various schemes to try and swindle Bdubs out of even more clocks. Tango joins them for their third meeting, and Keralis wears his Pearl head again. It still feels very funny, and he decides that sharing is caring. “Here, put on a Pearl head!” Keralis says, throwing Tango his spare.
Tango puts it on, and now two Pearls are looking back at him. “Is it supposed to feel like my head is full of cotton?”
“Yes, that is perfectly normal,” Keralis assures him. “You get used to it!”
“He’s right,” Pearl agrees. “I’m very used to it.”
Keralis squints at her in suspicion, but he currently has buttons for eyes, so he’s not sure if anything actually happens. “Was there a time when your head was not full of cotton?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Pearl says, “what with the cotton in my head and all. Makes it hard to remember these things.”
Keralis respects and admires that Pearl wants to maintain an air of mystery, so he laughs along. But he does not quite believe her.
On the day they decide to tear down an entire castle and rebuild it on Bdubs’ mountain, Keralis and Pearl wind up killing each other for fun midway through the project. Mumbo arrives with his end crystals to further complicate things, and after several rounds of recreational murder, Keralis puts on Pearl’s head again.
He knows what to expect by now, so the strangeness of it doesn't catch him off-guard. The interesting part comes when Pearl retaliates by putting on one of his heads. Keralis isn’t sure what he expected, but it’s not a knitted version of his own face staring back at him, complete with oversized black-and-white buttons for eyes.
“You've got a lovely head on your shoulders, Pearl,” he says. “Not terrifying at all.”
Mumbo turns to look at her too, and jumps about a foot in the air. “Good heavens!”
“What?” Pearl says, the picture of innocence. “Have I got something on my face?”
She blinks—and, come to think of it, Keralis can’t remember whether or not he’s ever seen Pearl blink before. Maybe he has, and he never noticed, but it’s hard not to notice when her eyes are so much larger. Mumbo seems to notice the same thing, because he asks, flabbergasted, “How on earth did you just blink with button eyes?”
Pearl does it again, twice in a row. Keralis is no closer to understanding how she does it, but he’s all the more invested in watching her to find out. “How do you blink with your goopy eyes?” Pearl asks.
“Oh, very easy. We use our eye muscles!” Keralis tries to demonstrate, but finds himself unable to do so. “Sorry, one second.” He pops off the Pearl head that he’s wearing and bats his eyelashes. “See?”
“Muscles, right. I’ve heard of those.” Pearl stretches her arms up to her head. “You used to have some, right, Mumbo? Do you still have ‘em?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because you’re a potato? Last I checked, potatoes don’t have muscles.”
“Yes, but surely…” Mumbo looks down at his arm, poking the skin—the peel?—around his wrist. “Oh, dear. Do I have muscles? How am I meant to tell?”
“I know!” Keralis draws his axe. “We can slice off a little piece of you and look inside!”
Mumbo goes faintly green, resembling a poisonous potato. “I would really rather you didn’t.”
“No, I like this idea,” Pearl agrees. “Aren’t you curious, Mumbo? I know I am.”
“And we could also find out what your head looks like on Pearl’s head,” Keralis suggests.
Mumbo sighs. “Fine,” he says. “But only because I strongly suspect you’re going to do it anyway.”
“I promise I will be careful,” Keralis says, crossing his arms behind his back. “Just a teeny tiny slice.”
“I don’t want to watch.” Mumbo holds out his arm and looks in the opposite direction.
Keralis cuts into Mumbo’s arm. Unfortunately, he misjudges the amount of strength needed to cut through a potato with a large axe, and ends up slicing off Mumbo’s entire hand. “Oopsy-daisy.”
“Ow,” Mumbo says, as Pearl picks up the hand from the ground. He sounds more annoyed than agonized. “Really?”
“It’s okay, it’s okay! Five minute rule, remember? You will be good as new after a nice respawn.”
“He’s potato all the way through,” Pearl reports, showing the hand to Keralis. “You don’t even have bones, Mumbo, see?”
“Can I get that respawn now?” Mumbo asks, still refusing to turn his head.
“Of course!” Keralis slices him through with the axe, then does it again. The hand that Pearl’s holding disappears, as does the rest of Mumbo, who pops up at the nearby respawn bed while Pearl picks up his player head from the ground and plops it on.
Similarly to Keralis’s head, Mumbo’s head on Pearl’s body is made out of interwoven material with button eyes. This time, however, the yarn has been replaced by what appears to be little strips of potato peels.
“Well, that’s distressing,” Mumbo says, summing up what they’re all thinking.
“I can’t see what this looks like,” Pearl says, “but it smells like raw potatoes in here.”
Her specification of raw gives Keralis an idea. “I wonder if we could put Potato Boy through a furnace?”
“I think I’ve had enough scientific experimentation for the day,” Mumbo says, gathering up his things from the chest. “I need to put an end to this whole potato business as soon as possible.”
After he leaves, Pearl walks over to the crafting table. “We could put his head through the furnace.” She crafts a furnace and sets it down, taking off the Mumbo head. “Aw, it won’t go in.”
“Too weird for normal Minecraft,” Keralis says, shaking his head.
Pearl laughs. “Story of my life.”