Chapter Text
Xisuma Void. Season 7, Week 60. 24/04/21
A lot has happened this week.
Xisuma sighed, staring at the blank document. “A lot has happened.” It’s certainly a way to describe the events of that Tuesday, when eight of their hermits vanished without a trace. If he could, he wouldn’t even write this log (he’d much rather be looking for his hermits), but he had to. Every week, since the beginning of season 5, he’d been keeping a weekly log of the server to keep track of all the mishaps that the hermits got up to. It started off as a small thing, a brief summary of the week sent off to a group of people who’d file Xisuma’s report in some archive or something - he didn’t know the full details. Then individual hermits started sharing their perspectives of the week - sorting out inaccuracies, defending their honour, or just providing an insight into events that Xisuma may have missed. Word spread, and now, by the end of each week, Xisuma would have a stack of papers ready to be sent off and organised. This week, however, the stack was significantly shorter, with eight hermit’s absences weighing deeply on Xisuma’s mind.
Eight of our hermits have disappeared (as of Tuesday 21st April) and since then, we’ve been looking for them as a group. The search has been taxing on a lot of hermit's health, both mental and physical, as the loss of any member is bound to cause upset among the group.
For your information, and so you can log the gaps in your reports this week, the missing hermits are as followed:
- Grian Dreamslayer
- Scar Goodtimes
- Tango Tek
- Etho Slab
- Impulse SV
- Ren Dog
- Cleo Zombie
- Bdouble 0100
This is a significant portion of our server, and we have all felt their absence strongly. We have tried to contact them, and some have also made the effort to contact family on other worlds, all to no avail. In our search, however, we have discovered that the Empires server are also missing some of their members (three to be exact), including Grian’s brother, Jimmy. As of right now, we are unsure if the disappearances are linked or not. Scratch that, we’re unsure of anything. We’ve been given nothing to work on. No notes, no hints as to where they could’ve gone or when they'll return. Nothing. As you can imagine, we’re all worried. We have tried to look through servers, to contact old friends, who’s servers may be hosting our hermits, and non-stop messaging their communicators. After all this search with no result, we think they are located on an unlisted server, with some sort of interference blocking the signals of their communicators. But again, that’s all just a hypothesis. We have no way of knowing what's actually going on until they return.
Xisuma had been at the forefront of the search, working together with some of the smarter hermits to try and track where the missing members might be. He'd been witness to every hermit’s disappointed face as they'd tried over and over again to contact close friends, and failed each time. Each day was more worrying than the last, and with no sign of the hermits returning, it was becoming more and more likely that they'd have to give up the search. Of course, there was another theory, one that had been whispered faintly, shared quietly between hermits, as if no one dared to say it out loud.
Another theory going around is that they're not coming back. No one has said this to me personally, but as admin of the server, it's hard not to hear rumours. I hope that this isn't true. I hope that I can look back on this log a few weeks from now, and laugh at how much of a fool I was. That, in actuality, none of us have noticed that they informed us of their decision to leave. Or that this was just another elaborate prank. Unfortunately, at the minute, the only plan of action is waiting this out. I don’t know when we’re going to give up looking. I don’t think we’ll ever give up, if I’m being truthful. But with nothing to go off of, and all of our leads turning cold after only a week, what else can we do? Server hop until we find them? That would take decades at the least - there’s so many servers in our universe, with hundreds being created each day. If we don’t know where they’ve gone, it’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack: nearly impossible, and frustratingly long. I hope that no matter where they are, they’re safe.
Xisuma looked over the document a few more times, but he was done. He couldn’t think of anything else to type. Anything he’d missed would’ve been covered by the other hermits anyway. Now all he had to do was send all the logs off, and he could go back to the search.
Mumbo K. Jumbo. Season 7, Week 60. 24/04/21
This week has been eventful, to say the least. For starters, I was sick, and couldn’t talk. To make light of this, I “forced” some of my friends to watch and guess what I was building. I showed Grian my newest piston door, I showed Ren my wonderful decoration skills, by decorating a staircase down to the piston door. Finally, for Iskall, I may or may not have destroyed some of his palm trees in favour of building redstone components for Pacific. But it’s not my fault that he built them in a redstone zone!
Now for the difficult part. Mumbo really didn’t want to write this. But it was important to keep a log of the week, whether that be good or bad. It wouldn’t be right to omit the most important part of the week because it made him uncomfortable. And who knows? Maybe writing his issue out will help fix it.
On the topic of Grian and Ren, something else has happened this week. It’s no doubt in the other logs, but I figured I’d share my perspective, and get this off my chest. That’s supposed to help, isn’t it? I think it is. It all started this Tuesday, when we woke to eight different notifications, all saying that a hermit had left the game. Normally, that wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary; hermits leave for events all the time. This time, however, no events were scheduled for that week (that we know of), and no one had told us that they were planning on leaving. Since then, we’ve tried every method in the book to find out where they went. Personally, I wasn’t too fussed about the sudden disappearance, as hermits leave the server all the time. Sure, it was a little odd that it was such a large number, and that they all left at exactly the same time (down to the second - Xisuma checked), but it could’ve been anything. A prank, or another time travel incident (see Season 6, week #54 for more details on the previous one) or anything nonsensical like that.
I was foolish enough to believe that until I tried contacting Grian. Usually, he responds within ten minutes (typically faster), but after three and a half hours, with no response, I tried messaging him again. And again. I think on that first day I must’ve sent him just under one hundred separate messages. After that, I came to learn that the other hermits were also having difficulty contacting those missing. Perhaps something was blocking the signal. It's quite simple to do, actually, if you're an admin on the server and have access to the code. I just can't understand why any of them would do that.
After spending the next few days figuring out what on Earth was going on, I decided to ask one of my best sources for help: Grumbot. After all, Grian was one of his co-creators, and he was a great help during the mayoral elections earlier this season (see Season 7, week #12-#18).
It wasn't exactly a lie, per se. Mumbo simply "forgot" to mention that the only reason he was with Grumbot in the first place was because he missed Grian, and went to visit one of their shared creations in hopes of easing that pain. After spending an embarrassingly long amount of time talking to thin air, and pretending Grian was with him, he decided to just… Ask Grumbot.
As expected, I gained absolutely zero knowledge from this endeavour. Grumbot was no help, but he did seem to recognise my pain, and responded to my questions by asking for his “other dad”. Responses also included “Mayor Mumbo find Grian”, and “Did he leave me?” It makes me feel a little bad for locking him away in a small box, and tricking him into thinking that I actually won the election. But at the end of the day, he's safe, he's happy, and it's not like he's actually self aware. As far as I know.
I'm planning on going through some of Grian's old worlds from before he joined Hermitcraft, in the hopes of finding him and the others. If that fails, I don't know what else I could do. But they won't be gone that long, right? Either way, we won't stop looking. We've already all agreed. They're family, and silence like this is unnatural. Some people say they won't come back.
Mumbo deleted the words the minute he typed them. He knew they would come back. Even if he had no evidence to support it, he could just feel it. They weren't gone forever.
He added some other notes about a redstone project he was working on, before sending the document off to Xisuma. God, he hoped they were okay.