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It’s a bright, ordinary Hermitcraft day. That’s about where the problem must’ve begun, Grian thinks: Hermitcraft days are ordinarily bright but not ordinarily ordinary, so statistically something did have to come up. And it has been awhile since it was something really properly catastrophically weird, so really, they all could have seen this coming. Boatem holes and fungus creeping over landscapes into brains and multidimensional rifts and moons crashing into servers and whatnot— it’s always got to be something — well, this time it’s boatem holes again, apparently, or it’s something adjacent enough. Boatem Hole 2: The Sequel?
Boatem Hole 2: Here We Go Again In Season Ten. Boatem Hole 2: This Time It Was Mumbo’s Fault.
Or— he thinks that it was Mumbo’s fault? It’s really looking like it was Mumbo’s fault. Mumbo’s stressing like it was Mumbo’s fault!
“Mumbo,” says Grian at last, when he’s run out of more sensibly specific questions to ask. They’ve been over when it happened (half an hour ago) and what he was doing (mining) and how it makes them feel to stare into (bad, very bad, approximately migraine-coming-on bad) and several other questions in addition to those, but— “Mumbo, how.”
This is, in the end, the main thing he wants to know.
“I don’t know.” Mumbo sounds very distressed. That’s fair. That’s fair, being distressed, this would distress just about anyone, Grian doesn’t even know how someone achieves this — “I’ve told you, I just— don’t know. It just happened. It was there, and then it wasn't. Or— it wasn't there, and then it was, I should say— the absence of a something—”
“You have to have some idea!" Grian cuts him off, because if he doesn't then Mumbo will just get twisted and tangled up in technicalities for an hour straight. Grian's seen him do it. "You have to have done— something—”
“I was mining. Grian, mate, I was literally just mining. That’s all! Perfectly normal and inoffensive mining!”
“Near bedrock. Who even mines near bedrock, anyway—”
“Yes, near bedrock, because that’s the best place for diamonds—”
Grian blinks, neck feathers fluffing up in surprise, wings bristling a little bit. He flaps them a bit to shake them out. “It’s the best—? Mumbo.” He hopes he sounds as incredulous as he feels. “Near bedrock hasn’t been the best place for diamonds for— how many years now? You know that. Your story is suspicious, I am suspecting it— suspecting it of being suspicious.”
“Wait— really?” Mumbo pauses in his fretting. “It hasn’t, are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure—”
“That does explain a lot about my mining struggles lately.”
“Oh, my god.” Grian feels an incredulous giggle building up inside his chest.
“Grian, mate, listen,” Mumbo says, for about the sixtieth time, and he sounds genuinely distressed, so Grian shuts his mouth and listens. He can shut his mouth for five seconds. He’s a capable man that way. “I am being perfectly honest with you, I have— no idea. How this has happened.”
“You have to have some idea,” says Grian.
“I was just mining.”
Grian wants to shake him but he doesn’t, because he loves Mumbo very much, so instead he says, “You were mining, and— can you walk me through step by step, the, the steps involved, if not how then— what’s happened here? You know, you have your pickaxe, and then— there’s stone and there’s— not stone, anymore? What am— I looking at?”
There’s certainly bedrock around the hole. Presumably, just over half an hour ago, there was also bedrock where the hole now is. It’d be a familiar scene, except that looking into the hole isn’t quite looking into the void— or it’s like looking into more void than standard void? Extra void-y void.
So— here's the thing: Grian thinks that Mumbo has maybe just possibly ripped a hole right through the server.
“You can see it as well as I can,” says Mumbo, sounding cross now, and Grian’s got half a mind to sound cross right back, but he wouldn’t do a very good job of it, he thinks, seeing how he can’t stop giggling.
“Seeing it is not explaining things,” says Grian between giggles. “My eyes are— not explaining what’s going on here. They are not sufficient to— to provide context.” This is partially true. Grian’s player eyes certainly aren’t telling him much. His physical, worldly, bound-to-the-server-by-his-body eyes cannot make any sense of what they’re seeing. He’s got access to slightly more information than the average player with their average player eyes, but still. “Mumbo, what am I looking at. What did you do.”
“Grian, I don’t know.”
Grian is perched at not-quite-the-edge of something that looks a whole lot like the Boatem Hole looked in season eight. In the last fifteen minutes he’s been perched many places in his attempt to get a good look at it: initially he’d perched much closer to the actual edge of the hole, but this sent him careening into a sense of life-or-death dread so intense it practically gave him vertigo, and then it did give him vertigo, and Mumbo had to drag him backward to keep him from falling right into it. And then he shouted at Grian for five minutes. (Grian doesn’t think it’s fair for Mumbo to shout at Grian about a hole in the bottom of the world that Mumbo made. He’s had no part in this except for the investigation of it! He’s an innocent investigator!) So then he moved to perch atop Mumbo’s shoulders for safety purposes (Mumbo’s shoulders are, as safety ratings go, very safe from hazards, in Grian’s opinion), but he was officially ousted from shoulder-perching after four minutes and forty-nine seconds for the cited reason of “Grian, stop that, my moustache is not a toy,” which is nearly a new record.
There’s some more back-and-forth about what it is (“Grian, I don’t know”) and what exactly Mumbo did to make it come into existence (“Normal things! Normal mining things, that’s all I was doing, G, I swear! I am a victim in this situation!”) and what to even do about it (“Ignore it…? Don’t look at me like that, it’s a perfectly sensible suggestion”), circles and circles of conversation, circles which get them approximately nowhere. One thing is clear, at least—
“Well, we need to tell X,” says Grian at last, and Mumbo makes a terribly funny sound of distress in response, a bit like a balloon deflating, and Grian almost falls over from how hard he giggles at that.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Mumbo says, once he's all done deflating, sounding now thoroughly deflated. “Nose goes?”
“Nose goes— nose goes? It’s your hole, Mumbo!”
“It is not my hole—”
“You made the hole! It’s your hole!”
“I did not and it is not — Grian, get back here, stop that—”
Grian’s darted a few blocks away and set about writing Boatem Hole 2: Made By Mumbo K. Jumbo, Sole Property Of Mumbo K. Jumbo on a nice little cherry wood sign. In response, Mumbo sets about shouting at him and taking an ax to it.
They do not tell X. They mean to tell X, but of course there's the argument of responsibility to settle and Grian tries placing five more signs and then runs out of wood and then gets distracted by that and then while wood gathering he discovers that someone's been "forgetting" to replant the trees at the top of the mountain again because of course and then that's the rest of Grian's day gone, really, and telling X winds up on the back burner. They're going to tell X, certainly. It's something they should really get to and really plan to get to, on the list of other somethings they should also really get to and really plan to get to, which is a very long list.
The next person to encounter Boatem Hole 2: Something's Not Right Here is GoodTimesWithScar, who almost walks right into it and gives Grian the scare of a lifetime because he’s pretty sure Scar would just walk right in and fall right down— his history with boatem holes is rather damning, as evidence goes— and Grian has a bad feeling about that, a really really bad feeling, so—
“Alright, new policy,” says Grian, clapping his palms together in front of him for officiousness, standing on a little podium he's built by the perimeter of the hole— the perimeter being the vague sense of a circle which he's eyeballing, far enough away from the edge that Mumbo won’t shout at him about it. “Thank you for coming to the first official meeting of the Not-Quite-A-Boatem-Hole Committee. First things first on the agenda—"
Scar interrupts him to ask about the complimentary snacks that he was promised for attending the meeting. Grian didn't promise anyone complimentary snacks and has no intent to give up the half-stacks of cookies and glistering melons in his inventory, but by the end of the conversation Scar has talked his way into them.
"As I was saying," says Grian at last, clapping his hands again (more frustratedly this time) to regain the attention of the little crowd. The committee! He does love making committees. "Our agenda. Meeting agenda— I have an agenda. First on the agenda! Importantly, most importantly, we need— official safety measures, I think. Containment procedures, or protections—”
“We have a policy name for this already,” says Cub, who is here, because of course he is here, and Grian’s very glad Scar didn’t actually fall into the Boatem Hole 2: Less Boatem, More Hole earlier today, because if he had then Grian doesn’t know exactly what would’ve happened to him and if it’d been bad then Grian would maybe be reduced to a vaguely player-shaped smear across Hermitcraft’s code right now. On account of Cub being here. “It’s called making things Scar safe. Existing policy. Perfectly sufficient.”
Grian scowls. “That is a policy that only applies to redstone machines,” he says, which isn’t true. He just doesn’t want Cub to ruin his very officially officious announcement, which he has put a lot of mental effort into. He has a new policy name thought up and everything. He's holding a meeting! He built a podium for it! “We need a new one.”
“That isn’t true,” says Cub, because he is terrible and hates Grian’s fun. “Literally just— make the hole Scar safe. We can put a fence up.”
Grian is LITERALLY HOLDING THIS MEETING TO SUGGEST THEY PUT A FENCE UP. He takes a deep breath and says, “Wow, Cub, that’s an excellent idea, thank you.”
The meeting continues about as well as Grian expected it might continue— that is, he had hopes, but this is Hermitcraft; it isn’t a proper meeting on Hermitcraft without a wide array of disruptions and distractions and mishaps, intentional and otherwise. Among those topics discussed are more rules for the maintenance and handling and safety procedures of Boatem Hole 2: Don’t Fall In This Time, No Really, Don’t. Doc stops by to ask if he can borrow some sugar for a “mysterious and ominous project, which you should all be very frightened of” and winds up commandeering thirty minutes of valuable meeting time to espouse the virtues of “honesty” and “criminals and thieves coming clean, if only for the sake of their own conscience” and Grian glares at Cub over Doc’s shoulder and mouths what did you do and Cub just keeps on smiling like he doesn’t know what Doc is talking about at all. Anyway—
“We should really tell X,” says Cub, once the meeting has concluded, and everyone cringes. Mumbo cringes most especially hard.
“Yeah,” says Grian, “we really, really should.”
The next person to encounter Boatem Hole 2: We Really Didn't Mean to Fuck Up This Badly is GeminiTay. “What in the baked Alaska— what are you doing,” says Grian, tripping over orderly piles of strange-looking lab equipment and several rows of bright yellow caution tape and then an open chest full of fire extinguishers, which— how does she even have fire extinguishers, Grian thought Xisuma had banned fire extinguishers after season nine’s big birthday bash disaster— and barely catching himself, only to smack his head on a gigantic robot arm she’s rigged up to the ceiling. “Gem!”
“Grian!” Gem chirps, standing upright in a spiffy little lab coat, looking downright chipper. She kicks the lid of the chest she’d been rifling through, slamming it shut.
...that's Suspicious. Grian blinks the sleep out of his Watcher eyes (they get sleepy, sometimes, and they have to take little naps) and takes a gander and finds that the chest contains eighteen stacks of pickles. “You’ve walked into my lab!” Gem says, sounding as chipper as she looks.
Her lab? “This isn’t— your lab, this is my Not-Quite-A-Boatem-Hole,” says Grian, huffing. “Or— well, it’s Mumbo’s, technically, but that means I get half custody.”
“I think you’ll find it’s definitely my lab,” says Gem, turning her attention to a collection of crafting tables with tools scattered across the tops of them. She picks up one tool Grian can’t identify and then another and starts poking at something in a petri dish. “You know, you say that a lot— half custody— has Mumbo ever agreed to that?”
“Well— I don’t think he minds,” says Grian, peering over her shoulder. “Not for this, anyway. He’d give me full custody if he could, which he can’t, obviously. He— er— made it.”
The thing that Gem’s poking at looks like it’s made of the same stuff that Boatem Hole 2: This Time It Was Mumbo’s Fault is made of, somehow. He doesn’t know how on earth she got a sample of it into a petri dish. It makes Grian a little bit dizzy to look at, even in such a teeny-tiny quantity, but Gem doesn’t seem bothered. Must be the lab goggles. PPE’s important, and all that.
“We at least suspect that he made it,” Grian goes on, “and no one else is a very likely candidate. He most likely made it, so he has to take some responsibility for that. Half custody.” He wonders if the committee gets partial custody as well. They could split it— four ways? Five? Is Doc a member of the committee? Grian is realizing belatedly that he never clarified that.
“Fascinating,” says Gem, noting something down on a clipboard and then turning to meet Grian’s eyes again. Her green eyes are very bright. “And how exactly did Mumbo make it?”
“He won’t tell me,” says Grian, reaching around to try and poke at the petri dish himself until Gem swats his hand away. “I think he’s embarrassed. It was definitely an accident, and probably a hilarious one. Anyway, what are you doing here?”
“I told you,” says Gem, leaning further over the little specimen of Boatem Hole 2: That's Sure Not Normal Voidstuff and squinting at it. “It’s my lab!”
“It’s not your lab. I live here. Close to here. It’s practically on my doorstep, and— were you around for the bases-and-doorsteps-of-bases litigation war? I don’t remember—”
“No, that was season seven.”
“You get the idea, though, doorsteps and bases— it’s serious business—”
“I get the idea,” says Gem. “I read some of those cases, actually— Scar illustrated them, did you know that? He drew you with big frowny faces and, like, big fat tears and there’s one where you’re just throwing a tantrum. Really makes a girl feel like she’s in the moment.”
“Practically on my doorstep,” Grian presses on, making a mental note to see Xisuma about having these drawings scrubbed from Hermitcraft’s records— just as soon as Boatem Hole 2: Significantly Worse Edition is dealt with, anyway— “means, by extension, it’s practically inside my base, and since you’re practically on my doorstep, that means you’ve practically built a base inside of my base.”
“I think you’re stretching some definitions there,” says Gem, biting her lip and having the audacity to look amused. She’s griefing Grian’s base with great big researchy contraptions and science thingamajigs, and she has the audacity to look amused about it.
“You can’t just say a place is your lab and then it’s your lab,” Grian bursts out, incredulous.
“I didn’t just do that,” says Gem. “I built an actual lab here and everything. See, those are my lab techs.” She points to a little group of people in lab coats conferring amongst themselves, who must’ve been made from armor stands. One of them waves at Grian. He waves back. “They’re really sweet. We’ve been hard at work here. Did you know the hole is leaking?”
“Oh, that sounds concerning,” says Grian.
“Sure does!” Gem holds up a little corked test tube and rattles it around some, and the specimen of hole rattles around inside of it, all… hole-like. “Leaking out, and code from the server’s leaking in— I would be surprised if we didn’t start seeing glitches pop up soon. Little ones, you know, weather anomalies.”
“Oh, weather anomalies,” says Grian. “Well, that doesn’t sound like that big of a deal.”
He is lying through his teeth. This is probably a very big deal, actually.
“You know, you should probably tell X about this,” says Gem.
Grian shuts his eyes. “Of course we should tell X about this,” he says, exasperated. “We’re— going to, soon. Very very soon, it’s next on the list of things to do, or at least the list of things to plan out our intent to get done, which is— basically the same thing, really. Have you seen Mumbo around this morning?”
So Gem sets up permanent shop around the hole, and she starts attending committee meetings by virtue of having set up permanent shop around the hole, and being inducted into the committee she agrees to the rules for the hole that have already been set up— rules about keeping Scar away from it, mostly, no matter how much he wheedles and croons and coaxes and tries to sneak closer for a little sneak peek.
"Aw, c'mon," Scar coaxes and wheedles and croons, "Grian, my very good friend, my dearest and fondest compatriot—"
"Don't let Cub hear you say that," Grian says wryly.
"Cub is my fellow vex," Scar says importantly. "It's a very different thing than compatriots. Anywho, as I was saying, my dearest Grian—"
"I'm not letting you through this door," Grian says, crossing his arms. Behind him is an iron door, and behind that another iron door, and only behind that is the perimeter fence.
"I just want to have a little chat!"
"A chat with the hole?"
"It's a friendly hole! I think!"
Boatem Hole 2: Seriously, If You Fall In We Don’t Know If You’ll Come Back Out is decidedly not Scar safe, and attempts to make it Scar safe have been, at best, moderately successful. It is a hole in the bottom of the server. The server. It’s a hole right through the code of the damn thing— a leaky hole, apparently— and if there’s one thing the hole-frequenting hermits can all agree on, it’s that GoodTimesWithScar should be kept as far away from it as humanly (vex-ily?) possible.
The hole-frequenting hermits are no longer just Grian and Mumbo and Cub and Gem (and, unfortunately, Scar); Grian swears Gem to secrecy but of course this means very little, because Gem’s a brat, and she tells Pearl the first chance she gets and Impulse and Etho and Tango the second and third and fourth chances she gets. Doc somehow manages to not find out, despite having literally stood in front of the hole and given a speech in the middle of Grian’s meeting about rules for the hole, but most of the hermits are mildly more observant than Docm77, and word gets around.
Realistically and practically and wisdomfully speaking, Xisuma should be among those hermits earliest informed. Mumbo has certain objections to this (hopeless embarrassment chief among these certain objections) so Mumbo does not inform him. And Grian really does mean to tell him, he does, because he should, and he’s going to, but okay, here’s the thing— MCC weekend is coming up on them now. And he can’t tell Xisuma right before an MCC weekend because there’s every possibility that the resultant consecutive collection of headaches (meetings, he means— headache-causing meetings— not actual physical headaches, those he’s been getting regardless) would prevent him from competing. That is no good at all, absolutely non-viable— and it’d be ridiculous, anyway, to have to skip an MCC over Boatem Hole 2: Now With An Additional 6 Loops Of Fences Around It, Because GoodTimesWithScar. Dear old admin Xisumavoid would be terribly stressed and no Grian wouldn’t blame him, but the thing is, the hole is stable. Mostly stable, by Grian’s best estimates and Gem’s best measurements— it’s maybe ninety percent stable or thereabouts— it’s very close to being completely and totally stable. What, will a few more days bring the server down, or something?
So Grian doesn’t tell Xisuma, and he goes to MCC and kills Dream again four times in PVP games and takes a delightfully clean first place in BuildMart— as you darn well should, is what Scar says about it, grinning and ruffling his hair, that’s our Grian, and Grian squawks at him about the hair-ruffling but feels bright and warm and soft inside— and takes second place in the whole thing, which is a fine finish, if he does say so himself.
And when the lot of them all get back from MCC, he does mean to tell Xisuma then, but okay, here’s the thing: if he told Xisuma right after getting back it’d just look to Xisuma like he kept it secret so he could go to MCC. Which is exactly what Grian did, but still. It’s not a very good look.
He spends a day or so mulling over how long is probably long enough that it won’t seem so suspicious, along with potential reasons to give Xisuma why they’ve spent so long not telling him about Boatem Hole 2: Less Meetings, More Headaches, Like As In Actual Headaches, Like It’s Causing Migraines With Aura And Everything.
Cleo is the next person to find out, on account of said migraines.
“Why are you asking me,” she wants to know, voice flat.
“You’re best friends with Joe Hills,” says Grian, hoping he sounds more matter-of-fact than anxious. “That has to mean familiarity with headache remedies, right?”
“That is an excellent point. I hope you realize how ridiculous it is that you’re the one making it,” says Cleo. “Alright, give me five minutes, I’ll be right back.”
“Wait,” Grian blurts. “I also— er— well. The headaches are— they’re a bit nontraditional in origin. I thought maybe you might— know more about that aspect of it. Also. You know, the whole—” He waves a hand at all of her, and she stares back at him, unimpressed. "I just thought I could maybe ask you some... questions?"
Cleo leans against the doorframe and pinches the bridge of their nose and takes a deep breath. They are quiet for a long moment, and then they say, sounding exasperated, “Grian, what have you done this time.”
So ZombieCleo— and then of course Joe Hills, because if Cleo knows then Joe is inevitably going to know— finds out about Boatem Hole 2: Somehow Scar Almost Fell In Again, Despite The Fences. The Not-Quite-A-Boatem-Hole Committee now consists of approximately half the hermits on Hermitcraft. They agree on very little— mostly just two things: firstly, that Scar should be kept away from it at all costs, and secondly that Mumbo (who continues to insist he had no active part in its creation) is lying.
(It's a fair thing to want to lie about, though— whatever it was he did— and he does seem just horribly embarrassed about the whole thing, so no one really blames him. Mumbo gets lots of kindhearted shoulder pats about it.)
Scar continues to make arguments for talking to the hole. Negotiating with the hole, specifically. Many many hermits try to explain to him that he's not going to negotiate with a hole in the bottom of the server— if any negotiating happens it's probably going to be hole just negotiating Scar right into it, Grian thinks darkly, dwelling on the way it tugs at his brain and gives him vertigo if he ever gets too close. Makes him shiver just to think of. Gem lets him borrow her lab goggles, which helps. PPE continues to be important, and all that.
When things really finally start getting out of hand, it’s not a bright Hermitcraft day at all. In fact it’s a rainy one: it’s a raining, thundering, storming, absolutely downpouring, full-cloud-cover-far-as-the-eye-can-see, cats-and-dogs-out-of-the-sky Hermitcraft day.
“I thought we’d turned off rain,” says Mumbo. “Completely— I thought we’d completely turned it off?”
“We had,” says Grian, feeling mostly confusion and also a little tiny inkling of dread.
“I thought— rain was disabled, on the server,” says Mumbo, “and storms, and thundering, and— storms full of thundering, and all of that, I thought Xisuma had that turned off.”
“He does,” says Grian a little bit weakly, the dread growing stronger.
“Seems like a bit of an odd decision, turning the rain back on,” says Mumbo. “We didn’t even hold a meeting about it. Or I certainly didn’t vote in any meeting about it— I might’ve missed a meeting, I suppose. I’ve done that before— missed meetings. Slept right through alarms. Then again I’m not sure why I’m telling you that, you’re the one who never lets me live my tiny little mistakes down, Grian, you really are a terrible friend—”
“If you’ve missed a meeting about it then so have I,” says Grian. “Mumbo, I don’t think it was Xisuma that did this.”
This is all but confirmed when Xisuma sends out a summons to every single hermit about “rather strange occurrences that he’s sure they’ve all noticed by now and that he just can’t get to the bottom of, and could they please all mandatorily meet outside his base in five minutes if at all possible to discuss some things, please, thank you, and also please again.” Grian puts his head in his hands. He wants to say it’s the hole, it’s definitely the hole, it HAS TO BE THE HOLE, because the shape of the rain and the thunder isn't right and his Watcher eyes can see it even if his player eyes can't. There's a gravity to it. A gravity in— in the wrong direction, sort of.
But he really isn’t inclined to give away the fact that he has a bit of extra insight into this situation. More than any player really should. (Mumbo knows a lot about Grian, but— there are some things nobody knows about Grian at all, except for the people who did those things to him.) So instead he says, still a little bit weakly, “Do you remember what Gem said about— weather anomalies?” and Mumbo blinks at him blankly and he goes on, “In her lab, you know, about the hole,” and all of the color drains from Mumbo’s face.
He says, “Grian, mate.”
Grian says, “Mumbo.”
Mumbo says, “Grian, are we breaking the entire Hermitcraft server?”
“Well, I don’t think we are,” Grian says kind of pathetically, because if the server’s breaking down, it's not the two of them technically responsible, or at least not directly— if the server's breaking down, it’s Boatem Hole 2: Less Boatem, More Hole that’s doing it.
They have to tell X. There's no way around it this time.
Xisuma is not happy to discover that the hermits have made— and managed to keep secret for, at this point, several weeks— Boatem Hole 2: Keep Scar Away At All Costs Please Please Please For The Love Of God Please. The committee comes up, of course. Xisuma wants to know how many hermits are members of the Not-Quite-A-Boatem-Hole Committee. No one is precisely pleased to tell him.
He makes several very distressed sounds and paces back and forth a bit and says “oh my days” and “that doesn’t sound good” in turns, several times, while Grian and Mumbo explain the rest of it. He's pulled the two of them aside privately to discuss it in more detail, because they weren't getting anywhere with everyone else present. Grian mostly does the explaining, and Mumbo sort of nods along and makes anxious sounds of affirmation the whole time.
“And you didn't think to mention it? At all? All this—” Xisuma pauses, takes a breath. “How long did you say it was, again?”
“Oh, um, er, four— four or five— weeks? Maybe?” Mumbo guesses timidly. He’s very bad at keeping track of hole-related information, all things considered, Grian thinks. Considering it's his hole, that he made.
“Six,” Grian says, and Xisuma goes very still, “and a half,” and Xisuma lifts one hand to—
To rub the bridge of his nose? Except that his helmet’s in the way, so he doesn’t seem to quite succeed at whatever he’s going for, and he sort of just awkwardly rubs a spot on his helmet instead. Grian bites his tongue very hard to keep from giggling.
“Six weeks,” Xisuma echoes, pained. “Six weeks— you didn’t think to mention this for six weeks?”
Grian struggles to swallow, heart beating a little bit faster now. “Well—”
“I wouldn’t say we didn't think to,” says Mumbo.
Grian’s gaze darts from Xisuma to Mumbo and back again and back again, panicked. He cuts in frantically, “It's just that— we thought— well, we thought you wouldn’t want to have to deal with it, maybe, if it wasn’t a very big deal, we thought—”
“Well, that’s not true,” Mumbo objects. “I distinctly remember you saying this was a very big deal and that we’d need to deal with it immediately. I distinctly remember you saying that. In fact— you said this was an even bigger deal than the time with the tropical fish, do you remember that? That was a big deal—”
Grian startles something violent, and then he says, somewhere between desperate and incredulous because Xisuma does NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE TIME WITH THE TROPICAL FISH AND HE'D PREFER TO KEEP IT THAT WAY, “Mumbo, you are not very good at talking us out of trouble— you understand that’s the goal, don’t you? Talking us out of trouble? Trouble, you know, with our scary admin we’re confessing to about creating eldritch horrors on his server?”
“You think Xisuma is— is scary?” Mumbo abruptly pauses every one of his twitches and squirms and anxious fidgets to stare at Grian. To just stare at him, flabbergasted. Well, Grian thinks that's a bit rude, thank you very much.
“That’s not the point,” Grian says, throwing his hands up. “We’re— we’re trying to talk ourselves out of trouble here. Out of trouble, not into more of it!”
“Well, then I don't know why you've brought me along,” Mumbo says crossly. “That just seems unfair. Setting me right up to fail, that is. What, do you think I’ve got some silver tongue I’ve never told you about? Some— some hidden talent, for the love of— that’s ridiculous— why didn't you just bring Scar, or Ren, maybe, if it’s convincing you wanted—”
“Because you're the one who made the hole, Mumbo!”
“I am not!” Mumbo protests shrilly. “Or— or if I am it was entirely accidental and, I’d like to emphasize, not my fault in the slightest, as we have been over many, many, many times, Grian!”
Xisuma, for his part, has gone through several stages of grief in the last five minutes, along with options for potential responses— he has attempted several of them and then been cut off, as Grian and Mumbo do actually seem much more interested in arguing with each other than in finding out just what their admin has to say about their terrible hole in the server. He has at last landed on the conviction that another cup of tea would improve this day dramatically, and so has set about making one, getting out first the kettle and then a tin of his favorite breakfast blend.
Well, the next logical step is taking Xisuma to see the hole, and this is about where things look like they’re going to get suddenly catastrophically worse. Because Scar is at the hole. Scar is right near the hole, and—
He’s taken down the fences. Grian stands, momentarily frozen with horror, at the top of the hill they've just crested, staring at Scar— he’s taken down the fences, and the walls, and the various traps set up around the hole, and every single defense mechanism. He has systematically gone through and taken them all down, or so it would appear; as Grian Watches with all of his eyes blinking wide open, Scar is depositing stacks of fences into a chest a few blocks away, and then he is turning and striding back toward Boatem Hole 2: Oh My Fucking God, It’s A Hole In The Bottom Of The Fucking Server. There's that salesman’s smile on his face.
“What— Scar,” Grian shrieks, and something terrible has crashed over him and started to fill him up, a cold fear unlike any he’s felt in a very long time, and he feels like he’s watching in slow motion as Scar strolls right up to the newly de-fenced hole— the hole right through the bottom of the server — the hole that seems to want to suck him right into it whenever he gets too close. “Scar!”
Scar either does not hear him or outright ignores him. What happens next is— it’s hard to explain. Grian’s not entirely sure that he’ll be able to put it into words, later, when he’s asked to describe it: Scar tips his hat toward the hole, says something, bows a little bit, flourishes—
The hole is closing itself up. Scar is leaning forward on his dapper little cane, in his dapper little hat and suit, watching and smiling, and the hole is— closing itself right up, folding and closing and leaving pristine blocks behind.
“That— can’t have just happened,” says Grian, incredulous.
“I think it just has,” says Mumbo, sounding like he might just faint.
“That can’t have just actually worked."
Scar extends a hand and something— something certainly shakes his hand. Grian couldn’t say what. Even from this far away Grian can clearly make him out: “Well, it’s a pleasure foremanly making your acquaintance, I have to thank you oh so kindly—”
“Does he mean formally,” Grian mumbles, amazed. “Does Scar actually not know the word formally? Has he gotten this far in life managing to never figure that out?”
“Well, perhaps he means he’s making its acquaintance as a foreman,” says Mumbo, which might be a contender for the most ridiculous thing that Grian’s heard all day, if the rest of the day hadn’t already happened. “Foreman of boatem holes— foreman of boatem hole operations and negotiations on the Hermitcraft server?”
“Negotiations,” Grian echoes. “He’s just— he's actually negotiated with the hole that you ripped in the bottom of the server.”
“There it goes,” says Mumbo, still very faint, and there it goes indeed: as they’re watching, the thing that’s shaken Scar’s hand tucks itself neatly away, slipping into the space between one pixel and the next and out of range of most players’ senses, and by the time Grian’s blinked the rest of his Watcher eyes awake and zeroed in it’s gone completely— as though it had never been here at all.
Scar stands with his hands on his hips, smiling up at the space that was just occupied by something far beyond a player’s capacity for comprehension. As Grian watches, a little stunned (and thinking maybe he shouldn’t be stunned— thinking, already, of course, of course it would be Scar) Scar turns and smiles at the both of them, and he lifts one hand in a wave.
Grian feels a wave of something uncontrollable rise up inside of him— something like glee, an exhilarated giggle, because Scar’s just— Scar’s just done—
He screams “SCAR” again, and then he’s taking off, spreading his wings and tumbling into a glide and spinning through the air toward Scar. He’s giggling by the time he crashes right into him, tackles him and spins him around, and Scar catches him easily and dances right into the spin.
“Well, hello there, Grian,” he says, sounding pleased.
“Scar, what’ve you done,” Grian shrieks, delighted, “you madman, how did you— the hole— did you just talk it into leaving?”
“Well, I made a new friend, I think,” says Scar, “I told you it was friendly, Grian, I sure did— and we had a nice chat, I offered some delightful wares, if you know what I mean—” He's waggling his eyebrows up and down.
Grian’s head doesn’t hurt, and the ground’s unmarred and Grian’s Watcher eyes aren’t seeing anything out of order at all, and above them the sky is clearing up, strange glitchy wrong-gravity clouds dissipating. Mumbo’s fumbled for his elytra and come to a clumsy landing beside the both of them, sounding frazzled and demanding to know what all that was about— Grian’s still giggling, and Scar’s saying, “Well,” with a dramatic flourish of his hat, and he’s launching into a story that’ll clear up at once everything and nothing at all.
It’s a bright Hermitcraft day. Grian wonders what catastrophically weird things might happen next.
(Up at the top of the hill, Xisuma is standing a bit bewildered with his cup of tea still in hand. After a few minutes, he shakes his head in a vague expression of disapproval and turns and walks back to his base. Being the admin of a place like Hermitcraft, you do kind of have to just shake your head and walk away sometimes.)