Work Text:
Taking something apart didn't just let you figure out how something worked. You could also tell a lot about someone from the insides of what they built.
The Dark Lord's circuitboards were full of cut traces and solder blobs, hallmarks of someone who was busier trying to get something to work than making it repairable or replicable. Trying to figure out the actual mechanisms inside anything Orange drew resulted in them disappearing in a puff of smoke, because they were made entirely of imagination. Purple was unreasonably good at carefully folding and hiding messes.
Unfortunately, the seams on the command block staff were welded shut. There was no means of nondestructive entry. If Yellow ever wanted to know anything about how it worked, she'd have to ask the source.
"I want to see how the staff works," Yellow said. "But I can't get into it. Can you tell me how?"
"Not without causing permanent damage with a saw, but I can show you some of my earlier failed attempts."
King did not invite Yellow to his workshop, because his workshop was his living room. Instead, he met her elsewhere, and brought a backpack with some staff handles sticking out of the top.
Yellow greeted him at the door. "Hi! Those are the old staves you were talking about, right?"
King laughed softly. "I haven't even put down my bag and you already want to get to business?"
"Oh! Right. My manners. Do you want tea?"
"Sounds good."
"What kind? I've got black, green, white..."
"I'll take green."
Yellow ducked away to put the leaves in, started a timer, and bounced back over. "So where do we start?"
"This is the first one I ever tried to make, after he... after it happened." King cut and unwound the tape around the handle, revealing several long wires that ran the full length of it. Inside was a hollow broomstick handle that had been sawed into sections; King carefully slid two of the sections apart.
It was absolute chaos on the inside. Wires were of seemingly random lengths and crammed in everywhere, and junctions were twisted together and wrapped in electrical tape. Circuitboards and chips, oversized due to how old they were, dangled randomly throughout. It was perfectly possible that the problem wasn't even anything in the design, but that important wires brushed up against each other and caused short circuits, or weren't attached at all.
"This is a mess," Yellow said.
"I was a mess." King winced. "Time... didn't exist, for a while there. I was running on spite and half-remembered college courses. A bunch of these aren't even correct, they were 'close enough' parts I scavenged from an old junk stash that I thought I could force to do something they weren't designed for."
"I can see why that didn't work," Yellow said, and noticed the tea timer was done. "Tea's ready. You want some?"
"In a bit. I want to show you another one." King pulled out a second staff. "This is from a few months and several iterations later. It's the first one that successfully demonstrated active channeling, not just amplification."
King pulled a white wool block out of his inventory and snapped it into place. He pointed the staff at the ground nearby; after a moment of concentration on his part, a single block of red wool materialized.
"Ooooh! Can I try?"
King handed the staff over. Yellow swung it experimentally. The first time, nothing happened. The second time, a couple spots of carpet and wool showed up, in random colors.
"This feels... different," Yellow said. "Less responsive? Laggier?"
"You could describe it that way. Did you want to see inside?"
"Yes please!"
King used a solder sucker to undo the seams, slid out several coated metal strips the length of the staff, and began pulling out tufts of expanding spray foam. Slowly, this revealed a number of wires and circuitboards. One was a single-board computer, the kind you could use to run a lot of complex code. Another was a long thin strip of perfboard: a board with a grid of little holes that could be used to solder custom circuits. Yellow also recognized cutting-edge chips and assemblies from the tech websites she followed. Up near the block socket there was a second tiny rectangle of perfboard, which presumably led to the contact points on each end of the fork. The soldering was neat, and all the boards had even been dipped in clear epoxy for protection.
King said, "As soon as I got this one working, I went hunting for Curseforge so I could get myself a command block. Spent the nights in between finishing everything beautifully. For the first time in months I was feeling actual hope." He kicked the table leg. "Stupid me."
"You're not stupid," Yellow said. "It did look like it was working with the other blocks, didn't it?"
"I took the command block home, stuck it in, and found out that it didn't work." King pressed his knuckles into his eyes. "Not good enough."
Yellow leaned in, hovering a hand next to King. "Do you... need a hug?"
"Not yet. I have one more to show you," King said, reaching over to grab another staff from the collection. "This is from near the end. I thought breadboarding in place would help with troubleshooting, but instead it made it nearly impossible to test without parts coming loose. But I put up with it way longer than I should've."
This one was less finished than the previous one. The housing could be snapped apart with a thin blade. But the center had a conveniently located access door, so nothing needed to be pulled apart for this one.
The physical construction of this one was actually more elegant than the second. That one relied on unusual fasteners on the long thin metal strips to hold everything together, and the expanding spray foam was the only reason why things didn't slide up and down. This one had a thick plastic strip with molded holes in it that floated in the center; wire bundles and components were attached to the holes with zip ties, and the strip was held taut and centered with larger zip ties at each end and regular standoffs made of nylon bolts and nuts. Expanding foam would still be useful to improve impact and heat resistance and in case anything happened to the plastic strip, but the design was no longer completely reliant on it.
Only half the metal strips were installed; the rest rattled freely in the casing. There was a location where a handful of wires stopped at stripped ends, with a photo of a breadboard (temporary circuitboard) representing what would have been there; the breadboard was wider than the staff itself, which meant the access panel was intended to allow the staff to be tested while the board was sticking out of the side. King then slid one of the tubes down to show the base of the fork end. That was another place where a smaller breadboard would have gone, represented by a second photo. Wires went up into contacts in each half of the fork.
King hunched forwards miserably. "I was ready to give up at this point."
Yellow asked, "Why didn't you stop?"
King didn't say anything for a long time. Yellow waited patiently.
When he finally spoke again, King's voice was very small. "It was the only thing I had left. If I stopped, I would never be able to get up again."
Yellow wasn't sure what to say about this. But there was tea, and King hadn't had any yet, so she poured him a cup and set it in front of him.
King didn't even look at it. Instead, he said "Sorry."
"For what?" Yellow asked.
"Everything."
Yellow pointed at the chaotic innards of the first staff. "This is the work of someone who doesn't think they have a future. You couldn't even think far enough ahead to bother with heat shrink tubes or a soldering iron, let alone get appropriate components. You were incapable of thinking about the consequences of your actions."
Yellow indicated the third. "And then you couldn't stop, because if you stopped then you would have had to admit to yourself that all this effort -" she pointed to the second - "was a waste of time."
King shoved the broken pieces of the first staff into his backpack so he wouldn't have to spend another moment staring at the obvious evidence of a mental breakdown. "I could have just been sad and cried for a year, grieving like a normal person. Why couldn't I just...?"
"Anger kept you moving. Anger meant you didn't feel helpless. Anger allowed you to feel like you weren't to blame."
King didn't know how to cry. He just slumped forwards.
"Um... do you need a hug?" Yellow asked, reaching out.
"Need, no. Want, yes." King reached over too.
King began holding Yellow gently, carefully. Then Yellow pulled him in with a fierce strength, and only then did King allow himself to hold on as tightly as he truly wanted.
Yellow said, "I can see why you did all those bad things now. You were hurting very badly, and I know what it's like to be buried so deep in a project that you don't see the consequences anymore."
"You understand?"
Yellow nodded. "And I forgive you."
King's grip tightened. "Thank you," he said, quietly.
Yellow patted him on the back and, after another good minute or two of hug, stepped back. She poured a second teacup and pushed it towards King. She took the one that had been sitting out for herself. "Drink. Before it gets cold."
King did so, and Yellow watched him slowly pull himself back together, his shoulders straightening and the distant look fading from his eyes.
"Have you ever considered writing this project up?" Yellow asked. "Like, it could make a great series of blog posts or an interesting magazine article."
"Why? It was dumb and pointless."
"Hey," Yellow said, gently, putting a hand on his. "I know that what motivated you to do all this was hatred and grief. But you also did a lot of real work, and solved genuine problems. If you salvage that work, then that time won't all have gone to waste."
"...I don't want to be someone people can ask about Minecraft. Not even under a pseudonym."
"Then how about posting anonymously?"
"What?"
Yellow smiled. "People already know me as a programmer for Minecraft mods, and I have a blog. I can tell people a friend of mine made this project and just didn't want their name on it. If people want to ask questions, they'll have to ask me. And if you're anonymous, people won't have to know why you did it - they'll just assume it was pure curiosity."
"...May as well, sure."
"Yes!" Yellow flapped her arms in glee. "Tell me everything! To start, the metal strips running the full length are for intention sensing, right?"
"Mm-hm. It's all handled by this board here. I used the one from Blueberry because it comes with a microcontroller that takes care of making it work when gripped in any direction..."
Yellow paid attention to every word. King looked at her fondly. At least something good would come out of this.