Chapter Text
“I woke up thinking you were still here,
My hands shaking with regret.”
- Bleachers, Like a River Runs
It’s an otherwise regular, cool autumn night when half of Hermitcraft wakes up screaming.
Well— Mumbo wouldn’t exactly say half. More like a quarter. Four sevens are twenty-eight… yes, a quarter. Maybe a little more, but honestly, who’s quizzing him, he should really just get back to the—
Right. The screaming. The…
The nightmares.
Mumbo isn’t one of the seven hermits who wake in the middle of the night to rabbiting heartbeats and heaving chests. He doesn’t scream the name of a player he doesn’t know, or hide beneath his sheets until he can breathe again, or cling to a friend for no apparent reason, like he later hears the others did.
No, he’s already up.
Mumbo’s usually up. Grian jokes that he’s like a vampire sometimes, even though he’s not. Maybe if he were, he’d at least manage to sleep during the day. But he’s just human. His brain runs too fast to shut down until some ungodly hour of the night, and he’s long stopped trying to fight it. So, he’s up, sitting on Treesa’s head, watching the moon and the stars overhead and humming the tune of some pop song he doesn’t know the name of.
That’s when he hears them: twin screams — one from the Swaggon, one from Impulse’s starter base.
And they sound…
Well, you couldn’t pay Mumbo enough to be in a situation where he’d scream like that.
He sees Impulse’s light turn on. Scar’s base lights up a moment later, then Pearl’s when she’s inevitably woken by the sound. Grian’s house, however, stays markedly dark.
Mumbo reacts quickly. Fumbling in the relative darkness of his own area, he finds the footholds he used to climb up to his lookout and quickly descends to his minivan, then the ground. When his shoe hits the grass, he hears the sounds of rockets — multiple of them, fired in a rush — and looks up to see a figure streaking across the sky, heading straight for Grian’s starter base.
Scar.
In a flurry of activity, Scar careens around the house towards one of Grian’s windows, landing where Mumbo can’t see him. Mumbo hears him call Grian’s name — once, twice, three times — before the vex gives up and rounds the house to the front door, urgently letting himself in.
Mumbo simply stands and stares, his heart beating fast.
There’s this thing Grian says he does when a lot of very confusing things happen at once and he can’t for the life of him make sense of them. He’ll step forward, then back again. Look around to check if anyone else is going to handle it. Go to speak, then think better of it. And his hands will come up, hovering in the air as if they should be doing something, but they don’t know what.
Mumbo does all of that now, staring at the last place he saw Scar.
He’s never really been a man of action. He’s more of a worrier. Mumbo spends a lot of time worrying, so he’s gotten quite good at it. What if-s and should have done-s and maybes that just seem too important to disregard. He’s even well-versed in the art of worrying about worrying and, of course, the inevitable worry that he’s worrying too much about worrying and not enough about the original worry. Then, when his worries actually are justified, he worries he might make things worse by interfering, and honestly, it must make him kind of useless, which of course triggers even more worry, and—
It’s safe to say that Mumbo doesn’t rush to Scar’s side and ask him what’s wrong. In fact, any amateur gambler could bet good money on the possibility that Mumbo doesn’t even move from his spot on the grass throughout the entire ordeal, mostly because that’s exactly what he does, and also because enough peer pressure could convince Mumbo to do pretty much anything, especially to stand still and worry.
So, his eyes stay fixed on Grian’s house, occasionally spotting Scar’s silhouette behind the curtains. His thoughts race with a million potential problems, hundreds of reasons that Scar might need his help, and they root him to the ground.
He should go. He should be moving. Why hasn’t Scar found Grian yet? Why isn’t Grian awake? Is Scar even—
Scar’s figure stops for a moment in the large hallway window facing Mumbo’s base, turning to look out at the rest of Boatem. When he meets Mumbo’s eyes, Mumbo’s blood runs cold.
He looks awful.
Eyes wide. Face gaunt. Tail, thin like a whip and slightly translucent, flicking anxiously behind him. He’s barely dressed unless you’d count his elytra and a pair of inside-out sleep shorts. His hair, usually well-kept, sticks out in places Mumbo didn’t even know his haircut allowed for, and he doesn’t have his cane with him.
What’s he trying to—
Scar is moving before Mumbo can even process he’s stopped, and then he’s gone, striding towards the other end of Grian’s house. The sight leaves Mumbo’s hands clammy, his feet itching to move, but his legs are still frozen in indecision.
Does he go to Scar first, or Impulse? What does he say? Does he watch for longer? Impulse’s base is silent; does that mean he’s okay? Does it mean he’s not? What could have even happened to wake them both at the same time, and so terrified, gosh, what if it’s still out—
“Mumbo!” comes a voice to his right, and Mumbo yelps and nearly trips over himself in fright.
Pearl is standing in front of her ship on the other side of the Boatem Pole, tugging on a dark hoodie as she steps out into the cold. She gives him a puzzled look, but her expression evens out into growing concern as a clatter sounds from Grian’s base, loud in the piercing silence of the night.
“Spoon,” Mumbo mutters to himself, then straightens his tie and turns to face Pearl properly.
Not an evil army of invisible zombies hunting your friends down, he tells himself. Just your neighbour.
That would be an embarrassing way to go.
“Hey. Did they wake you up, too?” Pearl calls, and Mumbo shakes his head.
“Oh, no, I was already up,” he says quickly. “I’m usually up.”
Most of the server knows, but he supposes Pearl’s new.
The avian studies him for a moment, then lifts a lantern off the wall and starts down the path connecting their bases, glancing over at Impulse’s house — at his absence, and at the lights still on upstairs.
“Did you see what happened?” she asks, and it would be a casual question if not for the urgency in her voice. Her grey wings slip easily through the slits in the back of her hoodie, and they flick and stretch a few times on their own, clearly anxious to get moving.
Right, Mumbo thinks. The screams in the night. Their friends.
Focus.
What was the question?
“Mumbo?” Pearl prompts.
“Um.” Mumbo searches for something to offer. His brain is all muddled up, out of sorts since Scar’s piercing look, maybe earlier, and he draws a blank. “I’ve no idea. Sorry.”
Pearl nods as if to say, “Me too.” Another clatter sounds from Grian’s house, and her focus whips towards the source, her strides lengthening as she nears Mumbo.
Clearly, he isn’t the only one on edge.
“We should help,” Pearl says when she eventually reaches him, like she’s already itching to. “You heard it, right? The… it sounded bad.”
Mumbo nods absently, his gaze following hers to Grian’s house. The lights on the lower floor have all flickered on, as well as one on the top floor, above the staircase. Scar must be searching the entire place.
Mumbo doesn’t understand. If Grian is so obviously not home, then what on earth has possessed Scar to search for him so thoroughly?
“Mumbo?”
Oh. Yes. Pearl. Dammit.
“Well—” Mumbo stammers, about to explain that he was very busy working himself into a tizzy when she startled him and that that’s really all he’s good for, but he cuts himself off when he realises what he’s saying. “Er. We should split up.”
It’s a disjointed, sudden suggestion, and Pearl takes a moment to recover from the whiplash before she shakes her head.
“We’d be better off checking on Impulse together,” she reasons. “Scar already has my brother.” She sees the protest in Mumbo’s expression and adds, “…Unless you’d rather be with them?”
Mumbo hesitates.
“I just don’t think…” he starts, uncertain. “That is, I’m not convinced Grian is actually… home.” He glances back at Grian’s house. “He didn’t turn the lights on. He’s a heavy sleeper, but that should have woken him up.”
Pearl fiddles with the drawstring of her hoodie and, after some thought, hums her agreement.
“Alright, then,” she says. “We’ll split up.”
A second passes where Mumbo tries to think of something more to say and comes up empty. So, he nods instead, and with a beat of her large grey wings, Pearl flies off towards Impulse’s house.
Mumbo approaches Grian’s base at a speed a little over the average walking pace for a man of his height. He’s anxious to get to Scar, but he’s also cautious, and some part of him worries if something might be truly, actually wrong — if the figure he saw in the window was really Scar, or something else.
When he reaches Grian’s base, he finds the door hanging open in the wind. The sound of footsteps pounding the floorboards overhead makes his heart beat a little faster.
“Scar?” he calls slowly. “Grian?”
The footsteps go quiet, then start back up again. No one replies, and there’s only one set of them.
Grian must be out, then. At least Mumbo made the right call.
“Scar?” he calls again, this time a little louder, a little more urgent, as he heads through the front room and begins to pick up his pace.
A trail of upturned furniture and open chests leads him through the lower floor and towards the stairwell. As he climbs it to the upper floor, he hears Scar messing about — doors opening and chests slamming shut.
It only takes a quick look at the continuing trail of destruction through the upper floor’s hallway to find out where he’s gone.
Scar’s made it to Grian’s bedroom.
The door swings free on its hinges just like the front door, swaying only slightly in lieu of a breeze to really get it going. Mumbo creeps down the hall, then stops at the entrance to take a careful look inside.
Grian’s bedroom looks like a tornado has ripped through it. The blankets are on the floor, the pillows scattered across the room along with a few of the shirts and trinkets that usually adorn his bed, and the closet door is open, clothes and boxes spilling out onto the floor.
Amongst it all is Scar, standing at the open window, his outline framed by the curtains blowing in the wind.
It would be a peaceful sight if not for the context. If not for the stuttering sound of his breaths, too fast to be controlled, and his white-knuckled grip on the windowsill as he looks out at the sea and the yet-untamed wilderness surrounding Boatem.
Mumbo steps inside on instinct. The moment he makes a noise, Scar whips his head around to locate the source.
He looks just as bad as he did in the hallway window, but more humanised. Mumbo can see the fear in his eyes from this close. The resignation, like he’s panicking about a lost cause.
What happened?
“Scar…” Mumbo says, because most of his brain’s processing power is being diverted to taking in the sight in front of him, not bothering to come up with the most compelling words.
Scar seems to relax a little at his voice, but in the grand scheme of things — in the tension of his shoulders and the tremor in his hands — a little isn’t a lot.
“Mumbo,” he breathes, staring at him.
“Scar, what’s—”
“I can’t find Grian.”
Mumbo blinks.
“O-kay,” he says slowly, looking around the room.
Scar pushes away from the window, a hand coming up to tug at his wild hair.
“I need to find him.”
The certainty in his voice makes Mumbo’s hands feel clammy again, and Mumbo takes a hesitant step further into the room. Something crunches beneath his shoe, and he realises a lamp has fallen over, sending shattered glass spilling out onto the floorboards.
When he looks up, Scar has begun to pace.
“Why are you here?” Mumbo asks apprehensively, searching for answers to a million different questions. “Scar?”
It’s pointless; Scar doesn’t reply.
“He could be hurt,” he says instead, and Mumbo realises Scar isn’t really here — he’s in his head, or somewhere else, in some theoretical world where everything is wrong and nothing Mumbo says is relevant. The vex’s breaths, quick and rabbit-like, come faster and faster as he starts to spiral. He’s obviously panicking, which Mumbo can empathise with. “And I don’t— I’ll be—”
Mumbo takes a few more steps forward, careful of the glass.
Right. Okay. Damage control.
He changes course.
“Let’s focus on you right now,” he says, holding his hands out in a placating gesture, like he’s approaching a timid animal. “Grian can wait.”
Scar, half-listening, balls his hands into fists and rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms, trying to ward off the panic. His breaths are coming faster, forced out of him like a cough ridding his body of a virus.
Mumbo doesn’t know what he’s doing. He hasn’t seen Scar panic a lot before, especially not like this. He’s going to make it worse.
He does it anyway.
“You’ve had a fright, yeah?” he continues, trying to keep his voice level. “Impulse did, too, I think.”
“I…” Scar tries, but he doesn’t seem to know what to say. He continues to pace, tugging at the collar of his sleepshirt — he must have found one in Grian’s nest and thrown it on against the bitter cold — his throat working around the air that his lungs so stubbornly oppose.
“Scar, you need to breathe,” Mumbo points out. They can’t do anything if he doesn’t.
Scar sways on his feet, shaking his head. “I just— I can’t— He’s not—”
“Don’t worry about Grian,” Mumbo insists, closing the distance between them slowly. “Just— Deep breaths.”
“I had a dream—”
“Deep breaths, Scar.”
Mumbo finally reaches him and stands in Scar’s path, gripping the man’s upper arms to ground him and stop his pacing.
“Scar.”
Scar looks up at him, then back at the window to his left. He rubs his face again, the motion jerky, and looks down at his shaking hands.
“I just— Can’t stop— Please—”
Mumbo takes Scar’s hands in his own and holds them tightly, his heart skipping a beat at the strength of the tremor in them.
“Hey,” he says, pretending Scar isn’t scaring the crap out of him right now. This isn’t something that comes over Scar often. He looks like he thinks he’s dying, and Mumbo’s the only one who can tell him that he isn’t. “It happens. Just breathe.”
Scar finally gets the memo. He squeezes his eyes shut, dropping his head a little so he’s looking at the ground when he opens them again. He sucks in a breath in tandem with Mumbo, then lets it out unevenly. When he tries again, his breaths stutter back into panic, but Mumbo squeezes his hands and models for him again until they start to even out.
“There we go,” Mumbo hums, relief filtering through the overwhelm. He’s never been on the other end of this ritual before. He hopes he’s doing it alright.
Scar swallows hard. His eyes flick to the window again, then back to Mumbo, his muscles still coiled like a cornered animal.
“He’s just out,” Mumbo promises, knowing Scar’s thinking about Grian again. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon, but you’ve got me for now, yeah? We’ll be alright, Scar.”
And… Oh. Oh, that is the wrong thing to say, because instead of relaxing, Scar’s eyes widen like twin moons.
“Out?” he repeats, tearing out of Mumbo’s hold. He stumbles slightly but doesn’t stop moving, his breaths hastening with fresh panic. “No, no, he can’t. He’s— he— he was yellow. And we— I let him— he can’t be out—”
Mumbo steps forward again, his hands returning to Scar’s upper arms, grounding, stopping him before he starts to pace again. Dread pools in the pit of his stomach at Scar’s words. Is Grian actually in danger?
“Scar, what…” he hesitates. “What did you dream about?”
Scar doesn’t answer. His chest heaves, his hands twitching at his sides, and Mumbo shakes him.
“Scar!”
Scar draws in a sharp breath, and his eyes dart up to meet Mumbo’s. He goes to speak, then stops.
“I don’t…” He trails off. Confusion rises in his expression, quickly turning to fright. “I don’t remember.”
“Don’t remember what?” Mumbo asks urgently. “Scar?”
Scar’s rabbiting breaths resume, his eyes fixed on Mumbo’s. It’s Mumbo’s fault; he’s scaring him. He lets go of Scar’s arms and steps back, still waiting for an answer.
“I don’t know,” is all Scar can say, speaking the words like they’re some unimaginable horror. “Mumbo, I don’t— I don’t know.”
The emergency meeting is held at Xisuma’s house. It takes five minutes of coaxing to get Scar to leave Grian’s base, and another five to write a note to leave on the avian’s doorstep — “Just in case he comes back.”
Pearl brings Impulse. Tango and Bdubs come together, both shaken, with Keralis close behind. Beside Doc, Ren looks haggard, like he’s fought and lost a war, and Etho’s eyes are tired above his mask. Joe follows with Cleo, whose gaze stays fixed on the ground, their arms crossed defensively over their chest.
The hermits pile into Xisuma’s house, gathering around the table that they use for regular server meetings. After the initial rush, those who weren’t woken by their friends or dreams trickle in slowly, and soon, the entire server is together, speaking with each other in hushed, worried voices.
Scar waits outside by the door, watching the sky. He refuses to come inside, even when Mumbo asks, so Mumbo stands away from the rest of the group, too, watching Scar from the kitchen towards the front of the house.
He’s waiting for Grian.
The meeting starts, and someone taps Mumbo on the shoulder to let him know. It’s Joe, he thinks. He’s not really focusing. He nods in thanks and sits down at the table, his hands clasped together, fidgeting.
“Does Scar know we’ve started?” Xisuma asks from the head of the table.
Mumbo nods.
“He won’t come in until Grian gets here,” he explains, glancing in Scar’s direction out of sight. “I… wouldn’t push him.”
Xisuma hums, understanding.
It’s not uncommon for Grian to be late to things. It’s probably why nobody questions his absence — that, and the fact that they have more important concerns. If Grian’s grinding or AFKing by a farm, it could be a while until he sees their messages. After all, a few districts had to be woken up, as Xisuma’s notification wasn’t enough to cut through the fog of sleep.
But if Grian’s in danger like Scar thinks…
Mumbo discards the thought. What did Scar say again? A dream. He just had a bad dream.
The meeting continues, and Mumbo listens in a haze.
Seven hermits. That’s the final count Xisuma gives. Seven of Mumbo’s friends were startled awake in the middle of the night like Scar, breathing fast and shallow with only muddled memories to guide them, fading quickly.
“It was like a bad respawn,” Impulse describes.
“Like dreaming,” Bdubs adds. “When you wake up, and you know you dreamed something that night, but after a few seconds, you don’t remember it at all.”
“I didn’t know why I was scared,” Ren says, his eyes trained on the table. “But there I was. And there Doc was, telling me I was freaking out on him, saying I’d had a nightmare.”
No matter how hard the hermits ask the seven to remember, they come up with nothing more than that. None of them knows what they dreamt about. Few even remember the nature of the dream, though Bdubs speaks of the taste of blood on his tongue, the flash of polished metal, and Ren recalls the sting of skin against rough cobblestone.
At some point, Xisuma asks if he can search their code. Tango reluctantly volunteers, but Mumbo doesn’t watch.
There’s a figure on the horizon, soaring towards them on one of the few non-mechanical wings on the server. Mumbo spots them through the window.
Grian.
Outside, Scar yells the avian’s name. Mumbo stands too quickly and hits his knees on the edge of the table, his chair making an awful screeching sound as he pushes it back. The rest of the table looks up at him, but he doesn’t care. He excuses himself and makes for the door.
Grian has landed by the time Mumbo makes it to the entry room. He hears them talking outside, hushed but urgent, and when he opens the door, he doesn’t know what to think about the sight that greets him.
They’re standing a few paces down the path leading up to Xisuma’s house. Scar has Grian captive, holding his shoulders with a grip strong enough to hurt, but Grian won’t look at him.
“I’m fine, Scar,” he’s saying, sounding tired. His wings look uncomfortable, flared out at odd angles, making him look small in comparison to the vast red-yellow-blue expanse of them. They used to do that in season six, back when Grian first joined. They think I’m still in danger, Mumbo remembers him saying. They’re trying to make me look big.
But they don’t do that anymore. He isn’t in danger, and though it took his wings a little longer to catch up, they settled down long ago.
Mumbo wonders if he caught a stone in them.
“You— G, I was so worried! At least tell me where you went,” Scar pleads.
Grian sighs. Mumbo knows that sigh. It’s the one he uses when he thinks someone’s being irrational.
“I did,” he emphasises. His voice lacks the frustration it would normally hold in this kind of conversation. Instead, it’s tight, like he doesn’t believe himself and doesn’t expect Scar to, either. “I told you, I was gathering sand. I needed glass.”
“At midnight?”
Grian hesitates. “Yeah.”
Scar doesn’t look convinced, but he lets Grian go. Loosens his grip, at least. Enough for Grian to shrug his hands away, which he does.
“Just… let me know next time?” Scar asks, and Grian gives a small nod, looking anywhere but at his eyes.
When he spots Mumbo, he falters, and Scar turns around, following his gaze.
“Hi,” Mumbo says awkwardly. “Er— you should come in, Grian. You’ve missed a bit.”
Grian’s wings twitch, like they’re trying to fold up behind his back but he won’t let them, and he nods tersely.
“Yeah,” he agrees, drawing away from Scar to head up the path towards the house. Scar’s eyes go wide, and he rushes to catch up, trailing behind the avian like a lost puppy. “Sure. Fill me in.”
Mumbo doesn’t want to be quick to assume, but Grian looks… guilty when they enter the meeting room.
He pauses in the entryway, only moving again when Scar runs into him with a muffled “Oomph!” and alerts the other hermits to their presence. Mumbo mutters an apology for disturbing and pulls Scar down into the seat next to his own, leaving Grian to take the one a bit further down the table.
The avian lingers for a moment, hesitant, like stepping into the room means stepping into something he’s not ready for. His wings still haven’t fully folded back, and in the cramped space, they make him clumsy. When he finally moves, he maneuvers through the cramped room like a foal getting used to controlling its limbs, shuffling past the backs of the others’ chairs with a great deal of effort to get to the only free space.
At one point, the wrist of his wing bats Ren in the back of the head, and he tenses.
“Sorry— sorry, Ren,” he says quietly, bracing for something that doesn’t come.
Ren doesn’t respond at first, but he looks up, pausing for a second as he presumably realises where he is. It’s understandable. Mumbo isn’t sure that any of the seven are entirely here.
“Oh,” Ren says after a beat. “No, you’re alright, dude.”
Grian nods quickly and politely draws his wings a little closer to himself, though they still don’t settle properly against his back. He moves to his seat, two down from Mumbo, and the meeting continues from where it left off when they entered.
When Grian looks settled, Mumbo lets his gaze fall on the device Xisuma must have brought out after he left. It looks a lot like a vitals monitor with a keyboard, what with the small display in the centre, the clunky, wheeled stand, and the sheer number of cords running out of it. One plugs into Xisuma’s admin communicator, and another links it to the presentation screen on the wall at the end of the table. The rest are connected to a series of small clips, one of which Doc is fixing to Tango’s pointer finger, a few others disappearing behind his neck.
Tango shifts a little in his seat, likely regretting his decision to volunteer. But Xisuma mutters something like, “All set,” and the blazeborn lets out a long breath and sits back.
Every hermit knows how ugly it feels to have your code searched. It’s disorientating, violating in a way nothing else is. Long, wispy fingers unspool the coiled instructions of your body and lay them out on a desk to poke and prod, letting the dirt and grit of the outside world into something that was never meant to be seen. Your still-beating heart is held in the hands of someone who could crush you with a simple command, who could reach in and pull the air from your lungs, stitch your memories together into something foreign, change every hair, every cell in your body, yet you are told to trust them completely, to hand over the keys without question.
Try as Xisuma might, no admin can search a player’s code without leaving things different from before. A hazy memory, a skipped heartbeat, a constant itch in the back of the mind that doesn’t go away for hours. The effects are short-lasting but uncomfortable, and Xisuma is one of the kinder admins — there’s no telling what cruel or inexperienced hands might do with the wrong tools.
Mumbo winces in sympathy as Tango tenses and sucks in a breath, his red eyes going glassy as foreign code slides in between the lines of his own and reaches out to it, gently touching, asking it to share.
“Relax. Try to let me in,” Xisuma says gently.
It helps that he’s a Voidwalker. He knows what he’s doing more intimately than most.
Tango blinks a few times, nods, and some of the tension in his shoulders releases. Next to him, Impulse reaches for his hand, and Tango takes it, letting him squeeze it tightly.
A moment later, his code appears on Xisuma’s screen, the one on the wall mirroring it after another second or two’s delay, and Xisuma starts to read.
Mumbo watches for a while, but the symbols mean nothing to him as a player, and he quickly loses interest after Xisuma sifts through the fourth “properties” file in focused silence. It’s obvious that the others aren’t watching, either. A few of them are dozing, others simply staring down at the table in wait. Etho is fiddling with the zipper of his jacket. Gem’s drawing on False’s hand. Cleo and Joe are having a one-sided conversation with their eyes — well, Joe’s eyes, at least; Cleo seems to be stubbornly non-responsive — and xB carries a few glasses of water back and forth from the kitchen, setting them down on the table and turning around to fetch more.
Scar is looking at Grian. Naturally. And Mumbo is looking at Scar, because the sight of him in the hallway window still replays every time Mumbo closes his eyes.
So, of course, his gaze follows Scar’s and lands on Grian, too.
The avian hasn’t spoken a word since his mumbled apology to Ren. Which is fair — no one else has said very much, either, and even so, there have only been hushed words, sombre ones taking into account the frazzled nerves of their troubled friends.
But Grian is not a quiet person.
No, Grian talks. Grian talks a lot, especially in meetings. He gets bored, of course. But he also likes to be informed, be it a conversation he’s walked into or a meeting he’s joined late. And he offers his opinion; his ideas are never-ending and often exactly what’s needed to kick the right line of reasoning into motion.
Which is probably why Scar’s watching him, quiet concern etched into his face as the avian stares down at the table and doesn’t utter a word.
He’s almost catatonic. Zed bumps his chair on accident, and he doesn’t even turn to look at him. At some point, a glass of water gets tipped over, and while the others wince or offer to help, Grian does nothing.
He just sits there, eyes vacant, fiddling with the sleeve of his sweater. His wings, still untucked, have tilted subtly inwards as if to encase him, and it’s like he’s actively avoiding communicating with anyone, unable to bring himself to face them despite his close relationships here.
It reminds Mumbo of a time years ago. A time he was sure they’d moved on from.
Maybe Grian’s just tired, Mumbo thinks. Void knows everyone is. But if he were, he’d be more obvious about it. He’d complain, because he’s Grian, and he’d nestle his head in his arms on the table or lean on someone’s shoulder like Bdubs is doing and listen for anything important with his eyes closed.
He wouldn’t look like he’d been caught with his hand in a cookie jar. Ashamed, expecting disapproval — punishment, even.
Which is strange because, as far as Mumbo knows, he hasn’t done anything wrong. He hasn’t even pranked anyone in a good few days, busy with one project or another, and Mumbo’s sure he knows Ren doesn’t blame him for his clumsiness.
Maybe it’s because he was late. Maybe he just felt watched, stepping into the room mid-meeting, and during such an urgent one, too. Or maybe he just feels sorry for his friends.
Regardless, Mumbo doesn’t have much time to dwell on it, because a worrying beep comes from the monitor with Tango’s code on it.
The whole table looks up, Grian included, and Mumbo’s heart slithers up his throat with dread.
There’s an error.
An error with Tango’s code.
That’s…
Mumbo sweats. That’s not good.
Xisuma types something — Mumbo doesn’t pretend to know what the admin is doing, but if he had to guess, he’d say it was a passkey — and Tango flinches, his code suddenly flashing red.
“Hm,” Xisuma says eloquently.
“Is that an ‘interesting’ hm or a ‘you’re dead’ hm?” Tango asks sceptically as Joe gets up to take a look.
The admin doesn’t respond. There’s a beat as he frowns and clicks a few more buttons, and the rest of the group holds their collective breath.
Suddenly, every surface of Tango’s body erupts into flames.
Well— more flames than usual, and certainly not normal blaze flames. Instead, they’re a brilliant blue, hotter than they should be and dancing dangerously on his skin. Impulse yelps and jerks his hand out of Tango’s grip, plunging it clumsily into one of the glasses on the table as Zed stands from his seat and grabs him by the arm to belatedly pull him away.
If the error message wasn’t enough, the flames certainly seem to do a good job of waking everyone up.
“That’s not me,” Tango warns, surprisingly less mortified than Mumbo would expect him to be, given that he’s on fire. He does give Impulse an anxious look, but Zed is already tugging him into the kitchen to find running water, so he looks at Xisuma instead.
Everyone looks at Xisuma.
Xisuma looks at his screen like it’s personally wronged him.
“Darn,” he curses. “Damn. It’s a firewall.”
“No shit,” Mumbo hears Doc mumble. The coding community has never been known for their creative naming conventions.
“You can’t just override it?” Tango asks, sitting up to take a look.
Xisuma shakes his head, and Mumbo feels the energy of the room shift as a select few hermits tense with growing understanding.
“Which means…” Keralis starts, trailing off with the sentence’s ending implied.
Xisuma hums somberly.
“Watchers.”
Instinctively, Mumbo’s eyes dart over to Grian. He sees a few others do the same. Grian notices — of course, he notices — and swallows and looks back down at the table, uncomfortable.
“Just a reminder that I’m on fire,” Tango chimes in, his voice getting a little more urgent. He’s right; his chair has started to smoulder. He’s getting a little hard to look at directly, what with all the light. “And I’d very much like not to be.”
“Right. Yes. Sorry, Tango, I’ll pull out,” Xisuma says, hurrying to shut the monitor down.
Usually, someone would snicker at the admin’s careless wording. Cleo, Scar, Etho. But no one does.
The situation is far too dire.