Chapter Text
The explosion comes late enough that Parrot has time to be right about it.
He’s on the ground when it happens, boots sunk into loam. He doesn’t look up; there’s no point. His wings are clipped close to his back, feathers trimmed into blunt arcs that never quite forget what they were meant to do. The habit of watching the sky has been replaced by watching the horizon instead. That’s where the lab is — or was. A neat geometry of stone and glass tucked too far out for anyone to stumble upon by accident, designed with the quiet optimism that if you put something gentle far enough away from the world, it might be allowed to exist.
The blast tears that thought apart.
The light reaches him first, white, hot and blooming, a sudden, obscene flower blooming through the treeline. Then the sound follows, a concussive pressure that hits the chest before the ears register it as noise, a low thunder folding the air inward and snapping it back out again. Stone slabs shear cleanly. Glass turns to glittering particulates. Redstone lines flash once, briefly exposing the structure’s nervous system, before going dark.
Fire spills upward, greedy and theatrical, painting the underside of the clouds in colors that don’t belong to nature. Dust lifts in a low, rolling wave, swallowing the silhouette of the lab piece by piece until even its familiar angles are gone.
He had known this was coming.
The research is safe, he made sure of it days ago. The night a spy slipped a book into his inventory. While the server was busy elsewhere — Spoke clashing with Reddoones, Prince Zam and the others drawing attention like magnets — another half of their team would come for him.
He would’ve known even without the spy — that had only confirmed what he’d already begun to suspect. For the past few months or so, his work had been accruing marginalia that did not belong to him; precise notes appearing in papers, annotations slipped between lines he could have sworn he’d written alone. Corrections, mostly. Places where he’d made assumptions he hadn’t realized were assumptions, small errors of inference quietly circled and amended. Though not pedantic, nor cruel. Written questions about his experiments, the kind that only came from someone who understood the work well enough to push at its weak points.
Each note is signed with a single initial; ‘W’.
Whoever ‘W’ was, they were intelligent. Parrot had followed a few of the suggestions despite himself, watched as they progressed his models, smoothed inconsistencies he hadn’t known were there. He didn’t trust easily, but he trusted competence, and W had earned that much.
(He’d tried, more than once, to trace the source. Cross-referenced handwriting, redstone technique, even the cadence of their phrasing. Nothing. ‘W’ remained stubbornly abstract, a mind without a body — or perhaps, too many).
It felt like a collaboration. Anonymous, and distant, yes, but respectful. Parrot finds that if he writes back, then he’ll eventually get a reply back. And so, a back and forth was formed. An unconventional correspondence, sure, but one nonetheless.
And yet there was a carelessness to it, a way the notes arrived without concern for whether he wanted them, without any pretense of permission. Too keen, as if the writer were less interested in the research than in how Parrot thought his way through it.
The last message hadn’t corrected or questioned him at all. It had been a warning, on the bottom of a lab report relating to creepers, delivered with the same clinical calm as everything else:
something is coming. you should leave the lab. be safe
- W
He’d wiped the servers clean before leaving. Every exploit scrubbed, every half-finished paper duplicated twice over. He’d even left a few false trails. Dead ends for anyone curious enough to follow. The building itself had been reduced to a shell housing nothing irreplaceable.
Firelight fractures across his eyes, amber and red splintering over brown irises gone painfully still. The dark shadow under it encapsulates all he has in his heart. He notes where the floor collapses inward, where the roof caves like a ribcage punctured from within. He could name exactly which rooms were gone by the cadence of the detonations. Storage first. Good. Then the auxiliary workspace, where he’d stopped keeping anything important months ago. The main lab took the longest — a stubborn thing — its supports holding just long enough to make the final collapse feel intentional.
He thinks, stupidly, of the kettle left on the counter. The mug with the chipped rim. The chair that never quite stopped wobbling.
Data was easy to duplicate, unfortunately, memory was not.
The lab had been a place to ask whether a world built on resets and bloodshed could sustain something else. Whether systems could be tuned toward preservation instead of annihilation. Whether life here had to be an experiment that only ever ended the same way. He’d believed, quietly and a little foolishly, that if he proved it on paper first, people might follow.
The building had held that work, had given it walls and a roof and the illusion of permanence.
Now it was smoke.
There was a strange relief in the finality of it. No more calculating whether the lab’s location was still defensible. No more contingency plans layered over contingency plans, each one assuming the last would eventually fail. The decision had been made for him, and the simplicity of that was almost kind.
Ash drifts down like gray snow, settling on his lab coat, clinging to the green, yellow, and cyan feathers at his ears. There’s nowhere to go, now. No base to retreat to. The spy will vanish. The fighters will regroup. The server will keep doing what it does best.
Parrot straightens, brushing dust from his coat. In the distance, another explosion echoes, muffled and far away. Someone else’s problem. He wonders, briefly, how many people will be hurt tonight — how many will call it necessary, how many will call it inevitable.
And yet.
He presses a hand to his chest, feeling the steady, irritatingly persistent rhythm beneath his ribs. Many would laugh, but hope is an idea stubborn enough to survive being proven wrong over and over again. If it still exists in him, then it must be real.
Parrot turns his back on the smoke and starts walking. His gait is even, unhurried, as if he were leaving any other worksite at the end of a long day. Behind him, the ruins continue to collapse in on themselves, settling into a shape that will soon be unrecognizable.
He does not look back.
────────
Parrot is seated at the small wooden table inside the small compromise of a house he’s built.
He built it into the side of a jungle mountain, where the stone juts out at an angle sharp enough to make gravity hesitate. The canopy rises below him in layered greens, a vertical sea of leaves and vines that sway and whisper but never quite reach the height he’s claimed. It isn’t flight — not even close — but he takes what he can get. The house itself is spare: stone, stripped logs, glass panes angled to catch light without advertising themselves.
Parrot is hunched over with a square of ravager hide spread flat beneath his hands, thick and dark and scarred in ways that suggest a long, violent history. He nudges it with the tip of a scalpel, watching how the surface resists, how the fibers flex and settle.
“Okay,” he says to no one in particular, voice low and even. “You're not supposed to do that.”
He shifts to make a note, graphite scratching quietly across paper. He taps the pen against his lip, thinking. Their knockback resistance remains abnormally high, approximately seventy-five percent reduction compared to baseline hostile mobs.
The papers around him are neatly stacked, weighted at the corners with bits of stone and spare metal to keep the mountain breeze from interfering. He flips one page, then another — and pauses.
There’s an extra sheet tucked between his notes.
He exhales through his nose, something like a laugh, something like resignation, and pulls it free.
As he holds one edge, he feels the faint indentation of the pen is pressed into the body of the page. Parrot lingers on it for a moment before reading.
solid observation on stun probability. 50% is higher than expected. interesting
knockback resistance tracks with mass and it aligns with what i’ve seen. riveting as always, X2
you might find this intriguing: i’ve read that ravagers used to exhibit fear responses toward rabbits before their current genetic code was finalized.
i’m curious whether that aversion still expresses under controlled exposure.
- W
“That is interesting,” he admits quietly.
He pulls the paper closer, then lifts his spyglass and peers through it at the parchment.
unfortunately, jungle biomes present limitations. lack of leporid populations aside, visibility metrics are poor.
He sighs, this time with a faint laugh, and angles the lens back down.
relocating to a forest biome would solve that. secondary benefit: lower hostile traffic variance. it’d be easier to model outcomes.
He lowers the spyglass slowly.
Parrot sits back in his chair, wings rustling faintly behind him. He stares at the note for a long moment, then glances toward the window, where the jungle canopy stretches endlessly upward, bright and exposed and loud with life.
“You’re not wrong,” he admits to the empty room.
There’s merit in the suggestion— scientific and otherwise.
Three days later, he packs.
Notes bundled carefully. Glassware wrapped in cloth. The spyglass tucked into an inner pocket where it won’t crack. Before he leaves, he takes one last look at the mountain house, at the way it clings stubbornly to the cliffside, trying its best to pretend height is the same thing as flight.
Then Parrot turns away and heads for the trees.
────────
The ground beneath his boots grew less forgiving, until grass vanished entirely and the world flattened and was stripped down to its fundamentals.
Bedrock.
By the time Parrot reaches the edge of the world, moving has become a habit.
The forest hadn’t lasted long. He’d arrived wary and tired, half-expecting to find nothing but empty ground and the familiar work of rebuilding from scratch. Instead, there’d been a shulker box waiting for him at the treeline, tucked neatly beneath an oak as if it had grown there. Inside: clean stacks of carrots, dandelions, golden carrots. Materials he loathed farming. Foraging is a thing he’d complained about, once, in a margin note he vaguely recalls writing.
Signed, as always, with a single initial.
‘W’.
He built a workspace and something dangerously close to settling in. He ran experiments, documented mob behavior and tested variables. It almost felt sustainable.
Then came the next note. Clinical. Apologetic in tone if not in content. The enemy team chasing Spoke had been sighted nearby. Not close yet, but close enough.
Parrot packed within the day.
And it went like that for months. He moved when a biome offered something specific — a mob variant, a mechanic worth isolating.
Sometimes it was framed as a necessity — this biome would yield better data, that mob spawned more reliably elsewhere. Sometimes it was safe. Sometimes ‘W’ simply wrote that the noise floor was increasing, saying it like it was professional courtesy between researchers who happened to share a frequency. And, he was usually right.
The distances stretched. Forest gave way to plains, plains to stone, stone to cold. North was long behind him, the snow biome that had once felt impossibly remote now reduced to a reference point on an outdated map.
There is no vegetation, just bedrock underfoot, a few notably broken. An exploit.
The cold settles into him immediately, leeching heat through his boots and up his legs. He exhales, and the air takes it without ceremony. A coldness no life should feel.
Above him, the structure rises, a refusal to yield. It reminds him of a factory, or a converted ruin. Orange accents stripe the roof in clean, deliberate lines, stark against the iron-gray bulk like warning tape. Three chimneys pump smoke into the sky at steady intervals, the plumes rising straight before the wind worries at them. Pipes run along the exterior in thick, looping networks, churning and rattling with something alive inside them.
Parrot slows. He takes in the scale of it, the intention. A place that was built because nothing out here could contest it.
This is far beyond north. Far beyond the snow biome he once thought was far enough from spawn to matter. Apparently not, he still remembers the sudden ambush, and the note that fell off one of his attackers. Written with coordinates below:
this should be far enough. stay safe
- W
He thinks, distantly, that this must be what it feels like to reach the end of a long, carefully written equation. Every variable accounted for. Every step leading, inexorably, to this.
There is no note waiting for him this time, just a sign at the entrance:
PARAGON
The door is already open.
────────
The interior is built of the same materials as the exterior — iron-gray walls, reinforced glass, exposed pipes running like veins along the ceiling — but the scale changes everything. The space opens up into something cavernous, deliberately so, the air cold and dry and constantly in motion. Machinery buzzing somewhere deep in the structure, a layered sound that never quite resolves into a single source.
There are more people than he expected.
They move with purpose, heads down, hands busy with work that looks repetitive and physical — hauling crates, adjusting valves, sorting materials into labeled chests stacked with algorithmic precision. They are all of similar stature. Nobody looks hurried. Nobody looks lost. None of them speak, nor do they look up when he passes.
He walks deeper, boots ringing softly against the metal floor as the corridors branch and fold in on themselves. He passes rooms with glass floors that reveal layers beneath. He sees a few power lines, redstone arrays, and whole sections of infrastructure in quiet compliance. He recognizes enough materials to feel a twinge of professional envy. Resources he’d spent weeks rationing simply there at one’s disposal. Another room houses what looks like spare machinery, parts laid out with obsessive care.
His mind itches at the order of it, the way nothing here exists without a purpose, it’s all coldly considerate.
At the end of the corridor, a sign hangs from the ceiling, bolted into place with unnecessary thoroughness.
HEAD OFFICE
The arrow beneath it points up.
Parrot hesitates for half a second, then takes the stairs. They’re wide and shallow, built for traffic that doesn’t quite match the emptiness he feels climbing them. The sounds of the factory dull as he ascends, replaced by a quieter, steadier hum of a heater.
The office is enormous.
Not ostentatiously so. Open space dominates the room — more floor than furniture, really — the ceiling high enough that Parrot has to tilt his head back to take it all in. Pipes run overhead, partially obscured by strips of purple terracotta set into the structure, color bleeding through industrial grey. The right wall is lined with bookshelves, some full, many conspicuously empty, as if awaiting conclusions not yet reached.
On the left stand two mannequins, posed neutrally, unadorned. They don’t display armor or clothing. They’re just… there. Parrot looks at them longer than he means to, then looks away.
In the far right corner sits a bed, narrow but neatly made, surrounded on two sides by bookshelves stacked high with loose volumes and binders. He blinks once.
This guy sleeps in his office, he thinks, mildly incredulous.
At the center of the room sits a white table, immaculate and entirely bare. A simple surface waiting to be used.
Behind it is a man.
He’s turned toward the window, looking out over the bedrock expanse beyond the lab. A purple bandana is tied around his head, the loose ends tugged gently by a draft Parrot can’t feel. He’s wearing a long white lab coat, pristine in a way that suggests it’s been replaced more than it’s been washed, and beneath it a dark purple turtleneck that blends into the shadows of the room.
Parrot stops just inside the doorway, suddenly aware of his own breathing, the soft rustle of his wings beneath his coat.
“Uh,” Parrot says, and then clears his throat. “Hello?”
The man turns.
A smooth, unhurried pivot, the same unhurried precision Parrot has seen replicated in the halls below. As if time here moves at a slightly different viscosity.
Up close, he looks… tidy. Black hair parted precisely down the middle, held back by a purple headband that keeps it out of his face without drawing attention to itself. Square glasses sit neatly on his nose, lenses clean, frames unremarkable. Hanging on his neck is a purple identification card. His smile comes easily.
His eyes don’t move with it.
They’re absent of any reflection, absorbing light and not giving any of it back. Not unfocused — if anything, too focused. Parrot thinks of a black hole diagram he once saw in a textbook; the event horizon is clean and smooth, densities so extreme they bend everything around them.
"X2," he said.
His voice is mild. Pleasant. Exactly what Parrot expects and somehow still wrong.
For a second, neither of them speaks. The hum of the machinery fills the space between them, steady and indifferent. Somewhere below, something vents steam. One of the pipes ticks as it cools.
“You made it,” the man adds, tilting his head just slightly, confirmatory. “Good.”
Parrot blinks once. Twice.
“Yeah,” he says. “I… did.”
There’s a pause, one that invites elaboration without demanding it. Parrot doesn’t fill it.
“That’s— okay.” He exhales, then straightens, wings shifting beneath his coat. “You’re ‘W’, I’m guessing.”
The smile doesn’t change. “I am.”
‘W’ watches him for a second longer, then steps away from the window, rounding the table with an easy familiarity that suggests the room was designed around his movement.
“How was the journey?” He asks.
Parrot opens his mouth, then hesitates. He hadn’t expected small talk. He definitely hadn’t expected the tone — conversational, like this was a scheduled meeting rather than the culmination of several months of quiet pursuit.
Parrot’s wings twitch near his ears. “Pretty long,” he says, then hesitates. “And cold, but I assume that’s intentional.”
“It is.” The man nods once, as if confirming a hypothesis. “Thermal discomfort discourages lingering visitors.”
His eyes looked Parrot up and down, attention settling on him like a measured force. “Are you okay?”
Parrot stiffens.
“I—” He pauses, recalibrates. The sudden question about his wellbeing startles him, which is a little sad if you think about it. “Yes. I think so.”
Another nod. Another small, satisfied smile. ‘W’ accepts the answer the way one might accept a provisional result.
“Good.” ‘W’ nods, as if checking off a list.
They stand there for a moment, the space between them too open to be comfortable. Parrot becomes acutely aware of the sterile white table, the mannequins at his periphery, the faint, omnipresent hum threading through the walls.
Parrot watches him for a moment, then says, “You know, since I’m here, at least tell me your name.”
‘W’ pauses, hands tucked behind his back, eyeing Parrot from a distance.
“Wifies,” he says.
Parrot rolls it over once in his head. “All right. Wifies.” He steps farther into the room, stopping a careful distance from the white table. “Nice to meet you. In person, I mean.”
“Likewise,” Wifies replies, and Parrot gets the distinct sense that the word means something different to him than it usually does to other people. “I usually prefer correspondence, but this felt necessary.”
“Did it.” Parrot glances back toward the door, then at the shelves, the pipes, the scale of the place. “You weren’t exaggerating about distance.”
“No.” There’s a faint note of something like amusement in Wifies’s voice. “I do apologize, but it minimizes interruptions.”
Parrot gestures vaguely behind him, toward the rest of the facility. “You’ve put in a lot of effort to… not introduce yourself until now.”
Wifies hums, thoughtful. “Direct introduction would have accelerated the variables unnecessarily.”
“You could have just said hello.”
“Yes,” Wifies agrees easily. “But this yielded more information.”
Parrot squints at him. “About me.”
“About you,” Wifies says.
“Great,” Parrot mutters. Then, louder, “How did you even find me in the first place?”
Wifies steps away from the table, circling it as he speaks, hands clasped behind his back. “You once introduced a thousand wardens into the End,” he says mildly. “Most people would notice.”
Parrot winces. “It was controlled, and I did it for Spoke’s sake.”
“I know,” Wifies replies. “That’s why it was interesting.”
He stops across from Parrot. “After that, I paid closer attention.”
“And the notes?” Parrot presses. “The books. Why not just talk to me from the start? Instead of sneaking into my lab.”
Wifies’s expression doesn’t change. “I’ve never been to your lab,” he says. “Physically.”
Parrot blinks.
“I respect your privacy,” Wifies continues.
Parrot opens his mouth, then closes it.
They stand there for a second longer than strictly necessary, two researchers circling the same datum from different angles.
“I’ve read your work,” Wifies continues. “Obviously. Your conclusions are spectacular, in any case, but what interests me more is your methodology. Your work is rigorous and careful.”
Parrot’s shoulders ease despite himself. “Yeah, I try not to break things that don’t need breaking.”
“And yet,” Wifies says, “you’re very good at it when you do.”
Parrot blinks, unsure of the implications, and chooses to redirect. “Well, you’re not so bad yourself. Your notes helped. A lot. Some of the corrections…” He trails off, then shakes his head. “You caught things I didn’t even know I was missing.”
“Just calling it as I see it.” Wifies smiles at him. There’s something unmistakable in his expression — though, not pride, exactly.. “Your methods are elegant,” he says. “You favor preservation over efficiency, not that it’s a bad thing. Most researchers don’t bother.”
Parrot feels heat creep up the back of his neck. “Thank you. I have to say, this place is… impressive.”
“Yes.” Wifies pauses, then adds, “But incomplete.”
That gets Parrot’s attention. “Incomplete how?”
Wifies looks at him, really looks at him this time, and the weight of that focus settles like a hand between Parrot’s shoulders.
“I would like your opinion,” Wifies says. “On several systems.”
Parrot tilts his head. Is this really all there was to it? Months of marginalia, cryptic annotations, and a trek through snow for feedback on a project. Not that he minded. The method just felt… elaborate.
“So what is this, then?” Parrot asks. “An evaluation?”
“No,” Wifies says. “An introduction.”
He makes his way to the left corner of the room, where a plain wooden door waits. “I thought you might like to see the lab,” Wifies says, already reaching for the handle. “You’ve been operating on partial data for months.”
He pauses, glancing back over his shoulder.
“And I prefer my subjects to be informed.”
Parrot opens his mouth to respond — to question that word, maybe — but Wifies is already opening the door, the screen flashing when he presses the card around his neck to it.
Name: Wifies
Status: Head Researcher
Lab ID: R-1000-01
ACCESS APPROVED
After a beat, Parrot follows.
────────
They walk.
Wifies sets the pace without comment, boots striking metal in an even rhythm. Parrot follows a few steps behind, eyes tracking everything at once.
The corridors widen into production floors. Glass-walled labs pass on either side, each one cleanly seperated. In one, potion arrays bubble in disciplined rows, colors shifting with precise timing, droppers clicking in perfect intervals. In another, Parrot glimpses what looks like a simulated terrain — modular rooms rearranging themselves, pistons and barriers sliding into place, pathways collapsing and reforming as if the space itself is thinking.
“This one’s built around redstone update order,” Wifies says, glancing back just enough to check Parrot’s attention. “Most people assume inputs resolve simultaneously, but as it turns out there is a code to it, as most things do.”
He taps the glass with one knuckle. Inside, a test subject steps onto a plate. Nothing happens. A second plate depresses nearby, and suddenly the floor vanishes beneath the first.
Parrot frowns as he watches the reset sequence kick in, the room knitting itself back together. “You really like escape rooms.”
“I like constrained environments,” Wifies says. “They make decision-making legible. When exits are conditional, people show you what they value very quickly — speed, safety, control. Sometimes, ego.”
They move on.
The next section is quieter. Observation decks ring a series of enclosed rooms below, each one slightly different — the lighting shifted, ceilings lowered, sounds dampened or amplified. Parrot’s wings itch under his coat, the enclosed geometry pressing close in a way he doesn’t like.
They pass another glass wall. Potion arrays dominate this one — rows of brewing stands cycling through precise combinations. Parrot’s brow furrows.
“Chemistry changes the brain, of course,” he says. “It’s only vital that it’s always kept in stock as my focus is on neuroscience.”
Parrot looks from the potions to the adjacent observation room, where another entity navigates a shifting maze.
He watches the subject. “You’re… dosing people before sending them in.”
“Sometimes,” Wifies says easily. “Sometimes I tell them too.”
“For what end?” Parrot asks.
“To see,” Wifies replies. There’s no shame in it. No pride, either. “The brain is remarkably plastic,” he continues, tone still even. “It’s quite interesting.”
Parrot blinks. “Nothing else?”
“Should there be?”
“... In a world where half the population dies and comes back on a weekly basis, I would say so.”
Wifies meets his gaze, unbothered. “Especially in a world like this, no?”
That sits wrong in Parrot’s chest, a low pressure that doesn’t resolve no matter how he breathes. He watches the bodies move through the corridors with the same unhurried precision, bodies angling and turning as if they’re following marks on the floor only they can see. They pass one another without collision, without acknowledgment, particles in a controlled system. Their silence isn’t even enforced; it’s simply unnecessary. Communication has already happened, somewhere else, earlier, in a place Parrot can’t see.
They turn another corner. The smell of something chemical is sharp enough to sit at the back of his throat. Pipes run along the walls and ceiling in dense clusters, pulsing softly as pressure shifts through them. The sound is constant.
The journey here had been too easy.
Guided. From the first note slipped between his papers, ink pressed to bruise the page, to the shulker box waiting for him where it shouldn’t have been, to the quiet, timely warnings that always arrived just before trouble did. Each move had felt like his own decision at the time — rational, even necessary — but laid end to end, they formed something cleaner than coincidence.
A straight line. Point A to point B, plotted so carefully.
He felt the familiar sour taste in his mouth, surrounded by systems that existed solely to observe how people behaved when they thought they were making decisions, the thought was unwelcome in his chest.
They’re walking past a large chamber sealed behind reinforced glass. Inside, a lattice of cables suspends a framework of metal and crystal, redstone threading through it in deliberate patterns. A chair sits at the center, surrounded by monitors cycling through abstract visualizations. Wifies keeps on talking.
Parrot barely hears him. The sound of Wifies’s footsteps fades into the constant industrial respiration of the factory, swallowed by the churn of pistons and the distant hiss of steam. He stops walking without meaning to, the motion arrested somewhere between thought and instinct, his boots planted on the metal grating as though the floor itself has issued a command.
Wifies continues on for several paces before the absence registers.
He turns, brows lifting a fraction in mild curiosity, head angling just enough to bring Parrot back into his line of sight.
“X2?”
Parrot swallows.
The words have been sitting behind his teeth for weeks, fermenting. He’d turn them over, and tested them from several angles. It accumulates weight with every relocation, every conveniently timed warning, every shulker box that appeared exactly when his patience for farming ran out.
“You’re the one who instructed Zam’s team to ambush my lab,” he says.
Wifies stops.
The pipes overhead continue their steady pulse, thick conduits shuddering faintly as something reroutes far above them. A mechanical arm resets somewhere out of sight. The facility remains indifferent, systems operating with the same meticulous regularity regardless of what is being confessed inside its walls.
The overhead lights catch against the lenses of his square glasses, bleaching them white for a heartbeat before settling again. When Parrot meets his gaze, the familiar hollowness is there, that unnerving depthlessness behind the glass. And then, unexpectedly, his mouth curves upward.
“Yes,” Wifies says, with the same tone he might use to confirm the time of day. “I was wondering when you’d bring it up.”
Parrot’s jaw tightens. “So you knew I’d figure it out.”
“I assumed you already had,” Wifies replies. “You’re very good at behavioural analysis.”
“That was my lab,” Parrot snaps, the control slipping despite himself. The words scrape on the way out. “My work. You blew it to rubble.”
“And I warned you,” Wifies says, unruffled, almost kind. “In advance. You were given sufficient time to evacuate, back up your files, and remove any volatile materials. You lost nothing.”
Parrot exhales sharply through his nose. He hates that Wifies is right.
“You could’ve just told me,” he says.
“That would have changed your behavior,” Wifies replies. “Besides, you were already a target — working with Spoke and all. Zam’s team was moving whether I intervened or not. I merely… redirected them.”
Both sets of Parrot’s wings twitch, a restless scrape of feather against fabric and wind.
“And for what?” he asks finally.
“You didn’t do all of this out of courtesy,” he says, carrying the accumulated weight of months spent relocating under moonlight, of labs assembled and dismantled like temporary hypotheses, of work constantly interrupted by the simple crime of existing too visibly on a server allergic to stillness. He gestures vaguely back the way he came, toward the miles of bedrock and iron and smoke. “The notes, the warnings, the resources. You don’t orchestrate half a server’s movement patterns out of goodwill.” He gestures vaguely back toward the corridors, the pipes, the endless infrastructure humming behind them. “So for what?"
Wifies tilts his head slightly, considering him.
“Because your work is exceptional,” he says simply. “Most researchers — and most people, frankly — operate under assumptions I have long discarded. They stumble over problems I’ve already solved in principle. But you — you approach the same questions differently, and sometimes, you arrive at conclusions I would never have expected. Yet your intuition is aligned with mine in ways I cannot ignore.”
Parrot blinks once.
“Few on this server could even comprehend the experiments you’ve attempted, let alone execute them with such precision. You are, in my estimation, one of the only people capable of keeping pace with the ideas I chase.” Wifies continues.
“Unfortunately, your environment is hostile to the kind of answers you’re seeking. You operate under artificial constraints; resource scarcity, time, constant displacement.”
Parrot lets out a short breath. “You mean the part where people keep trying to kill me.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not exactly a niche problem.” Parrot mutters. “That’s the server.”
“Yes,” Wifies says. “And I am not interested in letting the server dictate the ceiling of my research.”
He gestures outward, encompassing the factory in a single, economical motion — the bedrock foundation fused to the world’s skeleton, the chimneys breathing smoke into the sky, the systems assuring survival. This place has no contingency for abandonment.
“I want you to work here,” Wifies says, the words are delivered faintly with little flourish.
Parrot blinks.
“And you thought blowing up my lab was a good recruitment method?”
“I thought,” Wifies replies, “that proving I could protect you would be more convincing than promising I would.”
Parrot drags a hand over his face, thumb brushing the bridge of his nose. “You destroy my lab, chase me halfway across the map, and your solution is employment.”
“I preserved your research,” Wifies corrects gently. “And your life. If I wanted you to be indebted, I would already have asked.”
They stand there while the factory continues its quiet respiration, pistons cycling and vents exhaling warmth in measured intervals. Whatever line Parrot thought existed between benefactor and saboteur has dissolved into something far messier. His anger dulls. Not because Wifies has earned absolution, but because anger is a blunt instrument and he has always preferred finer tools. He’s learned, over years of surviving a server built on escalation, that fury burns fast and leaves very little behind. And whatever the case, he was alive because of Wifies, not in spite of him.
There is, however, another question.
It has been circling since the moment he crossed the threshold of the facility, a persistent pressure at the base of his skull that refuses to dissipate. With every corridor they’ve passed, every synchronized movement glimpsed in his peripheral vision, it has grown heavier, more insistent, until ignoring it feels intellectually dishonest.
“Your staff.” Parrot says at last.
Wifies hums in response. “What about them?”
His gaze drifts sideways.
Through the wide pane of reinforced glass, to the single chair bolted to the floor of the observation chamber. Parrot’s reflection bleeds faintly across the surface of the glass — green and yellow feathers ghosting over human features — two images briefly occupying the same plane before resolving again.
Someone is seated in the chair.
A figure occupies the seat, posture perfect, hands resting loosely on its knees.
It looks back at him.
The face is one he recognizes.
“They all move the same,” Parrot says. “It reminds me of military drills. They don’t talk, they don’t stop.”
Wifies stands beside him, solid and breathing, and Wifies sits beyond the glass, unmoving, eyes unfocused.
Parrot’s reflection overlays theirs in the glass, his own face briefly spliced between duplicates. The image fractures, overlapping like a faulty reflection, two identical silhouettes occupying mutually exclusive states.
Wifies here.
Wifies there.
Schrödinger’s cat. Except the box is transparent, and the answer is somehow both.
The workers hauling crates. The technician calibrating a redstone panel. The figure crouched by a valve with oil-stained gloves. Each face a variation only in wear — a nicked knuckle here, a sleeve rolled higher there — but unmistakably the same man.
Wifies.
Wifies.
Wifies.
He looks back at the original, or, what he assumes is the original.
“And they all have your face.”
Wifies blinks once. He does not respond immediately.
Parrot hears the click of pistons resetting, the slow churn of something massive shifting beneath the floor, the sigh of heated air venting through the walls. The facility continues its labor without regard for revelation, and Parrot becomes acutely aware that he is standing inside a system that does not pause for moral reflection.
“Yes,” Wifies says.
Parrot waits.
When no elaboration follows, he gestures faintly toward the glass. “So… what are they?”
“Replicas,” Wifies replies. “Or clones — if you prefer that term.”
“I don’t,” Parrot says, and rubs his thumb against the edge of his sleeve. “Are they… you?”
Wifies considers the question. “They originate from my genetic baseline,” he says carefully. “That is to say, they’re derived from me. But their cognitive capacity varies depending on what tasks are allocated to them. Some are optimized for manual labor, others for repetitive testing. One model may have heightened spatial reasoning than another, and that goes for all aspects.”
“Higher reasoning is unnecessary in most cases,” he adds. “And often interferes with the clarity of data.”
“That’s—” Parrot cuts himself off, pressing his tongue briefly to the roof of his mouth. “... incredibly strange. Do you hear yourself?”
“I suppose.”
“And you’re fine with that,” Parrot says. “With—” He gestures vaguely through the glass, toward the face beyond it. “With treating yourself like a renewable resource.”
Wifies’s smile returns, thin but genuine. “I am the safest subject available.”
Parrot grimaces.
“Besides, they’re not me exactly — they do not share my continuity of experience. Their memories begin at activation. Their cognition is functionally independent.”
That’s somehow worse, he can’t help the thought from appearing.
“So they think?”
“Yes.”
“They feel?”
“Yes.”
“Are they aware?”
“To a functional degree.”
Parrot’s jaw tightens. “Then they’re people, completely separate people from you.”
Wifies’s gaze flicks back toward the chamber. The clone inside the chair hasn’t moved, hasn’t even blinked.
“You could say that.”
Parrot’s wings rustle, feathers bristling. “So what, you just discard them when you’re done?”
“Salvage, actually,” Wifies says. “Their materials can be reused.”
“You’re using living people for experimentation,” he says.
“Yes.”
“And… you don’t see a problem with that?”
Wifies blinks once and tilts his head, for once, genuine confusion on his face.
“You work with Spoke.”
Parrot brows furrow. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“He assists you,” Wifies continues. “Gathers resources, participates in testing, exposes himself to danger on your behalf.”
Parrot’s voice sharpens. “Spoke chooses to help me.”
“And my models do too,” Wifies replies mildly.
“That’s not—” Parrot stops, frowning. “Spoke is just a guy. He’s not— I’m not experimenting on him.”
Wifies tilts his head.
“Neither am I,” he says. “I’m simply investigating the brain.”
“And even with all this,” Parrot says, gesturing loosely to the lab — all the moving parts, all the clearly advanced and self-sustaining technology. “You want me to work for you.”
“With me,” Wifies corrects.
His voice blends almost seamlessly with the factory’s rhythm.
“You retain authorship of your research. I will not interfere with your conclusions. I will provide materials, security, and distance from spawn sufficient to make your presence basically irrelevant.”
“And what,” Parrot says slowly, “do you get out of this?”
Wifies smiles faintly, as if pleased by the question.
“Proximity,” he says. “And access to you.”
Parrot scoffs under his breath. “You already had access. You’ve been writing in my papers for months.”
“Yes,” Wifies replies easily. “But I felt this would be more… productive.”
Around them, a cluster of clones passes in formation, boots striking the metal walkway in perfect intervals. One carries a crate of copper. Another drags a cart of instruments. None look at Parrot.
“You don’t even know if I’d say yes,” Parrot says.
Wifies’s smile deepens, just slightly.
“I do,” he replies.
Parrot’s brow furrows. “You’re awfully confident.”
“You came,” Wifies says. “You followed the trail all the way here, despite knowing it was me behind it.”
“That doesn’t mean I want to work with you.”
“No,” Wifies agrees. “But it’d be inefficient not to.”
Wifies steps past him, boots clicking softly against the metal walkway, and gestures toward a corridor branching off from the main floor. The lights brighten as they approach, obediently responding to their master’s every whim.
“Come,” he says.
Against his better judgment, Parrot follows.
The hallway opens into a vast chamber, its ceiling arcing so high it disappears into artificial cloud cover. Warm air rushes over him, smelling unmistakably life.
Grass stretches ahead in controlled gradients, blades uniform in height but imperfect enough to pass as organic. The ground dips and rises in gentle slopes, soil packed dense beneath the surface to prevent erosion. Oak and birch trees grow in deliberate irregularity, roots intentionally mapped to avoid collision, leaf canopies brushing one another as a programmed breeze passes through. The wind is constant but mild, cycling every few minutes; Parrot can feel the repetition if he pays attention.
A river cuts across the field in a clean arc, banks reinforced with stone beneath the dirt to maintain curvature. Its current flows at a stable rate, fast enough to carry debris but slow enough for observation. Light refracts off its surface with mathematical precision.
Beyond the river, the terrain changes.
Snow begins abruptly, powdered white hills rising from grass as if stitched from another world entirely. The temperature drops several degrees within two steps. Frost-bitten spruce trees stand rigid, needles brittle with ice.
Further still, the snow ends at a clean boundary of red sand. Heat replaces cold in a sharp gradient. The sky overhead shifts to a harsher orange tint, light scattering through particulate simulation. Mesa spires climb upward in layered terracotta bands, their strata exposed cleanly enough to study cross-sections at a glance.
To the left, humidity thickens the air.
Vines creep along stone and bark in overlapping growth patterns. Jungle trees tower high enough that their canopies intersect the cloud layer above, leaves shedding droplets at irregular intervals. Water pools beneath them, shallow but murky, algae responding dynamically to light levels. Insects buzzing with nature.
Past that, the land darkens.
Swamp water reflects no sky. Mangrove roots twist through brackish pools, their geometry complex and almost excessive. Occasional bubbles break the surface, methane simulation venting on a timer.
Every world, compressed and indexed.
Parrot stops walking.
“You… built this?” he asks.
“An imitation,” Wifies explains. “Exact block-for-block environmental fidelity. Variable weather, growth cycles, and regeneration rates are adjustable. Day-night cycles are included.”
“And the Nether?” Parrot turns to look at him.
Wifies nods. “And the Nether.”
Parrot stares forward.
“Think about it, X2,” Wifies says. “All the resources you’ve ever lacked, within reach. You can use redstone without rationing, acquire rare materials without negotiation, and access to infrastructure capable of sustaining experiments that would be impossible anywhere else.”
“My clones can retrieve whatever you require. TNT, wither skulls, anything. You will never need to divert your attention from your work or wait a second too long. All the logistics will be handled.”
“You will be comfortable,” he adds. “Fed, protected. Untouched by politics, alliances, vendettas.” His gaze flicks briefly toward the distant tunnels leading back toward spawn. “Far enough away that no one will find you.”
Wifies looks at him, black eyes meeting his brown. “You above all people understand how inefficient war is.”
Parrot’s jaw tightens.
He thinks of notebooks lost to explosions, to raids, to hurried evacuations where only half the pages made it into his inventory. Of research scattered across abandoned bases now buried under obsidian or claimed by someone else’s flag. Of how many times he has rebuilt the same apparatus from memory because the original was gone. Of experiments interrupted by alarms, by grief, by someone else’s war bleeding through his walls.
He thinks of the old lab near the river, long gone now, and the cat that used to sit on the crafting table no matter how many times Parrot moved it. He doesn’t know what happened to it after the ambush. He never went back to check.
He thinks of Spoke, descending into caves he himself wouldn’t risk, hauling shulker after shulker with materials Parrot needed to keep going. Of apologizing every time. Of accepting it anyway. Half-dead from runs, armor cracked, hands shaking as he dropped materials onto the table with a grin that said worth it. Of the constant calculations Parrot ran just to keep them alive — backup routes, stasis pearls, layered blast doors, escape tunnels disguised as storage rooms. The careful steps he took every time he left his lab, the ritual of hiding entrances, burning notes, memorizing coordinates instead of writing them down.
So much time spent protecting his work instead of doing it.
So much research, lost not to failure, but to circumstance.
He looks at Wifies again.
At the way the light reflects off his glasses, refracting the light and reflecting Parrot back on the lenses. The transparent layer shielding the light from being consumed by his eyes.
Wifies is smiling, an expression that — Parrot notes — he has never seen on any of his clone’s faces.
He thinks of the marginal notes in his journals written in pen, notably not his. How they had always understood his line of thought before anyone else did. Of how many breakthroughs had come from those annotations. How much faster progress would be if he didn’t have to farm, didn’t have to wait, didn’t have to ask.
How close he might be to finishing what he started.
Parrot exhales.
“…Fine,” he says at last.
The skin at the corners of Wifies’s eyes creases faintly. For the first time since Parrot arrived, the expression looks unpracticed.
“Good,” he says.
He reaches into the inside of his coat. From an interior pocket he produces a thin rectangular card and holds it out between two fingers.
It’s identical in shape and size to his own — vertical, made with smooth composite polymer, cool even at a distance. The surface carries a light-purple hue. Across the card’s y-axis, the word PARAGON is written in fine black lettering.
Parrot hesitates, then takes it between two fingers. The surface warms slightly at his touch, reacting to his biometrics. Its surface threaded with security lines that shift when he tilts it.
His face stares back at him.
A neutral angle he doesn’t remember ever holding. Accurate down to feather coloration, facial asymmetry, even the burn scars he’d stopped consciously registering years ago.
Name: Parrot X2
Status: Researcher
Lab ID: N-0000-00
Something tight coils in his stomach. He ignores it.
Parrot exhales through his nose and flips the card over. The reverse displays a schematic map — concentric rings intersected by corridors, branching outward from a central core.
“Your assigned lab is three levels below the arboretum,” Wifies explains. “Section N. Access elevators are marked in blue. Residential quarters are adjacent. Testing chambers connect through the western tunnel. Everything is already authorized under your ID.”
“Your equipment has been reconstructed from the schematics in your notebooks,” he continues evenly. “ if there are any missing components, they may be requested verbally or logged through the terminal interface.”
Parrot closes his fingers around the card.
“And the… world room?” he asks.
“Open access, of course,” Wifies says. “Though, I would avoid the deep dark sector unless supervised.”
Parrot glances back toward the artificial horizon, the simulated sun still hanging low over pixelated terrain.
“Right,” he says.
“If you require assistance,” he straightens, “you may request it at any time.”
He pauses, then amends.
“From me — or from us.”
He steps back, giving Parrot space rather than taking it.
“I’ll leave you to settle in.”
The lights along the corridor brighten in sequence behind him. His coat vanishes into the metal arteries of the facility, the lights dimming behind him as systems reroute and seals reengage.
Parrot remains where he is, alone at the edge of a world that isn’t real and yet behaves as though it believes it is. Grass sways on a timed loop. Leaves fall, despawn, reappear.
────────
Somewhere in the forest, a wolf sits obediently.
Its coat is too even in color, each piece of fur arranged with algorithmic precision. Its muscle density is calibrated, and heart rate steady. A perfect reconstruction, assembled from flawless genetic code and rendered without the inefficiencies of nature.
It has been watching the trees for some time.
High in the canopy, a parrot clings to a branch that sways on a looped wind pattern. The motion repeats every ninety seconds, precise enough to be predicted if one cared to count. Its wings hang unevenly at its sides, primary flight feathers fractured at irregular angles. The damage persists in a way the simulation does not normally permit.
The bird does not fly.
It hops instead, carefully, branch to branch, talons tightening before every shift of weight. When the wind strengthens, it leans into the force rather than trusting its wings, body tilting instinctively to preserve balance. It never descends. The ground remains an abstraction beneath it, a surface acknowledged only as danger.
Occasionally, a feather loosens and drifts downward.
The wolf retrieves them.
One by one, it pads across the grass and picks each plume gently between its teeth. It carries them to the same place every time, lowering its head with ritual precision. The feathers are arranged carefully, nudged and realigned until their colors sit correctly beside one another.
A mask.
Shaped like a parrot’s face — bright pigments stretched thin across a rigid internal frame, the beak curved into an eternal, artificial cheer. It fits cleanly over the wolf’s muzzle, contours matching perfectly.
Near it, is a patch beneath the tree, where it has been brushing away grass and flowers until bare dirt shows. He has sprinkled seeds on the area.
A fallen log rests beside the patch, dragged into position and rotated until its length aligns parallel to the trunk above.
The wolf steps backward into the bushes.
Its tail stills as artificial night settles in. The moon rises along a predetermined arc, silver light washing over leaves and fur alike. Crickets chirp on a loop. The parrot above sleeps fitfully, claws locked tight around the branch. The wolf does not move.
Patient as a system without doubt.
Behind the colorful mask, saliva gathers at the corners of its mouth and drips slowly down pooling soundlessly in the dirt it has prepared.