Work Text:
The first time Gem uses her power, she does not know what to expect.
It goes like this: Music from an unseen source echoes through the air. Gem snaps her head skyward; outside her awareness, Players all across the server have done the exact same. Joel reminds her of Grian warning them that something like this may happen during the session. Gem instinctively reaches for something inside herself and pulls.
Separation.
Never before has Gem thought in-depth about the concept of a soul. She knows that it's been philosophized about: the soul is one's personality, the soul is the what-ness of a living being, the soul turns you from a warm, wet moving sack of meat and bones into, well, you. She never thought about her body and soul being independent entities, that they were more like a diamond wrapped in fabric instead of a woven tapestry of two different colours.
And yet when she activates her power, she is involuntarily reminded of the idea that the soul and the body are two separate things. How else can she describe what happens? How else can she describe the unsticking of her conscious mind from the physical flesh that tethers it to the mortal plane, how else can she describe how she rises effortlessly into the air and leaves her body behind, how else can she describe the feeling of sensing the world around her without eyes or ears or hands or a nose or a mouth? It startles her so bad that the hold she has on her ability slips for a crucial second—and she's back in her body, reeling at having a face and a heart and feet again.
So. Astral projecting is an interesting experience.
At first, Gem is mildly disappointed about her superpower. Especially when she compares it to what she assumes the other Players have—maybe summoning lightning, maybe slowing down time? Those are so much cooler than astral projection. But as she continues to use it, she begins to realize its benefits. Despite lacking the organs, she realizes her senses are still fully intact in her projected form. She can see hollowed-out caverns beneath the ground, hidden traps scattered across the landscape, and hidden bunkers tucked away underneath others' bases. She can scout and see what other Players are doing, watch their every move without anyone realizing. She feels omniscient.
The way she moves through the server is difficult to describe. It feels inaccurate to liken the sensation to swimming—swimming implies the action of moving through a substance, and, separated from her body, Gem no longer feels anything. It feels inaccurate to liken the sensation to flying—flying, like swimming, implies effort needed to reach this result, and Gem is moving through the world effortlessly.
Perhaps the closest way to describe the sensation is that she's watching.
And being able to astral project has another unexpected benefit too. When Gem uses her power one time, she discovers she's not alone. She hears familiar voices, sees ghostly impressions of familiar faces. Hello?! she demands, as Skizz's and Mumbo's previous chatter turns into disembodied peals of laughter. What is happening right now! It's so nice to talk with them again; in this brief scene, Gem can forget that they're dead and gone, she can forget the multiple murders and the lives swapped and exchanged between the three, trading cards slid face-down across a table to eager sets of hands. It feels almost as if they're a normal group of friends catching up over an impromptu lunch. But their conversation comes to an abrupt halt when thunder sounds in the distance and Skizz and Mumbo are summoned away.
It's Grian who comes up with a plan to utilise Gem's ability in a different way. "If I take your power," Grian starts, "and Joel goes and kills Skizz and Mumbo, we can go and talk to them. They only have allegiance when they're alive. If Joel can kill them" —his eyes have an intense gleam to them as he lays out the steps of his plan— "and keep them in the astral plane, we can have a conversation with them about a plan."
Gem readily agrees, after an interjection to point out she's already been talking to Skizz and Mumbo this entire session. Joel's form of agreement is to set off across the server, sword in hand, to track down and kill the zombies. With the plan established, she once again slips away from her body.
*✧⛯✧*
You realize, immediately, that something is wrong.
The previous times you projected yourself, there was still a sense of something tying you to your body, tethering you to reality, like the anchor of a ship preventing it from drifting away on the sea. But this time, you don't feel that. Instead of that connection back to your body there is nothing, an emptiness that a slowly rising panic is quick to fill. You are unmoored, cast out on the sea with no idea of how to return, a kite with its string cut. You are lost, you’ve slipped into the space between strings of code, finding yourself in the blank margins that no one is meant to see.
It is dark. No, that's not quite right . . . Before, you were a set of eyes traversing the world, passing through solid ground and walls as easily as a fish slipping through water. Now, surrounding you completely, is a—nothingness. Surrounding you is what was initially perceived to be a blurry black or grey or dark something, the sight that greets a person when they close their eyes or place a piece of fabric over their face. It is an absence of light—or an absence of vision.
You try to explore your surroundings, but without eyes or a body there are no landmarks to determine how much distance you're covering—if you're even moving at all. Even though, before, you did not feel the ground under your feet, you could still orientate your location in the world. There: the spawn island and its ring of bushes. There: in the distance, a trio of colourful parrots. There: your teammate, running after another Player, unsheathing his sword as he goes. Where are those familiar sights now?
There's something else here.
You realize that with the instinctiveness of a rabbit being hunted, of a static charge gathering in a thundercloud moments before lightning tears through the sky. Following this discovery is a helpless mental floundering around, a frantic and animal casting about with senses that are strange to you without their physical counterparts attached. You have no eyes to see danger, no ears to hear approaching footsteps. You have no limbs to defend yourself with. You are completely and utterly helpless.
These newly noticed something elses feel limitless, they feel large in an incomprehensible way; you feel that if you had eyes in this plane of existence, you would not be able to fit them within your field of vision. They feel infinite, they feel like looking up into the sky at midnight and catching a glimpse of the cosmos, all glittering endless black and strangeness and eternity. You are within them, immersed in them. Yet whatever they are, they pay you no heed—but they could, they could. You are a guppy floating in perfectly still, clear water, completely vulnerable to any sharks idly circling. What is there to stop them from turning in your direction and swallowing you whole?
Although you do not have a body, you can’t help the instinct to stay as quiet and still and unnoticeable as possible. As you try to make yourself inconspicuous, you catch flashes of sentience from these beings, barely-there flickers of their perception of reality, and from these miniscule snatches you learn just the beginnings of what these things truly are.
And you realize that you are a gnat at the base of a mountain, staring up and up and up, overcome by your own sense of insignificance. Because, while you do not know what these are, you can sense just how important they are, how consequential these entities are to the Universe. A memory comes to you, a comparison of a diamond wrapped in fabric—but that comparison is not quite apt in this situation. If the Universe and these beings were to separate, reality would collapse. The Universe and these beings are a tapestry of two different colours woven so tightly into each other that, if unraveled, would cause irrevocable damage.
Emotion overtakes you, an aching, all-consuming sensation that reverberates through your non-existent form. It is horror; it is awe. Horror because you cannot comprehend these things in their entirety. Awe because you cannot comprehend these things in their entirety. How similar horror and awe are to each other—like a sob and a laugh. Those actions both have near-identical physical processes, do they not? A tightness in the chest, tears forming in the eyes, an ache in the face. Your horror-awe feels the same.
You watching the other Players was not at the magnitude of what these things are. It was laughable to presume your paltry snooping on others was the same as the total omniscience of them; in comparison to them you are an unborn fetus submerged in your amniotic fluid of short-livedness, opening your eyes to darkness and thinking that your surroundings constitute the entire Universe.
All of a sudden you feel them turn to you—they’ve spotted you, they know that you’re here, they see you. Although there is no retaliation, you still freeze and cower, a shaking and vulnerable creature underneath the eye of a cresting storm. You sense that you’ve uncovered a sanctified law of existence, pried into something you were not allowed to know; you are an ant that has fancied itself to have the ability to read an ancient and venerated scripture. And they perceive you, they watch—
You were not supposed to see this.
*✧⛯✧*
The reintroduction of Gem's awareness to her body is a shock of dousing ice water. A reflexive seizing up of every muscle in her body, her lungs and diaphragm dragging air into her chest through a sharp breath before she can even think to breathe. A wet squelch sounds in her ears; the sound of every cell in her body realizing there's something occupying it once more. There's a disconnect between her mind and her body, she realizes abruptly—although she knows that her soul and body are joined once more, her senses don't register it; it's like they're lagging several paces behind what is actually happening.
The ground beneath her feet wobbles. Like an animal cut loose from a hanging trap, she falls to her knees, barely manages to catch herself from collapsing face-first on the ground. The pain of her palms striking the ground is what lets her know that her senses are returning at last. Then the smell of lake water, cold and damp. Then the sight of her fingers digging into the earth beneath her, curved into claws and stiff like rigor mortis. Then the sharp, coppery tang of blood on her tongue (had she bitten the inside of her mouth without her realizing?). Then, finally, the sound of voices, indistinct and blurry as if she were hearing them underwater, before they slowly coalesce into intelligible words.
"—you good? Gem?" Joel. He's crouched down beside Gem, an anxious hand on her shoulder and an anxious expression to match. Grian hovers in front of them, arms folded and teeth worrying at his lower lip.
Her head is spinning, spinning, a seed pitched skyward by the wind. She tries to ask a question—her lungs spasm and a ragged cough is wrenched from her throat. When she does manage to speak, her voice comes out thin and hoarse in a way that makes her want to shatter something. "How . . . long was I gone?"
Joel gives her a funny look. He says, "What do you mean 'gone'?"
"Gem, you," Grian starts, then abruptly stops. He taps a finger against his bicep, opens his mouth to say something and visibly reconsiders what he was about to say, repeats the whole routine a couple more times. Right before Gem demands he just spit it out and tell her, he finally explains, "I couldn't find you in the astral plane. I took your power and left my body, and you just . . . weren't there." At noticing Gem's rising alarm, he hurriedly concludes, "Joel ended up punching you and that brought you back. But, like—it wasn't—it was less than five seconds between when you used your power and now."
Gem isn't sure whether to take Grian's words as reassurance or a further cause for alarm. It felt like it took much longer than that for her to come back from—from . . .
She doesn't remember. Already, the memories of where she'd gone are dissipating, growing faded and fictitious like a dream viewed in the morning. They are wisps of smoke that her mental fingers pass through as she grasps searchingly at them, as ephemeral and quick to vanish as snow melting under the sun. They've become so intangible that it's easy to convince herself that nothing has happened. She reasons to herself that it probably was only a few seconds that had transpired, exactly how Grian and Joel described. And if such a short amount of time had passed, it's absurd to think that anything significant could have happened at all. Gem looks up at her allies and gives them a reassuring smile, tells them that she's back and it's all fine and normal.
Grian looks like he's about to say something else, but then he returns Gem's smile with one of his own. "Right, if you're okay, then let's continue on with the plan."
Yes, the plan. Simple and straightforward: leave her body, talk to the ghosts, let Grian have whatever conversation he wants to with them. Yet even as she stands back up, dusts off her knees and prepares to astral project once again, she can't extricate the niggling little thorn of doubt that's lodged itself in the back of her mind. She can't shake off the echoes of her body's violent reaction when her soul had returned.
Where was it she'd gone? What had she seen?