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It was done. Spoke and Mapicc were safe, tucked away into a heavily fortified corner of the world. Impassible from both height limits.
They were safe. Safe. Safe. Safe.
So why did it feel so bad?
Spoke wanted this, didn’t he? Null could never touch them again. Never ever again. Never again in their perfect little nook.
Towering walls with rows upon rows of self generating obsidian surrounded them, carved with intricate colors and murals feigning the beauty outside.
Turns out you can get a lot for a quarter stack of emeralds and former relations. Something about starving artists.
Spoke could feel his mind corroding, numbing panic ingrained into his psyche. Fight or flight was his auto pilot, running for so long. Deep seeded panic when Mapicc drank that bucket of milk, his eyes aching and dead.
He didn’t seem like that anymore. But Spoke was getting worse. So much worse. Like all his whimsy was being leeched away from him to Mapicc; like a mosquito.
“Mapicc?” he could feel himself slipping, overcome by a pure primal fear of the ordinary. An animal trapped in a cage of his own making.
“Yeah?” Mapicc was right next to him, always right next to him. He sounded a little tired, staring into the fake sky with its little light bulbs pretending to be stars.
Spoke felt like those pretend stars.
“What day is it? I— I’m losing track of time here. I don’t even know if the sun is synced.” He scooted towards Mapicc, stray hand clinging to the muted red of Mapicc’s sweater sleeve.
“Oh, uh. I’d have to check.” That sweater used to be so bright, bright and beautiful and free of scuffs. Free of holes and blood and dirt.
What happened?
Mapicc got up, humming. They moved slowly through the meadows and forests and gardens, all designed free of imperfections. Everything was dazzling, glittery greenery assaulting his eyes. It was all so vibrant and full of life.
It sickened him. Sickened him to the pit of his stomach and more. It felt so wrong, being trapped here surrounded by beauty, surrounded by life and murals and empty buildings.
The men behind it all, Horace Altman and his team of builders, they could make a dirt house look pretty.
A dirt house like that old spawn one, with its crooked roof and mismatched black concrete letters. All evidence of it disappeared under the same man’s directory, replaced with a castle and crops and villages.
He wondered if a single block of the old spawn remained. Not the Mafia spawn, with its obsidian prison put to use as highways, but the true spawn. The spawn with the half-assed houses made by terrible builders, the spawn with Parrot’s bird cage. And Mapicc’s red hole in the wall. Maybe even Prince Zam’s empire.
Old landmarks never survive.
That was the nature of anarchy servers, after all.
They stuttered down a city that looked like it had lived a thousand lifetimes, artificially captured by still hands. Because nothing decayed like these did, with moss slowly crawling up brutalist stone houses. Plaster chipped off bricks. Wood hanging from slants. Plants everywhere.
Somehow still beautiful.
Things in Minecraft decayed from lava casts and burnt wood, creeper holes and mine-cart traps. Not like this. Not from nature taking its course. Not from gravity dragging cement into the Earth’s grave.
They passed a sagging power-line, beelined down an alleyway, and came out to a small shack. It was barely a house, but Spoke insisted they don’t use any of Horace’s beauty.
Mapicc didn’t care if they did or not, he wasn’t able to go anywhere without Spoke behind him anyway.
Spoke waited outside as Mapicc sorted through their chests. It took a while, only for Mapicc to realize that his book was scooted to a corner under his bed, and lured Spoke inside to fetch it for him.
He was thinner than before, so he reached it quite easily, using his elbows to shuffle out with the book in hand. Was Mapicc tracking the days here? He hesitated, the weighted leather firm in his hands. Staring at the cover.
Mapicc reached over and grabbed the end with one hand, giving a light tug.
“Oh. Sorry.” Spoke released the book, swallowing.
Mapicc just smiled. One of those awkward smiles when you accidentally make eye contact with someone you didn’t want to talk to. He tapped Spoke on the shoulder with two fingers, moving past him to the overgrown plant life outside the shack.
They climbed up a rickety iron fire escape, moving past barely working AC units and shattered windows. This particular apartment was a nice reddish terracotta, with black soot crawling out the windows and leeching from the ground. It seems the rusty fire escape wasn’t much use.
It was fun, making up fantasies for a world unlived in. He wondered if the fire was a “workplace accident,” or controlled, with soot scrubbed into the brick by hand.
Mapicc was already sitting on the roof when Spoke made his way up, he changed pages from what he was staring at almost instantaneously to Spoke’s arrival.
Spoke dropped down beside him, pretending to focus on the sunrise.
His throat felt dry the moment he was compelled to talk. “It’s—“ he swallowed, "Friday, right?”
Mapicc blinked, seemingly reading the book for the first time. Spoke got a peek at the hastily scribbled characters. It had dates sprawled across the paper with a sentence marking what happened that day.
“No it’s—“ He flipped the page, writing down the newest day with the sunrise. “It’s Thursday, bro.”