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Mapicc does really try to keep himself busy by designing his room. The yellow is eye-searing and omnipresent but he can use whatever blocks of red he has in his inventory to fix that, see? It’s a-okay! He can do this!
It should be nice. He should be having fun—he is in what should be a safe place, he has a couple of relaxing tasks he can do, he has no one to bother him but Zam, who seems content to sit alone in her room and do whatever-the-fuck.
Oh, Zam must be loving this butter-yellow base. Lucky fucker. But then again, if it was a blood-red base, Mapicc would probably like it just as much as Zam is liking this, so he doesn’t really have a leg to stand on. But, yellow, really? Yellow? It’s like the ugliest color Mapicc has ever seen. At least neon yellow has that like, zing, but this three-different-sides-of-a-bamboo-block aesthetic that this base has is not doing it for him. It’s not a good color, too tan to be exiting but too yellow to be soothing. It’s a nothing-color.
God, bro, he is not locked in. His mind is ping-ponging around. Where was he? Yeah. This is safe. He is in a safe place. He is safe. He is safe. He is safe.
He is staring at the walls. He has apparently stopped decorating his room, and is now staring forlornly at the walls. Huh. Okay. No, that’s fine. And normal. Mapicc loves staring at walls.
The walls are entirely made of bamboo blocks. Hasn’t he been over this? He hates them, though. They make him angry. Well, everything kind of makes him angry, the way that he is right now, but that’s not really important. What he means is that he is.
He is staring at the wall. He was decorating his room earlier.
When is Spoke going to get back? Spoke? He misses Spoke. He wants the hear the abysmally loud sound of that elevator coming down and feel the light-of-his-life the sun, the sun on his face. He wants to see Spoke again.
Maybe Spoke is dead—
He shakes his head. He stops looking at the walls—which are made of bamboo blocks and netheract that he put in there because he loves the color red—and looks at his hands instead. Human hands, with bitten-down fingernails and half-covered by the ratty hem of his ratty red sweater. Red sweater. Red. It’s so bright, it almost hurts his eyes.
Is he tired? He could probably get a nap in before Spoke gets back, if Spoke ever gets back, and the sound of the elevator would doubtless wake him up. It’s not like—Spoke gave him one job. Spoke told him to decorate his room. His room is decorated.
Bed. Netheract blocks in the walls. His inventory is shot to all hell, and it’s not like he can decorate a room with hoarded strength potions or grapples covered with the blood of lawmen or the few invisibility potions that he nicked off of the bodies of spies, so his options are kind of limited.
And it’s not like he can leave the base, to get new materials, either. Duh. So. Well. He can’t really decorate his room any further.
He is out of netheract. So he is sitting on the ground. He has bamboo blocks in his inventory, and he catches himself dragging the pads of his fingers across their ridges. The bumps in between the slats of bamboo. The grooves. This was a bamboo plant once. This base was a grove of bamboo once. Everything changes.
If he pressed his ear to the wall, would the bamboo tell him what it felt like to be a grove? Mapicc has been on this server for so little time in comparison to the amount of time that it has existed. It is hard to remember that there were ever things before him and Spoke, but there certainly were people, and there certainly were trees. Bamboo. Entire caves full of ores and mobs untouched by human hands.
Once, Spawn was full of animals. Once, Mapicc was somewhere else. Once, Mapicc was not afraid. Mapicc tries to remember this. Once, the world was full of love. Once, the world was full of beauty. Once, there was no pain and no hurt.
There was once a Mapicc so young he had never felt pain. And a Spoke, too, and a Zam, and a Leo, and a Jumper. Once, there were five individual stars in a night sky, none of them close enough to touch or close enough to hold. None of them close enough to hurt eachother.
Mapicc takes his hand out of his inventory and lays down on the ground. The grooves in between the slats of bamboo dig into his back, but he ignores it. He lays down on his back. Like a baby. He imagines that the world was never full of hatred.
The bamboo was once a grove, and this underground base was once a whole, undisturbed plane of stone. Once, that wall touched that wall, and there was no air to keep them apart, no bamboo-walls to keep them from looking at each-other.
Once, Mapicc and Spoke and Jumper and Leo and Zam were one soup of code, a soup of code with the stone and with the bamboo and with this entire server, all together, all holding hands and touching, with no air or evil or hatred to keep them apart.
There must have been an original sin, Mapicc thinks, to have made this an Unstable Universe, but that tipping point means that there was a world before evil touched this place.
The server holds Mapicc in its arms now, inside of it, inside of the stone that has been here since this chunk was loaded for the first time, or maybe since the seed was generated, and tells him, you know—be not afraid of those you run from, of those around you. Be not afraid.
One day, Spoke or no Spoke, you will crawl your way out of this this place and under the light of the sun. One day, you will not have to worry about Spoke, or Mapicc, or Jumper, or Leo, or the many dead, which have fallen to your feet like flower petals.
It is so still in this base, so quiet. Mapicc’s breath sounds like a firework in this air, bright and still and smelling of old bamboo and Mapicc’s own soap and Mapicc’s own sweat and the brimstone of hell.
He looks up at the same dizzying patterns of slats in the ceiling, and they could have been slats in a floor far below him, he would have no way of knowing. He has no orientation in space. He is not a human being, he is an idea, a though, pressed into stillness.
He is thinking too much. It is too quiet. One day, and he tells himself this like a worshiper assuring themselves of the eventual return of their God, Spoke will return. And there will be love. And there will be light. And Spoke, ever-kind and ever-smart and ever-driven, will take in hand the gentle mist that Mapicc has become and condense it back into a liquid, and pour that liquid into Mapicc-the-body’s mouth. And Mapicc will be a person, again.
He is rambling. His thoughts are not coherent. But who cares about that? His tasks are over. He can rest.
He should be asleep, but he is too afraid to fall asleep, or—or not afraid enough. What if Spoke dies? He has been doused in a bathtub full fo ice water. What if Spoke dies? What is Spoke does not come back? What does he care? He should care more, he should be pacing around his room like a caged animal, but he is not. He is stuck in this room, in this body, in this situation, and he feels nothing. Would he care if Spoke died out there? Should he?
Spoke dragged him into this mess. Without Spoke, he would not be going through any of this. Without Spoke, where would he be? At Spawn, unchunkbanned and unpained, all of his past unwound and unwounded out of his chest. The time unspools from his mind. It’s hard to not want to set everything on fire and start again.
It’s hard to not want to get on his knees and pray to Leo for absolution. Did Spoke forget everything that Leo did for them in the mafia? Did Spoke forget how much worse it was before him, how much worse after?
Mapicc can’t—he can’t look at Leo and feel anything but an ankle-deep sadness. Mapicc can’t look at Spoke and feel anything but an ankle-deep sadness. They are fighting a loosing battle. They are running a loosing race.
There is no way to burn the world down. There is no way to get out of this—no way other than through, and there is no guarantee he will survive that. He is trapped in this shitty yellow base. He is trapped in this hopeless, traumatizing situation. He is trapped behind the wheel of the trolley in the trolley problem. No matter what he does, someone will die. No matter what he does, there will be more pain.
He tries to make that feel okay. He lays down and presses himself back into stillness, into calm. If he is to die, he will do so with a serene smile, knowing he is going back where he came from. And he will see happiness again, peace again.
He wouldn’t be getting like this if Spoke didn’t leave him alone, and Spoke wouldn’t leave him alone if he trusted Mapicc to survive the battlefield. Did Spoke forget that he was supposed to be the pvper?
Whatever. It doesn’t fucking matter. He’ll die or he’ll live, and Spoke will die or he will live, and Zam will die or she will live, and Leo will die or he will live, and Jumper will die, or she will live. And Mapicc will have no part in it. Even if he could., his influence will be taken by Spoke.
But that’s okay. Who is he without Spoke? What does he have without Spoke?