Archive of Our Own

Egg hates fights. 

Not because he can’t take them— god, no. Give him a high vantage point, or better yet, his elytra, and he can snuff out hundreds of lives with the flick of his bowstring. Even if he prefers studying battle tactics over actually being involved in them, the all-seeing eye doesn’t miss shots. 

No, keeping himself alive isn’t the problem; it’s Wemmbu that he has to worry about. 

His best friend is, somehow, the most violent yet also harmless person Egg has ever known; no matter the scenario, Wemmbu's first instinct is always to fight first, think later. This normally wouldn’t be an issue—on this type of server, being a pacifist is basically asking to be banned—except for the fact that he doesn't have a modicum of the fighting ability needed to actually make true to his words. It doesn’t seem to matter what armour, potions, or weapons Egg gives him, even if it’s a fully maxed-out Netherite sword— with Wemmbu’s abysmal technique, it would be just as ineffective as if it were wooden. 

Sometimes, he theorises that something went wrong when the universe was creating his best friend, and somewhere along the line, a few ingredients had been left out. Egg has never met anybody quite like him before. Though, Wemmbu says the same about him, so that’s probably why they get along so well.

He’s tried everything, from finding teachers—too broke to afford that, and most left after they realised Egg wouldn’t spar with them—to trying to teach Wemmbu himself, which went similarly terrible— archery is Egg’s best play-style by far, but also easily Wemmbu’s worst. By now, Egg has accepted that maybe some people just aren’t made for fighting, and Wemmbu just happens to be one of the unlucky few. It doesn’t help that he seems fully unwilling to properly learn.

So, each and every time Wemmbu does piss off the wrong person, Egg is left with the role of having to both pull him back from whatever confrontation he’s got himself tangled up in, and also fight it in his place. 

He doesn’t really mind; PvP isn’t so bad when you’re good at it. It’s boring, yes, but Wemmbu seems to really enjoy watching how they play out, so Egg does it for him. And so they don’t die, but, mostly for him.

He’s used to it, by now— as soon as they bump into the wrong person, or Wemmbu takes offense to something he hears, Egg’s already preparing to swoop in and take care of the situation. He imagines it’s not dissimilar to being the caretaker of a particularly rabid animal, or a very immature little brother, and that makes it worth it.

Wemmbu’s the kind of person who’s never been subtle in his entire life, all fiery emotion and violent hostility, and he always manages to bring out the same emotions in whoever he’s arguing with. He attributes it to how he was raised; Egg thinks that’s just how he is. Nature versus nurture— either way, he’s a freak of. And, either way, he’s loud. Unfailingly, in the forever of time that they’ve known each other, Wemmbu has always been like constant noise pollution in Egg’s periphery. 

So, one morning, when Egg wakes up to a silent home, he immediately knows something’s wrong.

When he gets up, he actually feels well-rested. That’s the first warning sign, a full nine hours of comfortable sleep in their shared base, because if Wemmbu was around, Egg has no doubt in mind that he should have been woken hours ago by some sort of noise.

Instead, the base is quiet. He senses before hearing it; in an instant, it sends a feeling of foreboding through him of complete and utter wrongness. There is no tossing-and-turning body in the bed near his, no grating, nagging voice, no hand shaking him awake and dragging him by the wrist onto another genuinely harebrained scheme, adventure, and/or quest. 

“...Wemmbu?” Egg asks.

If this were a prank, it would be at this point that Wemmbu would jump out from behind the door, or from under the bed— he’d be too impatient to create actual suspense, all impulse and urgency and without a single drop of tactful planning. Egg waits, off-kilter, in suspense. It feels wrong; the ensuing quiet stillness after the sound of his voice dies out is even worse.

The base remains silent. Wemmbu’s bed is empty and cold. 

Egg knows, then, that he’s fucked.

“You are certain it’s him?” Someone hisses, britishly.

A sharp tut. “Andromeda, when have you ever found me to make a mistake? Though…” the blurry silhouette leans closer until Wemmbu can smell how expensive their perfume is, “I daresay even I am slightly bewildered. I find myself disappointed, to say the least, at how sharply our dear colleague’s standards seem to have declined.”

Wemmbu’s head has that distinct chloroform headache feeling a guy can only experience so many times before he starts recognising that he’s been kidnapped from the get-go. The room around him is hazy through his migraine; it smells damp, like he’s in somebody’s basement.

“Of course, Nathaniel. Alas, I am, too, alarmed at this outcome. This… thing— I can only imagine how terribly he has been tarnishing Eggchan’s very image and reputation…” she trails off with a world-weary sigh. “It’s simply ghastly.”

Still feigning unconsciousness, Wemmbu feels the faintest pang of indignation. Not at the weird person’s words, but the fact that he seems to have been kidnapped by 18th-century monarchy cosplayers. There really is a first time for anything.

“Indeed it is,” the man sniffs. “Ah. He wakes.”

Who, me? Wemmbu doesn’t say aloud. If he keeps pretending to be asleep, maybe this will actually become a dream, and he’ll wake up somewhere much nicer. A flower field, perhaps, with Egg nearby.

“Do not masquerade your repose, fool,” the woman says with contempt. He doesn’t need to look at her to hear the sneer in her voice.

Wemmbu cracks an eye open reluctantly. 

There are two people, towering over him where he’s on the floor. No, that’s not right either— he’s lying on something much softer. A bed, shoved against the wall of what looks to be a typical iron-barred underground cell. 

He gets up warily. The cell is dark, lit by dimmed lamps, but even in the low lighting he can see how stupidly elaborate these people’s clothes are, all high starched collars and gilded gold buttons. He rubs his eyes, just to be certain, but sure enough, these people sneering down at him really are wannabe aristocrats. And Egg says Wemmbu’s fashion taste is ‘archaic’.

“Uh, hello?” he says.

The man levies him a steady look. “Hello.”

“Why do you look like that?” Wemmbu can’t help but ask. 

He blinks, taken aback. “What do you—”

“Don’t chatter with him, Nathaniel,” the woman butts in. 

The man clears his throat. “Right. I forgot myself, Guildmaster, I apologise.”

“Why am I here?” Wemmbu continues, when his first question goes unanswered. “Who are you people?”

Nathaniel puffs up his chest. “We are representatives of the scholars’ guild of King Theobald’s kingdom.” 

Which only raises more questions. Wemmbu doesn’t even know where to start.

“You are affiliated with Eggchan, yes?” the woman—the Guildmaster—asks him. 

“Yeah, I know Egg,” Wemmbu says, immediately on guard. “Why? What do you want with him?” 

She crosses her arms, looking down her nose at him. “Eggchan’s proper role in this server is as a scholar. You have intoxicated his mind with trivial desires, pursuits undeserving of his capabilities. His rightful place is with us like-minded researchers, not fraternising with a nobody like yourself.”

“We want you to leave him,” the man adds on, “Leave him, let us add him back to our ranks, and henceforth never speak or interact with him again.”

“What? No.” Wemmbu says immediately. “No, bro, are you stupid?”

“Why not?” The Guildmaster demands. “You have not yet even heard our terms. We have rooms of shulkers overflowing with gold, diamonds, netherite. The king pays us handsomely for our services— this, we will give to you.”

“How much are we talking?” 

“More than you can even conceptualise.”

More wealth equals more guards they can afford equals a harder time getting out of this place on his own, so he can only hope that they’re bluffing.

“And all I have to do is leave Egg behind?” He pretends to consider it.

“And to not interfere as we return him back to us. Where he rightfully belongs.”

Most of the time, kidnappers just want him for information about Egg, or as a bargaining chip. He’s sort of a bargaining chip here too, but in the oddest possible way. It's as if they're Egg's toxis exes trying to get him back— it's all sorts of weird. Wemmbu’s heard of the guild through Egg’s occasional rambles about his past; he doesn’t remember much of it being good. To think they’ve come for him, after all these years, as if they have some sort of claim over him.

“And why do a bunch of book nerds care so much about Egg?” He taunts. “Dude, he left you guys for a reason, he’s not just gonna come back and be one of you again.”

“We will convince him,” the man says, self-assuredly. “If you agree to comply, when you are removed from the picture, there will be nothing tethering him to this pointless lifestyle anymore. He will see what’s best for him, in the end.”

Wemmbu wants to laugh in his face— clearly, these people haven’t met the same pigheadedly stubborn person he calls his best friend. 

He doesn’t, because, despite how comical this whole situation is, he is still, y'know, a hostage. 

“And if I don’t cooperate?” he asks. “If I tell him you guys drugged and kidnapped me in the middle of the night, he’ll get so mad you’ll be lucky if he doesn’t burn this whole place down. He’s probably actively crashing out at this exact moment.” 

Like he's threatening to tattle on them. The kindergartener approach has done him wonders in the past, so he's putting his pride aside again.

The Guildmaster’s face twitches. “It would do you good to reconsider.”

“Yeah, it’s still a no from me, bro,” Wemmbu snarks. “Look, if you let me go now, I won’t tell him this happened. How about it?” 

Not that Egg wouldn’t wheedle the information out of Wemmbu himself, but what these people don’t know won’t hurt them.

“You are correct. You won’t tell him this happened,” the Guildmaster decides with a smile. 

“So I can go?” Wemmbu asks hopefully.

“On the contrary, you won’t be leaving at all. Not until you agree to our terms.”

“I’m just genuinely not gonna do any of that. You can do what you want to me, but I’m staying with Egg. Just wait until he finds this place.”

“You have no idea where we are, do you?” she smirks.

Wemmbu stays silent. 

“We’re in the heart of the kingdom, hundreds of blocks below sea level. This is the underground research facility made especially for the kingdom’s greatest minds; the king’s most proficient guards rotate this building on constant watch. This facility was constructed years after Eggchan left us— he’ll never know to even look for it.”

So, he might be fucked.

And, to be completely honest, this is all fine. Egg’s fine. He’s perfectly, perfectly calm, and nonchalant, and confident in his ability to locate his most botted chungus of a best friend.

Yeah, it’ll all be right. It’ll be all right. Alright. 

The person underneath his sword yelps when, while he’s spiralling, the blade accidentally sinks deeper into her neck.  

“Oh, shoot, bro, that’s my bad,” Egg says, lifting it slightly. 

Killing the person you’re grilling for information is, like, the number one rookie interrogation mistake; this whole debacle has really made him sloppy. He might give her a golden apple if she knows enough to make her deserving of staying alive.

“I swear, I swear I don’t know anything,” she gasps out desperately. “I already told you, I don’t even know who you are, or this Wemmbu person, I didn’t see him get taken or whatever, just please, please please let me go.”

Nothing in her expression betrays a lie. 

“Are you lying to me?” he asks, just in case. “You really know nothing at all?”

“Yes, yes, I don’t. Just let me go, I’m sorry, I don’t want to die,” she pleads. “I don’t know you, I—”

A flick of his sword’s pommel against her unguarded temple, and she drops like a sack of bricks at his feet. He considers her, and his hand twitches on his sword’s leather-bound hilt; inutility begets punishment, no? Like, survival of the fittest and all that it entails, so maybe he should do her a favour and ban her before she gets taken out by some other less merciful person.

Footsteps behind him, and his bow is drawn, string taut for the ambush.

It’s another one, appearing from where she’s been hiding in the other room this entire time. She looks terrified.

“Go away,” the kid shrieks at him. 

She flinches away when she sees the weapon he’s holding, and it strikes Egg just how small this one is, years younger than the first. She can’t be more than ten, a literal infant, white-knuckling what looks like a kitchen knife at him. Terrible form. 

“Have you seen Wemmbu?” Egg asks the kid. “My friend, Wemmbu. He’s kinda short, purple—"

“Go away,” she yells again, somehow shriller than before. “Don’t touch my sister.”

This is all so absolutely pointless. The fifth base he’s dropped by and interrogated for information, all to get exactly zero answers, and now there’s a toddler waving a fruit knife at him. 

“Why are you all so useless?” he mumbles to himself. “How has nobody seen him? Not a single fucking soul, why are you guys even alive?”

The kid’s face screws up in confusion, but she plants her feet and lifts her tiny blade higher.

Egg considers shooting at her— and missing, obviously. Just to scare her a little.

But it won’t accomplish anything. It won’t give him the answers he needs. He’s running out of time.

Equipping his elytra, he flies away to the next base over.

Over the next few days, Wemmbu notices some patterns. 

It’s always the Guildmaster who stays, while the man leaves to do god knows what, though he returns periodically, looking more and more morose each time. In all of Wemmbu's time there, he only sees them two and the rotating guards at the front door. 

The furniture is sparse— he has the bed, which he discovers is bolted to the floor, and not much else. In addition to the guards, the Guildmaster remains on constant surveillance, but she sits outside of the cell in what looks to be her own office, complete with a heavy desk and several bookshelves. Because of course she has the prison cell inside of her office. 

There are no windows or clocks, at least none in his line of sight, so the only indication of time that he can access are the daily meals— even then, he’s pretty sure they’ve been giving the food to him at weird times to throw him off purposefully.

On the second day, the man comes in with a tray of food for Wemmbu.

The dry, gravelly bread is nothing of note. The opportunity, however, is— aside from meal deliveries, there is no other time that he gets to see the door open. What small view he does have of the outside is that it’s a hallway, no doubt leading off to several others, and then to what he assumes must be a way of getting back up to the surface.

It’s lunch time, he guesses. He’s been guessing a lot of things from his corner of the room, where he’s spent most the week sulking in. It’s the one closest to the door; all the while, the Guildmaster has been sitting at her desk, watching him furtively from behind her numerous books. 

There’s the jingle of keys as the other kidnapper fumbles for the deadbolt. Wemmbu waits, the Guildmaster’s eyes are burning a hole into the back of his head, and he doesn’t care what happens to him— if there’s a way out, as unlikely as it may be, he’ll be damned if he doesn’t try it.

The iron door creaks open. Wemmbu wastes no time. 

Springing to his feet, he shoves the man to his side—“Nathaniel!”, the Guildmaster shrieks, as the man tumbles to the floor—and sprints out into the hallway. 

The walls are the same as the ones on the inside of his room are the same as the floor and ceiling are the same as the smooth blade of a stone sword are the same regardless of what he may wish they were. It’s dark.

Freedom feels good, even if it only lasts a few footfalls.

When he turns the corner, there are guards at the end of the hallway. Full netherite, enchanted and everything— quite scary. Fuck that.

He turns back to the direction he came from, but they’ve sandwiched him in.

They chain his ankle to the leg of the bed for his good behaviour.

Egg takes a breath. Then another. Carefully, he wipes the red off his sword until it’s a gleaming black again, then checks over the rest of his armour. 

Clean. That’s good.

Raising a fist, he knocks lightly on the door of the final base. Last one in the three–hundred block radius around his and Wemmbu’s base, after two days and fifteen hours, after seventy-ish bases destroyed, after zero leads found and not a single soul aware of where Wemmbu has been taken. 

If this one’s as useless as he thinks it’ll be—

The door creaks open, and a face peeks through the gap. The person visibly pales at the sight of him, and goes to close the door immediately.

Egg puts a gloved hand out and forces them to a stop.

“Have you seen Wemmbu?” he asks the chungus. Steady voice, steady hands.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I haven’t. Please don’t kill me,” they beg in a rush. Their eyes are wide, fixed on his face. 

Egg looks to his left, at his reflection in their window. Oh, so that’s where he forgot to wipe. There’s blood splattered all across his face, painting his cheeks and forehead with dried and fresh alike. 

“I won’t hurt you if you tell me where he is,” Egg says, very reasonably.

“I don’t! I don’t know! We didn’t take him, I swear. I’ve seen— I’ve heard what you’ve been doing, they told us to evacuate but my— we didn’t have time, and— shit, shit, shit, please don’t kill us.” The person’s crying now, fat tears rolling down their face, as they try fruitlessly to pull the door shut in his face.

Why is it that they all beg and whine to stay alive, but never have any information to make their lives deserving of it?

“You’re as pathetic as the rest of them,” Egg informs them. 

It’s something Wemmbu would say, but he’s not around to do it, is he? Egg is so much funnier when Wemmbu’s around. Him as a solo act is too unbalanced— all violence, no humour. 

Well, Wemmbu was violent too, he supposes. Is. Because he’s still alive. Never mind the fact that Egg’s received no ransom, that there's been radio silence on all fronts ever since the day he was taken. He's still alive. He has to be. 

There’s blood on his sword again. God, that’s annoying— and he’d just cleaned it, too. 

“Are you truly just incapable of learning?” The Guildmaster’s voice echoes through the hallways. 

Wemmbu darts to the corner, holding his breath. The sawn-off end of the chain scrapes across the stone floor, deafening in the dead silence of the tunnels, and he curses internally.

He doesn’t know where he is— this is the first time he’s gotten this far. It’s dark in the labyrinth-esque mess of halls, and he can barely differentiate between open air and solid walls, but the guards must be using night vision or something, because when he lags for a second too long, one appears out of nowhere. Enchanted netherite casts faint purple waves, into his vision and he freezes in panic.

“Here, ma’am,” the guard calls out.

Wemmbu lunges at him, hoping to take advantage of the momentary distraction. 

The guard barely blinks, and a single beefy hand shoots out to pin him by the neck against the wall. Wemmbu strikes at him with his boot; it’s about as effective as kicking obsidian. 

“There you are,” the Guildmaster says, finally arriving. She sounds slightly out of breath, and it gives Wemmbu much more satisfaction than it should.

“Let me go,” he hisses back. His words come out kind of woozy. It’s probably from being shoved head-first into the wall.

“Were the chains not enough for you?” She sneers down at him. Even though she’s barely taller than him, she manages to turn the space of a few centimetres into a chasm of superiority.

“Let me—”

“You already know we never will.”

“Then I’ll escape. Even if Egg can’t find me, I’ll do it myself,” he grits out. 

The guard’s hand tightens around his neck.

“I suppose you’re right,” she agrees, and Wemmbu feels his own face morphing into confusion. “Chains aren’t enough. You,” she nods at the guard, “break his ankle.”

“Wait, wait, no—” 

The leg that’s been kicking half-heartedly at the guard’s chest is seized. There’s pressure, sudden and brutal. The crack is clean, precise. Somebody screams; his vision whites out, a million blinding stars, before it fades to still black.

The base is cold and silent. 

This is an already established fact. 

It’s just, it feels so completely and utterly incorrect that Egg wants to start screaming the second he enters what should be his home. The oppressive silence enshrouds him, buries him under its weight, Atlas beneath the Planet Earth.

There’s something deeply wrong with it. There’s something deeply wrong with him. And normally, Wemmbu would be by his side, ordering him around and being a public nuisance and making him human and now there’s nobody left. 

There has been no ransom. No hostage note. No information. 

No proof that Wemmbu ever existed in the first place, no proof that Egg has ever existed, been human, normal, alive, any and all of the above, in the first place.

No— no, wait.

On their kitchen counter lies a piece of paper Egg knows for a fact wasn’t there this morning.

Egg’s always told Wemmbu to just stay put in these situations, something about how he’s terrible at planning and terrible at stealth and ‘If I’m honest, they’ll probably just ban you when they get too annoyed at your bullshit, so just be quiet and let me take care of it, ok?’

And, logically, Wemmbu does understand where he’s coming from. They have a much higher chance of getting him out and in one piece if Egg’s there to ban everyone in their way. 

Anyhow, he is terrible at stealth. Subtlety is an art, and in this analogy, he is Helen Keller. 

But days pass and Egg never shows and Wemmbu’s starting to wonder if he’ll ever find him at all. 

It can’t hurt to try it on his own, can it?

The new terms of his kidnapping are that they’re never going to let him go, period. 

Well, the exact words, said by the kidnapper herself, are that, “Only after Egg agrees to return to us, will you be let free. We cannot trust you anymore, not with how irrational you have proven yourself to be in the past few days.”

Or something to that effect. Curled up on the floor, his ninth or tenth escape attempt thwarted by the guards once more, several ribs kicked in and a concussion to rival all concussions, it’s kind of hard to keep track of literally anything that’s currently going on. There’s a lot of verbal waffle that goes in one ringing ear and out the other. 

He knows for a fact that Egg would literally die before going back to being one of these snotty pricks. Therefore, Wemmbu’s probably never going to be let go at all, and Egg’s definitely currently losing his mind, wherever he is, and this whole situation just stinks. 

“I don’t understand you,” she says, a little after that, when Wemmbu’s slightly more conscious. “It has been, what, sixty hours, with how many failed escapes? Why can’t you just stay put? Why didn’t you agree to our terms? You’re doing this to yourself.”

“He’s never going to forgive you for this,” Wemmbu replies, words muffled by the ground that he’s currently speaking into. He’d get up to say it, look her in the eye, make it all threatening and serious, but his body refuses to cooperate. 

“He’ll never have to know.” 

And Wemmbu’s starting to believe it, too.

Come to the Kingdom's Capital. 

I will be awaiting your arrival. Do not concern yourself with an address; approach the gates, and I will find you instead.

Tomorrow, at dawn. Finally, we will meet again.

That’s all there is. No ultimatums, no threats or promises. Egg reads the letter until he’s memorised it, but the message holds no secrets or code to decipher. 

No information about Wemmbu, whether he’s currently safe or being held hostage or even alive. No information about the author themself, besides the confusing connotations of ‘again’, and all that it implies. It’s the type of puzzle Egg hates the most. 

“So, you guys aren’t even gonna torture me for information?” Wemmbu asks, some time later, between bites of an uncooked potato that tastes, remarkably, exactly like clay brick. Because he’s just a glutton for inedible food and punishment like that. “Not even an interrogation? I’m really feeling the love, over here.”

The Guildmaster’s glare could melt netherite, but she actually responds to his words. Wemmbu thinks she just pities him.

“Remind me, how many ribs did the guards break in your last escape attempt?”

Probably three to five, is his guess. The pain’s around that level, and Wemmbu would think it’s pretty depressing to know the exact degree of pain for how three to five broken ribs should feel, but the voice in his head telling him that sounds an awful lot like Egg, and thinking about Egg too much these days just makes him sad. 

It’s this, coupled with the still unhealed ankle and several other demobilising injuries, that have forced him to spend the past few days lying around in his cell, bored out of his mind. They’ve increased the number of guards outside, too— he learnt that the hard way.

“I’m just saying, you guys are scholars, and I’m a goldmine of information about everything Egg’s done since he was freed, just waiting to be studied, or whatever it is you guys do.”

He’s become so bored, in fact, that he’s decided to spend these past few days poking a conversation out of the legendary Guildmaster herself. It hasn’t worked very well; she’s extremely fond of biting one-liners and subtle insults, but seems uninterested in anything resembling an actual conversation. The best they get are arguments that go nowhere. However, Wemmbu will make do with what he gets.

She scoffs. “For the last time— this is not about you. You are a mere byproduct of our greater plan to return our elder scholar to us. This could be easier, you understand. If you had agreed to never approach Eggchan again, you could have been let go. Of course, it’s too late now.”

“And you understand that I never would have freaking done that. He hated it here— I wasn’t just gonna just sit back and let you guys force him back. You know, the first time I saw him smiling was months after we first met, when he learnt how to use a bow and shot a guy in the neck?”

“Barbaric and backwards.” 

“Yeah, fuck you too,” Wemmbu scowls. “Genuinely, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but what kind of shitty kidnapping is this? Good job, you broke half my limbs, and now I’m stuck here with nothing to do. Your people refuse to give me actual food, so I can’t heal, and all you’ve been doing is reading! Are you guys this unemployed, taking an innocent civilian out of his normal and completely harmless life? Me and Egg pay our taxes and everything— I know Theo wouldn’t stand for this.”

“King Theobald does not know this is happening. His chancellor gave us the authorisation to act as we see fit, and this is what we have deemed necessary. I am—” and she looks positively constipated as she says the next words, “—sorry, I suppose. Revolting as you are, you are also mostly innocent.”

“Hey, I agree. So, maybe, you should let me out, then?” Wemmbu prompts. What the hell is a chancellor?

“Not a chance, purple freak,” she immediately shuts down. But she seems to feel bad for him, like the way you feel towards a half-bald, one-legged, tail-less rat you see on the subway tracks begging his full-legged rat friends for a scrap of food. Half repulsion, half pity.

Crossing the room to the shelf, she picks up a stack of books before depositing them in a heap in front of the bars of the cell. 

“If you’re really that bored, you can entertain yourself with this,” she huffs. “You do know how to read, I hope.”

“Real nice person you are,” he retorts. “No wonder Egg’s just been raring to come back.”

He reaches for the top of the stack anyway.

The kingdom capital’s gates are grandiose and so extremely unnecessary. The guards greet Egg warily, but like the rest, know nothing about Wemmbu's location when asked. Or so they say. They're still suspicious, just like everyone else has been. 

Wemmbu would call him paranoid, but it isn’t paranoia when they really are out to get you. They already got Wemmbu, after all.

Egg moves on. Attacking the guards would launch a whole conflict, and he doesn’t have the time for that. 

“Eggchan!” a voice calls out. 

It’s a man. Dressed in the weirdest, most archaic garb ever, he looks like he should be familiar, but Egg can’t quite place his face. 

“Are you the one who left this?” He replies, holding up the letter. 

“Oh— oh, yes, you received my message,” the man fawns. “I’m so glad. It’s been far too long.”

“…I don’t know who you are, bro.”

“Nathaniel, from the scholars’ guild. We— you must have forgotten me, but we used to work together. It’s truly, truly an honour, I—”

“Wait, back up,” Egg interrupts, watching in fascination as Nathaniel shuts up immediately. “Scholars? I thought this was about— bro, I left you guys years ago. I need to find Wemmbu. Have you seen him?”

“No, I’m sorry.” 

Some people really are just born stupid. No matter how much academia they might dedicate their lives to, there really is no saving a lack of common sense. 

“Then why are you wasting my time?”

The man wrings his hands, seemingly doing his best imitation of a small rodent. “Look on the bright side— if your friend has been kidnapped, then you don’t need to keep wasting your time with such brutish company.”

He seems to take Egg’s silence as encouragement.

“He was not nearly good enough for the likes of you, the bottom feeder— to be honest, the kidnapper has done you a favour. And, well, given this new freedom, you— you should drop by, revisit us at the guild. We’ve missed you, our very own senior researcher; now that he’s out of the picture, you could consider returning. Your seat has been empty all these years, and—”

“I never told you he was kidnapped,” Egg hears himself say. 

The man’s face blanches, taking an unconscious step backwards. “I just— I only meant, I assumed that—”

“Tell me where he is,” he says, voice low. 

The man squeaks when his back hits the wall. He’s fiddling with the communicator clipped to his belt, frantically clicking at the buttons. Egg takes it from him before he can react and crushes it under his boot.

The man squeaks again, his eyes going wide at the sight of the broken device. “I don’t— I don’t, we didn’t— it was for the greater good. You have to believe us, we only wanted you to come back, he’s not even— he’s alive, I think, please don’t—”

“You think?” 

His sword is in his hands before he realises it. Egg leans the blade in a millimetre closer, cold netherite flush against the man’s clammy skin, and the idiot gasps in fear.

“Stop,” he chokes out. “Please, I—”

Always, with the begging. “Are you fucking stupid? Just tell me where he is!”

“Okay! Okay, okay, I will. Please don’t kill me.”

Egg inhales, frustrated. “Give me a location, or I swear—”

The man rattles off a set of coordinates instantly. “We only held him there, I mean, the chains wouldn’t work, and every time he got beat was only because he was trying to escape, and we couldn’t have that, and– and he’s alive! I promise, he’s—”

Egg repeats the coordinates. “You’re sure he’s there?”

“Yes! Please, get that sword away from me,” the man pleads. 

“If he’s not, you’re dead, do you understand?” 

“Yes, yes, I—” 

His words are cut off with a wet gargle. The man looks down, to where the sword has cut a clean line through his windpipe, before he crumples to his knees. The shattered comm, somehow still operational, dings quietly, announcing the death of its own user.

“Too loud,” Egg mutters to himself. 

There’s no way the man — Nicholas, or whatever his name was — could have lied realistically, not in that state of fear. And Egg knows he was going on before about how people could only be allowed to live on after they gave him the information he needed, but man would that guy not shut up. Talking on and on about chains and getting beaten, what a fucking idiot.

Yet, yet, with what he was saying— it sounded bad. There were implications upon implications stacked in his words, but— the man said Wemmbu was alive, so Egg has to trust in that. Not in the chungus, but in Wemmbu himself. He's strong in his own way. All he has to do is hold on for a little longer.

“I can’t believe you people are interested in this shit,” Wemmbu says, several hours later, slamming the book shut in defeat. He winces when the movement jars his sprained wrist, before forcing his expression back to neutral-mocking.

It’s all part of his new strategy. Build rapport with the stone-faced Guildmaster, let her lecture him about whatever crap she’s interested in, have some good-hearted banter, and when her guard’s down, he’ll make his escape. Hopefully, at that point, his legs will have regained full functionality.

To be completely honest, Wemmbu thinks she feels bad for him. Genuinely. These scholarly types are always so squeamish and soft-skinned. Yesterday night’s escape attempt resulted in his nose being broken, and nobody gave him anything to wipe the blood off with, so he’s pretty certain he looks downright pitiful right now. He can exploit that. 

“I suppose any sort of real literature would be difficult for somebody like you,” the woman immediately shoots back. It sounds like she’s been holding that one in for a while. She pauses, then, and sighs. “Which one are you reading?”

“It’s— uh, it’s the mathy, philosophical one. Laplace’s Demon and the Adventures of His Apprentices. I can’t even, like, understand this. How do you even combine math and philosophy? Why?”

The woman puts her book down, looking actually intrigued. “Laplace’s demon— that’s an interesting one. The theory posits that Laplace’s Demon is a being that knows everything that currently exists; it’s aware of the position of every particle that currently exists.”

“So what?” Wemmbu asks. Shit, this might actually be working.

“So, that means that the demon can foretell everything that has happened, and will happen, in the entire world. If all of our actions have already been foretold, if there is a being out there that knows every single thing we will do in the future, then are any of our actions even acted out of our own free will?” 

“...Right. That’s…”

He can bust the lock while she’s not looking. It’s a new one that they installed recently, but he’s never meant a lock he couldn’t crack.

“And the mathematics behind it — the physics, the possibilities that Laplace’s theory opens up — are countless. Frankly speaking—”

He pulls the pin from his hair and slips it into his palm. The chain’s length barely reaches the door, so he has to strain himself to get into the correct position.

He’s also not quite sure if the Guildmaster’s still speaking English anymore. He schools his face into intrigue each time she looks back up from her stack of notes that she’s whipped out from nowhere, but it’s genuinely straining his facial muscles.

“—you agree, yes? Even a layman as yourself must see how this calls into question the very concept of free will; even if disproven, it opens such a wide-spanning debate on causal determinism, that—”

There’s nothing he can do about the sprain in his wrist; it’s making his movements sloppy, uncoordinated fingers refusing to cooperate with his extremely important escape plan. 

And then he bends it in just the wrong direction, his arm jolts uncontrollably in pain, and the pin clatters to the floor. He hisses in pain, curling in on himself and away from the bars.

She doesn’t notice, just keeps talking.

“—as for its physical applications, there may be very few. But it does call into question concepts such as fate, or destiny. For the philosophy of the mind—”

That hairpin was the only thing letting him escape all these times. He watches helplessly as it rolls across the floor, far out of his reach.

His one sliver of a chance at freedom gone, Wemmbu sits back down on the bed in defeat. 

Without the distraction, there’s no point in listening to this bullshit a moment longer.

Wemmbu interrupts her, “You know, this is the issue with you scholars— nothing you study actually matters in the real world. How are you guys this bored?” 

The Guildmaster pauses, elbow-deep into her notes. “It’s a thought experiment,” she scoffs, emphasising thought. 

“You guys really have to invent your own problems to solve ‘cause you have nothing better to do?”

Her brow twitches. “I’m sure your own academic endeavours are much more impressive.”

The Guildmaster takes his lack of a reply as acquiesce. “That’s what I thought,” she sneers at him.

The coordinates lead Egg to a fancy academic building in the middle of the busy city.

No, that’s not right. The coordinates lead him to a fancy academic building in the middle of the city that’s about a hundred blocks above where he actually needs to be.

“I need to get to the underground level,” he tells the receptionist, calmly. 

“That’s only for diamond level personnel,” they reply, indifferent, fiddling through their filing cabinet. 

“I’m diamond level,” he lies.

“Name?” They ask, pulling out a clipboard.

“Stop wasting my time and let me in.”

The receptionist takes one look at his face and, without further protest, turns to show him where to access the bubble elevator. 

“What if I told you I had a nuke?” Wemmbu says out loud.

A few months ago, in Redstone City, blueprints for something called an Orbital Strike Cannon were found. The original creator had gone missing, and nobody was aware of what had happened to them, so Wemmbu and a few others—Squiddo, 4CVIT, and the rest of their team—have been working on restoring it for ages. They were actually pretty close to the finish line before he was, well, kidnapped.

“What’s that?” the Guildmaster asks.

Wemmbu can’t help but grin. Whenever this comes up, it never fails to make him giddy; Egg says he has a problem. 

“You said my… academic endeavours, or whatever, don’t match up to yours.”

“And I was correct,” she states condescendingly.

“And I’m telling you, I have a nuke. An orbital strike cannon. Rings of TNT that could be deployed anywhere in the world you want, reduce cities and fields into rubble, turn the tides of any war, kill anybody you’d like. How important would your hypotheticals be if they and you exploded into a million pieces?”

“That’s awfully violent,” she muses. “Eggchan wouldn’t like that.”

Wemmbu does burst out laughing, then, at how stupid she sounds.

“What?” she says indignantly. 

“You guys really don’t know him at all, do you?” he says, in between snickers. “The real Egg, not whoever he was pretending to be all those years ago. He’s literally— he could beat any single person on this server so easily it’d look like bullying. He’d be happy to do it, too.”

“You don’t know the first thing about that man,” the Guildmaster says sharply.

“Oh, but I do, too,” Wemmbu gloats. The sheer naivety of this person, of her whole plan… “He left you pacifist fucks for a reason. Not because he’s looking down on your scholarly pursuits or whatever— it’s just, you’re all so boring about it. All these pretenses, this high-and-mighty superiority complex, and for what? You’re no better than the rest of us just because you got a nice fancy education.”

“I’m sure you know all about that,” she deadpans.

“Whatever, bro. Your friend, Nathaniel, he’s been out trying to find Egg, right? Or recruit him, or whatever? There’s a reason he hasn’t succeeded yet.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”  

“It means, at least when Egg’s with me, he’s actually happy. I’ll be sure to inform him once I'm out of how our universe is deterministic and whatever bullshit, but I think he’ll have other things on his mind.”

“There is no reason I should indulge this petty squabble,” she mutters, and returns to her thick tome. 

A sudden yell outside makes them both jump.

The Guildmaster sighs in annoyance, getting up from her chair and approaching the door. She peeks through the peephole before her whole body freezes.

“What is it?” Wemmbu asks. 

“There’s no way…” she mutters under her breath. Another scream, and the sound of blades clashing reverberates throughout the hall. The guards are calling urgently for backup, but their voices keep getting softer, as if they’re moving further away. Moving away or being silenced some other way.

All the while, the assailant remains silent. This particular style of song and dance, Wemmbu’s seen enough times to recognise by sound alone.

“Egg?” he blurts out. 

The Guildmaster glances back at him, and her expression is confirmation enough.

“He finally found this place, didn’t he?” he says, cheerful.

“Shut up,” she hisses at him. “Get up.”

“Oh, he totally did,” he grins. “You’re so cooked. You’re all genuinely so—” 

“Shut up,” she repeats. There’s a dagger in her hands.

Wemmbu shuts up. 

The room is bright, much more than the hallway, and Egg recoils a bit at the unexpectedness of it. 

“Bro, you came,” Wemmbu calls out happily, before his words halt with a stifled hiss of pain. 

And Egg’s eyes focus, really properly focus, and he realises it’s not just Wemmbu standing against the far wall of the room. That knife at his throat is connected to a hand and a body and a face that, once he notices it, looks extremely shootable.

“…Egg?” Wemmbu says, quieter, unsure. 

He speaks, or tries to, but nothing better than a weak sort of exhale emerges. Egg’s throat is dry and he’s fairly sure he looks like a mess right now, all bloody with his slashed clothes, cracks webbing across his armour. The string digs into the crook of his fingers, snow-white feather fletching brushing his palm.

“Put the bow down,” the woman orders, voice level. Her voice is familiar. 

“You’re from the guild, right?” Egg asks. “You used to be— we wrote those papers together, years ago. What, did academia get too boring for you? You’re kidnapping chungies now?”

His arrow is set in a direct line to her head, but she shifts, moving Wemmbu in front of her like a meat shield. 

“We did this for you,” she says, forceful. “We thought, without your friend, you’d come back to us.”

Wemmbu squirms, clawed fingers digging into the kidnapper’s arms. Egg isn’t the only one who looks like the walking dead here— Wemmbu’s face is mottled with patches of blue and black, some bruises that look days old, others freshly struck in, and there’s crusted blood down the front of the fancy silk shirt that he made Egg buy for him forever ago, staining the vest. He’s stumbling as the kidnapper forces him forwards. 

“Fuck you,” Wemmbu snarls, hoarse. “Egg, don’t listen to—” 

The blade at his throat tightens, red beads of blood forming against pale lavender skin, and Wemmbu falls silent with a barely-there hitch of breath. He’s still glaring in indignation, but doesn’t say another word.

“Look where that got you,” Egg says dryly. “You should have known I never would have agreed— I left for a reason.”

This is good. Make her think he’s less emotionally invested than he truly is, create a sense of safety. 

“Put the weapon down,” she repeats. 

“I will if you let him go.” He tries to phrase it as a command, but the apathetic act is just that— an act; it comes out sounding more like a plea. “Or, I can let this arrow fly and you’ll die in seconds.”

“You would risk that? Which is faster— your bow,” she forces Wemmbu’s chin up with a slight tilt of the dagger, and a shudder runs through his entire body, “or my blade?”

Egg keeps the arrow steady. Kidnappers are cowards. This woman, she is a coward. She and Egg both know, all bluffs aside, that if she were to kill Wemmbu, her own death would be instantaneous; her temporary leverage, otherwise known as his best friend, is the one reason she’s still standing. So, she’s not the one in power in this situation, no matter how much it feels like she is.  

Even as he barely holds it together when he notices the painful angle that Wemmbu’s wrist is hanging limply at, or the stilted, wheezy breathing that signals ribs that have been cracked, if not broken— theoretically, there’s nothing for either of them to worry about.

The air is as tense as the flax of his bow. Egg counts silently, five, four, three, two—

The kidnapper sighs, lowering her dagger. Wemmbu exhales shakily, staggering towards Egg. 

He only manages a tiny step, more a limping shuffle of his feet than any actual distance. The chain, which Egg only notices now, stops him in his tracks. A fucking chain. Chafing into the ankle of the most harmless person in the entire server, tying him to the furniture of his own holding cell, like a dog. And Egg knew to expect nothing good—it was a kidnapping, after all—but this? 

He moves the bow, methodical, back in the direction of the kidnapper’s head, and she visibly panics. Survival instinct, a bolt of desperation, flashes across her face and Egg immediately regrets letting his anger control him, because she’s startled now, and the knife is still in her hands, and Wemmbu is conveniently close by, and—

He hears it before he sees it, the choked-off sound Wemmbu makes as blood spills down against the cold stone from where he’s been stabbed in the back. 

The woman curses, frantic, and there’s the pop of a totem, milliseconds away from being too late, and a shower of gold-emerald sparks engulfs Wemmbu’s body.

Egg jolts forward out of pure instinct, but then the kidnapper glares up at him, a warning, and he is paralysed.

Two steps, clean, precise, as she crouches down next to Wemmbu from where he’s kneeling, down on the floor. She leans in close, and Egg wants to scream at her to get away, but with a quick motion the knife is ripped out. In the next moment, panting reedy, thin breaths, Wemmbu’s forced back to his feet. 

Her hand is shaking, which is a terrible state for it to be in while it’s holding up the blade, still dripping red, up to his neck. Like that, they’re back to square one. 

“There won’t be a totem next time,” she says shakily. “That— that was my last one.” 

He can’t tell whether it’s meant to be a threat or not. The risk is too high. 

“Fine,” Egg relents, and he loosens the string, shoving the arrow back in his quiver. “Fine, look, I’m doing it. Just— what do you want?”

“I’m going to hand him over, and then you’re going to leave, and then you’re going to let me live,” she says. She glances away from Egg momentarily, down to the bloodied floor, and a nauseous expression forms. “Don’t shoot. Please don’t kill me. I’ll give you him if you promise you won’t kill me.”

“You just stabbed me,” Wemmbu swears. 

“I didn’t mean to,” she says, apologetic, almost sounding like she truly means it. “I don’t want to do this.”

“Yeah, really?” he snarks, breaking off to cough wetly. “Sure fucking seems like it. Look at the state of me, bro.”

The kidnapper bristles, “I wasn’t trying to— I’m not like you people. I’m not a murderer, I don’t—”

She’s interrupted by an arrow that lodges itself in the centre of her forehead. Funny thing it is, how distracting a skilled ragebaiter can be.

“Finally,” Wemmbu complains. “Why’d you let her yap for so long?”

“Yo, my bad, bro,” Egg snickers, crossing the room. He hopes it sounds like actual laughing from Wemmbu’s end; he’s on his last nerves, here.

He makes quick work of the chain, shattering the thin iron links with his axe. The rest is harder.

“Do you—” Egg stops, rummaging in his inventory. “Here, golden apples. Uh, no healing pots for now, but at the base, there should be some. I think. God, you look… genuinely awful. How are you alive?”

Wemmbu makes a face at him. “Nice to see you too, bro.”

“No, genuinely. Did they give you a mirror at all? You— wow.”

“I’m the immortal deadliest Eggchan and I actually hate my best friend,” Wemmbu mocks, before pausing. “Dude, are you good?"

Egg blinks. He’s been staring, he realises, at Wemmbu’s face. “What do you mean?” 

“You…” Wemmbu’s hand trails up, but halts mid-air. “Bro, I was only gone a few days. What’re you crying for?”

He splutters, “I’m not— crying, that’s absurd. That’s genuinely absurd.” But he is, and they both know it. He breathes in, slow, all shaky; it sounds as pathetic as he feels.

Egg should stay strong. He really, really, should, keep up the facade, make sure Wemmbu's safe before he allows himself to break. But Wemmbu's looking at him, his expression open, eyes wide and almost panicked, as he always looks whenever Egg gets to this sort of state. And that's enough for the last thread to snap.

“Fuck, I can’t do this. I can’t keep doing this, Wemmbu.”

“Doing what?” his best friend asks, simply.

Head cocked to the side, an expression that Egg barely recognises as confusion hidden behind layers of grime and bruising. He shouldn’t be like this, not him. Wemmbu is for clean fancy clothes and long flowy hair, not underground cages and cold iron bars and chained to the furniture.

"Bro, calm down, I'm fine," he continues, when Egg's composure continues to deteriorate.

“I thought you were—” Egg starts, voice thick. He swallows hard. “I don’t even know. Nobody knew what happened, and there was no ransom, and I had to— I killed all our neighbours, Wemmbu, and I thought you were dead. What would— what would I do, if you were? What’d be left for me?”

“I’m not, though,” Wemmbu says. Like that’s enough. He isn’t dead, present-tense isn’t— like Egg’s supposed to be satisfied with that.

He reaches out fully and swipes a tear off Egg's face, gentle. Egg doesn’t understand how he can do that, in an environment like this. There is no room for softness here, but Wemmbu’s never been any good at following rules.

“Yes, but you will be, won’t you? I— this keeps happening, and who knows what the next kidnapper will do to you, the next time, because there’s gonna be a next time, and— Wemmbu, what am I going to do?”

“Rude of you to imply I’d let that happen,” Wemmbu replies, straightfaced. 

Egg laughs, and it sounds hysterical. 

“What, you don’t believe me?” he asks, offended. “I’d fight them all off. Easy dubs, bro, they’ll call me the next Flamefrags." Wemmbu winces, and backtracks. "The next Eggchan, even.”

"Really." Egg says.

"Yes, really. Look, I'm still here, okay?"

He puts his hands on either side of Egg's face, fingers flattened over his ears, and stares directly into his soul. There's a determined look on his face, though Egg has no idea what it could possibly be for. 

"Okay?" Wemmbu repeats. "I'm not gonna leave you."

Egg stares for some time longer. His view is all blurry, muddied by emotion; ahead of him, all he can really see is a vague mass of purple, but still, he wants to savour this moment. Here's Wemmbu, the vague mass in question, his hands holding up—cradling, so painfully tender—Egg's head. Light, but firm. Here's him, crying like a baby, even though he's not the one that's been held underground in a cell for the past week. Here's the two of them, looking like the pair of fools they are.

"...Egg?"

He nods, slowly, careful not to jostle Wemmbu's injured wrist.

"Okay," he mumbles.

Wemmbu grins, cat-like. Hands drop, and Egg almost protests at the sudden loss of warmth. Wemmbu takes a step forward, limping, and Egg immediately breaks out of his weird trance, rushing to help him. It’s slow work, getting out, but the gapple seems to be doing its job, albeit at a snail’s pace. 

“But, seriously, I'll still kill anyone who tries anything,” he’s saying, back to his usual nonsense blabber. “They'll cower at my feet. All hail the goat Wemmbu.”

“Maybe let’s get those feet fully functioning first— I can see you avoiding putting weight on the left one.”

Egg wakes up the next morning to a base that is… still silent.

Or so Wemmbu seems to think. His attempts at quietness are sabotaged by his uneven footsteps, the slow pattern of soft-loud-soft-loud as his leg is still healing. He’s whistling under his breath, and even from across the hall Egg can hear him rummaging through the cabinets in their kitchen, in search of breakfast. 

It’s barely even sunrise— outside, the sky’s still grey. Egg wants to sleep for another six hours; he knows he probably won’t be able to, after being woken. His whole body feels sore from yesterday's fighting, and he's sure Wemmbu's feeling it even worse than him.

It'll be alright; they'll heal together. Perfectly, certainly, it's all he could ever hope for.