Work Text:
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“This is— wow, this sucks.” Hummer was trying to ‘investigate’, looking for a player who would finally fit what he wanted. Instead of finding anything along those terms, what he found disgusted him almost instantly.
As a Leviathan, he preferred being found organically. No potions. No creative mode.
Only pure belief and trust in being saved by a Leviathan. That was what he’d recommended people do on forums, ignoring all the times he’d been told it was ‘stupid’ or ‘false hope’. Nobody knew what he wanted better than himself.
Apparently, though Arronax thought that she did! So much so that she’d made a whole server for it, specifically to show off how ‘good’ she was at finding the Leviathan. Even if she hadn’t, to any degree, blamed its existence on a mix of two bugs. Not only did she blame it on two bugs, but she’d built a highly detailed museum full of her voice echoing that propaganda back to whoever joined.
Anyone would fall for something like this!
Was there a contact line? Hummer sure hoped so, looking around the server until he found her ‘questions & conversation’ website.
The most direct line he had.
He sent three questions, all of which were critiques of her strategy for ‘finding’ the Leviathan, and all of her information regarding it:
> Have you tried without potions?
> Did you do everything in survival, specifically hardcore?
> Did you try having some genuine faith in it?
Two of which were deleted by moderators. Sure, he didn’t care; fair enough, they could delete it as much as they had to. Hummer was clearly being salty.
On the last question, however, he got what he’d been waiting for after three days of going to work, investigating, playing Minecraft, and coming back.
A direct reply from the woman of the hour, the one who’d hardly replied to anybody else, which only read:
> If you have an email or anything we can talk on, go ahead and send it to me! I think you’d have some cool strategies.
That was the most customer service response he’d earned so far, but he didn’t mind it. Any response was better than no response if he was putting someone on the right path to finding the Leviathan. A route that’d keep them from preventing people from finding him.
He’d opted to send her both an email and his Discord, but she was quick to head for the latter. Hummer opened the app and accepted the friend request, already mentally preparing himself for either a barrage of awkward texts or a call that’d be uncomfortable no matter how much they spoke.
Instead, he got a:
> Do you want to join a server?
Huh.
> Sure.
Well, he would’ve wanted to reject, but she was clearly trying to show him something ‘serious’. Or at least, serious in her terms. Annorax didn’t even get mad at how much he’d doubted her; no, she’d sent him a Minecraft server IP afterwards.
Upon joining, there was no join message, and neither of them showed in the server list.
That could’ve been some sort of pack— even if Hummer knew what it was, he was trying to ignore it. Arronax sent a chat for him, going:
> we can get on call so yk where to go from spawn
He hadn’t even agreed before the call notification blasted in his ears, and Hummer let out a small huff before reluctantly accepting.
“Hello?”
“Ah! Hello!” Arronax’s voice held the same attitude it did in the note blocks; she quickly gave him a list of commands, “You should see one big pillar over there. Like, go back to your Minecraft tab and walk over there while I’m talking.”
With a small hum, he moved while talking, hardly acknowledging the conversation verbally and only listening to the orders.
“There’s a Nether portal with a piston bolt set up, ‘kay? Go through that, and then you should be at the right coordinates.”
Was it worth it to criticize her for having a faster route to go out thousands of blocks— no, he wouldn’t, even if the scoff already made it obvious he wasn’t pleased.
“What is this?” Hummer wasn’t asking that about the world; that much was obvious.
What were they having a conversation like this for?
“I just wanted to talk!”
“And you can drop that; I don’t know why you’re doing that,” Hummer murmured, not quite understanding why she was still doing that voice for a private call.
“Well, isn’t that rude?” Arronax was in front of him in-game now, but she’d dropped the voice when asking that. “Since you’re clearly such a fan, I was just trying to mimic the excitement people want. It’s cool that you don’t.”
Right.
“So we can discuss the issues with your research on the Leviathan now, right?”
He didn’t want to get off topic. All this was was a meeting of two curious minds, and he didn’t appreciate her whole attitude about it.
“I don’t really think there’s an issue, considering the whole part being—”
Hummer ignored her dramatic interruption into doing that ‘swallowing whole’ trick. It would’ve been a better threat if he didn’t know what was up immediately, and if he’d been more threatened by Minecraft.
Which now left the conversation at a standstill.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
This would’ve been some poor researcher’s dream.
There it was. Two leviathans, staring straight at each other. Staring as much as they could through a screen, really.
He wasn’t alone.
Other leviathans were real.
Not only were they real, but he was on the phone with someone who could perfectly understand all of his feelings. Nobody could truly see the two of them unless they completely trusted them. It made life so much harder up until now.
But wow, Cthulu, he hated her!
Arronax was clearly just as stunned as he was, but the whole thing only got under his skin more.
“You made that as a leviathan? Seriously?” Hummer’s frustration bubbled over, voice now sounding different in his microphone, “You know what’s wrong and what’s right!”
Not only that, she was clearly showing herself to people just to taunt them with the information. There’d be no way for them to disprove it.
But there wasn’t time to address that!
“Maybe I just don’t like attention.”
“But what if I do?”
“Sucks, man.” Arronax barely gave him enough time to fully comprehend the whole thing, both of them now clearly on the same page.
They were back to normal Minecraft in the same instant that they’d ditched it.
She questioned, mimicking the same frustration, “Why are you telling them how to?”
“I like my believers!” Hummer retorted.
This would be one long back-and-forth between the two of them, wouldn’t it?
As selfish as it was, he couldn’t find it to care while arguing, “Just because you don’t doesn’t give you a right to take them away from me.”
“And just because you do shouldn’t make them every other leviathan’s problem!”
“Then ignore them! You have the option to!”
He’d been the main guy responding to people who seriously followed all his instructions, keeping down reports that’d tracked him down the way he wanted them to.
In fact, Hummer hadn’t even met another leviathan until now due to how rarely anyone else dared to come out about the whole thing.
Arronax wouldn’t budge on her opinion, going:
“They shouldn’t have to be a problem to begin with.”
It just had to be a situation where they were pitted against each other. His first experience with a being similar to him, and their perspective was completely different.
There must’ve been others with her words now in mind— but they were doing the same as her!
Hiding away, neglecting everyone with faith.
The call went silent, neither of them having much else to say.
Forms shifting in real life aside, all the Minecraft parts of it wouldn’t matter now. Her museum had done the work it needed to for the vast majority of any believers left in Leviathans.
There’d be no point.
“This is a joke,” he grumbled to himself, already beginning to just try killing Arronax in the game.
“Hey— quit! I’ll just do this then, if you wanna keep being like that!”
Hummer wasn’t even phased by the error code in front of him afterwards. She’d shut down the server the two of them were playing at the moment he began trying that.
The server closed, and the call ended.
When he went to add more onto her question forum, he found himself completely IP-banned from the website, with a ban message calling him a ‘troll’. That filthy liar! Chances are she’d deleted his messages as well.
The only thing he hadn’t been banned from was her Minecraft server.
There was no genuine way for him to go through all the Discord servers, forums, or Minecraft servers full of now dumbified idiots who’d fallen for her words.
Fuck, he’d end up having to find someone who believed in him. That couldn’t have reached everyone.