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The hot sun beats down on the red Oklahoma sand. A rolled-up piece of paper rests in the cavity of a cow's skull, lying dusty and red and horned on the desert ground. A cactus stands very prickly over in the left third, and a tumbleweed will probably bounce across the screen any moment now. A little desert hummingbird flies low over the sand, looking for cactus flowers, and its wingbeats are the only sound for miles, maybe, aside from—
The TRAIN that barrels onto the scene, all of a sudden, horn blaring through that empty blue sky and across that red, red sand. The little desert hummingbird is startled away.
Inside one of the train cars is a diner called The Good Egg.
"We're not usually on a train, are we?" Grian is asking, staring out the window at scenery that he is trying very hard to recognize. "I don't think we're usually on a train. Have I missed something?"
He's not usually in Oklahoma, either. He squints out the window. It looks close enough to a red sand desert. Does that cow's skull have a piece of paper rolled up inside of it?
"Oh, an order," Gem says, just beside him, and startling him back to attention. She's dressed up as a waitress, with shiny black Mary Janes and frilly white socks and a bright teal apron, and she's examining a line of paper tickets hanging in front of the food running counter. "Several orders. Look at this, Grian. Tickets!"
"Oh, tickets," Grian says, brow furrowing in consternation. His teal shirt, with its neatly pressed collar, matches her apron. He's wearing no-nonsense black loafers. "I don't know what we're going to do with those. It looks like we've really let them pile up." The tickets all detail orders of eggs, cooked various ways; Grian has never cooked or even sold an egg, on account of the diner not being a real shop.
The tickets are printed on paper that looks old and yellowed.
The train car is empty. Grian wonders if the tickets are all to-go orders.
"Make them?" Gem says, like it's obvious. "Serve them?"
"You're going to make them?"
"No, duh, Grian, back of house is going to make them," Gem says. "But yes, I will serve them, with cuteness and charm, and I'll get more tips than you—"
"Back of house is one person," Grian says, "in total, and Gem, I don't know that he knows that we're really selling eggs, and I don't know that he knows what a Benedict is, any more than I do—"
"He's a very resourceful person," says Gem. "Very skilled, your favorite Minecrafter's favorite Minecrafter—"
"Don't these positions usually have a high turnover rate? We're contributing to that. We're inviting that. Think of the overhead on onboarding a new employee. The overhead, Gem."
"Not for us," Gem says smartly and matter-of-factly, lifting a stack of plates over her head with the ease of a waitress who has years and years of experience under her belt, or at least the ease of someone roleplaying that waitress. "Grab those napkins, please, I missed those— Not for us! Our turnover rate is zero."
"It's zero so far!"
"Etho won't quit," Gem says. "He loves us. And if he quit, I would spawntrap him until he agreed to come back, and he knows that, because I like, did it already—"
"Gem, have you looked out the window, and I mean really looked— wait, Etho tried to quit?" Grian cuts himself off, looking wounded. He's accidentally thrown the cloth napkins into the trash. Several things about this diner are different than the diner back home on Hermitcraft. He's noticed the whole being on a train, and he's noticed the strangeness of the landscapes flying by the windows. He hasn't noticed some of the subtler details. The floors are a rich glossy hardwood; it isn't a kind of wood that grows on any server.
There's a gun mounted on one of the walls of the seating area.
"No," says Gem, holding up her hands and waving them around— don't worry! "It was a misunderstanding. He had a bad case of Canadian moose flu and he was just calling in sick. He was really great about it, though, he said he probably should've clarified, like, all sheepish, and he came right back once he felt better."
Dreadful and irritating violence is high on Grian's list of priorities, so he never misses a chance for market research. "How did you spawntrap him?" He tilts his head. He'd have thought that Gem would've gone about it a little more old-fashioned than a spawntrap.
"With my sword." Gem holds up her sword. Swords are just more, like, cottagecore than lava pits. That answers that. Grian untilts his head and tilts it again in the other direction. Mumbo tells him that he looks like an eerie little bird when he does that. Grian's been trying to escape the bird allegations for years, but everyone watching has different ideas, and that dictates a lot more of Grian's reality than Grian would strictly prefer. Birdlike it is, then. Eerie and birdlike.
Gem says, "You look like a hummingbird."
Grian says, "Minecraft doesn't have hummingbirds."
Gem says, "It doesn't, does it?" and she sounds suddenly uncertain. There's trepidation in her voice, like she's bracing for a threat— trepidation in her grip on her sword's wooden handle. Gem handles threats exactly one way. "Do you think— we're somewhere else?"
"I've been trying not to think about that," Grian says, tense.
"Well," Gem says. "Cat's out of the bag now."
"That sounds like something I would say," Grian says absently, thinking fondly, I'm rubbing off on you, as they both turn their eyes up to the audience.
It looks back, just like it always has.
"Well," says Gem.
"Well," says Grian. "One thing's the same."
"It's kind of comforting," Gem says.
"Could you imagine if it wasn't there?" Grian asks.
"Well, yeah," she says. A little combative. Duh, Grian. "Sometimes it isn't there."
"But if it wasn't there at all," Grian stresses, "anymore, ever again." As a rule, Grian ignores the audience as much as he possibly can. He is disobeying this rule very flagrantly right now.
"Well," Gem says, as her grip tightens on the wooden handle of her sword again— as the train rattles and careens across the desert. "I don't— know— why you're asking me that question. Where do you think this train is going?" Her green eyes snap to meet his, piercing. "And where do you think Etho is? We should go get him. Do you think he's, like, noticed?"
"He told us earlier he was busy. He's a busy man."
"Busy making out with his boyfriend, I bet," Gem mutters.
The audience grows a little bit.
"That was a joke," Grian clarifies, annoyed. "Bdubs is not Etho's boyfriend."
"And yet you knew exactly who I was talking about," Gem sing-songs, spinning her sword and sheathing it in inventory and skipping around the corner of the service counter, toward the kitchen doors with their smudged circle windows, rattling as the train races across the sandy plains of some server unlike any that Grian's ever seen in his life. Gem is right. They're somewhere else.
He tries to use world chat.
<Grian> hello?
He stares at the words a little while. He feels suddenly very alone. A server is infinitely vast but it is also small, some ways— a whitelist of twenty-five players— cozy. The gut-punch feeling of where is your admin hits him hard enough to make him stop breathing, for a second.
Etho emerges abruptly from the kitchen doors, Gem trailing behind him. Etho says, "Hi, Grian! I made some eggs."
"Don't try them," Gem warns.
Etho looks hurt. "Bdubs liked them."
"Bdubs was lying to your face," Gem says. Etho looks more hurt. "Grian, back of house can't cook, it's, it's really dire."
"Is Bdubs— here?" Grian asks, a lurch of hope in his stomach.
"No," says Etho. "That was this morning, few hours ago. No one in that kitchen but me."
"No one on this entire train but us," Gem says.
"Etho, you've been around a long time," Grian says. "A long time, right? Since the early days. Inventor of the hopper clock and all, right? Has this ever— happened to you before?" Have you ever been this far from home with no idea how you got there? Really, really far from home— home doesn't exist here levels of, of far—
The question makes Etho still, thoughtfully. He thinks for a few seconds, and Gem and Grian both stare at him anxiously for those few seconds. It's like— suddenly everything's unsteady, the ground beneath your feet's not any kind of ground you know, everything's unfamiliar except for two people who you know by heart and who you suddenly want to stand very, very close to. Presently Grian notices that Etho is holding Gem's hand, and Gem's knuckles are white.
"I don't— think it has," Etho says. He says it almost gingerly. "This one's, uh— this one's pretty new."
"Oh," Grian says in a small voice.
"Oh," Gem says in an equally small voice.
"I think we're in for an adventure," Etho says, trying to sound cheerful and— well— adventurous— but it falls a little flat, because everything feels much more ominous than adventurous when you don't know where you are and you can't pull up a whitelist and you can't see any of your friends on this server and no one is responding in world chat. Where is your admin? That's nothing, of course, on how Etho is going to feel the first time he respawns. There's a lot about this universe that none of them have figured out yet.
A pilot episode would end right here; the camera would cut away to that hot Oklahoma sand, and the train would barrel off into the distance, blurring as the focus shifts. In the foreground, a little desert hummingbird would find a pink cactus flower to settle into and drink from.
(Maybe right before that, it would cut to the gun on the wall one more time.)