Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He was in the Waiting. Waiting for the new portal to appear. How ironic. Scott scoffed. It was a new thing-something his friend Lizzie had been working on. Misadventures, she called it. He was excited though. It had been a while since he had a Consistent World to enjoy. They’d talked about it a bit, he knew that he was going to settle in Meriport first. Meriport being, of course, one of the main towns. He had some ideas on what to do after he grew out of the town, but nothing big just yet. 

Suddenly, the Waiting turned dark, and Scott frowned. This wasn’t normal. 

He spun in a circle trying to see if it was just where he was standing, but the whole Waiting looked black. And all of his portals disappeared. He panicked. He had so many portals with so much progress-had he just lost them all?

“Uhh-” he muttered, and tried to walk around. Instead, he was met with what seemed to be an invisible wall. 

“Ow!” he yelled, stumbling back and covering his nose with his hand. “That wasn’t there before.”

“Well of course not. Why would it have been there before?” a voice said from somewhere. Scott blinked, and looked up and around. 

“Behind you,” the voice said. Scott spun around to see a cloaked figure with their arms crossed floating above what seemed to be the ground. 

“Well hello there,” he said sarcastically. The person let their arms fall to their sides and approached him curiously. 

“Hi there Star!” they hummed, and circled him. “You’re such an interesting person, you know that?”

Scott narrowed his eyes at this person. Star was his Symbol from the Watchers’ Life games. Did that mean this person was a Watcher? Maybe not. Watchers tended to be purple. This person’s cloak was black, and they had two masks to cover their face, not just one. A bark-like one over their eyes and a purple-rimmed green one around their mouth and nose. 

He frowned again. “Who…what are you?” 

“Oh you’re smart! Asking the right questions,” the person clapped their hands and spun around in a tight circle. “I’m a Creator!”

Scott blinked. “And that is?” 

“Another great question from our lovely Star! Unfortunately, I am not allowed to give that kind of information. It’s not like the Watchers tell you everything, is it?” the person put on a pouty tone, then snapped their fingers. “But I’m not like the Watchers! I still won’t tell you what a Creator is since that’s not important, but I can answer other questions!”

The Creator spread their arms out and twirled in delight. Scott folded his arms over his chest. Something about this person-it wasn’t right. How did they know about the Watchers? About his Symbol? How did they get to his Waiting? 

Important questions. That’s what he needed answers to. And the questions spinning in his head didn’t seem to be as important as just curiosity. 

“So… why? Why are you here and what do you want with me?” Scott asked impatiently, letting sass creep into his tone. 

The Creator face-palmed. “I should have led with that. Or at least waited to give you a note like I did with Sun.”

Sun? So this Creator also knew Grian and his Symbol. 

“I want you to play a game,” they said. Scott waved his hand. 

“And? Explain. That tells me nothing,” he said, though he was panicking slightly. A game usually meant a Life game. The ones made by the Watchers. But this person had nothing to do with Watchers, right?

The Creator flipped upside-down and floated in the air like that. Somehow, their cloak didn’t fall. 

“You see, Star, a few weeks ago, I got some of my friends’ Creations and put them in an arena, with 6 lives, many rules but mainly murder, for my own entertainment! They were my playtesters.” 

Scott didn’t like how things were looking. Murder and lives usually meant a Life game. And what was a Creation? The word didn’t sound familiar at all. 

”But, now that things are finalised, I want to see how some of the more.. professional Creations could handle it,” the Creator continued, and flipped around to look at him. “I’ve heard that Watchers have some incredibly… powerful and interesting puppets.”

The speech sounded practised. Scott tapped his foot against what should’ve been the ground. 

The Creator put themselves on the ground and their tone shifted to exaggeration. “Please cooperate. I’ve already had Sun to deal with. You don’t have to make anything out of this if it helps at all.”

Of course Grian was a pain to deal with. 

Scott’s panic subsided, and his frown turned to a grin. Maybe, maybe he could enjoy this. The Creator met his eyes even through their mask, and grinned with him, it seemed. 

“So, what do you want me to do?” he asked, tilting his head to the side, his teal hair falling in front of his eyes. 

“Oh you’re co-operating!” the person squealed. They pulled out a bottle from their cloak. “If you could be a dear and drink this tranjuja, that would be wonderful.”

The “tranjuja” liquid inside the bottle did not look appetising. It sloshed around in a slimy way, and it was colour the same as the void. 

Scott took the bottle hesitantly, but didn’t drink from it. 

“I want some answers first though,” he said, bringing his sassy tone back. The person teleported around, and giggled. 

“I knew you would say that. You’re Scott, after all,” the person said. “Since you’re being so nice, I’ll answer a few for you, Star.”

“Okay, first, stop calling me Star,” Scott snapped. “Second, will I still be able to join Misadventures? And third, who’s playing this game with me? I want to know who I’m fighting.”

“Alright then Scott,” the Creator said, and flipped themselves around to be lying down on thin air with their arms folded under their chin. “Of course you’ll still be able to join Lizzie’s World! In a few hours though. As for who you’re playing with… It’s your usual group, minus Lizzie and Mumbo. Subbed for them are two of my friends’ Creations who are there for punishment.”

Scott went through his mental list of players, then shrugged. “Alright.”

“Sooooo you’re playing without a hassle?” the Creator squealed. 

Scott nodded, and examined the strange bottle he’d been given. “I just… drink this?” 

The Creator nodded enthusiastically. Scott took a breath, expecting the liquid inside to taste really bad. 

Surprisingly, the tranjuja didn’t taste too bad, and Scott finished the bottle in a few swings. 

“Thanks for the chat, Scott!” 

Was the last thing he heard before being plunged into darkness, then what seemed to be his usual void. It felt familiar, comfortable. He wondered if that was all just a dream and he was going to end up in Lizzie’s World. Then light assaulted his eyes. Scott blinked.

“Welcome, everyone, to Fan Life.”

Chapter Text

“Welcome everyone, to Fan Life.”

Caly rubbed the sleepiness out of her eyes. Fan Life? Again? She looked around to see she was in a circle of people. Instinct told her to run, but why was no one else running? She scanned the faces to find only one familiar. Mayflower, standing beside her, looked furious. 

“A game playtested by Creations, now revised, and offered to you to play.”

The voice said words that Caly was all too familiar with. She and May were two of the “Creations” mentioned, she guessed.

“The rules are as follows…”

Rules. Always rules. 

“Each player will have four lives.”

Only four? Caly glanced at May, who rolled her eyes. They had six last time. 

“On four plus lives, you are peaceful and dark green. Three you are still peaceful and lime, two are yellow, when you can make traps and red, of course, is your last life.”

This was the same as last time, wasn’t it? Caly’s eyes located the source of the voice. A cloaked person standing on top of an azalea bush in the middle of the circle. The Creator. She recognised their bark-like mask and high-pitched tone. 

“Red names have all of their friendships and ties broken and become hostile; they can also team up with other red names, but you already know that.”

Another symbol on the ground. The same as the one that was in Spawn in the other game. The curved x with dots at the end of each point. The Creator’s symbol. 

“Reds and yellows may kill dark greens for a life, too. Reds are the only ones allowed to kill all, mind you.”

Caly knew these rules already. So far the only things that had changed was the amount of lives they had been given. 

“Remember the boogeyman? It’s back! At the beginning of every session a Creator,, will randomly and secretly select a non-red name on the server to become the boogeyman, or maybe more than one, who knows? She does.”

Of course she remembered the boogeyman. She’d been cursed with it a few times, having to kill her teammate Sam because of it. Caly wondered if the Creator mentioned would be the Campfire Goddess Sled, or Keiko. 

“The boogeyman has one job: secure a kill on a green or yellow name to be cured. While you're the boogeyman all friendships and alliances are out the window, do what you must to be cured, because if you don't, the next session you are onto the next coloured life.”

The same as last time, again. She knew these rules. Looking around, she realised that she knew maybe a few of these people. Only vaguely, somehow she knew that the parrot hybrid that was staring at her was called Grian. He looked anxious. A little curious, maybe, but somewhat panicked. Caly turned to face May again. May didn’t look at her. Instead, the duck-parrot hybrid’s eyes were staring over the horizon, her feet tapping the ground as if she wanted to run. 

“We also have another special twist this time: boss mobs drop lives. Upon killing a boss mob like the warden, a “heart” will drop and you may use it to gain a life, or trade it, who knows? You do.”

Caly wondered if this time, this rule would actually play a part in the game. Everyone in the other game was too scared to even explore the deep dark for a chance at a warden’s heart. The nether was basically unexplored and no one had found a stronghold either.  

“You know these simple rules already. Do not break them. I will not warn you against flying, you winged hybrids, because you know the consequences already.”

May ruffled her wings in agitation. Caly saw that a lot of the other winged hybrids were the same. She was plain human though, so she wasn’t too worried about that. 

“These rules are similar, but not the same as what my playtesters were bound to.”

Caly didn’t like being called a “playtester.” It felt controlling and strange. May also didn’t seem too happy with the choice of words. Caly stared at the ground.

“Are you ready, players? You better be. Your lives depend on it.”

Caly was done with the big long speech of rules she already knew. She wanted to go already. Probably hide in a hole for a few hours like she did on her first “session” last time. 

“SCATTER!”

The voice cut out, and the person on top of the azalea bush disappeared. 

Caly froze as everyone around her ran off in different directions. May glanced at her before taking off to the hills in the northwest corner. 

She didn’t remember this from the original game of Fan Life. But that was because she missed the first “session.” She remembered something her old teammate Sam had told her about-she’d recounted the circle and the rush to get materials. 

Materials. Caly remembered how it took a good few of those “sessions” just to get basic iron armour-some of which had been given to her by her ally Tania. 

Get iron first then. The command gave Caly something to grasp onto, even though it slightly terrified her. Going into caves -alone- was not her favourite activity. She shivered despite the sun shining warmly on her face. 

No. She wasn’t brave enough for caving. Who did she think she was? Gem? 

Gem… the ginger girl in the circle. Caly wondered where she knew her from. 

“You’re new,” a voice said from behind her. Caly jumped and swung at the person with her bare fists, then stumbled back with her hand covering her mouth. 

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry,” she muttered as the other person rubbed their now red cheek. Caly now recognised them as Grian, the parrot hybrid. 

“You’re good. For now,” he joked. 

Caly laughed nervously. “I’ll, uh-just be on my way I guess.”

“If you’re so sure,” Grian said, and began to walk off.

Caly waved at him weakly and turned to look at where a stream was flowing around the circle.

“Hey wait!” the parrot hybrid called. 

She spun around. “Huh?” 

“What’s your name?”

Caly paused.

“Caly. Caly Opaleye,” she repeated. 

“Nice name. I’m Gr-,” he started, but Caly interrupted him. 

“Grian, I know,” she finished, then ran towards the stream. 

She heard his confused calls before the sound of the stream bubbling overtook her senses. It was calming. 

The stream seemed to lead somewhere, so Caly decided to follow it. She was surprised to find sugarcane growing at its banks, but it was a pleasant surprise, and she took it gratefully. 

She liked the water, and the way it danced around her feet when she walked along its shores. It was pretty. She vaguely remembered a book about a sailor being thrown overboard by some blue haired guy. One that she wrote maybe? It sounded brutal. She grinned. Yeah, it sounded like something she wrote.

Caly wandered down the stream. It eventually led to an ocean, with a pretty beach riming the water. 

Run ashore was a rotting old shipwreck, which Caly immediately ran to without surveying the rest of her surroundings. 

Sand sunk beneath her feet, and she was suddenly grateful for having these shin-high boots laced up properly. Otherwise she was sure sand would be filling her boots and finding its way into her socks. 

The ship was on its side, but that proved to be no problem. Caly found an entrance from what would have been the top of the ship down to the hull, allowing her to easily clamber into its rotting chambers. 

Somehow, Caly knew the exact layout of the ship. It was so… familiar. Yet so alien to her mind. The smell of rotting wood wasn’t very pleasant, and so she forced herself to breathe through her mouth instead. 

Her fingers traced the sodden planks of the ship as her feet led her to a loot chest. She opened it, the chest creaking from rusty joints. The sight of rotten flesh made her extremely grateful for breathing through her mouth instead. 

She shifted through the contents of the chest. 

Rotten flesh, bamboo, paper, and a bowl. Somehow, the paper looked fine, but the bowl looked destroyed. Caly took the bamboo and paper. Something about seeing bamboo made her smile, as if it was a joke only she would understand.

Caly closed the chest and stood up properly again. There should be another chest on the other side of the ship- the captain’s quarters. She made her way over steadily, trying not to fall through any holes. 

Sure enough, at the end of the ship she found another chest, more intact this time. When she opened it, she squealed as she immediately recognised the white ingots of iron. Five, total, plus some nuggets too. An emerald, three lapis, and a slightly wet treasure map. 

Caly took all of them, placing them safely in her many pockets in her trousers and the pouch at her side. 

The map she kept in her hand. It looked to be nearby. Now she had a little adventure to go on to pass the time before nightfall. 

The foxine hummed as he wandered around trying to find a cave. Etho knew he couldn’t waste time when it came to these kinds of games, so getting armour first thing would definitely be useful. 

When “SCATTER!” had been yelled, he immediately dashed for the plains. He still didn’t understand what was going on properly, or who the person on the bush was. He only knew this was another Life game, and two new people had joined them in place of Mumbo and Lizzie it seemed. Otherwise he was sure he would’ve recognised Lizzie’s bright pink hair. 

They intrigued him. Usually, when there were new members, the old members would have heard of them before. But the winged hybrid and sailor dressed girls didn’t seem in any way familiar. Etho wondered where they were from, and how they got here. 

Now he was surrounded by a lot of horses in the plains, who were all lucky Joel didn’t come around. He was pretty sure Joel ran off east. 

“ETHOOOOOOOO!” someone yelled. Etho’s ears flicked towards the noise, and he found a ditch that Bdubs was jumping out of. 

He was tackle hugged, and Etho blinked in surprise. “Happy to see you too Bdubs,” he laughed.

Bdubs grinned with broken teeth, and Etho adjusted his mask. 

“You found an Etho?” Etho recognised Tango’s voice calling from in the ditch. 

“Hey there Tango,” Etho waved when Tango’s head popped up. 

Tango grinned back. “Heyyyy! You wanna join us? We found a cave here.”

“Sure,” Etho shrugged, and Bdubs jumped with joy. 

Etho followed the pair into the ditch. Well, what he thought was a ditch. Instead, what he found was a small hole leading to a gaping cave that was quite a drop down. 

“Woah!” he exclaimed when he almost fell into the cave from a sixty metre fall. Tango grabbed his arm and yanked him backward. 

“Bdubs almost fell in earlier too, you’re not the only one,” he muttered. Etho swished his tail in annoyance. 

“How are we going to get down there?” he asked, crouching over the edge. The cave was dark and looming, only small shafts of light from the surface made it down. 

Bdubs passed him a torch. “We were hoping to get iron for a bucket, but no such luck yet. Also dynamic lighting isn’t a thing apparently, so watch out for that.”

“I see,” Etho muttered, examining the torch. Tango’s usually bright flaming hair also did nothing to light the dark areas. 

He wandered around the smaller caves that sprouted from the ditch, collecting coal along the way for torches. He was hoping that one of these caves would snake their way down to the big cave, but most of them reached dead ends. He did mine a few veins of iron though, which would be useful for the bucket needed to get down to the cave. 

He started to make his way back to the ditch and called his friends’ names. While he was at that, he also found another decently sized vein of iron. 

“Why’d you leave us Etho?” Bdubs huffed. Etho gave him a confused look. 

“I thought we were splitting up to explore the smaller caves, sorry about that,” he shrugged. 

Bdubs huffed again while Tango checked a furnace. 

“We could go down now,” he said, feeding the furnace iron and coal. Etho checked the amount of iron he had on him. Thirty one raw pieces of iron. 

“Is there a point in risking a life if we already have enough iron?” he muttered, checking the furnace to see Tango had a little more than him. 

“I don’t!” Bdubs yelled, throwing five pieces of raw iron on the floor. 

Etho glanced at Tango. 

“I’ve left some of those smaller tunnel-caves unexplored,” Etho offered. Bdubs nodded, and Tango picked up the furnace, but placed a crafting table, and a few seconds later, tossed shields to both Bdubs and Etho. Then he started following Etho into one of the caves. Etho took the shield gratefully and put it on his left hand. 

This one in particular winded down in long, looping spirals. Etho ignored all the iron he saw, and elbowed Tango -hard- anytime he tried to grab some too. Bdubs was the one who needed iron now. 

“Hey!” Tango play-punched Etho after the fourth or fifth time he tried to mine an iron vien. 

Etho rolled his eyes. “We’re down here for Bdubs needing iron, not you.”

“I know, I know,” Tango muttered and rubbed his arm. Bdubs glared at them. 

“You’re acting like I’m a child,” he said. Tango grinned and flicked his tail. 

“Maybe you are.”

“HEY!” Bdubs ran after Tango after he took off up towards the ditch. Etho rolled his eyes again. They were both like children. 

Etho debated running after both of them, but decided to let boys be boys and continue caving. 

The cave winded down, down, down, down, down…

To the big cave. The foxine blinked when he realised there was dim sunlight shining on him from all the way up from the ditch. 

His boots clicked on the deepslate. 

He looked around. It looked somewhat safe. Only a few confused looking zombies around. Safe enough. 

Etho squinted up to the ditch to see if Tango’s fiery hair would jump out at him. Unsurprisingly, it did, and he heard distant echoes of laughter and yelling. 

“HEY GUYS!” Etho yelled as loud as he could. The yelling and laughing stopped. He took a breath before continuing. “THE TUNNEL LEADS TO DEEPSLATE!”

Yelling again, and just a minute later Bdubs bounded up to him and jumped around. 

“YESSS!” he celebrated, and Etho once again gave him and Tango a confused look. 

“Why were you two so set on this cave?” he asked. Tango brushed down his clothes and pointed to the deepslate. 

“More chances of diamonds I guess,” he shrugged. 

Etho blinked, then facepalmed. Of course. 

Tango placed a torch and a crafting table as he made an iron pickaxe with some of the iron he’d smelted earlier. 

“Expecting diamonds, Tango?” Etho teased. Tango grinned, and walked over to one of the walls that Etho was sure was just covered in glow lichen. 

“Nah, I have some,” Tango strolled back over and leaned on his crafting table while displaying the diamond in his slim little elf-y fingers. 

Etho tried to snatch it out of his hand, but Tango yanked it away into a pocket before he had the chance. 

“Awww, not gonna share?” he pouted, wagging his tail slightly. 

Tango tilted his head at him. “Don’t think you can split a diamond in half.”

“Only one?” Etho was surprised. Usually there were more. Now that he actually looked around properly, he didn’t think he saw any diamonds at all. He frowned. He knew that diamonds were less prone to spawning exposed to air but none at all was strange. “That’s weird.”

“BOO! Yeah that definitely is weird,” Bdubs appeared behind the two. Etho jumped back in surprise and Tango screeched. 

“For goodness sake, you don’t just do that,” Etho gasped. Bdubs took an arrow out of his arm and winced, then shrugged. 

“Nah. It’s funny,” he grinned. 

Tango rolled his red eyes and showed his diamond to Bdubs while Etho placed some more torches around. 

When he was just out of hearing distance from his friends, a spider leaped at him from an unlit area. Etho flicked his ears back in pain, and he swung his stone sword at it a few times before it died. From its dead body, an eye was the only thing left. He left the disgusting thing on the ground. 

Another spider leaped at him. Then another. And another. Etho panicked and forgot he had a shield, and ran back over to his friends to eat what raw food he had left.

“There’s so many!” he exclaimed, watching his health go up painfully slowly. 

Tango killed one. “Eeks.”

“It might be a spawner,” Bdubs suggested. Etho looked over to where the spiders had come from. The darkness obscured most of his vision, but squinting at it, it looked like there might have been some cobblestone there. 

“Possibly,” he said, and sat down. His health wasn’t going up nearly as fast as it should have. 

“Want us to explore it for you?” Tango mocked. Etho huffed. 

“Have you lost any health yet?” he retorted. Tango shook his head. 

“Well it’s not healing as fast as it should.”

Bdubs nodded. “Yeah, I noticed that too.”

Etho checked his health again. Seven hearts. 

“Let’s check it out then,” he sighed, and ran over, brandishing his sword and adjusting his shield once more. How about you don’t forget you have a shield this time?

The moment cobblestone came into view, Etho spammed the rest of his torches on the ground. Sure enough, it was a spider spawner. Tango and Bdubs caught up with him just as he placed a final one on top of the cage of spiders. 

“You good here Etho?” Tango asked. Etho blinked and looked at the mess of torches he’d left. 

He took away the unnecessary ones. “Yeah. I’m good.”

There were two loot chests, one of which Bdubs was snooping in. Etho lunged for the other one. 

A saddle, bones, gunpowder, and other random junk. Etho took the saddle and grinned. Horse time. 

“I’m going to go back up now. I need food,” he said, and without waiting for his friends, he dashed for the winding cave that led him down here. 

He did need food though. Once out of the cave and the ditch, Etho took a deep breath of 

fresh air and looked around for animals to kill. The sun was setting now, and so he’d have to be quick if he wanted animals to spawn. 

Then again, what about later? He’d have to save some animals for breeding later, wouldn’t he? Especially cows. 

He couldn’t run anymore. The hunger was driving him crazy. So what if they needed cows later? 

The first animal he was was a pig, two of them actually. Etho killed them both with his stone sword, blood staining his gloves and coat. That was fine. 

He had four raw pork chops now. He gnawed on one of them while looking around for more animals.  For some reason, all the animals he could see were pigs and horses. At least pigs when cooked gave some decent meals. 

He slaughtered a few more pigs and wandered to where he found a savannah. There he sat, plopped on the ground eating raw pork chops. That’s where Tango and Bdubs found him around two minutes later, Tango showing off two more diamonds. 

“Want one Etho?” he offered. Etho eyed the diamond, but shook his head. One diamond was basically useless. Might as well let Tango make a diamond pickaxe for obsidian and other diamonds. 

Finally, his health was back to full and he wasn’t hungry anymore, but eating raw meat made him feel uneasy. Tango started to set up furnaces again, so Etho put his last six pork chops in one of the spare ones for it to cook. 

In the meantime, he saw Bdubs struggling to make a saddle. 

“Can’t craft a saddle Bdubs?” Etho teased. Bdubs glared at him. 

“NO! Another thing this game is weird for. Seems to be no custom crafting recipes,” he growled. Etho frowned, and tried to make a saddle himself. It didn’t work, sure enough. His eyes caught on the saddle he’d gotten from the dungeon.  

He grinned, and ran for a brown and white spotted horse. It looked strong, and fast. 

Using the saddle, he mounted it quickly before Bdubs even knew what he was doing. 

“Yes!” he exclaimed and pumped his fist in the air while Bdubs started yelling. 

Etho grinned. 

Chapter Text

Joel had spent the last while gathering his full set of wooden tools and running around like a headless chicken killing animals for food. There seemed to be such an abundance of them, the server could spare a few. He’d seen a plains when he was back in the strange rule-explaining-circle but he hadn’t bothered to go over there yet. He needed his full set of wooden tools first. Later, he could kill some horses. He grinned just thinking about the desperate neighs. 

He’d run straight to the forest after the circle scattered. Had to swim over a stream, but he got to the forest first. For his tools. 

“I’m such an idiot,” he realised, looking at his wooden hoe. What a waste of time. He would continue to make a full set of wooden tools though. Force of habit. 

“You? An idiot? Makes sense,” a voice said from beside him, making Joel jump and stumble backwards. 

“Goodness’ sake Martyn!” Joel yelled, picking up his wooden shovel from where he’d dropped it. Martyn laughed. 

“You’re so easy to scare,” he said.

Joel huffed. “I am not!”

“We’ll see about that,” Martyn smirked. Joel rolled his eyes. “C’mon, you’re coming with me now.”

“Says who?” Joel stuck out his tongue. 

“Me.”
Martyn grabbed Joel’s arm and pulled him forward.

“Hey!” Joel complained. Then he realised that Martyn was leading him into a cave. Somehow, he hadn’t seen the massive entrance. It was extremely dark though. As they entered the cave, Joel blinked, trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness. 

“We’re going into a cave with nothing, no torches or armour at all?” he asked. Martyn flipped his stone pickaxe in the air and smirked while he mined a coal vein. He promptly made a stack of torches and tossed half of them to Joel. 

“Thanks…,” Joel muttered, and began trying to upgrade his wooden tools to stone. Hurried footsteps entered the cave. 

“Hello?” Joel recognised Grian’s voice echoing through the cave. He spun around, and Martyn crossed his arms. 

“You gonna join us G?” he grinned. Grian frowned, and shook his head. 

“Uhh, I’m not so sure. Right now I’m just trying to find out who the two new people in the circle were,” Grian said. He absent-mindedly mined a small vein of coal with a stone pickaxe and stretched his wings while Joel and Martyn watched. 

Joel leaned against the crafting table Martyn had placed. “And? Do you know who they are?”

“No,” Grian sighed. “Well, I ran into that sailor-dressed girl earlier. Her name’s Caly Opaleye. Still haven’t found the other parrot-duck one.”

Caly Opaleye. 

“Strange name,” Matryn mused. Grian scoffed. 

“Please, ‘InTheLittleWood?’ Really?” he said. Joel grinned, and Grian stared at him. 

“You too, ‘SmallishBeans.’ You can’t say anything about weird names.”

Joel flicked his wrist. “Yeah, and ‘Grian’ isn’t a weird name?”

“It means sun!” Grian argued. 

“And your original name was ‘Xelqua.’ What kind of a name is that?” Martyn said. Grian’s void eyes flashed purple. 

“I’m not Xelqua,” he said, and spun around to leave. “And by the way, be wary of the newcomers. Caly knew who I was.”

And the parrot hybrid ran off. 

Joel and Martyn exchanged glances. 

“That was weird,” Joel muttered. Martyn laughed. 

“Grian is always weird,” he said while crafting a stone sword. Joel hummed. 

“I guess so,” he muttered and finished crafting his full set of stone tools. 

He wandered around trying to get more coal and iron and stumbled into a zombie. It hit him with an iron shovel and Joel screamed in confusion and shock. 

“Stupid zombie!” he yelled while repeatedly stabbing it with his stone sword. It dropped the shovel. Surprisingly, it looked pretty new. 

“You alright there, Joel?” Joel spun around to see Martyn leaning against the cave wall with a smirk on his face and his arms crossed. 

“Bloody wonderful, mate,” Joel said sarcastically and ate some raw mutton. Martyn eyed the food. 

“You should cook that. Better saturation,” he muttered and crafted a furnace to cook the food in. Joel gave all the meat he’d gotten to Martyn, which at this point wasn’t that much anymore because he’d eaten a lot of it thanks to low saturation in raw meat. 

They sat by the furnace together, taking turns to take the food out and eat some to heal up. It seemed like Martyn hadn’t eaten at all since the start of the session, and so Joel offered most of the share to him. 

It seemed they were a team now, and Joel was fine with that. 

“Have we ever been a team, Martyn?” Joel thought aloud. Martyn gave him a confused look, then paused. 

“I don’t think so,” he furrowed his brow and stared at the cave walls. “Third, Last, Double, Limited, Secret, Real, Wild… we never really teamed did we? Sometimes enemies but never even allies.”

Joel hummed. “Well, we’re a team now I guess. I didn’t get dragged here for nothing.”

Martyn shrugged, took the rest of the food out of the furnace and stretched. 

“I’m going to light up the caves ahead, you put the next batch of food in and watch it. It won’t cook properly without being watched,” he said, and walked off. Joel huffed. Of course he had to babysit the furnace. 

Martyn trudged back sheepishly about thirty seconds later. “I-uh, I realised I used all the coal to cook the food.”

Joel rolled his eyes. “Wow.”

“Wanna come with me to try to find some coal?” Martyn asked. Joel grinned. 

“Sure, glad you need my help buddy,” he said. Said buddy checked the furnace and groaned when he realised that all the coal had been used. There was still food cooking, but they left it there to come back to later. 

While Martyn led him through the cave, Joel checked his communicator for the first time. 

“Hey Martyn?” he said. Martyn stopped. 

“Hm?”

Joel showed him the strange message that had shown up. “Did you see that?”

* ChibiKeiko is about to roll the Boogeyman. 

“Who?!” Martyn exclaimed. Joel shrugged. 

“I dunno,” he mumbled and continued walking. They walked into a darker area where they hadn’t lit up yet with no sign of coal to light their way. 

Not even a minute later, when Joel’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, he saw a silhouette floating in the cave. He nudged Martyn. 

“Uh-”

Etho stalked off to do something known only to him while Jimmy kept placing blocks. He already had a team, and he was so thankful for that. Tango accepted him so quickly, it made him feel proud to be a first choice. Earlier in the session Jimmy had just run around collecting different wood types, of which he was pretty sure he had a monopoly on one. Dark oak. 

Taking a small break from his building, Jimmy took out the saplings from his inventory and placed them accordingly on the ground. 

“Guys I have a monopoly this time,” he grinned. Etho strolled over and gasped in delight. 

“My tree!” he whispered in awe. Then he turned to Jimmy. “Are these the only saplings on the server?”

Jimmy nodded. “I’m pretty sure they are. Found two dark oak trees that were over the border far north and made sure to get all of the saplings.”

Tango nodded with respect. 

“We must protect it,” Etho said defensively and got to making a small fence around the saplings. Tango laughed at his friend’s antics. Jimmy smiled. 

“I also have birch, spruce, cherry, oak, bamboo and jungle,” he said. Tango looked slightly disappointed at this. 

“No mangrove?” he questioned. Jimmy shook his head, then tilted it in confusion. 

“Why’d you want mangrove? It’s the absolute worst to chop down.”

“Gem likes it. We could’ve traded with her, even better if you took all like you did the dark oak,” Tango pointed out. Jimmy remembered that Gem had made a cute little farm and walls rimmed with mangrove roots, and her barn out of mangrove. 

“Ah,” he sighed. 

Tango ruffled Jimmy’s hair. “It’s fine. If you ran around the whole server and didn’t find it I doubt it’s there. I don’t think a lot of biomes are here anyway, so you’re good Jimmy. You did great already”

Jimmy beamed. 

“It’s always Grian with the monopolies, it’s my turn now,” he thought aloud. “We do need sugarcane though.”

“True,” Tango muttered. “I can go look for some now that the sun is up again.”

“Good idea,” Jimmy said and the blaze hybrid ran off. 

Etho finished awing at the tree and making the fence around it and went back to whatever the heck he’d started doing. 

Jimmy shrugged and continued making his little house. Once the walls were up, he chose acacia wood over oak wood for the roof, just because he was building in an acacia biome. For this he had to go chop down a few acacia trees because he only had four logs of it and he needed a good few stairs. Making a new stone axe so as to not eat into Tango and Etho’s iron supply, he chopped down the few trees that were around then planted the saplings that he’d gotten from the acacia trees. The half stack he had now would suffice, but he didn’t want to leave the terrain bare. 

He crafted his stairs and got to work.

“What is that Jimmy?” Tango asked, pointing to the little house that Jimmy was putting the last acacia stair on. Of course the first thing Tango would do when he got back from his adventures was insult his building. Tango was holding a bunch of sugarcane which he promptly hid before looking around and turning back to Jimmy. 

While Tango was gone, Etho was digging a hole for what seemed to be no specific reason. And Jimmy made - well tried to make a decent looking house. Even now that he looked at it, he was proud of it. Yes, it looked like a vanilla house from a village just with oak wood replaced with acacia, but it was still decent considering the materials he had and it had been built in less than half an hour. 

Jimmy frowned. “It’s a house!”

“I am not using that as our base,” Etho called from where he was digging a little ways off. His head popped up and his little arctic fox ears twitched with the movement. “Yeah, not a chance.”

“It’s a good house!” Jimmy protested. Tango stared at the house and snorted. 

“Yeah right,” he muttered. Jimmy rolled his eyes and made another stone pickaxe to take down the house. No one begged him to stop, or told him it was a joke. He knew it was, his friends weren’t that mean, but it still kind of stung. Then again, he wasn’t sure if he’d believe them if they were overly nice to him since he was so used to them being mean. 

Etho came up from his hole where he was digging, his ears flicked towards the sound of Jimmy tearing down the house. 

“Do we have a team name?” he asked, completely unrelated to the conversation before. His voice was muffled as he had his face in one of the chests. 

“I was thinking of JET,” Tango hummed. He was sitting on the furnace, swinging his legs like a child. Jimmy smiled at that and returned his focus to tearing down his house. 

“Never had my name in an acronym before,” Jimmy said. Tango paused. 

“That’s right actually. It’s because your name is Jimmy. J’s are hard to put in words,” Tango waved his tail around as he said this. 

“I bet if my name wasn’t Etho then you would have picked Ranchers But Etho’s Here wouldn't you Tango?” Etho said as he walked over to them, his things presumably all neatly sorted in the chest. Tango stuttered. 

“No I wouldn’t!” he argued weakly. Etho laughed. 

“Just like how if I teamed with Joel again he wouldn’t beg me to call us the Boat Boys once more and ask for neck kisses,” he said, and plopped himself down on the floor to sit. “He already asks me for neck kisses on Hermitcraft.”

“And you don’t?” Tango veered the conversation right away from the Ranchers. Jimmy frowned again. He missed being Tango’s Rancher. Double Life was a great time. 

“Uhh,” Etho adjusted his mask and put his puffy white tail on his lap. “N-no.”

Tango grinned with his sharp teeth. “Thought so.”

“I miss the Ranchers,” Jimmy whispered under his breath. Tango heard this, of course. 

“What was that Jimmy?” Tango smiled sweetly. 

Jimmy half-glared at him. “I miss the Ranchers man! I say this all the time.”

Tango laughed. “You miss me!”

“I miss us as a team, I miss Double Life,” Jimmy sighed. “Even if I did die in one of the stupidest ways possible.”

Tango laughed again, then Etho cleared his throat. 

“Are we going to talk about our team or do you want to keep reminiscing about the good old days of Double Life?” he muttered half sarcastically. Jimmy chuckled. 

“We can talk about our team, yes Etho,” he said. 

“It’s JET now, isn’t it?” Tango crossed his arms. Jimmy and Etho nodded. 

Jimmy tilted his head to think. “If we’re JET, why don’t we build a rocket to replace my hut?” He gestured towards the half torn down house. 

“Yeah we’re called JET let’s make a rocket,” Etho deadpanned. “And not a fighter jet.”

Jimmy went bright red and Tango started laughing. 

“I-uh,” Jimmy buried his face in his hands while Tango tried to talk but he was wheezing too hard. 

“A rocket sounds good actually,” Etho murmured and Tango fell to the floor. 

Chapter Text

After Cleo confirmed that Joel’s death to a stalagmite wasn’t a boogeyman kill, she put her communicator back in her sock and continued on in life. 

“May!” she yelled from over her shoulder. The brunette hybrid perked her head up from the hole she was digging under the wool structure and stared. 

“Yeah?” she called back. Cleo placed down the last piece of wool she had and turned around. 

“Do you have any more wool?” they asked. 

May rummaged through her things and climbed up from the hole to pass Cleo a quarter stack of white wool. “All I have right now. The sheep aren’t eating the grass.”

Cleo accepted the wool and nodded. They’d have to gather more sheep later then. For now, she’d try to finish this tent with what she had. 

It was Scar’s idea to make tents and call themselves the Campers. After an extremely successful mining trip that gave everyone in the trio iron armour and a diamond sword, they split up for ten minutes to scout for good areas to base. May was the one who found this pretty area in the northwest corner. It was very hilly. On the side of one of the hills was an entrance to a lush cave that May had fawned over, and beside that hill was a big lake with a small island in the middle. While Cleo would have preferred to make something less flammable, sitting on that little island to make it a little harder to reach, Scar wanted tents, and May loved the cave. 

So now Cleo was making herself a white tent while May dug out an area under the tents as a bunker. Scar was out collecting animals, living out his zookeeper persona from Hermitcraft here in a Life game with farm animals. 

Cleo was actually quite fond of May. She was funny, sharing the same sense of humour that they and Scar had. Although a little awkward at the start, and almost dying several times during the mining trip, she fit right in with them. Not clumsier than Scar though. It wasn’t May who got jumpscare by glow lichen thinking it was a creeper. No, that was Scar. 

“I don’t suppose you like setting things on fire, do you?” Cleo mused. She heard May pause her digging. 

“In the Life game I played I didn’t really set things on fire, that was mostly Tania. But give me the chance and I will gladly burn something,” she called back. 

Cleo laughed. “So it’s good we have all the arsonists in one place.”

May laughed too, and they both got back to what they were doing. The only other person Cleo could think of that really liked playing with fire was Joel, though Scott also sometimes set things on fire. Cleo checked if she had a flint and steel on her. She didn’t, surprisingly. 

“Can’t be an arsonist without fire, can you?” she muttered under her breath and went to go break some gravel for flint now that the tent was done. 

It was a pretty basic tent. Scar would probably scoff at the zero texturing and the fact there was no movement in how the folds worked, but this thing was going to get burnt anyway, wasn’t it? That’s why May was digging out the bunker. Though having another bunker elsewhere would also be ideal, since bases tended to get dug under, blown up, set on fire and other wonderful ways of destruction. 

Cleo laughed to herself, and finally got a piece of flint from the gravel. At the same time, May climbed up from the bunker. 

“Done?” Cleo was surprised. Surely it would take longer to mine out a large area like they’d planned? This wasn’t Hermitcraft with haste beacons and efficiency five netherite pickaxes. 

May shook her head, her curly brown hair bouncing with the movement. “Nope. Not yet. Just bored of digging and I wanna make my own tent now.”

Smiling, Cleo nodded. “I can take over bunker digging for now then. You gonna start on your tent?” 

“Oh yeah! I’m gonna make mine yellow because of my wings,” she grinned, and stretched her duck-parrot wings fully to show them off. They were mostly yellow, though tipped with other colours. 

“You certainly are a ball of colour,” Cleo muttered. May laughed and adjusted her tie dye t-shirt. “It looks good on you though. Suits your personality.”

“Why thank you!” May said and went over to the sheep hole with a pair of new shears. “You are a ball of colour too, with the 80’s outfit.”

Cleo shrugged. “Guess I am.”

Although the 80’s outfit was fun to wear, sometimes they preferred their other outfit with the tattered clothes. It made them feel more scary with her ribcage half-exposed, and looked more like a natural zombie. She’d jumpscared May with this outfit all the same though. Cleo grinned remembering the look of utter horror on May’s face when they’d first met in that small cave. 

May went to dye the few sheep that had regrown their wool yellow, and sheared them while Cleo grabbed her pickaxe and climbed down to the bunker to see what May had done. 

Which was a lot. 

The group had marked out where each tent would be, one for each person, and so they made it so that the bunker would be right in the middle of the three of them, tunnels under each one to access it. She wasn’t sure how they would cover the entrances, but they would think of something, right? 

May had dug out most of where the planned bunker would go, minus a block down on the floor and one on the ceiling. She hadn’t dug out the tunnels under where the other two proposed tents would go, but she’d dug under Cleo’s. 

Cleo began to finish the mind numbing task of digging the rest of the main bunker. Easy task, but dull. She could see why May wanted a break from it. 

Maybe if they talked a little more that would make this more interesting. 

“May?” Cleo called, wondering if through the thick roof of the bunker she’d be able to hear them. 

“Yeah?” May’s muffled voice called back. Cleo thought for a second. 

“Wha-,” Cleo started but Scar’s loud voice cut her off before she could ask her question. 

“I FOUND US SOME COWS!” he yelled excitedly. “And pigs and chickens and we already have sheep.”

Cleo sighed, and climbed out of the bunker to talk better. “That’s amazing, Scar. Why don’t you build them a pen or something. Or y’know what? Shove them in the lush cave.”

“What a brilliant idea Cleo!” Scar smiled and led the cows down to the lush cave with a bundle of wheat in his hand. The pigs were tied to the fencepost that held up Cleo’s tent and the chickens had already wandered off.  

Rolling her eyes, Cleo scrambled over to Scar and pushed the precious cows back. “That was sarcasm Scar!”

Scar sighed. “Why must you always use sarcasm on me?”

Cleo scoffed, and heard May laughing behind them. 

“Are you not thankful for the cows?” he continued sadly. 

“Of course we are,” May reassured him, and helped make a cow hole and a chicken hole near the sheep hole, then slaughtered the pigs. 

“My pigs!” Scar frowned. 

“They’re a waste. We don’t even have carrots or potatoes to give them to it. I don’t even know where you got those leads to bring them here,” May explained. 

“I killed a wandering trader!” Scar boasted. May sighed and laughed at the same time, possibly debating her choice to team with Scar and not running off to find someone cooler. 

Cleo had been debating that choice for ages now. She knew what Scar was like in a Life game, having been his teammate before. 

“Brutal already,” Cleo commented, and Scar looked at her and smiled wide. 

“Thank you!”

Skizz blinked as he exited the cave, the bright sunlight hurting his eyes. 

The last warm rays of the sun before it set was certainly a welcome change from the cold dark caves, but it took him a second to get used to it again. 

Usually, by this point in the first session he’d have a friend or teammate, but it seemed like everyone had spread out completely. Since the first circle, he hadn’t seen a single person. 

He didn’t like being alone in the slightest. He missed having someone to joke with him at his side while fighting off monsters and mining iron. 

Sighing, Skizz found himself wandering back to the strange spawn. He wasn’t necessarily worried or curious about the symbol on the ground, but it would be a cool thing to know. 

“Skizz?” a familiar friend’s voice called out cautiously. Skizz recognized the voice immediately. 

“Impy!” he replied back happily. Impulse climbed out of the stream, eyeing him suspiciously. He looked tense. 

“Are you the boogeyman?” Impulse asked. No hello. No “how are you doing?” Just straight questions. Straight questions got straight answers. 

Skizz frowned. “No!”

“Okay,” Impulse relaxed a bit. Skizz realised this probably meant Impulse wasn’t the boogeyman either. Really, he’d forgotten the boogeyman existed except for the time that the strange floaty person came to give him a stick that said “YOU ARE NOT THE BOOGEYMAN.” And briefly when Cleo mentioned it after Joel’s death, but really it wasn’t a thing that was bothering him. 

“Good mining trip?” Skizz eyed his best friend’s diamond sword and iron armour. Impulse nodded. Skizz had also gotten a few diamonds on his caving trip, using three of them on a diamond pickaxe and saving the rest. 

“Do you want to team up?” Impulse and the straight up questions today. Skizz beamed. 

“Yeah, of course, dude!” he practically jumped up and down with excitement. He and Impulse didn’t get to team often, only really once during one of the past Life games, Limited Life, when they were the TIES with Etho and Tango. 

Impulse grinned. “Nice!”

They began to wander around as they talked. 

“Do you have a place in mind where you want to make a base?” Skizz asked. He had the village with Pearl to look after, but making a base there would draw too much attention to it and risk harming the villagers. 

Impulse hummed as he thought. “There’s a beach down south with a looted shipwreck. Since we’re a small team we should probably ally with a bigger team first though, and maybe base near them?” 

Skizz nodded. “You were quite far out last time, weren’t you? You and the Gs?” 

“Yeah, and I had like, five people on my team? BigB was pretty much a teammate because of how often he was at our base,” he thought aloud. 

“I remember that,” Skizz said. 

They kept walking along the stream until they reached the beach and the shipwreck that Impulse had described. 

“We could be water based. Water is a great defense,” Skizz pointed out as he stared upon the large body of water stretching through the world border. 

“Last time someone was water based they won the game, so I mean it’s not a bad idea,” Impulse said bitterly. That was true. Martyn was part of the Mean Gills, based on the ocean in Limited Life, and he won that game brutally. 

It took Skizz a second to realise that Impulse had been in that top three, fulfilling his final wish before he died. “TIES gets to the final three!” 

Impulse looked like he was in a daze, and Skizz snapped a finger in front of his friend’s face. 

“Sorry, just remembering. I usually don’t remember this much in a Life game. Mostly just fragments,” Impulse muttered, and Skizz realised he was right. He has been remembering a lot more than usual, even Hermitcraft events and happenings. That was strange. Skizz shrugged it off as just being a weird thing, just like pretty much everything else in this Life game. 

“So are we going to base on water or?” Skizz prompted. Impulse looked around. The sun had set already and there were some dazed mobs wandering around. 

“How about we try to find someone else first? It’ll be good to know where the bases are early game, right?” Impulse suggested. 

“Okay!” Skizz agreed. His friend squinted into the distance. 

“I think I see light in the distance,” Impulse started walking away from the ocean and off of the beach. “Let’s check there first.”
Skizz followed Impulse as he made his way over to where he thought was light. As they approached though, Skizz saw it too, in the corner of a plains biome, was a bunch of torches to light up the area.

Impulse started running, and Skizz quickened his pace to catch up with him. 

Where there was light, Skizz suddenly also heard the sound of voices. Shapes appeared in the light. The first one Skizz recognised was Jimmy’s bright yellow canary wings. 

“Hey Jiggles!” he called, and the group turned to look at the arriving pair. Jimmy smiled and waved. Joined by him were Tango and Etho, Etho sitting on the floor with his ears perked back and a hand on his sword, Tango sitting on top of a pile of furnaces swinging his legs like a child. 

“Skizz! Impulse!” Tango grinned and whipped his fiery tail in a wave. “How’s it goin’?”

“Pretty good,” Impulse replied and Skizz nodded in agreement. 

Etho stood up and turned to glare at them. “You’re not the boogeyman, are you?” 

Jimmy paused whatever he was doing and Tango stared right at Skizz. 

“Nope,” Impulse and Skizz said in unison, and Jimmy relaxed. Etho did not, and kept an eye on the two. 

“So you guys are a team?” Skizz asked. Tango nodded enthusiastically. 

“Yep! This is our land now, our team name is JET,” he explained. 

Skizz smiled while Impulse looked surprised. 

“That’s cool! I love the team name!” Skizz praised. Tango flicked his tail again. 

“All me, all me,” he grinned. 

“Of course it was,” Impulse said. Tango smiled again, pure delight. 

Skizz loved that teams were already being made, and that this time he had his best friend by his side. 

Chapter Text

Gem frowned as she checked her communicator, then gasped. 

“Scott!” she called. “Scott! Martyn’s killed BigB, and he’s dark green!” 

“What?!” Scott ran up to her, pickaxe in hand, looking concerned. Gem gestured to her communicator as he caught up to her. 

“Oh, he must have been the boogeyman,” Scott took out his own communicator and scrolled through the messages. He nodded to himself. “Yeah, he was the boogeyman, see? Keiko confirmed it there.”

As she scrolled down through the messages, Gem found Keiko’s explanation and Martyn’s deadpan celebration. 

“Oh. Okay,” she muttered. She’d forgotten that the boogeyman was a thing. When being told the rules in the circle she half-zoned out and the only thing she remembered was that there were four lives and you could get more from boss mobs. Scott had given her a run down of them again when they found each other in a cave earlier in the session, but even then it seemed like the boogeyman was the least of her worries. 

It didn’t matter now though. The boogeyman had killed someone, and that was done for the session. 

Scott wandered away and went back to his part of the strip mine. After caving for the majority of the session, Gem and Scott decided to strip mine for diamonds, making it a race to see who could get full armour, sword and pickaxe first. Gem currently had a chestplate, sword and almost broken pickaxe along a few spare diamonds she was saving for her leggings. Scott was only a few diamonds behind her, she hoped. They hadn’t had as much diamond luck as they wanted, in the caves there were so little, and in the strip mine it seemed as though they were more spread out than usual.The winner of the race got an IOU for the end game, which was probably a dangerous thing to gamble with, but Gem liked the competition. Plus, she knew she could beat Scott in pvp, and unless the IOU was to kill herself, which they’d put in the rules as illegal, then she was fine if she lost. If she won, she had plans. 

Because of the IOU, Gem knew that she and Scott would not end up on the same team. As much as she would have loved to have him on her team again like in Secret Life, she knew that he liked teaming up with different people. Although, Wild Life seemed to be a team up of a bunch of his old teammates. Pearl from Last, Cleo from Double, Impulse from Secret. Scott was an unpredictable person, Gem realised. The only pattern she could find with him was that allies tended to place higher. 

At least they were allies with this IOU, right? Gem shuddered. If they were enemies with the IOU, things could go much more badly. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. 

She shook her head, and went back to mining. 

Abusing the redstone trick was what got Gem her final diamond vein. Delighted, she ignored the last redstone ore and took the diamonds. A vein of six. She dug around it just to make sure that she hadn’t missed any, and found an extra one hiding above where the vein had been. 

She grinned, ran through the tunnels back to the crafting table and furnace set up to make her boots and leggings, leaving her with two spare diamonds for an enchanting table. She would have gotten the rest earlier, had her pickaxe not broken and she didn’t want to make a bunch of iron ones. 

“Scott!” she called, but it was mocking in her voice instead of shock this time. “You done?” 

“Not quite,” his voice called back. “Why?” 

Gem grinned. “I am.”

“No way!” Scott said, strolling into the furnace area. A diamond chestplate was over his usual denim jacket and boots he’d made earlier on his feet. He looked slightly panicked when he saw Gem’s full armour, but hid it before she could call it out or notice. “Dang it.”

“That’s an IOU for me,” Gem said, relieved. 

Scott sighed. “Yeah, I lost. Boo hoo for me.”

“You can’t win everything Scott,” Gem teased, elbowing him. He kicked the ground dramatically. 

“I guess not.”

Gem smiled again, overly relieved that she hadn’t lost the race. Unfortunately, Scott seemed to think the same things as she did. 

“Does the IOU make us allies? Teammates? Or does it make us enemies?” he asked, staring right at her to see her reaction. His sharp ice blue eyes pierced her gaze and Gem frowned, trying not to come up with a stupid answer. She wanted Scott on her team. She knew he was a deadly player. But she also knew that Scott wasn’t a simple person. 

She sighed, and fiddled with the handle of her unused diamond sword. “What do you think, Scott? I’d love to have you as my teammate again but knowing you, this puts us against each other because you like to keep things interesting.”

Scott paused for a second, then began tapping his fingers against his thighs. 

“I usually stay with whoever finds me first,” he started, his cold gaze making Gem feel like he knew something she didn’t. “Or if I find them first.”

“Does that mean you’ll stay with me?” Gem started to get excited. Maybe, maybe this time she wouldn’t have to babysit her teammate like last time. 

His fingers stopped moving for a moment, then returned to their unknown rhythm. “No. You’re right, I like to keep things interesting,” he grinned slyly. “How is an IOU between allies interesting? Where’s the fun in that?”

Gem suddenly felt extremely scared of Scott. He’d never been her enemy. Not even that brief moment in Limited Life did she need to be wary of the blue haired man. “You’re scary.”

“Aw, thank you!” Scott’s sassy tone replaced the ice in his voice. He leaned against the cave wall, arms folded. “I just want some fun, that’s what this is for, right?”

“They’re going to hate you for that,” Gem muttered under her breath and glanced at the way out of the cave. Speaking normally, she continued. “I’ll leave you here then, Star.”

Scott raised his eyebrows at the name, but Gem turned and strolled out before he could complain. 

If he wanted an enemy, he wouldn’t get one. Calling him Star was pushing what little of this alliance they had, but she felt she had matched his tone evenly. Gem hoped that this would leave them neutral. 

She didn’t need enemies this earlier, and certainly not Scott. 

“Do you have any orange dye, May?” Scar called to the younger teammate. 

He needed the dye to turn the sheep orange for his tent, both May and Cleo already had theirs and he felt left out. While they had been building and digging out the bunker, he’d gotten the assorted farm animals needed, though May killed his pigs. Then he’d built them neat little pens and got excited over the fact they had moss from the lush cave nearby and started to texture the area, but Cleo destroyed it all because “It would all be destroyed later.”

Scar found it unfair that in previous games other people built pretty buildings and bases and they didn’t care about it being blown up, but Cleo stopped him from adding detail to the tents. The connected textures were driving him insane. 

He loved being with the Campers though. It was looking to be a fun team. May had built a campfire earlier with logs facing it to sit around it, according to the tent locations too. 

“I have a few poppies and dandelions in a bundle if that helps,” May answered, passing him the flowers with a slightly mischievous smile on her face as the poppies landed on his palm. 

“What’s with that face?” Scar said suspiciously. May grinned and put her last poppy in her fluffy brown hair. 

“Nothing,” she smiled, and got back to breeding the cows. Cleo had stressed over leaving the cows out in a hole like that, but May realised early on that the animals respawned frequently. 

“In the last game I played, I’m pretty sure Tania just went around killing cows and sheep for food instead of breeding them,” she had said. 

“I like the sound of this Tania person. They sound very fun,” Cleo had grinned from the other side of the campfire. 

Scar shrugged at May’s weird antics over the flowers, and crushed them into dyes for the wool. The sheep hole was right beside the cow hole, so Scar could hear May feeding the cows and their sad moos as she killed the after while he peacefully dyed and sheared some sheep. He left some yellow for the sake of the sheep pen looking like part of a sunrise. Maybe he could convince Cleo to dye their tent pink or red. Pink would better go with their outfit.

Speaking of which, Cleo was off turning the island in the middle of the lake where they were based beside into a wheat farm to feed the animals and also to make bread if it was needed. From the mainland, it looked like such a pretty sight. It reminded Scar of Grian’s Hermitcraft base, and that island he’d terraformed recently with the giant pretty oak tree as the centerpiece. 

“NO WAY YOU’VE BEEN HERE ALL SESSION!” a voice panted from somewhere outside the camp. 

Scar almost jumped out of his skin and yelped. “Who’s there?”

At the same time, May gasped. “GRIAN?”

He climbed out of the sheep pen to find Grian and May in a shocked staring contest. Scar couldn’t tell who was more shocked, the parrot or the duck. Probably the parrot. 

Grian looked exhausted, and his red jumper was peppered with holes and slashes and badly cleaned up blood. 

“Hey G,” Scar smiled and broke the staring contest. 

Grian waved his hands wildly while talking gibberish. It seemed like he was gesturing to May, and Scar blinked at him until he made sense. 

“YOU’VE HAD HER THIS WHOLE TIME?!” he yelled. 

May’s shock turned to sass. “I can do what I want short parrot boy,” she scoffed, ruffling her wings. 

“Speak for yourself,” Grian said. May folded her arms angrily, and just stared at him. 

Scar watched the pair’s stand off and considered leaving, but decided to climb on top of Cleo’s tent to watch them instead. With the campfire crackling in the middle of the campsite and sunrise it looked like some movie scene he’d seen before. 

“Cool, isn’t it?” a voice chirped from above him. Jumping in fright for the second time in less than five minutes, he looked up to find the Boogeyman stick giver Keiko floating above him, mischief dancing in her eyes. Or maybe that was the campfire light reflecting in her warm brown eyes. 

“Very,” Scar shivered, wishing people and things would stop jumpscaring him. 

She sat beside him as they watched the two parrot hybrids interrogate each other. 

“Where did you come from?” Grian demanded. May grinned playfully. 

“Oh, you know. The Void. A previous Life game,” she shrugged. 

Grian growled. “What’s your name?”

“Mayflower Quack.”

“Fits the wings.”

“Yeah no shi-”

“MAY! NO SWEARING!” Cleo joined the party just in time to stop their new adopted daughter from cursing at the other parrot hybrid. 

“Fine, mom,” May rolled her eyes. “You’re not as fun as my Cleo.”

Cleo pointed their sword at May. “You’re going to regret that.”

“What do you mean ‘my Cleo?’ There’s other Cleos?!” Grian sounded more frustrated. May rolled her eyes again. 

“As if the name Cleo isn’t common enough. Yeah, I have a Cleo in my friend group. If you can imagine a slightly shorter, somewhat less crazy and plainly dressed version of this Cleo without the zombie skin than you’ve got my Cleo Crazy Person,” she explained slowly, as if she expected Grian not to understand English. 

“You don’t need to baby me!” he yelled. 

May pouted. “Aw, but you’re adorable when flustered and annoyed.”

“WHY ARE BOTH OF YOU LIKE THIS?” Grian yelled. Scar felt bad for him. He could see how frustrated his friend was getting, and May annoying him didn’t make it any better. 

He slid off the tent and gently pushed May back before she could respond. 

“G, I think it’s time you go,” he said calmly. Grian looked at him with hollow dark eyes. 

“Okay,” he muttered. He brushed down his clothes and turned and fled. 

Before he was out of earshot, Scar heard him say: “I just wanted answers. Is that too much to ask for?” 

Scar turned to May, who looked slightly dazed. “What was that for?” 

The duck-parrot hybrid shook herself out of her daze. 

“He’s adorable when flustered,” she said. Cleo sighed, then laughed. 

“I’m so proud of you!” they grinned, and high fived May. Scar frowned, unsure if that was okay. 

He ignored it and went back to shearing the sheep for wool to make his tent. Just after he’d collected half a stack Cleo muttered: “Skizz just died.”

Then they laughed. “He fell off a ladder!” 

Scar scoffed. Out of all his stupid deaths, he didn’t think he’d died that way. He heard May laughing too, though he saw on his communicator they were sending condolences for his death. He sent some too. Mostly, he was surprised he hadn’t died already. 

That made three deaths this session, none of them his. Joel to stalagmites, BigB to Martyn, Skizz a ladder. 

His communicator buzzed once again, this time with another admin message from Keiko, who’d supposedly disappeared a while ago. 

Keiko: End of session!

“We’re going then?” May asked. Cleo made a

sound of unknowing, and Scar just pressed log out. 

He’d had enough excitement for one day.

Chapter Text

Joel mined the last piece of obsidian he needed to make his nether portal and realised he didn’t have a flint and steel. 

That was fine, he could make one. He saw gravel out of the corner of his eye and went to break it for flint. He had iron, he’d gotten a good bit in the caves of this Resource World, though he used most of it on axes for chopping down trees here. His new build here on Misadventures was very cherry wood heavy, thus the need for the axes. 

The gravel dropped him a piece of flint, which Joel quickly combined for a flint and steel and made his nether portal. 

He made the portal without corners, as to save resources, though he knew if his friend saw it he would be mad. Joel grinned. Making Etho mad was one of his favourite pastimes. 

Etho… he wasn’t in this Consistent World. But the name of his friend made Joel remember a game where he was in it.

He wondered how long it had been since the last session. 

Striking the flint and steel, the nether portal lit up and swirled its purple glow. Grabbing his shield, Joel walked through the portal confidently. Shroomlights were one of the last things he needed for this new build. 

Somehow, he got lucky. A crimson forest spawned extremely close to his nether portal, and he didn’t have any run-ins with piglins or hoglins. 

His day was going surprisingly well. 

Now it was time to go home with all of these items. 

He typed out the command to bring him back to Misadventures and began to make his way back to Meriport where he’d bought a house last week, and all of his things and important stuff were. 

As Joel entered the village, he was met with his wife, Lizzie. 

“Hi Lizzie,” he grinned, hugging her. She hugged him back and flicked a piece of dust off of his armour. 

“Hi babe. Oh, is that all of the materials you wanted for your build idea?” she asked curiously. Joel nodded. 

“I’ve got most of it now. Just a few more things like slime, but I’ll do that tomorrow,” he said, showing her the various blocks he’d gathered. Lizzie smiled enthusiastically as Joel explained his build plan in the middle of the dark forest he’d found, a giant mushroom. 

Once he was done, Lizzie paused. 

“Joel, last week you left around this time,” she started. Joel waited for her to continue. “Is it another Life game? Scott, Martyn, Ren and Jimmy were gone too. Late, all of you.”

“It was, yeah. Did I not tell you about this?” he asked, confused. Usually she’d know about a Life game. 

“No?” she said, slightly annoyed. “I wasn’t invited.”

Joel frowned. “Oh.”

“I kinda wanted to play another Life game, I like to kill people,” she said quietly. Joel sighed. 

“This game is kind of broken, there are so many things… strange with it,” he explained. “Though, I do think you and Keiko would make great friends.”

Lizzie looked at him curiously. “Who’s Keiko?”

“Some strange woman who floats around and stalks us,” Joel laughed. When she’d appeared to him and Martyn to give them their sticks, he was so scared, but really, Keiko was just a silly person who enjoyed jumpscaring people. 

Or, that’s how Joel saw her. 

“Ooh! She sounds fun. Yes, me and her would be besties,” Lizzie plotted, determination in her pretty voice. Joel smiled fondly. 

Then she sighed. “I still don’t understand why I wasn’t even invited. I played the last two games and had fun! You even won Wild Life. Surely Winners’ partners get free invites, right?”

“I don’t know. I wish you were there though,” Joel sighed again. He thought for a moment, trying to think of any explanation as to why his wife wasn’t in the Life game. 

“There’s two new people,” he said thoughtfully, remembering the brief moment he’d seen the two younger players in the starting circle. “I think they replaced you and Mumbo.”

He realised Mumbo hadn’t been in the circle either. 

Lizzie tried to look offended, but really she just looked disappointed and frustrated. 

“I wouldn’t be able to attend anyway. Because of this World, y’know?” she complained. 

Joel hugged her again. “You put a lot of work into making this World, you better believe we love it and appreciate your efforts. If you can’t play this Life game, that’s fine, I’m sure Grian can invite you to another one. Who knows? Maybe you can fill in for someone.”

She sighed. “Yeah, that would be cool.”

Blinking, Joel realised the World was fading. The next session was starting. 

“Babe-,” he started, but Lizzie understood. 

She kissed him, and smiled. 

Fading fast, the last thing he heard was her saying: “have fun and don’t die. Love you.”

The world turned back and Joel still felt giddy. 

Chapter Text

He gasped, blinking as the world solidified around him. The trees went from white and grey to green and brown. The sky returned to blue. 

Scott leaned against the nearest tree to gain his bearings again. 

Fan Life. That’s where he was. His communicator confirmed it, seeing the name “ChibiKeiko” in the members list. 

He grinned. 

“Where did I leave off last time?” he muttered, trying to avoid talking to the non-existent camera. The fact he didn’t have to create off of this was certainly comforting, and it meant he could enjoy the game a little bit more. 

Like leaving Gem for his own fun. If that was seen by all, well, he would be hated. But now only Gem could hate him. 

What was he doing last time? Scott frowned and stared through the trees. 

Getting teammates, maybe? That sounded right. If he and Gem were enemies, then he needed some strong allies. 

And already, he heard voices. 

Running through the trees, Scott reached the mountain that he’d been nearing this whole time, the one in the very corner of the map. 

Built into the foot of the mountain was the start of a cobblestone box. He frowned. 

“Absolutely not,” he said, louder than he intended. 

Two people spun around to glare at him. BigB and Ren. Ren’s tail swished, ears twitching towards him. 

“What say you, lad? Repeat thineself!” Ren called from atop the box. Scott blinked, then shrugged. Why not go along with Ren’s dramatics? They were fun anyways. 

“My lord!” Scott started, bowing. “I refuse to see you living in a hideous plain box. You were a king! You belong in castles of gold and jewels, not a peasant’s abode.”

Ren looked surprised. 

Swished his tail again. 

BigB stared at him curiously. 

Scott continued. “I offer myself as a teammate, or an ally. And a helper to help turn this,” he gestured towards the box. “Into a castle fit for a king.”

“I quite like the idea of being king once again,” Ren said after a pause. “Let me converse with my associate before we accept your strange offer.”

Ren and BigB went off a little way and talked in dramatically hushed voices, turning to glance at Scott here and there. 

Scott didn’t care if they refused his offer. While he did want a bigger team this time, he was fine on his own or finding someone else. Plus, then it meant he didn’t have to make a castle for Ren. 

He wondered what they would think about Gem’s IOU. It certainly wasn’t a good thing, and most definitely a liability. If they accepted, Scott would most likely have to keep that a secret so it didn’t throw them off of wanting to be friends. 

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Ren spread his arms and announced loudly: “We accept your allyship.”

Scott smiled lightly and pushed his teal hair out of his eyes. 

“Join us here on top of the box!” Ren called, gesturing to the half-made roof. Scott glanced around for a way to get up there, quickly realising he had to climb part of the mountain to jump on top of it. 

He scaled up the mountain carefully, stopping just above where the box’s roof was being made and jumped, almost falling off of the edge but pulled himself on top quickly to cover his stumble. 

He was met with a slightly disappointed BigB and excited Ren. 

“Hello Scott,” BigB said cautiously. He looked like he wanted to continue, but Ren began to talk instead. 

“About what you said earlier Scott,” he said. “Does this mean I am King Ren once again?” 

Scott glanced at BigB, who shrugged. Scott shrugged too. 

“Yeah, I guess it does. This box can be turned into a castle, and we can build an army,” he suggested slyly. Ren grinned, and BigB sighed. 

“Brilliant! BigB can be my important second in command, and you can be my loyal knight,” Ren announced, and BigB finally smiled. Being important was good for him. Gasping, he drew an iron sword and pointed it at Scott. 

“Kneel,” he ordered. Scott tried to hide his shock and kneeled obediently. Lightly touching his shoulders with the blade, Ren continued in a powerful voice. “Scott, I knight you as my soldier, loyal and bound to me. Rise.”

Scott stood up carefully. Ren looked pleased. BigB was glaring at him once again. 

“And BigB,” the shepherd dog hybrid smiled at his second in command. From his pocket, he produced a badge of sorts, and Scott briefly wondered how Ren was able to get it. Ren pinned the badge on BigB’s blue jumper proudly. “As my second in command, I give you this badge, and power over my knight and castle.”

BigB smiled. 

“Now come on lads, this castle won’t build itself! Scott, show us your castle plans now. We must begin work on the structure at once!” Ren ordered, and Scott grinned. This was going to be a fun game with this team. 

“Pearl?!” Gem called again, ready to give up on waiting for her so-called friend. She’d been at spawn now for at least ten or twenty minutes. She was getting bored. 

She tapped her foot against the ground impatiently. Maybe Pearl had been lying when she offered allyship back in Hermitcraft. Or was that a dream? That would have been one strange dream, considering she thought that this was a dream and so she would have been talking about a dream in a dream. And if this was a dream, she was thinking of a dream in a dream in a dream. 

Gem shook her head. Enough about dreams. 

“GEEEEMMMMM!” Pearl’s frantic excited voice screamed as she crashed through the taiga, stumbling into the clearing where spawn was. Gem blinked at her friend. 

“Hi.”

“Hellooo!” Pearl chirped, smiling brightly. Gem laughed. 

“You’re more bubbly than you were back on Hermitcraft,” she pointed out fondly. Her friend just shrugged. 

“I like the kill or be killed of these games,” she explained briefly. “It’s fun, especially when you’re not a wet cat like I am.”

Gem laughed again, nudging Pearl lightly. 

That’s when she noticed the person who was watching them from the other side of the stream surrounding spawn. It was one of the new ones, the one wearing the sailor outfit. She had a look of awe on her, completely in a trance and didn’t realise that Gem was watching her until she said something. 

“Hello,” Gem tried, tilting her head at the newcomer. 

The sandy-haired girl blinked, then scrambled to her feet. “Hi!” 

She smiled and pushed her hair behind her ears, fiddling with the strands they were tied in front of her face. 

Gem smiled, and instantly liked this girl. 

“Pearl I know it was supposed to be just you and me, but I like this one. We’re taking her with us, wherever that is,” she decided, and grabbed the newcomer’s hand. 

“Oh!” the girl gasped and Pearl narrowed her eyes at her. Then she grinned. 

“Yeah I like this one,” she said. “What’s your name?” 

The girl loosened herself from Gem’s grip and rubbed her hand. “Caly Opaleye. Call me Caly.”

“Pretty name!” Pearl gushed. “I’m PearlescentMoon, known as Pearl. And this is my bestie Gemi-”

“GeminiTay, known as Gem, I know,” Caly muttered. Pearl stopped, and Gem looked at the girl curiously. 

Caly went wide eyed, and her face turned red. 

“How do you-?” Gem said, confused. She didn’t know Caly. So how did Caly know her?

“Um-” Caly fumbled, and gripped her pocket. “I just do.”

Pearl and Gem exchanged glances. Her friend’s gaze said everything-namely “are you sure you want this strange person who knows us but we don’t know them?”

“Sorry,” Caly mumbled, turning around to walk off. 

“Nope, we’re adopting you,” Pearl stepped in front of Caly. “I like your mysteriousness.”

The sandy-haired girl smiled. 

Gem smiled back. If Caly knew herself and Pearl, then surely she knew the rest of the crew? That could be somewhat an advantage. Gem knew the rest of the crew, obviously. But she had a suspicion that Caly was one of the Weak Watchers. She would have to mention that to Pearl later, or not. Pearl would probably be more wary of Caly then. She sighed, knowing what some Weak Watchers draw and write. 

Pearl was still fussing over Caly. 

Gem smiled. 

She wondered if either of them had any base ideas. She might have diamond armour already, but Pearl had base iron armour and Caly but a chainmail chestplate. 

“Hey, Pearl?” she asked. Pearl stopped complimenting Caly’s dark green poncho. 

“Yeah?” Pearl said. 

Gem gestured around her. “Do you have any base ideas?” 

“Um, well I’ve been kinda living in the taiga there-,” Pearl pointed west. “I have a small set up in a village.”

“A village?!” Gem gasped. “Are there villagers?” 

Pearl paused. “Yeah. Skizz and I hid them last time.” 

“That’s amazing!” Gem said brightly. Villagers could be useful assets later on in the game. 

“I hope you hid them well,” Caly said quietly. Pearl looked at her in confusion. 

“Well of course I did, I know what these nuggets can be like. They tend to kill and steal, correct?” she said. Caly nodded, slightly embarrassed. 

Pearl shrugged. “Yeah so obviously. Anyway, I doubt you two have homes so I’ma take you to mine, plus, I need to get Zilly.”

Gem tried not to feel offended. “Hey!” she elbowed her friend playfully. “Who’s Zilly?”

“My dog!” Pearl beamed. 

“What kind of name is Zilly?” Gem scoffed. 

Pearl made a puppet hand. “What kind of name is GeminiTay?”

“I think Zilly is a cute name,” Caly agreed. 

Pearl made jazz hands towards Caly. “ THANK YOU! See? This wonderful stranger is more accepting than you are. She agrees with my stupid naming system.”

Gem rolled her eyes. “You and your silly “illy” ending names.”

Chapter Text

“Hey!” Jimmy called, waving Tango over. “Keiko’s here!”

He had been sorting through the chests while Tango was building a rocket, his suggestion from last time that left him in stitches. Jimmy was still embarrassed over his suggestion for a base, but Tango took designing the rocket to the next level. It looked fantastic. 

Etho was off fishing by the beach nearer the middle, since it was a good food source and could also get things like enchanted books and bows if he was lucky enough. 

Keiko - she looked different. A long red vest over a purple shirt replaced her red dress from last time, but she was still unmistakably Keiko. 

“Hiya, boys!” she smiled, passing a stick to Jimmy, and carefully throwing one to Tango, who caught it without looking and continued working on the rocket. The blaze hybrid’s steampunk base over on Hermitcraft was coming in handy with this design, it seemed. 

“Where’s the fox?” Keiko asked. Jimmy took a second to realise she was probably talking about Etho. 

“Fishing by the beach I think,” Tango called before Jimmy could answer. Keiko hurried off, and Jimmy glanced at his stick. 

“YOU ARE THE BOOGEYMAN” it taunted. 

Jimmy tried to hide his fear. He couldn’t kill anyone! He was horrible at pvp, everyone knew that. And he couldn’t lie. Everyone was able to tell whenever he tried. 

The fear turned to panic. Sure, losing one life if he didn’t kill wasn’t that bad. Especially since three people had died last session. But it was always Jimmy died, Jimmy died. It didn’t matter who died before him, how long he survived. He was always going to be the Canary. 

He wanted to be better this time. 

He would have to kill, or die trying. 

“You good there Jimmy?” Tango called, slowly walking over from the rocket to where Jimmy was shaking. 

“Fine, yeah,” he muttered back. He considered telling him that he was the boogeyman, but he would probably have to wait for Etho. That was probably a good plan. 

“Alright. I’m almost finished with the rocket by the way,” Tango said casually, and Jimmy turned around to see a fantastic rocket standing tall on a landing pad. It looked like it was straight out of a kid’s design for a basic rocket, but made by Tango obviously. The detail was incredible, and it was pretty large for a one-two day build. It was mainly white, with a red cap and fliers on the bottom with circular blue stained glass windows. 

“Tango!” Jimmy exclaimed in awe. “This is amazing!” 

He circled the build, momentarily forgetting about his boogeyman problem. 

“Thank you,” Tango gushed. Jimmy remembered that Tango had only gotten into proper building in recent years, compared to just redstone redstone redstone.

He deserved the attention though. 

“Hey, guys!” Etho called as he ran over to the group, a saddle over his arms. He paused for a second, dropping the saddle and gasping. “Tango! That’s so cool!” 

The blaze hybrid blushed again, and Jimmy smiled. 

After they got over Tango’s amazing rocket, Etho grabbed the saddle he’d dropped and shoved it into Jimmy’s arms. 

“Got it while fishing. Now we can all have horses!” he beamed. Jimmy jumped with excitement. 

“Yes!” 

Etho had gotten a horse last session, a brown and white spotted one that had apparently caused Bdubs to run off and hate him. Tango had also gotten a horse with a saddle from Etho’s fishing, a grey one with white socks and a white streak down its face. 

Now it was Jimmy’s turn. 

While Etho and Tango started to move the furnaces and chests into the rocket, Jimmy looked around the plains for a horse. 

They weren't hard to find, just he wanted a specific one. 

He found a small herd near the forest that almost circled the plains, and in it he found the horse he wanted. A dark brown one with black speckles on its back. A beauty of a creature. 

He grinned, and pushed himself onto the horse. To his surprise, it didn’t buck or stray too far, and he was able to saddle it quickly. Jimmy whooped in joy and started to trot in the direction of the forest. It was decently fast, too. Not as fast as Etho’s, but pretty dang fast. 

Jimmy grinned, then started to panic again as he realised his head was stuck in a tree's branches. 

He couldn’t breathe. He was choking, slowly. He gasped for air, trying to breathe. He tried to get off the horse, but his hands fumbled with the reins. He tried to lower his head, but the branches grasped onto him like fingers clutching onto his skin. He tried to steer the horse away, but the horse was contently eating a patch of grass. 

He tried to call for help, but his voice came out a hoarse whisper. 

He tried so hard not to die, but the feeling came too soon. 

He gasped, realising he could breathe again. 

While taking deep breaths, Jimmy scrambled for his communicator, clicking respawn and appearing back at the temporary JET base where the chests had been. 

“Jimmy!” 

Tango looked so concerned. 

Jimmy smiled sheepishly. “Hi there.”

“Hey, look at that! Jimmy suffocated,” Scar announced to the rest of his team, grinning. 

“Pff,” May laughed. 

Cleo just rolled their eyes. 

They were at their base, the Campsite, as they were calling it, since they were the Campers. Scar had finished his orange tent earlier, and had somehow convinced Cleo to turn their white tent pink. Now the tents looked like a sunrise. 

They’d also done some work on the bunker below the site, bred up the animals and cooked enough food to last at least this session, along with making bread from Cleo’s wheat farm on the island on the lake. 

The group had just started making flower crowns to match May’s one of lilacs and poppies. Scar now recognised them as the flowers that he gave Grian when he turned red in Third Life. He wasn’t sure why May had picked that certain combination. Maybe it was just random. 

Now that they called themselves the campers, he really wanted an outfit to match it. Something outdoorsy, maybe. With the flower crowns of course. 

He wasn’t sure what flowers to use. He would pick an orange flower, but tulips didn’t work well in flower crowns. 

Maybe dandelions and poppies instead. 

Cleo was also stuck on what flowers to use. They had tried twisting rose bushes into a circular shape but it wasn’t working as well as they wanted it to. 

“Need help?” May offered them while bonemealing more flowers. For some reason, any flower could be bonemealed anywhere, which was a bit confusing but very handy. 

“No, I’ll get it eventually,” muttered Cleo as they poked themself with a thorn again. “Ow.”

May huffed. “If you say so.”

A moment of silence passed, disrupted by a certain someone in the sky. 

“Mind if I join you, guys?” they asked, grinning. Scar jumped at her voice. 

Cleo glared at her. “Keiko, you need to stop jumpscaring Scar.”

“Oops, sorry Scar,” Keiko said nervously. Scar shrugged. 

“Nothing to worry about.”

“You’re so jumpy, Scar,” Cleo rolled their eyes again. Scar rolled his back. 

Keiko landed, and started to walk away, but May grabbed her arm. 

“No, stay,” she ordered. Scar was surprised by the authority in her voice. Keiko also paused and narrowed her eyes at the small hybrid. “I have questions.”

Keiko blinked. “Okay.”

They all sat in a circle around the campfire, Keiko filling the empty log. 

It took about four seconds before May started asking questions. 

“How are there achievements on this? Why are Caly and I here out of everyone else? Is Tania watching us? Were we really just test subjects to her? Does she hate me for what I said? Is that why I’m here?” her voice broke with the last two questions. 

Scar and Cleo stared at her in disbelief. Keiko sat extremely still, looking slightly worried. 

She took a breath. “The achievements are an operator secret. You and Caly are here because both of you missed the most sessions other than Marzipan, but since she was the Canary it didn’t feel fair to put her into another death game. This is also a chance to redeem yourself, by the way. Tania isn’t watching you, but she can hear me, and will talk to me if I ask. Yes, and no, she played the game too, remember? No, she doesn’t hate you, she only hates herself.”

Scar and Cleo exchanged glances. He had no idea whoever “Marzipan” was, but the Canary was definitely the first one out. Tania seemed to be someone of power, but also someone confusing? He sighed. This made no sense.

“Okay,” May said in a small voice. 

Keiko looked around, wanting to change the subject. 

“Hey, Cleo, you’re a zombie, right?” she said. Cleo nodded, confused. 

Keiko tossed her a few cornflowers. 

“To my friend, cornflowers mean death,” she explained. 

“Oooh! Goodie!” Cleo grinned and threw their rose bushes into the fire. They started to weave the blue flowers into a pretty crown. “This actually suits me well, I used to have these flowers in my hair but then I changed outfits. Maybe I should bring the old one back for this game.”

May brightened. “That would be cool.”

“I can jumpscare you more easily in that one,” Cleo teased. 

May huffed. “You caught me off guard and I was still remembering who you were!”

She paused. 

Scar blinked. So she did know who they were, from somewhere. 

Chapter Text

“Hey, fellas!” Etho heard a familiar voice call from near the forest. 

He turned away from the conversation he had been having with Tango and Jimmy to see Joel strolling up to JET base. 

“Hiya, Joel!” Etho smiled and wagged his tail slightly. He hadn’t seen Joel in a while, this game or otherwise. It was nice to see his Boat Boy again. 

Jimmy and Tango also stepped out of the rocket to see the newcomer. 

“Heyy!” they welcomed in unison. 

Joel surveyed the area, eyes wide. The rocket was catching everyone’s attention. “Woah, this is cool. Are you guys a team?” 

The arctic fox hybrid nodded. 

“Yeah! We’re JET!” Jimmy said excitedly, grabbing Tango and Etho’s arms. Etho yelped with the sudden movement, but stood happily beside his teammates. 

“Nice, nice,” Joel nodded. “Martyn and I are a team.”

Etho immediately narrowed his eyes in thought. He felt like that team was a horrible idea. Two cocky Victors who joked too much, with one who made everything a play, and another who got angry too fast. In fact, Joel was already on lime due to his own stupidity, according to Martyn. And Martyn, who ruthlessly killed BigB as the boogeyman. Ren had told him about this when they hung out on HermitCraft a few days ago when Etho was fueling his shopping addiction in the Shopping District. The dog hybrid had made the kill sound very dramatic, though it did sound like Martyn too. 

“Oh, really?” Etho asked, his tone light. Joel rolled his eyes.

“No, really. I would totally joke about having Martyn as my teammate,” Joel said, his voice drenched in sarcasm. 

Etho put his hands up in mock surrender. “Woah woah, okay.”

This made Joel angrier. “Are you mocking me?”

“Noooo,” Etho grinned through his mask. Joel dropped it. 

“Okay then. But yeah, Martyn and I are a team, we’re the Helmet Buddies,” he said. “It’s a whole thing now.”

“Aren’t helmets banned?” Etho asked curiously. He noted the way Joel stumbled. 

“If they are, Keiko hasn’t come to kill us yet,” he muttered. 

“Surely, if they weren’t allowed the server admin would come to kill you,” Tango mocked. “I doubt she’d kill you. Maybe put a curse of binding pumpkin on your head instead.”

Joel pretended to shudder. “Wow, so scary, a pumpkin stuck on my head.”
“There’s no vanilla tweaks, idiot. It would be a pain to see out of,” Jimmy pointed out. Joel glared at him, surprised. 

“Are you calling me stupid, Jim?” he said, putting his hands on his hips in a sassy sort of way. 

“Yeah, obviously,” the canary hybrid joked. Joel rolled his eyes. 

“You’re the one who’s stupid, suffocating earlier,” Joel snickered. “How’d that happen?” 

“At least I didn’t die on day one to a stalagmite,” Jimmy snapped back. This shut Joel up.

Etho stared awkwardly between the two. Jimmy wasn’t usually this hostile. Now that he thought about it, the canary hybrid looked on edge. A red tint rimmed his warm, cocoa brown eyes.

Tango decided to put himself between the two. 

“Where is Martyn now then?” Tango asked casually. “You two seemed like the type of team to never leave each other’s sides because you’re constantly causing chaos.”

Joel waved his hand. 

“Probably caving or working on our base,” he said. “I just want to know what the teams are at the moment, especially since everyone is being so anti-social at the moment.”

Etho nodded. “I think Skizz and Impulse are a team, they came here last session and complimented our team name.”
“Well that’s going to be an interesting team then,” Joel muttered. That was true. Impulse was a backstabber, and Skizz was a sweetheart. Etho wasn’t sure how those two were friends sometimes, until he saw the two of them on HermitCraft. Opposites attract, he supposed. 

“You and Martyn are surely an interesting team too,” Etho pointed out. Joel grinned at this, tipping his iron helmet in the arctic-fox hybrid’s way. 

“I guess we are.”

He made as if to leave, and Etho watched as the man turned around and neared where Jimmy had put the horses. 

“Is this your horse Jim?” Joel asked. His hand was pressing down on the poor animal’s head. Etho had a feeling he knew what was coming. 

“Joel you’re not going to kill his horse are you?” Etho questioned, but he already knew the answer. Joel waved his free hand. 

“No, no, of course not,” he said, but his free hand then summoned a sword. “DIE YOU STUPID CREATURE!” 

“JOEL!?” Jimmy yelled, waving his arms and running over to where Joel was stabbing his horse. Etho felt he should intervene, but watching this was more fun. Tango seemed to have the same idea.

“Joel really likes killing horses, huh?” the blaze hybrid muttered. Etho laughed. It was kind of strange that he would kill a tamed one without any motive, but it was funny nonetheless. They would probably have to get Jimmy a new horse later though. 

“Yeah,” he said.

The two hybrids watched as Joel finished the creature off, pouting when it disintegrated into two leather and its saddle and not giving him its head. Jimmy looked furious. Even at a distance, Etho could see red flash again in his eyes. But the canary hybrid was lime? Etho perked his ears in interest. 

All of a sudden, the canary hybrid brought out his iron sword. Joel was still gloating, hoarding the saddle all to himself. The look of surprise on the short man’s face was priceless. Jimmy’s sword slashed anywhere he could aim. Beside Etho, Tango grinned. 

“He must be the boogeyman,” the blaze hybrid mused. Realisation struck. 

“Oh! That makes sense,” Etho nodded. 

“GO JIMMY!” Tango cheered. Jimmy’s concentration didn’t waver, though Joel’s did. The man who was being attacked turned his head to glare at the pair of hybrids watching the fight just to have his neck almost chopped off by Jimmy’s sword. 

Joel began to panic now, Etho noticed. He was begging. It wasn’t often when Joel begged out of sincerity rather than teasing. He resorted to running off, but Jimmy chased him closely, hard on his heels. 

Jimmy seemed to be getting his hits in well, until Joel turned around and struck back with a diamond sword. The canary hybrid faltered. 

“Should we help him?” Tango said, panic and concern now lacing his voice. The shouts of the fight made no sense to Etho’s pricked ears, there was too much going on. Joel seemed to be losing, but the amount of times his sword struck Jimmy’s side was concerning. Blood soaked his denim jacket, though Joel’s white shirt was now red and peppered with holes. 

“Good idea,” Etho summoned his sword from his hotbar and ran at Joel, right as Jimmy’s sword stabbed through the man’s body and he disintegrated with a yell. 

Etho stood in shock. 

Tango ran up and tackle hugged Jimmy. “I’m so proud of you!” 

He winced badly as Tango’s arms brushed past his wounds, and Etho winced with him. Those cuts looked deep. 

“Thanks,” Jimmy muttered, staring at his hands. He was shaking. 

Glancing at the ground, Etho was reminded that Keep Inventory was not enabled on this world. 

“We should steal his stuff,” he proposed. Jimmy nodded. 

“Do either of you have food first? I’m about to die,” the canary hybrid laughed nervously. Tango instantly shoved cooked steak in the other’s hands. 

“You could have led with that!” he scolded. Jimmy gave him a lopsided smile while he ate. 

Etho busied himself into putting Joel’s things in a chest while Tango took care of Jimmy. For someone who was walking around antagonising people, he had a lot of good things on his person. While he did leave most of his items in the chest, Etho took a few things as payment. Jimmy’s saddle, a diamond, his food, and his prized possession, his helmet. 

The arctic fox hybrid grinned. This, of course, would probably make Joel and Martyn -a very strong team- enemies with them, but that had already been made through Jimmy’s boogey kill and Joel killing the canary’s horse. The helmet being stolen would solidify the mutual hatred. Just as an enchanter would be Scar’s whole livelihood, the helmet seemed to be Joel’s. 

Once Joel’s things were safely stored in a chest by the forest, Etho wandered back to the rocket where Jimmy and Tango were sitting against it, Jimmy pressed up to Tango’s side. He'd taken his jacket off, presumably to wash it later. The white shirt underneath was also blood red, but Jimmy wasn't Scar. He wouldn't just take his shirt off like that. A swim would probably clear it later. 

Tango had his tail wrapped around Jimmy's waist, the flame at the end resting on Jimmy's lap. Etho couldn’t help but grin at the cute scene. 

“Aww, is Jimmy hurt?” he said in the baby voice he usually reserved for pets. Jimmy’s cheeks flushed. 

“Well, yeah. I was on half a heart when I killed Joel, and healing up takes forever,” he argued. 

“Doesn’t explain why you’re leaning against Tango,” said Etho, grinning so hard he couldn’t see properly. 

“He’s warm,” Jimmy muttered, his voice so quiet it was almost a sigh. 

“Yeah, it’s me, your local walking heater,” Tango rolled his eyes and chuckled. He pulled Jimmy in a side hug anyways. Jimmy hissed in pain, Tango had accidentally touched one of the gashes on his side. Tango loosened his hold but Jimmy leaned harder on him. This made Etho feel a lot like a third wheel. 

The artic-fox hybrid decided to leave them there and empty his inventory of any extra junk he collected recently. Tango had moved a lot of the chests into the rocket. It made the space of the rocket a little bit tighter, but it felt right. It being quite cluttered gave it a perfect rocketship vibe. 

Clearing out his inventory into a chest monster was very quick. Etho slowly made his way back out of the rocket to see Jimmy peacefully resting his head on Tango’s shoulder.

“How many hearts do you have now?” Etho asked, startling Jimmy out of his near-sleep.
“Uhh,” Jimmy stammered. “Five and a half.”

Tango hummed. “Damn, that is slow.”

“Have you guys not noticed the game difference yet?” a voice came from above. It startled the whole team, sending Jimmy and Tango a few blocks apart, Jimmy wincing from the force pressing against the wounds he had sustained. 

“STOP DOING THAT!” Jimmy yelled up to the top of the rocket. There, the world helper Keiko sat kicking her legs and smiling. 

“No,” she smiled.

Etho recovered from his fright to glare at Keiko with pride. He admired her ability to creep up on people so easily. 

“You’ve got to teach me how to do that at some point,” he ordered. Keiko gazed down at him with a mix of surprise and fondness. 

“Sounds good, fox boy,” she said. Etho grinned. “The canary is a good fighter. From what I heard, the person he killed is the best fighter on the server. Good job on that Jimmy. I’m glad you read your stick.”

Despite pretending to hate her, Jimmy blushed at the praise. 

“Oh, fire boy, Tango? That idea with the pumpkin is genius, I love it,” Keiko smiled sweetly as she left. 

Tango blinked, and stared at the rest of his team. Etho stared back. 

“She watches us constantly, doesn’t she?” he muttered. Etho nodded. 

“Yep,” he said. 

“She’s horrifying,” Jimmy shuddered. 

Etho glanced at the canary hybrid. “Nah, she's just silly.”

At this moment, Joel came storming up to the team. 

“WHERE’S MY STUFF, YOU MORONS??!!”

Etho sighed. 

Chapter Text

Skizz winced as he fell off of another crimson tree. 

He and Impulse were in the nether, for what? Aesthetics of all things. Impulse had realised early on that Skizz wasn't seen as a threat, at all. He was, in nature, a puppy acting guard dog. To combat this, Impulse decided to theme their base off of the nether. Unfortunately for Skizz, that meant actually going to the nether. 

He brushed himself down, trying to ignore the unbearable heat of the hellish place. His job was to collect a bunch of the crimson plants, vines, and some wood if there was spare time to do so. Shroomlights were also on that list somewhere. 

When Impulse told him the plan, he wanted to complain. Then Impulse said that he would be collecting lava and ghast tears. That shut Skizz up. 

Checking his Inventory, Skizz decided that about a stack of the plants, wood, netherrack and five shroomlights was enough. 

He went to find Impulse. 

“Impulse?!” he called. He had no idea where the imp was, and that scared him. They were supposed to stay in shouting distance, but Skizz had wandered a bit too much. 

The area he was in ended off in a cliff. Skizz stumbled back as he almost fell over. The biome had slowly changed to a warped forest, but he hadn't noticed. Under the cliff, was another stretch of mixed crimson and warped, on an island in the middle of lava. There, he saw a little ant Impulse running from an enderman. 

“IMPULSE!” Skizz called. The ant stopped running and seemed to be hiding under a tree. 

“SKIZZ?” came the reply, along with a distant enderman screech as it died. 

Skizz looked for a quick and easy way down, frowning when he found there was none. The little ant Impulse, however, had an idea. Right under where Skizz was looking over, Impulse seemed to be planting blue vines. They stood out on the red grass that they were placed on. Skizz, despite being stupidly slow sometimes, caught on quick to this. 

He jumped, his fall being broken by the winding blue plants. 

“Hi, Dop!” he grinned. He shook himself off. 

“Hey, Skizzly,” Impulse smiled. The imp angered another enderman and lured it under a platform he’d made. 

“Whatcha doin?” Skizz asked. “I got the plants and things you wanted by the way.”

“Wonderful!” his friend replied. The enderman screamed at him relentlessly as Impulse’s diamond sword slashed at it. “I’m collecting pearls. They’re good for get away plans in the future, and though we have access to villagers, I thought we might as well grab some now.”

“Sounds good,” Skizz agreed, and joined in, staring at a few endermen to anger them when he’d walked under the roof Impulse had made. 

They went along like this, idly chatting while the endermen screamed. Skizz came away with eight pearls, Impulse with twelve. 

“Good enough for now,” Impulse muttered, pocketing the fragile orbs. 

“Can we get out of the nether now?” Skizz pleaded. Impulse shrugged. 

“Alright. I think the portal is over there,” Impulse gestured towards a piece of mainland that was connected to their little lava lake island through a precarious one block wide bridge. 

Skizz cautiously followed Impulse over to the bridge, and right as they neared the edge, Skizz heard an enderman scream. 

He backed away quickly, trying to run for cover. Impulse seemed to be doing the same. Skizz wasn’t fast enough, however. The enderman caught up to him quickly, screeching its stupid little head off. 

“Hey!” he cried when it attacked him. “JERK!”

Cover was useless at this point, and before he knew it, Skizz was back at the village where he’d set his spawn. No armour, nothing. 

Skizz screamed in frustration. He was yellow now. Yellow!

His eyes still hurt from the glare that the enderman gave him, but it faded quickly enough for him to go back to his pity party. 

He didn’t even want to check his communicator, knowing people will be either faking concern or mocking him for dying again. He did check the tab list though, a strange little thing that didn’t show colours but rather numbers beside a player’s name. Frowning, he realised he was one of two yellows. He didn’t realise Joel was also on two lives. 

Skizz sighed, and kicked the door to the house open and grumbled about his horrible luck while he made his way to where he and Impulse had been setting up. He took the long way around, so he wouldn’t pass spawn or that giant circle fort he’d seen in the distance too many times. Whoever lived there was really going on defence. 

The sun was just rising, its warm rays a welcome sensation compared to the unbearable heat of the nether that he had just endured. 

Once he was at his and Impulse’s small settlement near where JET was situated, he sat on one of the crafting tables and waited for his friend to come through the portal. They’d gotten the obsidian off of Bdubs earlier this session, when they were looking around for a lava pool. He was in a pretty secluded area, Bdubs. Impulse traded a diamond and friendship for the obsidian, along with a future bucket of lava and something else that Skizz had forgotten about. He had been too busy admiring the quaint little house that Bdubs had built. 

Finally, Impulse stepped through the nether portal. 

“Impulse!” Skizz greeted, kicking his legs and jumped off of the crafting table. 

Impulse glanced at him, realising he was there. “Hey, Skizzy! Your stuff is in that barrel over there.”

Impulse gestured to a barrel beside the portal. 

“We can start building now if you want,” he offered. Skizz nodded. 

“Sounds good!” he agreed. He quickly donned his armour and began to help Impulse place the netherrack in random patterns. 

This was going to look so ugly. 

“People are dropping like flies today,” Scott said, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Or was that just Lag at its finest?”

Pearl fell from a high place. 

Caly fell from a high place.

“And who’s Caly?” BigB asked. 

“One of the newcomers, I suppose,” Ren said. 

The trio was almost finished with their castle at this point. The outside was all finished, and now Scott was just helping BigB and Ren sort out the interior. 

That was, of course, until two people died to the same cause out of nowhere, shortly after Skizz had died too.

“Oh yeah!” BigB exclaimed. “That makes sense.”

“Do you think it was a boogeyman trap?” Scott wondered. Even as he said it, the sentence didn’t fit quite right. 

“No, it cannot be!” Ren proclaimed dramatically. “For it was Jimmy who was the boogeyman today, and I would doubt there would be two on session two.”

“Good point,” Scott replied. He was still confused on how Jimmy, arguably the worst player in the game, killed Joel, one of the best fighters in the game. That, of course, would be a story he wouldn’t have to press too hard for when he met up with the canary hybrid later over on Misadventures. Knowing Jimmy, the first thing when they got back from this session would be to storm over to where Scott was setting up his Kingdom and brag about it, then drag him over to Joel’s mushroom area to piss him off. Unless Joel was on HermitCraft at that time. That was also a possibility. 

“Maybe it was a trap that failed, but then actually worked again?” BigB suggested.

“That’s also a good observation!” Ren said. The dog hybrid seemed very pleased to be doing detective work. 

“How about we just go over there and ask him?” said BigB, putting some extra materials away in a chest. The room the trio were in had been deemed the storage room, which of course was already messed up and Scott noticed that the stone BigB was putting in the chest, was the chest for seeds and saplings. Scott sighed. 

“You two can do that, I think I’m going to get you guys some upgrades,” Scott proposed. BigB shifted. 

“That actually won’t be needed for me. I went caving last session and have a bunch of diamonds in a chest somewhere underground,” he explained. “I forgot to bring them up because that was also the chest I had been dumping a bunch of spare materials in.”
Ren turned to him. “You’ve had diamonds this entire time?”

“Yeah,” BigB winced. “Sorry, I should have kept them with me.”

“I could get them for you while I mine some diamonds for Ren,” Scott hummed. “It shouldn’t be too much a bother, and you two can go congratulate Jimmy while I’m gone. And maybe find out why Pearl and Cathy? No, Caly died.”

Ren shrugged. “Sounds good. I’ll leave you to it dude.”

“I’m not sure if I have the coords saved for that, and while I could talk you through the complicated passage down the winding caves I went through, I think it would just be best if I went and got them myself,” BigB said. Scott nodded. 

“Okay.”

“Are you gonna go now?” Ren asked, looking slightly annoyed. He obviously didn’t want to go alone. 

“No, I can wait until early next session or late this session,” BigB said. “If no one’s taken them so far, they won’t take them now.”

“Alright,” Ren said. “Come on then, my second-in-command! We must go and find out the politics of the server!” 

BigB was then dragged by the arm by Ren pulling him through the castle doors. 

Scott stayed behind. While a knight should surely stay with his king, Scott had work to do. 

Gathering diamonds in this world was dull. And without Gem there to entertain him with chatter, Scott was left with nothing but his own thoughts to preoccupy him while he caved and strip mined. 

He’d gotten a grand total of four diamonds when he stumbled across something he should have expected from caving under a mountain. 

Scott has made the achievement [Sneak 100]

Chapter Text

Cleo sat in the shallows of the lake beside her wheat island. The sun was starting to get to her a bit, her rotting flesh hot to the touch. 

It was one of the downsides to the Games. Over on HermitCraft, all hybrids and monster-players were immune to natural cons like those. The Games, however, were unforgiving and painful. The winged hybrids like Grian had to pretty much carry around an extra set of useless limbs. 

The water was nice though. It was a cool relief from the relentless sun. Cleo thought they should go back to the mainland by now, considering she'd harvested half of the wheat anyways. She was itching to do something other than be a housewife. While they didn't want to cause obvious chaos like Scar, they did want to keep other people on their toes. Like taking random important things from chests, setting a single tree on fire, gaslighting people into thinking another team hates them. 

The usual, really. 

The Campers had just come back from visiting Joel and Martyn. 

The Helmet Buddies, they called themselves. Martyn had been wearing one, so was Joel, who was fuming because when Jimmy killed him earlier to relieve his boogeyman curse, Etho stole his helmet, so he had to make a new one. The pair had built a giant blocky helmet out of diorite and calcite as their base. The entrance was, of course, made out of the curve of the helmet where one’s eyes would be if worn. Despite how utterly ugly it was, Cleo thought it was somewhat functional. Not only was it a wide open base that couldn’t be easily trapped, but it was also a good vantage point. They had ladders and stairs around the inside and outside of the helmet to use the top part of the helmet as a watch point. Which was at a good height to see the edge of the forest they were bordering, and the hill that held spawn. They were pretty much directly east from spawn, whilst the Campers were nearer northwest and very far from civilization. 

Joel was still yellow though, for what seemed to be utter stupidity on both accounts. Cleo sighed. What an idiot.
She looked over to her teammates, her thoughtful expression shifting to concern. May and Scar looked like they were yelling at something. 

Confused, Cleo quickly swam over to where their teammates were bickering over something. 

“That’s like… a lot today!” they heard May exclaim. 

“Who died?” Cleo said half-sarcastically, expecting it to be something stupid like Scar accidentally making the bunker under the campsite one metre too wide. 

“Bdubs,” Scar said casually. Cleo blinked. 

“How?” she said, while going over to her tent to grab her communicator. They’d left it there so May and Scar wouldn’t bother her while she was farming.

Sure enough, Bdubs died to a drowned maybe five or ten minutes ago. 

Cleo snapped their head back, puffy ginger hair bouncing at the movement. “And you idiots only noticed now?”

Scar fidgeting with a petal that had fallen from one of the flowers on his flower crown. 

“I don’t look at my comm that often!” he argued. Cleo rolled her eyes. While that was true, and it was an utter pain to get the elf to look at messages he had been sent, she thought that at this point in the Life Games it would be easy enough to just… check his communicator at some point?

“What’s your excuse?” Cleo asked May. The parrot-duck hybrid just shrugged. 

“I was too busy shearing sheep to notice,” she said. 

“Alright,” the zombie sighed, and plopped herself down onto her tent’s carpet. 

“That’s a lot of lives lost today,” they said, scrolling through all the messages on her comm. 

“And we’re the only team that everyone still has four lives,” May pointed out. Cleo looked up. 

“Wait, that's true,” they muttered. She ran through the list of teams in their head, or the ones she knew. They had met the Girlbosses and the Helmet Buddies. From the Girlbosses, Pearl and Caly both had three lives from what seemed to be Lag. Joel from the Helmet Buddies had two lives. Cleo also knew from the Helmet Buddies that there was another team nearby, which was JET, Jimmy, Etho, Tango. Jimmy had three lives from suffocation earlier this session. She remembered a conversation from HermitCraft that confirmed Skizz and Impulse, a team, in which Skizz had lost two lives, one from a ladder last session and another from an enderman earlier this session. That left Grian, Bdubs, Ren, Scott and BigB. 

“Do you guys know if Ren has a team?” they asked. Scar snapped his fingers after a moment and nodded. 

“Yeah! He and BigB are a team. He was telling me about this on HermitCraft today, bragging about being Box Boys again,” he explained. Cleo nodded. BigB had lost a life last session to Martyn, the boogeyman. That narrowed things down to Grian, Bdubs and Scott. She guessed they could be a team, though those names usually didn’t stay on the same side for long. Even still, Bdubs was now lime because of the drowned, so it left the Campers as the strongest team. 

“Wow,” Cleo said. “I’m surprised.”

May pouted, fluffing up her wings a bit. “Do you have no faith in us?”
“Only a little bit,” Cleo grinned, laughing when Scar complained. 

The group talked like this for a while, back and forth sarcasm and jokes with humour Cleo would probably have to cut out of her videos, then was gladly reminded she didn’t have to create anything with this game. 

Cleo was enjoying this. As much as both of her teammates, Scar especially, seemed like people to protect along with herself, the scaredy cat she was, they were fun. She had somehow gathered all the chaos makers other than Grian into one tight bundle. 

Keiko turned up at some point, somehow managing not to scare them by turning up the normal way, walking. May toned down her jokes then. They sat around the campfire as the sun set again, the sound of the fire in the centre being a nice, calm background noise.

“May, did you ever get pictures of your Fan Life base?” Keiko asked at some point. “The game you ‘playtested,’ not this one.”

May paused for a second, then shook her head. “If I do, it’s not much.”

“I have some if you want them,” Keiko offered. May perked up at the idea. 

“That would be awesome!” she exclaimed. Cleo was also curious now. 

“Are we getting some Mayflower lore?” they asked jokingly. May nodded excitedly. 

Keiko summoned a whole photo album, flicking through the pages until she landed on one of a jungle temple precariously placed on the edge of a mountain. Weird world generation. 

“Woah,” Cleo gasped. It was pretty cool. Little ledges had been made to get around the temple a little easier and buttons littered the walls and floor. 

“We called ourselves the Temple Trio,” May explained. “Me, Cleo -our Cleo- and Aspen.”

“So original,” Cleo scoffed. May glared at her. 

“And we’re called the Campers in a campsite,” she huffed. “Let me happily remember the simpler days.”

Keiko flicked through more pictures. “This one was from the Showstoppers. I don’t think they ever finished their base, and it was always being burned down. One of the members had to be kicked out due to… problems.”

May winced at this. “Yeah, it was fun to burn down though.”

“They had a reputation board!” Scar exclaimed, stabbing his finger at a cherry plank board that was marked as “Reputation Board” in very small writing. “I’m not the only one!”

“The Showstoppers were also the lowest placing team I think,” May grinned. Scar frowned. 

“But-but the reputation board!”

“No one cares about your stupid reputation points, Scar!” Cleo said, biting back a laugh. She remembered using this system against him in Third Life, where Scar was constantly trying to scam people out of their clothes, and then Cleo blackmailed him right back so she took his armour.

“I did!” Scar pouted. 

Keiko just watched in amusement while she flicked through more pictures. 

“This is Bedrock,” Caly said suddenly, the pieces finally clicking together. 

Gem shot her a look of confusion from the central tower she was building. 

“What?” 

Caly sucked in a breath and explained. “There are two types of Worlds. Bedrock and Java. This is Bedrock.”

The sounds of blocks being placed paused. 

“I didn’t realise,” Gem muttered. “I knew there were different kinds, but I didn’t realise this wasn’t the normal World.”

Caly nodded. 

“How did you tell?” Gem asked. It was Caly’s turn to pause.

“Skizz was complaining about endermen earlier. They tend to be more aggressive in Bedrock Worlds. Also, the border is red walls in the sky. Also, I can’t hold blocks in my left hand,” Caly listed. She knew there was more than this, but it was a start. Gem hummed from the tower. 

“That’s interesting,” the elf said. 

Caly hummed in response and went back to building her little house. Gem was making the central tower of the Girlboss fort, and Caly was building a little home for each of the team’s members. Pearl, the one whose house was already built, had gone off to do some more caving. Gem hadn’t liked this idea in the slightest, considering she and Caly had died earlier to something the two older players called Lag. 

Caly had called it “Sleepy World,” but Pearl had just stared at her, as if looking at a small child and called the expression cute. 

She started calling it Lag then. 

Just as she started the lovely spruce roof on her little home, a breathless Pearl came running up the stairs from their mine. 

“THERE’S A STRONGHOLD!” she exclaimed. Gem peered down from her tower curiously. 

“That’s amazing!” she said. “Is this gonna be like Secret Life again where I fill the portal and you forget it even though I lost my eye to it?”
“Nooo,” Pearl assured, finding Gem on top of the tower. 

“Now get down here,” she demanded. Gem sighed, and decided to water bucket clutch off of the top of the tower. It wasn’t very tall at the moment, but the plans for it were. 

Caly held her breath as Gem fell, remembering the bucket clutch Sam had done off of the top of Stormy’s tower in her Fan Life. And just like Sam, Gem survived the fall. 

“Woo!” she cheered. Gem smiled at her. 

“Oh Pearl, Caly realised the thing wrong with this Game,” Gem turned to Pearl. “One of them anyways.”

“Oh?” Pearl questioned. 

“It’s Bedrock,” Caly said when Gem nodded at her to explain. 

Pearl seemed to know what that was already. “Oh! Well that’s handy to know.”
“Really?” Caly said. She didn’t know what interesting things could be done with that information other than use it to not die as often. 

“Yeah!” Pearl said excitedly. “You can’t stack minecarts on this version of World, meaning while we stay safe and use normal TNT instead, everyone else will be blowing themselves up trying to stack a bunch of TNT minecarts.”

Gem looked at Pearl, extremely surprised. “Why the heck do you know that?”

“Just curious all of the time,” Pearl shrugged. Gem rolled her eyes. 

“Good observation though Caly, we’ll have to use this to our advantage,” Pearl said. Caly nodded. 

“I wonder if anyone else noticed,” Gem wondered. “I half doubt it, knowing the people in this Game.”
“May might,” Caly pointed out. 

“Yeah, maybe,” Gem hummed. 

Their comms buzzed, which everyone was jumpscared by, thinking it was another death. But no, it was just Keiko telling everyone to end the session. 

“Aw, I was having fun,” Pearl pouted. “Even though I died.”
“Me too,” Gem agreed. 

“I would third that, but I’m so tired,” Caly sighed. Pearl glanced at Caly. 

“You’re like me!” she said excitedly. 

“Yeah, and if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed.”

Chapter Text

Etho found himself back at Joel’s base again. 

He was supposed to be working on his andesite shop, and the dropper game that he wanted to put with it, but he kept getting distracted. So of course, he ended up back at a friend’s base for a chat. 

They were chatting in his storage room, Joel sitting on some shulkers that he had been filling with materials for a new build, and Etho was leaning against one of the chest walls. 

Grian was with them too. The parrot hybrid also looked like he was procrastinating. Etho wasn’t very involved with the whole Exile thing, but he knew something was up. He was twitchy, his wings ruffled and not tucked behind them as they usually are since they tended to get in the way of building and such. Etho swished his tail at the thought. While wings would be useful, they looked like a pain to have sometimes with the amount of maintenance they needed, and in Life Games they weren’t allowed to be used, and so the avians were just left with two extra useless limbs that still needed to be preened and exercised. 

With that same logic, his ears and tail were also a liability, but at least it let him show emotion more fluidly because of the fact he wore a mask all of the time, and his ears still let him hear better than other players.

His said ears flicked back to the conversation in front of him, Grian was laughing at something Joel said that the arctic fox hybrid didn’t quite catch. He took this as a sign to tune back into the conversation. 

“That was a good one,” Grian grinned. Joel smirked back, a mischievous flick to it that Etho recognised as him knowing something others didn’t. He wondered what it was. 

“Yeah, yeah, enough about your stupid permit office now. I'm excited for Fan Life today,” Joel said. Etho paused at the statement. 

“You're going?” the arctic fox hybrid questioned. 

“Yeah?” Joel spun around to face him. “Are you not going?”

“I'm not going to either Game today,” Etho shrugged. Grian groaned at the wording. 

“I almost forgot about my deal with the Watchers for Fool's day, ugh,” Grian scowled. 

“It'll be fun, surely,” Joel said. Grian only slumped to the floor. 

“I think this one's gimmick is going to be really simple, but still somewhat new,” he mumbled. 

Joel hummed. “I just hope it isn't VR again.”

“I heard you had a great time with that one,” Etho chuckled. Joel glared at him. 

“I had the WORST time because of STUPID motion sickness,” Joel whined. “It was so bad.”

“Yeah, it's not VR this time I don't think,” the parrot hybrid on the floor assured. Joel sighed in relief. 

Grian glanced at Etho. 

“Why aren't you playing again? I know with the Fool's games you're not under that contract really, but why not Fan?” he said. Etho shrugged. 

“Thought I’d take the day off, I have things to do and places to be. Fan Life doesn’t seem that serious, and I doubt the punishments are either to be honest. Worst they could do is make me the boogeyman next session, right?” the arctic fox hybrid said. Joel leaned back on his seat on the shulker box. 

“Why don’t we all do that then, y’know, boycott it or something? If we don’t have to do it?” Joel complained. 

“Yeah, no fair!” Grian added. “I don’t want to do two games in one day!”

Etho hummed. “I think it has something to do with your Winner status, Grian.”

“What?” Grian’s head snapped up. “What do you mean by that?”

“They don’t let you leave if you’re a Winner,” Etho explained. For someone who didn’t like or interact much with the Watchers, Etho knew a lot. He liked to observe, he supposed. “Or, that’s what I’ve heard.”

The two Winners in front of him deflated. Their hopes and dreams of maybe one day escaping the Watchers’ grasp was completely shattered. 

“So… is that why you can miss sessions then?” Joel asked. 

“Everyone can miss sessions, just not everyone can miss whole Games,” Etho said. He narrowed his eyes in thought. “I think.”

“How do you do that then?” Grian pushed. “I can’t do Fan and the Watcher Fool’s Game. It’ll be way too much.”
“Says the one who suggested the Fools Games to the Watchers,” Joel hissed under his breath, though Grian caught it, and ignored it. Etho mostly just played the Games, and followed their rules. Most of the time. Grian, on the other hand, was an escaped Watcher, and that’s why the Games exist. From what he knew, Grian was only ever supposed to watch the Games as punishment for running away. To watch his friends beat each other up and kill each other until hatred was mutual and destructive. All while he ignored the urge to feast upon the emotions that came with it. But Grian found a way in, and played with them. He had been playing all of this time. 

Really strange things, Watchers were. Etho didn’t like messing with magic stuff, despite being the arctic fox hybrid he was. It messed with his head, he liked logic and solutions to problems that made sense. It was why he liked redstone so much. 

Etho ignored Joel’s remark, and instead turned to Grian. “I guess you just… refuse?”

“Refuse the tranjuja?” Grian asked. Etho and Joel blinked at him. 

“What?” they said in unison.

 “Did this not happen to you guys too? When I was first teleported to the Fan Life Game, that weird cloaked person pulled me into some Void room or something, and forced me to drink some strange syrup liquid in order to be teleported? And now I just get teleported with no warning,” Grian explained. Etho shook his head. That sounded really weird. 

“No, I just kinda appeared there, though I can kinda tell when I’m being teleported because things begin to feel fuzzy, and that’s when I know how to leave HermitCraft and just enter the Real World again,” Etho shrugged. 

“No idea what you’re talking about mate,” Joel said to Grian. “I’m the same as Etho.”

“Do all other worlding beings just hate me?” Grian groaned. 

Etho and Joel shared murmurs of agreement. 

Grian glared at them, and pushed himself off of the floor. 

“Nothing makes sense anymore!” he yelled at the ceiling. Etho stared at the parrot hybrid more intently, and realised his eyes were going a bit purple. 

“They won’t tell me as much as they did before now,” Grian complained. His voice kept getting angrier in tone. 

“I’m just another puppet to them, aren’t I?” he growled. Etho began to get concerned. 

“Grian?” Etho said. 

The parrot hybrid glared at him. 

Then the two Winners disappeared, and Etho felt the World go fuzzy. 

Not today, he thought. 

Chapter Text

Jimmy blinked a bit as the World formed around him. 

His wings ruffled behind him when he realised he was not home at all. He was at Spawn, on his horse. Etho’s horse was wandering, quite lost, as the arctic fox hybrid wasn’t there. Beside him, Tango stirred on his own horse. But the blaze hybrid didn’t look like Tango - not really. A tie was tied around his neck and a fine moustache was above his upper lip. This was not Tango. 

“Er- Tango?” Jimmy asked, just to make sure. Tango’s head shot up and he straightened, gripping the reins of his horse with a death hold. 

“Yes?” he said. Jimmy frowned. That was not Tango’s voice. It was merely a facade of Tango’s accent, glazed over with something more crisp. 

“Oh okay, I understand,” Jimmy nodded. The moustache and shifted accent were two pieces of a simple puzzle that even he could understand. “You’re Mumbo, not Tango, aren’t you?”

“No- no! What are you talking about?” The hybrid sounded panicked. He looked around frantically. Jimmy grinned. 

“You’re fine, buddy. This is a private Game, you don’t have to pretend to be Tango,” he explained. Mumbo melted. 

“Thank Void,” the mustached man said. “Why didn’t Tango tell me that?”

Jimmy shrugged. “I have no idea. Sounds like a pretty Tango thing to do. Knowing Tango, he probably still hasn’t noticed it’s a private Game yet. His powers of observation are close to non-existent.”

“That’s true,” Mumbo laughed. 

The pair sat in silence for a moment, then Mumbo pointed out Etho’s absence.

“Wasn’t Etho supposed to be here?” he questioned. 

“Huh,” Jimmy glanced at Etho’s wandering horse. “Yeah, he was.”

“Is he late, maybe?” Mumbo wondered.

Jimmy shook his head. “Etho’s usually not late. I think. That’s Grian’s thing.”

He rolled his eyes at this, remembering all the times Grian was late to events, always whenever Jimmy was the one to host or be a part of it. 

Mumbo hummed at this, fidgeting with his hands. His -Tango’s- tail flicked slightly from its place hanging limp over his horse. Jimmy watched in amusement when his new teammate jumped at the motion in fright. 

The canary hybrid suppressed a giggle, his own yellow wings twitching. “Come on, we’ve gotta get back to our base, might as well give you a quick tour and explanation of the teams while we’re at it.”

“Right, right,” Mumbo muttered. “What are we gonna do with Etho’s horse?”

Jimmy paused to stare at Etho’s white and brown splotched horse. 

“Did Tango have a leadrope on him at all?” he asked. He checked his own pockets and Inventory to see if he had one, but all he found was junk. 

“I found some string, but I doubt that’s helpful without a slimeball,” Mumbo sighed. 

“Darn,” Jimmy said. He looked around as if the answer would slap him in the face. The answer did not slap him in the face. The horse fell into a hole though. 

The canary hybrid snapped his head back when he heard a pained neigh from Etho’s horse. Jimmy slipped off of his own horse to find it in a small, dead-ended cave. 

“We could just leave it here I guess,” he called to Mumbo. Somewhere in his Inventory he somehow found torches and some dirt to cover the hole with. 

“Sounds good,” Mumbo called back. 

Once the horse was secure, Jimmy climbed out of the hole and jumped back on his horse.

“Follow me, Mumbo!” Jimmy exclaimed, then kicked his horse into a gallop. Distant sounds of distress and confusion yelled from behind him, but Jimmy kept going, leaping over the stream near spawn, turning a hard right when he approached the forest by the plains. Chatter and laughter came from within the forest, and Jimmy realised there was probably a team there, maybe it had something to do with a giant white platform he’d caught a glimpse of. 

Eventually, he was to the middle of the plains, close to the corner of the border where a savannah edged its way into the World, and where Tango’s beautifully built rocket sat upright. 

While he waited for Tango - Mumbo to catch up, Jimmy checked his communicator to see why it was buzzing so much. 

Martyn: Can I do a /summon Keiko? 

Keiko: I don’t see why not

Cleo: Martyn what are you up to

Scar: hes gona be uip to something stupid

Martyn: Not up to anything

Joel: At all

Gem: should we be scared

Gem: I think we should

Scott: let him summon a gal for goodness sake you guys

Jimmy: It’s never just summoning

Jimmy: what if they’re gonna spawn a wither storm

Keiko: I don’t even know what that is

Martyn: damn, there goes all of my world domination plans

And before Jimmy could react to that sentence, Mumbo arrived. 

“Woah!” Tango’s voice laced with Mumbo’s accent gasped from behind him. “That’s… that… It looks like a kids’ book picture. How long did this even take?”

It did, really. With its tall, cylindrical white body and red fliers and accents, a round blue stained glass window to one side, it really did look like it flew right out of a kids’ picture book about some astronauts exploring space. 

“Better part of the start of last session I think,” Jimmy said. “Tango did a brilliant job.”
His heart swelled with pride for his Rancher. 

“I - Tango built this?” Mumbo gaped. 

He was obviously still trying to grasp the fact that he didn’t need to pretend to be Tango. Though, being in someone else’s body would probably do some weird things to actions and words.

Jimmy winced at the thought, but nodded to Mumbo to answer the question he’d asked. 

The canary hybrid finally went to put his and Tango’s horses in the horse pen while Mumbo stared. He let the awe simmer for a moment, then turned to his substitute teammate when the horses were safely in their pen. 

“Right! Enough fawning over Tango’s amazing rocket. We should do something productive and important today, so that when Etho and Tango are here next week they can be proud of me. What do you think we should do?” Jimmy summoned all of the serious game plan thoughts. 

“Um-well,” Mumbo stuttered. He was pacing around in random patterns and fidgeting with a piece of string. “Gosh! I have no idea. Something useful, maybe? Is there - a farm we could make or supplies we’re missing?”

“Well…,” Jimmy looked around the rocket. The horse pen and a few extra chests were the only few things that surrounded the area. He was currently living off of rotten flesh, apples and the last bit of cooked steak that Tango had cooked last session. And while food would be great, and highly appreciated, Jimmy was bored. “I mean… food would be great. But I want an adventure, man. I hate being cooped up here. The only interesting thing we did last session was my kill on Joel and going to bother Bdubs.” 

“What if we made a farm for food then used that food for an adventure? Like… has anyone found a fortress yet?” Mumbo suggested. 

Jimmy shook his head. “I dunno. Don’t think so.”

“Well, maybe we could get blaze rods for potions! Like speed or invisibility so we can be nuisances,” Mumbo said proudly. 

Jimmy grinned, and playfully whacked Mumbo’s arm. “Now we’re talkin’!”

Mumbo beamed. 

“Who has a portal we could use later?” he asked. 

“Martyn definitely has one somewhere. First in the nether all the time, after all,” Jimmy hummed. “I think Skizz and Impulse also have one. We’re on good terms with them, so we could probably use theirs later I think.”

“Wonderful!” Mumbo exclaimed. “Should we check if they’re alright with it first, though? So then one of us could work on the farm while the other gathers obsidian?”

“Well, we won’t split up, buddy. I don’t trust you alone in this World, but I can definitely bring you to Imp an’ Skizzs’ place! Should be good to show you where some of our allies are,” Jimmy smiled, then grabbed Mumbo’s arm and led him towards Impulse and Skizzs’ base. 

Mumbo yelped, but let himself be led by the canary hybrid. 

Jimmy remembered Impulse and Skizz coming from where the beach was. South of spawn, west of where JET was situated. They were in the corner of the World, so everything was west of them really. 

The moment that they got close to the beach, the landscape changed drastically. The grass disappeared almost completely, replaced with netherrack and nether plants. 

“This is creepy,” Jimmy muttered. “IMPULSE? SKIZZ?”

He jumped over a lava puddle and avoided a few magma blocks when he neared the nether portal in the centre of the hellish area. 

“AHHH-oh hi Jiggles. Hi Tops,” Skizz’s voice cried out from behind the portal. He walked over calmly, looking embarrassed, and stopped in front of the duo. 

“Hullo! Could we use your portal later?” Jimmy asked, ignoring Skizz’s scream for his sake. 

“Yeah sure,” Skizz shrugged. “Hey Tops - you’re not looking yourself today…?”

“No, I’m Mumbo,” Mumbo sighed. 

“Oh!” Skizz said. 

“Yeah, not exactly the Tango you wanted right?” Mumbo laughed nervously. Skizz shook his head. 

“No, no. I’m just kinda sad that Impy abandoned me today too,” he said, frowning. 

Jimmy looked around. Sure enough, Impulse was nowhere to be seen. “Huh. So that’s why I couldn’t see him.”

“Yeah. Pearl’s also being subbed out for… Lizzie I think? And are you guys missing Etho today too?” Skizz asked. Jimmy nodded. 

“I can only imagine that going badly, you two alone I mean,” Skizz laughed. 

“Hey!” Jimmy and Mumbo protested. Jimmy scoffed. “You’re not much better on your own, buddy.”

Skizz laughed. “Hah, true.”

“You could join us maybe…?” Mumbo suggested, looking at Jimmy for permission. 

“Yeah! That sounds good!” the canary said excitedly. “We could be… ugh there are no vowels without Etho.”

Skizz paused for a second. “The… Rocket Dwellers? I know you guys are JET when Etho and Tango are around, but Rocket goes better with what Impulse and I are - The Hell Dwellers.”

“That’s actually an awesome name, both of them.” Mumbo looked surprised. 

Jimmy grinned. “Hell Dwellers sounds amazing, man.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Skizz bowed dramatically. “I think BigB actually came up with it last session when we visited the Castle.”

“Ohh, what’s his team? We haven’t been very social at all really,” Jimmy said. Since the conversation was going well, he looked around for a comfortable place to sit, and found a barrel was the best option. Mumbo kept pacing around but Skizz plopped himself down onto a chest opposite him. 

“Yeah, it was BigB, Scott and Ren on the team that Impy and I were calling the Castle Peeps,” Skizz explained. “Ren is calling himself King again, BigB is his second in command and Scott’s his knight apparently.”

“Is this Third Life all over again?” Jimmy whined. Skizz shrugged. 

“We’re allied with them right now, which pretty much makes you guys allied with them too, so you should be fine,” Skizz said. “I think.”

“I am so lost,” Mumbo muttered, flicking his fiery tail. Jimmy and Skizz paused. 

“Oh, yeah, you weren’t in Third, were you?” Jimmy asked. 

Mumbo shook his head and laughed nervously. “No, but then again, I thought I was in Second Life, which never happened by the way.”

Jimmy and Skizz laughed. 

“Well, that’s something,” Skizz said, smiling. 

“Yup,” the canary hybrid grinned, and stretched. 

The trio continued to chat until Mumbo circled them back to the plans that they’d made earlier in the session. 

“Hey Skizz, since you’re joining us today, we were planning on making some farms then searching for a fortress for the blaze rods later,” he explained. 

“I’m staying out of the nether, please and thank you very much. But I can and will help you with the farms if you want me too. Impy and I need a food source too,” Skizz said. He was drumming his fingers on the double chest he was sitting on. 

“Sounds good!” Jimmy said. He stood up and brushed himself down, shaking his yellow wings. “I am so ready to get things done today.”

“Hooray for productivity!” Skizz exclaimed, and shot up off of his chest too. 

The trio cheered. 

Chapter Text

“How much more wool do you think we’ll need?” Scar called out, exasperated.

The sheep would only eat the grass they were given so often, and it was getting frustrating. 

“How much you got there, Scar?” Cleo yelled back. They would need a lot for their new game plan, and Scar really hoped he had enough. 

The elf sifted through his messy inventory. “One stack of pink wool, two orange and - uh, one and a half yellow.”

“Sure, should be good enough for now I guess,” the zombie replied. Internally, Scar whooped with joy, and climbed over the sheep pen’s fence. They’d finally turned the sheep hole into a pen earlier this session, and Scar couldn’t be more thankful for it.

It looked really pretty, too. Though all of the sheep were sheared right now, it still looked like a sunrise. 

The Campsite looked busy. May was on the outskirts on one of the surrounding hills chopping down oak trees for the planks. Cleo was sorting chests, throwing “useful” things into one double chest, and crafting other “necessities” in another double chest. He supposed that the other double chest he saw her frequently throw things into was one labelled “useless junk that Scar and May have acquired.”

Scar threw all the wool he’d gathered in the necessities chest, where it settled nicely with another stack of each colour to add to it. 

“Thanks, Scar,” Cleo said, elbow deep in the contents of a particularly messy chest. Scar laughed nervously when he realised it was one of his chests, -Cleo was in his tent, after all- feeling guilty and surprised to know that he’d messed up a chest so badly in the span of only two sessions. 

“You do really gather the most useless of things,” Cleo grumbled, turning to face him, green rotting face in an expression of disappointment. She held out a singular vine of glow lichen. “How did you even manage to get this?”
“I-uh,” Scar stuttered. “Brought shears to a cave.”

“Right,” the zombie rolled their eyes and turned back to the mess. “Go and gather some wheat to feed the animals, will you?”

“Yes ma’am!” Scar saluted, and ran to the edge of the lake, where he jumped in to swim to the island that Cleo had covered in a wheat field. 

He was thankful for the fact that his new camouflage jacket was waterproof until water seeped under it and trapped itself there even after Scar had landed on the island. He scowled and took it off to shake it out. His new khaki trousers protested with the water too, but they weren’t as much of a problem since the World dried them out almost instantly. 

The plan with all the wool and supplies was to make multiple Campsites across the World to confuse other players. The Campers had realised that they were way too far out from any other civilization, and that while the current Campsite was good to hide things in, they were cornered by the World border. So this one could remain a back up bunker, the rest would be temporary set ups and spaces to store overflow items, and of course, to be decoys. 

Cleo, of course, was the one to think of the plan. They were the one to bring up the fact that they were so far out, and to maybe build another base elsewhere, then May added to it by saying to make a bunch everywhere to confuse people. 

Scar brought the vibes and his new outfit. 

The camo jacket had dried already, and so had his trousers. May had actually decided to match him, donning a cropped camouflage zip-up hoodie over a dark green t-shirt. She also had khaki shorts on too but she wore shin-high leather boots with tall white socks to make up for it. 

Cleo was also in one of her old outfits, the one with the blue crop top and stripy socks. 

All of them, though, still wore the flower crowns that they made last session. Scar wasn’t entirely sure how that worked, and how the flowers hadn’t died yet, but it was cool. 

The orange tulips and dandelions -Keiko had helped him twist the tulips into a reasonable shape- brought that pretty pop of colour that he was always striving to achieve in his builds. 

“Heyo!” a voice chirped from above him. Scar startled, jumped, and trampled a patch of Cleo’s crops. He dropped the half a stack of wheat that he had been holding and yelped, swinging his sword at the sound. 

“Who-whahat?” he mumbled, and the voice he now recognised as Keiko giggled. “Hey, no fair. You get me every time!”
“Sorry Scar, here’s your stick,” Keiko said with a hand covering her mouth, probably hiding her mocking laugh. Scar sighed, and picked up the stick that Keiko had dropped for him when she disappeared to bestow another soul with their fate. 

“YOU ARE NOT THE BOOGEYMAN,” it said. 

He shoved the stick in his pocket and went back to sowing and replanting crops. 

Being teamed with Pearl (Lizzie, today) and Gem was something Caly had never thought she had a chance of doing. 

Decorating a tower while having casual chats with the two? That was something she hadn’t even dreamed of. 

“You’re kinda like our housewife, Caly,” Gem called up suddenly from the base of the tower where she was putting the stairs in. 

Caly flushed. “Wha-what?”

It was the most random thing she’d ever been told, and she had played a Game with extremely random people before. 

“Housewife,” Gem called again, as if it was the most normal thing to say to your teammates. “You just stay at the base and do the simple mundane things.”

“Yeah-yeah, I guess so,” Caly stuttered. The comment was so out of the blue, yet now that she thought about it was quite on brand for Gem. 

“If she’s the housewife does that make us the providers, Gem?” Pearl, or rather, Lizzie yelled from the entrance of the Girlbosses’ entrance. Caly could barely hear her from the distance, but just loud enough so she could understand the words being said. 

“Yeah, I guess so,” Caly could hear the shrug in Gem’s voice. She continued organising the top of the tower, acting like she hadn’t just been called a housewife by Gem. 

She quite liked the simple mundane things, really. PvP wasn’t really her thing, and the fall she’d taken from caving last session put her off caving and adventuring completely. She was perfectly fine just staying at the base breeding the animals and organising chests to make sure everything was in order for her teammates. It was always funny to see Gem running back to base half-panicking because she ran out of food, and Caly would toss her some cooked steaks or bread, depending on what she had on hand. 

Maybe she deserved the “housewife” title. 

Eventually, Gem made it to the top of the tower with the stairs, replacing the ladder they had been using until now. 

“Oh! It’s so cozy, Caly,” the elf awed. Caly beamed. 

She’d put leaves in little planters on the windowsills of the tower, along with some flowers on others. Moss would have been a better option, but she hadn’t found any of that yet. 

A round table was surrounded by three chairs, and a boat was one block down in the middle of it so if they had a captive, they could keep them there. From there, Caly just piled barrels and chests in a neat order in the corners, along with some more small bushes and planters with peonies -a tribute to Sam from her Fan Life- and a lantern came from the very middle of the ceiling as a light source. 

“Thank you,” Caly smiled brightly. 

Gem swung herself onto the table and hummed. “It’s so pretty! Such a good meeting room too. Good job here!”

Caly smiled again. 

“GUYS! COME DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW!” Lizzie called from below them. Gem scowled. 

“Can’t get a moment’s peace on this World,” she muttered, and Caly followed her down the newly installed stairs. 

“What?” Gem asked, arms crossed over her chest when they reached the bottom, and neared where Lizzie was anxiously standing over a gravel patch by the entrance. 

“Don’t go through the front door,” she said briefly. 

“Ah,” Caly said. It was trapped, obviously. Lizzie had gotten boogeyman today, which was really unfortunate for Pearl, who would miss the opportunity. 

“It’s a pitfall trap, there’s dripstone at the bottom,” Lizzie explained. “It’s triggered by the string there” -she pointed to a very well hidden tripwire hook- “and technically you could jump over it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Okay,” Gem said. She paused for a moment to think. “Wouldn’t it be funny if Joel fell here and turned red first?”

“That would be kinda funny,” Caly laughed. Lizzie shrugged. 

“He might be my husband, but in this Game he is not my problem,” the substitute player said teasingly. Caly laughed. 

“Void, sometimes I forget you guys are married,” Gem giggled. 

“He doesn’t let me forget,” Lizzie huffed, but she was smiling, and Gem and Caly laughed harder. 

Chapter Text

Joel and Martyn passed Bdubs on their way to the massive castle that loomed to the back of the World. 

The man barely gave them any acknowledgement, only huffing and nodding in their general direction. Joel shared a glance with his teammate, but Martyn shrugged and kept walking towards the castle. 

The two had their cameras out, the ones Keiko gave them at the start of the session. Joel wasn’t sure how much storage it had, but he was going to abuse it nonetheless. 

So far, he and Martyn only had a few sneaky videos of the other players from afar, shooting it like a nature documentary. His personal favourite was when they were outside one of the forts near spawn, which had a tiny spruce sign in one of the corners saying “GIRLBOSSES FOR THE WIN.” He supposed that’s what the team was called. Girlbosses. He liked the sound of it, and it reminded him of Last Life Pearl. 

The Helmet Buddies had climbed a tree nearby and got some videos of the other team hanging around. It seemed to be Gem, that new girl Caly and Pearl, who today looked suspiciously like his wife. They had a tower, that trio, and three little houses surrounding it along with some animal pens and farms. 

At some point, Lizzie-disguised-as-Pearl started yelling something and called to her team to where she was standing over a sort of out of place patch of gravel. She pointed to it, and kept talking, and Martyn’s eyes widened. 

“That has to be a trap, Joel!” he whisper-shouted. “She’s the boogeyman!”

Didn’t that sound familiar. 

They left then, and made their way over to the castle, content with their new footage. 

Martyn said that this was the area that he killed BigB in at the first session. That meant Ren and BigB made the castle and lived in it, if Joel had listened to Martyn’s retellings correctly. That would probably make this encounter extremely awkward, but Joel was here for it. They were antagonising everyone in the World anyway, why not make it that little bit worse? 

Joel was certainly surprised at how big the castle he was standing in front of was. It towered over him, maybe forty blocks tall. It was incredible. 

Its inhabitants seemed to think so too. Joel spotted Ren and BigB immediately, hovering over the drawbridge over an unfilled moat -a moat!- talking amongst themselves and glancing up at the castle every so often. Scott was also there, and Joel wondered if he was the one at fault for the massive castle built into the side of the mountain. Scott would make a very good king, in his opinion. 

Instead of sneaking around for the footage this time, Joel decided to walk right up to the wildlife. 

“Pretty strange team over here,” Joel made his appearance very clear. Ren startled, BigB spun around, and Scott glanced at him and scoffed. Joel rolled his eyes at the trio and pressed the recording button. 

“Say, Martyn, we don’t usually go up to the wildlife like this, should we interfere with these creatures?” Joel smirked. He glanced over to Martyn, who also had his camera open and posed like a proper photographer. 

“No, no. Just let them do their thing,” Martyn waved his hand. Joel nodded to him, then turned back to the trio. 

The other team merely stared at Joel, blinking. Ren looked interested, eyes focused on the camera. BigB stuck close to Ren, protective. Scott glared at the Helmet Buddies, and stalked off into the castle. 

“So here we have,” Joel put on his best nature documentary voice, “the strangest Life Game team I have ever seen! While BigB, the one in the full diamond armour over a blue jumper, had teamed with Ren, that’s the dog hybrid, neither of them have teamed with Scott, the one who has just walked off like a sassy diva.”

“I HEARD THAT!” Scott called from inside the castle. He sounded pleased, though. Joel laughed, and Martyn stifled a chuckle. As much as Scott pretended to be angry at him all the time, Joel knew he was vain. 

Martyn continued their voice over as BigB and Ren slowly realised what they were doing. “It is especially strange that we can approach this team, as I slaughtered one of their members in cold blood on session one.”

BigB soured. “I almost forgot about that.”

“I should throw you into the pitfall trap for that one, Martyn,” Ren said, suddenly viscous. The dog hybrid side stepped on the draw bridge, displaying a trap that had been covered up recently. 

Martyn straightened from his videographer crouching pose, and pointed the camera at Ren’s lashing tail and Joel his at Ren’s flattened ears. 

“It seems the wildlife is getting aggressive. My comrade and I shall be leaving shortly,” Martyn said. Joel nodded, and added, “yes, how about now?”

He squeaked when Ren manoeuvred his way around the pair, blocking their ways out through the central forest. He was taller than both of them, Joel remembered as the hybrid towered over them. 

“RUN!” Martyn yelled and ducked under Ren’s arms and ran into the forest. Joel swiftly mimicked him, adding a quick kick to Ren’s shins to rub salt in the wound. 

Joel caught up with his Helmet Buddy almost immediately since Martyn had stopped at the hills near one of the other bases that looked like a campsite. Come to think of it, Joel thought he saw another base just like this closer to Spawn. No, he must have been imagining it or remembering it wrong. 

“We are going to get so targeted at the end of this,” Martyn muttered, staring into the sky. Joel laughed. 

“But worth it.”

“Yep.”

“Don’t you still need to kill someone, Joel? Y’know, ‘cus you wanted to stop being yellow, and you could kill a dark green for a life, right?”

“...Yes.”

“YOU COULD HAVE KILLED REN! THERE WAS A TRAP RIGHT THERE!”

“I FORGOT!”

And the two lost it and burst into fits of laughter over the absurdity of whatever nuisances they were being. 

Scott officially disliked the Helmet Buddies. 

They had been on his “probably enemies” list alongside Gem, but only because Martyn killed BigB. He didn’t want enemies, but his team did, and Gem just so happened to have an IOU to stab him with at any time she found fit. Gem of all people having that power scared Scott, and he was the type of person to be feared, not to fear. 

Usually, he would just stay neutral with everyone and try to come off as somewhat decent until the finale when everyone would target him or sometimes Pearl. Maybe this Game he wouldn’t pretend anymore, and just try to be a force. 

Soon after Scott heard the Helmet Buddies leaving, Ren and BigB joined him in their meeting room to the right of Ren’s throne room. To the left of it was a proposed map room, but they were yet to get maps. 

“Nice of you to join me here,” Scott said. Ren sat himself at the head of the table and folded his arms, leaning back. BigB sat to his right, and Scott was already seated to his left on the second chair. He could have sat in the first chair, obviously, but he knew he’d get up to pace around soon. 

“So, Scott, you were going to tell us about the lives?” Ren prompted. BigB nodded along with him. The knight stared at the second in command, realising how little he talked, and when he did, it was so cryptic that he would be thinking about it for days after. 

“Yes, that,” Scott sighed. “So, after finding the deep dark, I remembered what was said at the start of the Game in the rules, that boss mobs could be killed for lives. I called on Keiko to ask something that I will help you abuse if you’ll hear me out.”

Ren nodded, suddenly extremely curious. 

Scott took a breath. “So, I asked her when the lives had to be taken or absorbed. She said that there wasn’t really a timeframe, and that usually players consumed their lives right after they got them. They tended to be pretty low on lives anyway, or just maybe never thought about what I did. My plan is to kill wardens so we can save lives, maybe to acquire whenever we’re in a dangerous situation as a yellow or red. I asked this to Keiko and she said she had no problems but had to check with her higher up. When she came back, she looked delighted, and said that her higher up was ‘ecstatic to see someone using a plan she came up with.’ It was really weird, but since we’re allowed to use it, I think we should.”

Ren and BigB sat in silence for a few moments, processing the information. Scott had actually gotten up to pace around as he spoke, just like he thought he would. 

“That,” BigB said after a long pause. “Is actually brilliant.”

Scott smiled, glad he was of use. 

“I agree with my hand,” Ren said. “We can definitely look into making this work, and I’m proud of you for thinking of it.”

“Glad to be of service to you, my lord,” Scott said, and bowed. His teal hair fell over his eyes when he straightened, but he ignored it. 

Like all of the other bad things in his life.