#chap11: FINALLY amiright audience

[sleepless-in-southlands]

Last Cry Before Our Eternal Silence

Ao3

Chapter eleven of This Predacious Song, my multidimensional big bang fic! It’s a Mumbo-centric Hermitcraft/Last Life fic heavily featuring violence, blood, trauma, and horror-like themes. It is hurt/comfort with a happy ending. Please follow the embedded title link or the ao3 link for a complete summary and list of warnings for the story as a whole

Chapter eleven’s title from France’s Coast Guard’s final morse code message

~

    As Hermitcraft’s admin, Xisuma had learned a lot of things over the years. No matter how well you patched the code, there would always be some glitch waiting to be stumbled upon, for one. Or, in related teachings, if there was a glitch waiting to be stumbled upon, there was always a hermit looking to take advantage of it.

    (He loved his servermates, he did, but some days they seemed intent upon giving him grey hairs.)

    But the most important lesson he had learned was that, if everything seemed to be going well, it wasn’t. It was just the calm before the storm.

    So at first, when Xisuma saw his communicator lighting up with a call from an unknown number, he sighed. The server had been too peaceful recently. Something was bound to go wrong eventually.

    “Hello?”

    “Is this Xisumavoid?”

    Ah, full name. Not the greatest sign for the incoming conversation. “That’s correct.”

    “You’re an admin?”

    And they were calling for admin-related reasons. Xisuma frowned slightly. Another bad sign. “For the Hermitcraft server, yes.”

    “Can you verify that a, uh, Mumbo Jumbo is part of that server?”

    It was suddenly much harder to breathe. “He is. What’s happened?”

    “There’s been a respawn error.” The person on the other end of the line answered, much too neutrally given the severity of the situation. “You’re listed as his admin contact. I’ve sent you the details for the server and request you come as soon as possible.”

    “I’m on my way.” Xisuma promised, hanging up the call right after and switching to his messages. A new one at the top came from the same number he had just finished calling with, nothing in the message outside of the server details. It wasn’t one that Xisuma recognized, and as he got to the bottom of the information, he realized it was a private server, complete with a passcode to enter.

    Xisuma tried not to overthink anything as he prepared to make the server jump. Respawn errors were incredibly rare, but they could technically happen in any server, no matter how safe or properly managed. Just because Mumbo was in a private server- just because all of Hermitcraft had spent the last few months making worrying about Mumbo a personal hobby- didn’t mean anything.

    The jump went by in less than a blink, but it was still too slow as far as Xisuma was concerned. When the world around him loaded back in, he realized he was in a large room, standard red beds lining the long walls to his sides. One of the beds near the back had been hastily blocked off, as evidenced by the dirt block walls around it. Other than a player standing near the center, fiddling with his communicator, the room was empty.

    The other player glanced up when Xisuma arrived. “Are you Xisumavoid?”

    “I am.” Xisuma confirmed as he walked past the man, beelining for the blocked off bed. “What happened?”

    “Like I told you, there was a respawn error.” The man reiterated as he hurried to follow Xisuma. “But if you mean how he died before it occurred, he was killed with a trident through the chest.”

    “Drowned?” Xisuma pushed, mentally running through respawn error probabilities. They most often occurred with evokers and their fang attacks, due to conflicting code issues with the ground layer, but issues arising from a drowned’s non-collectible tridents weren’t too uncommon when it came to errors-

    “No, a player.”

    Xisuma stopped right as he reached the spruce door, turning back to face who he assumed to be the server’s own admin. “A player?”

    The other man looked at Xisuma as if he was the one missing something. “Yeah, a player.”

    “Why- was there a fight? Did Mumbo do something?”

    “It’s… a competition. Last player standing is the winner. Mumbo Jumbo was the only other contestant still in the ring at the time so, yeah, I guess he did that.”

    Although the server’s admin avoided the exact term, Xisuma knew exactly what he meant when he said ‘competition’.

    This was a death games server. A private death games server. A private death games server Mumbo had somehow gotten an invitation to.

    Oh, Mumbo, what have you been doing?

    Not wanting to waste anymore time, Xisuma pushed open the oak door and entered the mini room. It enclosed a single bed upon which Mumbo was laid out, eyes closed and expression distorted in pain. His jacket and tie had been removed, and the top buttons of his shirt undone to better show the site of the killing wound. The three puncture marks showed no signs of healing, but no signs of injury specific distortion either, as was expected of a respawn error injury.

    What wasn’t expected, however, was the collection of wounds that stood out starkly against Mumbo’s pale skin, all dripping dark blood and glinting with glitched edges. On his arms alone there were at least a dozen, ranging in size from paper cuts to gashes that practically encompassed his arm. Another shadowed his collarbone, oozing blood that rolled down to paint the trident wounds vicious red. Xisuma couldn’t even imagine how many more there must be on the rest of Mumbo’s chest and his legs.

    “And how did all these happen?” Xisuma asked the server’s admin, who had wormed his way into the miniature room to stand on the opposite side of Mumbo’s bed. His tone was harsher than he had intended for it to be, but he couldn’t entirely bring himself to care.

    “Hey, hey, hey! No need to get so surly!” The other man said much too defensively. “Respawn errors can happen in any server! And none of those glitch injuries occurred here!”

    As unsavory as Xisuma found him, the server’s admin didn’t seem to be lying. And while glitch injuries were not nearly as rare as respawn errors, they primarily popped up in poorly managed servers, or servers where fighting between players was frequent. And Mumbo had so many…

    The other man cleared his throat. “I hate to, uh, rush you, but don’t you think you should get your player here back to your server? His chances of surviving the error really aren’t good here, and, well, he should at least be somewhere familiar, right?”

    Xisuma hoped the glare he was shooting at the pathetic excuse of an admin was coming through his visor clear and obvious. He only wanted Mumbo gone so there was no chance of him perishing there and bringing unwanted attention upon his regulation-ignoring server and player-endangering games. If it weren’t for the extremely pressing matters at hand, Xisuma would have personally ensured the entire place was wiped out of existence and the man’s admin rights permanently revoked.

    But that could be taken care of another time. For now, unfortunately, the other man was right. The longer Mumbo stayed in the painful limbo between death and respawn, the higher the chance he would permadie, code unable to latch onto any respawn points.

    Doing his best to not aggravate Mumbo’s multitude of injuries, Xisuma carefully picked up the unconscious redstoner and hit the ‘jump back’ command on his communicator. They appeared at his base for only a moment before he was teleporting them within the server, to Boatem.

    Grian, walking between buildings in the main area, glanced over at them as Xisuma’s feet once again settled on the ground. “Xisuma? What are you- Mumbo?!”

    “Grian, is there a bed on the ground floor of your starter base?”

    “I- yeah, yeah, come on.” Grian started heading in the direction of his base, Xisuma following behind as fast as he dared. Every few seconds, Grian would look back, eyes on Mumbo. It was obvious he had questions but was holding back on asking them all until Xisuma did whatever he had to do.

    Grian held open the door to his base, letting Xisuma through before pointing to the side of his house his bed was tucked away in. “It’s right over there. I don’t know if it matters, but I haven’t used it as a respawn point in weeks.”

    “That’s probably for the best.” Xisuma responded as he came to stand beside the bed. He laid Mumbo on it before stepping away, giving himself some space as he pulled up the server’s code. Lines of green filled with symbols he was more than used to appeared before him with a thought, and Xisuma quickly set about navigating it.

    Finding Mumbo’s code was easy. The hard part was finding the code for the specific bed he was currently laying on. Trying to connect Mumbo to a bed he wasn’t in contact with would only worsen the respawn injury, and Xisuma couldn’t let that happen.

    In the gaps between his code, Xisuma watched as Grian’s hands ghosted over the top of Mumbo’s unhealing, bleeding arms. His lips were moving, but whether he was talking to himself or trying to murmur something to Mumbo, Xisuma couldn’t tell.

    After too much time for Xisuma’s liking, he found the right bed. Taking its exact object name, he linked it as Mumbo’s respawn point, waiting a moment before the screen flashed at him in confirmation of the change. He swiped the code screens away as soon as it saved, coming back to Mumbo’s bedside and looking him over.

    The trident wounds had healed, and his expression had become relaxed with the fatal injuries addressed.

    The other cuts hadn’t changed at all.

    “Xisuma?” Xisuma, distracted by the grisly sight of Mumbo’s remaining injuries, had remained silent too long for Grian. “What’s happening? Is Mumbo… is he going to be alright?”

    Giving his honest answer to that question would likely cause Grian to panic, which would most likely end up in the entire server panicking. Xisuma would rather avoid that, if he could. “Could you gather all of Boatem here? I think it’ll be best if I can talk to you all together.”

    Grian glanced back at Mumbo, clearly hesitant to leave his friend in such a state. Xisuma crouched down so that he was on Grian’s level, doing his best to keep his voice reassuring. “I’ll keep an eye on him while you’re gone. Everything’s going to be okay, Grian.”

    The way Grian looked at Xisuma made it clear he didn’t entirely believe that.

    Xisuma couldn’t blame him. He didn’t either.

    Despite his doubt, Grian still got up and left his base. Through both the door he left open and the walls of the house, Xisuma could hear him yelling for the rest of Boatem at the top of his lungs. If, by luck, all Boatem members were currently anywhere near their town, they’d hear him.

    Xisuma used what short time he had until Grian and co returned to close his eyes and forcefully breathe. As admin, he had to offer his hermits a steady and confident front. Someone who knew what was happening and knew what to do about it, or, at the very least, someone who could handle the aftermath if it all went wrong.

    One breath in was too sharp and metallic and Xisuma’s eyes opened automatically; the sight of Mumbo, bleeding-in-Hermitcraft Mumbo, glitch-ridden-skin Mumbo helpfully reminded him that he had no idea how to handle this, in the aftermath or otherwise.

    Four sets of footsteps tore Xisuma from his spiralling thoughts, turning around to find Grian leading in the rest of Boatem. Impulse, Pearl, and Scar looked confused until they saw Mumbo, every player moving over to crowd out every edge of the bed as they realized what was wrong.

    “Try not to touch him.” Xisuma warned as some of them got too close. “We don’t want to aggravate any of his… injuries.”

    Aside from Grian, who had taken up his spot near Mumbo’s head once again and seemed unwilling to step away from it any time soon, all of Boatem immediately pulled away from Mumbo.

    “What… what happened?” Scar asked faintly after a long moment.

    “Mumbo had a respawn error.” Xisuma started, deciding it was better to begin with the issue he had actually understood and been able to fix. “He was in a different server and he didn’t correctly register as part of their respawn system. The injury that had killed him didn’t go away after he died, and he became unable to respawn.”

    “Is that still- is he still-”

    “Now that he’s back in Hermitcraft, I was able to manually link him to a respawn point. He’s no longer stuck dying, and will wake up soon.” Xisuma answered before Pearl could fully answer the question, not certain if she- if any of them- could handle actually hearing the phrase ‘is he still going to die?’. “It will likely be a few days before he’s able to do much more than stay in bed, however, and longer until he’ll be back at full strength.”

    Impulse shifted in place a bit, eyes caught on one of Mumbo’s arms. “And… everything else?”

    Xisuma couldn’t meet Boatem’s collective eyes as he responded. “I… I don’t know.”

    “No ideas? Nothing at all?!”

    “I know they’re glitch injuries. They’re caused by random code errors that stop injuries from healing, regardless of respawn. When Mumbo’s more recovered, I’ll be able to take care of them by repairing his code.” Xisuma offered with a sigh. “But that doesn’t answer why they’re bleeding in a server with no blood mods. Or how he got so many.”

    “Could he have picked them up in the server he had the respawn error in?” Pearl asked. “It doesn’t really sound like a very well-kept server.”

    “Glitch injuries aren’t as rare as respawn errors, but they’re still not common. To have as many as Mumbo seems to… this couldn’t have all happened overnight.”

    Grian looked up at Xisuma, speaking slowly. “What are you saying, Xisuma?”

    The tension in the precious few seconds of silence that passed between his question and Xisuma’s answer was thick enough to clog the air, generated by the grim set of Xisuma’s face before he even spoke and the look in Grian’s eyes that suggested he already knew the answer.

    “The server Mumbo was last on was a server that hosts death games. A private one. The chances are he… he has been participating in quite a few of such games.”

    For a moment, the shock of Xisuma’s postulation left the entire group stunned into uncanny silence. Then, that moment ended, and so did the silence.

    Impulse and Pearl spoke- at first, to no one but the air, then to each other, as if saying everything suddenly on their minds (their justified concern, the signs they missed, what more could they have done, poor Mumbo-) would help clear them out. Scar mimicked Grian and remained largely silent, but as he slowly lowered himself to a seat beside Grian, looking pale, it became clear to Xisuma it was less out of having nothing to say and more out of not having the energy to speak.

    Someone asked what they- collectively- could do. Xisuma wasn’t exactly sure who it was, or if they really meant it as a real question or a rhetorical. Xisuma took it as the former.

    “It might be a good idea to investigate Mumbo’s base a bit- nothing invasive, just, see if there’s anything that might give us an idea of how long this has been going on for. I’ll give his code a more thorough look-over as well, in case there’s anything there.” Xisuma said, tacking on as he glanced at Scar, “It might be best if someone could help Scar retrieve his wheelchair, too.”

    “I’ll be fine.” Scar dismissed before Xisuma had finished speaking. “Take care of Mumbo first.”

    “I can go check out Treesa.” Impulse volunteered. “And I can get Scar’s wheelchair on the way back.”

    “I’ll go with him.” Pearl added, the two of them already heading towards the door. “Keep an eye on Mumbo while we’re gone, yeah?”

    Neither Pearl nor Impulse needed to hear the answer to know what it was.

    As they headed off, Xisuma took a seat on the floor of Grian’s base. He once again opened the server’s code in front of himself, this time moving immediately to the player database and ignoring the actual world. He opened Mumbo Jumbo’s player code and began slowly shifting through, looking for anything that might clue him into what had happened, and how long it had been happening for.

    Across from him, Scar leaned against Grian’s shoulder, both players looking at an undefinable midpoint between Mumbo’s sleeping form and Xisuma’s working one.

    “This is all my fault.” Grian murmured, low enough Xisuma could only barely hear it.

    “No it isn’t.” Scar replied in an equally quiet voice. “We couldn’t have known this was going on.”

    “But we knew something was.” Grian argued back. “We should have done more to help him- I should have done more.”

    “And we tried to. It’s not anyone’s fault that Mumbo wasn’t… wasn’t in a place to accept that help.”

    “...Do you think he is now?”

    Scar deliberated for a moment before answering, “No, I don’t. But we’re not going to let that stop us this time. No matter what.”

    “No matter what.” Grian echoed.

    They lapsed into silence after that, and Xisuma continued with his work, scanning line after line in an effort not to miss anything. Mumbo’s code was riddled with the butchered, unreadable sections that represented his various glitch wounds. Time stamps marking the respawn times the wounds became glitched allowed Xisuma to pinpoint when Mumbo had been getting them as well. The most recent had been only days ago. The furthest went back months.

    Xisuma continued to search through the code even as the signs of glitched injuries stopped popping up. He had still been unable to find any reason as to why his cuts would bleed in a server like Hermitcraft where such a thing wasn’t possible. Surely, if he kept scrolling, just a little bit further-

    It took a minute to fully process the reason when he found it. He wasn’t sure what his expression was, but it caught both Grian’s attention and Scar’s, the players shifting their gazes up at him.

    “What is it?” Scar asked, or maybe it was Grian.

    Before Xisuma could get his mouth to form the response, the door behind him opened. Xisuma saw Pearl pushing Scar’s wheelchair as she walked past him, Impulse remaining at a point behind his back.

    “Xisuma, we… I think we found something.”

    “Was it blood?”

    There was a short pause before Impulse spoke again. “Yeah, uh- one of Mumbo’s chests was completely filled with blood-stained suit jackets. A lot of it is on the arms, but some of the stains are in pretty random places. The one at the very bottom of the pile was only stained on one sleeve edge. And it was rolled up with a glove that had blood stains on the inside of it.”

    “A glove?” Scar repeated, frowning as he accepted Pearl’s help getting into his chair. “I remember seeing Mumbo with only one glove once- but that was forever ago, back when I was reverse-robbing him.”

    “But- there’s no way he could have been hiding glitch injuries that long, how could-”

    “I know how.” Xisuma interrupted, staring directly at the lump of code responsible for Void knew how much of all that had happened over the past months that only he could see. “Last Life’s blood and pain mod pack… Mumbo still has it.”