happy October! here is what every Hermit would dress up as for Halloween. i will not be accepting criticism (joke)
Bdubs - The bottom half of a couples' horse costume
Cub - Dr Frankenstein
Doc - Frankenstein's Monster
Etho - Puts a sheet over his head and calls it a day
False - Queen of Hearts
Gem - An elaborate, entirely handmade and hand-sewed, beautiful rendition of a forest elf
Scar - Luke Skywalker
Grian - Mumbo
Hypno - Just puts on some cat ears
Jevin - Drowned / Sea creature
Impulse - Classic red demon costume
Iskall - His favourite anime character
Joe - Just wears a shirt that says "responsible adult"
Keralis - Bee
Mumbo - Vampire
Pearl - Uses the 5AM Pearl cloak for Little Red Riding Hood
Ren - Cyborg future space werewolf
Skizz - The blue M&M
Joel - Shrek
Stress - Flower, as in, puts flower petals around her head
Tango - Cowboy
Beef - Fish man.
Wels - Dark knight
xB - Bigfoot
Xisuma - Doom Guy :)
Zedaph - Honestly no-one can tell and they're too afraid to ask
Cleo - Mummy ("You thought I was gonna be a zombie huh???")
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It’s two in the morning when Gem wakes up to screaming in her castle.
The noise is coming from the entrance hall, and it sounds like neither a wither nor a warden, so she figures she’s good to head down in just her pyjamas and her little silk house-robe. Her sword is a comforting not-weight in her inventory, visible a half-dimension away when she lets her attention slip to the peripheral of her vision. Whatever it is, she’ll be fine. It’s probably some bugged zombie or something – if it’s not just some new god-awful prank from Grian, or Scar, or both.
(She’s heard that thing under Scar’s base. It’s horrible. If they’ve put one of those in her castle, she’s going to kill both of them. Even if it was just one of them that put it there, she’s going to kill both of them. On principle.)
It’s not a bugged zombie, or a prank. It’s Pearl – also in her pyjamas, red flannel and a button-up shirt – hunched over, pulling at her own hair, howling. Her eyes are huge, wet, the pupils blown so large they’re almost black. There’s dark bags under her eyes, no colour in her skin other than high spots of red in her cheeks, the red of her nose where it’s running.
She’s barefoot – and that shouldn’t be what makes Gem’s heart break in two, but it is.
“Hey, Pearl,” she says, gently, raising her voice to carry over the wounded wailing. “Pearl! Hey. Can you look at me?”
She feels like she should have expected this, really. She’d heard from Mumbo what Grian had been like, after that first game, the one he’d won. She’d not been close enough to experience it first-hand, but she knew it’d been bad. She knows that winning those games is really more of a loss, than anything.
Pearl’s head snaps up. The howling stops, or rather transitions, turns into a choked gurgling, a gasping, this awful and wrenching sobbing like she’s gagging on her own saliva and desperately trying to swallow her screams. Her eyes are hollow, empty, nothing behind them but fear, pain. There’s something else there, too, some kind of deep and welling existential terror that makes Gem want to take a step back.
She doesn’t, but it’s a close thing. The back of her neck prickles, the hairs on the back of her arms standing on end. She swallows, instead, and forces herself to take a step forward, towards the fear.
“That’s good,” she praises, “that’s great, Pearl, good job. Well done. Now. Can you tell me what’s going on? Seems like you’re having a bit of a rough time, huh?”
When Pearl rushes at her – hunched, animal, too-fast and skittering and staggering – she still doesn’t back up.
She does, however, flinch. Her gaze slides to the peripheral, again, to the sword there. Just for a moment.
Pearl doesn’t seem to notice. “Tilly,” she gasps, grabs at Gem’s wrists. Her nails dig in, overlong, and draw blood. “Where’s– Tilly, what did they–” Her gaze sharpens, but only for a moment, and there’s still no sense in it. “What did you do to Tilly–”
Like this, this close, skin-on-skin contact between them, Gem can feel how hard she’s shaking.
“I’m sure she’s around here somewhere,” says Gem, as calmly as she can. “Can you tell me where you think you are, Pearl?”
Pearl gurgles, an awful noise. and tips forward. She’s still clutching hard enough to draw blood and, when she falls into Gem’s chest, she’s as cold as the night air outside. Her shaking rattles Gem’s ribs.
“He left,” she says, wet, like a child. “He left, he– he killed, he died, he killed himself, rather than– than be with me. He hates me. He wanted to get away from me so bad that he, he, he–”
She howls again, then, a noise of raw and ragged pain that seems to tear its way out of her like a living thing.
There are tears soaking through Gem’s pyjamas, and her heart breaks a little with it as she carefully, carefully, shifts a hand to cradle the back of Pearl’s head. Her wrists are bloody with nail marks, and some of it catches, smears in Pearl’s wild hair. She tries not to worry about it. They can wash it out later.
“Shh, shh,” she murmurs, pets at the tangled mess beneath her hand, holds Pearl close while she works through another bout of screaming. “Shh, shh, shh.” She takes them both to the floor, slowly, legs going out from under them as Gem lowers them down. “I’m here, I’m here. I’ve got you. I’m here.”
“He hated me,” moans Pearl, between sobs, when the wailing has passed. The shaking is slowing, easing a little, the agony giving way to a slower, bone-deep hurt, the madness passing into grief. “He wanted to die rather than stay.”
That’s not true, Gem thinks, and she thinks Pearl knows that too. But she doesn’t say that. Now is not the time for saying that.
What she says, instead, is just, “I’m here. And I don’t hate you.” She hesitates, for a moment, and then leans forward, curls over Pearl where they’re sat tangled together on the floor. Presses her lips to the top of Pearl’s head. “I’m here,” she says, and means it, “and I’ll stay. For as long as you want me to.”
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