#i think lots of hermits would have fun with the leviathan grandgousier is all.

[shortfeather]

the way the water echoes

did a little sprint based on that neverend mod idea, centered on cleo courtesy of @tripping-sideways. posting this mostly unedited; i think tumblr-only writing is gonna be more casual for me than AO3.

warnings: isolation, sort of imprisonment, liminal spaces, drowning, minecraft death mechanics including deliberately forcing a respawn

It doesn’t really hit her until she’s staring at the pit that leads to a second level, communicator hanging silent at her waist, how much trouble she’s in.

Cleo had been searching for an End portal a little closer to their base. Even with the Nether shrinking the distance eightfold, the main portal was ridiculously far from their home, and considering the amount of endstone she was going to be using this season it made sense to find one nearby. The stronghold had been half flooded, and they’d come close to death against the Drowned in the halls before finally making it to the portal room.

The lava was warm against their undead skin, even as the portal frame exuded a voidlike chill. To their delight, the frame had been mostly filled, just two eyes short. Cleo had popped them in, set a bed down for spawn, double-checked their gear, and hopped on through. Had bent their knees slightly, the way every new player is taught, so the jolt of the hard obsidian landing doesn’t do any damage.

Instead, she’d fallen far and landed in a deep pool of water, surrounded by white walls and with a beautiful blue sky shining down from above her. The exact opposite of what they expected.

Really, this whole dimension is about as different from the End as it gets. The End is all disconnected islands, here is a never-ending series of halls and rooms. The End is dark and cold, here is bright and pleasantly warm, enough for the cool water that covers the floor to feel like a comfort. The End is dead, and here there are bushes of something her inventory calls liminalgae, and occasionally, groups creatures similar to axolotls called poolfish. She can even pick them up, attracting them with the liminalgae like a cow to wheat. They're rather cute. The End is mostly void, here there is a beautiful flat ocean beyond the walls that an invisible barrier prevents her from reaching.

The End is a place Cleo knows how to leave, and here she does not.

She’s tried. The first thing she did upon scrambling out of the water was message X, only for her communicator to show a chat validation error. Their messages can’t go through, though waiting about ten minutes shows that they can still see the messages everyone else is sending. That’s comforting, to a degree; if they wait long enough, someone will realize something is wrong, and Xisuma can do his admin-y things and get them out of here. She’d told Joe what she was doing right before she found this dimension; maybe he’ll look into it even before someone thinks to call X in.

While she’d waited for other messages to come in, she’d taken a look around the room. Everything was made out of some variant of an unfamiliar block, similar in look to an iron block, but with a grid pattern and a feel like glazed terracotta. The entrance was decorated beautifully with bushes of the liminalgae stuff, which broke easily beneath her fist and stacked nicely in her inventory.

Which was also how she discovered her inventory was empty. 

Around then, her communicator had displayed a message from Mumbo, something about server lag. Cleo ignored it for a moment, because their inventory was empty, even their armor slots and offhand—they’d been fully prepared to go End mining, going so far as to stick a carved pumpkin on their head. It’s all gone.

Then they process that their communicator buzzed, and the fact that it’s not completely broken isn’t nearly as relieving as it could have been. They still can’t send messages out, but they can see what their friends are coordinating, and be prepared for whatever rescue entails.

Whenever rescue comes.

It doesn’t take long to get bored, which is why Cleo starts exploring, despite the fact that their F3 screen only says no, lmao. X is going to get an earful for including whatever mod this is when she gets back—

For now, they wander. They find some bizarre architecture choices, and rooms full of poolfish and liminalgae both. They discover, with a deep sense of dread, that the beautiful view of the flat ocean outside is a mirage; exploration reveals a set of windows that theoretically should point directly into another hallway, but instead show that bright blue sky. Whatever’s out there… 

Well, she’ll never know what’s out there, because the block refuses to break beneath her fist, no matter how long she punches at it. Same with the walls.

For untold days, she wanders. Without her F3 screen, there’s no way to be accurate about the time she’s spent here, but it feels like a week and a half. There’d been a jolt of hope when Joe asked if someone had seen them recently—but Tango had reminded him that they were End mining, probably deep in the grind by now. It’s been a week and a half, approximately, of ankle-deep water in hallways, and deeper water in grand, open rooms, and nothing to eat but liminalgae and nothing to do but walk around and breed poolfish. They’ve been staying close to the spawn room, unwilling to lose their one known location in this unknown dimension.

Their communicator buzzes more as time passes: Doc pranking Gem, Gem killing him in revenge. Xisuma reminding everyone to avoid the world border chunks until the next update. Grian pretending to be Iskall’s conscience, teaching him how to use boats. She mutes the communicator. It hurts to see everyone this way, while she’s stuck here.

She still checks it; she's not stupid. She just… can’t keep watching the texts fly by without her.

And then she finds the pit.

It’s a room unlike any other she’s seen so far. It leads down, deeper than even the deepest pool of water she’s encountered, and it’s filled with rows of stacked arches, bridging the gap. She crouches onto one and peers down. It’s darker, but not pitch black, and there’s a pool of water at the bottom, the same shape and size as the one they originally fell into.

In her inventory, her collection of favorite poolfish squirm. Cleo’s guts match the motion, because this is obviously where the dimension intends them to go. The pit yawns before her like a beckoning, like a challenge. But there’s no blocks here, no drops from poolfish or craftables with liminalgae. If Cleo jumps down, she has no way back up.

No way save dying, drowning or starving wherever she finds herself. Because that was the other thing she’d tried, when her messages refused to send and her inventory yielded nothing. Cleo had dove down to the bottom of the spawn room pool, and pushed all the air out of their lungs, and breathed in that cool water.

It worked everywhere else. It wasn’t pleasant, but it worked, and they were a grown-up who could work with something that wasn’t pleasant.

They’d respawned in free-fall and crashed into the very pool they’d just died in.

That had been a very brutal realization: they were stuck here. And yet it feels like that realization pales in comparison to the pit before her, the pit that calls to her so tauntingly with its insinuations. That there is more to this place than white walls and fake ocean and sunlight. That there is escape, if she’s willing to fight for it. Escape that may come quicker than her friends.

Cleo has always been a fighter. But they’re smart, too. Before committing either way, they check their communicator.

Unread messages:

<GoodTimeWithScar> DONT HOTGYU ME

<GoodTimeWithScar was shot by Grian>

<Grian> get gud 

<iJevin> seriously, is cleo just living in the end at this point?

<StressMonster101> Im sure theyll be back soon, luv

Without timestamps, it’s impossible to tell how recently Jev and Stress sent their messages, but they make Cleo waver. The safest option is to wait near the spawn room, where X or Joe will eventually spawn in and help her escape with their admin-y ways. With the poolfish and liminalgae, she can survive as long as necessary, although the liminalgae doesn’t seem to regrow. Still—up here, where she understands the terrain, is safest.

<iJevin> stress its been a MONTH

<iJevin> even for a megabase grind thats ridiculous

Cleo’s stomach falls out from under them.

A month?

They’ve been stuck in this endless pseudo-paradise for a month, and people are only just now worrying—

No. No, fuck this, fuck everyone except Joe who asked about them way back towards the start, except he hasn’t said anything since so actually fuck him, too. And fuck X for chatting about updates like everything’s normal, and Ren for saying innuendoes and double entendres like nothing’s wrong, and Grian and Scar for being Grian and Scar when she’s stuck in here—

Fuck Jevin especially, for saying that where they could see, where they could realize no one is coming for them.

Distantly, Cleo realizes that this is a bit much, that people do regularly go off and grind resources for absurd lengths of time, but that doesn’t stop her from beating back sobs by fostering the rage in her chest. Distantly, she realizes that this is all uncomfortably close to a breakdown, and they don’t get those. They don’t do those; they’re a fighter, someone whose first answer is violence and barbed words and arson. 

So. Fuck their friends. Fuck them all. Cleo will rescue herself. 

They double-check their poolfish and liminalgae count—enough to last another goddamn month, if need be—and jump into the dark waters far, far below.

#thank you tripping-sideways! cleo was not someone i would have thought to do but they're FUN #fwiw: they have actually been having a much worse time than they admit to themself. hence the IMMEDIATE descent into fury #but also like. they're smart enough to realize they're being dumb. unfortunately the one does not preclude the other. #TO BE FAIR IT'S BEEN A MONTH #in minecraft time! which is a long but not unheard of amount of time to grind resources #about the author #neverend mod au #my brain hurts too much to title this au so that's what it gets #might write other hermits experiencing neverend in the future? especially the last level #i think lots of hermits would have fun with the leviathan grandgousier is all. #hermitblr #zombiecleo #minecraft neverend