Grian comes to again, flat on his back, and groans. Distantly, he hears Scar yelling an apology. It’s hard to tell if Scar had accidentally dropped sand, accidentally kicked one of the dragon eggs currently littering their bases (causing it to fall), or had missed concrete somewhere and caused that to drop, but the apology, this time, was at least sincere, so he’s fairly certain Scar didn’t intentionally knock Grian out. Doesn’t mean Grian hadn’t been knocked on his ass by, what, a pavlovian reaction to sand? But it means Scar hadn’t been intentionally exploiting it.
He’s rubbing his head when he hears them chittering distantly. He looks up, and then he Looks up, just to make sure he’s not imagining it, and… yep, they’re there. The Watchers. They’re busy happily chittering about the fact that Grian passes out when any block falls to the ground. Of course they are. He wonders if this is their fault. Probably not; Watchers may be annoying, but they can’t see the future, so it’s not like they’d have known about the egg thing ahead of time. No, they’re probably just amused at his suffering.
Joke’s on them. This is mostly just going to make cleaning up slower. And they’re going to have to deal with that too, on account of the fact Grian can’t do much else until it’s done.
He’s trying to hit another egg with a piston when he hears, distantly, “shoot, the beach!”, realizes what has happened, and then he’s waking up on the ground again. He stares at the sky for a moment.
“Trust Scar with sand, I thought. He terraforms all the time, I thought. He won’t keep messing me up with it, I thought.” He groans.
The chittering of the Watchers gets louder. He hears a lot of ‘Scar’ and ‘sand’ and ‘he can’t bear it’ and. Great. Grian’s pretty sure he knows what comment is coming next—
you’ve never left that desert.
“So this is your fault!” he says, accusingly. “Why! All it’s done is make my life more confusing!”
Indistinct noises. At one point, when Grian had been more one of them than he is now, he had been able to tell all of the voices apart easily. Now, the Watchers are somewhere between the wall of incomprehensible, horrible sound that they are to mortals and normal voices. He has to strain to pick out anything overly specific. He supposes if he chose to go all Watcher again he’d be able to tell what they’re saying, but frankly, they’re all annoying, so why would he bother? Better to stick to things as they are.
He messages Scar: If you drop sand one more time I am going to figure out how to add more dragon eggs to your base.
Scar messages back: its an accideet
Grian responds one more time: lol. accideet.
He takes a moment before standing up to check around himself. Scar does seem to have moved on from whatever he’d been doing with terraforming to keep dropping gravity blocks, so it’s probably safe to stand without passing out again. What had he been doing? Right. Eggs. Piston.
you never left that desert, Grian hears again from the wall of noise.
“Right. That’s me. Never left,” Grian says. Honestly.
can’t stand the sight of scar and sand.
“You know you guys are reaching, right?” Grian says.
never left—
“I would if you’d let me!” snaps Grian.
Indistinct chittering. Deep breaths. He’s fine. He’s apparently developed sand-based epilepsy or something, and is trying to find the solution to that, but. Fine. He’s fine. It’s not like arguing with Watchers is ever actually worth it. They never change their mind. The thing is that they tend to think they know exactly how he works, and no matter how much he tries to refute their baseless assumptions, they still have a picture in their head, and they still keep working off of it.
A strange shudder runs down his back.
you never left that desert.
“Look, it’s not that I’m not over it,” Grian says. “I’m actually pretty over it. I’ve been over it since Last Life, really, even if none of you believe me.” He puts another egg in his inventory. “Scar’s my friend and he’s a weird guy and I like him, but it’s not like I’m not over that stupid game. Wouldn’t keep playing it if I weren’t over it, would I?”
Indistinct chittering about tragedy and deserts and dramatic final suicides and, look, Grian is good at telling stories. That’s the whole point. That’s why these guys won’t leave him alone. But sometimes, he swears…
“So you know, I would have left the desert by now. It’s just that you all haven’t. So guess who’s still stuck here? Believe me, it’s not me who’s not over it. If you wanted me out of the desert, you could let me leave any time you’d l—”
He has a second’s warning before he’s on the ground, dizzy, hoping he hasn’t gotten a concussion. He glances down at his communicator.
Mumbo says: that was me this time my bad
Shakily, Grian types: you have 10 seconds. start running.
The chittering gets more distant. Grian gets up. He checks to make sure his wings are on. He goes to light a rocket, but not before shouting: “Scar, if you do anything with gravity blocks while I am actively flying I will kill you dead!”
“Have fun buddy!” Scar shouts back. Grian’s not sure Scar actually heard a word he said. Well, hopefully there will be no sand falling from his hands while he goes to murder Mumbo, then. If there is, Grian’s—well, Grian’s going to have a broken bone at that rate, but he’s recovered from far worse falls. Some of those have even been Scar’s fault, by some measure or another.
He Looks back up at the mass he knows are the Watchers. “If this is you all’s fault because you never seem to have gotten over the whole desert thing, I’ll find a way to, I don’t know. Inconvenience you greatly. Not sure what I’ll do, but I’ll figure it out.”
The chittering gets way more fond, then. Pleased. They want him to do that. Can’t even threaten the assholes properly, they like it. Honestly, Grian doesn’t know why he bothers. It’s not like they’ll listen. No matter how many times he says he’s over it, it’s not like they’ll listen.
(Sometimes, he hates that he’s so good at stories.)
Right then. Time to wreak havoc on his friends for exploiting his very exploitable weakness, then. This sword’s got sharpness on it, right?
——
(originally written for @hermitcraftguesstheauthorevent, and posted on ao3 here; now that it’s revealed, i figured i’d go ahead and post it here, since it really matches the cadence of one of my tumblr things more than an ao3-only fic. enjoy!)
So you know how Fwhip said his Empires character in season 1 was gonna have a Vampire Arc that got scrapped?
My brain has decided to take this and just make it headcanon that he actually was a vampire the whole time.
This is not news to anyone. At least thirty percent of the population in the Grimlands are vampires. Centuries of redstone toxic runoff seeping into the earth and being recycled into the bonemeal used to grow food means that a lot of the crops grown in the Grimlands are not edible. The people had to adapt. There are literal blood banks that are run like high-quality organic grocery stores and source their blood from a wide variety of well-paid humans and very pampered livestock. They work closely with Gem’s apothecary to ensure a quality product. Both Mythland and The Gilded Helianthia have a long-standing alliance with the Grimlands and supply yearly deliveries of blood sheep and healthy crops, to support the vampiric and human populations respectively.
The rest of the rulers know, of course. It’s not a secret. Fwhip’s vampirism is treated like a dietary restriction and catered to accordingly at feasts and other meetings. Fwhip himself likes to make jokes about biting and “turning” his friends and being allergic to garlic, which can potentially fly over the heads of anyone who is not In The Know. (Note: Jimmy and Lizzie have been living under a rock in the ocean for centuries. They are not, in fact, in the know.) Vampirism is not common throughout the rest of the continent, and there are a lot of harmful stereotypes, and Fwhip is the first Grimlands ruler in centuries to have been born a vampire. Outwardly, he’s very chill and quick to forgive if anyone makes an insensitive remark, but he’s actually working very hard behind the scenes to bring more acceptance and understanding to his people. (Scott and Shubble were the hardest to win over. Shubble is uneasy around anything even vaguely related to demons, which vampires technically classify as. Scott is old enough to remember a time when vampires were much rarer and were routinely hunted and treated as monsters, and elvish society is slow to adapt. They are both doing their best, but neither of them are willing to be alone in a room with Fwhip. At least not without a fresh supply of blood to appease him.)
Lizzie begins to suspect that Fwhip is a vampire from the moment they formally meet. She puts together an entire conspiracy board and spends months feverishly compiling evidence with the intention of bringing his “condition” to the attention of the other rulers, envisioning it to be a huge Dramatic Reveal that would shock and horrify everyone. Joel finds the conspiracy board and has to gently sit her down and explain that everyone already knows, Lizzie, yes we are all cool with it. I literally provided bowls of fresh horse blood at the last meeting with Fwhip, did you not notice? No, that was not tomato soup, oh god Lizzie, don’t tell me you actually drank some of that and thought it was normal people food….?!
(Fwhip knows about the conspiracy board, too. He thought it was hilarious. He spent months gleefully making sus comments and feeding Lizzie all the damning evidence she could ever dream of. He is very annoyed that Joel ruined the entire joke.)
Jimmy is the last to know, as usual. His first ever meeting with Fwhip to discuss a tentative alliance ends in disaster since Jimmy hosted the meeting in the Codlands and provided what he believed to be a bountiful feast of seafood and varying grain dishes. Fwhip does not eat bite, which Jimmy takes as an insult. Fwhip was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but Sausage reassures him, “Of course Jimmy knows you’re a vampire! I told him myself!” (He absolutely did not. He is stirring up trouble for the hell of it. Sausage assumes the misunderstanding will clear itself up in a few weeks and everyone will laugh it off.) From then on, and for other reasons related to stolen cows and missing records and TNT traps, Jimmy and Fwhip are Dire Enemies. Even after the whole thing with the Codfather head and the dragon and after they eventually reconcile, Jimmy still does not know that Fwhip is a vampire. All the inside jokes and references fly right over his head, and after one too many “sucking and turning” jokes, Jimmy gets the mistaken impression that Fwhip has a massive crush on him. He panics as he tries to figure out how to let the man down gently.
Jimmy goes to Scott for advice. Scott, who has a massive crush on the Codfather himself and is intensely jealous of any man who so much as looks at Jimmy, is supremely unhelpful.
The next person Jimmy goes to for advice is Lizzie, who gets the mistaken impression that Fwhip actually does want to “turn” Jimmy and gives him a very long and heated lecture on how he should never trust these land-dwellers and he needs to keep his enemies close but not that close and maybe he should consider eating more garlic. At no point whatsoever does she clarify what she’s talking about. Jimmy walks away thinking that Fwhip has some kind of odd kink he doesn’t know about.
Jimmy finally finds out the truth at the Overgrown, during Katherine’s Race For The Crown, where right in the middle of the race Fwhip is overcome with competitive bloodlust and kills Katherine by drinking her dry in front of everyone. It’s a gruesome sight. Everyone is traumatized. Jimmy, who was watching the race from the sidelines, throws up in a bush and spends the rest of the day wondering how he didn’t figure it out sooner. Lizzie starts putting together a new conspiracy board on Katherine. Fwhip is extremely worried that his actions have ruined all his friendships and alliances and potentially endangered his empire and all of the vampires under his rule.
Katherine, who is part fae and older than Scott and has Seen It All, is just a little miffed that Fwhip got blood stains on her favorite dress.
It’s important to me that everyone understands that if you’ve got an autistic friend who periodically sends you pictures/videos/whatever of your Thing, because they know you’re into it… They love you.
Now don’t get me wrong, It may not necessarily be romantic love, they might not want to run off to a little farm in Montana where you’ll be married forever and raise little sheeps…
But they definitely love you. And they’re so happy when they spot a post about X and go “ooh, my friend likes X! I’ll send it to them!”.
I headcanon that on philzas wings there’s this little white spot near where the wing meets his back that’s shaped like a skull and it’s like Kristin’s mark on him as the goddess of death.
the second best thing about minecraft is that you can kill people with fireworks fired from a crossbow. the best thing about minecraft is that you can kill yourself with your own fireworks gun trying to do this if you’re not wearing armor with a high enough protection level.
ALT
