#and instead it ended up being - checks app - 2529 words

[theminecraftbee]

You dont have to do this, but you have teased a game of truth and dare for a while and i would really like to read it. You can make a lot of things very funny and a bit of laughs would be great before the next mental breakdown! Not that i mind the breakdown and the creeping sense of dread that has been slowly taking over boatem

"Alright," Grian says. "If we're doing this - and unfortunately I think we've finally reached the point we're doing this - we need to set rules. We may be playing Truth or Dare like schoolchildren, but we aren't animals."

There's a long, very loud pause as everyone takes that in.

"Technically," Pearl starts.

"We aren't animals," Grian says very definitively.

"I mean, he is right," Mumbo says. "If we're being technical, I'm pretty sure that whatever we are probably isn't an animal, in the strictest sense of that word. So he is right. Probably."

The five members of Boatem float through the void, or are one with the void. Eh, details. There's Truth or Dare to be played! Scar watches them argue, fascinated. He looks over at Grian and then looks back to Mumbo and Pearl. "You know, I'm beginning to get the sense I know why we have never managed to get to the part where we actually play yet," he says. "And like, guys, it's definitely been weeks, at least. Or months."

"Possibly years," Grian says.

"If it's been more than a year, I think I'm legally allowed to kill all of you the moment that won't make me start crying," Mumbo says.

"Oh god, we're doomed. Killing things makes him laugh, not cry," Pearl says.

"RULES," Grian says, somehow managing to emphasize the word as though it has three syllables instead of one. "How is it that I keep on being the voice of reason? The only reason I was agreeing to play this is because I want to make Scar do something really stupid!"

"Hey!"

"Would you pick truth?"

"No, that's the coward option, but -"

"My point stands."

Scar huffs, but doesn't argue.

"Alright then! Rules!" repeats Grian. "They're simple! If you can't do a dare, you can take the truth, or vis versa, but then you have to do whatever you're given. After your turn, you give whoever you want the next truth and/or dare, but you can't just retaliate against whoever made you do something, that's boring. If you lie, Mumbo gets to kill you, and if you chicken out, Mumbo also gets to kill you. Any questions?"

"Yeah. How do we lose?" Impulse asks.

"That's the neat part: the game never ends," Grian says.

"Oh, fun," Impulse says.

"I like this idea," Mumbo says darkly.

"Er, not that I don't want to play infinite truth or dare, that does sound delightful," Pearl says, "but what if, uh, after you've done at least three rounds yourself, you can choose to end the game instead of asking another question?"

Scar feels such relief as he shakily nods. Yes. Good rule. Pearl is his new favorite. Pearl is definitely his new favorite.

"Fine," Grian says, pouting. "But that means we can't target someone! They'll just end the game!"

"It's a good rule we're keeping it alright how do we decide who goes first?" Scar says, very quickly, determined to prevent Grian from talking anyone out of changing that rule before he could presumably make Scar's life hell. Why him, huh? Mumbo's right there! Mumbo's even got a funnier name, and reacts all silly to pranks! He's like, just as fun to mess with as Scar is!

Honestly, Grian, bullying behavior.

"I'll go first!" Impulse says cheerfully.

"Why do you get to go first?" Mumbo asks suspiciously.

"I mean, were you going to dare me?"

"...no."

"Was anyone else?"

"You honestly just feel like a bad first -"

"There we go!" Impulse says, smiling. "Any objections?"

It seems, for a moment, that Grian may try to object. However, it seems that even Grian finally wants to actually play. Technically, this isn't the first time they've had this rules conversation. It isn't even the second. Heck, it isn't even the third. It's, uh, more like the fifth? The first time they'd tried to play truth or dare was way back before they even realized anything was more wrong than the apocalypse, in fact! Man. Those had been wild times. They'd just normally descended into in-fighting before this point, or descended into pointless arguments about what a "valid dare" would be, given that none of them could easily do anything back then. But now all of them can move! So...

"Alright then. Scar. Truth or dare?"

"Oh come on!" Scar says loudly.

"Well?" Impulse says. "This is one more round Grian can't get you, you know."

"Fine. Dare."

"Lick Grian," Impulse says promptly.

Everyone stares for a moment. Pearl is the first one to speak. "Is that... the best you can...?"

"I mean, yeah," Impulse says. "What did you think I was going to say? We're in the void, I can't do half of my fun ideas! Unless you want me to dare him to lick Pancake instead?"

"That's worse, that's worse, just come lick me," Grian says.

Scar stares at Grian, shrugs, approaches him, and licks his face in a long stripe. It tastes like face. Actually, like weird face. Like the platonic ideal of a face, more than a real face. Not that Scar's licked that many faces, that's not a thing he goes around doing, he licks diamonds! Not faces! Those are different, and man, is he glad he's not talking out loud right now.

Grian rubs furiously at where Scar licked him. "You know, technically you didn't lick me."

"I know! So you don't have to worry about it," Scar says, as Grian continues to furiously wipe his face.

"Ugh," Grian says.

"Anyway! Truth or dare, Grian!"

"Oh, come on, now I can't go for you!"

"It's your rules."

"Truth."

Scar blinks several times. He looks at Grian sideways. "Who are you and what have you done with Grian?"

"You're going to dare me something really stupid so I'm choosing truth to head it off at the pass," Grian explains.

"Still. Anyway. Uhhhh. What kind of bird are you?"

"Don't know. Scar, I've told you I don't know. Also, wait, if we were being technical earlier, am I even a bird anymore?" Grian clearly stops to think about it. His wings flutter uselessly behind him, as though some subconscious thought in Grian requires he move them whenever he's thinking about them. This, of course, had been Scar's real goal. Grian literally always does that when talking about his wings. Scar's just got to get him talking a little more.... "I mean, I still think of myself as a bird. Or, a bird-person, at least."

"A birson," Scar says. 'Yes, we're aware."

"I... a... yeah, okay, sure. But, like, we've established our current general non-person-ness." Grian flutters his wings a little more. Mumbo hasn't noticed yet. Just a little more. "So, you know, my wings here, they're probably just -"

He stretches his wings. They smack Mumbo in the face.

"GRIAN!" Mumbo says.

"...SCAR," Grian says in turn.

"I didn't do anything," Scar says, lying entirely, as Grian, now flustered, tries to get his wings back in control. It really is fascinating, Scar thinks - technically, he knows, if they all squint, Grian doesn't have wings! Or, he has wings? Or, uh, he has the void-y perception of wings? The point is that, technically, Grian isn't Grian-shaped anymore. And yet, even his most annoying instincts are still all right there, ripe for Scar to use against him! It's hilarious!

Grian, meanwhile, is clearly fed up. "Fine then. Mumbo. Truth or Dare, if you're so annoyed!"

"Why, I think I'll take dare!"

"I dare you to shut up about my wings!"

"That's stupid. Why are we only coming up with stupid dares?"

"Well? Are you gonna?"

"I'd rather lick them."

"No one else is licking me!"

The two of them begin to argue about the dare. Scar turns to Impulse. "Hey, Impulse, do you think that counts as Mumbo refusing the dare? You know, if Mumbo cheats, does that mean Mumbo has to kill Mumbo? Since Grian said Mumbo's doing the killing in our rules."

"I really don't know," Impulse says, as Grian very purposefully smacks Mumbo with another wing as Mumbo lunges at him. "I think Mumbo's doing his best to kill Grian, though."

"Maybe we should stop him," says Pearl, sounding entirely disinterested.

"Nah, they'll get over it," Impulse advises. "They haven't actually killed each other yet."

"No, I mean, so we can keep playing. I don't care if Mumbo manages to succeed in, uh. Pulling enough feathers to never complain again? It was unclear. But I want to keep playing, I haven't had a turn yet! We'd barely gotten going!"

"Ohhh. Yeah, you have a point," Scar says. "Empty threats, or even completely full threats, are totally fine. So are fights. But we've barely gotten anywhere in this game yet, have we?"

Grian is now saying something incomprehensible about Mumbo and legs. Scar has no idea what they're talking about, but Mumbo seems deathly offended. Scar is briefly touched by the age of Mumbo and Grian's friendship. They clearly don't only have inside jokes by now, but inside insults. Only the absolute closest of friends can collect things like that.

"It really was a lame dare to end on," Scar says. "And a super lame dare to be fighting about. Those two are horribly irresponsible, really. Uh. Who's going to break them up?"

"Not it," Impulse and Pearl say simultaneously.

"Dangit! I should have said not it," Scar says. He turns to Grian and Mumbo, who have taken advantage of their full range of movement to -

- to -

Scar. Scar isn't sure what they're doing. This isn't just because Grian and Mumbo fights are incomprehensible. It's because they're - so, okay. Scar knows where they are. Scar knows, in general, the outline of their shapes, the way the vague impression of great, terrible, black wings must be Grian, and the way the thing seemingly coiled out of vines, or perhaps wires, must be Mumbo, except they also aren't there? It's like with them arguing like this, whatever perception filter they had on simply had decided to stop working, and had left them...

Well.

Scar thinks the horrors from beyond must get in a lot of fights, is all he's saying.

It's not that he doesn't know, intellectually, that they're all like that. It's more that this is the first time in a while that, instead of joking about it, or accidentally looking at it for themselves, Grian and Mumbo seem to have just. Well. Scar presumes they don't know, that they've given up pretending mortality. It's the sort of thing that both of them had been panicking about earlier. And Scar presumes they don't know, because it's terrifying, skirting on that edge where he has to actually think about the fact that they're all -

- that -

- what do you call an absence of space -

- the void had always felt like a thing that dissolved -

- focus. He shudders. Okay. Have Pearl and Impulse noticed? Probably? Impulse was... and Pearl had been the first to mostly... okay. Okay! He can do this. He just -

- he's -

- he's not a thing that's alive. Okay. Cool. Or, is it that the void is a thing that's alive, but he's only a piece of it? Or. No. Doesn't matter. How is he going to break them up? How? Grian and Mumbo, when they play-fight like this (and it is, for all of its current viciousness, still play-fighting), are the worst to try to get between, because neither of them have moderation. Scar knows! He got his beautiful custom tree blown up for his troubles, because Grian and Mumbo don't know moderation! And that had been silly early-game things, back when the season was bright and normal and they weren't all, you know, well.

"Scar," Impulse says, behind the distant roaring in Scar's ears. "Scar, are you - oh. Oh."

Luckily, Scar doesn't know moderation either.

BOYS, BOYS, YOU'RE BOTH BEAUTIFUL HORRIFIC ABOMINATIONS FROM THE DEPTHS OF HELL! THERE'S NO NEED TO FIGHT ABOUT IT, he says, and for the first time it registers that he does not hear his voice but he hears his voice but his voice is simply present. He supposes it makes sense. There is no air for their voices to travel in. But now, now it is obvious, because Scar does not move his lips, and does not shout, and yet his voice sticks to the forefront of the world, heard in perfect clarity, not heard, no clarity, just known.

Huh.

They turn not turn they are looking at him, Scar knows suddenly, and he would feel hunted, but suddenly he knows he is nothing-void-predator as well, and isn't that... interesting. For a moment - just one - Scar stops bothering with pretense and lets himself feel that, and...

He knows the others are afraid, perhaps. In that moment, Scar decides he is not. He is still afraid of many things. Of never going home. Of finding no one there. Of the fact this is all his fault. But of this? This is... something else.

He is being looked at. He is being perceived by emptiness. But Scar's used to being the center of attention, so he simply perceives them right back. He can feel the moment Grian realizes what's happening, and he can feel the dread in Mumbo, and, hm. That's not quite what he was going for. But it did break them up, and that was the goal.

WE'RE SO CLOSE TO ACTUALLY FINISHING A GAME OF TRUTH OR DARE. OR, WELL, NOT PARTICULARLY CLOSE, I GUESS, BUT WE'VE STARTED FOR ONCE! THIS IS A SILLY REASON TO GIVE UP ON IT.

"Scar," says Grian, and, huh. Okay, Scar's the only one who has the voice thing down. Well, now he just feels rude. "Scar, given - is now the time to be worried about -"

ABSOLUTELY, Scar says.

Mumbo laughs, a little high and hysterical, and its halfway to being the thing Scar has done with his voice. Scar shakes it off.

"Besides," Scar says, "I think you're scaring yourselves? And that wasn't even the dare! I mean, this isn't talking about Grian's wings, I guess, but -"

"Okay," says Grian, and he's managed to go back to pretending to be Grian again, or thinking of himself as Grian, or however that works. "Cool. That was weird. I hate that. It's your turn, Mumbo."

"Right," says Mumbo, who has gone back to being Mumbo shaped. Scar sits back, pleased with himself. "In that case. Scar."

"What!" Scar says. "After that!"

"Come on," Pearl says, "Impulse and I haven't gone yet!"

"Told you that I could go first," Impulse says cheerfully. "I give it even odds the game ends before I get to go, because everyone here knows I have no shame."

"I won't allow that," Pearl says.

"...was that a threat?" Impulse asks.

"Absolutely," Pearl says.

"...huh," Impulse says. "Neat."

"I'm still going for Scar," Mumbo says. "Truth or dare."

"I regret being the reason this game continued," Scar complains. "You all are playing to gang up on me!"

"Yeah. Gang up on me instead," Pearl says.

"I wonder about everyone's priorities," Grian says, and Scar agrees, even though he gets the sense they are talking about two very different kinds of priorities.

The game continues.