#he already kind of knew about mumbojumbo and grian

[cl4ssyjazzy]

Finally, after convincing my brother to watch hermitcraft, I have successfully introduced him to the life series. I asked him to just watch the first episode of Grian's third life and now the bastard thinks watching the entire movie and multiple other povs was his idea.

You shall see!! By tomorrow he shall ship desert duo!!

[redwinterroses]

A while back there were some requests for Xisuma angst or h/c that was unrelated to EX, so... I am attempting to fill this void. Heh.

Part 1 below the cut, Part 2 to be posted at a later date, and all to be put up on AO3 when finished. :D

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In retrospect, deciding to build a mega honey farm the first time he’d built any kind of honey farm might have been… overambitious.

Xisuma finished hurriedly blocking off the door to his honey farm building—the random assortment of blocks he’d scrambled to grab might have been funny in any other circumstances; there were literally diamond and emerald blocks mixed in with podzol and three stray jungle planks—and let himself sag against the new wall with a sigh. Looking up, he could see dozens of buzzing bees drifting about in the high-ceilinged space, bumbling off the walls and curiously exploring all the nooks and crannies of the rafters and support beams. Fortunately, he didn’t think too many of them had escaped the building altogether, but it was going to take him hours to get them all corralled back into their hives.

One misplaced bit of redstone and a touch of lag. That’s all it took to undo days of work on this farm.

A new message pinged onto his HUD.

<Docm77> who is lagging out chunks in shopping district? <iskall85> not me but i feel it too at my base. server lag? <cubfan135> it was fine last night but this morning is a mess. rip my melon farm the timing’s all out of whack now <Grian> blame mumbo <MumboJumbo> hey! not me this time!

X lifted a hand and disconnected his helmet, the seal hissing as the pressure equalized. The jungle air was thick and humid, and as he pulled off the helmet and ran a hand through his sweaty hair (he needed a haircut; add that to the ever-growing list of things to do yesterday) it was difficult to fill his lungs with the heavy oxygen. But for just a minute, he needed to get the screens and data out of his vision. The bees he’d just released hummed with annoying contentment, and he glared up at them.

“Just my luck,” he muttered to himself. Or to the bees. Or to the universe. Who even knew at this point. “Okay. Right, then.” He reluctantly slipped the helmet back onto his head, taking a deep breath as it resealed and filled with purified, thinner air.

“Take it from the top.”

Three hours later, he had the last of the bees retrieved and in its proper hive, the redstone repaired, and a failsafe in place to hopefully keep it from happening again. His stomach rumbled, but a quick glance at the messages in his inbox showed that he really didn’t have time to stop for lunch. He’d grab something later.

For now—he needed to deal with the lag issue. It was being felt across the server and probably had something to do with one of the plugins he’d installed recently needing to update and that was going to take a while to track down, so he headed up to his office in the main base tower and settled down at the console. Hypno had already died to flying into a wall thanks to the lag, and chat was full of complaints about ghost blocks and broken redstone.

<Xisuma> sorry, had an issue with my bees. Working on the problem now.

He didn’t wait for a response, toggling off chat and settling in to review the server settings and files. Individually. One by one.

Admin work was… settling, in an odd way. It was a system that he could understand: predictable and ordered. His attention could hone in on the coding and the settings and the bits and bytes, fingers clacking away at the keyboard, pulling folders and files from one side of his control screen to the other, checking and rechecking each item as it crossed his exploratory path. X fell into a rhythm, the only sounds in his office the humming of his control panel, the tapping of his fingers against keys and screens, and the ever-present soft hiss of his air supply.

He didn’t even notice when it got dark.

“Aha—” his voice, a bit rough from disuse, broke the silence of the office. “There you are.”

The offending file—once he’d found it, buried in a zipped archive in a subfolder on a backup drive—was simple to deal with, and with an exhausted flourish, he saved the changes and sent the information to the server. He could feel the minute it took effect, the entire world seeming to give a little lurch and then spinning on with renewed vigor.

Satisfied, he pulled up chat once more and sent:

<Xisuma> that ought to do the trick!

There was no response, and when he checked the status tab, he gave a small, self-deprecating grimace. It was incredibly late; everyone was either asleep or afk.

That was fine, though. They’d see it in the morning.

In the meantime, with the server this quiet, it was the perfect opportunity to catch up on the half dozen other admin tasks he’d been putting off. No one would mind if certain things went offline while they were all asleep, and he could have it all done by the time anyone else woke up.

Stifling a yawn, he got up and headed into his storage room to grab some supplies, already pulling up a list in his HUD of what needed done. He’d take a nap after everyone else was up and about again. For now: work.

.

Time… time was a construct. And a rather pointless one at that.

Lost in the checks on his to-do list and the comforting monotony of moving items into chests and out of chests and realizing there was something he needed to do before he could complete this project, but in order to do that he needed an item from a farm, which turned out to be overflowing so something needed to be done with those items but now the sorter is full and it really would be more efficient if he reconfigured the input redstone and—

He didn’t even really notice the black specks creeping into the edges of his vision, or the way he was having to do the same tasks over again because he’d done them wrong the first time—wait this chest is for andesite and I’ve just gone and sorted in a bunch of gravel—

It really was only a matter of time—construct that it was—before it all caught up with him.

.

There were voices in the darkness.

“…found him! Over here—”

“…is he doing? Grab the…”

“X? Xisuma, can you hear me?”

Hm? His consciousness swam up through the velvet darkness just long enough to realize that he was lying on the chilly concrete floor of his storage room, half-draped over a shulker with the edges digging into his ribs. Oh. Must have… dozed off…

There were figures moving around him, and voices that sounded concerned. He furrowed his brow, trying to pry his eyes open the rest of the way—if there was a problem, he needed to fix it. He was the admin. It was his job.

“Help me get him…”

“…take off the helmet?”

“Better leave it on for now…”

And then he was being lifted, and he didn’t have the energy to really fight off the fog that rolled over him, pulling him back down into the gentle, silent Void.