#so that's why he got dragged into the meeting (and immediately dunked on by zloy)

[betweenlands]

i for one am very curious the hopperhawks sound really cool :0

hello anon, sorry this took so long to answer, i wrote a fic

the explanation for some of the stuff in the fic though is as follows: basically, the Hopperhawks are a division of a group called the Red Matter Runners, a large organization that was initially formed to stop the apocalypse from happening and is generally just like. humanitarian organization. they’re like firefighters but for the multiverse i guess. i’m skipping over a lot of worldbuilding here.

the Hopperhawks, much like their parent organization, don’t have a super tight structure, they just sort of have division leaders that specialize in specific things and otherwise are organized into various teams with different team leaders. different teams in the Hopperhawks tend to do different things -- one might specialize in checking out unexplored worlds, another team might focus on working directly with people in a dimension, a third team could be specifically dedicated to evacuating people from worlds that are inhospitable to them, etc. Team 10B (the one Redtree leads) tends to focus on once-inhabited worlds, for example.

solo Hawks are pretty rare, because a lot of the time you want to have a team so you know who has your back, but there’s always exceptions. generally they’ll vary who they work with and have a specialized base of knowledge on a handful of things -- Pixl’s an expert on sculk and the history of F-E12 (aka the Empires SMP), for example!

applying for a long-term solo research project is really hard though, because it’s super risky sending out one person alone without them having a team to play off of and rely on. you’d pretty much be required to be a veteran in the Hopperhawks already, around for literal years of solo work, and have a lot of people willing to advocate for you. in Pixl’s case, he knows a ton of people in the Research sector of the Red Matter Runners, hence why there were like seven division heads there -- heck, he’s probably even sat in on other people’s solo research proposals before!

also before Pixl actually goes into Empires, the Hawks would have to go into the world with a sort of undercover team to check if it’s a “breaker world”, which is basically just... making sure it’s not a dimension that’s sapient and evil and wants him and everyone else dead. they do have teams that specialize in this, and breaker worlds are pretty rare so the risk isn’t super high, but better safe than sorry.

ALSO also, with regards to Pixl basically going undercover -- the Hopperhawks definitely don’t have anything like a Prime Directive, they’re very much allowed to intervene in any situations that would cause people in the world to come to harm, but Pixl’s take on living fieldwork is definitely a bit unconventional in that he’s intentionally tying himself into the current events of the world in order to be able to do his research on the past of Empires. basically that means everyone’s research assistant OCs are canon now though

he’s definitely a bit of a stand-out case but i figure that’s what makes him interesting to talk about! he’s definitely had this whole proposal planned out for a while if i had to guess and would also be probably very well-respected among the Hopperhawks to have the meeting go that smoothly.