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thetomorrowshow · 2 years

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hubris killed the god - ch 1

At first he thinks it’s a trick of his mind. Something brought about by the terror of the storm and the grief of multiple deaths.

When the other two llamas die and Scott finds their bodies, little black crawlies digging into their eyes, he knows it has to be real.

When three more llamas come down ill within the week, Scott knows that quarantine is hopeless.

And when he notices the blackness approaching, rolling over the fields on every side of Chromia, inching closer to the town until the Nether portal is inaccessible, Scott knows this isn’t just going to go away.

And he isn’t going to get away.

this is the first chapter of my apocalypse/horror/survival fic, set in empires smp s2. happy halloween!

cw: previous major character death, death of animals, mild gore, horror

The day before the end begins, it storms.

It’s a bad storm, one that Scott finds himself out in, battering down the storm defenses of the llama garden and covering patches of the flower fields in tarps. Then he gets inside before it can get any worse.

The rain is so heavy that his window becomes a dark sheet of water, his own thoughts deafened by the hammering of hail on his roof and the echoing thunder. Scott finds himself frightened by the way the wind seems to penetrate his home, and when his lantern blows out for the fourth time, he gives up on trying to keep a light on and crawls into bed, pulling the blankets over his head and pretending he can’t hear the way the house seems to creak under the weight of such a vicious storm. Eventually, he must fall asleep, his room so dark that he can’t tell the difference between eyes open and eyes closed.

When he wakes up, he wakes with the sun in his eyes.

Scott sits up slowly, inhales the scent of petrichor that fully permeates his bedroom. There’s a hole in his roof, he spots immediately, a shingle hanging through it, dripping water onto his floor below.

Compared to the horrifying storm of the day before, Scott finds it almost stiflingly quiet, the only sound being the plat plat plat of the water drops hitting the floor. He can’t very well let that continue.

Scott kicks the blankets away from his legs, where they’ve become tangled in the throes of his sleep. He only allows himself a moment, a moment to prepare himself for the work and wreckage that is surely waiting outside his door. For that moment, the sun shining in through the hole in his roof is beautiful, the water drops sparkling, the air fresh and delicious.

Then he gathers a breath and slides out of bed.

He’s right, unfortunately. Chromia has sustained a considerable amount of damage, roofs and roads torn up, entire swathes of crops felled, trees split down the middle and pulled to pieces. One unlucky building has collapsed entirely, a tree splitting its roof down the middle.

That damage is manageable, though. It’ll take time, but Scott knows how to build. He can repair buildings, fill potholes, replant crops and trees.

He can’t bring back the dead.

The llama garden is destroyed, the trapdoors hanging off their hinges, the hedges uprooted and blown over. Scott steps over storm-churned mud, speaking quietly—he’s not sure what he’s saying, something soothing and repetitive—as he approaches the huddled, wild-eyed herd of llamas, all squished under the hasty awning he’d constructed when the storm had begun.

There are two limp llama forms in the garden. Yeti and Eloise.

Scott takes care of them first, kissing both on the forehead before carrying them, one after the other, out of the garden and beyond the bounds of Chromia, to a plot of land he’d laid aside months ago with the hope he’d never have to use it.

The digging of twin graves is slow and mournful, but Scott doesn’t halt until he can roll the bodies in, dirt streaking down his face where it clings to his tear tracks.

He can’t particularly be blamed when he doesn’t look back, shovel hoisted over his shoulder, when he returns to the llama garden. So perhaps it isn’t Scott’s fault that he doesn’t see the darkness crawling over the graves.

A llama is ill.

Very, very ill.

It seems to have come out of nowhere—one day, Martina is fine, the next she’s shaking with fever and shying away from any touch. Scott separates the llama from the herd the best he can—which mostly means leading Owen into the garden and bringing Martina to the tavern, one of the buildings with minimal damage from the previous day’s storm.

At first, Scott assumes it’s stress. The stress of surviving the storm and watching two of her friends die had been too much for this poor llama, so he makes all the special little cures that he’s learned in his travels and leaves them for Martina with some warm blankets and pillows (he doesn’t spoonfeed her or anything, because if there’s one thing about Scott it’s that he hates being near sick people or animals, but he trusts that if she can recover, she will).

The next morning, Martina is dead.

And two more are ill.

This isn’t stress, then, this is something contagious. Scott entirely abandons his rebuilding plans, throwing tarps over holes in roofs and walls, and dedicates all his time to isolating the sick llamas before removing the dead one.

When he approaches the limp llama form on the floor of the tavern (already beginning to smell), he pushes it over onto its side to make it easier to pick up.

Crawling all over the llama’s belly are little, black, fuzzy—things.

Scott actually cries out in disgust, pulling his arms to his chest. The things are—they look like patches of mold, and from a distance he might have been convinced that the body was simply growing something, but up close they’re wriggling and swarming and it’s absolutely revolting—because they aren’t just sitting en masse upon the Martina’s body, but they seem to be . . . eating it.

They don’t have mouths—or if they do, they’re too miniscule to tell—but Scott can see unmistakable flashes of red between them, and certainly they’re eating his friend.

As he gazes in horror, something changes and their movements turn erratic, before they all begin to scatter from the body—and Scott doesn’t stick around to see the open carcass of the llama. He books it for the door, as the . . . things behind him reconvene upon the llama.

Scott slams the front door of the tavern and leans against it, breathing heavily. What—

What was that?

At first he thinks it’s a trick of his mind. Something brought about by the terror of the storm and the grief of multiple deaths.

When the other two llamas die and Scott finds their bodies, little black crawlies digging into their eyes, he knows it has to be real.

When three more llamas come down ill within the week, Scott knows that quarantine is hopeless.

And he isn’t going to get away.

The llamas are a lost cause. Within days, the entire garden is overrun.

Somehow, he manages to clear a path through the black things—mites, he starts to call them in his head, or plaguelings sometimes—to get to Owen’s body to say farewell, but even the hardest of glares don’t shake them from the body.

He can still walk through town, though the confines of his walk become smaller and smaller every day. The mites don’t seem to appreciate being looked at, scuttling away when he lays his eyes on them, but they return as soon as he passes, covering up the bare ground behind him. So, before the crops are entirely a lost cause, he gathers whatever bundles of wheat remain from the storm’s devastation of just two weeks prior.

He stacks all of his food stores in his house, and when he wakes the next morning to retrieve whatever building materials he can, his storage hall is blanketed in black. Safe to say he won’t be going over there any time soon.

And over the course of a month, Scott finds himself completely cut off from any source of food, building, and outside help.

He thinks about his friends, sometimes. Surely this plague isn’t just spreading in Chromia, because when he climbs to the roof of the tavern, he can look out and see endless patches of black.

Sometimes, his eyes turn toward his neighbor. Stratos is silent, its lamps burnt out, its heavenly glow burnished.

And that, perhaps, more than anything, scares Scott.

Whatever these things are, they’ve caused the god to abandon his city.

He thinks, sometimes, that maybe he ought to have tried to leave back when the first llama became ill. He should’ve gone to Shelby, or Sausage, or someone else with animal knowledge to ask about the illness. And both are such magical folk, perhaps they could have killed this plague before it properly began.

“Nice going, Scott,” he mutters to himself, eyes jumping from side to side as he walks down his main street. He can see them, hiding in the cracks of bricks and in between buildings and in the dying grass. He won’t let them get him yet. “Imagine what Pix’ll write about this. Foolish ruler overrun by tiny fuzzy monsters. Forgot to leave while he still could.”

But then there would have been no one to comfort the llamas in their last days, he reminds himself, even if it had to be from a distance. He still hasn’t touched a single mite, and he doesn’t plan to.

They’re terrifying, these mites, because they’re always there. There’s constantly a little bubble of black in the corner of his vision, reaching toward him like some amalgamous arm, only breaking apart when he looks directly at it. He’s had too many close calls, especially off the road where they can hide in the grass and pop up right beside his boot. Only the road is moderately safe.

Until, suddenly, he can’t even walk on the road anymore.

He steps out his front door to find that not only are the plaguelings swarming the road, like millions of tiny rats, but that they’re swarming around things in the road—and off the road—and on his doorstep.

Birds. Dead birds. One every couple of feet, like an entire flock had been dragged out of the sky by the reaching arms of many piles of mites.

And really, Scott thinks, a sickly feeling in his throat, who’s to say that isn’t what happened?

It’s clear what the message is, though—outside of his house is no longer safe. He’s stuck here with whatever he has to defend himself against the encroaching darkness, which is unfortunately not much.

Fire doesn’t work against them. He’d tried early on, watching with growing panic as they had mobbed the flame, seeming to multiply as they piled atop it until it was utterly smothered.

A sword is too imprecise, the mites scattering away from the blade before the swing can even land—same for an axe.

His shovel had been useful to an extent, though he hasn’t managed to actually kill them with it—the whacking of it on the ground had only served to scare them away for a few moments.

So Scott grabs his shovel, adjusting and readjusting his sweaty grip on it, and stands by the door, ready to swing at anything that skitters through the cracks.

That day passes mostly uneventfully, Scott jumping every time his house creaks, weapon aloft and body tense, only for nothing to happen.

The next morning, there are a handful of mites creeping toward his kitchen. The mites vary in size, the smallest being the size of a fingernail, the largest perhaps the size of Scott’s palm. Unfortunately, one of the mites in his house is the palm-size kind.

Scott whacks and whacks with his shovel, a scream tearing from his throat—these are the things that killed his best friends, he can only imagine waking up to one stuffing itself down his throat as he chokes on the nightmare and is enveloped by so many others and they’re going to kill him he’s going to die here—and yet it remains unsquashed, gathering with a couple of smaller ones in an unreachable spot under his furnace.

Scott stares, lets his shovel fall with a shaky, sob-like sigh.

This is it, isn’t it?

They’ve gotten into his house, and everywhere they go they spread death.

Within hours, there’s more. Scott tries to hit them with his broom, afraid of the way the shovel blade seems to be rattling loosely against the handle, but when they just begin to crawl up the broom handle Scott shrieks and throws it across the room.

There’s so many of them. There’s too many of them, all creeping and crawling inexorably toward Scott, the only living thing left.

Scott doesn’t sleep that night. He spends the night watching his bedroom door, because if he’s looking at it they won’t come in. They only move toward him when he isn’t looking, so he’s just going to stare at the door and put off the inevitable.

He can’t help but imagine that it’ll be a very painful death.

The earlier llamas had died of illness, a plague that Scott’s pretty sure they contracted by coming into contact with the darkness, but the later llamas. . . .

Well. It hadn’t been pretty. It had been torturous, really, hearing their panicked and pained brays, his heart aching as he couldn’t even bear to watch. He hasn’t even let himself dwell on it until now.

And now, surrounded on all sides by the deathly mites, Scott wishes that he’d died much earlier, entombed in his bed—succumbed to the illness.

It’s too late now. Now, darkness encroaches, and maybe it’s just the fuzziness of his eyes as he forces them wide open, but it looks like the mites may be creeping in along the sides of the room.

Scott holds his place until day, sunlight filtering in through his window. He’d never patched the hole in his roof, just covered it over with a tarp, and he knows that the mites are crawling over the roof because he can see the tarp weighing down, bulging into the room. If too many pile onto it, it’ll collapse into a bomb of flesh-eating death.

And that’s the only sign he has that the mites are around, because there aren’t any in his room yet, and somehow they don’t make noise. They’re silent as they crawl across his roof and down his walls, up his staircase and under his floorboards. They’ve always been silent.

This is his last day. He knows it.

Scott eats his last bit of bread, swallowing it down past his dry throat. He clips his knife into his boot—maybe he can cut some of them posthumously as they swarm over his body—and swings his trusty shovel around a few times, testing his reflexes.

Maybe he can frighten them a bit, even if he can’t kill them. It’s the noise—or the vibrations—of the shovel colliding with the ground that scares them away, but it doesn’t actually harm them. He doesn’t know how to harm them. He doesn’t know what to do.

He doesn’t know how to survive this. He can’t survive this.

And suddenly, there’s one in his room.

It crawls up under his door, the size of one of Scott’s fingers, and is still for a moment—long enough for Scott to bring down his shovel with a resounding crash beside it.

It’s gone in an instant, back the way it came.

But it’s only the first, and a few minutes later, there’s another one.

Scott scares that one away as well, anticipation mounting. He watches the door, shovel ready, breath coming faster—

He spins around, and sure enough, there’s one crawling under his bed.

It must’ve come up from the floorboards—or through a hole in the wall—they don’t just come in one way, they’re everywhere and Scott’s going to die surrounded by tiny monsters that he can’t fight—

BANG!

Scott jumps at the deafening noise, and there’s a crash from his window and he glances over—

A pair of booted heels kick through his window, followed by the legs and body and cowboy hat of Jimmy.

Jimmy lands on Scott’s bedroom floor, glass falling from his body in silver raindrops. He glances up, gives Scott a quick grin.

“Hey,” he says, and it’s never been so good to hear another person’s voice. “Needin’ a rescue?”

Scott almost drops his shovel in relief.

Jimmy’s looking pretty rough, his hair long enough to curl around his ears, beard a bit scruffier than he usually keeps it, shirt torn here and there, badge dull. But his stance is firm, and his eyes are sparkling with a determination that Scott hasn’t had in days, and his bandolier is loaded with bullets.

He looks like a godsend.

Jimmy cocks his pistol—he must’ve shot it, that’s what the bang had been—and aims it at the door, stepping toward it. “How many varmints are through there?” he asks over his shoulder.

“Um. A lot,” says Scott after a moment, hoisting his shovel and drawing up next to him. Jimmy grimaces, then takes a deep breath.

“All right, here’s how this is gonna go,” Jimmy says, briefly making eye contact before turning back to the door. “I’ll open that door real quick and shoot—they run from the sound of it. Then we’re gonna go out there, me shooting and you whacking that shovel around, until we’re outside where False can reach us. Got it?”

Scott nods. False is here as well?

He’s not alone anymore. He’s not going to die here.

Not yet, a wry voice in the back of his head reminds him. He could just as easily die in Jimmy’s hands.

Well, he thinks, raising his shovel. At least we’re going out guns a-blazin’.

And then Jimmy yanks open the door.

There’s hundreds of them out there. On the walls, on the floor, covering any chests and personal affectations. Scott actually takes a step back, but Jimmy just fires his gun into the center of it all.

The mites flee from the loud noise and the hole in the floor where the bullet strikes, leaving a substantial place in the center of the floor for them to step through. Jimmy strides through, Scott on his heels, glaring around to keep the mites from encroaching on their space.

When they run out of clear space, Jimmy hollers at the top of his lungs (Scott jumps a little bit at the sudden noise) and jumps up and down in place, his boots rattling the whole house. More of them scatter to the sidelines, twitching and crawling up the walls. Scott follows as Jimmy stomps through, yelling like a madman—and it works. The noise and impact of his shouts and boots spook the plaguelings, pushing them back far enough away that the two of them have a brief path through the squirming masses.

Scott beats at the ground with his shovel behind them, keeping any from creeping up when their backs are turned. He and Jimmy make their way to the front door like that, back to back, stomping and beating and yelling until they’re outside.

The sun is almost blinding after the total blackness that had covered every inch of inside, and though there’s seas of mites roving just beyond their feet, Scott can properly see the sun and sky and hear a loud whirring and clunking and see—

A flying machine?

Made up of copper and wood, great cogs and spinning wheels, clunking and clanking with some sort of blimp pulling it along—

And Jimmy yells something Scott doesn’t understand, but apparently whoever is up in the flying machine does, as a rope ladder unfurls and falls directly in front of them.

Jimmy stomps in place, grabbing Scott by the back of his shirt and shoving him toward the ladder. Scott knows how to take a hint—he sticks his shovel through his belt loop and he climbs, sweaty hands barely keeping hold of the twisting rope, feet scrambling for the swinging rungs.

If he slips and falls, he’ll fall onto Jimmy, leaving them free for the mites to suffocate. Falling is not an option.

His shovel clanks against his leg, his breathing comes heavier and heavier as his arms tremble under the weight of himself—he hasn’t climbed a rope ladder in years, and never one being blown around by the turbines of some great flying machine. It’s life or death, though, and every time he thinks of what waits for him if he falls from this height, he somehow finds the strength to grip the ropes a little tighter and heave himself up another rung.

It feels like it takes years, but eventually Scott can wrap his arms around the side of the flying machine and roll over it onto the deck, where he collapses, panting, his arms jelly and core aching. His shovel digs into his hip, but he doesn’t move, because somehow he’s safe. He’s been rescued.

Minutes ago, he’d been sure his own death was waiting, and here he is, sitting on a ship in the sky.

There’s a thunk, and he opens his eyes—closed against the rays of the sun—to see Jimmy standing beside him, pulling up the rope ladder.

“No one else down there?” he calls to Scott over the sound of the flying machine, and Scott shakes his head.

“Just me!”

Jimmy finishes pulling the ladder up, dropping it in a heap on the wood planks of the ship. “Get us outta here, False!”

There’s a shout from further along the ship—False, Scott realizes, shading a hand over his eyes to look ahead at the woman in question—and then the ship tilts dizzyingly, turning in midair, the noise of the cogs and gears and machinations louder than before.

Scott feels a little lightheaded, really. This is . . . this is a lot, and he hasn’t been given time to process any of it.

But Jimmy’s barely paused but to wipe his face with his neckerchief, making his way up to False to help with something or other, and Scott knows instinctively that if he wants to stay around, he has to pull his weight. It’s not his first time landing in groups like this—though in his experience, they tend to involve planning and executing heists rather than rescuing people from the apocalypse.

Depending on how he looks at it, that might be considered a heist. Of sorts. Similar enough that he at least has some frame of reference.

Scott knows that he can’t just lie here on the deck. So he pushes himself to his feet, readjusts his shovel in his belt loop, and joins his two rescuers at the stern.

False is at the wheel—a proper ship’s wheel, ignoring the chain of redstone linking it to whatever machine lies beneath deck—, grip firm on the wooden handles as she directs the ship. Jimmy’s beside her, stripping off his shirt—Scott feels his face heat as he catches sight of Jimmy’s chest, shining with sweat, biceps muscular and suntanned—and twisting around, examining every inch of skin.

“Think I’m good,” he shouts, buttoning his shirt back up. He gestures at Scott’s shirt. “Check for critters! There’s some privacy below deck, if you need it.”

And seeing as Jimmy next unbuckles his belt, Scott thinks it’s a very good idea to go below, lest he embarrass himself.

Below decks, Scott almost instantly loses a finger to an amalgamation of copper gears right beside the staircase, then nearly walks directly into a hiss of boiling steam. He can’t really see anything, and he spares a brief moment to wonder why on earth this ship is so dangerous before continuing on, more carefully now.

He maneuvers around the dark, cramped, sweltering space until he finds something resembling a bed—though it’s right next to some ticking redstone machine that seems annoying to sleep beside—that has a low lamp beside it. He tosses his hat down and shrugs off his coat, checks it for mites, then drops it on the bed to pull off his shirt.

Once he’s stripped down to his underthings, he checks all over his body for any black things stuck to his skin. All seems fine—he shakes out his clothes, turns them inside out, checks every inch for splotches of black.

Nothing. Thank goodness.

For good measure, Scott combs through his hair with his fingers, then redresses, carrying his patchwork coat over his arm (he can already feel his shirt begin to soak through with sweat) and firmly setting his hat on his head. He heads back up to the deck, lets out a breath of relief at the feeling of wind on his face.

Jimmy meets him at the top of the ladder, gestures forward. “It’s quieter up at the bow,” he shouts in Scott’s ear. Scott nods and follows him.

Surprisingly, it is a bit quieter. They still have to speak loudly, but not so loudly that Scott has to scream his lungs out. The wind is harsher here, blowing directly in their faces, and Scott has to hold one hand to his head to keep his hat from flying off.

“Your duds all good, then?” Jimmy asks, and Scott’s not quite sure what that means or how to respond, so he just kind of nods.

“Thanks,” he says in lieu of a response. “For saving me, and all that. I thought. . . .”

He doesn’t finish his sentence.

He’d thought he’d been alone. That everyone else was dead. That he was soon to join them.

He’d been about to die, he nearly died, he should be dead.

Jimmy only shrugs. “It’s what we do.”

We. There might be others, then? Jimmy and False, and . . . who? Where are they going? Is there possibly somewhere safe?

“Is everyone else safe?” Scott asks, peering down over the land. They’re passing over a forest, the leaves more black than green. He shudders to think of what might’ve happened to the animals living there.

Jimmy leans on his elbows against the deck’s railing, hands clasped loosely in front of him. “Some of them. There’s me and False, of course. Sausage—we’re staying at Sanctuary, he’s doing some sort of magic-thing to keep ‘em out. fWhip’s fine, Gem’s fine—they’re waiting for us. There’s others who are all right, just aren’t in Sanctuary. Some we aren’t sure of.”

“I imagine Joel’s fine, then,” Scott says, thinking of his eleven-foot neighbor in his floating kingdom. Joel’s pretty much untouchable up there—and what would stop him from just ascending to avoid all this?

But Jimmy, head turned to survey the land, says shortly, “Joel’s dead.”

Before Scott even knows it, his eyes are brimming with tears. He can—he can blame that on the wind, right? Because he’d barely known Joel, really, they hadn’t even been friends. . . .

But Joel’s dead. Joel is dead, and if the god is dead, what sort of hope is there for him? What sort of hope is there for any of them? Forget that he’s just been rescued—it’s certainly only delaying the inevitable, because Joel is dead and thereby, they all are.

“I—how?” asks Scott, swallowing back the lump in his throat.

Jimmy doesn’t answer for a long moment, looking off at seemingly nothing. “Hubris, you might say.” The look in his eyes is distant, sad, and it comes as no surprise when Jimmy turns away and heads back up to the stern, taking his place beside False.

There’s no time to mourn. This is an apocalypse situation, and Joel is dead and his llamas are dead and there’s barely any hope of survival, because below him, all Scott can see is death.

Just as he’d realized earlier, he has to show his usefulness. Any dead weight will be cut, and Scott desperately needs to stay aboard. Not that they have a chance, not if Joel’s dead, but he at least wants to see his friends one last time. He can’t die here.

With that reminder, Scott readjusts his shovel at his hip, then jogs back to False, looking for any job he can do.

fWhip and Gem greet them at the doors of Sausage’s church. Gem pulls Scott into a hug—he hugs her back as tight as he can—then releases him to hug False and Jimmy, while fWhip pats Scott on the elbow (the goblin can’t reach any higher) and leads him inside.

They’ve set up the church as some sort of headquarters, Scott understands immediately, seeing the maps and drinks and blankets strewn about the foyer. There’s a bed made in the corner, a half-eaten plate of food beside it. Scott’s stomach growls, but he ignores it in favor of heading toward the chapel. Surely that’s where Sausage is, and he really wants to hug the man (Sausage has always been so good at comforting, never judgemental, there’s a reason he gets along with just about everyone and Scott thinks that maybe, if Sausage tells him everything will be all right, then it will).

fWhip holds out an arm to bar the way. “Let’s not go in there right now, yeah?” he says easily, leading Scott instead to the table of maps. “Sit down, sit down! Make yourself at home! We’ve been sleeping at the tavern, so we’ll show you your room later, but this is where we spend a lot of our time! Either here or out on watch, you know?”

Scott doesn’t sit down, instead leaning against the table. He still feels a bit . . . wired, he supposes. His brain is still in fight-or-flight. He doesn’t want to sit, doesn’t want to be sedentary.

Gem and False file in, Gem going straight to the plate of food, False collapsing into a chair. Scott watches for Jimmy, but he doesn’t follow.

“It’s really good to see you, Scott,” Gem says warmly, handing him the plate. As if on cue, Scott’s stomach rumbles—he’d forgotten that he hadn’t eaten anything all day. And he doesn’t mind a bit of shared food, so he tosses the bread into his mouth, asking around the bite, “Who else is here?”

Gem grimaces. “Just . . . it’s just us, Scott. But there are others! They just aren’t here.”

“What Gem’s trying to say is that we’ve sort of been search-and-rescue, here, and now that we’ve got you, we can rescue the next person,” fWhip puts in helpfully. “We’ve been keeping eyes around. After all, we got you!”

Scott swallows, sets the plate down. He suddenly doesn’t feel all that hungry. “Who else have you saved?”

fWhip glances around. “Well, you, me, Shelby—except—”

“Shelby isn’t here, you said.”

“Shelby . . . Shelby fell out of contact,” fWhip says. “She was out keeping track of Katherine while we planned our rescue mission for you. But we haven’t been able to reach her in a few days.”

“We have these new things,” Gem interjects, and the nervous smile on her face tells Scott all he needs to know. They think Shelby’s dead, and they don’t want to talk about it.

A muted feeling of dread is beginning to grow in the back of his mind.

From her pocket, Gem pulls a copper redstone device of some sort, a bit of glass on the front of it and a couple of buttons on the side. “False made them! They can send messages to other devices instantly, so we can keep in contact! Look—”

She presses one of the buttons, and the glass lights up. Scott’s seen a couple of things similar to this in his travels, but when it reacts to her touching the screen, tapping on Jimmy’s name and pulling up a whole different display, he knows this is completely beyond his experience. And, at the moment, completely beyond his interest. Maybe when he’s less tense, less exhausted.

“See, Jimmy messaged me when you guys got on the airship!”

Sure enough, there is text on the screen that apparently comes from Jimmy: Got Scott. On our way back. Then a response from Gem: Can’t wait to see him! Stay safe all three of you!

“False has been crafting them herself!”

“fWhip helped,” False amends, nodding her head in the goblin’s direction. “I couldn’t remember a lot of the circuitry. He helped with that.”

“We’ll get you one as soon as we can get some more redstone,” fWhip adds.

Scott nods a couple of times. This is great and all, but there’s still that dread. . . . “So, what do we know? Is everyone else . . . dead?”

The three exchange a look, air suddenly thick with tension. After a moment, Gem speaks.

“Um. Did Jimmy tell you about Joel?”

“Yeah. I know about Joel, and. . . .” he still doesn’t know how to feel about it. He certainly still doesn’t have time to mourn. “But everyone else?”

“Right.” fWhip bites his lip—which looks painful, with how long and sharp some of his teeth are. “Well, Shubble’s gone out of contact. Jimmy came and got me from my cave about two weeks ago, and he and Gem and False all kind of met up to come to Sanctuary. Sausage is here, too. Lizzie. . . .”

“Lizzie was here,” Gem picks up when fWhip looks away. “She and Jimmy . . . they had some disagreements about how the camp was being run. About a week ago, she left.”

“Pirate Joe was here, too,” False says. “He left to look for safe land elsewhere.”

“Katherine’s in the same kind of situation you were,” fWhip says. “We just saved you first. We’re hoping to get her in the next couple of days. We haven’t seen anything of Pix or Oli. And . . . that about sums things up.”

“So . . . where is Sausage?”

Again, they exchange a look. Scott has to make a conscious effort to not roll his eyes.

“Sausage has kinda . . . gone off the deep end,” fWhip says eventually. “He’s in the chapel most of the time, praying to that St. Pearl of his. Love him to death and all, but he just kinda mutters to himself and isn’t all that helpful.”

Well, there must be something to Sausage’s prayers, if Sanctuary is indeed safe. And Scott isn’t exactly a religious man—sure, he’s prayed a fair amount, but he usually just picks whatever god comes to mind first and rolls with it—but it seems kind of disrespectful to pick on the man’s religion when he’s offering them a home. And presumably protecting them with said prayers!

But Scott’s the new person here, and he doesn’t say anything. He hasn’t quite figured out the status quo yet, and he wants to fly under the radar a little while longer. “Where did Jimmy go?” he asks instead.

“Oh, probably patrolling,” fWhip waves off. “He works himself too hard, that sheriff of ours. But it’s getting to be nighttime, so one of us should probably go take over, make him go to bed.”

Sure enough, a glance out the front window tells Scott that the sun does appear to be setting. And really, he wouldn’t mind an opportunity to explore what sort of borders they have here, how far out he can venture. As he opens his mouth to volunteer for first watch, though, Gem cuts him off.

“Scott, you need to go to bed too. You look like you haven’t slept in days!”

Just one day, really—though his sleeps have been rather restless as of late.

And while he would certainly appreciate a safe place to rest, he’s still a bit tightly wound. He hasn’t really got any idea of how they expect him to be able to sleep.

But Scott just nods, tossing whatever is left on the plate into his mouth and gesturing for the others to lead the way.

Gem shows him up the winding path—past villagers and a child and oh how Scott’s heart aches for his llamas—and to the inn, which is empty but for one tired serving staff, rubbing a glass with a dishrag.

“If you need anything to eat or drink, just help yourself to anything in the kitchen,” Gem whispers. “Jimmy wants to start rationing soon, but it doesn’t really matter what you take right now.”

“How many people are here?” Scott asks in the same tone, nodding toward the worker. Gem starts heading up a staircase against the right side wall, beckoning for him to follow.

“Most of Sanctuary’s citizens, and maybe a dozen refugees. It feels like we lose another person every day, though—people who think they can go beyond the border just for an hour to gather crops, or kids who accidentally wander too far.”

For a brief instant, Gem’s face is shadowed with grief as she looks back at Scott, but it’s soon erased, a smile plastered on.

Of course. Much like Scott, Gem hasn’t had time to grieve. He’d be surprised if anyone has.

Gem stops beside a door halfway down the hallway, twisting the knob and letting him in.

The room is small, but bright, a carpet made of green and orange segments in the center of the room. The duvet on the bed is purple, which matches nothing in the room, but combined with the colors of the rug makes Scott’s heart ache for Chromia.

There’s a classically carved wardrobe off to one side, a large window with drawn, plain curtains taking up a good portion of the far wall, and a small wooden table beside the bed that has a lamp and an empty glass upon it. Those three pieces of furniture take up almost the entire room; but though it’s small, it’s safe. Scott’s not had that guarantee in some time.

“I’m right next door, so just knock if you need anything!” Gem says brightly. “And there’s always somebody up, so if you just . . . need somebody, check the church or the outpost. Good night!”

And then she’s gone, door shut softly behind her, before Scott can even ask where and what the outpost is.

After a moment, he sits on the bed. It sinks under his weight a bit, the duvet wrinkling.

What’s he supposed to do? Just sit here as the sun sets, trying to come to terms with everything that’s happened?

Well, there’s at least a few things he can do. He pulls his shovel from his belt loop, rests it against the wardrobe, then takes his hat off and rests it inside, on a little shelf.

There’s a mirror fixed to the inside of the door of the wardrobe, and he stares at his reflection for a moment.

He really does look pretty bad, doesn’t he? His eyes are ringed with shadows (for a moment, his imagination sees those shadows as crawling and devouring and he shudders), face waxy and breaking out in patches, hair tangled and greasy. It needs a trim, he thinks absently, tugging on the ends that almost reach his shoulders.

He’d put his coat back on when they landed, and now he shrugs it off, and when he goes to hang it up his elbow bumps the mirror.

Scott is quick to steady it as it swings a bit, scraping against the wood, and he can’t help but think that if he had let the mirror fall he might be deserving of the bad luck its shattering would bring.

It’s that bump against the mirror that allows the scrap of paper behind it to flutter to the floor.

Scott finishes hanging his coat in the wardrobe before bending over to pick up the paper—and there’s writing on it.

Someone had left a secret message.

The message is scrawled in messy handwriting, all letters capitalized and difficult to decipher (several words are completely illegible), but when Scott understands, he feels a drop of fear bleed through his soul, the dread itching at his mind rearing up.

DON'T TRUST H—. — KILLED — WOULD DO IT AGAIN.

#empires smp #esmp #empiresblr #empires smp fanfic #scott smajor #hubris au #mas writes #there aren't going to be any blatant ships in this #like scott's very gay and finds people attractive but no dating will occur #and i dont think he's really looking for romance during the apocalypse. so.#anyway jkhdfjggsfjhsdkjfgskjfgkdsgfkjsdgf welcome to hubris au!!!!#ive never really done anything horror-like so if you have any feedback it would be much appreciated #ive left as many loose ends open as i can for now so if you have theories or the like 👀👀👀#and yah happy halloween!!#i really pushed my editing process to get this out today lol #lmk what you think!#love you guys

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