Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

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It’s like she’s coming out of a deep dream: that hazy liminal space when your vision’s still slightly fuzzy, and your hearing as well. Your thoughts flit around between useless imaginings, and you don’t want to start thinking properly, with how comfortable you are, at that moment. 

Pearl doesn’t know how to wake herself up.

She’s in a shallow, open cave, and the bright morning sun reaches her. But when she looks up to the sky, she can see stars. It’s like they’re on a separate layer of the sky, out of phase from the clouds and the sun - she’s got a foot in each frequency. She feels floaty, too, the ground beneath her isn’t solid. Like a ghost or a vision.

Also, she can’t remember anything.

Her name comes naturally: Pearlescentmoon. She’s on a server, she understands the concept, but she can’t think of its name. She doesn’t know how she got here, and she can’t remember a moment before.

She also knows that the best thing to do would be to tell the other players around her about this. There’s a player right next to her in the cave, with long red hair and satyr features - it wouldn’t take much to poke her shoulder and explain the situation she’s in. But she can’t bring herself to.

There’s only one strong goal in her mind, and it’s that no one can know. She doesn’t know what they’re not supposed to know, though it’s about her. But she needs to act like everyone here. 

They can’t know.

There’s a wild yell and she feels a ping in her head. Everyone outside the cave starts laughing about it, and the more formal tone devolves. The ping echoes slightly, and she feels the same sensation along her arm. She holds up her forearm to herself, and sees that a slim, mechanical device is attached. It wraps around her forearm like a sleeve, except the point facing towards her is built up a small amount with metal, and it has a black screen. There’s a single message:

The device doesn't feel weird to her, it's actually quite snug. There's a name for it, she knows that, but she can't recall it.

As she looks up, the satyr is looking at her, approaching.

“Nice to meet you!”

She holds her hand out in greeting. Pearl shakes it.

“Nice to meet you too,” she says, trying to copy her intonation.

“I’m Geminitay. Call me Gem!” Gem looks excitable, with a high-pitched voice, and she's shifting left to right on her deer hooves. She's wearing overalls, and has two antlers tangled up in her hair.

Pearl takes that moment to look down on what she's wearing. She looks humanoid, and she can't see any clear nonhuman traits on her legs and arms. She has sneakers and a hoodie on; it feels comfy enough.

She looks back up, and sees Gem staring at her. Gem looks away quickly, moving toward the cave exit.

“Ready to go?” She says, placing a foot on a few stable rocks that lead out of the cave.

Pearl nods her head.

She knows the fundamentals of what she should be doing, just barely. The stars in the sky move around her, sometimes blocking her vision, and sounds seem muffled to her - she can’t hear any wind. All of her senses seem to be throwing her off, and it feels like she’s moving half as fast as she should be - but what is she comparing it to? She doesn’t have any clear memory of the start of a new world, just instincts prompting her to go this way and that. Still, she breaks wood, explores the server, and talks to the other players, all in her attempt to blend in.

There’s Mumbo, a human with a moustache, who stammers a lot and stares at her like she's dying. She doesn't know why. Does she remind him of somebody? Grian has a similar look in his eyes, but he speaks to her normally, more or less. He’s short, with bird legs and wings.

Later she meets Scar, a goofy-seeming man who wields magic without a thought. He doesn’t act like anything’s off, but she feels weirdly... observed when she speaks to him. Being near Impulse - a demon with flightless wings and front-facing horns - feels a bit like getting coddled. Nothing overt, it’s just in the way he speaks. Gem is the only player who seems normal to her, although her perception may just be warped by every other player she’s met.

Regardless, she’s working through what she knows she’s supposed to for a new world. She picks up a bit of the wood she’s collected - oak, of course - and pulls it forward in her mind to get wood planks. She takes those to make a crafting table, and places it down.

And then, looking at the crafting table, she realises - she can’t remember how to use it.

She knows she was able to before. There's a certain way you need to do it, you need to… to…

She stares at it for a while, trying to draw up anything.

She doesn't want anyone to see her like this. It’s too vulnerable, too embarrassing. She wanted to make a fence to surround a wheat field she’s making, after she thankfully found a hoe at a broken nether portal. 

She turns her back to the table and sits, leaning against it. She looks up to the sky, and tries to find constellations that she's named before. 

They always look unfamiliar, and she's thought before that they’re always slightly shifting. Still, she finds some new ones and names them, just to have.

Impulse finds her like that, spacing out and staring at the sky.

“Hey, Pearl, you feeling good?” he says, startling her a little. She hadn’t noticed him - or, she had, but his voice was like a shock to her senses after all the quiet.

“Yeah, just, um, thinking about my starter build ideas.” She hopes she sounds normal enough.

“Need help with any... uh, materials?” Pearl sees Impulse cycle through his inventory, trying to find something, “It feels like I've grinded an entire forest, I have too much oak for my own good.” He pulls an oak gate forward into his hand. 

It’s just what she needs. She looks back at the crafting table she's leaning on. If he gives her a few stacks of the fences, she can avoid using the table to build her farm. But if her hoe breaks, and if she wants a bucket to add some water…

Impulse sees where she glances, and she stiffens.

“... Do you need help with crafting? Sorry, the server Xisuma finds can have a few weird mods that affect everything a bit, sometimes it can be hard to adjust.”

Pearl nods, feeling small.

“I can show you how to do it?”

She breathes out, trying to ignore her bubbling anxiety. “Please, yeah.”

Impulse takes her hand with his and places it on the crafting table.

“It gets easier every time you do it, you just have to feel for the code,” he says. “And… voila!”

Pearl watches in amazement as a stack of oak gates appear in her hand. What Impulse did seems obvious now, like the muscle memory from before has been pulled from a fog in her brain.

She doesn’t understand what he means by code, but she knows she can’t ask. There’s been too many questions already, and Impulse can’t get suspicious.

She can't let anyone know. It's an immovable goal.

“Thank you,” she says, a little slowly. She creates a few gates as well, marvelling at the new knowledge. She’s almost afraid she’ll lose it in her head again like last time.

“If you need help with anything else, anything, DM me, got it?” Impulse says.

Pearl smiles back. “Got it.”

There’s a lot of chaos going on at all times, apparently. Pearl finds herself staring down at the Boatem Hole, which now has no rock bottom. The bedrock’s been destroyed.

She leans further to get a better look, tilting a little precariously over the hole.

Suddenly she feels a hand on her shoulder. She turns; it’s Scar, with a vex-like grin and in one of his road-worthy wheelchairs.

“I understand that the Boatem Hole’s to be admired, but do be careful!” Scar smiles at her. “We probably should’ve put rails up…” His eyes stare into space as he thinks.

“Careful?” Pearl says.

“Well, I’m sure some people enjoy getting dumped into a random point in the outervoid, but personally, I’d avoid it. Don’t let me stop you from having fun, of course!”

“The outervoid...?”

“Yeah, so maybe don’t lean that far forward.” Scar hums, narrowing his eyes. “You know, I’m going to get some equipment for the rails. This is a bit of a hazard. Bigger than the normal Boatem ones, at least.”

He leaves Pearl sitting there, more confused than ever.

A Week Earlier:

Xisuma’s almost getting used to the late nights. There’s a small routine there: he gets up, as soon as he’s able, messages anyone else he can think of if they’ve heard anything, searches through any code or logs or anything he’s given to find anything close to a hint. He eats when he remembers, falls asleep at his desk. Wakes up again.

It’s not healthy, of course, but there’s been a lot piling on. The hermits were even supposed to start a new season a week ago, but it’s been put off.

Because there’s a player missing. Pearlescentmoon.

From what Scott’s messaged him, she’s been gone for almost seven months. She was a part of the Evo group, and Grian’s known her since they were young players. A few other hermits know her as well, and the rest know of her. Everyone’s feeling the impact of her disappearance. A lot of them are helping look for her alongside him.

There’s almost nothing to look for. Xisuma keeps searching, of course, but there’s been no solid leads for months. They have players combing through grass of servers near where she disappeared. 

Xisuma’s getting to the point in his routine where he can feel himself falling asleep. He stares, eyes unfocused, at his computer, wondering if he should be smart and get into a bed of some sort.

That’s when he gets the ‘ping’ of a message. He almost doesn’t check it, the way his eyes are half closing every time he blinks.

He looks up to read it. His heart stops in his chest. He reads it again, hoping the late nights haven’t been getting to him.

He can’t imagine it’s real, after all these months. The playername is hers, exactly. He’s had a long time to memorise it, after looking through her files in detail. He dips into the message’s code, there’s nothing out of order. 

He sends a reply, his mind in shock but his hands are still moving to type out something, anything. He’s tried to send her messages before, of course. It never worked.

He hits send again.

It’s the same error they always got. Still, he can’t help in his desperation, trying again and again.

It feels impossible. She would need an address to send the message in the first place. He looks at the metadata in the first message, searching for the address, and it’s blank. It doesn’t look like it’s been scrubbed or altered, it’s just… not there.

He takes a minute to just breathe, heavy, trying to calm himself down. He needs to message… everyone. Scott and Grian especially. He needs to tell the hermits to meet. And then they need a plan. This is the most they’ve gotten in months in terms of Pearl, and from the body of the message, they may be seeing her soon. 

Xisuma knows that the message hasn’t been sent by Pearl, which shouldn’t be possible, with how close a player’s communicator is linked to them. Something’s going on that makes him uneasy, almost nauseous. He needs to know what.

He’s not sleeping tonight.

Chapter Text

Pearl’s been settling down with her life on Hermitcraft. The others seem to have gotten more used to her, these last few weeks. She doesn’t feel completely normal, but a little ... to the left of it; she spends most days grinding materials, laying around sketching base designs, and relaxing.

She's slowly piecing together everything that she's supposed to know. It's slow going. She's learnt that the metal device on her arm is a communicator, and it can do a few different things, like message other players. She's learnt there's two other dimensions: the Nether and the End. She's even gone to the Nether, to collect pretty wood. She's learning all the mob names, too: spiders, creepers, even the different variants of shambling zombies which never fail to send chills through her like her own skin is rotting along with them.

Today, she’s making a trip to Cleo’s base for some of her spare copper. Cleo’s a zombie player, with all shades of blue in her patchwork skin. She’s grounded and sharp in her words, but with a hidden mischievous streak (as hermits always seem to have). They first met a few days into the new server, when they teamed up to find a few beehives. The thing about Cleo that makes Pearl like her so much is that, just like Gem, she acts almost normal around Pearl. They always end up talking whenever Cleo comes to Boatem, and the last time Cleo came, Pearl mentioned she needed copper for one of her builds. Cleo easily replied that Pearl could have some of hers. 

Cleo turns up with the supplies she needs, but when Pearl sees her, she has a tough-looking fabric over her shoulders, like a cape. It’s cut in a weird way, so Pearl knows it can’t be a cloak or a shawl, and she’s also wearing knee braces that look like it connects to the fabric. Cleo catches her staring at it.

“... Do you know what this is? Impulse said that you, uh...”

Pearl shakes her head. She hasn't seen anything like it since she's arrived, so it can't be common. It would make sense she doesn't know what it is, hopefully.

"It's an elytra - you can find them in the End. They’re sort of artificial wings, I guess. Most players use an elytra with rockets as boosters to get places faster.”

“Are there a lot in the End?”

Cleo shrugs. “The End stretches forever, so technically, yes. They’re really hard to find, though, and the further you go into the end, the higher a chance you have of falling into the outervoid.”

That was the second time Pearl had heard that word. Her own mind makes her frustrated often, because she recognizes the word as something she should know, and it’s familiar. But there’s nothing in there to help her know what the word actually means .

She’s prepared to just nod, to just take the copper and leave. But the frustration of not knowing what Cleo means overpowers the incessant whispering that tells her to keep quiet.

“... Can you explain the outervoid thing?” she says, after a moment of silence.

Cleo smiles. “Of course,” she says. “Outervoid is what’s outside of servers. The code that makes up servers forms projections, which is what players see, like grass and mobs and player’s bodies themselves. The outervoid, though, is just filled with scrap code that isn’t projecting anything. There’s not much besides that - It’s just data floating around. Players can travel between servers without travelling through the outervoid, so not many actually go there.”

Pearl nods along.

“There’s a few different ways to get to the outervoid. If you fall into the void the right way, that’s the easiest place to get in. It’s easier to fall into the end void, but the overworld’s void is more of a weak spot out of the server. You can also head up into the sky, and I’ve heard the boundary gets thinner at night. It’s a bit easier when there's a full moon, as well.” She scratches her chin. “Doc would know a lot more about this stuff than me. He uses the outervoid to find loopholes in normal world physics, so he knows a few more creative ways of getting there. You can use frogs if you know what you’re doing.”

“What’s the outervoid look like?”

“Ah, the problem with players is that we’re used to actually, y’know, seeing things. The outervoid’s just code. So your brain will interpret how it likes. Everyone sees different things. When I went, I saw a forest at night, but the trees were so tall I couldn’t see the leaves, and I kept tripping over branches and shrubs. Joe tells me his is just a bunch of abstract colours, and he's waist-deep in them. I’ve also heard of people seeing just blackness.”

“Mine’s a night sky. It’s like I’m floating through space.”

Cleo looks at her, with some unknown emotion in her eyes. “Do you remember going into the outervoid?”

“I think..” Pearl takes a long time to answer. She feels like she’s trying to pick up blocks with fingers missing. She keeps forgetting she’s missing so much, and it trips her up every time. Her frustration is slowly culminating, but she’s stuck.  “I… I must have been there recently.”

Cleo doesn’t say anything to that.

Pearl grabs the copper after they chat some more, and Cleo promises her an elytra next time she visits. As she walks away with the shulker, she tries to pick her brain for the memory. She’s been in the outervoid before. She knows she has. Something about it sets off alarm bells in her brain, making her tense, but there’s nothing she can do if doesn’t know why she’s reacting like that.

She leaves the thought unresolved, but it sits at the back of her head for the rest of the day, small but still present, and she goes to sleep with that same unease.

Your entire being is being torn apart, there are hands inside your chest, breaking ribs and shredding viscera and ripping through your lungs

The pain lights up like plasma - you don’t know where you are

You can’t move. Did they take your arms too? Your legs? Your eyes, your teeth your fingers your breath your heart -

I, FOR ONE, CAN NOT WAIT TO WATCH

You’re submerged in water, and your head keeps going under. You knows they don’t want to hurt you, but you also know they don’t care either way

They're ripping out bits of you. Bits of teeth. Bits of skin. There might be nothing left at the end

WE WILL REFORM YOU

They’ve done something to you, you and your soul and you self. If you reached for your heart you're sure you’d find a chasm. Your body feels like a shell

You feel like a split atom, forceful and bright and breaking apart. It’s getting harder and harder for you to think, and you can hear the other side of yourself trying to reach back, voices whispering in your consciousness. They’re screaming

Pearl’s head was fuzzier than usual when she woke up this morning. She was almost expecting it, with how nice the days before had been. She knew it wouldn’t last.

Scar must notice when she stumbles over a small rock on a path, or maybe he sees the way she can’t stop blinking as she struggles to focus- either way, he pulls her gently aside, telling her to stop building for the day and just rest. She quietly admits she doesn’t want to be alone in her house, and he organises a sleepover.

Boatem sleepovers are always fun, but this time Pearl’s struggling to enjoy it, feeling as though she’s a step back from her body. The others notice it too, so they all decide to end the fun early to sleep.

Pearl tries to sleep, but as hard as she tries, she stays awake. She’s been careful to breathe slowly and deeply, feigning sleep, just to make sure the others don’t worry about her, but as soon as she hears their breathing even out, she steps quietly over the kitchen to… do something. She’s not sure what, just doesn’t want to keep pretending. Maybe she can make some hot chocolate.

When she steps into the kitchen, though, Scar’s already there. He’s sitting at the kitchen island, staring at the communicator on his arm. He looks as tired as she feels.

He’s muttering something to himself as he scrolls through whatever’s occupying him on his comm. She catches the word ‘watchers’, and it feels important to her. It’s a word she used to know, like outervoid, but it feels heavier. darker.

A moment later, Scar glances up and notices her, eyes widening minutely. He doesn’t jump, but she can tell he’s surprised.

“Couldn’t sleep as well?” he asks.

Pearl nods, feeling like she caught a moment she wasn’t supposed to see. Scar looks stressed, even more so now that he’s seen her.

“...Who are the watchers?”

Scar gives a long, drawn out breath, like he's preparing himself. “Want any hot chocolate?” he says.

He gets up to pour her a glass when she nods, and then they both sit down at the kitchen island.

“Scrap playercode can get stuck in the void, sometimes, though it usually doesn’t stay for too long. Have you heard of some players having chats?”

Pearl nodded. Joe Hills had mentioned it offhand to her once.

“That’s one way lost playercode can manifest, and the most common. They form a mass of consciousness - something like a hivemind, or an ants’ nest. Most of the time, they're harmless and not very powerful.

“But the longer they stay in the void, the more they learn how to manipulate the code around them, and I’ve.. heard of watchers that try to influence servers. They find a server that’s a bit unstable so they can almost reach through, and they provoke the players.

“Watchers don’t have the same moral standards as players - they’re not really conscious. They just want to see what button they can press, what they can make happen. They want entertainment.”

At The Start, on EmpiresSMP:

Pearl’s head has been hurting lately. It doesn't feel like a migraine, thankfully, but there’s been a low, persistent something for the past week and she doesn’t know how to get rid of it. It’s like someone’s slowly submerging her brain in water and using it as a sponge. It never hurts too much, but it feels like something is blocking her from thinking properly. 

She hasn’t told anyone about it, though. A week’s worth of a headache seems like a cause for concern, especially with how weird it feels, but it almost seems like the headache’s stopping her from doing exactly that. It takes too much energy to go from ‘my head hurts’ to ‘this is unusual’ to ‘I should do something about it’. 

And the even weirder thing: she’s been thinking of Evo a lot lately. Too much. It’s taking up her head as much as the liquid in her brain. It started off as reminiscing on old times, then the feeling of loss she thought she’d gotten over, and now… she wants to find it. They left the world in such a rush, and no one had gone back since. More and more, recently, she’s been able to convince herself it was still out there.

A few days after her head had started hurting, she brought up the possibility to Scott. They’d been hanging out, and then it had been too late for her to go back to her kingdom, so she was staying the night. 

She and Scott can talk for hours, if they want to, but this time it’s more relaxed. Scott’s been on his bed, reading something, and Pearl’s leaning on him, just staring into space. She can’t tell if Scott’s noticed her being weird lately, but it doesn’t seem so. There weren’t a lot of outward signs, just the sloshing inside her head. She’s thinking of Evo again, although, maybe again wasn’t the right word. She hasn’t stopped thinking about it for days.

“Do you think Evo could still be out there?” she says, knowing she’s broken a comfortable silence.

Scott turns to look at her. “Why are you thinking about this now?” he says.

“I’ve just been thinking about it, lately.”

“I think the most you could find of Evo’s code would be a few code chunks floating around,” he says after a pause. “You wouldn’t be able to find it. That place was halfway destroyed by the time we left. I was thankful that the grass wasn’t dissolving under our feet.”

“But…”

“But what? Are you actually considering finding it?”

“No, of course not.” Pearl plays with her hair, the fiddling helping her calm. “I’m just… getting too caught up in the past, I guess.”

“Pearl, it would take you years to find Evo again. There wasn’t even a stable address code after all the forced updates it went through. You’d have to find the general location and search through each server manually. And travelling through the void that much is risky. You wouldn’t even notice your code dissolving.”

“Even if I did go, which I won’t, you could still find me on any server I ended up on. I wouldn’t even have to reply, you’d just have to wait for the letter to get to me.”

“How reassuring, when you’re dead or dying I can send you a magical letter about it,” Scott scoffs, his cutting tone at odds with the depth of concern and compassion in his eyes. “Promise me you won’t actually try and find that server?”

“Promise.”

The submerged feeling was getting worse. She’d have entire conversations but not feel present, or realise she couldn’t remember what she’d done all day. Her hands were getting shaky, too. She’d been dropping swords and pickaxes without even realising.

And she couldn’t stop thinking about Evo.

Her dreams were dominated by memories of the server, and every single thing she saw felt like a reminder. It was less like a longing, and more like a compulsion. But she knew Scott was right about everything he said. The server wasn’t there. And even if it was, broken servers were dangerous. 

She knew her obsession was becoming unhealthy. Still, she felt like she couldn't do anything about it. There was a block between her thoughts and her body. 

It must have only been a matter of time, then, until she broke - it was night, a still moonlit night on Empires as she looked over her kingdom, but any details around her slipped from her fingers, there was nothing but static in her head. She couldn’t stop herself. Her hand came to her forearm, where her communicator was located. She could do a lot of things on her comm. She could’ve asked Scott or Gem to come over, or even messaged the general chat for help. But she didn't feel in control of herself. She closed her eyes, and apologised to Scott in her head.

She knows the others are messaging her on her comm, but her head fills with white noise every time she considers checking it. A letter from Scott arrives every other day, but she moves on too quickly for them to track her. Days pass as she descends further into that dizzy, fuzzy sensation - but on her sixth day of searching she comes across something she thinks could be it. 

She can see the builds they once made, even in ruins. The server looks like it’s been frozen in time since they last ran from here - she can even see the minecarts at the train station haven’t been moved. She can’t remember the state of the server the last day they were there - it was too much of a frenzy. She’d only been focused on the rush to escape, hadn't been paying attention to how much of the server had fallen into void.

The server’s broken apart, with its chunks cracked into pieces and colliding here and there, and she walks until she can go no farther, the terrain too unsteady beneath her feet-fingers-code. From there, all she can see is space. It feels cold, and it's bright. There’s a few stars close to her, appearing a bit bigger than the sun, and a planet system above her, taking up half the sky with its colours. Nebulas shift slowly in the void. Everything’s in motion, just slightly, a glacial crawl through the universe. 

That slow motion as a whole is why she didn’t spot it sooner. It’s only when the ground rumbles, and it feels like a mean laugh, and part of the sky disconnects from itself, peeling itself from the backdrop. 

It’s far away, but she can’t tell how big it is at first. The realisation comes to her as it moves, growing larger and larger without stopping. It’s bigger than planets, she sees it next to a spiral galaxy, still coming closer, and she feels like she's shrinking into nothingness as the watchers come to greet her.

She had never seen the watchers before, just felt their influence on the server. Even still, she knows they’ve grown. Grian spoke of them like they were the size of the player, maybe a bit bigger. How long have they waited here, slowly accumulating power? Everyone on Evo had assumed they were dead- did they stay in place for years, just until they had enough influence to… to… 

There are two, three, more. They clump together and break apart. She can’t hear the words they speak but she understands them, like a language she hasn’t heard since she was a child. There is nothing but fear. The fuzziness in her head doesn’t dull it, it just makes it so she can’t get away.

WE HAVE MISSED YOU, one sings, and it’s like the planet she’s walking on has looked her in the eye.

WE HOPE YOU WILL ENTERTAIN

Chapter Text

Xisuma takes in the hermits that have shown up for the second group meeting about Pearl: their huddled bodies, some with messy hair, most with weary eyes. They’re shoulder to shoulder in Gem’s base, sitting around a large table: almost every hermit is here, save a few off-server, gathered for a mystery that’s more exhausting than exciting.

The mood’s low, and most of the hermits have the same downcast expression. Grian’s had it the worst of all of them, and he sits slumped in his chair. A month into Pearl’s disappearance, he’d started to go weeks without eating or sleeping.. Xisuma knows Mumbo and Scar are doing their best to help keep him healthy. The entire Evo crew has the same look to them.

Gem’s the most hopeful out of all the gathered hermits. She’d been the first to notice Pearl was missing, on Empires, and had searched for her the longest, up until Xisuma had gotten that message that changed everything. She’d immediately messaged Xisuma that she was joining Hermitcraft too, and Xisuma would never think of turning her down. They’d planned to ask her to join the server before, regardless. He regrets that she’ll never get a proper, happy welcome to their group, but right now, there are more important things to worry about.

Xisuma clears his throat, and the faint murmurs fall silent. “I’ll go over the minutes from the last meeting, since some people weren’t there,” he begins. “As soon as Pearl arrived on the server, we checked her code. She’s missing half of her base code. We don’t know how it’s possible, but it looks like the two halves of the code are still vaguely connected, so she’s still mostly functioning. We traced back the other half to a point in the outervoid, which Scott told me was around where EvoSMP used to be.”

Xisuma tries his best to keep his tone level, calm. He lays out the words like a distant fact. His voice does not quiver.

“We have some updates from last time. Doc, Ren and I have been going through the code in the area where we traced Pearl’s to. We can’t go through it with an automatic scraper, since the watchers will be able to detect it, so it’s a slow process. “

He pauses. “We managed to find the other half of Pearl’s code. It’s... locked, with a passcode.”

Gem, who has been looking more and more anxious as Xisuma speaks, lifts her head to meet his eyes. “So how do we find it? Are we… Are we close to fixing this?”

“Please.” Xisuma says, “Let me finish.” He can’t help the exhaustion that’s in his voice. He steeples his fingers, letting his head fall forwards as he tries to regain composure.

“We already have the passcode. It wasn’t well hidden, which is why our team was apprehensive. It looked like a trap.”

Gem looks too hopeful. Her deer tail keeps flicking. Xisuma prepares himself.

“We would need to pull the code to Hermitcraft to help Pearl. So we’d need the passcode in Hermitcraft, as well. But the passcode, it’s a watcher’s code. We can’t fix this without bringing a watcher into Hermitcraft.”

The room was already quiet, but with that pronouncement, the silence stiffens into place. The mood is sombre and steely, the quiet unnerving. There is no murmuring, no conversation, or even glances at each other. Everyone’s in their own head, each wondering the exact same things.

“The watchers planned this, of course. We can’t bring a watcher into Hermitcraft. But we can’t let Pearl keep living like this. They’ve trapped us.”

Gem frowns. “That can’t be our only two choices. Can we move Pearl to another, empty server, and bring the watcher there? Or we could do it in the outervoid?” She was trying to keep herself calm, but there was a hint of panic in it.

“We can’t move Pearl anywhere without her full code, and taking her into the outervoid is a death sentence. It’s where the watchers can influence most. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“So we fight the watchers,” Gem says without hesitating. “I’m not leaving Pearl like she is now. No matter what.”

“You’re acting like bringing the watchers here is something we have a chance of surviving,” Grian snaps. “The watchers will grow more powerful if they have server access. That’s why they’re so powerful now, because of how they seeped into Evo over time. We can’t lie to ourselves and think we have a chance, no matter how powerful a player we get on our side. It wouldn’t matter who - Technoblade, TFC, Ivorycello - you wouldn’t win.” 

“Are you giving up?” Gem glares. “Do you want to help Pearl, or not?”

It shocks the room - Xisuma can feel it. Soft-spoken Gem, clear-headed starry-eyed hopeful Gem, with a vicious accusation in her voice. Even Grian looks taken aback for a moment, before a shadow passes over his face, uncharacteristic and hurt - he looks like a cornered animal.

“Don’t say that to me,” Grian says, low and cold, his tone like nothing Xisuma’s ever heard from him before. “I want to help Pearl! I’d also rather not let every other hermit die because we were too desperate to think clearly! You don’t get to say that to me, you don’t know how much I’ve been -”

“Please. Everyone,” Xisuma says, looking between Gem and Grian. “I… understand how you feel, but we need to stay focused. I’m sorry I can’t give you any good news.” He’s never been able to handle it when the hermits fight amongst themselves, with real anger behind their words rather than teasing jibes. As an admin, it’s his duty to keep the server functional - and that includes its players.

“I’m sorry,” he says, exhausted. “We can’t win.”

“Don’t say that shit, Xisuma,” Cleo says, and a few nod along with her. “There’s always a way. We all know that.”

“Sorry, Cleo, you’re right,” Xisuma says. It feels fake on his tongue, but he tries to summon up enough hope to convince himself. “I just - where do we go from here?”

Cleo sets her jaw. “I think we should talk to Pearl.”

“Isn’t that what we all agreed we wouldn’t do?” Scar interrupts, eyes darting around nervously. “We didn’t want the watchers to realise something’s off, if they could potentially see through her eyes. And we don’t know how she’ll react.”

“We know the watchers wanted us to find out, now, with the passcode. And we need information. Anything. We can’t - We’ve exhausted every other resource. Maybe we’ll learn something we can use.”

The group is silent for a while. Xisuma lets them have time to mull it over.

“Okay,” Xisuma says. “Does anyone have anything else to add?”

There’s a few murmurs, but nobody speaks up.

“Raise your hand if you agree with Cleo.”

Everyone raises their hands.

“...Okay.” Xisuma wants to believe this is solvable, but the feeling of foreboding is ever present, and he doesn’t know how long he can keep this up. “Cleo, come with me to my base, I’ll DM Pearl now. Everyone else, meeting adjourned.”

Pearl can’t help the sinking feeling in her stomach. She’s sitting in Xisuma’s base, on a seafoam-blue couch, waiting for anyone to say anything.

She’d gotten a vague message from Xisuma to meet at his base, and that it would be important. When she arrived, both he and Cleo had been there, and they’d given her some hot chocolate in a glass, and sat her down without saying anything.

“How are you feeling, Pearl?” Xisuma asks. He looks tired. Everyone had a drink - Xisuma’s holding his milk (with ice) in hand, while Cleo downed her black coffee in less than a minute. They both sit in chairs around her, forming a triangle with the three of them. Pearl feels trapped.

“I’m... okay.” She doesn’t know where this is going.

Xisuma hums. “I’ve - hm, players have been telling me you’ve had… some concerning behaviour.”

Pearl feels her stomach sink. The seating position feels more like an interrogation, right at this moment. Both Xisuma and Cleo are leaning in towards her, and she sinks more into the couch, a subconscious effort to get away.

“... What did they say?”

“You seem to not have a memory for several important things. This isn’t a problem, but-”

Pearl’s eyes widen. She feels herself panicking, but she tries to hold it in. “You - That’s normal. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong, but it’s not… normal, Pearl. And we think we know why -”

Pearl glares at Cleo. “You didn’t react when I asked questions. That means they’re normal questions to ask! I wouldn’t have asked if they weren’t!”

Cleo’s expression doesn’t change, it just cements into something firm. “No, Pearl, they weren’t normal to ask. Maybe if you were a newly formed player, sure, but you’re as old as most of the hermits.”

“How do you know?” Pearl feels like she’s yelling, just a little. “I could be a new player! I - I can’t be, you can’t know…” She trails off in a whisper.

“Do you not know if you’re a new player or not?”

“I’m - I am a new player. Okay? That’s why I don’t know a few things.” She feels betrayed and erratic. She’s in fight or flight mode, and she can feel her heart in her chest pounding.

Xisuma sighs. “Pearl, we know you’re not a new player.”

“How can you know that?” Pearl’s definitely yelling. Her whole body’s shaking, and she feels something wet on her face, and realises it might be tears. 

“Because we know you. From before you came to Hermitcraft.”

Pearl’s glass breaks in her hand.

The pieces crunch , and her palm lights up in pain. Most of the glass falls to the floor, and the hot chocolate, half finished, drips from her fingers, mixed with the blood from her cuts.

She can’t stop crying. She doesn’t know why. She’s been stumbling through these past few weeks, barely knowing her own name, only driven by some outside force that wants to keep her as quiet as possible. 

She clenches her fist harder.

Cleo and Xisuma have appeared by her side, and they’re talking to her, but she can't hear the sounds. Cleo’s prying her fist apart, and she lets it happen, while Xisuma cleans up the glass underneath her.

They stop trying to speak to her and start speaking to each other at some point. Pearl does nothing but sit there, head resting on her chest, staring unblinking at the floor. Cleo uses tweezers to get the glass out of her hand, then wipes it, then wraps it in bandages. Pearl’s mind stays blank throughout it all - she can’t hold onto any one thought for long enough to process it. Random emotions bubble up and then fizzle away, too fast for her to do anything.

And then she hears the word ‘watchers’, when Xisuma whispers it to Cleo. 

It sets her off, sets off something in her, and she feels like a scared rabbit, jumpy and weak, so she makes an attempt to run. She jerks up off the couch, surprising Cleo and Xisuma.

Cleo just pushes her back, setting her down back to the couch. “Pearl, please. Talk to us.”

She can hear what they’re saying now, that shot of adrenaline heightening her senses. It’s hard to speak. She can tell what’s coming out of her mouth isn’t quite intelligible - isn’t fully sure what she’s even trying to say, but she’s trying - she can feel her breathing whistling in and out of her chest, and she whispers about the watchers- they’re important, very important, if only she knew why.

“Do you know about the watchers?” Xisuma says.

“Y-yes. They’re, they… They’re in my head.” Even speaking that half-baked sentence sends her heart spiking in fear, and it’s almost starting to hurt, like a punishment for even speaking around the topic.

Neither Cleo or Xisuma manages to hide the genuine fear that flashes over their expression.

“What are they doing in your head?” Cleo says, almost coldly.

“I can’t… I’m normal, I won’t ask any more questions, I promise -”

“Hey, hey. It’s okay, Pearl. Just tell us what they’re doing.”

“I won’t ask any more questions, please…”

“Pearl, look at me. You’re normal, okay? This is a thing every player goes through. We just need to know what the watchers are doing to you.”

“They’ve.. They’ve… They can control me. I don’t know. I just can’t let players know.” It’s like the energy seeps from her body, after that. Cleo prompts her some more, she can hear what they’re saying, but she doesn’t respond.

They sit next to Pearl for a while, but they’re not waiting anymore, they’re almost as still as her. They’re mourning.

“We really messed this one up, huh?” Cleo says, in a moment of silence. 

“We did,” Xisuma admits. “We don’t have anything after this. The watchers will make a move soon, I can feel it. And we can’t do anything about it.”

Chapter Text

It’s night, and Pearl’s shoes kick up dust as she walks through Boatem’s paths; Grian, at her side, is silent, and she hates how she’s lost any ability to find comfort in his quiet. Pearl’s been feeling terrible the past few days, constantly nauseous, though the compulsions she usually has (don’t tell anybody, act normal) have been quiet.

She always has at least one other Hermit near her, and they always look sad. Pearl doesn’t talk much anymore. She has bouts of anxiety, sometimes, where her current situation catches up to her, and her body shakes and cries for hours while her mind hovers above, separated from her actions.

Grian’s her current guard, and she asked him, rather suddenly, if they could go outside for a walk.  Grian seems the most affected by her, besides maybe Gem, but Gem fuels her stress into trying to get Pearl to talk, just a bit, while Grian just stares at her like she’s already dead. She knows he’s the most likely to let them go out to walk. They all know the watchers can control her, now, but Grian cares too much about her to take any precautions.

She doesn’t know why she asked. There’s something there, there always is, but it’s almost not her body anymore, so she lets herself be taken outside to walk through Boatem.

Pearl stays silent, like she has been for the past few days, while Grian  picks at his hands and fingernails, tugging feathers from his wings as they walk. They turn down a path that leads them near the Boatem Hole.

The clouds covering the moon suddenly shift. Pearl feels like she’s falling, her own control of her body failing, as the stars above her grow brighter. She can feel the earth pounding beneath her feet - oh, she’s running? - before she even realises she’s being compelled.

It’s completely physical, visceral - her mind can’t catch up with what she’s doing. She feels scared, rather than just numb, for the first time in days. She hears Grian give a surprised shout, running to catch up with her, but she’s already too far away. Then, though, her feet draw to a stop - she blinks, hard, and is finally able to process where she is. Her boots are on the edge of the Boatem Hole, where a small wind could knock her into the abyss. Her eyes are staring down into the darkness, unblinking.

Her body slowly, slowly turns, so she can see Grian run up to her; he takes miniscule, cautious steps forwards, one by one, like he’s trying not to frighten her.

“Pearl, please... Come over here.”

She can barely talk, and her voice cracks and stutters. “I can’t. I can’t move my feet.”

Grian takes another step closer. “Okay. Okay, just... please.” His eyes go to his comm, about to ask for help, and her pilot notices his brief moment of distraction.

Pearl tips backwards. She stumbles into the Boatem Hole, trying to break control, but it just makes her fall faster.

She stares at Grian as she falls; his eyes are wide, and she can do nothing but watch as he starts running towards her. (There’s irony in that, maybe.) She sees him jump in in some desperate attempt to catch her, but her eyes are already half closed by then.

There’s nothing else like freefall.

The transition between void and outervoid is a strange one. You fall for a lifetime, and it feels like your body is floating away from itself, then from one moment to the next: you wake up in the outervoid. As Pearl opens her eyes, she sees stars surrounding her, blinking bright and then dimming in their slow, controlled movement. It’s not much different to the usual scenery of the starry backdrop she’s grown used to. It almost feels familiar, in a way. Like she’s coming home.

“Fuck,” Grian says. “Fuckfuckfuck.”

Pearl looks around, and sees him floating near her. She can see the Boatem Hole above them; it looks warped from this angle, the once-straight hole twisting and twirling like a ribbon. There’s a small glint of the moon through the hole, the only sign of the server above.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. It’s like their drop into the outervoid has shocked her back into her skin - she’s clear-headed enough, at least, to speak. It could be something arcane about her presence in the outervoid; or maybe just primal fear, running deeper than anything the watchers could do to her. “They probably already know where we are.”

Grian tugs her closer, linking their arms. “It’s - Pearl, it is looking bad, but I’m messaging the hermits right now, and there’s a chance they can pull us back before the watchers can get us. Don’t freak out right now, okay?”

Pearl lets herself be pulled towards him. She feels like a doll, sometimes, even more so floating in the outervoid. The watchers will come for her. She knows this with a striking, sobering certainty.

“It’ll be okay,” Grian insists, like he’s trying to convince himself. “As bad as it looks, we’ll figure something out. We - we always do. The hermits will pull us up before any watchers can find us.”

Pearl stays quiet to that. Grian - all the hermits - have whipped themselves up into a frenzy. They’re fighting tooth and nail for her. Pearl quietly wishes they would - just let her go. All this effort, energy, stress and tears - just for her. For her to stay with them.

The watchers won't even kill her, not really. They like to play with their food. That’s okay. Her mind’s already mentally in the back seat, ready for her fate.

They float for a while more. Grian keeps tapping on his comm and making small sounds, but she’s stopped paying attention to what he’s doing. When it’s been too long to bear the waiting any more, she speaks up. “You should get away while you can,” she tells Grian, her voice echoing through the silent void around them. “They’re only after me. You should be fine if you’re by yourself.”

Grian laughs at that. “Pearl, the last time I left you to the mercy of watchers, you almost didn’t make it out. I can’t… I’m not doing that again.” He let out a shaky breath. “I know you don’t remember this, any of this. But we’ve been friends for a long while, and we know these watchers. We... we thought we were done with them, until… you disappeared. We barely made it out last time, sure, but we made it out. I won’t let any of this happen a second time, I don’t care what you have to say about it.”

Pearl wants to talk him out of it. He’s right, she doesn’t remember him, but something in her still cares. She needs to get him out of here, to convince him this is pointless, that at least one of them can be saved.

That’s when she hears it. There’s a deep rumbling, a hum that fills the space, slowly growing. A deep, visceral reaction to it awakens somewhere primal within her, and she instantly knows - it's the watchers.

She can’t remember the last time this happened, but she knows it’s playing out exactly the same. Part of the sky starts to move, a massive swathe of galaxies and nebulas and stardust.

Grian splutters, eyes going wide as he stares. She doesn’t know what he’s seeing, can’t imagine what it looks like in his eyes. She wonders if the watchers were this massive the last time he saw them. They’re impossibly big. It seems unnatural, the way their bodies push against the edges of space, like an oversight in the system. Maybe she’s the only one who perceives them this way - the only one who thinks of them as such an unstoppable force.

The watchers don’t slow as they come near. They just spiral closer and closer towards them; everywhere she looks, they’re there, surrounding their prey. They clump, absorb together as they reach each other. Pearl wonders if she and Grian will be absorbed as well.

Grian’s shaking. He wraps his arms around her in a hug from behind, her back against his chest. He’s crying, as well, whispering something that Pearl’s stopped being able to hear, with how loud the watchers’ song is. It’s like the universe around them vibrates with their frequency.

They’re getting closer and closer. Pearl can’t see anything else but watchers. The sky blots out. The humming is too loud, it shakes her and Grian, the rumbling has turned to a roar - it feels as if her ears are bleeding, and her vision starts clouding over as they reach higher and higher frequencies.

At what must be some ultimate, world-shattering final note, Pearl blacks out.

The first thing she feels is cold. It stings her limbs, chilling her to the bone even as she’s only half-conscious of her body; slowly she comes back to herself, sensation superseding higher thought, memory only a haze that can’t quite hurt her. Then the curtain falls, and Pearl jerks awake, eyes flying open - the watchers, Grian in the outervoid, the singing - her memory comes back to her like a punch to the gut, and abruptly she’s shaking again, struggling to focus on the environment around her even as memories of the watchers’ singing beat in her ears like some arcane, cosmic drum.

She’s in a deep cave, and the only light she can see, barely visible, is high above her. The mouth of the cave is filled with jagged rocks that clamp together, and she can’t make out the outside besides the soft light that shines through.

She’s waist deep in still, clean water, and although she doesn’t feel wet from it, the cold seeps into her, causing her to shiver.

She doesn’t know if Grian is still with her, if they allowed her that, but she still searches desperately around her. The water is an inky black; only a small bay to her left is lit up by the light from above. She puts her hands into the water to feel around, bumps them along the rocks and cuts herself, wincing at the pain - but after a few seconds, she finds a shoulder. Quickly, she yanks Grian out onto her lap, so his legs and chest are still in the water but his face is exposed to air. The water wouldn’t stop him breathing, it’s only an illusion, but it's hard to remember, with Grian's limp body right in front of her.

There’s a small moment where she’s relieved she’s found him, that the watchers have granted her this much, but it’s interrupted by the memory of when they were in the outervoid. Him shouting that he wouldn’t leave. Pearl should have tried harder to push him away. Anything to save him, at least, from her fate. She doesn’t know what the watchers want with him.

She glances around the cave again, a futile search for anything that might show something. There’s only a single path from the lake to what looks like the outside, no offshoots or drops. But the path is impossible to climb without any tools, its steep height seems to stretch the longer she looks towards the top.

The mouth of the cave is odd - the pattern of stalactites and stalagmites is rhythmic, all in a row and one after the other. There’s also a small breeze, Pearl notices, which will go towards the mouth of the cave for several seconds, rest, then blow in the opposite direction.

It dawns on her, the realisation settling down into the pit of her stomach.

They’re inside of a watcher. She’s feeling its breath, she can see the teeth. She remembers the last few moments before they woke up here - the watcher swallowed the both of them. The teeth look the exact same.

She focuses back on Grian, looking at his face. She thought he’d been asleep before, that she’d simply woken up earlier than him, but when she pulls him more into the light, she can see that his eyes are open. They’re dazed, unfocused, but they’re open.

“Grian, please,” she whispers, some unknown, fearful instinct keeping her voice low.

His eyelids flicker, just a bit, and his mouth moves, but no sound comes out. She doesn’t even know if he recognizes her. 

She needs to get Grian to safety. She owes him that much, at least. She doesn’t have her comm on her - she has a fuzzy memory of pushing it off of herself as she fell into the Boatem Hole. So she pulls Grian’s left arm up towards her, and turns on his, squinting at the new light source.

The messages continue on, desperate and dithering away. Pearl types up something quickly, afraid a watcher will notice.

There isn't a response for a long while.

Pearl doesn’t know how they’ll be able to, with her and Grian trapped in the nest of the most powerful watcher group they've seen. It’s suicide, trying to rescue them.

She can't bring herself to type that out, but she knows she’s dooming all of them with her silence.

She holds Grian closer to her, dread setting in. She failed Grian, before she even began. He’s stuck here, with her. Can she bargain with the watchers? She knows instinctively that the watchers would never bargain, and even if they were willing to listen, what did she have to give?

As the minutes go by, with her sitting in the water, she hears a low level frequency that she doesn’t notice at first. When she focuses on it, she realises that it’s a steady stream of whispers, biting at her ears.

It’s getting louder now, so where she can almost make out what it’s saying, and as she strains her ears, she does

Turn around.

She’s had her back to the bay, so when she turns her head, she sees what she instinctively knows as the watcher, the watcher she and Grian are trapped in. They stare at her.

The body looks like a player’s, with arms and legs and fingers. It wears two sets of wings almost like a decoration, rigidly posed on the body, clinking like glass as it moves. There’s something of a face, but it's unmoving. Her vision almost warps around it, like it's not meant to be seen. She can make out feathers, a mouth, a nose. There aren’t any eyes. They’re wearing clothing from a lost era, like the first of the first players wore.

HELLO the watcher says, clearly amused IT IS GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN. PEARLESCENTMOON

“It’s.. it’s… I don’t want you here.” It’s even harder to think with a watcher so close. They whispering’s turned to nonsense again, but they’re an undercurrent of emotion, of something desperate.

YOU MAY THINK THAT. IT IS NOT OF OUR CONCERN. WE ARE SURPRISED YOU MANAGE TO TALK IN THIS STATE. IT IS QUITE INTERESTING

“I remember you said that… from before,” she mumbles. “When you... when...”

WHEN WE CUT YOU OPEN? WHEN WE CLAIMED HALF YOUR SOUL? YOU ARE INTERESTING. PLAYER CODE IS ALWAYS FASCINATING

She’s exposed, helpless, with this watcher in front of her. She thinks he’s smiling at her, and he sits patiently, waiting for her to respond.

“…What did you do to Grian?” she says, hugging him tighter in her arms. Grian doesn’t respond to her. He’s still slowly mouthing words, eyes staring aimlessly.

HE MAY BE INTERESTING, BUT HE IS STILL A THREAT TO US. WE NEED HIM SUBDUED, JUST SO HE WON’T BE ABLE TO FIND ANY ESCAPE    

The watcher leans in towards her YOU, HOWEVER, ARE NO THREAT. WE CAN KEEP YOU AWAKE WHEN WE WANT TO. WE CAN PUT YOU TO SLEEP IF WE MUST. WATCH, PEARLESCENT they hold out their hand to her face, and snap their fingers. WE ARE IN CONTROL    

She doesn’t stay awake long enough to feel her head hit the water.

Chapter Text

She’s awake again.

She jerks upright from where she’d been lying, submerged in the water. Her mind is filled with nothing but a deep, all-consuming panic, and she whips around the room until she spots the watcher, staring down at her.

The watcher put her to sleep with nothing to prompt them, just clicking fingers and a point to make. It breaks her down at her core, makes her body turn to ice.

She always knew from the start - at least in her subconscious - that the watchers controlled her. She’s a doll to them. A body to operate. Something to watch squirm and wriggle, to make pathetic. But that reality is now in front of her, staring her down, even more so than when she fell in the Boatem Hole. Even the constant numbness of her mind can’t dampen or soften the terror she feels. Or, she considers bitterly, the watchers control that too, and they want to watch her break down in front of them, the cosmos breaking her brain like an ant before a god.

“W-what are you doing?” They want her to talk, and she can’t bring herself to disobey, even when it’s within her control. The whispering’s still present, nudging her thoughts this way and that, making it even harder to think.

IT’S IN THE NAME, IS IT NOT? I AM WATCHING YOU

“Why? I don’t…”

I THINK YOUR FRIEND WAS EXPLAINING IT TO YOU. WE ALMOST HAD YOU BEFORE. YOU ESCAPED US. WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YEARS UPON YEARS. YOU WERE THE EASIEST OF THE GROUP TO INFLUENCE, WITH YOUR CONNECTION TO THE MOON. YOU CAME TO US SO QUICKLY

Pearl tries to pull the memory from her brain, and she can only find murky, scattered recollections, it’s like she’s trying to cradle water, trying desperately to get it to stay with her. The watcher can see her struggle. The watcher can bear witness to her soul, pick through the bits in her code, laughing at how she screams.

YOU’RE ALMOST CUTE LIKE THAT, TRYING TO GRAB ONTO THE MEMORIES, FORM IT INTO SOMETHING SOLID. ARE YOU EVEN CONSCIOUS LIKE THIS? YOU’RE BARELY A PROJECTION

Pearl doesn’t have an answer to that. She feels she doesn’t need to. The watcher’s only speaking at her now, their grin large and uncanny.

YOU’VE BEEN SO COOPERATIVE, WE THANK YOU FOR IT. YOU’VE HELPED US SO MUCH. THE WATCHERS OUTSIDE WILL ALSO WANT TO THANK YOU, IN TIME, BUT FOR NOW, IT’S ONLY US.

“What did you do to me?”

WE CUT YOU OPEN. STOLE YOUR EYES AND EARS AND LUNGS, PILOTED YOU WITH YOUR OWN CODE IN OUR HANDS. IT WAS AN UNREFINED PROCESS. YOU WERE OUR FIRST. NOW, HOWEVER, WE KNOW MORE they nodded towards Grian. HE WILL BE THE SECOND. HE MAY BE SOMETHING EVEN GREATER

“No…” Pearl can barely speak, but still she forces it out through uncooperative lips. “Please, you can’t.”

She wanted to keep believing in that hopeful, naive illusion she’d constructed for herself: that the watchers wouldn’t care about Grian. That he’d be left as he is, barely conscious but untouched. Only a sliver’s chance of rescue for him, but - a chance, at least. She can’t pull to mind the torture that went into creating her as she is now, but she can feel her limbs start to shake even as she considers it, reaches for the memory, comes up against only terror and agony and being utterly broken. There was a hand inside her chest, stroking organs, collecting what it wanted. Her limbs were frozen while her mind burned down. She’s still choking on smoke, falling to the ground, and Grian will now go through the same. 

“Please…”

WE WILL MAKE HIM OURS, SEND HIM BACK TO THE SERVERS. WE WILL CONTINUE GATHERING AS MANY PLAYERS AS WE CAN. SLOWLY, BUT OUR PATIENCE IS ENDLESS. AS LONG AS WE CAN SEE INTO THE WORLDS, THROUGH YOUR EYES, IT IS ENTERTAINMENT. YOUR KIND HURT US SO BADLY, ABANDONED US FOR YEARS. WE CANNOT LET THAT SIT IDLE

“No, please.” Pearl doesn’t know why she’s begging; it’s impossible for her to stop. She can’t feel if she’s crying, with the cold creeping numbness on every part of her body. Her tears do nothing, regardless, they just add to the water she’s already in, like they weren’t there in the first place. There’s nothing left she can give, only her pathetic words, only her helplessness, her entertainment. It will never be enough. “Please, please -”

She feels the watcher frown. WE WILL COME BACK WHEN OUR CONVERSATION CAN BE MORE INTERESTING. GOODBYE, PEARLESCENTMOON

The water drags her under.

She snaps out of the water, awake and out of breath. It disorients her in the worst way, being shoved down then dragged up again and again, messing with her sense of time, so she can’t know if she’s been kept here for days or hundred of years. The isolation presses on her chest, makes it hard to breathe, and she touches her face with a shaky hand to feel tears that hadn’t stopped even as she slept. The whispering, the voices, scream-chatter-mumble-whisper in sync as her throat constricts. She falls back into the water, and her hands can’t catch her, her head going under. She pushes back up, like she’s fighting off an ocean.

The watcher is waiting for her, smiling as they watch how she flounders. 

Her panic drags her above and out of the water, thrashing; her exhaustion tugs her to the floor of the lake, where she shudders, whimpers, rests. Her chest shivers as she tries to inhale, feels only water - panic animates her, until she’s above the surface again - and the watcher is there throughout it all, its eyes always on her, always smiling. Up, and down, like a twisted carnival ride. She’s too tired to move, her limbs don’t answer to her, but the panic is so instinctual that her body doesn’t seem to care.

THERE YOU ARE they say, after she stays down in silence for more than a few minutes, unmoving.

The whispering quieted down as she had, raised to a roar when her body shook. It’s speaking something she wants to understand, but there’s too many voices to make out anything coherent. She strains her ears, and she can feel the message: a burning hate for the watchers; the fear of being trapped, caged . They speak in sync with her heartbeat, pulsing, every beat telling her of their anger. She lifts herself up, so she can be sitting, so she can have that small bit of defiance.

“Why do you have voices?” she asks. She knows they’re coming from the watcher; they tell her themselves.

VOICES? WHAT A NOVEL INTERPRETATION. IT MIGHT BE YOUR SOUL, SCREAMING OUT TO YOU

“My… soul? It’s here?”

OF COURSE. I TOOK IT, I TOLD YOU. IT’S NOT SO FLIMSY A PROCESS THAT I HOLD IT IN MY HAND. NO, I HAVE GRAFTED IT TO MYSELF. IT’S HOW YOU WERE CONTROLLED, AND WHY YOU CAN NEVER GET IT BACK

She’s always felt something missing, but the knowledge that it’s right here in front of her, unreachable but so, so close, it eats at her heart. There’s something tragic in her: she’s not whole, she never will be again, there is nothing she can do to fix it and there never will be any way to fix her. The whispers nip at her ears and brain, acknowledging her. They’re trying to reach her as well.

AND NOW, GRIAN WILL GO THROUGH THE SAME THING. WE PLAN TO TAKE MORE OF HIS HEAD THAN ANYTHING ELSE. WE HOPE TO MAKE HIM MORE STABLE, MORE CONTROLLABLE. WE ARE STILL LEARNING ABOUT THIS PROCESS

The voices are still screaming at her, pleading and begging. She feels the same. “You can’t take him. You can’t -”

She can’t remember her and Grian’s past, but she feels what she said about him in her heart - there’s something about him that she knows. He’d promised that he’d help her, and she can’t do the same. Part of her is, despite everything, defiant: she can’t let Grian become like her, broken and confused and controlled. The way the watchers talk about him, she isn’t even sure he’ll be aware enough for thought. But she knows that the watchers will laugh or ignore any of her pathetic attempts to save him. And there’s no one else around. It’s just her, Grian, and the beings who want to pick them apart.

The voices seem to agree with her. There is no one but her.

YOUR DEMANDS BORE ME JUST AS MUCH AS YOUR PLEAS. SLEEP WELL they say, and Pearl can feel the initial wall that might force her to go to sleep. But it’s weaker than usual, and she can push through it. She can almost feel the other half of her working against the watcher from the inside, not letting the command reach her.

The watcher doesn’t notice that she’s still awake. They’ve never thought of her as a threat. They’re reaching for Grian’s body, him lying lifelessly, and something in Pearl snaps. The watchers see her as a puppet that’s outlived its usefulness, see Grian as their new favourite toy - and the rage that’s been boiling within her, led by the voices, overflows. She’s been made helpless by the watchers, tossed this way and that, but something breaks in her now. She’s too desperate to lie down and bleed. She will be helpless no longer. 

The voices are impossible to drown out. They are pulling towards her, and she knows what they want her to do. What she must do.

The watcher reaches for Grian. She reaches for them. The watcher’s face isn’t something she can see or comprehend, but she feels its surprise as she strains to grab at wings, clothes, anything she can dig her fingers into and use to drag - they both splash into the shallow water, away from Grian.

The voices are a cacophony and a choir, and as she hits the watcher - a bare, knuckled fist - they scream like an off-tune polyphony. She hadn’t even known if she would have any effect, if the watcher would be unmoved by the attack and just put her to sleep again. She doesn’t think it would have if she’d have done it earlier - the white, angry heat inflaming her has brought her fists to the higher frequency the watchers live on, or maybe dragged them down to meet her on her angry, hurting, mortal level.

She feels more real now than in all her memories, in the cave of a conjugate god, fighting its form. There’s stars in the sky that are moving, and great beasts around, but she can feel herself punching and scratching at the watcher beneath her. She’s on top of them. She aims for their eyes. Feels their nose shatter. There’s no blood on her hands, but she knows she’s made them hurt.

She pulls out feathers and they scream, and she realises that this will not last long, one desperate player against all the watchers that will surely come.

The voices scream to take me back, make me whole. It’s like the world in her ears.

Her eyes are staring at the watcher, unblinking and afraid, and she knows that somehow, someway, she needs to reach her code.

She puts her hand in their chest and through their lungs and it's like honey, almost, barely solid. She digs through, and pulls out their heart. The veins are still attached, but she can barely hear the watchers' screams with the voices in her ears, coming directly from her code trapped in their blood.

It’s her. It’s what they ripped out of her, months ago, using her. She can feel the heart in her hands, and she can feel her hands cupping herself. They are one. They need to be one.

She takes a bite out of it, blood scattering like dewdrops on her palms, like fine jewellery. She takes another. This, here, is salvation: she’s been starving, she finally understands, since she arrived on Hermitcraft. And now, at last, she can feel herself becoming whole.

She wolfs down the heart in a few bites, voices gone and replaced with ringing in her ears. Her hands and mouth are red; the waist-deep water around them is pink-stained, the colour radiating from her, the aura of a dying, angry god.

Her laboured panting fills the silence, deafening to her ears. She feels... different. She’s still in her state of static, but she can feel her sense of self slowly coming back to her; the world is shimmering in and out of darkness, but she feels anger, knows anger, remembers her fury. The other watchers will know by now that the one hosting them is dead. Their screams were too loud. And she can’t let herself and Grian be captured again.

Her vision is red and it's blinding. The curtains are closing on her once again, and she steps back, losing herself to the rage. 

Chapter Text

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.

Pearl’s consciousness comes back to her in scattered pieces, as she slowly crawls out of her sleep. She can't fully hear what’s around her, just cloudy words here and there. A part of her can feel a difference in herself between now and the past few weeks. Even half asleep, she feels more aware of herself.

The first time she wakes up doesn’t last long. She feels a hand holding hers, and two voices talking back and forth. Her throat is dry, and she mumbles ‘water?’ without much thought. The voices stop. Her hand is squeezed, and there’s something else said with her name in it, but she can’t fully make out the words. She fades out of consciousness a few seconds later.

The second time, there’s almost no noise around her. She cracks open her eyes a small amount, the first time in weeks, it feels like. She feels weak. She looks around, and sees an IV drip, with what looks like a Regeneration potion in it.

She turns her head a bit, and sees Cleo staring at her. Her vision’s still a bit blurry, so she can’t make out much of Cleo’s expression, but she hears a quiet gasp.

“Pearl?” she says. “How are you feeling?”

Pearl tries to say “good”, but her voice has gone unused for such a long time that she can only open her mouth and close it again, defeated. She lets out a hum instead, and bobs her head to show she’s aware.

She finally gets a good look around the room. She’s in her starter base’s bedroom, but it’s been modified to hold more people and medical equipment. The whole place has been cleaned up - not that Pearl had left it very messy, but it’s been dusted and all the blueprints and stationery left on her desk have been rolled up or stored neatly. There’s a new comms armband sitting on her desk.

Cleo’s gotten her water, and Pearl drinks it gratefully. Cleo waits patiently for her.

“Did you guys know the entire time?” Pearl asks.

Cleo nods, eyes downcast, not even bothering to ask what Pearl had been referring to. “Xisuma got a message that said it was from you, but you’d been missing for seven months, at that point, so we knew you weren’t the one who sent it. We didn’t know what to expect when we let you on the server, so we all agreed to act like we didn’t suspect anything.”

“Seven months...” She mulls the number over in her head, not quite able to fathom the amount of time it represents. All of her memories from before are back, but her time in the outervoid with the watchers - the first time, when they’d torn her apart, not the second time when she’d reversed the roles - is still scattered and hazy. It didn’t feel like seven months. Her memories of it last seconds, but the feelings of pain could have taken up an eternity. “I must have scared Scott to death.”

“Just a bit. He had almost everyone he knew looking for you. Which is a lot of people. I think he was trying to send letters to Dinnerbone, at some point.”

Pearl gives a small smile at the idea of Scott shooting a letter off to a mythical demigod.

“... Is Grian okay? The watchers… they did something to him.”

“Oh, yes, completely. He was just starting to wake up when we arrived. He slept it off when we got back to the server, and he’s completely fine now. I’ll DM him to come visit you soon, now that you’re awake.”

“Oh… good.” She’d done it, then. She feels very removed from the past two weeks, like it was a different person entirely. She can even remember flashes from being inside the watcher, though it's almost nothing except pain pain caged let us OUT-

There was so much pain she didn’t realise she was carrying, and not just the half of her that had been trapped. It had felt like she’d been breathing water, and now finally, she’s breathing in air. The strain on her body is gone, she can speak and look around without much thought, without fighting against a drowning body. She feels peaceful.

“I can finally think properly,” Pearl says. “It felt so weird, with half my code missing. I just felt confused, all the time. Like I was driven by only instinct.”

“You’ll never have to go through that again,” Cleo says, tone low and serious, and Pearl can tell she means it like a promise.

“I don’t even know what happened, how I got myself back. The outervoid showed me things, but…”

“When we arrived at your coords, it looked - to me, at least - like you'd fallen unconscious in the middle of a large grove. There were wolf-like creatures all around you, cut into limbs and torsos. And you had… blood, dripping from your mouth, a lot of it. Joe said all his colours turned red for miles, with you at the epicentre, and that everything was screaming. We don’t know, either.”

“I know I got my code back. And… I think I stole some of the watchers’ with it.”

Cleo takes a moment to process that. “I… I’m glad you escaped, then. I’m sorry the hermits couldn’t do much for you.” She looks down at her hands, and Pearl sees she’s struggling with what to say.

“I don’t know what you could have done,” Pearl says softly. “Those watchers were… unlike anything else. They’d waited so long from Evo, just for revenge. And they were already insanely powerful when we were playing on Evo. No one could have been able to kill them.”

“Except you,” Cleo says.

Except her… She’s pulled back to that feeling of pulsing rage, her head screaming, just fully formed. There’s nothing else there, in that memory, but that rage. It would scare her, maybe, if she didn’t know that that’s what kept her and Grian alive. She doesn’t think she can be scared, knowing that she and Grian, all of Evo, are safe after years and years of unknown danger.

“Grian half-remembers it,” Cleo says. “He’s told us what he can, but I don’t think he knows much about the end. So we don’t really know what might happen next, with you.” She gives a laugh that Pearl can tell is - not faked, but deliberate, as though Cleo is trying her best to make Pearl feel safe. “Hopefully nothing.” 

“Do you want me to call the Boatem crew over?” Cleo offers a moment later.

“Please.”

Pearl stares into space as Cleo taps on her comm. 

“...am I still allowed on Hermitcraft?” Pearl says tentatively, “I know my invitation was more because of an emergency situation than anything else…”

“Oh, Pearl, of course you’re allowed here! You did everything the hermits did with half your brains missing! You’re overqualified!”

Pearl gives a small laugh that sounds a bit chokey with her dry throat. “I’m glad you’ll keep me, then.”

She’s finally able to step outside a few days later, and as her and Grian step out onto the porch outside her house, she’s greeted with a surprise.

“Oh,” she says, taking in the sky above her.

The shifting stars are still there.

It’s different from before, though. Before - when she was half-taken by the watchers - the stars surrounded her, like she was wading through them. Here, though, the stars move slowly through the sky above Hermitcraft, brighter and glittering but still in the heavens where they belong. (Her eyesight’s gotten a lot better, apparently.)

“What is it?” Grian says. 

“I can see the stars again.”

Grian tenses at that, so Pearl quickly follows up, “Not like last time! … It feels like I’m seeing more, not like it’s blurring my vision.” She turns her attention back to the sprawl of Hermitcraft before them and sees the same thing coming from the Boatem Hole, the starry residue spouting from the hole like smoke from a volcano.

“...That can’t be safe,” she mutters to herself. Why are the stars coming from such specific areas? ... oh.

“I think I can see the outervoid, or at least how to get to it,” she concludes. “I can see stars coming from the Boatem Hole.”

Grian nods. “That might be useful, actually. Is that a… watcher ability, then?”

“I don’t know where else it would come from. I don’t think exposure to the outervoid would cause it…” She trails off.

They sit in silence for a few moments.

“How… freaked out are you, by becoming part watcher?” Grian says, tentative, as though he doesn’t really want to broach the subject, “I just - I want to know if it's a sensitive thing.”

“No, I - weirdly, I feel fine with it? I know it’s a bit early to have processed all that, but - me taking the abilities was the one part of all of this where I felt I had control, and it's what got us out of there. I’m grateful to have it.”

“Just another close call for the both of us, right?” Grian gave a choked laugh. “ I - First of firsts’, Pearl, that was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. Beats out all of Evo. I was so helpless - all I could do was listen to you be controlled by that watcher. I couldn’t do anything. You had to save us both, and it looked like it almost killed you.”

“Cleo said the same thing too.” Pearl looks back at Grian, hesitantly moving her arm to place it around him. “It doesn’t matter how we got out, it matters that we did, okay? We’re here now. We’re not there.”

Her nightmares are still shaking her awake with her screams. Memories she can’t find in her consciousness have gone into her dreamscape, and they haunt her nightly. But she’s not there, she’s here. By the side of a lifelong friend, safe for the first time in months.

Grian leans up on her side, taking a deep, slow breath. “I’m glad,” he says, “It might be fun, finding out all your new abilities, testing what happens. Like a side project.”

“It’s nice to discover new things,” she agrees. “Things that don’t want to hurt us.”

It’s mostly small things, they discover. Grian keeps all the information in a neat, intricate spreadsheet, and sometimes they’ll even do a few tests to find out more. Cubfan’s even been involved in it, she’s been to his lab a few times.

She can tell a weapon’s enchantments before holding it. She knows when it's going to rain hours in advance. Perhaps the most useful, she doesn’t need to use a crafting table anymore: she can do it with just her hands.

She’d hoped that the pattern would continue, where she’d keep finding out cool new tricks with friends by her side, not a worry in the world.

Pearl’s walking through the pine forest near Boatem, trying to find Gem. Gem’s usually at her base, but when Pearl knocked on her door, no one answered. She really needs to find Gem soon - the sun’s setting, and she wants to get Gem to look at the moon through Grian’s new telescope. Grian insists the moon’s gotten bigger. Pearl thinks he’s gone slightly batty, but Mumbo agrees with him as well, so she needs a fourth opinion in the mix, and Gem’s the most likely to agree with her. At least, she hopes.

She’s walking down the pine path, imagining in her head where dear Geminitay could be. Grinding for materials is likely, though she might be hanging out at False’s. There’s also a good chance she’s trying to find an ocean temple, since she’d been talking about it recently.

Her mind seems to lead her to an image of Gem, deep in the mines. She’s at Y-11, maybe a few thousand blocks west of Pearl. Pearl instinctually believes the image.

Then she trips on a root. She tumbles to the ground, scraping her knees and hands.

The image of Gem is the only thing she can see. It’s not going away, and she’s effectively blind. She tries to stand up again out of panic, and falls again. She can’t control her vision - it’s stuck on Gem, peacefully mining away.

Pearl is starting to freak out, but she stays on the dirt ground. Her hearing is muffled as well, almost gone. Any mob could sneak up on her now. She doesn’t even know if a respawn can fix this.

Her breathing picks up, and her heart hammers in her chest. She starts shouting for help, but she can barely hear her own voice.

She doesn’t know how long she shouts for, but her voice is hoarse when there’s a hand on her shoulder. She jumps from it, but the hand doesn’t do anything else, and she’s eventually able to hear Scar’s voice, though muffled, talking to her.

“Tap twice if you can hear me, Pearl,” he says, and she does as he asks, shakily bringing her hand to the one on her shoulder and tapping it like Scar asked.

“Okay, that’s good. What’s happening? Are you okay?”

“I can’t see -” she begins, voice shaky, then corrects herself - “I mean, I can see, but I can’t see in front of me.”

“What are you seeing?”

“I can see Gem mining. I think it’s actually her, like a live feed.”

“… Okay, I must say, I did not expect that.” Scar hums under his breath like he’s thinking - she can hear him a little better now - then suggests, “Maybe try leading your vision to someone else? How’s Impulse doing?”

She lets herself focus on Impulse, trying to replicate what she thought about Gem: how he’s doing, guesses on where he is… Her vision tilts to the side, giving her vertigo. When it comes back, she can see Impulse.

“He’s… putting phantoms in boats? I don’t know why.”

“Impulse is a real go-getter for our new cult, don’t worry about it too much,” Scar says. Pearl decides she doesn’t need to unpack that. His hand on her shoulder is soothing, grounding. “Okay, now try bringing your vision back to where we are.”

She does and it’s easier now, the more she tries it. She gets a bird’s-eye view of her and Scar, sitting on the ground - there’s his hand on her shoulder - and she can see everything else that’s happening within several chunks. Her vision doesn’t diminish the more it sees, like normal vision. She can see every strand in her hair despite her ‘eyes’ being dozens of blocks away.

She shakes her hand to the side and sees the action from her overhead view.

“That’s unnerving,” she says.

Scar hums. “Very cool, though. Can you bring it back to yourself now?”

Now that Pearl’s calmer, it’s easier to feel how the ability works, like stretching a new limb.  The roaming vision is like another set of eyes she can close, and she does so, blinking a few times as she gets used to her normal vision. “Woah.”

“I feel that,” Scar says. “How are you feeling?”

“Less freaked out, now.”

“Are you good to continue on your way?” Scar asks gently.

“I should be…” She pauses for a moment. “Just wanted to ask, you think the moon’s still being normal, right? Grian and Mumbo have been saying some weird stuff.”

“Well…” Scar starts, and that’s confirmation enough.

“Never mind,” Pearl says. “I’m going to find Gem.”

Pearl’s excited. She, Mumbo and Gem are gathered in Mumbo’s base, sitting on beanbags and chatting eagerly - it’s their weekly show-and-tell, and she has something really fun to share this week. The show-and-tell started off as a bit of a joke, but the Hermits- her now included- will take any opportunity to hang out, especially with how distracted they can get, working on projects for days or sometimes weeks without stopping to chat.

The rules are simple - show something off that you found that week. It can be big or small, tangible or metaphorical. It just has to be something new. It might be a new baking recipe, or something bought off-server. There’d been quite a few cool rocks shown. They always gather in Mumbo’s tree base, and they always clap, no matter what’s presented this week.

When they’re ready to begin, Pearl stands up, grinning. “I’d like to show something new I’ve found out about myself,” she says, with a presenter’s tone. “Behold!”

She presses down on her scalp with her index fingers on both sides. As she pulls them up, slowly, antlers like Gem’s grow with it. In just a few seconds, she has a full pair of deer antlers.

“Tada!” She stands, receiving claps.

“How did you do that?” Gem asks, touching her own antlers.

“I think I have a small ability to influence code, now,” she says. “I can change other features as well, but I can only do it to myself, so I think my code’s more… fluid, now, than others’.”

She covers her mouth and nose with both hands, and when she removes them, there’s a bushy moustache on her face, identical to Mumbo’s. The two clap again.

“…Wait,” Mumbo says. “You can’t turn into vegetables, can you? You’re going to take my thing!”

“Theoretically, I could, but I’d never infringe on your thing.” Pearl pulls both the antlers and moustache back into her body. “I’m hoping to use it for a bit of dress-up next season, I’m going for an alien theme.”

Gem and Mumbo nod to that, and her show-and-tell turn is over, so she goes to sit back in her bean bag. Mumbo stands up next.

“Now this is another rock, even better than last week’s…” he says, pulling it from his inventory.

“Hey, wait,” Gem says. “Why can you shapeshift, Mumbo? I thought you were human.”

“I’m sure at least a few other humans can do what I did,” he says, holding his rock, which is very smooth and has a cool-looking reddish stripe in it.

“…I don’t know if they can.”

“Then why do they have phrases about becoming what you eat? That has to be from somewhere.”

Pearl and Gem both glance at each other, and shrug.

“You know, that sounds right,” Gem says. “Carry on, Mumbo Jumbolio.”

Mumbo brightens at that. They spend several fun hours discussing the properties of metamorphic rocks.

It’s the beginning of the new season. A fresh start.

Pearl’s happy to have one. She’s got a new look just for the occasion. There are shiny freckles on her face, and antennae in her hair; she’s added moth wings to her back, and cut her hoodie to fit. There’s laughs, and the energy is light. She and Gem even have a redo initiation, which ends in several hermits’ deaths, all in good fun.

Scar catches her at some point during the day, as she’s using her new wings to get to the top of one of the larger, more annoying oak trees. “Hey there, young lady!” he shouts. “You can’t use your wings like that! It’s cheating!”

Pearl floats back down to the ground, looking him up and down. “Your wheelchair’s flying a foot off the ground.”

“Hey now! This wheelchair is floating, not flying. There’s a big difference, there.”

“I saw you flying above water an hour ago!”

“Floating above water,” Scar grins.

Grian decides to show up then, jumping down from the canopy. He must have gotten a few good supplies already, because he’s sporting shiny diamond pants. He glides down using his wings, not taking any fall damage because of it.

“How’s everything going? Also, I’m loving the matador look, Scar.” He nods towards the now-elven man.

“Nothing much at all, I’m just stopping Pearl from cheating with her new wings,” Scar said.

“All of us can fly here!” Pearl yells, with no heat to it.

Grian laughs. “But only one of us is cheating.”

“And you’re going to tell me that, on Hermitcraft, you’re strongly committed to not using your wings until everyone has elytras?”

Grian nods like an altar boy. “How could you, Pearl? You think so little of me! I would never try to gain an unfair advantage against my fellow servermates, who I respect deeply.”

Pearl recalls her long friendship with Grian, their first servers, their many adventurers, going back so far she barely remembers a time they didn’t know each other. She remembers when he first got wings, and how, immediately after, he’d insist people PVP him, then take to the sky and drop arrows on their heads.

Grian smiles at her, daring her to retort.

“Hmmmm,” she says. She loves this, all of it. The teasing, her friends, the new start.  Her new wings. She feels content, the way things have ended up.

She still has nightmares, of course, and wakes up shaking from them. She doesn’t really like caves, and prefers to stay aboveground. There’s also a chilling new pile of instincts that are slowly coming to the forefront of her mind, making her want the same as her captors did - she wants to watch with her farsight, and even more unsettlingly, she wants entertainment. It eats at her, knowing that part of the reason the watchers caused them so much pain is now inside of her, driving some of her decisions. She doesn’t know if she can come to terms with it.

Still, she’s got friends by her side, adventurers to go on, and a scary amount of power (that she’s hoping will give her an advantage in the next MCC). She’s changed, in an irreversible way, through horrible means, but she’s still alive. 

She’s still here.