Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s hot. 

Sweltering, if you will. If you have the energy for eloquence, the willingness to use a thesaurus, or the abililty to think of any word that isn’t hot .

There are other things that Zam feels when he wakes up—confused, uncomfortable, dry—but it’s the heat, the beams of sunshine that especially strike him before he even opens his eyes. He still chooses not to, because he’s familiar with the brightness of the sun that would welcome him if he were to open them, and he’d rather not face it.

He’s laying on the ground, a large mass of scratchy, rocky grain surrounding him. With the way it bites into his skin, pressing into and invading every part it can reach, Zam feels obliged to stand up, just to escape the warm, hostile ground.

He tries to stand, the ground warping beneath his feet makes the task a little difficult, but he manages. He opens his eyes just as the sand begins to stop falling from the movement.

It’s hot.

He can still feel the sand. Instictually, Zam brushes himself off. A few grains fall, but he can still feel more on his skin, beneath his clothes. 

It’s a pointless effort to try and rid himself of sand—for now, at least—so he turns his attention to surroundings.

From here to the vast, accompanied by the occasional cactus, dead bush, or patch of dry grass, is sand. Ceaselessly. It’s entirely devoid of human life beside himself, not a pyramid, a well, or any visible tampering with the desert in sight.

Zam blocks the sun from his eyes and squints to see any farther, but there’s still nothing but desert.

It’s empty.

And hot.

How did he even get here?

From what he can remember—

his reign over the empire; the war against wemmbu; his life’s work falling to pieces, blown to bits while he watches helplessly; trapped in a prison with wemmbu; barely escaping with his life; joining the mafia, attempting to cling to any power he can grab onto; losing; losing; losing

—it’s a little blurry.

The circumstances which led to his arrival in this desert are… unclear, to say the least. So, finding his way to wherever he can call home, if something like that still exists on this server, will be difficult.

There’s really nothing he can do other than take the first step. 

So he does, shifting his weight and moving one foot forward.

Of course, the sand shifts around his foot planted in the ground, and he loses his standing, falling face-first into the ground.

Zam doesn’t try to get back up. Just lying here, he can pretend the desert, his current predicament, isn’t something he has to worry about. He can close his eyes and pretend this is just a dream. A prophetic, metaphorical dream about the future to come. 

Though, that doesn’t really bode well for him, does it?

“Fuck.”

It’s hot.

And now, there’s sand in his mouth. Gross.

Chapter Text

A sharp piercing pain, followed by a dribble of warm liquid down his back. This repeats—although lesser—onto his sides, the back of his legs, and, very briefly, at the base of his neck. This is the first thing Wemmbu feels when he wakes up.

When he opens his eyes, he finds himself looking up at the harshly blue sky at a slant. He’s not laying on the ground—his feet are planted against it as the grains of sand around them shift against his weight. Instead, he’s leaning against something, and that something is painful.

Wemmbu tries to push himself upward, pressing his hands into the sharp, stabbing thing he’s held up by, only to feel the same pain, but ten times worse. 

Still, he manages to push himself away.

There’s just a bit more blood outside of his body rather than flowing on the inside than he would’ve liked. It’s not like there’s much he can do about it though, other than get some water to wash it off and get some food for regen.

Wemmbu looks out, and finds only dunes, stretching from the small dune slack he stands in into what looks like infinity.

This is not optimal.

Possibly even bad, one might say.

Well, it’s not the first time he’s been in this sort of sticky situation where he’s found himself in the middle of nowhere with practically nothing. This time, it appears he has… his mace, Gambit, and the clothes he wears on his body. Great . It seems like this “adventure” might end up being a more difficult one…

He turns to look at what he was leaning against and—a cactus. Or, multiple cacti leaning against each other to hold up his weight and not collapse. A few of the cacti spines are dripping red.

The sharp pain, for a moment, resurges. 

Absent-mindedly, he wonders how long he was asleep on top of the cacti, and how much blood he could have lost. 

Wemmbu looks at his hands, the same hands he pressed, willingly, against the spines of the cacti—now bathed in his own blood. The pricks were bad enough to pierce his skin and leave a decent mark (that is, the blood), but not an ailing wound. This would hurt, but only for now, so long as he gets something he can use to heal up. A golden apple or anything that can provide saturation would do.

Given his lack of inventory, it’s best he gets a move on so he can actually find something, anything he can use.

So, Wemmbu takes his first step into his search for… civilization? Structures? Mobs or food? Anything that can help him.

Or, with what he’s seeing right now—miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of sand, and maybe more—anything at all.

✧ ★ ✧

Attemping to search is a little difficult, to start.

Aside from the desert conditions themselves, there are a few issues. Namely, the blood on his back had begun to dry, sticking his sweaty cotton t-shirt to his skin—attempting to move his back felt like his skin might peel off with the shirt as it shifted around. The injury from the cacti may not have been deep, but its surface area per se was still an issue. Still, it wouldn’t have been an issue had he been wearing his jacket—a purple, lightweight windbreaker—which would have been much more difficult to pierce. Instead, it was tied around his waist. 

Wemmbu reaffirms that, given he had no choice in his current predicament, this outcome was not his fault.

Umm. Well. 

He thinks he had no choice. But—

He doesn’t quite remember. Whatever happened before is like some kind of void in his mind—it’s just gone.

Wemmbu knows himself, though. This isn’t a choice he would take.

Probably.

Anyway—

Wemmbu takes a seat on the ground, his legs crossed into a pretzel shape like how a child or Eggchan—speaking of, where’s he at?—might sit.

The solution here, Wemmbu decides, is to get the shirt off of his body before blood platelets decide to lay full claim over it, then to put the windbreaker on to prevent any sand from getting into the injury on his back. He’s hoping that the purple jacket shouldn’t result in the same sticking issue as the shirt given its waterproof material and that the blood should be mostly dried already, but if not… He’ll just have to deal with it.

It’s going to hurt regardless.

He removes the shirt from the front, so it’s not covering his body, but it’s still attached through the dried blood. Then, he carefully peels the shirt away from his back as well. It’s like ripping off a bandaid, but in the excruciatingly slow way. 

He’d love to quickly rip away the shirt in one go, but the shirt is not, in fact, a bandaid, and has a very real chance of taking a chunk of skin alongside the blood. Well, he thinks this at least, but he’s not one-hundred percent sure. The sharper bites of pain when he peels the shirt a little too quickly leave him not willing to test this hypothesis with an experiment—Wemmbu’s not in the mood for the scientific method.

Overall, it hurts. A lot. Both in his back and in his hands, which still ceaselessly ache from the occasional needed use of pressure to grab onto the shirt properly.

Quickly, Wemmbu puts the windbreaker on, and zips up the front. He tries to limit it from touching his back too much.

In his hand, Wemmbu holds the shirt. One side of it is clean white, though with a bit of a sweat stain, and the other is stained red. Though, the stain wasn’t as bad as he thought it was, so he probably wasn’t as hurt as he felt. He spins the shirt around his finger, wrapping it up into a ball, quickly but gently wipes the blood from his hands onto it, and shoves it into a large pocket in his pants.

As gross as the shirt is, it probably isn’t a good idea to throw away the only shirt in his possession. If—when he encounters water in the future, he could probably clean it at least a bit, even if he couldn’t remove the stain.

With the main obstacle to Wemmbu’s Desert Adventures solved, now he has to face the desert conditions themselves.

It’s hot, of course. But even with the windbreaker making it a little warmer than he likes, he trudges onwards.

Wemmbu climbs to the top of a dune, and a breeze blasts sand right past him. It doesn’t hit him in the face or eyes, thankfully, but it still provides him with a bit of cooler air temporarily. With a higher vantage point than the valley between the dunes, he’s able to see much more—but also nothing more.

It all looks the same, like someone used world-edit to copy and paste the same features over and over. Well, it doesn’t actually, but with how little actually spawns in the natural generation of a desert, it may as well be. It’s just shitty cacti and patches of dry grass, sometimes with the occasional bright pink cactus flower. The cactus flowers aren’t something he’s used to seeing, but just spinning in a circle to see so many has already made him sick of them.

More sand dunes. Some dead bushes. An arroyo that hasn’t filled with water in what looks like years, flowing far from one direction into the opposite. Fuck if he knows which cardinal directions those are.

Like lightning has struck, it pops into Wemmbu’s mind that he actually can check which direction it flows, as he grabs his communicator from a pocket, different from the one in which his shirt resides—that would be gross to intermix the tech stuff with the things to wash.

Wemmbu clicks into the communicator’s navigation button—the third functional button from the left above the screen—and the screen activates, showcasing…

Well.

The coordinates section of the navigation screen is fully blurred, which— great . The biome is a desert, how helpful, thank you so much. The compass still seems to be working, though, telling him that he’s facing north, so the arroyo flows from the north to the south. Or the opposite, there’s no water in it to tell him.

All of this is useful information. Obviously.

Wemmbu wonders what he should be doing, at a time like this. He has nothing, no information, no gear besides his mace, and not a hint of a direction to take. If he can’t see his coords, it’s not like he can get help from anyone. Not that he needs it, really—he can handle things on his own, and that isn’t going to change now, if ever.

He supposes he should look for signs of people. Maybe then he can access an ender chest, get himself an elytra and rockets, and book it somewhere less stranded. Less hostile, and less willing to hurt him the second he arrives. Somewhere he can use the navigation on his communicator.

Wemmbu climbs down from the dune, and decides to follow the path predetermined by nature itself, and follows the arroyo north. The left bank of the arroyo is covered in dried grass that will only get in his way, so he walks on the right bank.

In the dune slack, it’s less windy, but also hotter. That’s the trade-off, Wemmbu supposes. But it feels nicer even with the heat, strangely enough. With the view of the seemingly infinite desert blocked off by the height of the dunes, the vast world seems less likely to consume him.

It doesn’t feel any safer.

✧ ★ ✧

The sun is still high in the sky, and Wemmbu continues to find nothing of interest. Is time moving slower? It certainly seems like it. But maybe it was a perception thing—like the reverse of time flies when you’re having fun where time swims against the tide of a fast-flowing river when you’re bored as shit . It’s not like he’s been keeping track.

It’s still hot as hell.

The arroyo is shallower here, the amount of water that formed it unable to flow this far into the desert. He feels like he followed the wrong path, now not only is he still lacking substantial progress beyond wandering—for now, he hopes—but now his feet ache from walking.

Wemmbu makes a sharp right from the fading arroyo and climbs atop another dune, this one crescent shaped. A breeze hits him as he reaches the peak. It's a nice reprieve, and thankfully not sand-filled.

He takes a seat, and stares out around him to see both what is familiar and completely unfamiliar. You, reader, guessed it: it’s more of the same shitty desert!

It’s break time, Wemmbu decides, and rips his shoes—boots meant for combat and armor, entirely unfit for walking around in a desert—from his feet. It feels great.

He unzips and removes his jacket, and then inspects the inside back panel. No blood, that’s good. The copious cacti spine wounds felt a little better, and he can only barely feel the phantom sting of the spikes in his skin. His hands still ache, but he can’t get away with not using them to try and ease that pain—it’s just not a possibility.

Still, he needs some saturation to actually feel good . But with the way things are looking, that might take a while.

Wemmbu puts the jacket back on, but doesn’t zip it up. Even with the breeze on the dune, it’s too hot for that, now—the heat’s gotten worse since earlier, especially combined with his walking.

So, he takes his break.

And sits.

And looks out into the distance.

It’s almost calming, really. There’s something peaceful about staring out into nothing, knowing that you’re the best thing to happen to this purposeless place.

Wemmbu reaches down beside his right pocket, and removes a heavy, metal object from its weapon holster. The mace, Gambit, is a strange thing; holding by the core is difficult because it seems so heavy (and it is), but holding it by the handle—the breeze rod—is easy, like holding air. It’s cool to the touch, too, which is nice. A completely different mood from the desert. It doesn’t even hurt his aching hand, which maybe has gone a little numb.

Other than himself—the only conscious living being in the desert that he knows of—everything about this place is quiet, unmoving, stagnant.

Oh, and other than the soft wind that quietly whistles as it passes by on the sides and peaks of sand dunes.

…And other than that thing in the distance that looks like it's moving.

It blends in with the yellow-gold sand—it could be nothing, like a heat-distortion induced mirage. That thing where it gets really hot and it gets really blurry and it looks like something’s moving even though nothing’s there.

…

It— the red, black, and yellow thing is decidedly not a mirage—is moving closer.

Something else alive is in the desert with him.

Wemmbu hopes it’s something— someone who might be able to provide insight, who can help him understand more about this place.

Or someone with gear. So that he can kill them.

That would be good, too.

Chapter Text

Everything is fine, Wemmbu tells himself.

Upon approaching the thing he thought was something that could help him, he was sorely disappointed. It was nothing, really. Just a pest.

“Ummm… Hello?”

Something waves in front of his face—another part of the illusion, as it were.

Wemmbu continues walking past the mirage, and where he first saw it. Considering it’s not nothing , just something useless , it probably came from somewhere. So, he might as well search in that direction. Maybe there’s a clue related to how he arrived in the desert.

“Wemmbu? Are you ignoring me?”

Yes, his arrival to this place. That’s something important to figuring out…the mystery? This whole thing feels like some puzzle he has to solve. Only there are no clues. And no deus ex machina hint-givers that appear whenever you’re struggling to figure it out. 

Well, other than this bug buzzing around that he’s trying to trace the origins of. Wemmbu’s kind of hoping that by walking this way, maybe he’ll find a hint of something, or put some pieces together at least.

Beside him, at his right, the sand on the ground crunches as though it’s being walked on.

“Where are you even going, man? There’s nothing that way—I just came from there. And why aren’t you wearing a shirt? You look pretty stupid with just the unzipped windbreaker. It kind of kills your whole vibe, y’know.”

Wemmbu walks, and fiddles with the zipper of the jacket as he goes. The area in front of him, as similar as it looks to everything else he’s seen, has to have something different about it. There has to be some significance to it. Maybe. He’s not the smart one here, but if this is anything like Wato’s escape room, anything could be worth looking into. Maybe there could be something linking both his and the pest’s arrival spots, and that could be something…

Ugh. This is hard. Whatever.

Wemmbu has his boots back on; he put them on before leaving the dune he was resting on. It’s not the best footwear one could have in the desert—and he’d much rather be barefoot—but he’d rather not carry them around or leave them behind and be unable to retrieve them. 

It’d be better if he actually had gear, though. No threats—other than the pest, and that one’s only a minor possibility of being an issue—have arisen yet, so the need for gear hasn’t come about either, but if any problem does occur… 

Well, if there’s one thing Wemmbu knows how to do, it’s fight his way out of any issue.

“What with that look on your face, huh? Wemmbu, are you thinking about fighting people? You’re so obvious.”

There’s this annoying sound ringing in his ear. Wemmbu’s eye twitches.

He continues to walk. There’s not much else to do here.

“You know, there’s more to life than fighting. I don’t think you’ll ever live a peaceful life, me personally. Just feeding yourself to this… cycle of violence is only going to get you killed in the end.”

The fuck is this guy— this bug buzzing about?

What even—

Ugh.

Wemmbu, regardless of whatever noises are flooding his ears, walks on. 

As hot and miserable as this place is, and it is , there’s something a little serene about how empty it is. It’s worrying, sure, definitely, but at least there’s not too much that can bother him. Sure, there are stupid cacti, and bugs, and useless dead bushes, and patches of dry grass that only emphasize the lack of meaningful existence—

But still. It’s not the same chaotic fight for power he’s used to. It’s nice in a different sort of way. Like a break, kind of. Not something he’d like permanent.

Wemmbu blinks.

Something moves.

It’s not familiar.

“Not that I care. Keep fighting, actually. I can’t wait to see you die at the fault of your own hubris.”

The noise, Wemmbu tells himself, is nothing. Even as something hot rises to his ears, his face, in a way he knows isn’t the climate.

In his peripheral, something moves. Swishes? Breathes, maybe?

It’s not familiar.

“I hope you do.”

Wemmbu lunges for it, quickly grasping the handle of Gambit and swinging the heavy core right into it. Under the weight of the swing alongside the mace’s spikes slicing into it, the normal force does nothing to stop the blow—there’s no resistance at all.

There’s a loud crunch , reminiscent of the sound of biting into a nice refreshing slice of watermelon. God, that’d taste good right now.

“Dude! What the hell?!”

On the ground are bits of green scattered on the ground. If some of it were red, it would actually look pretty similar to a crushed watermelon. Or blood and brain matter, if it were someone’s head.

But it wasn’t.

It was just a cactus—one that looked like it was moving with the combined effort of the small, short breeze and the persistent heat haze that made everything look wrong.

Wemmbu stares into the middle distance, where the cactus once stood tall. If all it took was a little heat and just a bit of irritation to do, well, that …

He will be able to get out of this place—

Wemmbu looks at the one beside him, staring incredulously at both him and the remains of his last action scattered in the sand in his stupid gold, black, and red regalia. He catches the other’s eye, unsure of the ideas behind it—unsure what plan is in store for him. It can’t be good, considering… Well. Everything.

—he has to.

✧ ★ ✧

Walking is boring, there’s nothing here, and it’s all pointless. Given Wemmbu has autonomy over his actions and recognizes this fact, he stops. It’s that simple.

Finding some clue, if it even exists, isn’t going to get him anywhere because—let’s all be honest here, we know what happens when one tries to get Wemmbu to solve a needlessly complex puzzle that you can’t just brute force—he just isn’t going to figure it out. That’s just the reality of the situation.

Wemmbu brings out his communicator, and pressed down one of the buttons on top on the far right. On the blank screen is now text: Create Group and Join Group . With the buttons below the screen, but not the keyboard, he selects the create group option.

“You know, Wemmbu, calling isn’t something I’ve tested yet. I don’t think it’ll work, but—hey, at least you’re trying something worth your time.”

Wemmu ignores this and takes the earpiece from the comm and puts it in his ear. Using the invite player feature, he tries to invite Eggchan—but, uh.

“Told ya.”

An error message takes up the screen:

[ (!) Invite request not sent.]

Not to point out the obvious, but for even calls to not be supported in a server where information can be transmitted from spawn to the farlands … Well, this place has to be so far away from any civilization that it probably shouldn’t even exist.

Or maybe the group function is just under maintenance…? That’s more likely than existing in a place that shouldn’t, at the very least.

Wemmbu removes the earpiece, puts it back in its spot, and taps the button to the left of the button for accessing groups on his communicator. 

“Yeahhh… That won’t work, either. Tried it a while ago. I actually tried messaging you, believe it or not—completely did not send.”

He shoots two messages to Eggchan.

A shadow forms over his shoulder.

You whisper to eggchan: yo bro where r u

You whisper to eggchan: idk about u but im in a desert with a shitty bug following me around

[ (!) 2 messages not sent.]

“Are you seriously pretending like I’m a fucking bug, Wemmbu? Really? And isn’t that my line anyway?”

Ugh, and it still won’t stop buzzing.

It’s getting really annoying at this point. Wemmbu waves his hand around in the air where the shadow is in hopes of deterring the pest.

“You can’t just swat a guy, man. This hurts my feelings… Well, not really, but you get what I mean.”

Wemmbu attempts to send out two more messages, just as a test.

You whisper to Wato1876: test

[ (!) 1 message not sent.]

You message to loppezz: test

[ (!) 1 message not sent.]

Alas.

“Dude, if you want to talk to someone so bad, you can quit pretending like I don’t exist.”

I need to do something else, something more productive than wasting my time with this , Wemmbu thinks as he powers down the communicator and shoves it into its spot in his inventory.

Wemmbu tightly grasps his mace. The aching pain in his hands has gone numb, but still not dissipated, and now he faces another issue—he’s not satisfied. Even after the cactus from earlier—now that he thought about it, it was good vengeance against cacti as a whole for his back and shirt—having not achieved a single real success since his arrival hurts. Wemmbu wants a real win, a real push for progress in getting out of this stupid desert to literally anywhere else.

“Uh, Wemmbu? Are you done with your—brooding or whatever the fuck it is you’re doing? ”

Wemmbu puts Gambit back in its place by his side.

It’s not worth it.

✧ ★ ✧

Now that he thinks about it, he’s rather hungry. And the sound that just escaped his empty stomach just confirms that theory.

There are usually rabbits, the ones that blend in really well with sand, in the desert, right? Wemmbu doesn’t have a way to cook one, but, hey, something’s better than nothing.

“Wemmbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.”

God, it’s like tinnitus in his ears that just won’t stop. Usually that sort of thing goes away when he notices it, but right now it really doesn’t.

“Are you still doing this, really?”

For a moment, Wemmbu thinks he sees a rabbit, but when he squints his eyes to focus—it’s the stupid heat haze again.

His shadow is longer than it was earlier. Another shadow, almost as long as his own, stands close by. Turning around, the sun is lower in the sky than before.

At least he wouldn’t have to deal with the heat and all the mirages that come with it soon.

It would be cold instead. Dark.

And there would be mobs.

“Like, I get it, it was a little funny at first, but— it’s getting kind of— I’m— I’m getting sick of it.” A pause. “We should… We should be working together in this.”

Just a mace would not be enough to handle an unlit desert’s worth of mobs. It just isn’t enough, not without any armor or protective equipment.

Ugh.

Wemmbu really does not want to do this.

“Can you be done ignoring me already?”

He turns to his 7 from where the sound originates, and locks eyes with the person standing there.

Wemmbu quickly realizes that he hasn’t actually looked at him directly a single time since first encountering him. His eyes, though widened in slight shock, are as dark as he remembers, and Wemmbu is reminded of their final meeting in the end—when they last worked together.

Things have changed since then, of course. His hair doesn’t frame his face as regally as it used to, and he’s since ditched his dumb little cape—not as put together as usual. His crown still sits atop his head regardless, showing off a status he no longer has.

He has no power here, as much as he’d like to think he might—Wemmbu’s the one who holds it, now.

So, Wemmbu speaks his first words to Zam:

“ Sure , let’s chat.”