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thetomorrowshow · 2 years

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Grian was obliterated by a sonically-charged shriek

GoodTimeWithScar died

“Tim?”

Jimmy doesn’t look up. Not yet. Instead, he gazes down, closer, at where Scar had spontaneously exploded into nothing, his possessions flying every which way. It had been a lonely death for both of them. Like his own.

“Tim,” Grian says again, and Jimmy looks up at him. He looks . . . like himself. A bit frazzled, a bit of Red still glinting in his eyes, but that’s just Grian, really. Behind him, Scar waves, fully clothed once again.

“Why are you here?”

Jimmy almost laughs at that, because where else would he be? He’s always been here, in a sense. So has Grian.

Grian’s different, though. Grian fights back. Grian doesn’t want to be here.

Jimmy closes the eyes he has on Martyn and Pearl and Etho and focuses all of his attention on Grian. “I have to be here,” he says eventually. “You know that.”

And maybe Grian pretends he doesn’t know, but the look Scar gives him is not insignificant. Scar knows Grian quite well, has been around him long enough, will stay with him (Jimmy can See the strings that still connect the two, can See that their futures are sewn together into one seam). Scar knows a thing or two about Seeing.

Grian snorts. “Who are you hanging around for this time? Scott, Martyn, Joel—the game’s over, Timmy. Go home.”

“Funny,” Jimmy mumbles, a pang echoing through his chest. “That’s just what Tango said.”

“Listen to him,” advises Grian, patting Jimmy heavily on the shoulder. “You’re on a new server, aren’t you? Something about kingdoms?”

Grian knows full well where Jimmy lives. Jimmy feels his eyes sometimes, late at night when they’re both supposed to be fast asleep, a foreign sense of panic and then relief at finding him exactly where he’s supposed to be. He humors Grian, though, nods.

“Right. Go there. Forget about these guys, they’ll be along soon enough. Yeah?”

There’s something hopeful in Grian’s tone, in the way he almost-but-doesn’t grab Jimmy’s hand.

Jimmy hates disappointing people.

He shakes his head. “My work here isn’t done,” he says softly. “You know that.”

Grian’s jaw tightens, his face smoothing over into blankness.

“Fine. Do what you want, I can’t stop you.”

Grian could try to stop him, if he really wanted to. He was always so powerful. But the avian glances at Scar, then back at Jimmy, and Jimmy wonders briefly if Grian really thinks Scar doesn’t know.

After all, if Scar was any less aware of the situation at hand, he wouldn’t be able to see Jimmy at all.

There’s not another word from Grian as he stomps off, disappearing into the mist that surrounds them. Scar hangs back, shoots Jimmy what’s likely meant to be a calming smile.

“He’s just grumpy that he got us killed, don’t worry about him,” Scar says jovially. Then, quieter, more considerate, he adds, “He’s scared for you. He thinks you’re . . . employed against your will, shall we say.”

“I’ve been a Watcher for quite a bit longer than he ever was, thanks,” Jimmy retorts, and to Scar’s credit he doesn’t even blink. “And he knows what I am, who I am. Tell him if he’s got a problem with that, he can bring it up with the Prophecies of Old, all right?”

Scar grimaces. “I’m sure he knows . . . whatever that’s all about. Season Eight just spooked him, is all. And then this. . . .” he clears his throat. “He'll be back to regular-ol’-Grian in no time! Well, gotta get back to my theme park. See ya, TJ!”

And then Scar’s gone, mist covering him in one great cloud and then breaking apart to reveal he’s vanished. Jimmy nearly laughs—typical Scar and his magic tricks.

There’s still four pairs for him to Watch. And from what Jimmy’s seen (and what he’s Seen) of this game, he knows which ones are going to lose.

His going first had been a given, really—he has to be outside of the game to really manipulate anything. Tango had been an unfortunate byproduct of that.

Next was Ren and BigB, mostly due to Grian’s trap prophecy—and maybe Jimmy ought to find an assistant, because it’s getting rather hard to keep track of all these prophecies and bring them to fruition, but he managed that one rather nicely and then made certain that none of Grian’s traps worked for the rest of the game, which ultimately led to his downfall.

It’s just the four pairs left now, and it’s easy to push subconsciously for the portal to be trapped, and even easier to push both Joel and Etho through it. He had planned for a while for them to die, but Etho’s slippery and Joel’s unexpected, so he feels some sort of vindictive pleasure when Joel swears his way through the After and into the Beyond (trying to forget the abject horror with which he Listened to Joel’s agonized pleas for Etho to find safety, to not feel this pain).

Impulse and Bdubs are an easy choice after that, even though Pearl really should not be able to win that fight. Bdubs Sees a bit more than he should, sticks his tongue out at Jimmy as Impulse pulls him back to Hermitcraft, seeing nothing.

And then he has to end it.

Jimmy can See his friends, the smudges of dirt and dried blood that paint them, the haggard lines of exhaustion in their faces. He can Hear the desperation in their thoughts, the way their voices beg for mercy.

He’s perhaps the only one who can grant it.

And he’s made his choice.

Maybe it’s the ghost of his voice that whispers for Martyn to turn against Scott, and maybe he chooses Martyn because of how well Martyn Listens, but Martyn just tilts his head, nods, and nocks a firework.

Cleo doesn’t want to go along with him, but she has to. Jimmy makes sure to eliminate all of her other options. He sends them after Pearl. He wants to give the victor a little more victory before the end.

When they die, they appear beside Jimmy just as everyone else has, but unlike everyone else, Jimmy speaks to them.

“Hey, Martyn,” he says, and Martyn looks every which way before his face dawns with comprehension.

“Timmy,” he chuckles, even as Cleo frowns at him. “Thought the voice sounded like you. Third again, Tim—have you got something against me?”

“Who are you talking to?” Cleo asks. “We’re alone.”

“It’s not your turn yet,” is all Jimmy can say. He’s not sure when it’ll be Martyn’s turn—there’s dozens of prophecies he has to sort through before deciding which threads to follow next time, and he doesn’t even know if any of them have Martyn as a winner. The Watchers and Listeners alike are rather frustrated with Martyn lately; he wouldn’t put it past them to make him suffer for a while.

“That sucks. Least I didn’t kill myself this time, am I right?”

“Sure. Good job, Martyn.” Jimmy tells him, voice purposefully placating. Martyn doesn’t sputter in outrage, though, as he would in the games. He just shoots a tired smile in the opposite direction of Jimmy (who Sees it anyway) and says,

“How long are you here for?”

Cleo rolls her eyes and steps into the mist, past death. Martyn lingers, waiting—hopefully, almost—for an answer.

Jimmy checks up on Scott and Pearl. They’ve still not met up, yet, Scott taking a moment to rest before finding her.

“Not long,” he says after a moment, the bloodlust that’s been plaguing everyone’s thoughts for so long (and giving him a horrid headache) finally beginning to abate. “Why?”

Martyn shuffles his feet a little bit, shrugs. “I dunno. Figured you might not want to be alone after this, might want to hang out. Yeah?”

Jimmy doesn’t remind him that he’s got an entire server to return to, plenty of friends waiting for him. He knows that Martyn’s not asking for Jimmy’s sake.

“I’ll message you,” he promises, and Martyn smiles again before fading into the mist.

Then all that’s left is the victor.

And Scott.

And Jimmy, of course, but he doesn’t ever really count himself when it comes to these games, even when he’s still within them. He’s always out first, he always has to be—and not only for prophecy purposes. Grian really doesn’t like Watchers—or any sort of outsider—intruding on his territory, but someone has to be there to make sure there’s safe passage to another world.

Scott’s making his way toward Pearl now. Pearl’s still cuddling her dogs, telling them all about how she won.

And then Scott’s there, just behind her, and maybe it’s a little push from Jimmy that puts the idea in Scott’s head, gets him to start unbuckling his chestplate.

It’s not like Scott will ever know. With the Red bloodlust, Scott would be lucky to even recognize thoughts that are his own.

Pearl doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like Scott’s tower of tnt, doesn’t like that he’s talking to her, could be a distraction—her fingers flex around the sweat-stained leather of her sword hilt, ready to block any attack that comes, ready to slash the wire of a fishing rod—but Scott simply smiles, congratulates her, and lights his pyre.

She screams, quick and cut-off because soon enough Scott’s dead and just afterward she’s dead.

The world relaxes under Jimmy’s hands, held taut for so long. He relaxes as well. It’s over. It’s finally over.

Scott turns up before Pearl, and Jimmy, knowing all, knows why—he’s let her ghost linger for a few moments, long enough to say farewell to her dogs.

Scott looks around, and there’s a light behind the fading Red in his eyes that tells Jimmy exactly what he’s looking for, exactly what he’s remembering.

“No happy ending this time, eh?” he asks with a quirk of his lips. Jimmy chuckles. Scott can’t hear him or see him, though, so it’s a moment of humor reserved for himself.

Scott turns to leave, but pauses. “Don’t forget MCC this weekend, yeah?” he tosses over his shoulder. Then he’s gone.

And it’s just Jimmy.

And Pearl, who has suddenly appeared.

“Oh,” she says quietly, then louder, “hello? Is anyone here? Scott?”

She’ll leave soon enough and forget her loneliness, so Jimmy turns his attention toward more pressing matters. The world’s going to collapse entirely soon—otherwise it would just be taking up space—and Jimmy helps it along, grabbing a line of code and yanking, watching it unspool an entire hill. That’s always going to be satisfying to him, no matter how many times he does it.

A sound from beside him—she hasn’t left yet, oddly enough. “I’m still alone,” Pearl sniffles, and one unseeable eye blinking open before her shows Jimmy that she looks so terribly lost, tears just forming in her eyes. “Except I don’t even have Tilly with me, here. It’s just . . . me.”

What’s left of Pearl’s tower folds in on itself, vanishes as the world itself begins to twist. Box crumbles. Jimmy winces as his own grave cracks and disappears.

Pearl’s crying, Jimmy realizes with a start, a fat tear rolling down her cheek before she can stop it. She rubs at her eyes with the torn sleeve of her hoodie, takes in a shuddering breath.

“I wanna go home,” she whispers to no one, and Jimmy wonders why she doesn’t. “Which way is home?”

Oh. If Jimmy isn’t mistaken, she’s glitched.

It’s not the first time he’s had to deal with a glitched player in one of Grian’s death worlds. Last game, Bdubs’s final death had glitched similarly, leaving him stuck in the limbo of the void. He’d started to become Watcherish for the week that he was stuck, looking down at the game below and eventually Seeing. It had taken Jimmy far too long to try the simplest solution, the one that actually got him out, after working through dozens of different ones.

This time, he takes Pearl’s hand before he tries anything else.

She gasps, but she doesn’t let go. Instead, her grip tightens around Jimmy’s not-quite-corporeal hand.

“I’ll lead you home,” he tells her, knowing she’ll hear nothing.

Pearl, to her credit, follows.

She doesn’t stop crying, which is awkward for Jimmy, really, because how is he meant to comfort someone to whom he is nothing more than mist right now? And sometimes her cries are less anguished and more angry, and that’s a whole issue that he really doesn’t want to deal with so maybe it’s better that he can’t help.

She’ll start feeling better once she’s on Hermitcraft again. Red still stains her skin and mind, leftover from being Last. Both Grian and Scott had each had a particularly difficult time shaking off the despairing bloodlust after their respective wins.

But neither of them had glitched. Both had moved on almost instantly to their next servers. Pearl is stuck here with all of those warped feelings.

He doesn’t envy her position. He does pity it.

It’s not a short walk to Hermitcraft, but not a particularly long one either—Jimmy leads her into the mist for maybe ten minutes before he starts feeling the pull, that distinct Hermity feeling that tells him in gentle whispers that this is where Pearl belongs.

He releases her hand and her defenses shoot up, face guarded and one hand ready to punch while the other grasps aimlessly at nothing.

She needs a final push, then. If she were more in her right mind, she would have sensed the pull of her home.

And she just looks so terribly lonely.

So Jimmy forces all of his strength into giving his body weight and wraps her in a hug.

She’s surprised, and murder is still very much at the forefront of her mind, but after a moment she relaxes into it, hugs him back, her hands grabbing for a body that isn’t there to her. She sighs, butts her head up against him, her head finally going quiet enough that it isn’t grating on Jimmy’s ears.

“Don’t know who you are,” she says. “Too tall to be Grian, which is who I expected, really. Thank you, though—whoever you are.”

“You’re welcome,” Jimmy responds, and she still doesn’t hear him, but she lets him ease her into Hermitcraft’s current before releasing her to disappear into it.

And he’s really been alone for quite some time, but finally he’s alone-alone, with no more voices and faces that he has to keep track of. He can just close all of his eyes and stop Seeing and stop Listening and just Stop for a moment.

There’s so much paperwork to do.

He could stay here to do it. Once he’s done overseeing the destruction of the server he could just hang out in the timeless nothing of the void, where no one can bother him and he can get it done on time, rather than cram it all into his schedule the night before the deadline.

Or he could go back to Tumble Town, finally get a chance to relax. Stretch out in his own bed with Deputy Norman by his side. Get dirt under his fingers, feel the mesa sun beat down on him, build something with his own two hands. It’s really not a tough choice to make.

He’s always been more Player than anything else.

So Jimmy goes the way Joel and Scott went, follows the thread that whispers of Empires until he finds the current, lets himself be washed away into it.

He’ll definitely do some of that paperwork tomorrow. Totally.

Jimmy wakes with a gasp, lungs frantically filling and refilling after so many days in the void without needing to breathe. He’d forgotten how much of an adjustment period properly having a body is (at least it’s not as bad as waking in the Cod Empire had been; the air of the mesa is much thinner and doesn’t feel like soup sliding down his throat).

Other than his breathing, it’s quiet. Not quiet in the way of the void, the suffocating silence only broken by the words of the dead. Quiet in the way of the world—wind kicking up a bit of sand outside, the cry of a faraway bird, Norman purring at the foot of the bed.

He thinks maybe he’ll build a shop today.

Jimmy takes a few more long minutes to figure out how to breathe and move before forcing himself up. He rolls out of bed, pulls on his jeans and buttons up his shirt. He grabs a bite of hardtack before stepping into his cowboy boots, dusts the crumbs off his hands and pins his sheriff badge onto his vest.

He’s about to step out the door when he realizes he’s almost forgotten the most important part! On a hook by the kitchen table is a beautiful ten-gallon hat, and he swings it on and fingers the part of the brim that’s already wearing thin before marching out the door, ready for a day of living.

A violet eye blinks open in the back of the hat.

#double life smp #trafficblr #dlsmp #double life fanfic #mcyt #jimmy solidarity #traffic smp #solidaritygaming #watcher jimmy #listener jimmy #listener martyn #ask to tag #empires smp #I TOLD YOU I WASNT HURTING HIM IN THIS ONE #so welcome to my new au #will be on ao3 once i title it #i don't currently have any ideas for writing more of it #but there's. there's a lot of lore here #the day the last dl ep came out i went into a haze and emerged two hours later with this #i didn't even know what it was about until the next day #there's so much lore for this au that i'm probably not gonna do much with #just bc i have other focuses atm #but basics: jimmy is a triple threat and the first one ever #which means there's a lot of prophecies abt him #and he's learning how to fulfill prophecies so he can bring peace to his peoples etc #very chosen one-esque ik #mas writes #anyways lmk what you think!#love you guys

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definitelynotshouting · 22 days

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Can I ask, since you mentioned agreeing 'even if under duress' - how did the Watchers convince Player Grian to join them in hunger au?

So take this with the specific grain of salt that ive never watched Evo directly (but have friends who have ((thank you wren)), so i know tidbits via osmosis from them), but my thought has always been that the riddles the Watchers gave the Evo Players were all tests used to measure cleverness and intelligence-- the whole point of them attempting to copy the mind of a Player into a Watcher larva in the first place was to try and avoid the insanely high infant mortality rate their typical juveniles go through, bc they dont understand their own limits enough to even know they have them yet. So they needed a Player they knew they could instruct and who would listen to them, and, well. Grian, for all he was rebellious and outright defiant of the Watchers, still solved their puzzles and only had to be punished once before he stopped trying to mess with them

What ive always pictured is after the dragon fight the two main elders of the Watcher colony finally revealed themselves to Grian properly-- i have this crystal clear image of the two of them hovering above and next to the central end island, looming over Grian, and like, these guys are big. HUGE. A good 5x bigger than the ender dragon itself, at LEAST. It would be hard not to feel insanely intimidated by that, honestly, especially when there are two of them side by side, blocking your entire view of the End from that direction.

Anyway picture that with the context of these two giant floating winged worms youve never seen before, who have demonstrated their powerful ability to manipulate code in a way you cant.... telling you that they have chosen you to become one of them. Thats an immense amount of pressure, both from flattery and fear, especially considering theyve punished you before for defying them. I like to think even then, Grian balked a bit, and while i dont have exact dialogue beats here, i know the Watchers continued putting that pressure on him (likely while leveraging his friendships too-- like ive always said, if Grian hadnt been chosen, BigB wouldve been, and i can absolutely see the Watchers offering to take him in Grian's stead) until he finally caved and accepted their "offer" of joining them.

Unfortunately, he didnt find out exactly what that entailed until it was far too late.

#shouting speaks #asks #hunger au #evo watchers #watcher!grian #grian #evo smp #tldr they pressured tf out of him to do it #through both flattery and also leveraging his own fear against him #he was a Player after all. they were likely bumping his mood post-dragon fight to make him more suggestible #the most painful thing abt this to me is that the Watchers still werent being deliberately malicious here like #with the way they viewed Players this was NORMAL to them #they just. didnt rlly consider them as much more than food/hosts for their young. in their eyes the Watcher that emerged was different #than the Player it had hatched from #even though it had Grian's mind memories personality and stats #every day i feel shrimp emotions abt this #the horror he went through..... and they never once thought of it as torture #they never once regarded Player!Grian as something that needed to know what was going to happen to him #bc it was normalized to them. yeah sure Watcher juveniles hatch from Player hosts thats NORMAL thats part of their life cycle!!!#the only new thing is this one would still retain the Player's mind #it was a fucked up science experiment basically and grian wasnt told ANYTHING before it actually happened to him #sobs and cries ohhh grian i fucked you up SO BAD huh #also huge shoutout to my friend wren for giving me a little context while i wrote this and confirming my ideas slotted in #rlly well with existing canon. character understander status continues to stay intact im winning #txt

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