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ice-cap-k · 6 months

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Surviving Dead

I don’t know if it is still a thing by the time you read this, but did you know that in Minecraft there was a bug where the Ender Dragon’s breath attack would still kill you even if you were holding a totem of undying? You would lose your items and then come back where you last set your spawn…

Cross-posted on AO3 here: Surviving Dead

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Cleo was born the day after she died.

Now, that probably doesn’t make much sense, does it? Unless you know Cleo pretty well. Then you would agree that the statement suits her.

She was a zombie, after all.

You might be able to tell if you spent enough time around her. Would notice the scar beneath her eye that never fully healed or faded. Or notice the way her hair and nails never grew any longer. The pale, bloodless skin that almost looked green in certain lighting was probably the biggest clue, though.

But it was more than that, though. Unlike the rest of the hermits who weren’t ‘undead,’ she left no trace.

Joe was the first one to notice it after she joined the server. She had misjudged the distance on her leap. The ground came rushing up to meet here.

“Whoah!”

She knew it wouldn’t hurt when the bones broke. That she of all people had the least to worry about if she died. Respawn was a nuisance that lost you time and left you scrambling to refind your items. But that didn’t stop the fear from seizing up her arms and legs. Her brain still went blank with panic, rendering the water bucket in her inventory useless. She always did have a fear of heights, and therefore afraid of the ground itself.

ZombieCleo fell from a high place

Cleo rolled out of bed with an annoyed sigh. At least she didn’t have to travel far without armor or tools.

Joe was waiting for her with a chest back by the cliffside. He sat on its lid, twiddling his thumbs, when she picked her way back down.

“I put your stuff in the chest,” he offered, slipping off the lid. ”I wasn’t sure where you would have set your spawn…”

“Oh, my bed’s not far.” She flipped open the lid. Sure enough, he had laid out the armor, pick, and sword carefully along the base of the chest so they wouldn’t scratch against each other. There were also a few stray ink sacks and a flower piled in the corner. When had she picked up those?

“You know, Cleo, I… uh… I saw you fall back there.”

If it had been anyone other than Joe, she would have rolled her eyes. “Yes, I realize. No need to go rubbing it in my face now. I never claimed to be good at survival.”

“No! No no no,” Joe threw his hands out, shaking his head. “That’s not what I meant!”

“Then what did you mean?”

The chest lid creaked closed once more. Now Cleo was the one to sit down on top of it so she could lace up her armor. The buckles on the chestplate were difficult to undo with undead fingers still half numb from respawning.

Another set of hands reached into view. Joe picked up the next strap down. He slid the leather through the metal clasp for her with ease. “I don’t know… I just… I’ve never seen you drop dead right in front of me before. Or if I did I never really noticed. It looked like you didn’t leave a body behind. You vanished the instant you hit the dirt.”

“Ah.”

When your average person died, their body lingered for a moment. There would be a flash of pain as the damage to their flesh and bones set in before their consciousness moved on. The husk they had left behind would linger for a moment, nothing more than an empty shell without a soul and nowhere to go. And after that short moment passed and reality caught up with the newly respawned hermit, the body would fade away only to eventually appear sometime later as nothing more than a hollow shell destined to wander the land looking for the piece of itself that had moved on without it. Forevermore looking for something to fill the gaping hole left inside.

A zombie, if you will.

Cleo didn’t have that issue. She had never come across previous iterations of herself. There were no other Cleo’s wandering around the caves like there were Joes, or Jevins, or Bdubs, or any other hermit, really. Nor would that ever happen.

She stopped bothering with the chest plate and moved on to the boots. She let Joe take it over instead. Regular laces were easier to tackle when you didn’t have circulation in your hands.

Joe took the chest plate without question. He sat down on the chest next to her, sliding the large piece of armor into his lap as he moved. Brown eyes flicked back and forth behind green glasses from the chest plate to Cleo’s face and back again.

“It’s fine. It’s FINE. It’s just a thing I do,” she muses. “One of those things that comes with not actually being alive. Don’t go worrying about it.”

“Are you sure it’s alright?”

“Of course. It’s normal for me.”

“Does it hurt?”

“B-what?!” Cleo dropped her half-tied laces. It took a moment for her to register what he was asking before she broke down laughing. Some of the tension left Joe’s shoulders as he realized she wasn’t upset. He even chuckled along nervously.

“No,” she said once she recomposed herself. “If anything, it hurts less when I respawn than it would when you do.” Part of it was because she didn’t have a body that would linger. Part of it was because her dead nerve endings couldn’t send out those sorts of signals at the rate a normal human body could. They were stunted and slow in comparison.

She finished up with the laces and pulled out the leggings. There were more straps on these, but she only had to loosen a few to slip back inside.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said with a nervous smile. “I guess I never really thought about how things might be different for you, with you being a zombie and all. “You’ve just been Cleo for as long as I’ve known you, and then something like that happens in front of my face and I can’t help but think, ‘Oh! That’s different.’”

“In all fairness, you met me after all this happened.” She motioned to herself.

“If I might ask, how did it happen?”

The strap fell from between her fingers.

“Only if it’s alright with you, though,” Joe added. He had finished up with the chest plate by now. It rested in his lap, waiting for whenever she was ready to throw it on. He leaned over. One shoulder gently bumped against her side. “You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. But if you do want to…”

She pursed her lips. "I don't think it's a matter of me not wanting to. It's more like I don't think I can."

Joe's nervous eyes narrowed. She could practically see the gears in his brain go into motion as he tried to parse out what she meant. "I didn't mean to bring up bad memories."

"That’s not it. It’s more like there isn't much for me to remember. I can't recall."

Her life before her undeath was an empty gap in her mind. Sometimes there were vague notions and feelings that crept up behind her when she least expected it. For instance, she had a feeling she had been a teacher in her previous life. It was her best guess considering the odd sense of deja vu that set in whenever she lectured one of the other hermits. It felt right.

Cleo was also fairly certain that who she had been before her untimely undeath had been a lot like who she was now. She wasn’t your typical wandering zombie. She didn’t hunger to fill some empty feeling deep inside. She still had a soul. A personality. A need to explore interests and desires. There was talent in her hands that let her build palaces and raise crops. That had to have come from somewhere. “Do you at least know how it happened?”

Sort of. But that wasn’t a very good answer.

“The first thing I can remember was being afraid. More afraid than I have ever been since,” she started. One leg of armor was fully strapped on. Her leg was firmly strapped into the greave of the other, covering everything from the knee down. The cuisse that was supposed to be covering her thigh was still hanging from the knee. Her hands moved automatically to finish tightening the leather fastenings into place.

“It was like I just woke up that way. One moment everything’s dark, and then the next, my eyes fly open and all I can think about is ‘I can’t breathe.’ I couldn’t see. I couldn’t move either, even though it felt like I was shaking like a leaf.“

It hurt like crazy, too. Not that I was physically hurt as far as I could tell later. But I suppose it’s a bit like how you describe dying from fall damage. You guys all say that you come back feeling like every bone in your body should be broken.”

But for me, it felt different. My skin burned like I had just been dipped in acid. When I closed my eyes, I saw an endless black sky and glowing purple eyes staring back at me. There was a little bit of that fear of falling, too. Like I thought I should have been falling through an abyss instead of lying down-“

“So that’s why you don’t like the End,” Joe cuts her off, eyes widening in realization. He pats a closed fist within the palm of his other hand like he’s just cracked a particularly difficult code.

“I don’t mind the End,” she snaps, playfully jabbing him in the side with an elbow. “I just have no illusions about it. I am fully aware that it is a terrible, dangerous place. And I have a healthy sense of self-preservation, unlike the rest of you.”

By now her legs are fully strapped into the armor. Joe offers the chest plate. He holds it up for her so she can slip inside. Then he reaches for the buckles at her side while she holds it in place. “We’re all professionals here. I’ll have you know that last time we beat the dragon I only cried once and died thrice.”

This time, Cleo really did roll her eyes. “Somehow, that’s still better than what I managed on that trip. Now where was I? Oh! So yeah, it didn’t feel like my bones were broken. I don’t think I died of fall damage, at least.”

“But the really weird part was that I woke up underground. In a box. Someone had gone and buried me. They must have thought I had been dead dead. No respawn. No fading body. Just me. And I suppose I was dead. It’s not like I have a heartbeat for them to feel anymore.

“It was pitch black down there. It took some fumbling around, but I managed to feel some other things in the box with me. There were jagged bits of ceramic. Couldn’t tell what those were. Some dead flowers were up by my head. They were nothing but dried-out leaves and petals at that point. And then there was a diamond pick. Whoever had buried me had been nice enough to put the pick in the box with me before closing the casket.

“It wasn’t enchanted, but it was better than nothing. There wasn’t much room to move around in the box. I couldn’t sit up straight or bend far enough to reach my toes, so I used the spike on one end to start scratching at the lid over my chest. It was the best I could do since I couldn’t swing it.

“The scraping noise it made was awful, but eventually I managed to break through. Soil came raining down as soon as I did. The hole I made widened as the dirt pressing down on it shifted. It all came down on top of me.

“It was heavy and it was everywhere; pressing down on my lungs, pinning my arm down… It got threateningly close to where I might just accidentally breathe it in…

“It felt like I would suffocate down there. In retrospect, it’s a good thing I don’t actually need to breathe. If I had, I probably would have been stuck in a death loop, assuming that my spawn was there at the time. It would have had to have been since that casket was the last place I had slept. And I was definitely having a panic attack so you can be sure there was no oxygen left in that box.

“And then I had to make the whole situation worse by pulling more dirt in. There was too much on top of the box. If I pushed out, it wouldn’t go anywhere. So it had to go somewhere. I had to use that pick to shove as much dirt as I could off to the bottom of the casket where my feet were.

“That seemed to do the trick, though. Once some of that soil wasn’t piled on top of the lid anymore, the ground had a bit more give to it. I could drag myself out through the mud, hand over hand…

She was vaguely aware that Joe had stopped messing with the straps hanging from her chest plate. Instead, he wrapped one arm around her shoulders and pulled her against his chest. The armor clattered at the sudden movement. “Joe-?”

His eyes were watery behind the lenses of his glasses. His other arm pulled her in for a tighter squeeze. “You must have been so scared.” Yeah. That’s pretty much how she started explaining all this. Still, it was Joe. “Yeah.” She awkwardly brought her own arm up so she could pat his back reassuringly. “But it’s alright now.”

He returned her pat with a well-meaning one of his own against her shoulder, only to wince as the edge of her armor dug into his ribs. She pulled away and he didn’t protest. “But I still don’t get it. How did that death end up so different?”

“I’m not entirely sure after that. I just kinda rolled with what happened around me after that. It didn’t take me too long to figure out I had a few quirks. But there was one thing about that dumb box that gave me an idea or two about what happened.”

One of Joe’s eyebrows went up.

“I, uh… I went back to the gravesite later. It was so surreal, but I ended up digging it back up to check the casket for clues. It took me a while to clear out all the dirt that had spilled in from the top, but remember when I mentioned those little ceramic things I didn’t recognize?”

Joe nodded.

‘Well, when I looked at them in the daylight, they looked like broken pieces of a totem of undying.”

She paused, giving Joe plenty of time to mull over what she had just said. She watched his face flicker from one expression to another: from contemplation to confusion, to disbelief, to bewilderment. “Are you saying that you must have used a totem and it didn’t work?”

“I’m saying I don’t know for sure,” she stated plainly. “But I suspect that a totem went off and it only partially worked.”

It made sense to her. Totems bound the soul to the body in times of extreme duress. The latent power inside was so strong that it could heal in an instant and protect the flesh from future damage, if only for a little while. So let’s say the totem wasn’t fully charged, or didn’t break fast enough, or whatever other possible mishap happened that she could reasonably think of. Was it really that unreasonable to think that the totem only half worked? It could have succeeded in anchoring her soul to this body but hadn’t been enough to actually save her.

The last few buckles on her chest plate slid into place. She was once more fully protected from the dangers of this world. Or as protected as she could manage. Both she and Joe stood up. He gave her a few steps worth of space so she could pick up the chest.

“That’s actually terrifying to think about,” he said, burying his hands in his pockets. “I wonder if you got bugged out. Have you talked to Xisuma? Or any other admin on any other server?”

Cleo nodded. “I have. X took a look and it doesn’t show that there’s anything wrong with me. If it was a bug, it would be server-related. I am what I am no matter where I go, remember?”

“I know. I know. It’s just.. How does that even happen?”

She shrugged and smiled. “Your guess is as good as mine.” That’s all it really was, anyway. A guess. “Now come on. We’ve wasted enough time here. I need to get down in the mines if I’m going to have any diamonds this season.”

#whumptober 2023 #prompt no. 25 #“Buried alive”#hermitcraft #creative writing #zombiecleo #joe hills #zombiecleo-centric #painful respawns #broken respawn #zombie zombiecleo

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