The Temptation of Power ||| Hermitcraft Watcher AU

Chapter Five

Tw for panic attacks

"Grian! Dude, where on Earth have you been?" Those were not the words Grian was expecting when he arrived home. He looked at Mumbo, confused. Why was he in his house? "I've been sending messages, haven't you seen?"

"What do you mean?" Grian replied, had he missed something? Was this the danger the Watchers had mentioned? His heart seemed to get louder in his chest and the panicked tone the moustached man was using made his breathing want to increase.

"What do you mean what do you mean? You've been gone for three days! Me and Pearl were looking for you and you were absolutely nowhere, you weren't even replying to messages." He said.

"Oh," Grian replied. He'd been gone for three days? It was quite common for time to work a bit differently when going between servers, but he'd been pretty sure it hadn't been that long since it was night when they left and also when they arrived back. Mumbo frowned. "Why were you so worried?" It wasn't unusual for hermits to occasionally leave completely for a few days and sometimes even weeks without saying anything.

"I don't know, just... Pearl seemed to get worried half way through searching for you and I guess I just... did the same." He said.

"Sorry." His mind had been elsewhere and he hadn't considered his friends. Maybe he'd been paranoid that they were a danger, maybe he had been too self-centred.

"It's okay, as long as you're good. Where were you? Out of interest." Mumbo asked, clearly calming.

"Er, just resource gathering, y'know, off the continent." Mumbo nodded. "Why were you looking for me?"

"Pearl said she wanted to talk about something and then I was just helping her." Mumbo said. Grian thought back to Pearl, building her base in Evo. Did she remember him or was this unrelated? It was yet another question that needed answering.

"Okay." He said.

That night, Grian struggled to get to sleep. But this time, not because of the cold - he now had his cloak which he used as a blanket - but because of his mind rioting. All his questions and ideas and fears were whizzing around his head.

* * *

<Xisuma> server meeting today at 11:00

The vibrating communicator pulled Grian from his sleep and he read the message with hazy eyes. Great, he thought sarcastically. The meetings were never particularly interesting, and normally he ended up having a kicking battle under the table with Scar or sometimes Tango and Zedaph while the Sensible (er) Ones like Impulse gave them hard stares.

He sighed as he folded up the warm cloak and put it in his Ender chest, he couldn't exactly go around wearing it without receiving a few odd looks. As he did so, he noticed that his fingertips had gone slightly purple. When he'd been a Watcher and had been regularly using magic, they'd gone dark enough purple to seem black at the ends and the colour had spread between his first and second knuckle. Right now, they were a fairly vague colour and it only made it's way just past his nails, but he could probably expect them to get worse.

He grabbed a pale blue pair of woolly gloves he wore in winter and slipped them on, before pulling some rockets out of a chest and making his way to X's base, where they'd agreed would be their meeting place that season since there was no shopping district.

About half of the hermits were already there when Grian walked into the small meeting room situated in an out-of-the-way spot in the admin's base. He wondered vaguely whether there was a meeting room in Evo and how similar it was to Hermitcraft, but pushed the thought to the side when he saw Tango and Scar sitting at the opposite end of the table to Xisuma, glancing at him with mischievous glints in their eyes. He smirked and went over to them, reciprocating the glance.