The Chained Watcher

Xisuma's Suspicions

Deep in the depths of Xisuma's castle's basement, there is a secret room. Said room has been hidden behind an intricate redstone lock made to dissuade visitors, which was disguised to blend in with the rest of the hallways. Inside that room is a sparse collection of notebooks, and a large corkboard. Xisuma himself is currently frowning while looking at the board with its clues.

This room was made to keep his suspicions towards Grian secret while also letting him organize his thoughts and information. The problem is, it's not any one thing that strikes him as heavily suspicious, but rather a large amount of coincidences. 

When he first met Grian, the hermit's personality seemed kind of distant, though that could be attributed to time in the arena. Now though, he was quite active, seeming to have interacted with almost all of the hermits at some point in time. Back when the portal hub separated from the fortress, he also showed no visible surprise at the sight of the outside space visually shattering.

It's really difficult to catch him off guard, but that doesn't say much of anything to be honest. Despite not being an avid PVPer, he keeps going to Hypixel with the excuse of 'training his pvp skills'. And honestly, how likely is it to befriend a cult of hackers while on a rescue mission? To the point where he got invited to raid a base with them.

Xisuma isn't sure exactly what's going on with Grian, but he's pretty sure it has something to do with the Watchers. Did he know where the one that disconnected the portal hub was? Was he secretly a spy? What would even be the purpose of spying? He didn't know, and that was the problem.

Maybe he should head to Hypixel himself and see if he could find something Watcher related? It was worth a shot.

~~~

Hypixel's spawn was quite impressive, with a large number of players frequenting the area. But now he was faced with a dilemma. Which part did Grian head to? Going with the assumption that he was secretly meeting with a Watcher crosses most of the minigames off the list, so only a few things were left. 

Skyblock wouldn't work well, seeing as if an admin checked it any abnormalities would be quickly brought to light, but maybe the smp? There's a lot of land there, with most of it pretty sparsely populated. A secluded location wouldn't be too hard to find, plus the chances of an admin checking that specific area were abysmally low.

Destination set, he made his way to the smp portals. Should he choose one of the main factions? But what if they expected him to participate in one of their wars... Seems like Neutral is the only choice.

His spawn location is a desert, with a savanna biome visible somewhere to his right. He closes his eyes, straining his senses to catch even the slightest trace of Watcher magic. Almost imperceptible, a slight taint to the North. He started walking.

Several times, he had to detour around groups fighting over resources and territory, but he soon found a ransacked base in the middle of what used to be a forest. The magic was somewhere inside, probably buried underneath the remains of what looked to have been a blue-team base, judging by the flags.

Entering the ruined base, it looked like anything of value had been looted either in the initial raid or by scavengers. A couple broken farms, an empty trading hall, one very broken vault door... Eventually, Xisuma reached the closest hallway to the magic signature, and he realized that he had no tools.

There was a wall in between him and his target, and without tools he would just have to punch through it. He groaned, and started punching. It took him several minutes to make it through, but then he saw what he had been tracking.

It was a minecart. With a hopper in it. He had been tracking a hopper minecart, and had punched through a wall to reach it. If the magic signature wasn't coming from it, he would almost have thought it was normal. The only abnormal traits it possessed was an unusually shiny exterior, and a slightly purple glimmer if you looked at it just right.