The Chained Watcher

Priority

~~~

The next destination was the Nether, and while trudging through the forests Jimmy and Martyn fell back to talk and update Taurtis. Grian had done a lot of things that just didn't fit with the image of a Watcher, and they were hoping Taurtis might have some inkling as to why.

<Solidarity>: Update on the weird things the Watcher's done: Willingly fixed random damage to the Empire without prompting or expecting payment, friendship with his server's admin seems genuine, claims deja vu, and has just been generally good-natured

<Taurtis>: Well, there's no way a Watcher with only one pair of wings has been there before, so they must have seen something similar. All of my previous infiltration missions have shown Watcher society to be very strictly hierarchical, and genuine friendship was a foreign concept. Fixing broken things without being told to? That just doesn't match any Watchers I've seen. Even the weakest of them tends to lord their status over normal civilians.

<InTheLittleWood>: Well we've clearly got an anomaly here, cause none of the usual assumptions that have held true for Watchers apply. Do you think he might have been raised differently or something? Taken in by farmers as a child, or maybe an old grandma who lived in the woods.

<Taurtis>: No, we might not know much about young Watchers, but occasionally we have encountered ones that are less than a month old. Even then, they don't look like children, more like upper teens or adults.

<Solidarity>: How are Watchers made?

<InTheLittleWood>: Pfft

<Solidarity>: No, wait, I didn't mean it that way!

<Taurtis>: Well, we're not actually sure. It's a closely guarded secret among the Watchers, and only their research personnel and high-ranking members are told. We've never gotten it out of them, so I don't have anything to tell you.

<InTheLittleWood>: We're almost to the Nether, so we'll need to go silent for a bit. We'll be heading to the End after that, so I can't say when we'll send our next message.

<Taurtis>: Next time the portal hub connects to the main planes, I'm gonna have to go visit you two. After all, any excuse to get away from scanning duty is a good one.

~~~

Well, the Nether was a bust.

There was nothing there but haphazard cobblestone bridges stretching over barren seas of lava, ready to crumble away at the slightest misstep. How did they know about the crumbly bits? Grian found out the hard way. He stepped on an oddly textured piece of cobblestone and it just gave way beneath him, dropping down into the lava below. If Grian didn't have wings, he would have followed.

Returning to the Overworld, they crafted up a dozen eyes of ender to guide them to the stronghold and set out. It was quite the journey, but they eventually reached the place the eyes were pointing to. Down they went, until they reached the odd stronghold consisting solely of a custom portal room. This was the last place they remembered before getting dropped in the Void, so there was definitely some significance to it.

The portal itself was inactive, with one of the frame blocks lying broken on the ground. How does that even happen? Those are supposed to be unbreakable! After a couple seconds of staring at the broken portal, Grian lights up and turns to Xisuma.

"Hey X, you're an admin, can you spawn us another frame block? I know this isn't our server, but an unusable portal seems like a genuine glitch to me."

Xisuma sighed, pulling up a floating panel of magic while responding. "Fine, just this once." He tapped at the screen a few times, frowned, tapped again, repeating as his face got more and more confused. "It's not letting me. The server isn't letting me spawn in anything with commands."

Jimmy cut in. "But wait, aren't servers supposed to do what admins tell them to? Why would it be stopping you?"

The admin lowered the slowly circling panels, turning to face him. "Do you want the long answer or the short one?"

"Uh, short first, then long if it doesn't make sense."

"I don't have priority."

"Scratch that, let's go with the long one."

"Okay, so we've found a funny little thing with admin commands and how they interact with the different servers. The first player to join gets what we've come to call 'priority' from the server, which designates them as the player in charge of permissions. If you have two admins, one with priority and one without, the one that has priority will almost always end up superior in a command battle, barring a drastic difference in skill level. Are you following so far?"

"I think so. So priority is a good thing?"

"Very much so. It didn't use to be very obvious, but if you go onto a single player server it becomes almost painfully so. Trying to use commands without permission from the player with priority is like trying to swim down a bubble-vator. It just doesn't like to work in the slightest. Normally this is a good thing, since it lets the admins of big public servers like Hypixel deal with hackers easily, but now it's causing us a bit of a problem. Since I don't have priority, the server won't listen to what I tell it to do."

"Then who does have priority?"

"That is actually one of the few things an uncooperative server will tell me. It's usually used to request permission to use commands, though the priority player can turn that off if they want to be incognito. Just give me a second and I'll send the request."

Xisuma sat down nearby, raiding the panels back up as he tapped away at them. Fifteen seconds later, he stopped and did a double-take, looking at where they stood next to Grian. "Grian, why do you have priority?"

Grian almost fell off the brazier he was perched on. "I'm sorry, I have what now?"

At the same time, Jimmy and Martyn had the exact same question. "He has what now?"

"It says here that Grian has priority. The really strange thing is that this should be the first time he's joined this server, so why would the priority fall to him? Grian, what did you do this time?"

"I didn't do anything, really!"

"There shouldn't even be anything that can change priority. From what we've found, it's set the moment someone enters the server and just won't change at all after that. Jimmy, Martyn, would you mind asking your admin to look into this?"

Well that's going to be a bit of a problem. "We, uh, don't have one?"

"How do you not have an admin??? What do you do when glitches pop up?"

"It's- It's hard to explain, alright? Can we just go check out the End?"

Xisuma narrowed his eyes at him. "For now, but we will be talking about this later."

Grian snickered. "Ooh, you're in trouble now. You activated his 'dadmin' mode."

"You hush, agent of chaos."

His only reply was a cheeky grin, turning to the portal and summoning the missing piece. With the frame complete, the missing eye was placed with a flourish, and the portal ignited with a shuddering boom. Grian didn't even wait before jumping in, prompting them all to follow him through.

~~~