The slime could change colors.
First, he was blue. Then, he was red. He was currently turning purple, because Wels was feeding him an allium.
"What are you doing?" Grian tried to process the fact that a slime hybrid could digest a flower and turn the same color. It was impossible. But, then again, lots of things in their group seemed impossible. This just added to the mix.
Wels was giggling as he watched the flower travel through Jevin's body. A moment later, Jevin burped, and he turned a bright purple. Wels burst out laughing. "Ah, it never gets old."
Grian could see Cub on the other side of camp, watching the slime with interest. He still wasn't sure what to make of the scientist. Was he a threat? He and Doc definitely had some history. Grian stayed far away from that. He mostly hung out with Tango, Zed, and X, since someone had to keep them in control.
He probably wasn't qualified, but he did it anyway.
Grian watched X play with Reuben. Tango and Zed were also nearby, messing with the water again. On a tree nearby, Wels had pinned the map he'd taken out when he went exploring to the trunk. The world was full of biomes, and that was just one direction. There was a whole other side of the world that needed exploring.
The builder examined the scene before him. It sounded so odd out of context. A scientist and a past experiment are having an argument. Two men from hell and heaven are playing with a simple liquid. A guy from the End befriended a pig. A princess with ice powers and her overprotective bodyguard. And so much more. They barely knew each other, barely even spent that much time together, yet their stories were already intertwining with each other.
Then there was Grian. How would he describe himself from an outsider's point of view? He was part of another world, watched that world get destroyed, and carried a part of the people who destroyed that world with him at all times. Depressing backstories all around.
A slight tremor in the ground caught Grian off guard. At first, he thought Stress was up to her icy tricks again. Then, it happened again. Larger this time.
Grian momentarily couldn't move, as if he had no control over his body. Perhaps it was a trick of the eye, but the trees around the builder seemed to glitch out suddenly. What was going on? His first thought was the Watchers. They've come to torment him again. But this wasn't their style.
Something was wrong--things were glitching out. The others started to notice it too. X fumbled over himself, for a second seeming to melt into the ground. The ground swayed, and the tremors were getting larger.
The epicenter was coming from the clearing. The clearing where almost everyone's portals had appeared, spitting them out into this world. This was different--nothing like this had ever happened before. Normally there was no disturbance.
But now the whole world was shaking. Jevin was blobbing around, and under different circumstances, Grian would have laughed. Stress yelped and crashed into Cleo, almost knocking over her hood.
Grian ran to the clearing. As he traveled, he was set back multiple times or even shot to the side once or twice. The glitches were getting out of hand.
There was a portal in the clearing, all right. It didn't have a border at all--it looked like a rip in the world. The edges were jagged and pulsated with red light. It didn't look like the one Grian was thrown into, or the End portal Xisuma had described.
On the other side, there was a completely flat world made out of what looked like sandstone. The ground was littered with various circuitries of...Redstone? Were those all Redstone machines? Grian didn't know that much about the red dust. It was too complicated. But even he could tell that these were very precise machines that probably took hours to do.
For a moment, he was tempted to use his magic to stop it all. It was probably possible. But, despite all his denial that everything was fine, he still wasn't ready to use it.
The tremors seemed to reach a peak. Grian could barely move without glitching. With luck, he could be thrown into the portal in front of him and he'd be stuck there with whoever was on the other side.
That person came out of the portal just a second later. Well, fell is more like it. The man tumbled out of the rip in the world and promptly faceplanted onto the ground.
Grian blinked. That was...anticlimactic.
The person got up. He wore a black suit with a red tie, and had black hair and a large mustache. Not seeming to notice Grian--or the fact that he wasn't in the other world he was just in--he dusted himself off and turned around, grumbling about glitches his machine made. Finally, he realized that he wasn't in that Redstone world.
He turned around and spotted Grian. And he yelped. And jumped back. And landed on his rump.
The situation had such a dramatic leadup. Grian was sure that there was some sort of virus or big threat to the world. But, in reality, it was a dorky mustached man who had already tripped over himself twice.
"Uh..."
Grian decided to be blunt. "Hi. You came here just like us. Well, not the faceplanting part. Portal. New world. Confusion. Blah, blah. The main thing is that we don't know why this is all happening. So you're just as clueless as us. Hi. I'm Grian."
The man blinked. "Mumbo...but can you repeat that again? Slower?" He had a faint blush on his cheeks, but the reason was obvious. He'd just faceplanted in front of a stranger who'd bluntly explained why he was there.
Grian started heading back to the camp. "I'll explain on the way back."
"Woah, woah," Mumbo called back, sounding flustered. "I'm supposed to trust you right off the bat? Trust that you won't kill me?"
He had a point. This whole situation was one big problem after another.
"I will drag you back if you don't come with me," Grian said, half joking, half serious.
"Oh, very nice. That ensures my trust in you." Mumbo had the same tone.
"Great. Let's go."
»»————- ★ ————-««
The rest of the group told Mumbo the rest of the story. Nothing much, but Mumbo shed light on a detail no one else had noticed.
Stress and Wels were telling their story when the mustached man cut them off. "Wait. Describe that portal again."
A little confused, Stress explained the blue ice-rimmed portal. Mumbo then turned to Grian. "What about you?"
Haltingly, Grian described it. "It was pure black and glowed with Watcher magic." He opened his hand and almost, almost, summoned up a little bit of the magic. "I couldn't see much of it, it blended too much into the background. But the Watchers created it."
He tried to communicate to Mumbo that he didn't want to elaborate, and he seemed to understand. He nodded and turned to X, who described the End portal.
Mumbo nodded, thinking. "Well, these three portals don't have anything in common. You said that they brought you to the same location."
Cleo seemed to catch on. "They were even created by different people."
"I came through a Nether portal. Zed went through a glitched Aether one," Tango spoke up.
"There was a portal in the woodland mansion," Cub said.
Doc glanced slightly at Cub. "I don't remember a portal."
Bdubs, Cleo, and Jevin said the same.
The puzzle pieces clicked. The ending picture was clear, but it made the mystery they were trying to solve even more confusing. By answering one question, they unlocked another.
"So, if all these portals looked different, were made by different people, or weren't even spotted or existed for some people...
"...why did it bring us all here, to the same place?"
(WC: 1342)
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Hermitcraft: Origins
Fanfiction"Each world has its own story. Even if you tried to get a story from me, I wouldn't be able to tell you half of it. There is so much life in each build and block, and each event has told their own tale. But it has to start somewhere." Fate has the o...
