Chapter Text
Zedaph closed the panel on the side of the contraption. Tango and Impulse watched him put the finishing details on his latest invention.
“Didn’t X say that this thing was dangerous?” Impulse asked.
Zedaph turned to them and smiled. “Dangerous? Not at all!” He stood up and pulled off his gloves. “I understand Xisuma’s concerns, but I don’t see why one test drive would be so bad!”
“Yeah,” Tango said as he elbowed Impulse. “You aren’t scared of a machine that makes flowers are you?”
“No, but like--”
Zedaph held up a hand to Impulse. “It’s going to be okay, okay?” He said, “I know when X says to be careful, we listen. But I’ve double, triple checked the redstone and mechanics! One rose, that’s all I’m doing!”
Impulse looked between Tango and Zedaph’s smirks and the machine. He sighed.
“Okay.”
“Great! We’ll get lunch after this, on me!” Zedaph promised, “I am starving!”
Tango and Zedaph smiled and turned to the machine, looking over it. Impulse watched a few paces back, trying to ignore the bad feeling in his stomach. There was something he didn’t like about that machine. It was supposed to make a poppy into a rose. Seemingly harmless, Xisuma had good reason to worry about it. The older versions of Minecraft exist further and further away the longer they go back. Now that they were in season ten, 1.7 was so long ago. Bringing up that old code was dangerous.
And maybe a little bit of him was scared because of what happened to Grian.
The machine powered on and Zedaph looked on with awe.
“Tango! Hand me the poppy!” Zedaph commanded.
Tango handed him the red flowers and Zedaph took it from him. He leaned forward and reached into the machine. He smiled as the shape of the petals started to change.
“It’s working!” He cheered.
Just as the words left his mouth, the machine sparked. Smoke rose from the platform. Zedaph saw it and tried to pull his hand out, but the wires of sickly yellow code held his hand firmly in place.
“Zedaph!” Tango yelled, grabbing his arm. “Impulse, turn it off!”
Impulse ran over and punched the off button, but it was stuck. He ripped open the side panel, but even removing the redstone couldn’t stop the process.
Then Zedaph started to get pulled in. He screamed and Tango grabbed him around the waist, holding him down. Impulse screamed as the machine continued to function. Tango screamed as Zedaph slipped from his arms. They couldn’t even hear Zedaph anymore. There was a hiss of air and then an explosion, sending Tango and Impulse away and knocking them both out.
Zedaph woke up with a headache. He groaned and pulled a hand up to his head. He felt a tickle on his nose and opened his eyes to see himself holding a poppy. Its red petals sparkled in the light. His eyes grew and mind rushed with memories. It didn’t work.
At first he smiled in a sort of relief but it wasn’t long before he realized where he was. Or, rather, realized he had no idea where he was. He pulled himself up, pushing off of bright green grass. He was met with the view of green trees and a soft breeze. A melody of piano he hardly recognized sung behind him. There was nothing around him, nothing that could be called Hermitcraft, anyways. It was empty and cold.
Zedaph looked down at the flower in his hand and sucked in a deep breath. He put a hand on his stomach. He wasn’t hungry anymore. He looked behind himself and stared into the sea. He could just barely see more land on the other side. A thick fog covered it.
“Tango!” He yelled as he started walking. “Impulse?”
The world hardly moved around him as he stepped into the forest.
~~~
[SERVER] Zedaph experienced [DATA EXPUNGED]
Xisuma felt a tinge of pain radiate throughout him when he read the message. Keralis noticed the way X’s eyes dropped and stopped laughing at the joke Xb made. He exited the conversation and leaned over the table to his admin.
“Shishwammy, everything okay?”
It was one of those no communicator lunches, and Xisuma only had his on him in case something like this happened. Plus it was connected to his armor, he couldn’t exactly take it off. So when whatever happened to Zedaph happened, he was the only one at the table who saw.
He simply stood up. “You keep having fun and I’ll figure this out, okay?”
Keralis cocked his head. “What happened?”
“Nothing…” Xisuma breathed, “yet…”
He left the restaurant, and the others looked to Keralis to tell them what happened. He didn’t know, so they picked up a communicator and looked in chat.
There’s a mix of emotions when you tell someone not to do something and they do it anyway but they also get hurt. In a normal situation, maybe the hurt would be punishment enough, but you can’t not try to help the one who hurt the most.
In this case, Tango, Impulse, and Zedaph did something stupid and the hurt was Zedaph disappearing from the face of the world.
So, when Tango and Impulse, covered in blood from metal hitting them and tears rolling down their faces, stumbled to Xisuma, the admin was unsure of what to say.
They should’ve listened to him, but they already knew that. There was no point making them feel worse.
The next logical step was to get Impulse and Tango into a safe place to calm down and then ask what happened. Xisuma took them back to his base and sat them down with tea and towels. As they took deep breaths, Xisuma carefully removed shards from their arms and wiped the blood from their faces. He could tell they could tell he was upset.
“Talk to me,” Xisuma said, sitting down in a chair opposite to them. “Please tell me what happened?”
Impulse spoke first; “We’d built a device that was supposed to turn a poppy into a rose. And we used it… even though you said not too.”
“And Zedaph?”
“He got pulled in,” Tango breathed, eyes wide. “And then he was gone.”
Xisuma closed his eyes and pushed away the spiral of thoughts beckoning him. There was enough to think about right now, his failures as a person wasn’t one of them.
~~~
Zedaph quickly realized where he was after knocking down a birch tree and turning it into planks. He held the oak planks in his hands. This wasn’t the release. But it wasn’t alpha… beta. He was in beta. That’s good to know.
And it made sense, to some degree. It would’ve been assumed that the machine would’ve used the newest code and textures, but apparently it didn’t. It was using code from much earlier. But the poppy hadn’t even changed. It was still a poppy.
Zedaph suddenly felt weak. His knees almost pulled him down and he leaned on a tree for support. It was becoming more and more clear to him what happened. He lifted up the flower as he sank down to sit on the ground. A leaf fell from its stem. In a weird way, Zedaph felt like that meant something. What a leaf falling could ever mean to him was beyond him and the confused panic filling his head. He curled his knees up and buried his face.
He shoulda’ listened to Xisuma…
By the time he looked up, the sun had set and he heard footsteps around him. He scrambled to his feet and tried to run from the creeper that started to hiss, but his legs didn’t run. Panic and tension filled his body as he pushed to go faster, but his legs wouldn’t move beyond a walk. He couldn’t run. And normally a nightmare would’ve ended before the creeper took his life, but this wasn’t a nightmare.
Zedaph gasped awake on the same beach where he spawned, the world still covered in ashen black and his body slightly aching. He scrambled to his feet and felt something in his hand. He raised up the poppy. It still sparkled in the low light.
“What did I do?” he mumbled to himself, looking up at monsters who crawled out of the dark forest.