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Honestly, he thinks it’s kind of funny, how stupid his manifestation of the family ability is.
Not even just “kind of” funny. It’s really funny, actually. One of the silliest things that could happen to a man, and it’s happened to him. He’s sure if he’d been even a modicum more serious he’d hate it, but it’s just one of life’s serendipitous decisions that led him to be this way.
His mother had sighed and looked at him with that funny half-smile of hers and had said, “Of course, you get the ridiculous version.”
He had been unable to respond in anything but moos, as he had somehow turned himself into a cow moments after finishing a glass of milk.
It took a fair amount of finagling to become human again (read: killing a zombie and being turned back to his original self with a careful combination of weakness potion and golden apple) but he couldn’t bring himself to be annoyed. If this was the hand life would deal him, why, he’d simply have to convince everyone it was a royal flush (and why do they call it that anyways? after the name of the sound of the toilet?)
(He really should get better about these trailing asides; now he’s thinking about bathroom noises.)
It had been rather simple to hide his very literal interpretation of “you are what you eat”, thankfully; he figured out that it wasn’t the food itself but what it represented that mattered to the gift. The effort in harvesting and hunting and cooking was so fundamental to the human experience that just by taking part in it, he retained his form.
It also helped when the group he fell in with grew enamored with death games, of all things.
He doesn’t think that’s how it started. At first, he was just an almost-adult, asked to join a group of people who planned on circumventing the inevitability of the void by creating a world for themselves-- as many times as they could. It’s no secret at first that he’s the youngest, but he wins his spot with his ingenuity and he clings to this haven amidst the dark waters of the void. They call their worlds Hermitcraft, and the inspiration behind the name does not elude him.
Fitting, isn’t it, that their group would name themselves after the creatures that found discarded shells and made them into homes. Fitting, even more so, that they named themselves after a card that begged for mental journeying and rest.
He somehow forgets about his gift until his fifth iteration as a Hermit, during which he decides not to kill anything. It’s the opposite of a death game (though he learns how to thread the needle’s definition, and he ensures that his kill counter stays down even while he collects the simulacrum heads that the world grants as a prize upon death) (he learns that end crystals are beautiful in their danger, that they’re more energy than mass, that just the slightest alteration of their equilibrium forces the delicate particles within to crash with a sudden burst of energy) (he learns that they are dangerous in their beauty and he coerces the Hermits into stand-offs, eggs in hand, with a slight twinge of hope that he’ll regain his original form, but when he sees his reflection in his hourglass and he is still a potato, he’s not surprised or disappointed).
To be fair, his gift wasn’t really on the forefront of his mind when Xisuma found their newest world, their most perilous one yet: an island that floats in the void, the ocean around it streaming into nothing but simple atoms and droplets of energy. He warns them that the area around the island is volatile, constantly in flux, and that the safest place for the Hermits (until everything pulls itself apart in its inevitable loss against the void) is on the island.
He doesn’t notice anything wrong (well, besides being a giant potato) until Grian invites him to a meeting in which they dangle over the void on bouncing llamas. He chuckles as Pearl immediately opts out of riding a llama, citing her lack of elytra, and tries his best to avoid bonking his head too hard on the bedrock meant to keep the void out of the island.
There’s something sharp in Grian’s gaze when he looks at them all, and his gaze settles on Scar more than once. “We’ll merge our bases into the first ever Hermitcraft gigabase,” he says. “Form a corporation called Boatem Incorporated.”
“Sounds like a great idea,” Scar says casually, but he’s holding himself taut, a creature stilled in a hunter’s prowl. He smiles in anticipation and his mouth splits open just a bit wider than one might find comfiting.
Impulse just smiles and says, “I’m in,” but his eyes do not leave Grian’s form and he fiddles with his inventory, hand hovering over sword then pickaxe then sword then stone (he’s never seen Impulse fidget) (before, that is).
He catches Pearl’s eye as she peers over the bedrock at them; her expression breaks out of its neutrality to convey some sense of anxiety before flickering back to Grian’s face and smoothing out once more.
“Let me think about it for a little while,” he says, and the strange tension melts away as the others jokingly protest how their heads are starting to hurt as they smack against bedrock. He laughs, relieved. “I think I might be in, I’m in.”
Later, he wonders if Grian’s desire to create Boatem Inc. is fully driven by capitalism or by something else. He finds the man sitting at the edge of the Boatem Hole (freshly expanded by Impulse’s methodical work), staring into the abyss.
“Don’t fall in, now,” he says, and to give Grian some credit, he startles but doesn’t fall in (and if he goes for his inventory and his sword flickers in his hand a bit, well, he pretends not to see).
“Isn’t it a bit late?” Grian asks.
“I wouldn’t know, BDubs keeps going to bed,” he says.
Grian huffs out a laugh (actually, it didn’t sound like a laugh. It honestly sounded more like a sort of sigh and snort combined, like some sort of animal’s chuff). “You never know, maybe he got distracted by a clock and didn’t sleep for once.” His eyes go distant and trail back down into the Boatem Hole. “Mumbo, what do you know about the void?”
He blinks. “The void? It births and kills worlds, it swallows everything. The only way to escape it is by flying out of it or finding a world to live on.”
“Do you think-- do you think that people could survive in there?”
“Grian, I don’t like where your mind is going,” he says frankly. “If we’re talking theoretically , as in we’re doing a thought experiment and won’t jump in the Boatem Hole for whatever reason , then... maybe? From what I know, the void isn’t a black hole or anything-- if anything it’s blank space, but based on how there’s still gravity if you fall through it, there has to be a bottom to it, something innumerably bigger than any of the worlds that we can be spawned into.” He’s never really thought about it, but now that he has the concept excites him. “I’d imagine if you can figure out a way to combat the lack of air in the void, you’d smack right into it.”
Grian blinks. “I zoned out of half of that,” he confesses, “and the other half sounds rather worrying.” They both chuckle at that declaration.
“Do you think falling in the void is like dying?”
He ponders that. “I’m not sure. Respawn probably pulls you back to your world too quickly to really process death. I’d imagine it’s not. I’d imagine it’s like falling.”
Grian laughs again but he sounds tired. “Way to state the obvious, Mumbo.”
“Do you think Grian’s doing alright?”
The hesitancy in Pearl’s voice stops him from immediately brushing off her concern. It’s not an uncommon question: Grian was known for worrying ideas and more worrying executions, and many a Hermit for some reason believed him to be the key to understanding Grian, no matter how much he objected that if they didn’t know what was going on under that waffle, why would he ?
But Pearl knows this. Pearl’s new to Hermitcraft but not new to knowing Grian and if there was anyone that could ask him that question with some amount of seriousness, it’s her.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, he’s decided that you’re CEO of Boatem, for one,” she says, and the levity in her tone undercuts any sting from her words. “Have you seen the meeting room he set up for that one?”
She takes him to a room that hovers over the Boatem Hole and his steps stutter to a stop when he sees the four end crystals bobbing up and down in its corners. He swallows back an ounce of horror that begins to creep up on him before turning to her.
“That’s not meant to be me , is it?” he asks, pointing at the haphazardly constructed face on the wall. He does not ask about the crystals. After Pearl laughs at his words, she does not bring them up.
The next meeting, Grian tells them to fly as high as they can through the air and fall to their deaths.
The next meeting, Grian tells them to fly as high as they can through the air and fall to their deaths and he wonders just how much he actually understands Grian. It feels silly that this meeting is just to tell them about the colorful donkeys he’s wrangled up for all of Boatem to ride around on.
He hopes he’s wrong. Grian stuffing his face with chocolate for a simple wordplay joke implies that he’s wrong. He’s been wrong about being wrong before, though, and he does rather hope that he’s wrong about being wrong about being wrong.
Two wrongs might make a right, but what about three? Wait, no, that’s just simple maths, isn’t it. Two negatives are a positive, three are another negative.
Well, he never professed to being all too good at maths.
“This seems terrible,” he says point-blank.
“Time to lose all of my levels,” Pearl mumbles.
Grian laughs too loudly at that. He seems to be ignoring him.
The wind whistles shrilly in his ears and the tips of his fingers char a bit as he frantically lights firework after firework, blasting himself through the stratosphere. He hadn’t really thought too hard about how he’s a potato, but now he can feel it in how the thin air doesn’t really affect him that much even while he hears his peers breathe raggedly as they fly through clouds. He can’t really turn to look and see how they’re doing; his eyes are watering and he grits his teeth as he focuses on the sun, desperately trying not to think about how high up they are.
It feels stupid that this meeting is just to tell them about the colorful donkeys he’s wrangled up for all of Boatem to ride around on.
He tells them about it, his voice still perfectly clear as he details his weak plan of advertisement that was really just an excuse to make his friends chuckle a bit and
the wind is whistling in his ears and–
has the sun always been that bright?--
he hits the ground.
MumboJumbo fell from a high place.
Apparently, Pearl was the only one who fell into the Boatem Hole, out of some flavor of luck (he doesn’t know if it’s good or bad yet). Her voice is a bit hoarse and she seems to be still blinking the void out of her eyes, but she gives him a tired smile when he looks at her out of concern.
“Does anyone know what I said?” he asks.
“I was too busy seeing where everyone was falling,” Grian replies, and he files that away for later.
“I heard something about a car company before I went void,” Pearl says with a cough.
He shows them the donkeys. Their expressions are worth the amount of grooming and the effort it took to wire the whirring machinery that he’s hidden in their saddles to convey the sleekness of a luxury vehicle.
“‘Impulse Speedy Vroom’,” he hears Impulse read off of a saddle, and he hopes he’s not imagining the cautious glee in the man’s voice.
“Personalized number plates,” he explains as Scar hoists himself onto GoodTimesWithSKRRRRTTTT-STU-STU-STU-STU (he’s proud of that name in particular).
“Mumbo, now that we’ve got the horses, what do we do with them?” The sharp gleam in Grian’s eyes are back, and he’s not sure if he likes seeing it while Grian is delightedly ollieing on G-Force.
“What d’you mean?” he asks, petting MumBOOOOOOOST! on the head as it nervously shuffled beneath him. “This was it. This was the plan.”
“This was it?” Grian gives him a look he’s given him a lot recently (and never before), one that reads of confusion and uncertainty and barters held over one’s head underneath the easy confidence that he’s been trying so hard to exude.
“And was it not worth it?” He nudges MumBOOOOOOOST! on the side and it rears up as a particularly loud VRRRRRROOM! emanates from his saddle bag.
“We’ve at least got to use this to market Boatem,” Grian insists, and he leads them towards an unsuspecting Cub.
“Do we have any tunes?” he asks, and before Grian can answer, someone else pipes up behind them.
“Need some tunes? Should we fire it up?” And it’s the most excited he’s heard Impulse as of recent, and he’s already breaking down the rather simple circuit that he used to generate the car noises in their donkeys’ saddles and reattaching a new disc to them–
“Here we go!”
And now they’re blaring something electronic and high energy and pop and racing along stalagmites and he wonders if he imagined the way that Impulse’s and Scar’s and Grian’s eyes all lock onto what he imagines must be Cub, carefully building his biome even further.
After they terrorize the bemused man, they rocket back to the hills, high on their own laughter, and somehow between it Scar giggles that he’s stolen Cub’s bed.
It’s not like beds are sacred in Hermitcraft, but there’s something oddly insidious about sneaking through Cub’s base while they’re bombarding him with colorfully painted donkeys and blasting music and entreating him to “Buy at Boatem!” There’s safety in knowing that you’ll wake up where you slept, and taking that away makes something turn in his stomach.
Grian cackles something dry and humorless at Scar’s confession, and the lump in his throat grows a bit more. “Why?” Grian asks.
Scar doesn’t answer, simply taking the bed out to show them. “Look, I got his bed!” he crows gleefully, a humor in his voice that he does not understand (he wonders if he might have understood at one point) (if his brain has been simplified along with his body) (he wonders if he wishes he understood still).
“Wait, no– go back and give it back,” he says.
He doesn’t miss how Scar glances to Grian before hanging his head dramatically and trotting back over to Cub. And if he does laugh at how silly the man looks, it isn’t enough to distract him from something eating at his insides at the whole exchange.
It’s almost refreshing to sit behind tinted glass as Zedaph jots something down on a clipboard. He hums quietly, the sound picked up by the tinny intercom.
“Did you need anything else?” he asks, and the scientist glances up and gives him a smile as he tucks a pen back into his pocket.
“Just a couple more follow up questions, no tests,” Zedaph says. “May I ask, why the cod head?”
He blinks. “Why not the cod head? You asked for something more unusual?”
Zedaph half shrugs to him. “Most people wouldn’t think to become an animal when asked for unusual. I’m just curious where the idea came from.”
“I hadn’t been a fish in a while, I guess? Can’t think of any better reason than that.”
The scientist stares at him. “‘In a while’?” he repeats.
“Well– yes?”
They look to each other in silence for a bit before Zedaph very visibly swallows a laugh. He consults his clipboard again. “Okay, so not a vocab guy, not a numbers guy, and not a fish guy, now– should I add that in?”
He stifles his own laughter. “I mean, it’s your test, you tell me your conclusions.”
“Alright, one more question before I let you go,” Zedaph says. “Why do you think being stationary is a superpower?”
He thinks of how constantly in flux his body is, how fluid his bones are, how he’s always fidgeted to have some sense of knowing where and how he exists in the world.
“Is it not one?”
Zedaph sighs good-naturedly. “Well, go on then, out you get,” he says.
He finds out why Grian and Scar look at each other like the last two people alive and the first two people dead. He finds out why Impulse seems wary of promises made with no contracts. Something clings to his throat in this new land that Grian asked him to adventure to, floating through the void away from the island to a small, enclosed world that the void shies away from.
He’s human here, and he stays human. It’s not a surprise that he does: only a human would want to trap its peers, would barter lives back and forth like currency, would feign that words could overrule the innate and desperate need to survive above all else. How it ends is so vastly different from how it starts, and, well.
He forgot what it was like to kill.
He forgot how human it was to kill.
He forgot how human it was to beg for mercy, to supplicate and give up all that is human just so you could live another three minutes. He forgot how human it was to immediately go back on your word. He forgot how messy it was to be human.
When Grian’s the one to drive a sword through his chest and send him choking on his final breaths, he’s not surprised.
He hates being a pig.
He’s of the opinion that anyone’d hate being a pig. His snout (oh god, he has a snout) snorts every time he inhales and wheezes as he exhales. It’s hard to hold a pickaxe with cloven hooves and his ears twitch randomly and he has a tail now. It’s all falling apart.
Also, he still has his mustache. He doesn’t know whether this is a comfort or just weird.
After a second of thought: weird. Really weird.
He’d also sort of forgotten what it felt like to be made of musculature and bone and to sum it up: bad. It felt bad. He can feel aches in his side from throwing his arms slightly too bombastically and his legs give out from walking too much earlier than they ever did when he was a potato. He’s not sure why eating more potatoes hasn’t triggered his gift (actually, he’s fairly certain it’s either because pigs eat potatoes or because his potato eating isn’t due to some internal mantra that resonates with potatoes) (he’s not sure what internal mantras potatoes have, necessarily, but he wishes he did). and though he remembers the hour or so he spent as a cow in his childhood, he finds himself waking up the next day with his hands still pink.
His mother had taught him that his gift was not a shame, but it doesn’t feel like that when he hates how he breathes . Instead of standing proud and tall as a pig, he shoves on a simulacrum head he had gotten from somewhere and pretends he’s still a potato.
Pearl finds him sitting at the edge of the Boatem Hole, looking in. She joins him without hesitation.
“Isn’t it a bit late?” he asks. The words echo around them.
“Wouldn’t know, time passes as it wishes,” she says lightly.
They sit in silence. She’s humming quietly under her breath, her fingers tracing the shape of the hat Scar gave her. He watches her give the little llama that sits in it a pat on the head.
“Paddy,” she says when she catches him looking. “Cute, isn’t he?”
He wonders how she can be so calm after everything. He wonders if the stories that Scott told him of Pearl laughing in the face of a demon are true.
“What do you think is in the void?” she asks, peering through the hole under them. He’s never seen Pearl so comfortable around the Boatem Hole, but maybe an afternoon of patiently cleaning up Tango’s prank has desensitized her to it. He does not linger on if there might be some other reason.
“Anyone without a home, I’d reckon.”
Pearl looks at him for a moment before throwing a golden carrot into the hole. “For whoever’s in there,” she says. He doesn’t know how to respond.
They sit in silence after that.
He’s tired of being a pig. He’s tired enough to have rigged up an entire contraption with the sole purpose of extracting Grian’s soul in hopes that maybe, it’ll trigger the change in his body.
(he has forgotten how human it is to ensnare one’s prey)
(he has forgotten how human it is to acknowledge morals and then forsake them)
He transforms a place of peace and though he hopes that Grian will come to him as a friend, he is prepared for him to come as– not an enemy, but perhaps more a loving nuisance.
He’s not actually surprised when Grian easily chooses the option of killing him over helping him. Maybe he would have been once, but he’s choked out a final breath at Grian’s hands before.
“Grian!?” he says anyways, out of some lingering disbelief, and Grian laughs with the steel that’s ever-present in his voice now. “You’re fully aware of what that one means and you’re still stood there, yeah?”
“I get it. ‘I, Grian, will kill Pork-boy to get out of here’.” Grian looks to him and he sees that glint in his eye, left over from a world of red and yellow and green names. “Yeah.”
Grian somehow talks himself out of it and then back into it and then realizes what he’s done and they laugh about it between each other, laughter of one hunter approving of the other’s trap. Grian pushes whichever button he’s closest to and is sent into the killing chamber that he’s made for this occasion.
“Mumbo, I have ninety-six levels,” Grian complains as wood bashes into his body. “This is going to take a long time!”
“Well, I obviously didn’t test it,” he replies, sitting in front of the window he can use to look at Grian. His wings are broken now, he notices idly, and his armor is protecting him from the worst of it but he can see a trickle of blood coming from somewhere above his hairline. “Is this going to be one of those awkward things where this feels like it’s going to be quick, but I have to watch you slowly suffer to death?”
“You’re squeezing the soul out of me,” Grian says, and he can hear how wet his voice has become.
“It’s like a juicer,” he says.
In between the hysterical high-pitched laughs, Grian sighs. “Good-bye,” he says before his body dissolves into particles. He can’t help but laugh at the man’s dramatics before looking down.
Pale skin. Five fingers. He stretches them, marveling at his reclaimed dexterity (he hadn’t realized how clumsy his potato hands had been). There’s something more though: a sharpness that lingers in him still, a paranoia that settles in the back of his chest that he can’t quite breathe through. He’s human again, yes, but not in the way he was before, and he wonders if he’s lost or gained something.
Grian returns. He puts the entire thing out of his mind.