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Nothing matters anymore.
Nothing has mattered for a really, really long time. Spoke would be hard-pressed to find the exact point– he'd be wishy-washy. But you'd know, eventually. It's hard to miss the bedrock, and while it would be pretty easy to miss the buttons scattered around spawn, it'd be very hard to miss the effects of them. And really, it doesn't matter.
(The buttons are connected to command blocks. He doesn't really know why he set them up, but it was funny. When Bacon and Jaron push one, poof! There go their pants. Parrot complains over the voice call, but it doesn't really matter to him besides the lost armor points.)
But nothing matters. Spoke can stand with his hands in his shorts pockets, watching the tab list grow and grow, and feel a detached pride for his work. He's so connected to the world after getting OP that he can feel it, feel the server shuddering as more and more people pour in. It doesn't really matter– it's been like that for a while.
When Spoke first found the glitch, it was an accident. He's loading into one server, and then he's in another, and suddenly he's in a blank abyss and his communicator is pinging and it feels like he's two people, two breathing cycles off-sync. When he does some research, the output is interesting… but not worth it, after he tries it a little more. It's not gamebreaking or dangerous, but it's interesting.
Spoke isn't satisfied. He shows it to Vitalasy and Subz, who complain similarly– Vitalasy sees the sky glitching, flashing between sunrise and sunset. It's fun to see what they can do– they figure out flight – but none of it helps. He shows it to Ashswag and he's a natural, something about him already being weird and glitchy and, well, Ashswag, he doesn't complain at all.
The biggest problem they run into is this: a lot of the good stuff the Wormhole can do, stuff like hacking in items, being able to run commands, that's already walled off by not having OP. He's not in creative, so anything they try to smuggle through worlds just disappears. Like it was never there at all.
That's fine. It doesn't matter. Spoke can get OP.
Spoke and Parrot are– were the No Pants People Party. It mattered to Parrot, definitely. Mattered to him so much so that he put it on the line for a video, up against one fragile heart beating in Parrot's chest. Mattered so much that it was a real tear-jerker when he had to equip pants, after all. He would've died otherwise.
…Anyway, Spoke and Parrot are also pretty close friends. They have patterns. The server admin and the rulebreaker– that's been their roles for a while. Spoke knows how Parrot ticks. It's easy to bait him, easy to get a meeting. Parrot is tired of Spoke's shit this season already, surely, after the dupe war. He doesn't want to deal with duped items mixed with legit items, he says.
Ha. He's got a big storm coming. Doesn't matter.
Spoke tells Parrot that he has four exploits that he can hand over, to gain his trust, if he hadn't already gotten it from the NPPP. Spoke shoves barrels upon barrels into Ashswag's hands, in a creative world, and Ashswag tells him you gotta act, bro, you gotta put on an Oscar-worthy performance. It's not going to be that hard.
Spoke talks to Parrot. Parrot clicks a sign, and the moon jolts from the center of the sky to the horizon. (Ashswag, in a cave somewhere, gets put into creative mode. He's shaking when he pushes the barrels into the furnaces, but he gets it done.) Spoke's got Parrot eating out of his hands, practically, so when Parrot asks who else knows, Spoke decides to show some of his cards.
Ashswag appears, parts of him in perpetual motion of glitching pixels, and takes off his armor. He gets in Parrot's weird, admin-power-diluted face. "You're so violent, Herobrine," he taunts as Parrot tries to punch him, and then he flies up, and Spoke is laughing and Ashswag is laughing and Parrot is laughing but the job's already done.
Spoke, Ashswag, and Vitalasy start spreading out stashes. Vitalasy's gets found– seriously, who puts a stash that close, why did he place the barrels at all– but it doesn't really matter. What matters is Parrot, the social game.
Spoke talks to Parrot. Parrot places a command block minecart. Spoke places a lever, and flicks it, and– being OP feels like vertigo, at first, if you're not prepared for it. Everything suddenly twists, gets lighter, buzzes and buzzes and it feels like it stretches for so long in just the blink of an eye. Spoke flicks to creative mode, and nothing matters anymore.
It is, Spoke will admit, a little astonishing to see the Three-Heart Trio still going. He'd given Parrot an end goal, because he's so generous, because if anything, more people than just him deserve to make a video out of the world ending. (Isn't that funny? Parrot asked Spoke to end the world back in season two.) (Doesn't matter.) The Three-Heart Trio putter on, insist on not exploiting, and Planet's the worst of all– he still insists on three hearts. He still insists on that mattering.
Planet, whittled down to just one heart, is running. He's been running for a really, really long time. It's not a secret– he's the weakest link. One fragile heart beats in his chest. Mapicc skewers it with just 18 seconds to spare. And that…
…
"How many hearts are you at, right now?" Spoke hasn't worn armor for a while. Today isn't any different. Spoke stands on his own two legs, mind whirring and strangely silent at the same time, like he'd done the initial glitch again. Two breathing cycles, off-sync.
Parrot stands across from him, also armorless. Some of his feathers are strangely askew. "Thirteen," he says, quietly.
"How many was Planet at?"
"Zero."
He feels light, nearly weightless, and yet he's still standing with his feet flat on the grass. "Did he really stay on three, the whole time?"
Parrot just shrugs. "Far as I know. He had totems, but like– yeah. Three hearts."
Spoke's quiet, for a while. The night ticks by at the right pace, this time, without the server over-taxed with all the weight it had to carry. Spoke can weirdly almost feel that, too, like he just got done lifting weights, oddly sore. Planet stayed on three hearts. He remembers Bacon– maybe more of them, but Bacon for sure– making the painstaking effort of fumbling with the stacked totems to just hold one at a time. Planet stayed on three hearts.
… That matters, thinks Spoke, almost unbidden. By the time the moon is setting, he finds his words. Carefully, like an actor trying to save a fumbled line, he says: "I mean, Planet has been the closest to being banned. Even against unlimited power, he remained on three hearts." Parrot nods, slightly. "I think, because of that… I think you deserve to see something that you should have seen a while ago."
He doesn't know why it matters, but the thought keeps pinging in his mind, louder than anything. Frankly, he doesn't even know how the Three-Heart trio pulled it off. Come on– command blocks scattered around the server that spawn structures and delete pants. Poopies, an immortal, unstoppable endermite. Games upon games, events upon events, surrealist as end cities stretch up towards Subz's derelict floating islands, fortresses next to Zam's "Rising Star" tower, whole swaths of nether terrain and blue glass instead of grass and water. The Three-Heart Trio stuck to their guns, stayed disadvantaged, stayed weak.
Spoke shows the Lifestealers around the vault. The command blocks tile so far into the distance that Spoke's eyes unfocus when he looks to the other end of it. When everyone lines up to jump into the void, same as any other season's end, Spoke flags Parrot down because something is still bothering him, something isn't clicking.
"You left the team a while back– a while back. That was Dupe War era when you gave up on, uh, N-triple-P, I mean." Spoke can hear footsteps behind him. People are watching. "Was it just 'cause you were, like… just, terrible?" Hell, Woogie's behind him, a little to the right. He feels like he's running out of gas. "You couldn't continue with, like– you couldn't continue playing the game without pants? You just were too weak? What was it?"
Parrot's cutting him off. "Spoke," he says. "Spoke. Look at you, bro." Yeah, thinks Spoke, I'm looking, the entirety of him is so suffused with the weave of the server that you could probably convince him he'd dissolve into it if he zoned out hard enough. "There were two options in the No Pants People Party, and you knew that too. It was either you leave or you use exploits." Spoke can see Parrot's taloned hand twitching at his side. "Both of us failed."
"Why couldn't you use exploits?" asks Spoke, fumbling. "Why didn't you?"
"Because then, I'm failing the server," says Parrot, resolute. "And that's why, even as desperately as I wanted to use exploits, with Planet, and Bacon, and Jaron? I didn't touch them."
Oh.
Okay.
…The rest of the server's getting antsy, so Spoke just nods. He nods, he gets out of the way so people can take their screenshots, and wordlessly, he starts buckling on netherite leggings. The weight of it is foreign, cold against his bare shins where his shorts don't cover. When he laces the leather straps into their buckles, it's as if he solidifies.
Parrot's hand has stopped twitching.
(After the Dupe War, Parrot had flagged him down. Parrot's one-heart challenge was still fresh enough to be red and raw, not fresh enough to be actively bleeding– but still straight-edged and sharp in his mind, even through the buzz of creating matter from nothing, the blood-loss-and-unloss of the process. Parrot shows Spoke a little scrap of pink wool, a couple of holes punched into it from where his talons had worked through the weave. Spoke, in turn, shows Parrot the NPPP rule book that was taking up valuable space in his inventory.
"Why did you do it, Spoke?" asks Parrot.
Spoke says: "It's the same reason why you put on pants. To be free from the restrictions."
But he'd refused the pants, then.)
Well, it doesn't matter anymore. Spoke wears pants when he jumps into the void.